THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES (94 page)

On the other hand, how was it to be determined precisely what distribution was a “just balance”? Only a just balance (as opposed to the infinitely many possible divisions of territory that might result in a theoretical “balance”) could deliver legitimacy to the settlement. The application of the principle of the balance of power could, in the context of legitimate dynastic states, direct the territorial augmentation (or diminution) of these states strictly on equilibrist lines. This was the Utrechtian answer. But in the absence of dynastic legitimacy, the principle could not determine what states were legally entitled to receive territory. Even if every slice of pie were made equal, how would one know how many slices there were to be? To say of the great powers that they must be of equal weight does not determine how heavy they are to be, or on what they are permitted to gorge themselves.

As we shall see, four large questions preoccupied the peacemakers at Vienna—the German and Italian Questions (which were the result of Napoleon's erasure and redrawing of the German and Italian national maps) and the Polish and Saxon Questions (which became interlocked with each other). Of these four, the latter two became the most divisive and, at one juncture, even threatened to lead to fresh hostilities among the allies.

By the end of the war, Russian forces had occupied Poland and Saxony. The Grand Duchy of Warsaw, carved out by Napoleon from Polish lands partitioned to other powers in the eighteenth century, had no legitimate status, and the Saxon king had forfeited his status by abandoning his imperial role and siding with Napoleon slightly but fatally longer than other powers had felt it necessary to do. The Russian tsar therefore proposed creating a new state of Poland, along state-nation colonial lines, with himself as hereditary monarch. In exchange for Prussian support for this project, and in compensation for Polish land hitherto granted to Prussia in the partitions and that would now be taken back, the tsar would see that Saxony was granted to Prussia.

Such proposals were potentially highly damaging to the legitimacy of the new international constitutional system. If Saxony, an ancient state with a legitimate heir, could simply be absorbed by Prussia, then the right of conquest had entered the world of the state-nation with all that state's potential for ferocity and subjugation, a capacity unknown to the modest cessions of the territorial state. If Poland could be re-created only to become a colony of Russia, then the legitimate bases of state creation were
made a farce. The principle of the balance of power was of little help here. If anything, it could be argued that a larger Prussia would be a useful counterweight to France and that a Polish enlargement of Russia would pull Russia into European affairs, with salutary effects on Russian temperance and on the availability of Russian assistance in maintaining the balance of power in Europe generally. For Russia the point was moot: she had defeated an enemy at great cost and now deserved a reward. She asked for no more than that which she already, by force of arms, possessed.

Castlereagh wrote to the tsar of a “duty” owed by the great powers. The principle “of territorial compensation for expenses incurred in war, unless qualified in the strictest sense by its bearing upon the general system of Europe, cannot be too strongly condemned…. The peace of the world cannot coexist with such doctrines.”
³¹
“Just” principles regarded the society of Europe as a whole. The great powers were given great responsibility, but it was not granted to them in order for them to embark on a “lawless scramble for power.”
³²

The solution was to introduce a countervailing principle—the general welfare of the society of states, taken as a whole—and to comprehend within this principle the maintenance of the legitimacy of the new constitution. On the basis of this principle, Russia was persuaded to accept a further partition of Poland. Indeed, when the tsar ultimately agreed to this proposal, he told the Poles that he was unable to fulfill altogether their national hopes because the interest of Europe as a whole had to take precedence over their own.
³³
More importantly, the Prussian attempt to annex Saxony was rebuffed. Each of the allies had been brought around to a position originally held only by Talleyrand, on the grounds that to decide otherwise would damage the legitimacy of the new system and thus imperil the legitimacy of all its territorial and financial allocations. The basis for this change in view was the consciousness of a “general system of Europe,” and the “common interest of Europe as a whole” (
l'intérêt général
).

As we have seen, the Congress of Vienna was not the first such convention to define the legitimate constitutional form of government for member states, but it was by far the most intrusive. The state-nation—a constitutional entity based on the consent of the governed—was replacing the territorial states of the previous century, even though a coalition including territorial states had decisively defeated the most dynamic example of the new form. The third interlocking key to legitimacy lay in recognizing this development by specifying constitutional norms for individual states.

