Napoleon's Wars_ An International History, 1803-1815 - Charles Esdaile [353]
20 November 1815, Britain, Russia, Prussia and Austria entered into the so-called Quadruple Alliance, whereby they engaged to keep the peace against France and to hold regular congresses to ensure that war did not break out again. Even before that, Russia, Prussia and Austria had signed the much-misunderstood Holy Alliance, the point of this agreement being not so much to crush revolution wherever it raised its head, but to promote international stability. On this Metternich, who regarded it with great scorn, is very clear: ‘No very severe examination was required on my part to see that the paper was nothing more than a philanthropic aspiration clothed in a religious garb which supplied no material for a treaty between the powers . . . The most unanswerable proof of the correctness of this statement exists in the circumstance that never afterwards did it happen that the Holy Alliance was made mention of between the cabinets, nor indeed could it have been mentioned . . . The Holy Alliance was not an institution to keep down the rights of the people [or] to promote absolutism or any other tyranny. It was only the outflow of the pietistic feeling of the Emperor Alexander, and the application of Christian principles to politics.’54
Although the peace settlement that resulted from the French Wars has often been criticized, it was by no means the disaster of legend, and particularly not if it is assessed in the context of the world as it was understood in 1815. It undoubtedly met the security concerns of the great powers in respect of France: ‘As the treaty is now framed,’ wrote Castlereagh, ‘especially in the exclusion of the family of Bonaparte, I think it will give a very powerful appui to the king . . . It will also make the Jacobins - in truth the whole nation - feel that they cannot break loose again . . . without being committed with all Europe, and bringing down a million of armed men upon their country.’55 No attempt was made to turn the clock back to 1789, and, if many territorial changes were made, few were especially objectionable to the populations concerned as, outside France, nationalism was in its infancy as a political force. By the same token there was no great outcry in Germany and Italy at the failure of the Vienna settlement to address the issue of national unity, while even in partitioned Poland the issue was not so much continued foreign domination as the way that that domination was exercised. At the same time, too, the new frontiers were on the whole eminently justifiable, the Europe that emerged from Vienna being, as Paul Schroeder in particular has argued, far more stable than that of 1918 or 1945, let alone those of earlier general peace settlements. Encapsulated in the Congress system was the vital recognition that the powers of Europe could no longer engage in the endless dynastic warfare of the eighteenth century: the stakes were too high and the costs too great. The watchword of the Congress, in fact, was not reaction, but rather peace, and, in the wake of the estimated five to seven million deaths of the French Wars, one can thank God for it.
How, though, are we to assess the role of the Napoleonic Wars in European history? The most obvious effect was political. While the conflict gave birth to neither liberalism nor nationalism as political forces, it did accelerate their development, as witness the constitutions of a recognizably modern nature that had been promulgated in Spain, Sicily and Sweden, and the national movements that emerged in Germany, Italy, Serbia, Greece and Poland. On top of this, officer corps were frequently drawn into the discourse of the day, while the much retouched