The Congress of Vienna

Tim Chapman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781134680504
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

In 1814-1815, after the French revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, the leaders of the most important countries in Europe gathered together to redraw the frontiers of their continent. The Congress of Vienna explores the attempt by Britain, Russia, Austria and Prussia to agree Europe's new frontiers after almost twenty years of continuous fighting against France and analyses how successful the Congress was.
The Congress of Vienna offers a readable introduction to this difficult topic, providing a background to the negotiations, a summary of the agreements reached and assessment of the longer term consequences.

1

War and Revolution in Europe 1789–1814

The Congress of Vienna was a gathering of all the major states of Europe to draw up a peace settlement at the end of the wars against Napoleon in 1814–15. It was attended by the four main allies – Britain, Russia, Austria and Prussia – which were the countries mostly responsible for the defeat of Napoleonic France, the state that had caused the wars. Several minor states that had fought with the victorious allies – such as Spain, Portugal and Sweden – were also present and most of the remaining countries of Europe sent delegations.

Importance and Scope of the Congress of Vienna

It was one of the most important meetings in European history, comparable to the Versailles peace conferences after the First World War or, earlier, the Treaty of Utrecht (1714). It not only set out the way in which France was to be treated after launching twenty years of war following the 1789 Revolution and the subsequent rise of Napoleon; it reconstructed the frontiers of states that spread across the central and eastern areas of the continent and restored many of the former rulers. It also set out the fate of a great many colonies around the world. There was a huge amount at stake.

Some countries that had been invaded and abolished by Napoleon never reappeared; others were recast in larger or smaller forms while at the same time the largest states looked for bounty and rewards for having won the war. In the complex discussions that took place at Vienna there was a battle for the principles upon which the new Europe was to be based. And, in the midst of this conference of power-brokers, there was one of the most glittering displays of Society figures and leading members of the aristocracy ever seen on the continent.

It was a momentous occasion and one that turned out to be highly successful. It played a major part in making 1815 a turning-point in European history as a long period of war was brought to a close and it was followed by almost a century of peace. The next general war between Europe’s leading states was the Great War of 1914–18. Many students of European history in the nineteenth century begin in 1815, in line with much of the historiography of the period; after all, the map of Europe that emerged in 1815 was the starting-point for great changes later in the century that were wrought by the unification of Italy and Germany.

However, setting 1815 as the point to begin a course is in many ways misleading because it marked above all the end of an era, not the start of a new one. The peacemakers of 1815 were men who were backward-looking and conservative, who were concerned to put right the mistakes and misdeeds of the past that they themselves had witnessed and fought against. Their view was coloured by their own bitter experience of war and revolution. They did not see their task as being to reinvent Europe for the future or to pander to the dangerous new ideas that the French Revolution had spread; rather, they wanted to restore Europe to peace by inflicting limits on France and by strengthening their own defences. They did not want a new Europe so much as a better version of the old one.

In order to understand the Congress of Vienna, then, it is essential briefly to retrace the key developments in Europe from 1789 that informed the peace of 1815. As the peacemakers themselves saw the situation, there were two basic problems. First, they had to contend with the ideas of the French Revolution as they had begun to take root in the populations that the French had conquered, and especially within France itself. Second, they had to find ways to restrict the possibility of France (or any other state) mounting another war as devastating as the last. Of the two problems, the second was the one that they took most seriously at Vienna, partly because it was the one that, in practical terms, they could do most to combat. It was to be left to the rulers of individual states to deal with internal problems.

The French Revolution

By tradition, the French Revolution has been portrayed as the storming of the Bastille on 14 July 1789. This is at best a shorthand explanation for the huge changes in France from the 1780s until the execution of King Louis XVI in 1793. Historical research has shown that there was not just one outbreak of revolution but a series of rebellions against the king and the old system of rule (called the ancien régime) by different classes of people and for different reasons. The cumulative effect of these protests was for confrontation and then conflict to emerge with the king, and this situation, initially led by the nobility, developed its own momentum and subsequently revolutionised France. This had not been the aim of the nobility’s original protests against the king.