This had begun with the Bourbon restoration. The allies were careful to provide that the recall of the Bourbon dynasty was not an acknowledgment of pre-existing rights (as Pitt's original program might have been taken to
mean). Rather Louis XVIII was required to grant a representative constitution (the
Charte
) and was placed on the throne only after an offer was forthcoming from the French Senate, an institution created by Napoleon. The states that defeated Napoleon essentially shared, or came to share, the state-nation constitutional form of which he was the main European architect. Though he despised Napoleon, Talleyrand appreciated this point. He wrote that

The tsar had announced that he wished representative constitutions in all states,
³⁵
and, as we shall see, the constitution for the German states, the Act of Confederation, included an obligation for all member states to enact constitutions providing for representative institutions. Some states resisted, of course, and some were unable to comply: Austria had no single nation from which it could forge a state-nation; indeed the nationality principle was lethal to its cohesion as a state. The most Austria could manage was to adopt the title favored by state-nations for the head of state; Francis had become “Emperor of Austria,” as Napoleon had been “Emperor of the French,” and as eventually Victoria of England was to become “Empress.” Although Prussian representatives at Vienna had been among those who insisted on the provision for German representative institutions, Prussia too was hesitant. It was but a fragment of the German nation. Prussia could not support the creation of a German state-nation from which she was absent, but Austria and Russia could scarcely support a new German state of which Prussia was a part.

This concern for the domestic composition of constitutional regimes was tied to the issue of legitimacy and thence to stability. Wellington conceded that after the treaty France remained strong enough to overturn the rest of Europe—that, in other words, a balance had
not
been achieved—but rejected proposals to weaken her territorially through adverse cessions. Such cessions would delegitimate the French government. As Castlereagh put it, punitive reductions would leave “the [French] King no resource in the eyes of his own people but to disavow us; and once committed against
us in sentiment, he will be obliged soon either to lead the nation into war himself, or possibly be set aside to make way for some more bold and enterprising competitor.”
³⁶
Wellington concurred:

Thus we see intertwined the three issues of the balance of power, the general welfare of Europe, and the constitutional makeup of individual states, all bearing on the crucial matter of legitimacy. Only a Europe composed of stable states, managed by a directorate of the most powerful of these states, with a mandate to act in the interest of the society of states as a whole, would prevent a new outbreak of such cataclysmic war as Europe had experienced for twenty years. Otherwise, the collapse of legitimacy in one great power would provoke a new war, as had happened in France. The stability of the system thus depended upon the internal stability of its major states, and this domestic security could be ensured by attention to the security of the society of states generally. The one reinforced the other. Metternich and his allies in Berlin and St. Petersburg later attempted to deploy this insight in order to use the Vienna directorate as an engine for domestic repression. Be that as it may, the focus on the domestic constitutional structure of the member states represents a crucial step in the development of a constitution for the society of states.

Before Napoleon's fall, Metternich had persuaded the British ambassador to Vienna, Aberdeen, to join him in a peace overture that proposed terms that confined France to the Pyrenees, the Rhine, and the Alps. When learning of this, Castlereagh was horrified: the proposal violated the long-standing English principle of denying to any great power the Low Countries' approach to the English Channel. Thus appalled, he drew up his famous
Instructions
in his own hand and had them approved by the British cabinet. These he determined to take to the continent personally in an effort to hold the Coalition together for a peace of constitutional dimensions.

The
Instructions
envisioned the re-establishment of Holland (to include the former Habsburg Netherlands), Spain, Portugal, and Italy (“in security and independence”), Prussia brought west to the Rhine, the Bourbons restored in France to prewar borders—provided this dynasty could be shown to be acceptable to the French people—and above all, a consolidating and persisting international alliance. This alliance was “not to terminate with the war” but to remain as a deterrent to “an attack by France on the European dominions of any one of the contracting parties.” Castlereagh then traveled to allied military headquarters in eastern France along with the advance. From there a “congress” convened at the village of Chatillon-sur-Seine in early February 1814. In an atmosphere of great tension owing to recent French victories in the field, acrimonious personal relations between Castlereagh and Metternich (and between Metternich and the tsar), Castlereagh persuaded the other powers to accept his plan for an alliance that would serve as the basis for a constitutional arrangement among the states of Europe to be worked out at a subsequent congress. This plan was adopted as the Treaty of Chaumont, signed March 9, 1814, and represents an historic moment in diplomacy. The treaty set precise conditions for the conduct of the coalition, provided for 150,000 troops to be contributed by each of the four powers, and required Britain to provide a subsidy of five million pounds to pursue the war. In Articles 5 – 16, the powers committed themselves to defend each other against any future French attack by contributing 60,000 men each to an international force to be commanded by the party requesting aid.

