Congress of Vienna
The powers that beat Napoleon spent nine months in Vienna redrawing the map of Europe, and the arrangement held for a century. The congress opened in September 1814 and never met in plenary session. Business was done by the four great powers — Austria, Russia, Prussia and Britain — in committees, at dinners and at balls, with Metternich presiding and some 200 states and delegations waiting outside for their fate. Talleyrand, representing a defeated France, got himself into the inner group within weeks by insisting on the principle of legitimacy, which gave the small powers a case and France a role. The quarrel that nearly wrecked it was Poland and Saxony. Russia wanted the whole of Poland and Prussia wanted the whole of Saxony as compensation, and in January 1815 Britain, Austria and France signed a secret defensive alliance against the other two. The compromise divided both. The settlement's principles were a balance of power, compensation, and the restoration of legitimate dynasties where it was convenient. The Netherlands and Belgium were joined, Prussia was given the Rhineland to face France, Austria took northern Italy, Britain took Malta, the Cape and Ceylon, and thirty-nine German states replaced the three hundred of 1789. Napoleon returned from Elba during the proceedings and the delegates kept working. The critics are right that it ignored nationalism and liberalism entirely and produced the revolutions of 1830 and 1848. It also produced ninety-nine years without a general European war. It also produced the first international agreements on things that were not territory: the condemnation of the slave trade, free navigation on international rivers, and a fixed order of diplomatic precedence that ended a century of ambassadors fighting in doorways. The congress system of periodic meetings lasted about eight years.
- Year: 1814 CE
- Category: Political
