Congress Of Vienna Quotes

By effectively proscribing all change from below without placing any constraints on the powers of rulers, such a system arrested normal development and created a situation in which, since absolutist rulers were unlikely agents of social, economic or political development, change could only be brought about by violent revolution.

It would be idle to propose that the arrangements made in 1815 caused the terrible cataclysms of the twentieth century. But anyone who attempted to argue that what happened in Russia after 1917, in Italy and Germany in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, and in many other parts of central and southern Europe at various other moments of the last century had no connection with them would be exposing themselves to ridicule.

Might does not make right,” Talleyrand reminded. Has not Europe, he added, suffered enough from that doctrine, and paid for it “with so much blood and so many tears”? The golden age of peace could be right around the corner, if only every peacemaker would follow this course of action.

Of course it was not only the Bourbons’ mistakes which helped decide Napoleon to risk everything to try to regain his throne. Emperor Francis’s refusal to allow his wife and son to rejoin him was another, and the fact that his expenses were running at two and a half times his income. There was also sheer ennui; he complained to Campbell of being ‘shut up in this cell of a house, separated from the world, with no interesting occupation, no savants with me, nor any variety in my society’.88† Another consideration was paragraphs in the newspapers and rumours from the Congress of Vienna that the Allies were planning forcibly to remove him from Elba. Joseph de Maistre, the French ambassador to St Petersburg, had nerve-wrackingly suggested the Australian penal colony of Botany Bay as a possible destination. The exceptionally remote British island of St Helena in the mid-Atlantic had also been mentioned.

France aspired, in other words, to create a situation whereby “every ambition and unjust enterprise [would] find both its condemnation and a perpetual obstacle.” This might sound like a grand, unattainable ideal, he said, but Europe really had no choice. Without such principles in place, held firm and rigorously guarded, international affairs would soon degenerate into a reckless pursuit of self-interest and power—just as that reckless scramble had plunged the Continent into that “long and deadly horror” of the last quarter century. Now that Napoleon was defeated, Europe must take this opportunity to crown justice as the “chief virtue” of international affairs. Leaders of states must pledge that they would never act nor acquiesce in any deed that could not be considered just, “whatever consideration [that] may arise,” because only justice, he said, can produce a true state of harmony and stability. Anything short of that would create a misleading and meaningless false order, destined to collapse when the first powerful state decided to take advantage of its superior strength.

Talleyrand took quill in hand and penned one of the more remarkable documents of the Vienna Congress. This paper, a letter addressed to Metternich dated the nineteenth of December, was an elegant combination of philosophy and policy that affirmed the importance of justice and the rights of states in the face of aggression in international affairs. The French foreign minister first reminded Metternich that his country asked nothing for itself. France was satisfied with its borders and had no desire whatsoever for additional territory. What his embassy hoped instead was to persuade its fellow peacemakers to agree to one guiding principle, namely, “that everywhere and forever the spirit of revolt be quenched, that every legitimate right be made sacred.

His two brief trips to attend the party congresses in Stockholm and London in 1906 and 1907 were, by the way, his first exposures to foreign life, and it is doubtful that he spent much time outside the meeting-halls. A six-week sojourn in Cracow and Vienna at the beginning of 1913 was his only other known venture abroad before he traveled to Teheran in 1943 to confer with Prime Minister Churchill and President Roosevelt on the war against the Axis.

How wrong they are, these Potentates, to go out like this without dignity, without anything to distinguish them,’ wrote Anna Eynard in her diary, ‘for it is then that one sees them as men just like any others, and even as less, for they have been placed in the position of being able to achieve more.

was reminded of a story about the contentious talks during the nineteenth-century Congress of Vienna. After the Austrian diplomat Metternich was awakened with news that an ambassador he had been sparring with had died in the night, Metternich reportedly asked, “What can have been his motive?

A Christian statesmen serving the Ottoman Empire in 1852 would have had a number of reasons to invoke the career of the Duke of Wellington. The recently deceased Wellington was an Anglo-Irish and yet rose from that disadvantaged background to become a military and diplomatic leader defending the British Empire in India and against Napoleon. Representing Britain at the Congress of Vienna, Wellington was conservative in a time of changes and challenges for England and for the European system of politics. Wellington had apparently managed to reconcile the contradictions and challenges of his position and earn a shining reputation in life and in death as a defender of the British Empire. Stephanos Vogorides, the Ottoman Christian statesman who invokes Wellington here, was almost an exact contemporary of his. [...]. He encountered perhaps even more profound challenges than Wellington, struggling to no avail to reconcile his position as an Orthodox Christian serving not the Russian or even Greek state but the Ottoman state, in the midst of the conflicts growing more intense by the day in the early 1850s.

At the Congress of Vienna (1814–1815) he did his spying in other ways: He would blurt out what seemed to be a secret (actually something he had made up), then watch his listeners’ reactions. He might tell a gathering of diplomats, for instance, that a reliable source had revealed to him that the czar of Russia was planning to arrest his top general for treason. By watching the diplomats’ reactions to this made-up story, he would know which ones were most excited by the weakening of the Russian army—perhaps their governments had designs on Russia? As Baron von Stetten said, “Monsieur Talleyrand fires a pistol into the air to see who will jump out the window.

By effectively proscribing all change from below without placing any restraints on the powers of rulers, such a system arrested normal development and created a situation in which, since absolutist rulers were unlikely agents of social, economic or political development, change could only be brought about by violent revolution.

The Napoleonic Wars and the New World Order that Followed (1803–1815) The Napoleonic Wars lasted from 1803 to 1815, when Great Britain and its allies defeated Napoleon and his allies. As is usual, the victors got together to create a new world order, which was hashed out at the Congress of Vienna. It drew new boundaries to ensure that no European power would become too dominant, based on balance of power concepts that would avoid war. The British emerged as the world’s leading empire, and as is typical after the war and the establishment of a new order, there was an extended period of peace and prosperity—the Pax Britannica. Western Powers Move into Asia (1800S) The British and other Western powers brought their gunboats to India, China, and Japan in the mid-1700s and into the 1800s, causing dramatic disruptions to the course of their histories. At the time, both China and Japan were isolationist.