interests, was hailed as the dawn of a new era. In a sense it was so; but hardly in the manner nor to the degree that some had hoped. In its councils the arts of the old diplomacy, still inspired by the traditional principles or lack of principles, were directed to the old ends; and the world, as though the popular upheaval of the Revolution had never been, was treated as real estate to be parcelled out by the executors of Napoleon’s empire among sovereigns by divine right, regardless of the wishes of the populations, which figured in the protocols merely as numbers to be balanced and bartered one against the other.
This process of “dividing the spoils,” as Gentz called it, was naturally pregnant with possibilities of quarrels. Of these the most dangerous was that provoked by the resolution of the emperor Alexander I. at all costs to keep the former grand-duchy of Warsaw for himself, while compensating Prussia for the loss of some of her Polish territories by the annexation to her of all Saxony. The deadlock caused by the stubborn insistence on this plan, which the other great powers were equally determined to frustrate, all but led to war, and by a secret treaty signed on the 3rd of January 1815, Great Britain, France, and Austria agreed to make common cause in that event against Russia and Prussia. It needed Napoleon’s return from Elba (March 1815) to remind the powers that their particular interests must still be subordinated to those of Europe. The common peril restored the broken harmony; and while the armies of the Alliance were closing in for the final struggle with the French emperor, the congress hurried on its deliberations, and on the 9th of June 1815, a few days before the battle of Waterloo, by which Napoleon’s power was finally shattered, the Final Act, embodying the treaties of Vienna, was signed.
The territorial arrangements thus effected were for half a century the basis of the states system of Europe, and the treaties in which they were defined the charter of international relations. It was in central Europe, where Napoleon’s policy had most profoundly affected Territorial adjustments of the Vienna treaties. the pre-revolutionary system, that the greatest changes were made. No attempt, indeed, was made to restore the Holy Roman Empire, in spite of the protest of the pope against the failure to re-establish “the centre of political unity”; but the Confederation of the Rhine having come to an end, Germany was reconstituted as a confederation of sovereign states, in which all the former members of the Empire which had survived the revolutionary epoch found a place (see Germany). Austria, in virtue of the imperial tradition of the house of Habsburg, received the presidency of the federal diet; but the bulk of her territories lay outside the frontiers of the Confederation, and the non-German character of the Habsburg monarchy was accentuated by the other arrangements at the congress. In Italy Lombardo-Venetia was erected into a kingdom under the Austrian crown; while the dynastic settlements in the other Italian states tended to make Austrian influence supreme in the peninsula (see Italy). In return for this, Austria surrendered her claim to her former possessions in the Low Countries, which were annexed to the crown of Holland, so as to form, under the title of the United Netherlands, an efficient barrier to French aggression northwards. The function of defender of Germany on the Rhine frontier which Austria thus abandoned was assigned to Prussia, an arrangement pregnant with momentous issues. In compensation for her disappointment in the matter of Saxony, half of which was ultimately restored to the dynasty of Wettin, she received a large accession of territory in the Rhine provinces, carved partly out of the suppressed kingdom of Westphalia, partly out of the former ecclesiastical states, and comprising the imperial city of Aix-la-Chapelle and the former electorate of Cologne. To Prussia also was conceded the right to garrison the federal fortress of Luxemburg.
Of the other German states, Bavaria, which alone was sufficiently powerful to be of any great importance in the general affairs of Europe, reaped the reward of her timely defection from the cause of her protector Napoleon. She had, indeed, to restore to Austria the territories annexed to her at the expense of the Habsburg monarchy by the French emperor: Tirol, the Quarters of the Inn and of the Hausruck, and part of Salzburg. But she received ample compensation elsewhere, notably the former Bavarian Palatinate with a strip of territory to connect it with Bavaria proper. The right to garrison the federal fortress of Mainz was also ultimately conceded to her. Bavaria was thus placed in a position to continue her traditional policy of aiming at the position of a European great power and holding the balance between Austria and Prussia (see Bavaria: History). The two other German states whose elevation to kingdoms had symbolized a similar ambition, Saxony and Württemberg, were henceforth relegated to a position of third-rate importance; Saxony depended for her very existence on the rivalry of her more powerful neighbours: Württemberg protested in vain against the dictatorship of the great powers to which she was forced to submit. Finally, the electorate of Hanover, partly out of compliment to the king of Great Britain, partly because with the abolition of the Holy Empire the title elector had fallen obsolete, was elevated to a kingdom. The request of the elector of Hesse for a similar concession in his case was refused by the powers assembled at Aix-la-Chapelle in 1818.
Of great importance were the changes effected in the north and east of Europe. The affairs of the Ottoman empire, which the treaty of Bucharest (1812) between Russia and Turkey had left in a very unsatisfactory condition, were not dealt with by the congress, in spite of the efforts of Great Britain to bring them into discussion. But the concessions made to the emperor Alexander elsewhere represented a notable advance in the European position of Russia. The possession of Finland, conquered from the Swedes in 1808, was confirmed to her; and, above all, the erection of the former grand-duchy of Warsaw into a constitutional kingdom of Poland under the Russian crown not only thrust the Muscovite power like a wedge into the heart of Germany, but seemed to threaten the Polish possessions of Austria and Prussia by setting up a quasi-independent Poland as a centre of attraction to the scattered elements of the Polish nation; though in the sequel the establishment of the city of Cracow and its territory as an independent republic, to avoid the difficult question of its assignment elsewhere, proved a more fruitful source of nationalist unrest. In the north the settlement confirmed by the congress marked the definite withdrawal of the Scandinavian Powers from any active influence on the affairs of the continent. Alone of the parvenu monarchs of the Napoleonic age Bernadotte retained the crown of Sweden, to which, by the treaty of Kiel, that of Norway had been added. On the other hand, by the cession of Swedish Pomerania to Prussia, Sweden finally withdrew from the southern shores of the Baltic. The Scandinavian states ceased henceforth to play any determining part in European politics. In the south, on the other hand, the restoration of Savoy and Piedmont to Victor Emmanuel I., king of Sardinia, and the incorporation in his dominions of the territories of the former republic of Genoa, were factors pregnant with mighty issues. The object of this increase of the power of the house of Savoy was but to erect a barrier against any possible renewal of French aggression in Italy; in effect it established the nucleus of the power which was to struggle successfully with Austria for the hegemony of Italy.
The gains of Great Britain in Europe were comparatively small, though by no means unimportant. By the retention of Malta she secured her power in the Mediterranean, and this was further increased by the treaty of Paris (November 5, 1815), by which the powers recognized her protectorate over the Ionian Islands. (See Vienna, Congress of.)
But for the episode of the Hundred Days, France would have emerged from the congress with recovered prestige and mistress of at least some of the territorial gains of the revolutionary wars; though Napoleon had thrown away, during the negotiations at Châtillon, the chance of preserving The powers and France. for her her “natural frontiers” of the Rhine, the Alps and the Pyrenees. After Napoleon’s second downfall she was in serious danger of dismemberment, for which the German powers
