The Age of Industry (Europe from 1815 to 1914 A.D.).
A History of Europe, Chapter 13, Part 1 The Xenophile Historian ×search Custom Search A History of Europe Chapter 13: THE AGE OF INDUSTRY, PART I 1815 to 1914 This chapter is divided into two parts, which cover the following topics: Part I The Congress of Vienna Cracks in the Metternich System The July Revolution and the Birth of Belgium The Rothschilds: Financial Royalty The German Confederation The Sonderbund War Demographics, 1815-1848 Britain Goes Industrial The Year of Unsuccessful Revolutions Two Steps Forward, One Step Back The First World's Fair The Unification of Italy Go to Page Navigator Part II The Iron Chancellor's Bag of Tricks The Franco-Prussian War The Paris Commune Demographics, 1848-1871 Bismarck's Peace The Age of Imperialism Demographics, 1871-1914 A New Century Begins How NOT to Win Friends and Influence People The Powder Keg of Europe The Congress of Vienna The French Revolution had all of Europe burning for twenty-five years. States and institutions that people had lived with for centuries, like the Republic of Venice, the Holy Roman Empire and the French monarchy, suddenly vanished. After Napoleon Bonaparte became the emperor of France, the political picture changed with every battle. What next year's alliances would be, what next year's map would look like, were questions no one could answer. Peace finally came in 1815. Napoleon went into exile on St. Helena, and representatives of the nations of Europe, led by the four powers that had defeated Napoleon (the United Kingdom, Russia, Prussia and Austria) returned to the Congress of Vienna to draw up a map of Europe with frontiers that were meant to last. Now that they had become the target of revolutionaries, the rulers of Europe were beginning to see that the needs of their countries (and of mankind as a whole) might outweigh their own needs and desires. What they created was in effect a trade union of kings, a nineteenth century forerunner to the League of Nations and the United Nations. The participants had three goals in mind: 1. Keep France from becoming a threat to world peace again. 2. Draw the political boundaries of Europe in a way that will put an end to wars of conquest. 3. Prevent ideas favoring liberty and "popular governments" from ever running unchecked in the future. For that reason the next generation became a time when ultraconservative politics reigned. Four individuals dominated the meetings: Prince Klemens Wenzel Nepomuk Lothar von Metternich, the Austrian foreign minister and official host; French foreign minister Charles Maurice de Talleyrand; Tsar Alexander I of Russia; and Viscount Robert Stewart Castlereagh, the British foreign secretary. Alexander was a badly confused mixture of liberalism, religious mysticism, and personal ambition, whose influence was balanced by the more sensible Castlereagh. Talleyrand was a thoroughly unscrupulous ex-clergyman who had a remarkable talent for succeeding and getting ahead whether his boss was a Bourbon, a Jacobin, or a Bonaparte; he did it so many times that his motto was, "Regimes may fall and fail, but I do not." At Vienna he became the life of the party, charming so many delegates that they treated him as a partner rather than as the representative of a defeated enemy. It was Metternich, however, who got his way most often; his combination of conservatism and hardheaded realism, known as realpolitik, dominated the meetings, and he guarded the agreements of the Congress for the rest of his career. His stamp on the final result is so obvious that the period from 1815 to 1848 is often called "the Age of Metternich." From our point of view the congress was a big ten-month-long party. Austria, as the host, sponsored a series of shows, hunts, balls, and concerts (Beethoven introduced his Seventh Symphony here) which took up more time than the meetings themselves. Kings, princes, and diplomats chased each other's ladies, and when they were caught at it, they claimed they were gathering information on their rivals (of course). In this sport Talleyrand took both a mother and her daughter as mistresses, while the mistresses of Metternich -- Wilhelmina, Duchess of Sagan, and Princess Catherine Bagration -- kept themselves so busy that they were given the title of grandes horizontales, meaning they were two of the nineteenth century's most famous courtesans. All this debauchery doesn't seem too bad, however, because the statesmen attending the Congress usually found it easier to reach agreements away from the pressure of the conference table. "At a ball, kingdoms were enlarged or sliced up--at a dinner an indemnity granted--a constitution sketched while hunting; occasionally a bon mot, or a witty idea, brought an agreement where conferences and notes failed."(1) Since the participants were kings, emperors, and foreign ministers, the general consensus heavily favored principle and hereditary rights; they also agreed that the major powers should get major rewards. And Russia, the biggest of all, got the most. However, since three of Russia's four western neighbors were allies (Sweden, Prussia and Austria; the nonparticipant was the Ottoman Empire), Russia's gains would come at their expense and they would have to be compensated elsewhere. The end result of the Congress of Vienna was therefore a westward shift of boundaries. Russia returned Tarnopol to Austria but kept Finland and Bessarabia; the Tsar also increased his share of Poland to 3/4 of the pre-1772 state (the only areas he didn't hold at this point were West Prussia and Galicia). Norway was transferred from Denmark to Sweden. Prussia obtained a third of Saxony, the last piece of Swedish Pomerania, and a large "Rhine province." The latter made Prussia the predominant power in western as well as northern Germany.(2) Austria's reward lay in Italy. By putting Milan, Mantua and the whole former Republic of Venice under Austrian rule the Hapsburgs got a useful block of territory, which embraced two thirds of the Po valley. Since three other Italian states also had Hapsburg rulers, all of Italy was now in Austria's "sphere of influence."(3) One victor, Britain, had no continental ambitions, and took nothing in Europe except some offshore islands to serve as bases for the Royal Navy: Heligoland in the North Sea, Malta and seven Ionian islands in the Mediterranean. She was amply rewarded overseas, though, because of France's total preoccupation with Europe, an attitude reinforced by the British blockade. Because of the blockade, the colonial empires of both Napoleon and the French satellites (Portugal, Spain, and the Netherlands) crumbled away, leaving Britain clearly ahead of everyone else when it came to holding real estate overseas. England took Trinidad from Spain, Mauritius from France, and nearly all of the Dutch colonial empire: South Africa, Sri Lanka, Java and the western half of Guyana. Java was returned to the Dutch and they were paid $600 million in compensation for the rest, but the Malay peninsula now moved out of the Dutch sphere of influence, particularly after the British founded Singapore in 1819.(4) Back in Europe, France shrank back to her 1792 frontiers, minus a few border fortresses that were taken away as punishment for Napoleon's last campaign ("the Hundred Days"). To a generation exhausted by revolutionary change the conservatism and hardheaded realism of Metternich had considerable appeal; after all, if everyone accepted the idea that frontiers should never be changed, there would be no more wars. But the leaders of Europe did not care much for what their subjects wanted, and drew the map in a pattern they could live with. Since only Britain and the United States had governments at this point whose authority came from the people (rather than from divine right), this made for a very stable situation, but it also created a map that seemed designed to frustrate nationalism at every opportunity. German nationalists left the Congress of Vienna unsatisfied; the arrangements made for Germany will be explained in another section. The Polish nationalists wanted a country of their own but didn't get it; the "Kingdom of Poland" set up at Vienna was ruled by the Russian Tsar's brother and was officially returned to its previous status as a Russian province after an unsuccessful uprising in 1830-31.(5) Italian nationalists were ignored completely; the part of Italy not directly ruled by Austria was divided into six states, all of which were to some degree Austrian satellites.(6) Within a few years secret societies sprang up, full of idealistic students and intellectuals, and there they plotted to create a Europe more suitable to nationalists. The following statement, issued by one such group in London, was a typical nationalist manifesto: "Everywhere, royalty denies national life . . . Revolution alone can resolve the vital question of the nationalities, which superficial intelligences continue to misunderstand, but which we know to be the organization of Europe. It alone can give the baptism of humanity to those races who claim to be associated in the common work and to whom the sign or their nationality is denied; it alone can regenerate Italy to a third life, and say to Hungary and Poland 'Exist!' It alone can unite Spain and Portugal into an Iberian Republic; create a young Scandinavia; give a material existence to Illyria; organize Greece; extend Switzerland to the dimensions of an Alpine Confederacy, and group in a free fraternity and make an Oriental Switzerland of Servia, Roumania, Bulgaria and Bosnia." By its own standards the Congress of Vienna was a success. It was most successful in making France a respectable power. The map they drew also prevented a major war on the Napoleonic scale for 99 years; none of the European conflicts described in this chapter lasted more than a year, and all were local in nature. Ultimately the biggest failure came because it resisted change, rather than harnessing or accommodating it. Although many liked Metternich's goals, industrial and societal progress meant that every year there were fewer who believed them to be possible. Cracks in the Metternich System The quadruple alliance of Austria, Britain, Prussia and Russia agreed to have regular follow-up meetings to solve mutual problems. The first took place in 1818 at Aix-la-Chapelle, Charlemagne's ancient capital; there the military occupation of France was ended, two years earlier than originally planned, and France was admitted into the club, making it a quintuple alliance. Alexander I wanted to call this alliance "The Holy Alliance," with its policies based on "justice, Christian charity, and peace," but nobody else knew what he was talking about. The principle of military intervention by mutual consent was approved as well. Two years later popular uprisings in Spain and Italy put the intervention resolution to the test. They began with a mutiny in the Spanish army against Spain's king, Ferdinand VII. Ferdinand was a cruel, ruthless reactionary who even restored the Inquisition; one observer described him as "having the heart of a tiger and the head of a mule." Civilian rebels quickly joined the movement, and Ferdinand agreed to their demand that the liberal constitution of 1812 be restored. A parliament convened, and the king became a virtual prisoner. The news of this revolution encouraged more like it. Uprisings in Naples and Portugal forced kings to grant liberal constitutions patterned after the one in Spain. In Piedmont the rebels went one step further, forcing the abdication of their king. Not long after that came news that Greece had begun a war of independence from the Turks. All this dominated the minds of the statesmen who went to the second follow-up meeting at Troppau, in Moravia (1820). By this time the British were having second thoughts about belonging to a bloc of nations dedicated to suppressing the will of the people wherever it might break out. They were overruled by the conservative majority, who declared that states undergoing a change in government because of revolution were no longer part of the European alliance, thereby justifying intervention on behalf of the former rulers. Britain decided to go its own way, perhaps with the French on their side, and afterwards only sent observers to the Metternich congresses. In 1821 the alliance, now a quadruple one again, gathered at Laibach in Slovenia, invited the king of Naples to visit, and gave him an Austrian army to scatter all opposition and put him back on his throne. This worked so well that they met in the northern Italian city of Verona one year later, to plan a similar action for Spain; here the conservative influence overpowered the relatively moderate Louis XVIII of France, and he found himself supplying the army used to crush the Spanish rebellion. Once this was complete, the conservative kings planned a cooperative effort to bring the rebellious Latin American colonies back under Spanish rule. But here they met their first defeat; the British navy refused to cooperate or get out of the way, and the United States declared in no uncertain terms that it would regard any invasion of the New World as an unfriendly act (the Monroe Doctrine, 1823). The final post-congress meeting took place in St. Petersburg in 1825. The main issue here was the Greek war of independence, and the meeting disbanded without reaching any sort of agreement. Each major power now did what it pleased: Prussia and Austria sat out the conflict because a Greek victory would change the 1815 frontiers; Britain and France, overcome by sentiments for the birthplace of democracy and Western civilization, got involved on the side of Greeks; Russia intervened because the Greeks were Orthodox Christians like themselves, and from their point of view, anything that hurt the Turks couldn't be all bad. After this the system of cooperation so carefully worked out at Vienna no longer existed; the British prime minister summed it up by saying that from now on it was "Every nation for itself, and God for us all." The July Revolution and the Birth of Belgium British, French and Russian intervention in the Greek war was a complete success; by 1829 Greece was free. The first Greek head of state, Count Kapodistrias, was assassinated before long, and Otto I, the second son of Bavaria's King Ludwig I, was chosen to become king. This may not have been the best choice, for the Wittelsbach family had a reputation for producing mad builders (see Ludwig II in footnote #16). Sure enough, the young Otto quickly drained the national treasury by turning Athens into a building site. He did give the Greeks a constitution in 1844, but otherwise abused his subjects so badly that after thirty years of misrule, they rose up and threw him out (1862). Otto and Queen Amelia returned to Bavaria, and the kings who ruled Greece after that came from the royal family of Denmark. Greece, showing the core territory it started with in 1832 (dark blue), and how it grew over the next 115 years. While Metternich and his neighbors conspired to stop time and progress on the Continent, France and Britain put aside their age-old rivalry and began to work together. This cooperation came about because of a common-sense attitude in both governments. As in the 17th and 18th centuries, Britain continued to lead the way in political reform. One out of every eight Englishmen had the right to vote as the century began, a proportion that the Reform Bill of 1832 raised to one in five.(7) To many outsiders it seemed that there was some connection between Britain's liberal system of government and its exceptional economic performance, leading reformers on the Continent to argue that political reform would allow their countries to become economic/military powerhouses as well. This movement was especially strong in France. Louis XVIII had spent his ten-year reign steering a careful middle course between the French royalists ("Ultras") and radical reformers; his aim was to "heal the wounds of the Revolution." However, Louis had no children, so upon his death in 1824, he was succeeded by his brother Charles X, whose attitude was altogether different. Charles wanted to restore the ancien regime in all its absolutism and glory, and put the clock back ridiculously far in the process. The liberties of the press and universities were the first freedoms to go; reparations to the tune of a billion francs were approved to compensate the nobility for the chateau-burnings and other unpleasantries of 1789. By the time Charles was done only one Frenchman in 300 could vote, and that was for a National Assembly that had hardly any powers at all. But while the king wanted to rule like a divine-right monarch, he was a man of mediocre mind, meaning he did not have the ability to do so. In July 1830 he decided he didn't like the results of the latest elections, nullified them, and dissolved the Assembly. His timing could not be called Napoleonic; he provoked a revolution while most of his army was busy conquering Algeria. The French refused to put up with Charles any longer; first they elected a new Assembly that was even more liberal than the one the king had rejected; then they chased him out of the country. The biggest problem of the Bourbon dynasty's senior branch was that it wasn't very fertile; all of its men, not just Louis XVIII, had trouble producing children. Charles X had two sons, but the eldest son was childless, and while the second son had nine children, only one, Henri, Duke of Bordeaux, was legitimate. However, there was a fertile branch of the dynasty, the descendants of the second son of Louis XIII. Over the past two centuries, this branch had held the title of Duke of Orléans; one of them, Louis Philippe, better known as Philippe Égalité, was mentioned in Chapter 12. Philippe Égalité's son, also named Louis-Philippe, had been an active participant in the French Revolution, but unlike his father, he managed to flee the country when the National Convention turned against him, during the Reign of Terror. Louis-Philippe spent the next twenty-one years in exile, in the United States and Britain. When Louis XVIII became king, he allowed Louis-Philippe to come back to France, calling the Revolution a time of "forever regrettable circumstances," but he did not like him. Louis-Philippe stuck around after that, looking for a chance to make himself the next king. Then when Charles X was forced to abdicate, Charles expressed the wish that the crown pass to his legitimate grandson Henri, but the elected part of the National Assembly, the Chamber of Deputies, liked Louis-Philippe better, because unlike the other Bourbons, he was a known reformer, so the Chamber instead crowned Louis-Philippe. Rather than claiming to be a divine right monarch, Louis was known as the "Citizen King." Among the first things he did as king was approve a tenfold increase in the number of voters and promise to rule like a British constitutional monarch. The success of France's revolution helped to touch off the Belgian uprising four weeks later. The Low Countries had proved a problem for the Congress of Vienna. Divided by the Protestant Reformation into an independent, Calvinist north (Holland) and a Hapsburg-controlled, Catholic south, they could hardly be expected to survive a future French revival if allowed to remain in pieces. But the Austrians had learned the hard way that isolated territories brought more trouble than revenue, and didn't want the southern half back. The solution was to make a Dutch noble, William VI of the House of Orange, King William I over the whole thing. Unfortunately, the population of the south was 50% French-speaking, 100% Catholic, and King William, surrounded by a clique of Dutch advisors, couldn't resist the temptation to promote both the Dutch language and Protestantism in the south. This caused discontent, which grew in… truncated (71,441 more characters in archive)