OPINION:
THE CONGRESS OF VIENNA: POWER AND POLITICS AFTER NAPOLEON
By Brian E. Vick
Harvard, $45, 436 pages
The Congress of Vienna, begun in September 1814 and concluded in June 1815, was unique, an unprecedented Pan-European conference that laid the foundations for the post-Napoleonic age. It was also the first superpower summit. Never before had the monarchs and senior diplomats of all the great European powers — Russia, Austria, Prussia, England and France, plus representatives and rulers of second-tier Scandinavian, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and German kingdoms and principalities — gathered together in one place in pursuit of a lasting peace settlement designed to stabilize long-contested borders and prevent another major European conflagration.
On a lighter note, it is the only peace conference to inspire an operetta. Johann Strauss Jr.’s “Wienerblut,” a posthumous confection that bundled together many of the Waltz King’s most popular tunes, wrapped up in the flimsiest of plots, is an appropriate tribute to the Congress’ frivolous side. The fact that “Wienerblut” was produced eight decades after the Congress took place, by which time the shimmering waltz had replaced the stately polonaise in Viennese ballrooms, may explain why so many people misquote that worldly old courtier, the Prince de Ligne, as saying, “The Congress doesn’t work, it waltzes.” What he actually said, in the impeccable French used by most cultivated Europeans of his generation, was “le congress ne marche pas: il danse,” and the dance it danced most was the polonaise. As the distinguished British diplomat and author Harold Nicholson rather archly observed in his 1946 history of the Congress, de Ligne first made the crack “before the Congress had even assembled,” and repeated it “on every successive occasion until on December 13 he died … from a cold contracted while waiting for an amatory assignation at a street corner in his eightieth year.”
The image of frivolity has endured, partly because the social whirl and the decision-making were inextricably intermingled. In the words of one eyewitness, kingdoms were “cut into bits or enlarged at a ball; an indemnity was granted in the course of a dinner; a constitution was planned during a hunt … . Everyone was engrossed with pleasure.” Engrossed, but not altogether distracted. While Czar Alexander II, Prince Metternich and countless lesser crowned or noble celebrities spent many of their evenings in pursuit of pleasure — sometimes competing for the same society beauty — they didn’t neglect their day jobs, either. Indeed, as a then-not-very-well-known academic named Henry Kissinger would argue in his doctoral thesis, the Congress was responsible for 100 years of overall European peace. Plenty of relatively brief conflicts occurred involving a few major players — notably the Crimean War pitting England, France and Turkey against Russia, and the bilateral Austro-Prussian and Franco-Prussian wars — but none of these engulfed all of Europe in the kind of long, bloody strife characterizing the Napoleonic era or, for that matter, the wars of France’s Louis XIV a century earlier.
Despite its preponderantly conservative, “legitimist” approach, the Congress also addressed a number of “progressive” concerns, such as civil rights for Jews in Germany and efforts to eliminate the slave trade and, eventually, slavery itself. Perhaps the most powerful justification for the Congress’ emphasis on “legitimacy” and a stable diplomatic structure is the epic tragedy that followed when that system finally collapsed. World War I swept away both the good and bad aspects of the old European order that had ushered in a century of relative peace and unprecedented medical, scientific, economic, educational, social and artistic progress, all drowned in an ocean of blood from which the two great evils of the 20th century, Fascism and Communism, would emerge.
Brian Vick’s serious, thoroughly researched reappraisal puts all of this into perspective and acts as a healthy corrective to emotion-driven detractors of the Congress like Woodrow Wilson, who vowed that there would be no “odor of Vienna” in the disastrous Paris Peace Conference following World War I. Indeed, in its harsh treatment of the defeated and its reckless, radical redrawing of the map, it was the antithesis of the Congress of Vienna: Where Vienna gave birth to a structure, however flawed and fragile, for lasting peace, the Treaty of Versailles sowed the seeds of a second devastating world war within a single generation. In the end, what is most remarkable about the Congress of Vienna is not its many and obvious failings, but the fact that — between all that dancing and dallying — it achieved as much as it did.
• Aram Bakshian Jr., a former aide to Presidents Nixon, Ford and Reagan, has written widely on politics, history, gastronomy and the arts.
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