The Europe of Napoleon and Metternich, 1798 to the 1840s.

 

Major Themes

• The enduring legacy and influence of the French Revolution in 19^th century Europe: the on-going struggle of liberal, democratic, and national aspirations against countervailing efforts to restore international and domestic stability, to repress signs of revolt or revolution, and to restore essentials of the “Old Order” or the “Old Regime.”

   

  • Conclusion to lecture: A Major Claim.

  The Struggle to defeat Napolen and the French dreams of internal hegemony succeeded on the battlefield of Waterloo and in the meeting rooms of the Congress of Vienna in 1815. And yet the struggle to defeat the French Revolution failed. In the 1820s, this failure was evident in the seizure of independence by the Greeks and by Latin American countries (Chile, Venezuela, Columbia, Peru, and Mexico), just as it was evident in the winning of independence by Belgians in 1830 and in the successful revolutions in France in 1830 and 1848. These events showed that the central political thrust of the French Revolution could not be readily contained: no regime deemed legitimate could long endure that did not incorporate representative government and some degree of popular participation.

   

• Liberalism’s chief aims were the liberation of the economy from state intervention and the establishment of representative government, mainly in the form of constitutional monarch.  Liberals were not democrats.
• Democracy had classically been defined as the worst form of government because it led to the rule of the mob under despots. Rousseau gave democracy the modern, positive sense that prevails today, meaning government based on the participation of the people and justified by the principle that sovereignty resides with the people, not with kings, princes, magistrates, or other elite groups. The radical phase of the French Revolution provided examples of modern democratic practice through its establishment of universal male suffrage and support for an enlarged notion of “equality” by embracing the principle that the state had an obligation to provide education for all citizens, financial assistance to those who were in need, and other means of equal participation in the benefits of democratic republic.
• Nationalism (politically based) as it emerged from the French Revolution was based on popular sovereignty and the equal rights of citizenship that all members of the nation or political community had by virtue of their membership in that politically constituted nation. This was a politically based conception of nationalism that was linked to patriotic loyalty to the nation. 
• Nationalism (culturally based) emerged in another form that was based on shared culture of language and history. This took root in the Germanies in response both to the absence of a common German state in Central Europe and to aggressive nationalism carried by the French in their military campaigns from 1792-1815 and its occupation or annexation of states and principalities within the Germanies as well as Italy. Without a common state, German proponents of nationalism called on their common heritage of language and culture to foster unity that could then bring into being a true national state for Germany.
• Conservatism was an ideology of change in the sense that legitimate and desirable change came about through slow, gradual historical evolution, not by violent and dramatic revolution. One of its founders was Edmund Burke, a British writer and member of Parliament, who denounced the French Revolution as disastrous and illegitimate assault on the true nature of French government and society.  Joseph de Maistre, a Francophile writer from the kingdom of Savoy, based his theory of conservatism on a renewed version of divine right monarchy and the central importance of the church in any legitimate state.  Conservatives worked for change in the sense of returning a revolutionary society to its “old order” and to preserving traditional institutions such as dynastic monarchy, aristocratic privilege, and the church.

 

• Examples of the Conservative turn of mind and state practice
• The Peterloo Massacre near Manchester, England in 1819
• The Karlsbad decress of the German Confederation in 1819, outlawing organizations espousing liberal or radical or nationalist principles.
• The Restoration of the Church in France: the example of Restoration Crosses being erected among Liberty Trees (see pictures and commentary)
  

 

• In international relations, the Congress System that worked to keep Europe from any general war from 1815 to 1914 and that helped bring an unprecedented degree of stability during the entire 19^th century.
• Clemens von Metternich (1773-1859) was from 1809 until 1848 the Foreign Minister of Hapsburg Austrian and the major architect of the Congress System.  Like Napoleon, he was extremely self-assurred and conceited.

 

“There is, he said of himself, a wide sweep about my mind. I am always above and beyond the preoccupations of most public men. I can cover a ground much vaster than they can see. I cannot keep myself from saying about twenty times a day: ‘How right I am, and how wrong they are.’”

 

o       Metternich based his policies on 1) the conservative notion of “legitimacy,” which equated the good and just with historic tradition and the institutions of dynastic monarchy, church, and aristocratic privilege and 2) a new vision of balance of power in international affairs.  To restore and protect the legitimate order of Europe meant to restore and protect legitimate monarchs who would preserve traditional institutions:

 

The Bourbons in Spain and France

The Pope and other rulers in Italy

The Netherlands under King William I of Orange

The Polish Kingdom under the Russian Tzar

 

o       The success of the Congress System, 1815-1848.

§         A moderate territorial settlement after the defeat of France satisfied the victors (Britain, Russia, Austria, and Prussia) without humiliating France but by including France in the new Congress System. (A great contrast to the Peace of Versailles ending World War I, whose terms were designed to humiliate defeated Germany.)

§         The Great Powers kept their agreements to ally against revolutionary aggression, in large part because of their recognition of the vast costs in money and men involved in a general European war.

§         The Congress System worked through a council of the Five Great Powers (Britain, France, Prussia, Austrian, and Russia) who settled international disputes through diplomatic meetings of all parties instead of bi-lateral or multi-lateral negotiations a kin to the alliances during the 18^th century.

§         The Congress reorganized Central Europe, which up to then was a field of intense rivalries, instability, and war since the 17^th century 30 Years’ War. The German Confederation under joint Prussian and Austrian leadership saw the political geography much simplified from the 300 principalities in 1789 to 38 in 1815.

§         Concerted action to act together, to maintain the status quo, and a balance of power or equilibrium in Europe generally succeeded.