The Congress of Vienna

By the end of this lesson, students will be able to:

• Account for how European states responded to Napoleonic rule and the consequences of that response (LO H; Skill 3.D; KC-2.1.V.D).
• Account for KC-2.1.V.D: how the 1814-1815 Congress of Vienna sought to restore the European balance of power and contain the threat of revolutionary and nationalistic upheaval.
• Identify the principal Vienna negotiators (Metternich, Castlereagh, Talleyrand, Alexander I, Hardenberg) and the principles of legitimacy, compensation, and balance of power that guided the settlement.
• Account for the Vienna territorial reorganization: French reduction, German Confederation, Prussian gains, Habsburg adjustments, Russian acquisition of Congress Poland, the new Kingdom of the Netherlands, and the British overseas gains.
• Account for the post-Vienna Concert of Europe and its effectiveness in containing revolutionary and nationalist movements through 1848.

Napoleon's defeat at Leipzig (October 1813) and his April 1814 abdication produced an immediate diplomatic problem: how to reorganize Europe after twenty-three years of revolutionary and Napoleonic warfare. The May 1814 first Treaty of Paris settled the immediate French question (reduction to 1792 borders; Bourbon Restoration; modest indemnity) and called for a general European congress to address the broader settlement. The Congress of Vienna assembled in September 1814 and worked through June 1815.

KC-2.1.V.D captures the central point: after the defeat of Napoleon by a coalition of European powers, the Congress of Vienna (1814-1815) attempted to restore the balance of power in Europe and contain the danger of revolutionary or nationalistic upheavals in the future. The Congress was the most ambitious European diplomatic gathering since the 1648 Peace of Westphalia. Delegates attended from every major European state, but the principal decisions were made by the five great-power negotiators: Klemens von Metternich (Habsburg foreign minister and host), Robert Stewart Viscount Castlereagh (British foreign secretary), Charles Maurice de Talleyrand (representing the restored Bourbon France), Tsar Alexander I (representing Russia personally), and Karl August von Hardenberg (Prussian chancellor).

Three principles guided the Vienna settlement. Legitimacy: the restoration of pre-Revolution dynasties wherever possible. The Bourbon Louis XVIII returned to France in 1814 (and again after Waterloo in 1815); the Bourbons returned in Spain (Ferdinand VII) and the Two Sicilies; the House of Savoy returned to Sardinia-Piedmont; the Italian states' pre-Revolution dynasties returned. Talleyrand championed legitimacy as a way to give the restored Bourbon France a moral standing equal to the great powers; Metternich championed it as protection against revolution. Compensation: territorial adjustments to compensate powers for war losses or to maintain balance among them. Russia received most of Napoleon's Duchy of Warsaw as Congress Poland; Prussia received compensation for losing parts of its Polish territory in the form of roughly half of Saxony, the Rhineland, and Westphalia; Sweden lost Finland to Russia but gained Norway from Denmark. Balance of power: preventing any single state from dominating the continent, the principle that had organized European diplomacy since the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht (Topic 3.6). The settlement strengthened states surrounding France (the Kingdom of the Netherlands; an enlarged Prussia; an enlarged Sardinia-Piedmont) to contain potential French resurgence.

The territorial reorganization made several major transfers. France was reduced to its 1792 borders. The first Treaty of Paris (May 1814) was generous: France retained territory acquired before 1792, paid no indemnity, and accepted only brief allied military presence. The Hundred Days and Waterloo produced the harsher November 1815 second Treaty of Paris: France was reduced to its 1789 borders, paid a 700-million-franc indemnity, accepted three-year allied occupation, and returned art and antiquities Napoleon had looted. Germany: the Holy Roman Empire was not restored. Instead, the German Confederation of 39 states (Austria, Prussia, plus 37 smaller states) replaced both the dissolved Empire and Napoleon's Confederation of the Rhine. The Confederation had a Federal Diet (Bundestag) at Frankfurt under Habsburg presidency.

Prussia gained substantial territory: roughly half of Saxony (whose king had remained loyal to Napoleon), the Rhineland, Westphalia, and Swedish Pomerania. The acquisitions made Prussia a German great power straddling the central European map. Habsburg Austria gave up the Austrian Netherlands (transferred to the new Kingdom of the Netherlands) and the Habsburg Netherlands satellite kingdoms but gained Lombardy and Venetia in northern Italy and Tyrol back from Bavaria. The Habsburg eastward orientation continued (Topic 4.6); Italy became the Habsburg sphere of influence. Russia gained most of Napoleon's Duchy of Warsaw as Congress Poland, a Russian satellite kingdom with the Tsar as Polish king under a constitution. Russia also retained Finland (acquired from Sweden in 1809) and Bessarabia (acquired from the Ottomans in 1812).

Other major transfers: the new Kingdom of the Netherlands united the former Dutch Republic and the former Austrian Netherlands under William I of Orange (the union dissolved in 1830 with Belgian independence). Britain gained Cape Colony from the Netherlands, Ceylon (modern Sri Lanka), Malta, the Ionian Islands, Heligoland, and other strategic overseas positions. Switzerland was guaranteed perpetual neutrality. Sweden lost Finland to Russia but gained Norway from Denmark (through the Treaty of Kiel of January 1814, ratified at Vienna). Denmark lost Norway but kept Schleswig and Holstein. Spain was restored to its pre-Revolution borders under the Bourbon Ferdinand VII. The Bourbon Two Sicilies (Naples and Sicily) were restored. The pre-Revolution Italian dynasties returned to Tuscany, Modena, and Parma.

The post-Vienna Concert of Europe was the system of conservative diplomatic coordination among the great European powers (Britain, Austria, Prussia, Russia, plus France from 1818) to contain revolutionary and nationalist politics. Foundational documents included the Quadruple Alliance (November 1815) committing the four allied powers to renew their military coalition if France threatened the peace and to meet periodically to coordinate European policy. The Holy Alliance (September 1815) was initiated by Tsar Alexander I, in which the Russian, Austrian, and Prussian sovereigns pledged to govern their states according to Christian principles — a more spiritual document that Castlereagh dismissed as “a piece of sublime mysticism and nonsense.” Together the two documents framed the post-1815 conservative international order.

The Concert held a series of post-Vienna congresses to coordinate responses to revolutionary outbreaks. The Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle (1818) admitted post-Napoleonic Bourbon France to the Concert as a fifth great power. The Congress of Troppau (1820) and the related Troppau Protocol committed the eastern powers (Russia, Austria, Prussia) to intervention against revolutionary movements. The Congress of Laibach (1821) authorized Austrian intervention to suppress the 1820 Naples revolution. The Congress of Verona (1822) authorized French intervention to suppress the 1820 Spanish liberal revolution. By the mid-1820s the Concert system was beginning to fray: Britain (under Foreign Secretary George Canning) increasingly distanced itself from continental conservative interventions; the Greek War of Independence (1821-1832) divided the powers; the Spanish American independence movements that produced Latin American independence (1810s-1820s) ran outside Concert control. Yet Metternich's leadership made the Habsburg foreign ministry the principal European coordinating center, and the “Metternich system” dominated European politics until the 1848 revolutions broke the consensus.

The Vienna settlement is conventionally judged a successful peace. It produced no major European war for the next forty years (until the 1853-1856 Crimean War) and no continental general war for ninety-nine years (until the 1914 First World War). It accommodated post-Napoleonic France gradually back into the Concert. Its territorial reorganization — particularly the German Confederation and the strengthened Kingdom of the Netherlands — lasted in modified form into the 1860s. But the settlement also stored up problems that would explode in 1848: the suppressed nationalist movements in Italy, Germany, Poland, and the Habsburg lands; the conservative resistance to liberal constitutional reform; the absence of representative institutions in much of central and eastern Europe. Topic 5.7's central message is that the Vienna settlement attempted to restore the pre-Revolution European order but succeeded only partially: revolutionary and nationalist forces, having been unleashed by 1789 and Napoleon, could not be permanently contained.

Three sources documenting the Vienna settlement: the Final Act, Metternich on conservative principles, and the Holy Alliance text. Skill 3.D asks students to evaluate how claims and evidence support, modify, or refute each source's argument.

1. (Causation, Skill 3.D) Read the Final Act of Vienna excerpt. What claim does it make about the principles guiding the settlement? What specific evidence in the Act supports the claim about “the durability of the equilibrium of Europe”?
2. (Causation) Account for KC-2.1.V.D: how did the Congress of Vienna seek to restore the European balance of power and contain revolutionary upheaval? Identify three specific territorial decisions and explain how each served balance-of-power objectives.
3. (Causation, Skill 3.D) Compare Metternich's Confession of Faith with the Holy Alliance text. How do the two documents characterize the threat to European order, and what specific evidence does each invoke?
4. (Causation) Account for the three principles of the Vienna settlement: legitimacy, compensation, and balance of power. How did each principle shape specific outcomes, and where did the principles conflict?
5. (Causation) Account for the post-Vienna Concert of Europe through 1848. Why did the system contain revolutionary outbreaks in Naples (1820), Spain (1820), and elsewhere through the 1820s, and why did it eventually fail in the 1830s and 1840s?

Draft alignment — pending educator review. AP European History codes correspond to the official College Board Course and Exam Description (Effective Fall 2023, V.1). Statements below are paraphrased in the CountryReports voice; refer to the College Board's published CED for verbatim wording.