Enno Kraehe's Metternich's German Policy, vol. 2: The Congress of Vienna (Princeton, 1983), is still the most detailed, if exhaustive, narrative of the diplomatic maneuverings at Vienna. Paul Schroeder's The Transformation of European Politics (Oxford, 1994) still convinces historians of the transformation of international norms accomplished there. Brian Vick, in what amounts to a major tour de force, has shed clarifying light on the “historical ecologies” (331) of the Congress, the “embeddedness of diplomacy and its actors in the wider and deeper culture and political culture” (330) of the post-Napoleonic era.

Using a vast array of archival and secondary sources, Vick reveals the ways that statesmen attempted to shape and were shaped by what they perceived as public opinion at home and abroad. It was a public opinion they found expressed in the social salons that they attended, in the press and pamphlet wars that they conducted, and in the massive parades and festivities that they orchestrated to impress their friends, rivals, and an emerging and attentive public.

Vick goes far beyond any traditional recital of upper-class social events during the Congress to an analysis of the wider popular culture in which it was held. In a chapter entitled “Selling the Congress,” he writes perceptively and wittily about the initiatives taken by private entrepreneurs to feed the desire for “political consumption” (77) among the masses. He depicts and explains the popularity of “spectacular realities” (67) like panoramas, dioramas, and wax displays, and of the playing cards, commemorative medals, engravings, and porcelain products available at all levels of pricing for the tastes of aristocrats, upwardly mobile bourgeoisie, and the common folk. Vick also comments wryly on the “Gesamtkitschwerk,” as he calls it, of the publication of commemorative battle music with accompanying iconographic illustrations, “early example[s] of multimedia marketing” (93).

While Vick is at his most innovative and delightful in his discussion of popular culture associated with the Congress, he has most interesting observations to make regarding the “religious sociability” (138) and the “cross-confessional tendency” (139) of the cosmopolitan elite society that networked in the salons that brought together Catholic Church dignitaries, Russian Orthodox diplomats, and evangelical Protestants in the homes of prominent Jewish women in Vienna. Vick also reminds his readers of the diplomats' attention to affairs beyond Europe, calling particular attention to a “diplomatic first” when the English statesman Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh, succeeded in establishing a “semipermanent international commission to oversee the process of ending the slave trade…” (205).

Impressive, too, is Vick's argument that the statesmen of the Congress of Vienna “were much more apt to support constitutions and employ rights talk than the usual depictions allow” (233). He notes that “the peace settlements of 1814–1815 … witnessed one of the greatest waves of constitutional establishments in European history” (233). Vick reviews the Allies' insistence on a constitution for a restored Bourbon France, a constitution in the Netherlands and Norway, and talk of developing a federal constitution for the new German Confederation.

Finally, and most convincingly, Vick details the diplomats' immense concern for and attempts to mold public opinion during the Polish and Saxon crisis that in early 1815 threatened to trigger a war between Russia and Prussia on one side and Austria, Britain, and France on the other. In this excellent chapter, he traces the press and pamphlet wars through which each set of allies tried to portray themselves as the true protectors of national feelings. Vick reminds us that “The chain of patriotism paradigm for nationality—building from the local and regional levels to the national—also found its application in the Saxon debates, and again on both sides” (291). Prussian and Russian polemicists argued for Saxon and Polish “national” feelings as best protected through the control of these regions by the respective larger “German” (Prussian) and Slavic powers. The British, French, Austrians, and Bavarians used the same national-feelings arguments, but in defending Saxons and Poles against their aggressive larger neighbors.

Brian Vick and Harvard University Press have made a profound contribution to scholarship by opening so many new approaches to and insights about the Congress of Vienna on the occasion of its bicentennial. Especially welcome is the inclusion of excellent renderings of contemporary lithographs, copperplates, and medallions. This reviewer's only complaint is the publisher's apparent decision that excellent endnotes obviated the need for a separate, and thus more accessible, bibliography. One can, of course, use the search function in the digital book version, but some of us enjoy accessibility in print versions, too.