The Congress of Vienna and its Legacy

War and Great Power Diplomacy after Napoleon

Mark Jarrett

• Editorial: I.B. Tauris
• Año: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780857735706
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: History
• Categoría: European History

In 1814 the five reigning dynasties of Europe, Alexander I of Russia and ministers such Metternich and Talleyrand, descended upon Vienna. The Vienna Congress marked one of the great turning points in diplomatic history; the first attempt to create an 'international order' to secure peace for the nineteenth century. The blueprint for modern-day global governance models such as the UN, it was a response to Napoleon's expansion across Europe, and sought to build upon the state systems he left behind whilst shoring up the privileges and power of Europe's elite. Here, Mark Jarrett argues that the Congress of Vienna in fact marked the beginning of the end for the Ancien Regime, yet, despite its disintegration following the suicide of Castlereagh, the 'congress system' has had an enormous influence up to the present day. The role of diplomacy as a means to conflict resolution, the workings of multi-lateralism and the emphasis on international organizations to guarantee national sovereignty were all long term by-products of the 'congress system'. A new synthesis of archival material, The Congress System is a fresh exploration of a key event in the history of International Relations and Diplomacy.

Part One

WAR

War is nothing but a duel on a larger scale … Each tries through physical force to compel the other to do his will …

Carl von Clausewitz, On War

Napoleon revolutionized the world; filled with his name the four quarters of the globe; sailed beyond the seas of Europe; soared to the skies, and fell and perished at the extremity of the waves of the Atlantic.

François-René de Chateaubriand, The Congress of Verona

The present Confederacy may be considered as the Union of nearly the whole of Europe against the unbounded and faithless ambition of an individual. The great object of the Allies, whether in war or in negotiation, should be to keep together, and to drive back and confine the armies of France.

Lord Castlereagh to Lord Cathcart, 18 September 1813

During the battle our squares presented a shocking sight. Inside we were nearly suffocated by the smoke and smell from burnt cartridges. It was impossible to move a yard without treading upon a wounded comrade, or upon the bodies of the dead; and the loud groans of the wounded and dying were most appalling.

Captain Howell Rees Gronow, Reminiscences

This morning I went to visit the field of battle, which is a little beyond the village of Waterloo, on the plateau of Mont-Saint-Jean; but on arrival there the sight was too horrible to behold. I felt sick in the stomach and was obliged to return. The multitude of carcasses, the heaps of wounded men with mangled limbs unable to move, and perishing from not having their wounds dressed or from hunger, as the Allies were, of course, obliged to take their surgeons and wagons with them, formed a spectacle I shall never forget.

Major W.E. Frye, After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel

1

The European State System and the
Napoleonic Wars

THE Congress of Vienna and the Congress System that dominated the European political scene from 1814 to 1823 were primarily reactions to the previous epoch. An understanding of the developments of this decade therefore demands some familiarity with what preceded it—both in terms of the geography and political structures of the ancien régime and of the rapid succession of national and international regimes that transpired in the maelstrom years of 1793 to 1813.

The European state system of the eighteenth century

The statesmen at Vienna were born into a world far different from our own. Europe on the eve of the French Revolution was not, as today, neatly divided into similar nation-states, but contained a myriad of different structures, ranging from small city-states to large multi-ethnic empires. The Europe of this period has been aptly described as divided into three zones: an eastern zone dominated by the large empires of Russia, the Austrian Habsburg domains and Ottoman Turkey, as well as the elective monarchy of Poland; a middle zone with the smaller principalities and city-states of Italy, Germany and Switzerland; and to the north and west, an outer ring of nascent national states, consisting of Sweden, Denmark, Prussia, the United Provinces (Holland), Great Britain and Ireland, France, Spain and Portugal. Even these latter states were not without imperial pretentions; several, in fact, possessed large colonial empires overseas.¹

Though eighteenth-century Europe was not composed of parallel nation-state structures, neither was it organized along the lines of universal empire like ancient Rome. The empires of the European eastern zone were vast multi-ethnic states, but lacked any aspirations to universality. Each European state—whether republican city-state, national kingdom or multi-national empire—constituted an independent centre of sovereign political power. These states shared a common culture and a degree of economic interdependence. They exchanged diplomatic representatives, recognized the force of treaties between themselves and had evolved their own traditions of international law. Contemporaries were highly conscious of belonging to a ‘society’ of states or ‘republic’ of Europe. Historians today refer to this complex blend of cultural and economic interdependence and political independence as the ‘European State System’, out of which our own present-day system of kindred nation-states on a global scale has emerged.

