The establishment of French influence in Italy and Germany had stirred
up in both countries a national feeling, the growth of which was
encouraged by the example of Spain. No greater mistake was ever made by
Napoleon than when, ignoring the strength of the Spanish resistance, and
the development of a national movement in Germany, he resolved to enter
upon the Russian campaign and to march to Moscow. Unconsciously Napoleon
"had called into vigorous life the forces of Democracy and Nationality
in Germany and Italy." The failure of the Moscow campaign led at once to
a national rising in Prussia, and as soon as Austria had united her
forces with those of Prussia and Russia, the overthrow of Napoleon at
Leipzig in October 1813 was the result, and "the imperial yoke was
shaken from the neck of the German people." Napoleon's wars had roused
feelings of patriotism in Italy, Germany, Russia and Spain. It was at
least realized by the nations of continental Europe, what had long been
apparent to Englishmen, that a nation to be strong must be united. To
"the subversive cosmopolitanism" of the French Revolution was now
opposed the modern idea of nationality, against which the Napoleonic
legions hurled themselves in vain. (See NAPOLEON I.; NAPOLEONIC
CAMPAIGNS; FRENCH REVOLUTION; ALEXANDER I, EMPEROR OF RUSSIA;
METTERNICH.) (A. Hl.)
Reconstruction of Europe.
Congress of Vienna, 1814-1815.
The downfall of Napoleon involved that of the political system of Europe
which he had constructed. The changes wrought by the revolutionary
period in the old states system were, however, too profound to admit of
any attempt at a complete restoration, even had the interests of the
allied powers been consistent with such a course. The object of the four
great powers in whose hands the settlement of Europe now lay, was
rather, after taking precautions to confine France within her
"legitimate boundaries," to arrange such a "just equilibrium" in Europe
that no individual state should for the future be in a position to
overset the balance of power. The first object was to be attained by the
re-establishment of the ancient dynasty in France, as a guarantee to
Europe against a renewal of the revolutionary propaganda; the second was
the work of the congress of Vienna, by which, between September 1814 and
June 1815, the reconstruction of Europe was taken in hand. The opening
of the congress, in which for the first time all Europe seemed to be
united for the friendly settlement of common interests, was hailed as
the dawn of a new era. In a sense it was so; but hardly in the manner
nor to the degree that some had hoped. In its councils the arts of the
old diplomacy, still inspired by the traditional principles or lack of
principles, were directed to the old ends; and the world, as though the
popular upheaval of the Revolution had never been, was treated as real
estate to be parcelled out by the executors of Napoleon's empire among
sovereigns by divine right, regardless of the wishes of the populations,
which figured in the protocols merely as numbers to be balanced and
bartered one against the other.
This process of "dividing the spoils," as Gentz called it, was naturally
pregnant with possibilities of quarrels. Of these the most dangerous was
that provoked by the resolution of the emperor Alexander I. at all costs
to keep the former grand-duchy of Warsaw for himself, while compensating
Prussia for the loss of some of her Polish territories by the annexation
to her of all Saxony. The deadlock caused by the stubborn insistence on
this plan, which the other great powers were equally determined to
frustrate, all but led to war, and by a secret treaty signed on the 3rd
of January 1815, Great Britain, France, and Austria agreed to make
common cause in that event against Russia and Prussia. It needed
Napoleon's return from Elba (March 1815) to remind the powers that their
particular interests must still be subordinated to those of Europe. The
common peril restored the broken harmony; and while the armies of the
Alliance were closing in for the final struggle with the French emperor,
the congress hurried on its deliberations, and on the 9th of June 1815,
a few days before the battle of Waterloo, by which Napoleon's power was
finally shattered, the Final Act, embodying the treaties of Vienna, was
signed.
Territorial adjustments of the Vienna treaties.
The territorial arrangements thus effected were for half a century the
basis of the states system of Europe, and the treaties in which they
were defined the charter of international relations. It was in central
Europe, where Napoleon's policy had most profoundly affected the
pre-revolutionary system, that the greatest changes were made. No
attempt, indeed, was made to restore the Holy Roman Empire, in spite of
the protest of the pope against the failure to re-establish "the centre
of political unity"; but the Confederation of the Rhine having come to
an end, Germany was reconstituted as a confederation of sovereign
states, in which all the former members of the Empire which had survived
the revolutionary epoch found a place (see GERMANY). Austria, in virtue
of the imperial tradition of the house of Habsburg, received the
presidency of the federal diet; but the bulk of her territories lay
outside the frontiers of the Confederation, and the non-German character
of the Habsburg monarchy was accentuated by the other arrangements at
the congress. In Italy Lombardo-Venetia was erected into a kingdom under
the Austrian crown; while the dynastic settlements in the other Italian
states tended to make Austrian influence supreme in the peninsula (see
ITALY). In return for this, Austria surrendered her claim to her former
possessions in the Low Countries, which were annexed to the crown of
Holland, so as to form, under the title of the United Netherlands, an
efficient barrier to French aggression northwards. The function of
defender of Germany on the Rhine frontier which Austria thus abandoned
was assigned to Prussia, an arrangement pregnant with momentous issues.