The Congress of Chatillon disbanded on March 19, and the allies took the bold decision to leave Napoleon in their rear and march directly on Paris. Paris fell on March 30, 1814. Talleyrand assumed leadership of the provisional government, convening the Senate on April 1 to approve guarantees of civil and political rights. These guarantees also gave assurances to officers, bondholders, and property owners who had profited during the Revolution and its aftermath. The government removed the requirement of loyalty to Napoleon and replaced it with a draft constitution which limited royal power and ratified both the revolution's seizure of émigré properties and the restraints it had placed on the Church. On April 6 the Senate summoned the Bourbon heir. Napoleon abdicated one week later and was conveyed to Elba, where he was given a minuscule island kingdom and an annuity of two million francs.

Thus the way was cleared for a treaty with a new regime in France. The result was the First Peace of Paris (so named because Napoleon's breakout in 1815 led to a second agreement between the powers and France), which has been rightly taken as a model for treaties of peace. It returned France, generally speaking, to the frontiers of 1792, when the epochal war had
begun. It provided for no further occupation, no indemnifications, no confessions of wrongdoing—nothing that would humiliate the new king, Louis, in the eyes of his people, or give to future French leaders a means to incite popular indignation against foreign states. The treaty even permitted France to retain the looted works of art stolen from a number of continental capitals. Significantly, the treaty justified this extraordinary leniency by distinguishing the revolutionary regime of France from its people, thus emphasizing that the war that had just been waged was a war against Napoleon's government, not against the French people.

The Treaty settled matters between France and her adversaries, but it did nothing to sort out affairs for the rest of Europe. Vast territories were without government and the borders of many states were unsettled. Napoleon had swept away the old map and his defeat had now erased the new one as well. Armies of occupation roamed across vanished frontiers; rulers set on their thrones by Napoleon had fled (with the exception of Murat, who still reigned in Naples), but representatives of the old regimes Napoleon had replaced could not exercise authority without the mandate of the victorious coalition that had defeated him. Article 32 of the Peace provided for a new congress to be assembled in Vienna, to which invitations would be issued to all the powers engaged on either side of the conflict. Now Europe waited: its state system had been shattered—even the location and boundaries of most of its states lay undetermined—its commercial system had collapsed, the Holy Roman Empire had disappeared, and a new constitutional system for Germany had not been put in its place. All parties with interests in these events came to Vienna in September 1814. More than two hundred representatives of various entities arrived to press their claims for recognition and to advance their ideas for the new European order.

In a secret, unpublished article of the Treaty, the four victorious powers resolved to decide among themselves the ultimate direction of the Congress. By September 23, this general program had been refined. Proposals on all territorial matters would be decided upon first by the members of the Quadruple Alliance (the Grand Coalition of four great powers), then submitted to the French and Spanish for approval, and then forwarded to the Congress for ratification. The five chief German powers would draft their own plan for a German constitution. Britain, Russia, Prussia, and Austria, plus Spain and France, would determine procedural matters.

On that same day, Friday, September 23, 1814, His Serene Highness Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, Prince of Bénévent, formerly the bishop of the Revolution and Napoleon's foreign minister, arrived in Vienna. Within a week he had thrown the plans of the Coalition into complete disarray. Talleyrand—that “pattern of subtlety and finesse,” “a creature of grandeur and guile,” as the biographer Philip Ziegler refers to him—was not going to be content with the subordinate role the Four had assigned to France. He immediately objected to the exclusion of France from the directing role of the great powers. He took up the cause of all the excluded powers, arguing that the Four had no mandate to decide matters in advance of the convocation of the Congress, and in this he was supported by the Spanish representative, Don Pedro Labrador. After a meeting on September 30, a shaken Gentz, the secretary of the Congress, wrote in his diary: “The intervention of Talleyrand and Labrador has hopelessly ruined all our plans. They protested against the procedure we have adopted; they gave us a dressing-down which lasted for two hours; it is a scene I shall never forget.”
³⁸
Repeatedly Talleyrand threatened to take his case to the Congress as a whole.

Talleyrand even objected to the use of the word
allies
. He argued that the Quadruple Alliance had ended with the signing of the Treaty of Paris. The legal status of the Alliance existed only so long as hostilities remained unresolved; the four member states were legally bound as individual states simply to carry out the provisions of the Treaty, one of which was to convene the Congress—in its entirety—on October 1. The directing body of the Congress, insofar as it took its authority from the Treaty, must therefore consist of all eight powers who were parties to the Treaty,
if
their authority was confirmed by the whole Congress in plenary session.