Each of these autonomous political units was, of course, subject to both internal and external constraints. European society as a whole was aristocratic and corporatist: within each polity, a subject’s rights and duties were largely defined by his or her membership in a hereditary ‘estate’ or ‘order’. The eighteenth century was also, like our own, marked by its own peculiar patterns of national growth and international rivalry. Even before the outbreak of the French Revolution, the boundaries between states were often in a state of flux.

Eastern and Northern Europe

Russia

To the east was situated Europe’s most populous country. Vast expanses of land and the possibility of escape had led landowners to impose serfdom on the peasantry at a time when the institution was dying out in Western Europe.² In the late seventeenth century, Peter the Great launched a broad programme of reform that recast Russia along Western lines and greatly enhanced her military strength. He forced the boyars (the old nobility) to shave their beards and wear Western clothes; he moved the capital westward to St Petersburg, a new city constructed on the Gulf of Finland; he seized church lands and subordinated the Russian Orthodox Church, transforming it into a mere department of state. Peter replaced the unruly palace musketeers (the streltsy) with a new professional army, introduced compulsory military recruitment for life, and imposed a new ‘poll’ tax on the hapless peasantry. He merged Russia’s hereditary and service nobility, introducing the ‘Table of Ranks’ in 1722, which assigned personal status based on service to the state. Peter imported advisers from the West, sent Russians to study abroad, and founded military colleges and institutions of higher learning. In consequence, Russia extended her frontiers to the southwest at the expense of the Ottoman Turks and defeated Sweden in the Great Northern War (1700–21) to become the leading power on the Baltic.

Forty years after Peter’s death, Catherine the Great seized power in a palace coup. During her 33-year reign, Russia’s population soared from 23 to 37 million.³ In exchange for absolute obedience to their monarch, the Russian aristocracy and gentry won control over local government and enjoyed unchallenged authority over their serfs. Catherine annexed territories from Poland, Sweden and Ottoman Turkey, including the fertile grasslands of ‘New Russia’ (the Ukraine). She extended Russia to the Black Sea and established a virtual protectorate over Georgia in the Caucasus. The Tsarina even dreamt of overthrowing the Ottomans and establishing a new Byzantine Empire in Constantinople.⁴ Under her sceptre, the Russian military became the largest in Europe: by 1795, this ‘colossus of the North’ possessed a standing army of 279,000 infantry and 100,000 cavalry and Cossacks. Military reforms, based on tactics developed in the wars against the Ottomans in the Caucasus and Crimea, anticipated changes introduced elsewhere during the French Revolution.⁵

In short, Russia had emerged as a great power. Within the Russian state, the Tsars achieved absolute rule, untrammelled by the Russian Orthodox Church, local representative bodies, or even by the written law. ‘I find in Russia only two estates’ wrote one reformer, ‘the slaves of the sovereign and the slaves of the landlord … [T]here are no free men in Russia’.⁶ The only restraint on Tsarist authority was the prospect of a palace coup. The great paradox was that Westernization had been initiated wholly from above. Western ideas touched only the upper echelons of society, widening the gulf between the governing classes and the vast majority of Russia’s populace, still locked in serfdom.⁷ Other Europeans viewed Russia’s large armies, absolutist government and rapid expansion with a mixed sense of curiosity and alarm.

