Russia Against Napoleon_ The True Story of the Campaigns of War and Peace - Dominic Lieven [320]
Although this might seem to make the 1814 campaign pointless, in fact this is untrue. If the allies had signed a compromise peace with Napoleon in March 1814 he would have been in a much stronger position to challenge the peace settlement than was actually the case in 1815 after his escape from Elba. He would have had longer to plan his revenge and would have been able to pick his moment. His position within France would also have been stronger. By 1815 the restored monarchy had many supporters and even Napoleon’s chief bulwark, the army, was riven with tensions between those who had compromised with the Bourbons and the hard core of Bonapartist loyalists.
Above all, the international situation would have been more favourable. In the end in 1814 the allies could unite with relative happiness around the restoration of the monarchy. A compromise peace with Napoleon would have been much less acceptable, above all for Alexander. Attempting subsequently to achieve agreement among the allies on a European settlement would have been all the harder. Even without this, the Congress of Vienna looked at one point as if it was going to result in a renewed European war. With Napoleon poised in Paris to exploit allied dissensions and his former allies awaiting his resurgence the dangers of further wars would have been great. In fact by the time Napoleon re-established himself in Paris in 1815 the allies had achieved agreement on the peace settlement and were united in their determination not to let him unravel it. That made his defeat nearly certain. In June 1815 Napoleon had to risk everything by trying to destroy Wellington’s and Blücher’s armies before the main allied armies could intervene. He knew that even if he succeeded in doing this, he still faced probable defeat at the hands of the massive Russian, Austrian and Prussian forces already approaching France’s borders.
The Hundred Days made little difference to the terms of the peace settlement. France more or less retained its 1792 borders. Russia got most but not all of the Duchy of Warsaw. Prussia was compensated with part of Saxony and was given Westphalia and the Rhineland in order to secure their defence against French revanchism. The very loose German Confederation which was created under Austrian and Prussian leadership far from satisfied the hopes of German nationalists or liberals, though these were much fewer on the ground than subsequent nationalist historians claimed. This was even more true in Italy, which after 1815 was made up of a number of illiberal states under a rather benevolent Habsburg hegemony.
For the Russians, the key elements in the settlement were Poland and Germany. As regards the former, many of Nesselrode’s dire predictions proved correct. Alexander did consider seriously the idea of a federalized Russia with representative institutions, into which the constitutional Polish kingdom might fit more easily than into the present autocratic empire. Understandably, however, given Russian realities at the time, he retreated from this idea. Soon enough the contradictions between the monarch’s role as autocratic tsar and constitutional king of Poland became glaring. The 1830 Polish rebellion ended the experiment of constitutional rule in Poland. Meanwhile the revolt of Russian officers in the so-called Decembrist movement of 1825 owed much to injured Russian national pride at the Poles being given freedoms denied to the Russian elites. In the century which followed 1815 the Poles contributed much to the Russian Empire’s economy. In political terms, however, both the Polish and Jewish populations of the former Duchy of Warsaw caused the Russian government many problems. Nor was it even clear that the annexation of the Duchy had strengthened Russia’s strategic position. On the