Given the current challenges to European unity, in particular Russian aggression in Ukraine and dissent in the European Union over economic policy toward Greece, Europeans should remember that, two hundred years ago, they celebrated together a long-awaited peace, as their statesmen collaborated on a lasting settlement to solve territorial questions and ensure international stability. Revisiting the Congress of Vienna, however, is not an exercise in nostalgia. New works on the Congress underscore the critical international stakes in 1814 and 1815, following two decades of war and revolution, and reveal the complexity of the negotiations, political goals, and the unsettled nature of postwar Europe. The Congress was so successful in solving the existential problems of Europe that Europeans would not fight a comparable war against each other for another century—until the Great War in 1914. The challenges that Europe faced in the twentieth century suggest, in fact, that the type of collaborative diplomacy developed at the Vienna Congress remains essential to limit conflict.Footnote ¹

If the Congress produced a framework for a lasting peace, contemporary publicists often maligned its gatherings, and most nineteenth-century historians remained critical of its legacy. The assembly of aristocratic elites—with their dazzling festivities and hard-nosed territorial negotiations that traded populations among states—generated scorn, ridicule, and ammunition for political caricaturists. Many great hopes for transformative social change remained unmet in 1815, and historians with strong ideological agendas subsequently condemned the Congress as a betrayal to the peoples of Europe and their aspirations for their own nation. This contrast between the demonstrated success of and the coexisting prejudice against the Congress underscores the need to emphasize its origins in two decades of highly destructive warfare that annihilated states while expanding the French Empire and its satellite system across Europe. The vast human, economic, and social cost of these wars required a peaceful settlement following Napoleon's decisive defeat at the Battle of Leipzig in 1813, when Russia's Tsar Alexander I proposed a general meeting among the great powers to address post-Napoleonic Europe.

The negotiations that resulted in the Congress's Final Settlement in June 1815 commenced in France in March 1814. Tsar Alexander I, Emperor Francis I of Austria, King Frederick William III of Prussia, and Lord Castlereagh of Great Britain signed the Treaty of Chaumont, which demanded that Napoleon relinquish all conquests and return France to its borders of 1791 in exchange for a ceasefire. If Napoleon rejected the treaty, the Allies pledged to continue war until he was defeated. Napoleon ultimately abdicated, which led to the signing of a second treaty in May 1814, the Treaty of Paris. Shared concerns about promoting stability in war-torn France led to a moderation of the latter settlement, which revised French borders to those of 1792. It also outlined general territorial changes that included an expanded Kingdom of the Netherlands and a federation for German Central Europe. Because other important matters, including the futures of Saxony, Poland, and the slave trade, went unresolved, the powers decided to reconvene in Vienna that autumn.

After a series of public and private celebrations of the long-awaited peace were held in Paris and London, the Russian emperor and other European monarchs joined representatives from across the continent in Vienna. The third largest city in Europe after the British and French capitals, Vienna swelled by more than a third following the arrival of two emperors, four kings, eleven ruling princes, and more than two hundred plenipotentiaries, sizable numbers of uninvited emissaries, as well as large retinues of ministers, counselors, relatives, and servants. Most of the royals lodged in the Hofburg Palace as guests of their Austrian host. Despite the presence of hundreds of representatives and envoys awaiting a general meeting or at least an audience with the great powers, the Congress never met in the form of a plenary session that included all the assembled delegates. The eight signatories of the Peace of Paris—the “Committee of Eight”—met only occasionally, and separate committees addressed German affairs, Switzerland, river navigation, slavery, and population statistics. The primary transactions at the Congress took place in Klemens von Metternich's Chancellery on the Ballhausplatz or in Castlereagh's rented rooms at Minoritenplatz. During the Congress, the negotiations among the ministers of the four victorious Allied powers represented, therefore, the same kind of informal transactions undertaken earlier at Chaumont, Paris, and London. At the same time, Prince Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand gained increased influence for France during negotiations on the volatile Polish-Saxon Question. Wilhelm von Humboldt aptly described the five great powers—a pentarchy that resolved all territorial and procedural questions—as “le véritable congrès.” Even Napoleon's return for one hundred days in 1815 did not threaten the great powers’ shared commitment to international stability; instead, his exploits affirmed and strengthened it.