In compensation for her disappointment in the matter of Saxony, half of
which was ultimately restored to the dynasty of Wettin, she received a
large accession of territory in the Rhine provinces, carved partly out
of the suppressed kingdom of Westphalia, partly out of the former
ecclesiastical states, and comprising the imperial city of
Aix-la-Chapelle and the former electorate of Cologne. To Prussia also
was conceded the right to garrison the federal fortress of Luxemburg.
Of the other German states, Bavaria, which alone was sufficiently
powerful to be of any great importance in the general affairs of Europe,
reaped the reward of her timely defection from the cause of her
protector Napoleon. She had, indeed, to restore to Austria the
territories annexed to her at the expense of the Habsburg monarchy by
the French emperor: Tirol, the Quarters of the Inn and of the Hausruck,
and part of Salzburg. But she received ample compensation elsewhere,
notably the former Bavarian Palatinate with a strip of territory to
connect it with Bavaria proper. The right to garrison the federal
fortress of Mainz was also ultimately conceded to her. Bavaria was thus
placed in a position to continue her traditional policy of aiming at the
position of a European great power and holding the balance between
Austria and Prussia (see BAVARIA: _History_). The two other German
states whose elevation to kingdoms had symbolized a similar ambition,
Saxony and Wuerttemberg, were henceforth relegated to a position of
third-rate importance; Saxony depended for her very existence on the
rivalry of her more powerful neighbours: Wuerttemberg protested in vain
against the dictatorship of the great powers to which she was forced to
submit. Finally, the electorate of Hanover, partly out of compliment to
the king of Great Britain, partly because with the abolition of the Holy
Empire the title elector had fallen obsolete, was elevated to a kingdom.
The request of the elector of Hesse for a similar concession in his case
was refused by the powers assembled at Aix-la-Chapelle in 1818.
Of great importance were the changes effected in the north and east of
Europe. The affairs of the Ottoman empire, which the treaty of Bucharest
(1812) between Russia and Turkey had left in a very unsatisfactory
condition, were not dealt with by the congress, in spite of the efforts
of Great Britain to bring them into discussion. But the concessions made
to the emperor Alexander elsewhere represented a notable advance in the
European position of Russia. The possession of Finland, conquered from
the Swedes in 1808, was confirmed to her; and, above all, the erection
of the former grand-duchy of Warsaw into a constitutional kingdom of
Poland under the Russian crown not only thrust the Muscovite power like
a wedge into the heart of Germany, but seemed to threaten the Polish
possessions of Austria and Prussia by setting up a quasi-independent
Poland as a centre of attraction to the scattered elements of the Polish
nation; though in the sequel the establishment of the city of Cracow and
its territory as an independent republic, to avoid the difficult
question of its assignment elsewhere, proved a more fruitful source of
nationalist unrest. In the north the settlement confirmed by the
congress marked the definite withdrawal of the Scandinavian Powers from
any active influence on the affairs of the continent. Alone of the
_parvenu_ monarchs of the Napoleonic age Bernadotte retained the crown
of Sweden, to which, by the treaty of Kiel, that of Norway had been
added. On the other hand, by the cession of Swedish Pomerania to
Prussia, Sweden finally withdrew from the southern shores of the Baltic.
The Scandinavian states ceased henceforth to play any determining part
in European politics. In the south, on the other hand, the restoration
of Savoy and Piedmont to Victor Emmanuel I., king of Sardinia, and the
incorporation in his dominions of the territories of the former republic
of Genoa, were factors pregnant with mighty issues. The object of this
increase of the power of the house of Savoy was but to erect a barrier
against any possible renewal of French aggression in Italy; in effect it
established the nucleus of the power which was to struggle successfully
with Austria for the hegemony of Italy.
The gains of Great Britain in Europe were comparatively small, though by
no means unimportant. By the retention of Malta she secured her power in
the Mediterranean, and this was further increased by the treaty of Paris
(November 5, 1815), by which the powers recognized her protectorate over
the Ionian Islands. (See VIENNA, CONGRESS OF.)
The powers and France.
