The Congress of Vienna (Part 1) (1814)

0:06 By the summer of 1814,

0:09 the combined strength of Europe brought France to its knees.

0:13 After almost 25 years of war, Europe was finally at peace.

0:19 Nobody knew this at the time,

0:21 but the peace that was negotiated here and now served as the launching

0:25 pad for a 99 year run without a major war between Great Powers.

0:31 A monumental achievement.

0:39 After hostilities ceased, the immediate problem was that nobody quite

0:43 knew what the world looked like anymore.

0:45 The preliminary peace agreement that ended the war in 1814 restored

0:50 international borders as they had existed

0:53 in 1792- with some slight modifications.

0:56 But these borders on the map no longer reflected the reality on the ground.

1:01 The Duchy of Warsaw a.k.a.

1:03 Poland existed on paper, but in reality it was under Russian occupation.

1:07 All of these tiny German states existed on paper,

1:10 but in reality they were under Prussian control.

1:14 France existed on paper,

1:15 but in reality it was under the joint occupation of the Russians,

1:18 the Austrians, the Prussians, and the British.

1:22 All that being said, by the summer of 1814, the Treaty of Paris had been signed,

1:28 the 1792 borders had been temporarily thrown back into place,

1:31 and the war was over.

1:33 At least for now.

1:35 The urgent task at hand was to take this hyper-volatile

1:39 international system and transform it into something more stable.

1:43 Most people recognized that the 1792 borders were no good in the long run,

1:48 because those borders had lead directly to almost 25 years of war.

1:53 The prevailing mood among the victors was

1:57 that a well-balanced international system was necessary,

2:00 one that could resist the kind of reckless expansionism

2:03 that the French Revolution had unleashed upon the world.

2:08 But before we talk about the new system that was created at this time,

2:12 let's first discuss the 5 Great Powers as they existed in 1814.

2:17 This whole period of instability began with the French Revolution,

2:21 so let's start with France.

2:23 Defeated, under enemy occupation, but nevertheless, still a Great Power.

2:39 When Napoleon was defeated,

2:40 the allied victors imposed a set of peace conditions upon France.

2:45 All things considered, they were pretty moderate.

2:47 The first of these called for the restoration

2:50 of the Bourbon monarchy from before the Revolution.

2:52 This brought the 58 year old King Louis XVIII to the throne,

2:55 the younger brother to the king that was executed under the Revolution.

2:59 The second condition for peace was a shiny

3:02 new French constitution that would guarantee certain political rights.

3:06 The third condition was an agreement from the new

3:09 king to leave many of the Revolutionary reforms in place.

3:14 The massive redistribution of wealth and land that took place under

3:16 the Revolution was to be mostly upheld by the new regime.

3:21 So it goes.

3:23 The old French aristocracy were allowed to safely return to the country,

3:27 but they were a shadow of their former selves,

3:30 and never again rose to the dominant political

3:33 position that they had enjoyed in the 18th century.

3:37 The Restoration of the Bourbon king

3:40 was intended to make the conservatives happy.

3:42 The new constitution was intended to make the moderate liberals happy.

3:46 The preservation of the Republican reforms

3:48 was intended to make the Revolutionaries happy.

3:51 It was a big sloppy compromise,

3:53 and its purpose was to hold France together so that there

3:57 was actually a France for the allies to negotiate with.

4:02 Despite its recent defeat, France remained a heavyweight on the continent.

4:07 They were the second most populous country in Europe,

4:10 and still controlled the most potent military force in the world.

4:13 So long as these facts remained true, France would remain a Great Power.

4:18 With this in mind, France's objective

4:21 going into the upcoming peace negotiations was, to the extent possible,

4:27 minimize any further French concessions or territorial losses.

4:32 Many European leaders understood that France would need to opt

4:36 into any new international system if there was to be lasting peace.

4:41 Others were simply out for blood.

4:43 France's job for the immediate future would be to keep the wolves at bay.

4:56 To this end, the new king brought

4:58 in an experienced hand to serve as his Foreign Minister.

5:02 Talleyrand.

5:04 Talleyrand was a French nobleman who got

5:06 in on the ground floor of the French Revolution.

5:09 Through the Revolution he became a politician,

5:12 then a diplomat, then an early supporter of Napoleon.

5:15 Talleyrand served as Napoleon's Foreign Minister for 8 years,

5:18 until the two had a falling out and Talleyrand resigned.