The first group of people in France to rebel against the king was the nobility. In the eighteenth century, its members enjoyed privileges that the ordinary people in society did not share. The nobles were spared paying certain taxes, such as the taille on land, and they enjoyed legal advantages in law courts. But from 1787 they became increasingly hostile towards the king because Louis XVI wanted to tax them more heavily. He had to do this in order to pay the debts he had accumulated by fighting in such wars as the American War of Independence, when France helped the USA throw off British rule after 1776. By 1786, the monarchy was on the verge of bankruptcy with a deficit between income and expenditure of 112 million livres.

Louis tried to win over the nobles and raise more income by using some of their own representative bodies. He recalled the Assembly of Notables, a dormant assembly of noblemen and clergy that had last met in 1626, and the Paris Parlement which was one of thirteen courts responsible for administering much of France. At different times, they were each asked to support tax rises in return for Louis passing reforms in other areas of French life, such as the legal system, education and the church. However, neither the Assembly nor the Parlement were won over by this royal ploy, and each had the same response; Louis had to allow the Estates-General to meet.

The Estates-General was effectively a parliament that was elected by all members of French society – which meant the peasants and workers as well as the clergy and nobility. The debate between Louis and the nobles was clearly developing beyond the problem of tax to wider issues in society. Louis was therefore reluctant to call the Estates-General and initially reacted by cutting back the powers of the parlements. However, by August 1788 the royal coffers were empty and, desperate to raise more revenue, Louis gave in and called the Estates-General. The revolt of the nobles was by this stage well under way.

The second group of people to rebel against the king was the bougeoisie or middle class which had hitherto supported the opposition of the nobles. It became rebellious when it seemed that the Estates-General would meet on the same basis as in the past (though it had not met since 1614). This meant that its members would mostly be the nobles and clergy who might work only for their own benefit rather than for the good of the French people as a whole. The vast majority of the population was composed of peasants, together with urban workers and the middle class, and by 1789 these groups were seriously underrepresented in the Estates-General. The bourgeoisie led the opposition to the aristocrats and campaigned for better representation. Eventually, they were successful and in the elections that followed there were 610 deputies to represent the ordinary people compared to 303 for the clergy and just 282 for the nobility.

All of this was a circuitous route for the monarchy to take simply to raise more money, but by allowing the Estates-General to meet there was now much more at stake. The debate had extended beyond tax and reform to the political importance of ordinary people as well as to the role of the nobles and the king. The assembly first met on 5 May 1789 and its business was pushed along by the bourgeoisie which, on behalf of all of the ordinary people, insisted on joint meetings with the nobles and clergy. The king opposed this because the Estates-General was beginning to evolve independently and represented a challenge to him. Louis’ handling of the situation was poor and, after hurried meetings and the ‘Tennis Court Oath’, the assembly was provoked into full-blooded support for a constitution which would formally limit royal power.

Observers thought that the way was now clear for the king and the Estates-General to reach some agreement about taxation and reform. This turned out not to be the case. Louis was simply buying time before trying to retake all power for himself. He built up the number of troops in and around Paris from 4,000 to over 30,000 in early July 1789 and on 11 July he dismissed one of the ordinary people’s leaders, Necker. This inflamed the temper of the Parisian crowds and set the scene for the infamous storming of the Bastille.

The Storming of the Bastille

The storming of the Bastille brought in to the course of the French Revolution the third group in French society to rebel against the king. Already, the nobles and bourgeoisie had acted with contributions at a high governmental level. The ordinary people of Paris, the sans-culotte(s) or ‘the mob’ now played a part by seizing weapons and ammunition from gunsmiths so as to take on the royal troops by brute force if necessary. Their motivation was not just political. France, and Paris in particular, was suffering very high grain prices following a succession of poor harvests from 1778 which intensified in 1786 and 1788. The vast majority of workers’ pay was spent on bread, the basic foodstuff, and the number of people who were underemployed or out of work altogether was high. Customs posts on the edge of Paris were attacked by mobs for impounding grain and then on 14 July 1789 the mob looted muskets before marching on the Bastille so as to seize ammunition.

