Major European Events Between 1789 and 1835
Senior 4 · History
Major European Events Between 1789 and 1835
Lesson 4 of 5
25 min
From September 1814 to June 1815 the rulers and diplomats of Europe met in Vienna to rebuild the continent after Napoleon. The French court painter Jean-Baptiste Isabey drew the chief negotiators, and engravings of his picture were sold across Europe. Read the title in the panel at the bottom: Congrès de Vienne. Séance des plénipotentiaires des huit puissances signataires du traité de Paris ("Congress of Vienna: a session of the plenipotentiaries of the eight powers that signed the Treaty of Paris").
Analyse it. Ask of any source: who is in the picture, and who is missing?
Definition
Legitimacy: the principle that the "rightful" (legitimate) royal families overthrown by the Revolution and Napoleon should get their thrones back. Balance of power: arranging states so that no single power is strong enough to dominate the others. Compensation: giving a state new land to make up for land it gave up.
Congress System: the attempt, from 1815 to about 1825, to keep the peace through regular meetings (congresses) of the great powers. Concert of Europe: the wider habit of the great powers of settling crises together, which lasted much longer. Intervention: one state sending forces into another to change what happens there.
The Final Act was signed on 9 June 1815, nine days before Waterloo. Austria's foreign minister, Prince Klemens von Metternich, chaired the Congress; Britain sent Lord Castlereagh, Russia's Tsar Alexander I came in person, Prussia sent Hardenberg, and France Talleyrand. Their decisions followed four principles.
| Principle | Examples in the settlement |
|---|---|
| Legitimacy | The Bourbon kings were restored in France (Louis XVIII), Spain and Naples; the Pope regained the Papal States |
| Containing France | A ring of stronger neighbours: Belgium joined to Holland as the United Kingdom of the Netherlands; Prussia given the Rhineland; Piedmont-Sardinia given Genoa; Swiss neutrality guaranteed |
| Balance of power | Austria, Prussia and Russia all enlarged, but none allowed to dominate: Russia got most of Poland as "Congress Poland", Prussia only three-fifths of Saxony, not all of it |
| Compensation | Austria did not recover Belgium but received Lombardy-Venetia in northern Italy; Sweden kept Norway, taken from Denmark in 1814; Britain kept the Cape Colony, Ceylon and Malta |
Germany was reorganised: the roughly 300 states of the old Holy Roman Empire, dissolved in 1806, became a German Confederation of 39 states under Austria's presidency. And on 8 February 1815 eight powers signed a declaration condemning the Atlantic slave trade, which became Annex XV of the Final Act. It set no date and had no means of enforcement; Britain, which had banned the trade in 1807, had to press for years for real action at sea.
The victors had just fought France almost without a break from 1792 to 1815. They wanted:
Three agreements gave the system its form:
The Holy Alliance was the Tsar's idea: the Catholic Emperor of Austria, the Protestant King of Prussia and the Orthodox Tsar promised to rule as Christian brothers. It was vague, but it became the symbol of the conservative Eastern monarchies. Britain never joined it. The Quadruple Alliance was a real treaty, and its Article VI created the congresses.
| Congress | Problem | Decision | Britain's position |
|---|---|---|---|
| Aix-la-Chapelle, 1818 | The allied army still occupied France | Troops withdrawn by 30 November 1818; France joined: the Quintuple Alliance. No agreement on stopping the slave trade at sea | Agreed |
| Troppau, 1820 | Revolution in Naples (July 1820) forced the king to accept a constitution | Troppau Protocol (19 November 1820): states changed by revolution that threaten others are excluded from the alliance, and the powers will bring them back "by peaceful means, or if need be, by arms" | Sent only an observer and objected; in May 1820 Castlereagh's State Paper had rejected general intervention |
| Laibach, 1821 | Naples | Austria authorised to act; its army beat the Neapolitans at Rieti (7 March 1821) and restored the king's full power | Present; accepted that Austria could act in Italy, its own sphere, but not a general right to intervene |
| Verona, 1822 | Liberal revolution in Spain (1820) | Russia, Austria and Prussia backed a French invasion of Spain, carried out in 1823 | Wellington declared Britain opposed to the whole principle of intervention: an open break |
| St Petersburg, 1825 | The Greek war of independence against the Ottomans (from 1821) | No agreement among the powers | Acted outside the congresses: in April 1826 it signed its own Protocol of St Petersburg with Russia |
| Achievements | Failures |
|---|---|
| No war between the great powers until the Crimean War (1853 to 1856), and no war involving all of them until 1914 | Ignored nationalism and liberalism: Italians, Germans, Poles and Belgians were divided or ruled by others, and revolted in 1820 to 1821, 1830 and 1848 |
| France was brought back into the family of powers quickly and peacefully (1818) | The powers split over intervention: the Eastern monarchies against Britain, and later France |
| The first attempt to manage international affairs by regular conferences: an ancestor of the League of Nations and the United Nations | The system of regular congresses broke down within ten years (Verona 1822, St Petersburg 1825) |
| The slave trade was condemned by international declaration for the first time (1815) | It was used to crush constitutional movements in Naples (1821) and Spain (1823), making the powers look like a club of kings against their peoples |
Historians disagree. Henry Kissinger, in his 1954 study A World Restored, praised the Vienna statesmen for building a stable order based on a balance of power. Critics answer that the order was stable for monarchs, not for peoples: it held down nationalism and liberalism until they exploded in 1830 and 1848. A good answer weighs both.
Rwanda and Africa today. The question that split the congresses, whether outside powers may intervene inside another state, is still alive. The world's failure to act during the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi led to the idea of a "responsibility to protect", and the African Union's Constitutive Act, signed at Lomé on 11 July 2000, gives the Union in Article 4(h) the right to intervene in a member state in grave circumstances: war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity. Unlike Troppau, it is about protecting people, not protecting thrones.
Warning
Do not mix up the Congress of Vienna and the Congress System. The Congress of Vienna (1814 to 1815) was one meeting that drew the new map. The Congress System was the series of later meetings (1818 to 1822, and 1825) meant to keep that settlement in place. Also, the Holy Alliance and the Quadruple Alliance are different: Britain was in the second, never in the first.
Tip
Learn the congresses in order with "A T L V": Allies Tried, Later Vanished. Aix-la-Chapelle (1818), Troppau (1820), Laibach (1821), Verona (1822). The colours of the timeline tell the story: green, orange, orange, red.
Important
Discuss. At Troppau the great powers claimed a right to intervene to protect kings from revolution. Today the African Union claims a right to intervene to protect people from genocide and crimes against humanity. What makes one intervention legitimate and another not? Who should decide, and what can go wrong when nobody acts?
CrashCourse, "The Congress of Vienna: Crash Course European History #23". Watch for the aims of the statesmen at Vienna, the principle of the balance of power, and why the settlement could not hold back nationalism.
Practice
Key points
Sources and credits
Written by Ganzaa: the source questions, the two diagrams, the tables and the exercises. This lesson adapts CC BY-SA material and is shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Quick check
Match each congress to its main business.
Tap one on the left, then its partner on the right.