5:23 After this, Talleyrand began telling others that Napoleon's

5:26 endless lust for war would bring ruin upon France.

5:31 In time, he began passing intelligence to France's enemies,

5:35 and launched preliminary discussions with them regarding

5:38 what a post-Napoleonic France might look like.

5:42 This relationship made him an obvious choice

5:45 to bring back into government after France was defeated.

5:49 That's the generous way of looking at Talleyrand.

5:52 The ungenerous way of looking at him is that he was a cockroach,

5:57 a survivor, an opportunist.

5:59 Every time the political winds began to shift,

6:02 Talleyrand suddenly found himself on the other side.

6:05 Every time the French government looked unstable,

6:07 Talleyrand found an excuse to be out of the country.

6:10 When it became clear that France would not win the war,

6:14 Talleyrand was the first to abandon ship.

6:21 Boats!

6:25 But no matter what you think of him, Talleyrand became the most powerful person

6:29 in the French government after the fall of Napoleon,

6:32 and yes I am including the King when I say that.

6:36 His great task as Foreign Minister would be to keep the wolves at bay,

6:41 and re-integrate France back into the international

6:45 order as a co-equal Great Power.

6:49 Let's now turn our attention to the 4

6:51 Great Powers that brought Napoleonic France to its knees,

6:54 starting with the greatest of the Great Powers and working our way down.

7:08 As always, the historian Eric Hobsbawm puts it better than I ever could.

7:13 Britain "had by 1815 gained the most complete victory

7:17 of any power in the entire history of the world,

7:22 having emerged from twenty years of war

7:25 against France as the only industrialized economy,

7:28 the only naval power,[...] and virtually the only colonial power in the world."

7:34 The thing that made Britain the greatest of the Great Powers was the Royal Navy.

7:40 Sometimes people talk about "strategic depth,"

7:42 which is the idea that during wartime, you want the lines of battle drawn

7:47 as far from your major population centers as possible.

7:50 In 1815, Britain's strategic depth extended

7:53 to all the world's oceans and beyond.

7:57 No country has ever been safer from invasion.

8:02 The moment of Britain's great victory was also

8:04 a moment of great uncertainty for the British monarchy.

8:07 George III was King, and was unable to enjoy Britain's newfound prosperity.

8:13 George probably suffered from a number of genetic disorders,

8:16 as well as other things like bipolar disorder and dementia.

8:21 At times it was quite bad.

8:23 He was in constant physical pain,

8:26 and suffered from hallucinations, delusions, and memory loss.

8:29 He was occasionally coherent, but not often, and not for long.

8:34 In 1811, at the height of the war,

8:36 the British Parliament transferred the powers of the monarchy

8:39 to the King's 48 year old son, which made him the Prince Regent.

8:43 Within a few years, the King was

8:47 no longer presentable enough to appear in public.

8:53 Britain's dominant geopolitical position was all the more impressive

8:56 considering the fact that of the 5 Great Powers,

9:00 Britain was only the 4th most populous.

9:02 But the picture becomes more clear when you look at wealth.

9:06 In 1815, the British people were,

9:08 on average, the wealthiest people in the world,

9:11 at least 50% wealthier than their counterparts on the continent.

9:16 This trend would continue for the rest of the century,

9:19 by the year 1900 they would be almost twice as wealthy as the average European.

9:25 This incredible wealth and geopolitical security helped produce a uniquely

9:31 robust political culture with public lively debates and an informed electorate.

9:36 In 1815, the British Prime Minister was the Earl of Liverpool,

9:41 a kind of centrist-conservative.

9:43 The fact that he was kind of conservative was actually a huge deal,

9:46 it was the manifestation of a seismic shift going on within British politics.

9:51 Let me explain why.

9:53 Since the 17th century,

9:55 there had been two political factions in the British Parliament.

9:58 The Whigs, a liberal faction who favoured giving Parliament more power,

10:03 and the Tories, a conservative faction who favoured giving the king more power.

10:08 England in the 17th century was utterly consumed

10:10 by the power struggle between these two factions.

10:13 They even fought a Civil War over it.

10:16 Over the course of this struggle,

10:18 England swung wildly between having an authoritarian king and no king at all,

10:23 sending one to the grave and another into exile.

10:27 By the end of the 17th century, the question was settled.

10:30 The Whigs won.

