THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES (33 page)

Nor was the environment of the Congress suited to his virtues. Castlereagh was honorable and undevious;
³²
Metternich and Talleyrand were notably, even ostentatiously, neither. Castlereagh was tolerant in religious matters (though an Anglo-Irish peer, he had long supported Catholic emancipation, and resigned from the government in 1801
³³
when the king refused to sign the emancipation act) and modest in his deportment; by contrast, Tsar Alexander I, the most flamboyant and politically indispensable personage at the Congress, persuaded every single party attending to sign a declaration in behalf of a “decent Christian order” (except the Ottoman sultan, the Pope—who refused to sign along with Orthodox and Protestant monarchs—and Great Britain), kept spectacular mistresses, and was acknowledged even in this society as a narcissistic megalomaniac. Yet, despite all these obstacles, Castlereagh did to a very large degree succeed.

Castlereagh played, first, on the awareness of all parties that a few states, collectively, possessed preponderant armed force and second, on the fact that while any one of these states could mobilize an entire nation to inflict horrific damage on the others, any further international conflict was sure to arouse the will of nations to seize their states because the mobilization of entire national peoples produced a larger and more critical audience for public decisions. Between these two apprehensions, fear of military defeat and fear of domestic upheaval, Castlereagh strung his diplomatic strategy. As we will see, it really had very little to do with the “balance of power” as that term had been used in Europe since Utrecht, although labeling it as such gave it the status of precedent.

As we have observed, the eighteenth century armies fielded by territorial states were (compared to their successors) relatively small and highly professional. Prior to the 1790s a military treaty might call for the provision of a force of 18,000 or 24,000—reckoned in the Roman units of 6,000 soldiers associated with the legion. In a previous chapter, the increase in size brought about by Frederick the Great was noted; yet on only two or three occasions did he ever commit more than 50,000 men to a battle. The French
levée en masse
, a nationwide mobilization, transformed this scale. In 1808, on the eve of the campaign that ended at Wagram, Napoleon commanded some 300,000 troops in Spain, another 100,000 in France, some 200,000 in the Rhineland, and another 60,000 in Italy. One expert has calculated that between 1800 and 1815, the number of Frenchmen called up reached two million, of whom an estimated 400,000 died either in service or as a result of service in war.
³⁴
By the time of the Hundred Days, the Coalition was able to field quickly 750,000 men, of whom 225,000 converged on Waterloo. Such magnitudes transfixed the attention of every political leader in Europe. Armies of this size meant that a campaign prosecuted on a continental scale would risk destroying the state that waged it,
as indeed the French state had been destroyed, but only if opposing forces of comparable size could be mustered.

This was the true
balance
in Castlereagh's calculations: a collective security force of such immense magnitude that it would deter any great power from aggression. As Ford has observed, Castlereagh's “position rested on the belief that genuine national interests, clearly recognized, could create in Europe an equilibrium of forces capable of rendering war unfeasible for any one power, or even for a coalition unless directed against a single aggressor.”
³⁵

To maintain such a coalition credibly required a commitment from all the major states. Even if the benefits to the common good justified a common effort, what was to prevent any single state from opting out of such an effort and still enjoying the fruits of general security? If the cost of a European conflict was so horrific, why wouldn't a state simply let the others fight—or not fight, for that matter? For if one state kept out, why would its rivals bleed themselves white in a conflict for the common good? If one state did keep out, why wouldn't the others do likewise, leaving the field to the most aggressive state? This problem required Castlereagh to exploit the second overwhelming impression of the wars that had just ended: wherever the war had been taken, large and hostile popular insurrections had been touched off. These occurred in Belgium in 1798, Naples in 1799 and 1806, Spain in 1808, and the Netherlands in 1811–1812. There is some dispute whether these were national uprisings or simply revolts of a familiar kind against the requisitioning by troops of foodstuffs, horses, and equipment. It is of no matter: in either case, war on an international scale meant unleashing popular national forces that the state could not control.

This was the problem of the state-nation, which, unlike the nation-state, had no broad-based elective assemblies to mediate strategic decisions and, speaking comparatively, little free press to articulate and educate public opinion. The state-nation, however, did have positive characteristics that Castlereagh understood perfectly. Its leadership was cosmopolitan, it could take decisions quickly and make commitments over the long term, and it possessed a mercantile and industrial tax base that could benefit from defense preparations and direct military expenditures. It was, in short, ideal for the innovation of the Congress, which Castlereagh introduced at Vienna, having insisted on provisions for this mechanism in the preceding treaties among the allies.

