CHAPTER I

THE CONGKESSES, 1815-22

Napoleon, in his exile at St Helena, explained to the world, through his secretary Las Cases, the great ideal toward which all his efforts had heen directed. He had aimed, he said, at concentrating the great European peoples, divided hitherto by a multiplicity of artificial boundaries, into homogeneous nations, out of which he would have formed a confederation bound together " by unity of codes, principles, opinions, feelings, and interests." At the head of this league, under the aegis of his Empire, he had dreamed of establishing a central assembly, modelled on the American Congress or the Amphictyonic assembly of Greece, to watch over the common weal of "the great European family." The dream had been dissipated by his ruin; but he prophesied that it would yet be realised, sooner or later, "by the force of circumstances." " The impulse has been given, and I do not think that, after my fall and the disappearance of my system, there will be any other great equilibrium possible in Europe than the concentration and confederation of the great peoples. The first sovereign who, in the midst of the first great struggle, shall embrace in good faith the cause of the peoples, will find himself at the head of all Europe, and will be able to accomplish whatever he wishes."

Whether, but for the chastening effect of his downfall, Napoleon would ever have proclaimed this ideal, or whether, had he done so, circumstances, which he acknowledged to have been even his master, would have enabled him to realise it, is a speculation more fascinating than profitable. The significant thing is that so keen an observer of the temper of the times should have given it to the world, on the morrow of the Congress of Vienna, as the apology for his career.

The treaties which were the outcome of the Congress were, in fact, a bitter disappointment to those who had looked for an authoritative recognition of those new-born forces of nationality to which, in the stress of the War of Liberation, the monarchs had appealed. They were scarcely less of a disappointment to those who had hoped from this unique constituent assembly of sovereign princes an international constitution which would have obviated for ever the need of the barbarous

C. M. H. x. 1 1

A central constitution for Europe

appeal to arms. " Men had promised themselves," wrote Friedrich von Gentz, immediately after he had witnessed the signing of the Final Act, " an all-embracing reform of the political system of Europe, guarantees for peace ; in one word, the return of the Golden Age. The Congress has resulted in nothing but restorations, which had already been effected by arms; agreements between the Great Powers, of little value for the future balance and preservation of the peace of Europe; quite arbitrary alterations in the possessions of the less important States; but in no act of a higher nature, no great measure for public order or for the universal good, which might compensate humanity for its long sufferings; or reassure it as to the future. . . . The Protocol of the Congress bears the stamp rather of a temporary agreement than of work destined to last for centuries. But, to be just. The Treaty, such as it is, has the undeniable merit of having prepared the world for a more complete political structure. If ever the Powers should meet again to establish a political system by which wars of conquest would be rendered impossible and the rights of all guaranteed, the Congress of Vienna, as a preparatory assembly, will not have been without use. A number of vexatious details have been settled, and the ground has been made ready for building up a better social structure." It is with the attempt to complete the work left unfinished at Vienna, and to build up this "better social structure," that the history of Europe from 1815 to 1822 is mainly concerned.

The idea of a central constitution for Europe, though new life had been given to it by the common sufferings of the revolutionary epoch, was of course no new one. The Holy Roman Empire, so long as it carried on even a shadowy existence, had remained as the venerable symbol of this idea ; and, at the close of the Congress of Vienna, Cardinal Consalvi, in the name of the Holy See, had entered a solemn protest against the failure of the Christian Powers to maintain the " centre of political unity." But the Empire had been too long closely associated with the interests of the German nation and the House of Habsburg to be treated, even by theorists, as the key-stone of an international confederation ; and in all the " projects of perpetual peace " which had been published to the world during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Empire had been either ignored or assigned, at best, but a subordinate place. Of these schemes the Projet de Traite pour rendre la paix perpetuelle, published in 1713 by the Abbe de Saint-Pierre, deserves more particular notice as having formed the basis of all subsequent plans of the same kind. It aimed at making the Treaty of Utrecht the basis of an international system resembling that established afterwards among the German States by the Act of Confederation framed by the Congress of Vienna. A European League or " Christian Republic " was to be established, of which the members were to renounce the right of making war against one another and to submit their disputes to the arbitration

Birth of the Concert of Europe

of a central assembly of the Allies, whose decision was to be enforced, if necessary, by a common armament. This idea was taken up and elaborated, from time to time, by thinkers of the most divergent schools.

Yet, but for the Revolution, all their projects might have remained mere speculations of theorists. It was the common peril of the revolutionary propaganda, however underrated and misunderstood, that first revealed to statesmen a political Europe, recognising common rights and common duties. The Concert of Europe was born in the circular letter of Count Kaunitz, dated July 17, 1791, in which, in the name of the Emperor Leopold, he impressed upon the Imperial ambassadors the duty of all the Powers to make common cause for the purpose of preserving "public peace, the tranquillity of States, the inviolability of possessions, and the faith of treaties," and pointed out, as Voltaire had done in his Siicle de Louis XIV, that the nations of Europe—united by ties of religion, institutions, and culture — formed but "a single family." Thirteen years later, when the moral had been enforced by the bitter results of the continuance of the traditional dissensions, the Emperor Alexander I of Russia took up the theme. In a dispatch dated September 11, 1804, and addressed to Novossilzoff, the Russian special envoy in England, he suggested for the consideration of Pitt a plan resembling in general outline that of the Abbe de Saint-Pierre. In the event of the triumph of the Coalition over Napoleon, the outcome of the war was to be, not merely " the liberation of France," but the universal triumph of " the rights of humanity." To this end it would be necessary, " after having attached the nations to their Governments by making these incapable of acting save in the greatest interests of their subjects, to fix the relations of the States among each other on more precise rules, such as it is to their interest to respect." A general treaty was to form the basis of the relations of the States forming "the European Confederation." " Why could one not submit to it," the Emperor asked, " the positive rights of nations, assure the privilege of neutrality, insert the obligation of never beginning war until all the resources which the mediation of a third party could offer have been exhausted, until the grievances have by this means been brought to light, and an effort to remove them has been made? On principles such as these one could proceed to a general pacification, and give birth to a league of which the stipulations would form, so to speak, a new code of the law of nations, while those who should try to infringe it would risk bringing upon themselves the forces of the new union."

This proposal had, of course, been stillborn. Ten years were to pass before the liberation of France prepared the way for new experiments in the confederation of humanity; and meanwhile the Tsar himself, dazzled by the genius of Napoleon, had bartered away at Tilsit his ideals of a united Europe for the vision of a world in which there should be room only for the Emperors of the East and the West. His

4 Chateaubriand. ' De Maistre. Bentham

breach with Napoleon, the horrors of the Moscow campaign, and the comradeship of the wars of Liberation had reawakened the old ideal. And, to all appearance, the times were singularly propitious for its realisation. The close of the revolutionary era had left Europe exhausted and disillusioned. " The doctrine of extreme equality," which had issued in the despotism of one masterful will, might still—to quote Talleyrand — " have as apostles and partisans a few dreamers, building theories for an imaginary world"; the surface of society, here and there, might be agitated by the nationalist storm called up during the War of Liberation; but, in general, princes and peoples alike aspired only to some moderate system which should be a guarantee of peace and of orderly progress. The question which occupied the minds of theorists, as of men of affairs, was in what this system should consist. However opinion might differ as to the social changes wrought by the Revolution, there was little difference as to the principles on which they had been based. To Chateaubriand and de Maistre, the apostles of the new Ultramontanism, they were " satanic," as false and as fatal as those which had inspired the original revolt against authority and laid upon the world the curse of God. To Jeremy Bentham, the prophet of the new Liberalism, the " Declaration of the Rights of Man" was merely a " hodge-podge of confusion and absurdity," and its outcome, in so far as this had been disastrous, but the result of false premisses and defective logic.

These strangely contrasted appreciations may be taken as generally typical of the two schools of political thought which came into prominence at this period and were destined to play so conspicuous a part in the controversies of the nineteenth century. One aim was common to both; for alike they sought in a quaking world for some firm foothold of authority. The one found this in religion, and in the divine right of the established order ; the other in inductive science, and the duty of men to build up, on the secure basis of observed facts, a social system which should conduce to " the greatest happiness of the greatest number."

For the moment it seemed as though the new " Utilitarianism" would vanquish the spirit of reaction in the councils of the world. Bentham, who had lectured mankind for half-a-century in vain, in his old age suddenly found himself a power. Liberalising manarchs in Europe and the young republics of the New World sought his advice. His works, in the French versions of Dumont, circulated by thousands, and his principles left their impress on a dozen experimental constitutions. Yet the cold syllogisms of the recluse who proclaimed a gospel of enlightened selfishness did not appeal to a generation accustomed to be swayed by violent and conflicting emotions. The scientific spirit, which in a subsequent age was to work so great a miracle of transformation in the material and intellectual world, was as yet in its faint beginnings. Stronger by far as yet was that romantic spirit which

The romantic and the religious reaction 5

represented the revolt of the human imagination against the iconoclasm of the Revolution, and which sought its inspiration in the idealised past.

Romanticism was the outcome rather of emotion than of thought. It appealed, indeed, to history, but to history so ill understood as to be itself romance. It sought to materialise in art, in literature, in religion, its ideal vision of a world long dead. It inspired the Gothic revival in architecture, the " Christian " school in painting, the Romantic school in literature, and in religion the Catholic revival. In politics its influence, less clearly defined, since it was the outcome of confused and nebulous ideals, was from the first charged with fateful contradictions. It conjured up the beautiful mirage of the Middle Ages, which transfigured the selfish cry for the retention or revival of feudal and ecclesiastical privilege; it breathed new life into the doctrine of the divine right of kings; but it also, in its reaction from the colourless cosmopolitanism of the Revolution, gave an imaginative stimulus to the new-born passion of nationality which was to prove, during the century, the revolutionary force most fatal to the established order of the world. The nationalist agitation indeed, though alarming to the authorities, was practically confined as yet to Germany, and in Germany to a section of the literary and professional classes. The world at large was content to accept the principle underlying the Treaties of Vienna, to the f ranters of which sovereignty was still territorial, the nation no more than the aggregate of souls owing allegiance to a single government. The doctrine of " Legitimacy," which the cynical statecraft of Talleyrand had devised as the best lever to raise the Bourbons once more to the throne, identified the rights of sovereignty and of private property by basing both on prescription. This doctrine was consecrated by the principle, loudly proclaimed by the apostles of the religious revival, of the eternal union between "the altar and the throne."

The religious reaction, which is one of the most remarkable phenomena of the period immediately following the Revolution, and one of the most momentous in its results, was mainly the outcome of a natural revulsion. To the devout imagination it was natural to see in the woes that had fallen upon Europe the divinely decreed consequences of the unbridled reign of reason. The fashionable philosophy of the eighteenth century had brought dogmatic Christianity into disrepute, and the old antagonisms, which had once sufficed to deluge Europe in blood, had all but vanished. But the sceptical spirit which, in both Catholic and Protestant pulpits, had tended to substitute ethical philosophy for dogmatic religion, rested on too slight a foundation to resist the force of deeply stirred religious emotion. Scientific criticism and the study of comparative religions which, later in the century, were to prove more serious foes to Christian orthodoxy, were as yet unknown ; and it was easy for Chateaubriand, in his GSnie du Christianisme published in