The Bastille was an old and notorious prison that had come to symbolise royal power – and cruelty. It contained just seven inmates but the mob was primarily interested in taking hold of its store of gunpowder rather than freeing those inside. By July 1789, many of the royal troops were becoming unreliable and had been moved to the outskirts of Paris thereby leaving the Bastille defended by just thirty Swiss guards and eighty army pensioners. The governor of the Bastille, the Marquis de Launay, appreciated how weak his forces were and eventually surrendered in the hope of avoiding bloodshed. He misjudged the situation and paid with his life, as he was quickly decapitated and his head paraded through the city streets on a pole. While these events did not necessarily mean the end of the French monarchy, they symbolised the shift in power away from the king and towards the people of Paris. By mid-July, about 250,000 Parisians were armed, while the king’s troops remained on the edge of town, not trusted by their officers to be loyal to the crown. The revolt of townspeople spread from Paris to other major cities in France, such as Marseilles, Lille and Lyon. This was known as the ‘municipal revolution’.

The fourth group to rebel was amongst the most conservative in French society and consisted of the rural labourers. Across most of France, peasants rose up and seized grain held by their local lords and destroyed records of their feudal dues and tithes. Hundreds of chateaux were attacked during the spring and summer of 1789 and the peasants’ anger was exacerbated by rumours that the 1789 harvest was going to be deliberately destroyed by groups of men in the pay of the nobles. Although this reaction, known as the ‘Great Fear’, was not justified, it led to further attacks on the nobility and its property. Clearly, the four rebel groups were not united, as they began to attack each other, but the movement of reform begun by the nobles was now beyond their control and tending towards revolution.

The Fall of the Monarchy

Louis XVI was in a weak position and had moved his court away from the centre of Paris. On 17 July 1789 he was humiliated when he was brought back to the capital and forced to wear the revolutionary colours of red, white and blue. Effective power now lay with the ordinary people, whose representative body took the name of National Constituent Assembly, and whose aim was at this time to return the country to some sort of calm. Its first step in this direction was the August Decrees which abolished the feudal system and its heavy toll of taxes, tithes and labour dues that fell on the peasantry. This undermined the position of the landlord class and prompted many to leave the country for fear of peasant violence. But it also won over most of the French people to the new Assembly, and enabled it to pass further reforms. With careers becoming open to talent, the bourgeoisie was also won over and it was this group that benefited most from the restructuring of Frances institutions in local government, law, the church and the armed forces.

The Assembly had begun its work of modernisation with the famous Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen in August 1789 which began by asserting that ‘Men are born free and equal in their rights’. From this followed civil and religious freedoms and the task of devising a constitution to formally limit the kings power. Initially, the Assembly hoped to work with the king, but continuing violence and food shortages in Paris meant that the mob had the final say in what changes were made. Thus, the king was brought back to Paris for a second time in October by a crowd of angry women, and he was effectively held there as a prisoner. The Assembly, too, needed to be mindful of the views of the mob, lest a crowd stormed into one of its meetings and imposed its will by violence – something that was frequently threatened.

The reforms that were passed included the reorganisation of France into departements, districts and communes so that power was decentralised; from 1791, taxation was based primarily on land, although revenue was also raised by confiscating and then selling church lands; trade was speeded up by the introduction of decimal weights and measures, and internal customs barriers were ended in October 1790. Law courts were restructured and made common to the whole of France, and punishments became more humane with the abolition of torture and fewer capital offences; the church was subjected to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy which cut the Pope’s influence and realigned the church districts with those of the state. The Catholic Church rejected the change and gave support to the counter-revolutionary movement which emerged in the 1790s, such as that in the Vendée. These reforms reflected the ideas of such men as Voltaire, Rousseau and Montesquieu, who had criticised the system of rule in France in the eighteenth century.

In the meantime, Paris remained very active politically with the growth of hundreds of political clubs such as the Jacobins, which kept ordinary citizens well informed of developments. The capital also continued to be violent, as the new government could not instantly solve France’s economic problems. Strikes and riots broke out in 1791 due to high bread prices and this volatile situation continued to drive the Revolution towards more radical measures so as to appease the mob. It was fuelled further when Louis XVI tried to escape from Paris, but his ‘Flight to Varennes’ was cut short and he was returned to Paris as a prisoner once more in June 1791.