10:32 Parliament became the supreme political authority in England,

10:35 and the monarchy began to fade into the background.

10:39 This brought about a really strange period in British politics,

10:42 something that will never happen again.

10:45 For more than 100 years, every British Prime Minister was a Whig.

10:50 This period is sometimes called the Whig Supremacy,

10:53 or the Whig Domination, sometimes even the Whig Oligarchy.

10:56 I like the term Whig Oligarchy,

10:58 because it gets at one of the key political truths of this period.

11:02 I described the Whigs as the faction of Parliament,

11:05 but it might be more accurate to describe

11:08 them as the faction of modernity and industrialization.

11:12 This meant that Whig political power

11:15 emanated from cities and business and capital,

11:18 while Tory political power emanated

11:21 from aristocratic landowners and the countryside.

11:25 At the time, the Whig modernist and pro-business

11:28 worldview called for free trade and religious toleration,

11:32 alongside a slow and steady expansion of political rights.

11:37 The Whigs had a general distaste for slavery in all its forms,

11:41 even while they continued to participate in the business of slavery.

11:47 So for more than 100 years, the Whigs dominated British politics,

11:51 and for the first 50 or 60 years there are basically no close elections.

11:56 The Whigs routinely won 300-400 seats in Parliament,

12:00 and other factions were lucky to break 100.

12:03 With such a dominant command over Parliament,

12:05 it was only a matter of time before

12:08 the Whig faction started to develop its own factions,

12:10 and then factions within factions,

12:12 and then factions within factions within factions.

12:16 This competition between sub-factions actually made elections competitive again,

12:20 and in the 1770s Britain elected its

12:24 first Whig Prime Minister from the conservative sub-faction.

12:27 During the French Revolution- perhaps in reaction to the French

12:32 Revolution- Britain elected several more conservative Whig Prime Ministers.

12:37 But they all took great care to quiet people's nerves

12:39 and make it clear that they were all still Whigs,

12:42 they were all members of one big political party.

12:46 One was brave enough to brand himself

12:48 as an "Independent Whig," whatever that means,

12:50 but nobody dared to go any further.

12:54 So by 1814, Lord Liverpool, another conservative Whig, was Prime Minister.

12:59 But he was in an impossible situation.

13:02 His conservative Whig majority in Parliament was modest,

13:05 and his sub-faction seemed to be falling apart.

13:09 Four men were asked to form government before him,

13:12 and all four failed to hold the coalition together.

13:15 The only reason Liverpool was able to get the job

13:17 done was because although he was a conservative Whig,

13:20 he was on the liberal end of the conservative Whig spectrum.

13:24 I spoke of factions within factions within factions before, I was not joking.

13:30 As soon as peace was announced,

13:33 protests started popping up all over England calling

13:36 for "Bread or Blood." One publication at the time wrote

13:40 that "all the triumphant sensations of national glory seem

13:45 almost obliterated by general depression." Change was in the air,

13:50 it was not a good time to be a conservative politician in Britain.

13:55 In fact, it seemed entirely possible that the conservative

13:58 Whig moment was simply a reaction to the French Revolution,

14:02 and with peace, the liberal Whig natural order may just reassert itself.

14:15 All of that is simply a long winded way of saying

14:18 that when it was time to negotiate with the other Great Powers,

14:23 Liverpool found himself politically constrained from every direction.

14:27 If the negotiations went badly, he could not only be thrown out of government,

14:31 but the conservative Whig sub-faction could be wiped out forever.

14:36 The peace negotiations would be handled by the British Foreign Secretary,

14:40 the Viscount of Castlereagh.

14:43 Castlereagh had strong opinions when it came to Europe.

14:46 There were some pro-war nuts in the conservative Whig sub-faction,

14:50 but he was not one of them.

14:53 Castlereagh's view was that every British intervention

14:55 on the continent was a colossal policy failure.

14:59 If he had his way, Britain would never again send an army to Europe.

15:03 One of the reasons Castlereagh thought

15:06 this way is because he was an imperialist.

15:09 As Hobsbawm said, Britain at this time was

15:12 virtually the only colonial power in the world.

15:15 Some of the more liberal Whigs had

15:18 mixed feelings about that, but Castlereagh didn't.

15:20 He thought it was awesome!

15:21 He believed that Britain's future was out in the colonies,

15:24 and it would be best for Britain

15:26 if Europe remained stable and peaceful and boring.

