16

Vienna and the Failure of Reform
1815–1840

Finale: Napoleon and Waterloo

The city of Vienna in September 1814 was on parade. The congregation of Europe’s leaders had gathered to breathe a collective sigh of relief. Napoleon was gone and France defeated. Emperors, kings and princes came with retinues of military and political advisers. Present too, crowded into hotels and rented townhouses, were 200 German princelings and hangers-on, hoping to snatch crumbs from the deserted table of the Holy Roman Empire. To these were added representatives of cities, churches, banks, corporations, even publishers. Delegates were accompanied by courtiers, wives and marriageable daughters.

Vienna, humiliated by Napoleon, was overjoyed to be the centre of attention. One estimate had its population surge from 200,000 to 300,000, as its streets thronged with migrant servants, ostlers, cooks, tailors, ‘courtesans and confectioners’. The winter was given over to entertainment, energized by the new waltz, with its exhilarating rhythms. Beethoven was summoned in November to stage a concert of his rousing Battle Symphony (now rarely performed), in honour of Wellington’s triumph at Vitoria. The French, unabashed by their Leipzig defeat and led by Talleyrand, held a competition to decide Europe’s finest cheese. Britain submitted Stilton and Switzerland Gruyère. Of sixty entries, France’s brie de Meaux was declared le roi des fromages.

The formal proceedings were presided over by the practised statesmen Talleyrand, Metternich and Castlereagh. Against the wishes of the others, Castlereagh insisted on France’s presence, lest it have grounds for disregarding any settlement. The earlier Paris treaty had already performed the customary ritual of readjusting the boundaries of old Lotharingia to form a buffer zone along France’s eastern border. Vienna confirmed this, but also sought to rescue and restore Europe from Napoleon’s blight. There were bilateral claims and counter-claims to be resolved. There were issues of restitution, compensation, trade and debt. There was France’s colonial empire to be shrunk and reapportioned. Vienna was a United Nations assembly in embryo.

Proceedings were nearing an end in March 1815 when Vienna was shattered to hear that Napoleon had escaped from Elba and landed near Cannes in the south of France. He had then marched to Paris at the head of a new army. Louis XVIII had fled Paris and Napoleon resumed his old throne. The Vienna delegates declared him an outlaw and adjourned to assemble a seventh anti-French coalition, before struggling to complete their business.

The task of confronting Napoleon was assigned to Britain’s now Duke of Wellington. He had replaced Castlereagh as head of the British delegation and, like Marlborough a century before, was regarded as a token of Britain’s sincerity in seeking a new European order. He assembled a modest British army of 25,000, a third of them Irish, to add to an allied strength in Belgium of 118,000. Napoleon raced his ‘army of the north’ towards Brussels, to confront Wellington before he could be reinforced by the Prussians under Blücher.

Napoleon’s advance found the allies ill-prepared and Wellington’s prospects in doubt. After preliminary skirmishes on 16 June at Quatre Bras, battle was joined in earnest outside the village of Waterloo. Though the British infantry squares wavered before the force of the French cavalry, they ultimately held their ground. The outcome was thus inconclusive until the arrival late in the day of Blücher’s Prussians on the French flank. Napoleon’s imperial guard broke and fled, and the French were routed. The role of the Prussians was much debated afterwards, but exchanges between Wellington and von Clausewitz agreed that the Prussian arrival was critical. It was, as Wellington admitted, ‘the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life’. When Napoleon’s carriage was captured by the Prussians, it was found full of jewels, which were incorporated into the Prussian crown.

Waterloo was, on the day, decisive, although had Napoleon won, he would certainly have had to confront a larger coalition force, as at Leipzig. As it was, he was driven back to Paris with the British and Prussians in pursuit. This time his marshals told him emphatically it was over. In June 1815 he abdicated and fled Paris for the coast, writing to Britain’s George III pleading for ‘the protection of the laws … from the most powerful, most constant and most generous of my enemies’. It is said he dreamt of asylum as a British country gentleman. The letter was never delivered. Despite also contemplating escape to America, Napoleon was captured by the British, saving him from probable execution by the French or the Prussians. He was taken aboard HMS Bellerophon and transported by HMS Northumberland to the distant British colony of St Helena in the south Atlantic. ‘I am the new Prometheus,’ he told his secretary, ‘chained to the rock to be gnawed by vultures … Before ten years have passed, all Europe will be Cossacks or republicans.’ Six years later he was dead, stomach cancer the suspected killer.