Reactions to Louis’ attempt to escape polarised political opinion, with radicals calling for a republic (at the Champ de Mars meeting, for instance) and moderates still hoping for a compromise. The moderates did well to get Louis’ agreement to a new constitution in 1791 but the outbreak of war against Austria and Prussia in 1792 led to a renewal of the republican movement and the eventual election of a National Convention headed by Robespierre in September 1792. It was this body that voted to execute King Louis XVI in January 1793 so as to establish the republic more firmly. He was put under the guillotine at 10.22 am in the Place de la Revolution, amid tight security provided by 80,000 troops that patrolled the square and the route to the platform. Once the blade had dropped, the executioner held up the severed head to the crowds so that they had proof of France becoming a republic.

Revolutionary France

By 1793, the effects of the French Revolution had created the characteristics that were to dominate French society for the next twenty years. Amid the cries of ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’ that summed up the revolutionary ideas there was also extreme and uncontrolled violence; in 1792 for example, the ‘September Massacres’ of prisoners in Paris gaols occurred which killed up to 1,400 nobles and priests who were suspected of opposing the Revolution. From 1793–5, the Terror claimed another 40,000–50,000 victims. War had broken out against France’s neighbours and was to continue almost unabated until 1815, by which time hundreds of thousands had been killed on the battlefields. French society had been irreversibly altered by the rise of new ideals that questioned the authority of the king and undermined the traditional power and stability provided by the nobles and the church. These ideals, however, were often tainted by bloodshed.

To replace the old rulers, Republican France appointed such new political leaders as Robespierre, Roux, Hebert and Danton, whose rapid rise and fall reflected the volatile state of France. What agreement there had been amongst French people in 1793 about how the country was to be organised began to disintegrate as the nation faced the consequences of its own actions: violence, reform and war. People s attitudes polarised into two broad views: those who supported the Revolution and those who opposed it. In the first group could be counted the sans-culotte(s), or urban workers, while the second attracted more support in the countryside. The themes of revolution and counter-revolution were to dominate much of nineteenth-century France as it lurched from one regime to another in 1814, 1815, 1830, 1848, 1852 and 1871, due to revolution and war once again.

During the 1790s, the revolutionary groups’ internecine fighting saw more blood spilt as rival factions jockeyed for position. Under the Committee of Public Safety, Hebert was removed, then Robespierre fell and the Thermidorians came to power in 1793–4. On a larger scale, the White Terror of 1793–7 saw a royalist backlash and guerrilla warfare in the Vendee which killed several thousand more people. On many occasions, this was cold-blooded murder; the noyades, or drowning of victims on barges that were sunk on the River Loire, killed hundreds, while firing squads and the guillotine were also in common use. The Directory ruled France after a new constitution was drawn up in 1795 and set about restoring law and order as France began to tire of its own excesses and upheaval, and in this it was quite successful.

The reforms that were passed under the Committee of Public Safety centred on a new calendar (dated from 22 September 1792) and a further erosion of the status of the church, so that most church buildings were closed and Notre Dame became, in the madness of the time, a Temple of Reason. Many priests gave up their jobs. The Directory succeeded in stabilising a currency that had become worthless due to inflation, and the taxation system was successfully revamped by Ramel.

In the meantime, France had been at war from 1792. Initially, this was against just Austria and Prussia but it was soon extended to Britain, Holland and Spain, which were the members of the First Coalition. France became more menacing after issuing the Fraternity Decree, which threatened to export revolution to other countries, and then in 1793 it went on to assert a right to reach its ‘natural frontiers’. This meant pushing the French frontiers as far east as the River Rhine, thereby annexing all of the Austrian Netherlands (Belgium) and a substantial part of the United Provinces (Holland). It also meant...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures, maps and tables
• 1. War and revolution in Europe 1789–1814
• 2. Aims of the great powers at the Congress of Vienna
• 3. The territorial settlement
• 4. The congress system
• 5. Breakdown of the settlement 1830–1914
• Glossary
• Glossary of Placenames
• Further Reading
• Biographies
• Index