The collection of royalty and ministers, and their retinues, was most active and visible in a variety of public and private festivities. The Habsburg monarchy provided many celebrations and entertainments for the city's countless guests; this included parades, hunting parties, dinners, balls, concerts, opera, and even sledding parties. In addition, private dinners, balls, salons, teas, soirées, and church services offered opportunities for informal diplomatic encounters and discussions. Several of these festivities were especially symbolic and meaningful: the Festival of Peace on the first anniversary of the Battle of Leipzig, followed by Metternich's Peace Ball; a medieval jousting tournament—the Grand Carousel—held at the Spanish Riding School; the performance of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony, conducted by the composer himself; the funeral of Field Marshal Prince de Ligne; and a memorial mass for Louis XVI in St. Stephen's Cathedral. The Austrian police expanded an already elaborate espionage system by using the conference to gather information on all visitors. Spies opened, read, and resealed all mail in Vienna and collected and sifted through the contents of wastepaper baskets and fireplaces. Viennese of all social classes reported their observations and conversations to the police, and each morning the Austrian Emperor read a summary of the most interesting revelations collected the prior day. For ten months in Vienna, antechamber negotiations, earnest dinner conversations, and committee reports coexisted with social gossip, police reports, and an active press. The Congress generated countless state documents, memoirs, letters, and police reports that historians still use to interpret the full significance of the event.

The two-hundredth anniversary of the Congress of Vienna offers the opportunity to entertain and introduce the general public to a monumental historical event, as well as an occasion for conferences and scholarly reappraisals.Footnote ² Most conventional academic studies of the Congress focus on power politics and diplomacy, but two recent popular works present the Congress as a diplomatic and social pageant. Drawing on primary sources that they cite at length, Anna Ehrlich and Christa Bauer present the Congress as an urban, social, and political event in Der Wiener Kongress. Diplomaten, Intrigen und Skandale. Adorned with portraits of the leading players and scenes of Vienna, the book provides a useful popular overview of the affair and its aftermath. Adam Zamoyski's Rites of Peace: The Fall of Napoleon and the Congress of Vienna (released in German as 1815. Napoleons Sturz und der Wiener Kongress [2014]) also draws richly from highly descriptive memoirs, diaries, and correspondence. Zamoyski attempts to present a holistic approach to the Congress, examining events in staterooms and salons, ballrooms and boudoirs. He follows descriptions of negotiations with gossip about parties, love affairs, and unruly princesses. Focusing on instances of frivolity and sexual scandal, Zamoyski refers to the Congress as a great charade in which one found the “continuous interplay between the serious and the frivolous. … The rattling of sabers, talk of blood mingled with strains of the waltz and court gossip, and the most ridiculously trivial pursuits went hand in hand with impressive work” (385). That phrase aptly summarizes the approach of this book.

Zamoyski's unpersuasive conclusions are particularly disturbing in a popular work, for they reinforce old prejudices against the Congress's results and participants as unjust, incompetent, disreputable, and self-serving. Metternich appears as a master of the machinery of repression designed to reimpose the ancien r é gime, and as a jilted lover who failed to understand the presumed strength of nationalism. “The architects of the settlement defeated their own purpose and sowed the seeds of untold problems in the future” (563), the author concludes, by denying nation-states a political existence. Zamoyski's deterministic and late nineteenth-century notion of nationalism underscores the ahistorical nature of this work. The consensus among most scholars is that national self-determination was hardly realistic in 1814 and 1815; Zamoyski thus rejects much of the most recent scholarship.

By the early twentieth century, historians came to recognize the Congress of Vienna as a great diplomatic accomplishment that had produced a foundational peace settlement; for this reason, most conventional studies present a diplomatic narrative that emphasizes the interplay of power politics and leading personalities.Footnote ³ Russia's Tsar Alexander, Britain's Lord Castlereagh, Austria's Prince von Metternich, and France's Prince Talleyrand receive lead billing, and Austria's Emperor Franz, Prussia's King Friedrich Wilhelm III, Prussia's Chancellor Karl August von Hardenberg, and other statesmen and diplomats play supporting roles.Footnote ⁴ In the last two decades, historians have debated the very nature and foundation of the political equilibrium achieved by the peace settlement. Some have argued that it represented a revived balance of power, others a flexible multipolar system or a bipolar Anglo-Russian hegemony.Footnote ⁵ Paul W. Schroeder's 1994 tour de force on international relations distinguishes itself among these interpretations and views the work of the Congress as more than successful: it was a revolutionary transformation in conceptualizing peace and embedding it in a new international system.Footnote ⁶ Schroeder's work also contextualizes the Congress within a longer systemic perspective on European international relations. He contrasts the ideas and practices of this new international order based on great power cooperation, embodied in mutual restraint, respect of treaties, and deference to public law, with the unchecked primacy of war as a tool of diplomatic leverage, glory, and wealth characteristic of the eighteenth century. Napoleon, for all his modernizing polices and pronouncements, clearly employed military conquest in the spirit of the eighteenth century as a means to meet his unlimited ambitions. According to Schroeder, the military, social, and economic costs of Napoleon's wars compelled the statesmen in Vienna to reconceptualize peace as a lasting settlement built on a “mutual consensus on norms and rules, respect for law,” and a legitimate political and social order.Footnote ⁷ Political scientists, comparing the settlement in Vienna with other postwar arrangements, emphasize that the Congress created new patterns of diplomacy, mitigated self-interest, and integrated strategic restraint into the international system.Footnote ⁸