There had of course been other conferences and congresses before Vienna; two or three, the Westphalian conferences at Münster and Osnabrück in 1648, and that at Utrecht in 1713, have been discussed, and form the subject of Part II in Book II. Those congresses, however, met for the sole purpose of arranging peace settlements—where settlement was the
objective, including parceling out the territorial spoils of war. The Congress of Vienna was something new.
*
Of this Congress Metternich wrote,

Relying on the Treaty of Chaumont, a secret article inserted in the first Treaty of Paris had reserved the determination of Europe's ordering to the great powers of the Coalition. Castlereagh now concluded the Quadruple Alliance of November 1815, which reiterated the key features of Chaumont but stipulated that the great powers would hold periodic conferences,

“Thus,” as Craig and George put it, “the new order was in a sense given both a constitution and a constitutional watchdog (as defined by the final act), and a concert of powers to watch over it.”
³⁸

At Vienna, diplomats of the great powers met repeatedly with each other and with parties as various as the Vatican emissary, the sultan of Turkey, rival Italian factions, thirty German princes, and representatives of the Jews of Frankfurt am Main. Meanwhile, ten special commissions dealt with specific questions ranging from the organization of Germany and Switzerland to topics such as population statistics, diplomatic rules, and the vexing matter of the slave trade. There was no plenary session of all the delegates until the signing of the final comprehensive treaty, called—as with the Helsinki Accords in our own day, which the Congress prefigured—the Final Act. The historian Jacques Droz has concluded,

The course of the Congress did not run entirely smooth. The tsar and the Prussians were not quite willing to abandon their goals of using the Congress to win historic territorial concessions. Tsar Alexander's ambition was to gain a Polish kingdom that would recover for Poland all of Prussia's share in the partitions of 1793 and 1795, with the tsar as king. Prussia, for its part, wished to annex the whole of Saxony.

On January 3, 1815, Castlereagh concluded a secret agreement with Austria and France to resist, by force of arms if necessary, these extreme claims. It has been questioned by historians whether this was in fact merely a bluff; Castlereagh would have been hard put to secure the approval of Parliament for such a war. However that may be, the agreement, which was quickly leaked, had the desired effects both of bringing France into the Alliance, and of persuading Prussia and Russia promptly to moderate their demands. Within six weeks the Polish and Saxon questions had been resolved by compromise, and the Final Act was signed on June 9, 1815.

Of all the powers of the coalition, Britain took away the least in territorial gains. It annexed nothing on the continent. It returned scores of overseas areas seized and occupied during the years of warfare. At Ghent, moreover, Castlereagh had concluded a treaty with the United States that ended the War of 1812 on terms so generous in light of the British capture of Washington that American students are routinely taught that the United States actually won the war. This far-sighted statesman had, more than any other person at the Congress, created a permanent system of consultation, a genuine “concert of Europe.”

On November 20, 1815, the coalition partners committed themselves for twenty years each to contribute 60,000 men should there be any attempt to overturn the settlement. In the meantime, however, Alexander had drawn up the Treaty of the Holy Alliance, a union of the tsar's religious convictions (Castlereagh called it “a piece of sublime mysticism and nonsense”
⁴⁰
) and Metternich's reactionary intrigue. This treaty, though innocuous enough on its face, in fact sought to organize the powers of Europe for intervention against internal revolution. Such a step was viewed by Castlereagh as a subversion of the true purpose of the Congress and in a diplomatic note of October 19, 1818, Castlereagh protested that

Confronting this nineteenth century version of the Brezhnev Doctrine, Castlereagh continued to cling to the hope that peace could be maintained among nations whose internal systems remained their own affair. Two months after the Holy Alliance was concluded, Castlereagh renewed the Treaty of Chaumont and arranged for the periodical calling of international congresses. The first of these meetings, the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle in the autumn of 1818, seemed to reinforce his hopes. He and Wellington attended for Britain; for Austria, the emperor Francis I and Metternich; for Russia, the tsar and Nesselrode; for Prussia, Frederick William III; for France, Talleyrand's successor (Talleyrand having resigned to become Louis XVIII's royal chamberlain). Although the Quadruple Alliance was reaffirmed, a new agreement, the Quintuple Alliance, was formed to admit France into the society of great powers “to protect the arts of peace.” All occupation forces agreed to leave French soil; progress was made on a more generous definition of Jewish rights, the abolition of the slave trade, and mediation between Sweden and Denmark. Yet beneath this harmony, there lay a fundamental division of purpose as to the proper scope of the emerging directorate of the five powers.

The three eastern monarchies held the view that political revolutions were the responsibility of governments, like other public order problems—crime, for example, or epidemics and panics. When, therefore, a revolution broke out within the European world, it was the responsibility first of the state government, but second, if necessary, of the international directorate—the
Concert of Powers
, as the phrase was first used at Aix-la-Chapelle (Aachen)—to stabilize the situation. All this they had learned from Napoleon, who had used the rhetoric of revolution to bridge state boundaries, and had effectively exploited civil discontent as a strategic weapon.

Castlereagh did not share this view. For one thing, he knew that the British Parliament would not support a policy of constant intervention in other states, particularly to prop up repressive regimes. This meant that the directorate would proceed without British consent—that was part of the rules—and that this would gradually isolate Great Britain. Second, he saw that enlarging the agenda of the Concert moved the powers away from the two contexts of concern on which he had relied for their cooperation, for while revolutionary activity might arise from national feeling and might by contagion threaten neighboring regimes, it did not necessarily arouse a national people to arms against their neighbors. Once the focus was off this threat to international security, the states of the coalition would not need to hang together and would soon split into rival camps, in part on the basis of their differing attitudes about political reform. It was at Aix-la-Chapelle that Castlereagh condemned all efforts “to provide the transparent soul of the Holy Alliance with a body.”
⁴²
Even a new revolt in France, he added, would openly justify intervention only if it were judged that the result would be the arming of the nation for conquest elsewhere. By adroit diplomacy he was also able to prevent discussion of the question of intervention against the Latin American colonies that were in revolt against Spain.