Vienna: the settlement

The Congress of Vienna now completed its business, seeking to settle a Europe that had, in the past quarter century, seen carnage unprecedented since the Thirty Years War. An estimated five million people had died across the continent in the twenty-five years between the start of the French Revolution and Napoleon’s departure, a greater proportion of the population than was killed in the First World War. France alone is thought to have lost one and a half million. All Europe’s economies had atrophied and the emergent industrial revolution been put on hold, everywhere except in Britain.

The regimes present at Vienna craved the status quo antebellum. Instinct told them to return to the principles of Westphalia and Utrecht, to salvage Europe from its revolutionary trauma, in effect to pretend that Napoleon had never happened. Metternich’s particular fixation was that a balance of power should obtain across Europe, Napoleon’s empire being dismantled to this end. A new Netherlands incorporated Belgium to its south, the latter’s fourth ‘overlord’ after Spain, Austria and France. Savoy was linked with Piedmont and Sardinia to form a buffer state on France’s south-eastern border. Poland and Saxony suffered for their brief flirtation with Napoleon by being dismembered, part going to Russia, part to Prussia, leaving mere fragments as independent.

Prussia wanted revenge for Napoleon’s humiliations, and proved the chief beneficiary. It was awarded much of Saxony as well as much of north Germany as far as the Rhineland, including the mineral-rich Ruhr. The result was that what had been an ‘east-Elbian’ Prussia now stretched from Poland in the east to the French border in the west. Austria won Salzburg, the Tyrol and its old territories in north Italy. Venice, now under Austrian rule, regained its stolen bronze horses of St Mark’s.

The delegates felt they had no option but to accept the demise of the Holy Roman Empire. Napoleon’s thirty-six-state German confederation was refashioned as thirty-nine, with Vienna asked to chair its largely ceremonial gatherings in a Frankfurt Bundestag. The new entity was called a ‘third Germany’, alongside Prussia and Austria. The identity of this third Germany was much discussed. The Holy Roman Empire had watched over it for a thousand years. There seemed little cause to disturb such a testament to local sovereignty, least of all with the hovering presence of an assertive, belligerent Prussia to the north.

Yet would a Bundestag talking shop be enough? German consciousness had been stirred to life by Napoleon’s conquests. German universities, officers’ clubs and the craft guilds of Hamburg, Frankfurt and Heidelberg wanted to be at Europe’s top table. To be a people without a nation seemed antiquated, neither one thing nor another. As Simon Winder has noted, while this new Germany was being stitched together, Mary Shelley in Geneva was dreaming of Frankenstein’s monster stirring ‘with an uneasy, half vital motion’ into signs of life.

Britain’s Castlereagh was under strict cabinet instructions not to get embroiled in any continental horse-trading. Vienna confirmed Britain’s wartime colonial gains, including Cape Town from the Dutch. As for Britain’s future in Europe, as after Utrecht its job was done and its soldiers would stand down. The Whig Lord John Russell opposed further spending on an army, as it would risk turning ‘a naval into a military nation … a mighty island … into a petty continental state’. The army was cut from 600,000 to 100,000, most of it for the colonies. Wellington was left to hold an annual banquet for his Waterloo generals in his house at Hyde Park Corner. A new London bridge was named after the battle, opened in 1817. The French later retaliated with the Gare d’Austerlitz, among others.

Vienna aftermath: the Concert of Europe

One outcome of Vienna was Castlereagh’s concept of an ongoing congress, a ‘concert of nations’, to settle international disputes before they reached a battlefield. Britain, with Russia, Prussia, Austria and France, agreed to hold regular meetings to this end. The concert’s intention was dubbed ‘to keep Britain in, France down and Russia out’. The days of seemingly constant European wars should be over.

Less noted was Napoleon’s principal innovation, his application of the apparatus of a modern state to the disciplines of war. It was an apparatus that once in place proved strangely resistant to dismantling itself. The question should have been how to curb such power, and make it accountable to its citizens, but Vienna did not ask it. Instead it discussed how to protect the continent’s ruling autocracies against future rebellion. Monarchs in Prussia, Austria, Poland and France had tinkered with national assemblies, and mostly regretted the outcome. Castlereagh was here a radical, warning that popular sentiment could not be suppressed for ever. At home he might be a rigid conservative, but compared to Russia’s Alexander or Austria’s Metternich, he was a tearaway liberal.

One consequence of Vienna was the gradual but emphatic end to the most odious blot on Europe’s overseas activities since the growth of empires in the seventeenth century, the Atlantic slave trade. Slavery had long ended, or at least elided into serfdom, in Europe itself. It had facilitated the opening up of plantations across the Americas in the eighteenth century, with the Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, French and British all major traders. Cities such as Lisbon, Cadiz, Nantes, Bristol and Liverpool prospered greatly. Their ships conveyed manufactured goods to west Africa, picking up slaves from African traders, transporting them to the Americas, then bringing sugar, rum and cotton to Europe.

The horrific so-called ‘middle passage’ meant that most of the tens of millions of slaves did not set foot on European soil, though thousands still did. This made it more difficult for campaigners against the trade, formed by a group of British Quakers and William Wilberforce in 1787, to publicize their case. Having ended its own trade in 1807, Britain entered a series of trade-banning treaties in 1818 with Spain, Portugal and the Netherlands, backed with British compensation to the former traders. The Royal Navy was deputed to enforce these, albeit spasmodically at first. This did not mean the end of slavery in Europe’s colonies, let alone in North America, but ending the trade was a first step.

The genie in the bottle: the hesitant 1820s

Vienna might have dismantled the French Revolution, but it could not ignore that it had happened, or its arousal of hopes of a new order. As the years passed, young Germans, Italians, Belgians and Poles asked what had been gained from Leipzig, Waterloo and Vienna. Germany was still thirty-nine states, Italy was still nine and ruled by outsiders. Greece and much of the Balkans remained under Turkish rule. Vienna had nursed Europe back to health, but not cured the disease that preceded it. That disease, as Castlereagh said, was the lack in most of Europe of any mechanism for securing consent to power.

Though Louis XVIII restored the French monarchy and nobility, he did not wholly reverse the Revolution. France stayed secular. The Code Napoléon was entrenched, with an assembly, a National Guard and departmental prefects in place. Royalists constantly pushed for a return to the Ancien Régime, but against them were renascent radicals pushing for change. Louis attempted to walk a line between them. He tried to recapture the spirit of France’s pre-revolutionary past, by combining aristocracy with the Revolution’s bureaucratic statism. It was unlikely to be a stable marriage.

In 1820 Spanish radicals had seized power in Madrid through the Cortes (assembly) and reduced the absolute monarchy of Ferdinand VII to a mere figurehead. There followed the ‘Liberal Triennial’ of mildly revolutionary rule, until in 1823 France sent an army to restore Ferdinand to his full autocracy. They marched into Spain, flagrantly breaching the spirit of Vienna but returning Ferdinand to his throne. The attendant violence was horrific, to be chronicled by Goya in his grim Black Paintings series.

The turbulence in Spain had a seismic impact in South America. Spain’s colonies took the opportunity of civil war back home to replicate North America’s War of Independence. In this they were astonishingly successful. Driven by the charismatic leadership of Simón Bolívar, within a decade from 1821 they had swept aside Spain’s colonial armies, creating Venezuela, Colombia, Peru and Bolivia. Other Latin American states, including Argentina, Uruguay, Chile and Mexico also achieved independence from Spain during the same period. In 1822 Brazil became independent of Portugal.

To the dismay of the Vienna Congress powers, Britain’s Canning recognized each independent South American state in turn, under pressure from City interests eager for exclusive trade. Recognition also worried the American president, James Monroe (1817–25), who saw both the possibility of France backing Spanish reconquest and Canning’s role as threatening. In 1823 he imagined the horror of Russia taking California and Peru, France taking Mexico and Britain taking Cuba. This would, he said, ‘be dangerous to our peace and safety’. Thus was born the Monroe doctrine, that the Americas, north and south, should be no-go territory for their former European parents. They were now the United States’ ‘sphere of influence’.

1830 and the year of revolutionary failure

The French Revolution had led to aftershocks across the continent, but without serious damage to Europe’s established order. As the nineteenth century progressed, the revolutionary urge began to resurface. First signs were in a surprising quarter, long-dormant Greece. In 1821 this orphan of old Byzantium staged a full-scale revolt against the Ottoman Turks. The struggle exhilarated Romantics across Europe, led by the heroic Lord Byron. The poet’s death fighting for the Greeks in 1824 coincided with a craze for all things Hellenic. Classical architecture, stimulated by the French Revolution, was replicated in state buildings, country houses, churches and universities across the western world. America’s Washington, under construction at the time, became the neoclassical city it remains today.

In 1824 France’s Louis had died, and with him the slow meander to reform. His successor, Charles X (1824–30), was a reactionary spendthrift who, as a teenager, had been Marie Antoinette’s dancing partner and darling of the Versailles court. He sought a return to the Ancien Régime, and was crowned in a truly spectacular ceremony in Reims, where medieval monarchs had been crowned. Greece was his opportunity for glory. In 1827 Charles joined Britain and Russia in sending ships to aid the rebels in Greece, where Russia was casting covetous eyes at the weakening Ottoman empire. An Anglo-Russian fleet engaged the Turks and Egyptians at Navarino off the Peloponnese, the same waters as had seen Lepanto in 1571. As Lepanto was the last major battle of oared ships, Navarino was the last exclusively under sail. The Turks were crushed by superior European gunnery and, by 1830, southern Greece was an independent if modest state. European nationalism had won a small but totemic victory.

That same year in Paris, Charles reacted to a series of assembly defeats with ordinances dissolving the assembly, ending press freedom and restricting the franchise. Mobs returned to their old haunt, the streets, but Charles was unmoved. He told the now ageing Talleyrand loftily, ‘I would rather hew wood than reign like the king of England … I see no middle way between the throne and the scaffold.’ Talleyrand soberly replied, ‘Your majesty forgets the post-chaise.’ Within days Charles took fright and fled to Britain, where he was allowed to settle only as a private citizen, the ‘Count of Ponthieu’.

This miniature rerun of the French Revolution saw the throne pass to the king’s cousin, the ‘bourgeois’ Louis Philippe of Orléans (1830–48). He greeted a delighted crowd from the balcony of the Hôtel de Ville, arm-in-arm with the elderly Lafayette. The amiable Louis Philippe proved a steadying influence. He steered a path between the hotheads of left and right, abolished France’s hereditary upper assembly and brought France eighteen years of peace. Delacroix’s revolutionary icon of Liberty, a topless maiden carrying a tricolour over a sea of corpses, referred to the 1830 coup and not, as is often supposed, to 1789.

Throughout 1830, Europe’s capitals echoed to the cries of the Paris barricades. Riots broke out in Brussels among French-speaking Catholics, protesting the ill-matched Vienna union of the Netherlands, Flanders and Wallonia. They had been ordered to speak Dutch and accept equal status for Protestants. The Concert of Europe went into action. Britain’s new foreign secretary, Lord Palmerston, collaborated with Talleyrand to separate Belgium from the Netherlands and guarantee its neutrality. In 1831 a separate Belgium was at last brought to life.

Italy next picked up the baton. Napoleon had given it a taste of unity and republicanism, but Vienna had returned it to Austrian overlordship. Moves for Italian unification proliferated, but they were largely confined to the Carbonari, secret revolutionaries’ clubs with branches across Italy. They had little military clout and a rising against Austria in the northern provinces proved short lived.

Also in 1830, a group of Polish officers and landowners rebelled, yet again, against Russia. A new tsar, Nicholas I (1825–55), was a far cry from his predecessor, the pragmatic Alexander. To his biographer, he was ‘autocracy personified: infinitely majestic, determined and powerful, hard as stone, and relentless as fate’. He reacted to the rebels by forcibly ending such autonomy as Poland was granted under Vienna and crowning himself king of Poland. Warsaw was devastated and saw a middle-class migration to Paris, to be entertained in its misery by Frédéric Chopin. ‘I suffer and pour out my despair at the piano,’ he groaned. Poland’s ailment was what Palmerston called ‘that sad inheritance of triumphant wrong’. With that, the revolutionary upsurge of 1830 was over. The architecture of Vienna remained intact.

A very British revolution: 1832

The greatest impact of the events of 1830, other than in Greece, was ironically in the nation least touched by revolution in France. Britain was experiencing the political backwash of economic success. The industrial revolution had changed its social geography to a degree as yet unknown on the continent. In 1801 the British population had been nine million. By 1841 it was sixteen million, plus eight million Irish. The countryside was depopulating and the cities were booming. Outside London, the biggest were no longer York, Bristol and Norwich but Manchester, Birmingham and Leeds. Social structures were changing and new leaders emerging. The defining British institutions were becoming less the country estate and the church and more the factory, the mill and the fledgling railway.

British politics did not reflect this change. Parliament might hold in check an unpopular Hanoverian monarch, but it was hardly accountable to the people. The hereditary and episcopal House of Lords held a veto on reform. Local government was patrician. The Church of England was moribund. Parliament represented a quarter of a million electors, mostly in rural counties and ancient boroughs, far fewer than in France and Spain. Most of the centres of industrial life were not enfranchised at all.

What had long guarded and developed the British constitution was the prevailing liberal ethos of its political establishment. It delivered the country leaders of remarkable ability, Walpole, the Pitts father and son, Lord Liverpool, Castlereagh and Canning. Each had tempered conservatism with tolerance of reform. The British people could pride themselves on free assembly and relatively free speech. A hearing was given to the radical philosophy of Jeremy Bentham, the prison reforms of Elizabeth Fry and the free trade of William Huskisson and Richard Cobden. Searing cartoonists such as Gillray and Cruikshank were tolerated, where they would have been guillotined in France.

In 1819 this outwardly serene state of affairs suffered a shock, when a peaceful rally for electoral reform at St Peter’s Field in Manchester was dispersed by soldiers on the orders of a panicked local magistracy. Eleven died and some 500 were injured in what became dubbed by headline writers the ‘Peterloo Massacre’. In most of Europe, the incident would have passed unnoticed – ‘only in England would they call that a massacre’, wrote one French commentator. But public and political opinion was appalled. To edgy conservatives, the event was a portent of British revolution. To liberals it was a summons to urgent reform.

In 1830 the long-decrepit George IV, so obese he scarcely ever appeared in public, died and the general election customary on the monarch’s death was narrowly won by the Tory Duke of Wellington. He responded to calls for reform by saying that ‘as long as I hold any station in the government … I shall always feel it my duty to resist such measures.’ Reform, he said, was the beginning of revolution. The remark did something almost unprecedented in Britain. It drew mobs into the streets. Wellington was nicknamed the Iron Duke not for his military prowess but for his reactionary political intransigence.

Wellington felt obliged to resign and the Whigs under Lord Grey took power. In 1831 Grey introduced a ‘great reform bill’, abolishing nearly sixty ‘rotten’ (that is virtually empty) constituencies and unseating 168 MPs. It more than doubled the franchise to over 650,000 and brought to Westminster representatives of the new cities. The bill met opposition, first from Tories in the Commons and then, after a second election delivered a pro-reform majority, from the Lords. Politics was in turmoil. Pressure on the new king, William IV (1830–37), to create pro-reform peers finally brought him and Wellington to their senses. The Reform Bill was voted through in June 1832. Parliament had rescued itself.

Though hardly ‘democratic’, Britain in 1832 showed that political reform could be achieved within a constitutional framework and without civic upheaval. The central institutions of the state, the king, Parliament and its leaders, never lost control of the debate. Even Wellington took it in his stride. When asked to comment on the newly reformed Commons in 1833, he replied, ‘I never saw so many shocking bad hats in my life.’

The new Whig Parliament confirmed the fears of conservatives everywhere. It banned child labour, and introduced a poor law, albeit in a form harshly satirized by Charles Dickens. Parish vestries were replaced by municipal corporations. Trade unions were legalized, and those unionists who had been deported to Australia for ‘combination’ – such as the Tolpuddle Martyrs – were brought home. In 1833 a bill abolishing the slave trade throughout the colonies was passed, Wilberforce dying just days after being told of its passage. In 1834, as if symbolic of a political spring cleaning, the Palace of Westminster burned down, to be replaced by a palatial new structure. This was in a gothic style that came to be associated with a new post-classical age, in church and state alike.

Three years later, a demure eighteen-year-old Princess Victoria took the British throne, shortly to marry an impeccable German husband, Prince Albert. The new Victorians might be smug, but they were not idle. No British troops sailed to support Spanish liberals, Polish rebels or Italian liberators. The Whig Parliaments of Grey, Melbourne and Palmerston held mostly to the non-interventionism of Walpole and the Pitts. Britons were more like Californians of a century and a half later. Their obsession was to explore new technologies and new horizons. While the rest of Europe was making revolutions, Britain was making ships, steam engines and cloth. In 1841, Brunel’s new railway completed a run from London to Bristol. Abroad, the British empire grew to cover much of the world’s land area and a quarter of its population under what was declared (by Britain) to be a worthy successor to the Roman peace, a new Pax Britannica.