Talleyrand's intervention was a tour de force. The defeated state had turned the ideology of the state-nation—its vulnerability to charges of illegitimacy, its ideology of consent, its sensitivity to public opinion, in short its entire superstructure of the man-made and thus the accountable—against the victors. On October 8 another meeting was held: Sweden, Portugal, Spain, and France would be added to the Four Powers, to make a “Preliminary Committee of the Eight.” Four days later the Eight published their first declaration: the opening of the Congress would be postponed until November 1. This declaration expressed, perhaps a little defensively, the intention that all procedural issues would be resolved “in harmony with public law, the provisions of the [Treaty of Paris] and the expectations of the Age.”
³⁹

The Committee of Eight handled most vital questions, often following meetings of the Four and, after January 9, the Five, France having finally been included in the smaller directing group. Ten special committees were set up to which various problems were allocated. The Congress, as such, only really came together in order to adopt the Final Act on June 9, 1815, when the assembled representatives with some exceptions (notably Spain) adhered to the findings of the committees, including those of the directorate of Eight.

Five particular questions bedeviled the peacemakers: the German Question (Napoleon had destroyed most of the three hundred kingdoms and principalities that composed the Holy Roman Empire, which in any case had been declared defunct in 1806); the Italian Question (Napoleon had driven Austria, the principal prewar power in Italy, from that entire country, stripped the Vatican of its temporalities, and imposed a usurper who still reigned in Naples); recognition and territorial problems associated with the new states of Switzerland, the United Netherlands, and with the Kingdom of Sweden, whose monarch was a former French marshal; and most intractably, the crucial issues of Poland and Saxony, described above, which pitted the policies of the prewar territorial states with respect to annexation, against those of the new state-nations and their quest for collective legitimacy.

It was widely assumed that because Prussia, a victor, could scarcely be expected to lose territories it held in 1805, the tsar and the King of Prussia must have concluded a secret compact by which Prussia would receive Saxony (still occupied by Russian troops) in order for Russia to create a new Polish kingdom that would incorporate Prussia's former Polish provinces. Initially both Britain and Austria supported Prussia in its bid for Saxony—Britain on grounds of improving the balance of power by bringing Prussia westward, Austria as part of a bribe to induce King Frederick William of Prussia to renege on his promises of support to Russia over Poland. By mid-October the British thought they had the makings of a compromise and proposed that Metternich present to the tsar a joint position on behalf of the other three powers: Poland could be wholly repartitioned, or given a genuinely independent status, or returned to its partial configuration as in 1791. On October 24, Metternich met with the tsar. The meeting was a disaster. Afterwards the tsar, joined by Frederick William, demanded that Emperor Francis replace Metternich. It was evident that an agreement among the coalition partners could not be achieved by the time of the proposed opening of the Congress.

Now the four powers faced a new dilemma: should they jeopardize the Congress itself by another postponement or should they risk throwing the settlement into the hands of an open constitutional convention? It was proposed that a three-man commission begin examining the credentials of the accredited representatives; that would buy time. The Committee of Eight would be convened when the credentialing process was complete, in order to discuss the organization of the Congress itself. Talleyrand began to speak sarcastically of “the Congress that [is] not a Congress.”
⁴⁰

As public opinion began to turn against the annexation of Saxony (and as the tsar seemed intransigent regarding Poland), both Britain and Austria backed away from their support for Prussian ambitions. Castlereagh
changed his position and advised the Prussians not to press the claim to all Saxony “against the general sentiment of Europe.”
⁴¹
In reaction, the Prussians on November 7 informed the Austrians that they were breaking off all talks with Castlereagh over Saxony and Poland. That evening it was learned in Vienna that Russia had turned over the administration of Saxony to the Prussian army.

Now Austria played its German card: if Prussia wished to participate in the new German Confederation, it could not afford to alienate the other German states by consuming Saxony. Metternich sent Prussia a proposal to divide Saxony, giving some territory to Prussia but retaining Dresden and Leipzig in an independent kingdom ruled by the hereditary heir. For the first time, these proposals were sent to Talleyrand.

In a state paper of December 19, Talleyrand argued that the important issue raised by Saxony was one of legitimacy, not merely one of territorial compensation or the balance of power. An established heir could not be deposed simply because other sovereigns coveted his lands, as Frederick the Great had coveted Silesia. In the new world of the state-nation, the right of marginal conquest so dear to the territorial state had to give way to the claims of legitimacy. It was “contrary to justice and reason,” Talleyrand wrote, for Prussia to demand territory; it was a matter for the lawful monarch, the king of Saxony, to decide what he was prepared to yield to the Prussians, and in any case, he could not yield the state itself because it was impossible on legitimate grounds for him to do so. Saxony belonged to its people, not to its king.

In October Castlereagh had had a similar exchange with the tsar. The Russian emperor had angrily pointed out that he had 200,000 troops in Poland, and occupied every city and village. Castlereagh had replied: