The Austrian chancellor who presided, and gave his name to an age of reaction
Foreign minister from 1809 and chancellor from 1821; the 'Metternich system' policed liberal and national movements.
History · Revolutions & empires
The Congress of Vienna
September 1814 – June 1815
The great powers redraw Europe after Napoleon
With Napoleon on Elba, the victorious powers gathered in the Austrian capital to settle the map of Europe. Business was done in private among Austria, Britain, Prussia, Russia and a nimbly readmitted France, while hundreds of lesser delegations waited amid a famous round of balls and hunts. The Final Act, signed nine days before Waterloo, restored dynasties, buffered France with stronger neighbours and created a habit of consultation that kept the powers from general war for decades.
How to spot them
- ▸An Austrian foreign minister in the chair; a French foreign minister who talked his way from pariah to partner
- ▸A jibe that it does not march, it dances
- ▸A Polish-Saxon quarrel that nearly split the victors into two armed camps
- ▸Signed in June 1815, days before a battle in Belgium
What happened
'Le congrès ne marche pas, il danse' — a quip attributed to the Prince de Ligne (1814)
He died that December, before the congress finished dancing.
The French foreign minister who used the principle of legitimacy to get a defeated France into the inner circle
He had served the monarchy, the Revolution, Napoleon and the restored Bourbons.
The British foreign secretary who negotiated the settlement and cut his own throat six years later
Wellington replaced him at Vienna when he returned to London in February 1815.
A dispute over Poland and Saxony that led Britain, Austria and France to sign a secret defensive pact against Russia and Prussia (3 January 1815)
The threat evaporated when Napoleon landed in France in March.
The loose league of 39 German states created to replace the old Reich (1815)
Presided over by Austria, with a diet at Frankfurt; it lasted until 1866.
The system of periodic great-power conferences that grew out of the settlement
Aachen, Troppau, Laibach and Verona followed between 1818 and 1822.
Key ideas
- Legitimacy: restoring the pre-revolutionary ruling houses wherever possible, the principle Talleyrand used to argue France's case
- Balance of power: France was hemmed in by a strengthened Netherlands, an enlarged Prussia on the Rhine and Austrian control of northern Italy, but not dismembered
- Collective management: the powers agreed to meet periodically to handle crises, the germ of later international conference diplomacy
Quick-fire facts
- •Hosted by Emperor Francis I of Austria; Metternich chaired the proceedings
- •The main negotiators were Metternich for Austria, Castlereagh and later Wellington for Britain, Hardenberg for Prussia, Tsar Alexander I for Russia and Talleyrand for France
- •The Final Act was signed on 9 June 1815, nine days before Waterloo
- •Russia took most of Poland as the semi-autonomous 'Congress Kingdom'; Prussia was compensated with part of Saxony and the Rhineland
- •The Austrian Netherlands were joined to the Dutch to form the United Kingdom of the Netherlands, which broke apart in 1830
- •Switzerland's perpetual neutrality was recognised, and Norway was transferred from Denmark to Sweden
- •The congress condemned the slave trade in a declaration of February 1815, largely at Castlereagh's insistence
- •It also fixed diplomatic precedence by rank of mission rather than by the seniority of the state — rules still broadly in use
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Sources
- Fondation Napoléon — History of the Two Empires: the fall of the Empire and the settlement of 1815
- Encyclopaedia Britannica — Congress of Vienna Consulted for the territorial settlement and the negotiators; cited without URL as the site blocks automated access.