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.
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
Treaty of Nov. 20, 1815, and the Concert of Europe.
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
The Holy Alliance.
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
England and
the Concert.
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.
The highwater-mark of the activity of the Allies as a central government for Europe was reached at the congress of Aix-la-Chapelle (q.v.) in 1818. France was now admitted to the Alliance, the objects of which were reaffirmed by a public declaration to which she adhered; but at the Congress of Aix-la-Chappelle, 1818. same time a secret treaty renewed the compact of Chaumont between the four other powers. Certain questions outstanding from the congress of Vienna were referred for settlement to a ministerial conference to meet at Frankfort in the following year. The treaty which was the result of this conference was signed on the 20th of July 1819. The bulk of it was concerned with territorial settlements in Germany: between Austria and Bavaria, and Bavaria and Baden; but some of the articles arranged for the cession of the border fortresses Philippeville and Mariembourg to the Netherlands, defined the frontiers of Savoy, and settled the reversion of the Italian duchies held by the empress Marie Louise.
Meanwhile the balance of forces within the European concert
had shown a tendency to shift. At the outset the restless
activity of the emperor Alexander, his incalculable
idealism, and his hardly veiled ambitions had drawn
Austria and Great Britain together in common suspicion
Alexander I. of Russia and Metternich.
of an influence that threatened to be little less disturbing
to the world’s peace than that of Napoleon. But
at Aix Metternich had begun to realize that, in the long-run,
the system of repression which he held to be essential to the
stability of the European, and above all of the Austrian, polity
would receive little effective aid from Great Britain, fettered
as she was by constitutional forms; while Alexander, alarmed
at the discovery of revolutionary plots against his person, had
already shown gratifying signs of repentance. The “Jacobin”
propaganda of the tsar’s agents continued, it is true, especially
in Italy; and, in spite of the murder of the dramatist Kotzebue,
as a Russian emissary, by the fanatical “Bursche” Karl Sand,
Alexander joined with Castlereagh in protesting against the
reactionary policy embodied in the Carlsbad Decrees of October
1819. But the murder of the duke of Berri on the 13th of
February 1820 completed the Russian autocrat’s “conversion.”
At the congress of Troppau, which met in the autumn of the same
year, he was a “changed man,” committed henceforth heart
and soul to Metternich and his policy. The outcome of this new
Congress and protocol of
Troppau, 1820.
understanding was the famous Troppau Protocol,
published to the world on the 19th of November 1820,
and signed by Austria, Prussia and Russia. The
immediate occasion of this manifesto was the military
insurrection, under General Pepe, at Naples, by which
the Spanish constitution of 1812 had been forced on the king
(see Naples: History). But the protocol embodied a general
principle involving issues infinitely more important than any
arising out of this particular question. “States which have
undergone a change of government due to revolution,” it declared,
“the results of which threaten other states, ipso facto
cease to be members of the European alliance, and remain
excluded from it till their situation gives guarantees for legal
order and stability. If, owing to such alterations, immediate
danger threatens other states, the powers bind themselves, by