The Ottoman Empire

To the south, the territories of the Sultan stretched across North Africa, the Levant, Anatolia and even the Balkans in Europe, including Greece. Although the Ottomans ruled over Christian subjects, they were not Christians themselves, and in consequence they were not deemed by Europe’s Christian rulers to be members of the European community. In the eighteenth century, the Ottoman Empire began to slip into what some have seen as a long decline: the legendary Janissary corps became a hereditary caste that blocked military reform; the artillery, engineers and navy fell technically behind Europe; government administration became less efficient; and North Africa and the Danubian Principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia (present-day Romania) grew virtually independent of Turkish control. Even in Bosnia and Turkey itself (Asia Minor), local chieftains sometimes defied the Sultan’s authority. Russia took advantage of Turkish weaknesses during the Russo-Turkish War of 1768–74 and obtained impor tant concessions, including de facto control of the Crimea and access to the Black Sea for Russian merchant ships.⁸

Scandinavia: Denmark and Sweden

Northwest of Russia, Scandinavia consists of a narrow extension of the North German plain (Denmark) and a larger peninsula cradling the Baltic Sea and stretching northward beyond the Arctic Circle (Norway, Sweden, Finland). Its population had reached approximately four million by the end of the eighteenth century. Control of this region had been contested between Denmark and Sweden for much of its history. Danish kings not only controlled the Sound—the narrow waterway connecting the Baltic to the North Sea— but also ruled over the German duchies of Schleswig and Holstein, and the Kingdom of Norway. In the late fourteenth century, all of Scandinavia fell under Danish rule, until the Swedes reasserted their independence in 1520. Sweden, which already possessed Finland, expanded by seizing the province of Skåne from Denmark and taking most of Pomerania on the southern Baltic coast. In the seventeenth century, Sweden swelled further in consequence of the battlefield triumphs of Gustavus Adolphus. She briefly became one of Europe’s great powers and mistress of the Baltic, controlling its shores not only to the south but also to the east (Livonia, Estonia and Ingria). But in the Great Northern War (1700–1721), the Swedes faced a formidable coalition composed of Denmark, Russia and Poland. Swedish military power was pulverized by Peter the Great at Poltava in 1709. Russia occupied Finland, which she later returned; however she retained the Baltic provinces of Ingria, Estonia and Livonia; Hanover annexed Bremen; and Prussia seized Stettin (present-day Szczecin in Poland). The spectacular collapse of Swedish power abroad was accompanied by a resurgence of power by her nobility at home, known as the Frihetstiden or ‘Era of Liberty’ (1718–72). The warrior-king Charles XII died without heirs, and the Riksdag (or Estates) conditioned the succession to the crown on the new monarch’s consent to an extraordinary diminution of royal power. In marked contrast, Danish rulers continued to exercise absolute power. Despite the loss of Skåne, they also continued to collect tolls on the traffic through the Sound.⁹

Poland and its partitions

Situated on the broad Northern Plain between Russia and the German states, Poland had long been one of Europe’s largest states, with her origins reaching back to 966. It is worth examining her fate in some detail, not only as an object lesson in the realpolitik of late ancien-régime diplomacy, but also because her shadow would loom large over the later proceedings at Vienna. In 1569, Poland and Lithuania, including the Ukraine, had joined together to form an immense ‘Commonwealth’ (Respublica). Poland’s capital then moved from Kraków (Cracow) to Warsaw, while the new Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth became an elective monarchy with a Diet (Sejm) consisting of a Senate and 200 elected deputies, controlled by the Polish aristocracy (szlachta). The kings of the Commonwealth were elected by a colourful assembly of the entire nobility, gathered behind provincial banners in an open field. Foreign candidates were permitted, inviting the interference of other powers; indeed, different noble clans deliberately wooed foreign sovereigns as candidates.