The new studies by Mark Jarrett, Maartje Abbenhuis, Wolf D. Gruner, and Heinz Duchhardt build impressively upon these earlier works to emphasize the pivotal role of the Congress in establishing a new international order. Jarrett's The Congress of Vienna and Its Legacy: War and Great Power Diplomacy after Napoleon is a very readable traditional diplomatic narrative of the Congress and the so-called Congress System that it created; it offers a solid and well-structured analysis of the statesmen and their backgrounds and ideas, and of the Congress's proceedings. Jarret views the principal negotiators as “cut from a common cloth, but with a complex pattern” (84) of privilege and of exposure to enlightened ideas, confrontation with revolutionary upheavals and years of war, and accommodation with, as well as struggle against, Napoleon. In fact, he credits Prince Adam Jerzy Czartoryski and William Pitt for outlining an 1805 blueprint to reconstruct Europe that would influence Russian and British plans in 1814. Jarrett's work reaffirms the idea that the great powers reached major decisions without consideration of the smaller powers or subject peoples, yet emphasizes that the Allies also wanted each state to subscribe to the entire settlement to legitimize their decisions and create a “new system of public law for Europe” (149). The author concludes that the mutual endorsement of the territorial settlements at the Congress of Vienna resolved the legacy of anarchy created by the French Revolution and Napoleonic warfare, and marked a decisive step in the evolution of the modern state system. He recognizes the significance of the territorial simplification in the European “Middle Zone” (Central Europe and the Italian peninsula) as smaller states disappeared or consolidated for security reasons, resulting in greater international stability. It is curious that Jarrett distinguishes the Congress of Vienna and its territorial decisions from the so-called Congress System that emerged after 1815. According to Jarrett, the Congress System was an attempt to develop “institutional mechanisms to superintend relations between sovereign states with the aim of maintaining world peace and stability” (353), but it ceased to function after 1824. Although Jarrett worries that Europe's elites obstructed progressive social change to maintain their own power, he credits them with “sincere efforts to reduce violence through collective action” (377). He ultimately offers a positive assessment of the Congress, which, in his view, cultivated international cooperation based on new norms and procedures that “became enshrined as recognized methods and traditions of diplomacy” (354).

Maartje Abbenhuis takes a more thematic approach in her sweeping analysis of the nineteenth-century, An Age of Neutrals: Great Power Politics, 1815–1914. This study also focuses on great power decisions, while highlighting the importance of small powers and neutrality as a key means of stabilizing the international system.Footnote ⁹ Emphasizing the Congress's creation of buffer zones to separate rival states, Abbenhuis asserts that neutralization was a tool of power and diplomacy, as well as a means for avoiding war. She presents Cracow, Moresnet, the Ionian Islands, and especially Switzerland as successful examples of neutralization that were designed at the Congress to thwart potential tensions. For example, neutralizing the Swiss cantons—a challenging geostrategic location at the crossroads of Europe—created political equilibrium by recognizing an already established practice of neutrality, as well as the canton's potentially volatile political culture. Abbenhuis asserts that Switzerland's formal neutralization heightened the state's importance in the international system because it was now managed and guaranteed by the great powers. The Congress of Vienna was a fundamental turning point, according to the author, because the great powers “willingly neutralised” (239) states, cities, territories, islands, and waterways to promote international stability. She concludes, therefore, that the “great powers promoted and protected neutral rights in ways” they had not done before 1815 and have not done since 1914. Like Jarrett, Abbenhuis focuses on great power decisions in 1814–1815 without considering how small states may have contributed to the neutralization process in order to ensure their own sovereignty and goals. She illustrates, however, that after the Congress of Vienna, great and small powers alike adopted neutrality as an effective and pragmatic tool to limit wars, restrain hostilities, and mediate among belligerents. Unlike Jarrett, Abbenhuis emphasizes the longevity and central legacy of the Congress System for general peace during the nineteenth century. For Abbenhuis, the Congress System endured past the 1820s not as a fixed process, but rather in another way: in the expectation that when confronted by international crises, the great powers would continue to confer in concert through ambassadorial meetings and multilateral negotiations.

Condensed and reworked versions of earlier and larger studies, Heinz Duchhardt's Der Wiener Kongress. Die neugestaltung Europas 1814–1815 and Wolf D. Gruner's Der Wiener Kongress 1814/15 are directed toward students and a broader audience.Footnote ¹⁰ Duchhardt's succinct survey covers all the key traditional elements of the Congress: the major personalities, detailed proceedings, and elite cultural spectacles. He concludes that the Congress could not live up to all contemporary hopes, and that the failure to include the Ottoman Empire was its greatest oversight. He nevertheless credits the Congress with generating long-term stability and peace. Gruner's treatment is far more sweeping in scope and structural in analysis. The Congress of Vienna took place during a transitional epoch—the so-called Sattelzeit—and became a catalyst for a “new Europe,” creating the stability necessary for further modernizing and industrializing processes. The author is less interested in the personalities and festivities than in the ideas and hard work that drove the peace process. The Congress created a multipolar balance-of-power system, Gruner argues—one that could accommodate the different goals and ambitions of the European states in order to generate the kind of compromise necessary to manage crises and maintain stability. He addresses the German Question at great length and explores in more detail than most other studies the role of medium-sized states like Bavaria. He places the German Confederation (to which the Netherlands and Denmark also belonged) at the center of the new European security system because it played a key role in maintaining both German and European equilibrium. Gruner also insists that flexibility—not ideological dogmatism—shaped the settlement. Like Duchhardt, as well as authors discussed later in this review essay, Gruner does not regard the Vienna settlement as a “Restoration” but rather as transformational. He concludes his study with an overview of two centuries of assessments of the Congress.

Like Gruner, two recent biographical studies of Metternich and Castlereagh also reject typical claims about the supposed ideological rigidity of these two statesmen. Wolfram Siemann's Metternich. Staatsman zwischen Restauration und Moderne outlines the conventional presentation of Metternich as reactionary, absolutist, and anti-nationalist. This short work, a kind of “Metternich lite,” is a preview to a proposed upcoming larger study based on the Metternich family archives. In this present survey, Siemann traces Metternich's life, emphasizing the ways in which war shaped his worldview. Metternich understood that the Napoleonic campaigns had changed the nature of warfare, expanding its scale and destruction with entire peoples called to arms. Conservative, but not reactionary, Metternich's hatred of war fueled his efforts to develop a lasting peace for Europe. Like Schroeder and Gruner, Siemann rejects the idea of “Restoration” as a conceptual framework, attributing to Metternich the creation of a “territorial revolution in Central Europe” (52) that was aimed at ensuring lasting stability. Reform—including constitutionalism—was necessary in order to maintain the security of dynastic and monarchical rule. Metternich clearly did not support popular representation or sovereignty, but he was not ignorant—as Brian Vick also points out in his study—of the power of nationalism. He viewed supranational monarchy as a source of common interests and as the protector of national minorities within the empire. In terms of diplomacy, Metternich preferred reconciliation, compromise, and the rule of law to create a bulwark of stability and balanced order necessary to stop a usurper like Napoleon.

Taking an approach similar to that of Siemann, John Bew's Castlereagh: A Life challenges the maligned image of Castlereagh as an unthinking reactionary and tyrant. Bew argues instead in this rich biography of the Irish statesman that Castlereagh was both enlightened and conservative. In fact, he describes Castlereagh's approach to governance as “civic” and “enlightened conservatism” (571–72). For Castlereagh, both reactionary and revolutionary regimes could destroy peace; his main task since negotiating the Treaty of Chaumont was, then, to keep the Allies united on developing an enduring peace in Europe. Bew views Castlereagh's greatest accomplishment after 1812 as his ability to wage war against Napoleon in combination with successful diplomacy. Allied unity became the centerpiece of Castlereagh's foreign policy, in fact. Bew traces Castlereagh's diplomatic challenges and successes during the Congress of Vienna, particularly his difference of opinion with his cabinet and the British public. Demonstrating a nuanced understanding of diplomatic negotiations, Bew contends that Castlereagh's cooperation with other powers was never grounded in ideology; he sought to protect British interests in the peace negotiations, secure long-term stability, and give Britain a voice in European affairs. Castlereagh became one of the most influential statesmen in Europe, but remained disparaged in Britain during his lifetime. Few of Castlereagh's critics appreciated his part in defeating Napoleon, his diplomatic efforts to foster international stability, or his involvement in ending the slave trade. Napoleon's critique of the Second Peace of Paris—which Bew cites—succinctly captures Castlereagh's contributions to international relations:

To have been critiqued so directly by Napoleon for his failure to exploit the peace settlement at the expense of others must have seemed like high praise to Castlereagh.

Reinhard Stauber's highly readable Der Wiener Kongress provides a comprehensive assessment of the settlement that addresses humanitarian concerns and summarizes the cultural importance of Congress festivities.Footnote ¹¹ Like many of the other authors under review, Stauber argues that it is a mistake to view the Congress as a conservative master plan, and emphasizes the nature of the negotiations as cooperative, incomplete, and compromising. The German Confederation was not an instrument of reactionary politics, for example: decisions made in 1819–1820—not in 1814–1815—shaped the future development of the Confederation, he argues. Stauber is the most critical of the term Restoration as a label for the period following the Napoleonic era and, in particular, of the claim that it was a goal of the Congress. It was not a revival of ancien régime absolutism, in his view, but rather restitution and the return of legitimate monarchies that characterized the Congress. Stauber argues that (aside from the thorny problem of Poland) the major powers shared a remarkable degree of consensus on territorial decisions; echoing Schroeder, he emphasizes, moreover, that the common political goals of security and order formed the basis of the Congress's cooperative approach. His thorough discussion of the German Committee's negotiations considers the role of German states besides Prussia and Austria, as well as the mediated Standesherren. Stauber also includes territorial decisions confirmed after the Congress, such as the bilateral negotiations between Bavaria and Austria over Salzburg and the Rhenish Palatinate in 1816. Like Gruner, he argues that the Vienna settlement abetted peace in Central Europe by weaving the German Confederation into a defensive international network that reduced opportunities for conflict. He also acknowledges the importance of the Confederation in supporting pluralism and federalism in Central Europe: it protected and nurtured the political culture of small states and resisted hegemonic centralization. Finally, Stauber's work is the only one among those under review that addresses in any depth the Congress's forward-looking deliberations on freedom of movement and deregulation of trade on the Rhine, and the development of international control of rivers. Indeed, the Central Commission for Navigation on the Rhine, which dates from the Congress, is the oldest of all international organizations.Footnote ¹²

In contrast to the fairly conventional framework of great power politics adopted by the other works, Brian Vick's The Congress of Vienna: Power and Politics after Napoleon argues that the Congress occupied itself with much more than territorial changes: it addressed the humanitarian problems of slavery and rights for religious minorities, demonstrated concerns about instability in the Ottoman Empire, and supported constitutionalism as a way to maintain political stability and the rule of law. Unlike the other studies, Vick features a truly international and politicized public, including men and women, the nobility and the middle class, Christians and Jews, as well as liberals and conservatives from across Europe, all of whom gathered in Vienna in 1814 and 1815. He also considers the influence of salons, state festivals and spectacles, court and growing consumer culture, as well as the political press in shaping public opinion during the negotiations.Footnote ¹³ By exploring social networks, correspondence, the press, and public opinion, Vick presents the way in which the “influence politics” (328) of the broader public linked political culture to the international system. He examines the effect of the international public on the diplomatic decisions made in Vienna, asserting that the larger public realm constrained and influenced the statesmen and their resolutions. In addition, Vick addresses key themes that engage with other works in this review: the festive and public life of the Congress, the public role of women, the press and public opinion, the complex understandings of political ideology—including nationalism—and humanitarian concerns.

