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By Root 2695 0

of Europe, too, commerce and industry and sometimes even agriculture were all but at a standstill. There was also a serious problem of public order: the hundreds of thousands of deserters, beggars and, in a few areas, irregular combatants of one sort or another proved a fertile breeding ground for brigandage. But most of all, war was equated with revolution. Whereas before 1789 conflict had been a matter of armies, cabinets and dynasties, from the French Revolution onwards it had been associated with frightening levels of social and political change. Setting aside the changes implemented in the territories ruled by France, in Prussia it had proved necessary to emancipate the serfs and, at least in theory, open the officer corps to all classes of society, while in Spain, Sicily and Sweden war had brought political revolution. Only slightly less frightening was the issue of popular revolt, whether it was in Valencia in 1801, Lombardy in 1809 or even England in 1811-12 . Clearly, war had to be banished from the scene. How, though, was this to be done? In 1648 and 1713 general peace settlements - the treaties of Westphalia and Utrecht - had been negotiated after periods of near Continent-wide bloodshed, but these had been totally ineffectual when it came to remedying the features in the international system that led to conflict. What was needed, then, was a peace settlement that was very different from anything that had gone before - a revolutionary treaty for a revolutionary age.

The problem was that there was no agreement amongst the powers represented at the international congress that now met at Vienna. The chief positions on a ‘systemic’ approach to the peace treaty were those of Castlereagh and Alexander I. Let us begin with Castlereagh. The British Foreign Secretary was, as we have seen, a bitter opponent of the French Revolution and, still more so, of Napoleon, and he felt strongly that a restoration of the Bourbons was the best hope for the future. In April 1814 this had duly been achieved, but in a sense the problem had not gone away. There might be another revolution in France, or some new Louis XIV might emerge to challenge the existing order. The chief territorial aim of any settlement therefore had to be the construction of a barrier system that would keep France penned in. Inherited from Pitt, who had seen it as the necessary corollary to any compromise peace with the Republic or Napoleon, this scheme was the central goal of British foreign policy in 1814; but Castlereagh’s views were not limited to Western Europe. On the contrary, it was quite clear to him, first, that there would have to be a territorial settlement that took in the Baltic, Poland and the Balkans as much as it did the Rhine frontier; second, that such a settlement would have to rest on a ‘balance of power’; and third, that some means would have to be found of ensuring that future disputes were settled by means other than military conflict. Broadly speaking, the idea of an anti-French cordon sanitaire was endorsed by most of the other rulers and statesmen who came to the peace table. However, there were some important variations that were to give rise to many difficulties later on. To avoid provoking her unnecessarily, Castlereagh, for example, wanted France to be treated relatively leniently, whereas the Prussians wanted at the very least massive financial compensation and possibly territory in Alsace-Lorraine as well. Equally, while Castlereagh believed the moment for foreign intervention was the point at which France, or, indeed, any other power, threatened the general peace, Metternich thought in terms of intervention against revolution even when it remained within national boundaries. And, finally, whereas Castlereagh wanted to see a general guarantee that would commit the powers of Europe to maintaining the status quo established in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars against all comers, Alexander wanted to guarantee them against France alone, thereby giving Russia a free hand in Eastern Europe.

This was not the only issue separating Alexander