The Partitions of Poland

In the seventeenth century, Poland’s elected monarchs failed to curb the powers of the magnates in the Sejm or to obtain the powers needed for a centralized administration and larger royal army.¹⁰ The szlachta even claimed the right to challenge royal measures by forming armed associations, known as Konfederacy (‘Confederations’). In the early eighteenth century, a succession of Saxon kings preferred residence in their native Dresden to Warsaw. The Polish nobility benefited as their country’s central government grew progressively weaker. The magnates basked in their ‘golden freedoms’—exclusive rights to own land and distil alcohol, as well as exemption from land taxes, custom duties and even most grounds for arrest. They gloried in a mythical ancestry, claiming to be descendants of a race from the east, while Poland’s peasantry remained mired in the toils of serfdom.¹¹

In the late eighteenth century, Poland-Lithuania was still Europe’s second largest state in area and third in population.¹² Yet Poland’s size no longer reflected her power. The powerful Czartoryski family hoped to remedy their country’s shortcomings by strengthening the powers of the Polish Crown. To overcome the opposition of the other magnates, they turned to Russia for support. In 1764, Catherine the Great procured the election of her handsome Polish favourite, Stanisław Poniatowski, whose mother was a Czartoryski. To Catherine’s surprise, rather than acting as a Russian puppet, Poniatowski (now King Stanislaus Augustus) proposed the Czartoryski reforms, including creation of a responsible ministry and abolition of the notorious liberum veto, which allowed any deputy in the Sejm to veto legislation and to terminate the Sejm’s proceedings. These reforms were naturally opposed by Russia and Prussia, who hoped to keep Poland infirm.¹³ Catherine demanded that the deputies of the Sejm accept a Russian guarantee of the political status quo, necessitating rejection of Poniatowski’s proposed alterations. These events sparked a rebellion of conservative Polish nobles, equally opposed to the reforms and Russian influence. Their revolt in turn triggered Russian intervention. Nor was this the end of this startling chain of events, for when Russian soldiers crossed into Ottoman territory to chase Polish recalcitrants, they unexpectedly provoked a new Russo-Turkish War: Russian forces swiftly defeated the Ottomans and overran their territories in the Balkans and the Crimea.

While the war in the east was still raging, Frederick the Great of Prussia took action to acquire a corridor along the Baltic to connect his territories in Pomerania with East Prussia: in fact, he proposed to Russia and Austria that they all take slices of Polish territory. By each taking a share of the booty, Poland’s three neighbours claimed to be acting on behalf of the European balance of power. Poland’s military forces were insufficient to resist this combination, and the Sejm reluctantly ratified the loss of nearly one-third of Poland’s territory and approximately four of her almost 11 million inhabitants in the First Partition.

In 1788, Russia was again drawn into conflict with Ottoman Turkey at a time when the rest of Europe was becoming preoccupied with events in France. King Stanislaus Augustus and the Sejm used these distractions to increase the size of the Polish army and to introduce a host of progressive reforms based on Enlightenment ideas, culminating in the Polish Constitution of 3 May 1791, which created a hereditary monarchy, confirmed the rights of the nobility, granted self-government to the towns and abolished the liberum veto. The adoption of the new constitution, however, quickly led to cataclysmic disaster. A group of conservative Polish nobles, sponsored by Catherine, opposed the changes and again invited Russian intervention. Having just concluded peace with Sweden and Turkey, Catherine launched a new invasion of Poland in 1792 on the pretext of crushing revolutionaries. Once again, the Poles were overwhelmed, and both Russia and Prussia took new slices of Poland in the Second Partition in 1793. Poland lost another four million of her inhabitants, while the deputies of the Sejm were coerced into endorsing the disastrous partition.

One year later, the Polish patriot Tadeusz Kościuszko—who had once fought bravely alongside George Washington for American independence— launched a popular insurrection against the occupying powers and even managed to defeat Russian forces at Racławice. Vastly outnumbered, the Poles were soon defeated, and Kościuszko’s defiant gesture ended tragically in the total extinction of the Polish state by the Third Partition.

In three successive partitions—1772, 1793 and 1795—the ancient kingdom of Poland was thus completely effaced from the map.¹⁴ Her territories and population were completely absorbed by Russia, Prussia and Austria. In 1797, the three partitioning powers signed a solemn treaty never to revive the Kingdom of Poland again. On the one hand, the partition of Poland distracted the eastern powers, preventing them from strangling the French Revolution in its in fancy. On the other, the rape of Poland created an unfortunate legacy that was later to haunt—indeed to dominate—the statesmen at Vienna in 1814.

The Habsburgs and Europe’s middle zone

The Holy Roman Empire and the German states

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