Most recent studies of the Congress provide descriptions of the related festivities that consumed Vienna, whereas Vick's study looks deeper into their social and cultural meanings. Vick asserts that the state and civil society blended in the realm of salon sociability and festive culture; this was particularly evident in military parades, religious ceremonies, court festivities, and popular celebrations like the Volksfest. Although this culture of display drew heavily on traditional aristocratic representative culture, as well as on preexisting institutions and language, it also included civic elements of representation, grassroots patriotism, market forces, and a cross-class sociability comprised of men and women, the court, and the urban populace. Military and court festivals reinforced traditional authority as they engaged a broad public in patriotic discourses. Vick identifies the military festivities as innovative because of the way in which they fostered a close identification between the soldiers and the populace, who both celebrated their own role in recently gaining sovereignty. Vick similarly presents the Volksfest as an event that openly embraced Austrian dynastic and state-based patriotism within a supranational empire. These festivities illustrate changing ideas about popular identification with the monarchical state following two decades of war. Like Vick, Stauber also addresses the monarchy's public role and notes that—because of their engagement in the Congress's decisions, court culture, and social activities—monarchies were scrutinized by the public more than ever. As Vick points out, images of the monarchs, especially of Alexander I, were omnipresent in Vienna in the form of busts, prints, cards, medallions, as well as painted porcelain and glass. The Congress marked, therefore, a transition in monarchical representation: monarchs became increasingly humanized and sentimentalized, on the one hand, but, on the other, lost control over their public image in an age of growing consumer and media cultures.Footnote ¹⁴

If festivities have often been treated as “background music” to the real business of the Congress, women at the event have been either ignored or objectified. Zamoyski's one-dimensional work entertains his readers with sexual intrigue and amorous affairs, but it ignores the complexity of women like Wilhelmine von Sagan, whose anti-Napoleonic sentiments, anti-Prussian attitude, conservative worldview, and political ambition are absent from his story. The sex, it seems, is so much more interesting. Karen Hagemann, Glenda Sluga, and others have pointed out that gender norms were in transition during the Napoleonic era.Footnote ¹⁵ Deeply invested in the politics of the period, women supported the war effort and local militias, cared for war refugees and disabled veterans, and influenced political and diplomatic decisions; some even claimed the right to fight against Napoleon.Footnote ¹⁶ Vick's book takes seriously women's political sociability, in particular the hosting of salons, where they acted as mediators of information and social spaces across class and religious lines. He emphasizes that women's presence at teas, receptions, dinners, and other festivities was not frivolous; rather, they participated in discussions and drew their own conclusions based on conversations, press reports, and insider knowledge. Vick portrays the salons of Fanny Arnstein and her sister Baroness Eskeles as a pro-Prussian network at the Congress, whereas Sluga explores the politically savvy salons of Germaine de Staël. Both authors address Anna Eynard-Lullin's informal diplomacy on behalf of Geneva.Footnote ¹⁷ According to Vick, mixed gender salons and dinner parties were part of larger social and political networks and thus represented one component of “influence politics” at the Congress.

The press, which cultivated and circulated public opinion, plays a key role in Vick's understanding of “influence politics,” which “occupied a central place within both the political culture and the international system” (328). Most studies of the Congress of Vienna focus on the dominant role of the great powers, often leaving public opinion and the press unaddressed. Vick asserts that public opinion—comprised of both elite and popular views—informed and even shaped the decisions reached in Vienna. Bew similarly notes that Castlereagh felt constrained by British public opinion, which, in particular, restricted his diplomatic flexibility on the slave trade. Convinced that the public did not recognize the Congress's larger goal of achieving European equilibrium, Castlereagh may have “despised and braved” (580) public opinion, Bew concludes, but he did not ignore it.

Vick asserts that statesmen considered public opinion when determining how to realize their goals and oppose their adversaries. With respect to the Polish-Saxon Question, for example, he explores the statesmen's attempts to shape opinion in the press and monitor public views. Identifying the key papers, writers, and state players—in particular the Prussian-Bavaria contest to win German public opinion—as well as European-wide press campaigns, he concludes that the decisions in Vienna on Saxony embodied a compromise between the dictates of power politics and the need to appease public opinion in Europe. There is strong evidence of an increasingly politicized public gathered in Vienna, as well as of publics that followed the proceedings from afar. Indeed, the Saxon press wars and other Federkriege could well have been early examples of “public diplomacy,” i.e., diplomatic efforts to influence public opinion in order to create a favorable impression of one's own foreign policy.Footnote ¹⁸ But linking the influence of public opinion to the decisions made by statesmen at the Congress remains difficult. One is left to speculate about the degree to which public discourse influenced the rulers and diplomats in their reevaluation of Saxony's fate, and about how to measure this in light of such great power decisions as Russia's withdrawal of support for Prussian expansion in order to meet the goals of a larger international settlement.

Most of the works reviewed in this article demonstrate a nuanced view of political ideologies and reject the Congress as a reactionary settlement that repudiated liberal aspirations and ignored nationalist sentiments. Vick, for example, asserts that conservative—especially reform conservative—and liberal ideas remained closely linked and were not mutually exclusive. Gruner, Stauber, and Siemann also suggest that the statesmen at Vienna viewed limited constitutions as the best possible tool for staving off radical revolution through compromise and limited reforms. Vick highlights the unprecedented constitutional settlements of the era as part of diplomatic efforts to court public opinion, but they also maintained state sovereignty, fostered stability, and integrated and reconciled new populations. Simply put, constitutions were one of the best ways to satisfy postwar Europeans “without dangerous experiments that might lead to radical extremes” (240). Noting that constitutional promises accompanied many of the territorial changes in German lands, Vick points out that liberals and conservatives alike believed that constitutions secured civil and political liberty by protecting individual rights, checking royal authority through legislative and budgetary constraints, and cultivating a civic spirit and patriotism that bound citizens to the state. He draws on the discussions regarding the constitution of the Kingdom of Württemberg to illustrate the difficulty of “distinguishing allegiances and lines between liberal and conservative” (255). Constitutional monarchism, as Markus Prutsch's recent study of the French Charte and south German constitutions demonstrates, embodied a compromise that provided a quasi-representative constitutional system because it retained many of the monarch's traditional rights; it helped to overcome the political fragmentation of the post-revolutionary and Napoleonic eras, as well as to stabilize the continent politically.Footnote ¹⁹ Neither Congress statesmen nor monarchs—nor, for that matter, the majority of the educated public—believed in popular sovereignty, but they clearly understood constitutions as an important legal tool for promoting internal stability and affirmations of state autonomy.

These new works on the Congress also revisit the issue of early nineteenth-century nationalism. In the past, historians criticized the statesmen in Vienna for either an insufficient awareness of nationalism and the rights of nationalities, or for an unreserved rejection of national aspirations. In contrast to the model of nation-state nationalism circa 1919, Vick's work, for one, draws on recent scholarship that highlights overlapping political allegiances, regionalism, state and territorial patriotism, dynastic loyalty, and cultural nationalism to present a sophisticated understanding of nationalism in the early nineteenth century.Footnote ²⁰ He and Siemann assert that political leaders understood that they had been fighting a war of nations based on a wave of patriotic mobilization against Napoleon. Vick underscores the fact that leaders like Metternich made distinctions between political nationalism and a “national sprit” or cultural nationalism; Metternich himself, he suggests, was willing to work with national sentiments. The Congress affirmed language rights and some degree of autonomy for Poles, for example. Moreover, respect for national sentiments was compatible with fostering loyalty to supranational dynasties. Vick views local patriotism, territorialism, and cultural nationalism as central to “step-wise identity building,” in which such “hierarchies of attachment” (274) strengthened loyalty to the dynasty and empire in support of the Congress's diplomatic settlements. He notes Metternich's hopes that the “Lombard spirit” and Galician regionalism would help incorporate Italians and Poles into a broader Habsburg identity.

Although the degree to which these ideas really influenced or shaped territorial policies in Vienna is unclear, these arguments are a serious departure from earlier assumptions derived from nation-state nationalism. Gruner and Stauber make this point most clearly with respect to the German Confederation. Despite the wartime rhetoric of patriotic and cultural nationalism, and despite Karl August von Hardenberg's early plans for a centralized federation, medium and small states continued to assert state sovereignty, thus ensuring a loose federation. Territorial and dynastic self-preservation was too strong—and nation-state nationalism unavailable and unviable—in Central Europe in 1815.

Most of the works under review also address humanitarianism at the Congress, especially the abolition of slavery and the promotion of religious freedom. The universalist language of humanitarian protection and the advancement of basic human rights animated negotiations over slavery, which was viewed as morally repugnant and, in principle, abolished at the Congress. The subject of state's rights and power, however, limited the implementation of practices based on universal principles. Spain and Portugal's demand to set their own timetable to end the slave trade in their colonies illustrates this point. Vick's study highlights the relationship between humanitarian language, great power consensus, and political networks in the effort to end the African slave trade and raids by Barbary corsairs, all of which illustrated changing attitudes “toward notions of civilization and barbarism, East and West, Christianity and Islam” (194). He points to the work of francophone intermediaries Madame de Staël and the Swiss economist Jean Charles Leonard Simon de Sismondi, who cooperated with British abolitionists to agitate against slavery on the continent, suggesting that, together, they formed part of a “Protestant international” (201) that retained ties to spiritual “awakening” networks across Europe and religious confessions. Moreover, Vick argues that publicists, diplomats, and abolitionists all viewed Africans as rights-bearing members of the international community who deserved humanitarian protection. That protection also extended to the victims of kidnapping by the Barbary corsairs, who held European Christians in bondage. Abolition of African slavery propelled a discussion of Christian slaves in North Africa spearheaded by British Admiral Sidney Smith and Hanseatic merchants. The problem of the corsairs remained unresolved at Vienna, but, according to Vick, it became linked in diplomatic and public spheres to the abolition of the slave trade.

The statesmen in Vienna spent more time addressing religious politics than most general studies suggest.Footnote ²¹ Following wars that had redistributed confessional communities across Europe, the statesmen at the Congress sought to ensure that populations were content and stable. Vick and Jarrett both emphasize the protection of religious minorities—Catholics and Jews, in particular, in German Central Europe—as examples of ecumenical humanitarianism and enlightened values committed to guaranteeing free religious worship. After losing temporal and political power, the German Catholic Church sought to reconstruct its position and guarantee civil rights for Catholics living in Protestant states. As negotiations took place at the federal level, individual states challenged the process to protect their sovereignty; this ultimately led to separate agreements between the Vatican and individual states following the Congress's Final Settlement. At the same time, Jewish delegations petitioned the German Committee to preserve citizenship rights gained under French rule, employing language based on universal rights to support their cause. As Vick points out, the leading statesmen at the Congress endorsed their cause; public opinion, the press, and salons similarly supported the improvement of Jews’ legal status based on religious tolerance and justice. Jews nevertheless lost citizenship rights that had been granted by French rule. Vick refers to German states such as Calvinist Bremen that sought to return to a pre-Napoleonic religious and civic order—which included the expulsion of recently relocated Jews. Individual German states like Bremen, but also others such as Hanover, Bavaria, and Frankfurt, opposed federal interference in internal affairs and asserted state sovereignty in determining citizenship rights: anti-Jewish sentiments born of economic envy, fear of competition, religious prejudice, and distrust of different laws and customs supported such positions.Footnote ²² As Duchhardt and Vick attest, the framers of the Confederation lost an opportunity to expand enlightened citizenship laws, but Jarrett underscores that, despite this setback, the international community addressed, for the first time, the rights of conscience and citizenship for European Jews, thus setting an important precedent. Discussions about the rights of religious minorities at the Congress reveal tensions between the internationalism of the great powers and the claims to sovereignty by individual states, as well as between the limits of toleration and universalistic humanitarian claims in post-Napoleonic Europe—despite elite and public support for such progressive ideas.

Building on past work about the Congress, most of these new publications contribute new perspectives on the proceedings and on the significance of the Vienna settlement at the level of state and international politics. As a whole, these works acknowledge the success of the Congress in 1814 and 1815, but also point to continuing and unresolved tensions in the years after the wars, in particular friction between internationalism and state sovereignty. All concur that the term Restoration is a misleading and incorrect political and social conceptualization for the decades after 1814. Most of these studies also view the Congress from the perspective of the end of the eighteenth century—rather than through the traditional lens of late nineteenth-century, nation-state nationalism—and thus understand it as part of a transition toward modernity.

These studies also demonstrate the range of analytical perspectives one can take toward the full spectacle of the Congress of Vienna. Jarrett, for example, suggests that the Congress can be investigated from a “levels-of-analysis approach” to comprehend better the interactions among leading actors, the requirements of the international system, and, finally, geostrategic, economic, and political concerns. Vick's work clearly adds another level of analysis and contributes a new approach to understanding the significance of the Congress by emphasizing the importance of civil society, public opinion, and political culture. His analysis provides a touchstone to track and measure the influence and engagement of the public in international as well as in local political affairs after 1815. It suggests we reconsider the conventional, simplified characterizations of the period after 1815 and revisit the era with a new focus on political networks, the press (even after 1819), constitutional debates, and the intersection of elite and middle-class culture, sociability, and consumption.

The statesmen active at the Congress of Vienna bequeathed to subsequent generations practices for developing peaceful diplomatic settlements based on serious work in committee meetings and the antechambers of power. Their work also resonated beyond those closed doors, and it found voice through a politicized public in numerous public and private venues: court and civic festivities, salon and dinner party discussions, the press and pamphlet literature. The complex relationship between great power diplomacy and an engaged public—central to international relations in our own time—emerged in Vienna in 1814 and 1815. This legacy may be just as important as the century of peace it initiated in Europe.