When France at length collapsed in 1815 under the pressure of a world in arms, the statesmen who had carried on the war against her collected to a Peace Congress in Vienna. While the populations of the Continental System were still starving under the English blockade, which the British Government maintained for some months after Waterloo, the Congress danced and sang and flirted and in the intervals made a Peace.
The war had been waged to put an end to French militarism and to make the world safe for autocracy (or, in certain countries, aristocracy), with the maintenance of which the liberties of mankind were inextricably bound up. The most conspicuous offender against these liberties was Napoleon ; and there was a strong public movement in the Allied countries to ' hang l'Empereur '. It was with undisguised relief that the Allied statesmen in Vienna were able to substitute the less dangerous solution of life-long internment in mid-Atlantic in the custody of Sir Hudson Lowe.
But the perils of the future were unfortunately not removed with the elimination of the French Emperor. The war had let loose on the world the bacillus of ' the Revolution ', which comported the
negation of God and the Family and the existing social system and yet strangely enough was highly contagious. The deeper purpose of the Vienna Peace Congress was to erect a barrier against the onslaughts of this dangerous pest.
The lead at the Congress was taken, almost from the first, by Austria. Not that Austria had contributed more largely than the other Allies to the ultimate victory. On the contrary, for the last two years of the war she had relied on the others with their relatively unimpaired man-power to bear the brunt of the struggle ; and in the final Hundred Days which ended with the battle of Waterloo no Austrian troops were engaged at all. That the decisive factor in Napoleon's collapse had not been the military genius of the Archduke Charles or the Duke of Wellington (the foremost among the Allied Generals), but the financial strength of Great Britain, was sufficiently obvious. But, when at the close of the conflict the other Allies proceeded to disarm, Austria did not ; and the force which her armaments in being lent to her arguments at the council table was very quickly apparent.
The Austrian Chancellor, Prince Metternich, proceeded to build up a system of vassal States, all vowed to the principles of ' legitimism ' (as the maintenance of the Peace Settlement was then described) and all looking to Vienna for political counsel, military instructors and armament loans.
There was one part of the Peace Settlement to which those of the Allies who, like the Emperor Alexander, considered themselves idealists—' ideologues ' was the contemporary term—attached the utmost importance ; and that was the establishment, for which the Peace Treaties provided, of a league of (' legistically ' minded) nations with a council of the chief Powers as its executive organ. It was hoped in this way to provide the machinery for focusing international public opinion (assumed to be pacific and conservative) against disturbers of the existing settlement, and bringing recalcitrant German or Italian Princes with ' Liberal ' tendencies to heel. A quasi-religious significance was attached to this combination of the chief powers, which was known as the Holy Alliance, and was the nucleus of a whole philosophy of political mysticism.
The guiding spirit and the driving force of the Holy Alliance came from Vienna. If anywhere in Europe there was a State which had earned a reputation for arbitrary or brutal administration (like Naples), or which denied rights and liberties to its subjects (like the States of the Church), or maintained the ascendancy of a governing race or class by keeping the leaders of the minorities in exile or gaol (like Modena and Parma), such States were invariably vassals of Vienna. If anywhere there was a State with Liberal or constitutional
tendencies, it was sure to be outside the Austrian orbit, and to be regarded with profound distrust by the Holy Alliance.
The policy of Austria was based on genuine, and (as the event proved) well-founded apprehension as to the effect on herself of any changes in the position of the vassal States as fixed by the Peace Treaties : and the arrogance with which she was apt to treat other countries, and on occasion even her own vassals, was essentially an expression of weakness—in contradistinction to the arrogance of Napoleonic France which was the expression of Napoleon's strength. Those statesmen who appreciated this distinction and stood up to Austria commonly gained their point : but they were few and far between, and not always the Ministers primarily responsible for the foreign affairs of their respective countries. In general the Foreign Offices throughout Continental Europe were at pains, willingly or unwillingly, to bring their policy into conformity with the Austrian system.
The policy of the rest of Europe throughout the half-century which followed the Peace Settlement was conditioned by the struggle to remove or palliate the servitudes which in the interest of Austria the Treaties had imposed.
The first outbreak came in 1830, when some half-dozen props of the system collapsed, not all of which could afterwards be replaced. The United
Netherlands disappeared incontinently from the map, and the legitimist Bourbons in France and a certain number of German Princes lost their thrones. The Austrian hegemony lasted till the next upheaval in 1848. In that year of casting off of yokes, when to be alive was good but to be young was very heaven, Metternich had to escape from Vienna in disguise and the Holy Alliance ceased to be regarded by anyone any longer as holy. The wreckage of the 1815 framework still remained : and it took one war in Germany in 1866 and a whole series of wars in Italy between 1848 and 1870 to clear it finally away.
Rich England stood by meanwhile giving no effective support to either side, but growing richer and richer while the Europeans struggled in the meshes of their toils. When the struggle was over, the English Liberal Gladstone pronounced its epitaph with the characteristic exclamation : ' When and where has any good ever come out of Austria ? '
Such is the story of the Peace Settlement of 1815.
' Of what use then ', said Asmodeus, ' is the
faculty of memory, if mankind does not profit by the experience of the past ? '
' We are here ', replied the Demon, ' without doubt in presence of a disposition of the Supreme Will. The scope of my own activities, for example, would be diminished by at least one-half, if mankind were to begin to learn the lessons of History. but, the Devil be praised,' he added, leering piously, ' they never do.'
(pages 199 -204 )