But for the episode of the Hundred Days, France would have emerged from
the congress with recovered prestige and mistress of at least some of
the territorial gains of the revolutionary wars; though Napoleon had
thrown away, during the negotiations at Chatillon, the chance of
preserving for her her "natural frontiers" of the Rhine, the Alps and
the Pyrenees. After Napoleon's second downfall she was in serious danger
of dismemberment, for which the German powers clamoured as essential to
their safety. That Louis XVIII. continued to rule over the territories
"handed down to him by his ancestors" was due to the magnanimity, or
policy, of the emperor Alexander I. (q.v.), and the commonsense of
Castlereagh and Wellington, who saw well that the "just equilibrium,"
which it was their object to establish, could not be secured if France
were unduly weakened, and that peace could never be preserved if the
French people were left to smart under a sense of permanent injury. By
the second peace of Paris, signed on the 20th of November 1815, France
retained her traditional boundaries. The unsatisfied ambition to secure
her "national frontiers" was to bear troublesome fruit later.
That the treaties embodied in the Final Act of Vienna represented a
settlement of all outstanding questions was believed by nobody. They had
been negotiated for weary months in an atmosphere of diplomatic and
feminine intrigue; they had been concluded in a hurry, under the
influence of the panic caused by Napoleon's return from Elba. To
Friedrich von Gentz they were at best but "partial arrangements," useful
as forming an authoritative basis for the establishment of a more
complete and satisfactory system. The history of the international
politics of Europe for the years immediately succeeding the congress of
Vienna is that of the attempt to establish such a system.
Treaty of Nov. 20, 1815, and the Concert of Europe.
The Holy Alliance.
England and the Concert.
After a quarter of a century of almost ceaseless wars, what Europe
needed above all things was peace and time to recuperate. This
conviction was common to all the powers who had inherited Napoleon's
dictatorship in Europe; but on the question of the method by which peace
should be secured, and the principles which should guide their action, a
fateful divergence of view soon became apparent within their councils.
All were agreed that France still represented the storm centre of
Europe; and a second treaty, signed on the 20th of November 1815,
renewed the provisions of the treaty of Chaumont, in view of any fresh
outburst of the French revolutionary spirit. But the new treaty went
further. By its 6th article it was declared that "in order to
consolidate the intimate tie that unites the four sovereigns for the
happiness of the world, the High Contracting Powers have agreed to renew
at fixed intervals ... meetings consecrated to great common objects and
to the examination of such measures as at each of these epochs shall be
judged most salutary for the peace and prosperity of the nations and for
the maintenance of the peace of Europe." This was the formal charter of
the concert of the great powers by which for the next seven years Europe
was governed, a concert to which the name "Holy Alliance" has been
commonly but erroneously applied. The Holy Alliance, drawn up by the
emperor Alexander I., and signed by him, the emperor Francis, and King
Frederick William III. of Prussia on the 26th of September 1815,
represented a different and conflicting ideal. Actually it was not a
treaty at all, but at best a declaration of principles to which any
Christian could subscribe, at worst--to quote Castlereagh--"a piece of
sublime mysticism and nonsense" from the political point of view (see
HOLY ALLIANCE). It gained its sole political importance from the
persistent efforts of the tsar and his ministers to replace the
committee of the great powers, established by the treaty of the 20th of
November, by a "Universal Union" of all the powers, great and small, who
had signed the Holy Alliance, and thus to establish that "Confederation
of Europe" of which the autocratic idealist had borrowed the conception
from the theorists of the 18th century (see ALEXANDER I., emperor of
Russia). It was clear from the first that any attempt to set up such a
central government of Europe under a "universal guarantee" would imperil
the independence of the sovereign states; and from the first Great
Britain, represented by Castlereagh, protested against it. She would
consent to take common action on the basis of the treaties she had
actually signed, consulting with her allies on each case as it arose;
but to vague and general engagements she refused to commit herself. The
attitude of Austria and Prussia was from the outset less clear.
Metternich was torn between dread of revolution and dread of Russia; the
Holy Alliance, though essentially "verbiage," might be useful in
holding the imperial Jacobin in check; the "universal guarantee" could
not but be discouraging to the "sects"; on the other hand, the extreme
willingness of the tsar to march 200,000 Russians for any "European"
purpose in any direction convenient or inconvenient to Austria, was--to
say the least--disconcerting. Frederick William III., on the other hand,
though he too had signed the Holy Alliance with reluctance, in moments
of panic saw in the "universal guarantee" his best defence against the
renewed attack by France which was his nightmare. In effect, owing to
the firm attitude of Castlereagh at the congress of Aix-la-Chapelle,
"the transparent soul of the Holy Alliance" never received a body,
though attempts were subsequently made at the congresses of Troppau,
Laibach and Verona to apply some of its supposed principles--attempts
that led to the definitive breach of Great Britain with the Alliance.