15:31 There was some hypocrisy at work here.

15:34 Peace between the Great Powers meant that nobody

15:36 was allowed to touch any of Britain's new conquests.

15:39 Peace between the Great Powers meant that Britain could instead maintain

15:44 its advantage and focus on making money off of its colonies.

15:49 All that being said, Liverpool and Castlereagh genuinely wanted peace.

15:55 The British public had been exhausted by the war,

15:58 and if the conservative Whigs wanted to maintain their majority,

16:01 they were going to have to show some results.

16:04 Together, Liverpool and Castlereagh came up with a list

16:07 of specific goals for the upcoming negotiations.

16:11 The most important item was that they wanted

16:14 the Netherlands re-formed and strengthened on the English Channel.

16:17 Two reasons for this.

16:18 First, they wanted an ally on the continent

16:21 to break up any consolidation along the coast.

16:24 Second, this was historically a natural path for French expansion,

16:28 and going forward, the British wanted to cut that off.

16:32 Along these same lines, they also wanted the French out of Spain,

16:35 and Spain restored to its previous borders under its previous monarch.

16:40 Castlereagh also had instructions to make sure that the new

16:43 peace deal would keep Italy free from French influence.

16:46 Historically, every time the French started messing around with Italy,

16:49 it meant that France was becoming way too powerful.

16:53 No more.

16:54 Going forward, Italy would be a red line.

16:58 Castlereagh had other goals as well,

17:00 but the big ones were all about containing France.

17:03 Before the peace negotiations began,

17:05 Castlereagh backchanneled his list of priorities to both Austria

17:09 and Prussia and got from them an unofficial thumbs up.

17:13 At least two of the other Great Powers

17:16 wouldn't oppose any of Britain's big ticket items,

17:18 and France wasn't exactly in a place to put up much of a fight.

17:23 The only remaining unknown going into the negotiations was Russia.

17:29 Nobody quite knew what they wanted or what their intentions were.

17:45 When Castlereagh met Tsar Alexander of Russia for the first time,

17:48 he wrote to his Prime Minister that he believed

17:51 that the Russian monarch was not of sound mind.

17:55 It's difficult to characterize Tsar Alexander,

17:57 because it seems that most of his mental energy was caught

18:01 up in creating narratives about what kind of person he was,

18:05 and not so much on what he did or how he behaved.

18:09 The thing that confused Castlereagh and confuses

18:11 me to be honest is that Alexander

18:14 had 8 or 10 of these narratives going through his head at the same time,

18:18 and wasn't particularly bothered when they contradicted each other.

18:22 Let me give you some specific examples.

18:25 Alexander considered himself a true "Enlightenment Monarch," and told

18:29 anybody who would listen that he believed in a limited,

18:33 constitutional monarchy, and wanted Russia to have elections,

18:36 and a parliament, and independent courts.

18:40 At the same time, he ruled Russia as a tyrannical dictator,

18:43 which was justified in his mind because he

18:46 believed that he was God's chosen instrument on Earth.

18:50 These two thoughts are not compatible.

18:52 But Alexander did not see a contradiction.

18:55 He would simply switch between these two modes of thought depending

18:58 on who he was talking to and how he felt that day.

19:02 Here's another example.

19:04 Alexander believed himself to be the most honourable man in Europe,

19:08 a man who revered ritual, and tradition, and justice.

19:13 Simultaneously, he believed that God made him Emperor of Russia for a reason,

19:17 and if he needed to go back on his word

19:20 and use brute force to implement his will, that was all part of God's plan.

19:25 These contradictory beliefs made Alexander impossible to deal with.

19:30 His positions came off as utterly random,

19:32 and they could change at any time depending on his mood.

19:36 He was unpredictable and unreliable and incomprehensible,

19:40 particularly bad traits for a diplomat.

19:44 So naturally, Alexander selected himself to represent

19:51 Russia at the post-war peace conference.

19:58 As the most populous country in Europe, Russia was a formidable land power.

20:03 But that inherent strength was undercut by weak institutions,

20:07 weak governance, and the fact that Russia remained a technological backwater.

20:12 This backwardness had always been a source

20:15 of immense insecurity for Russian monarchs,

20:18 but by 1814, all of that insecurity was gone.

20:22 Russia had just done the impossible and defeated Napoleon.

20:26 At least in their own imagination that's what happened.

20:28 The truth is a little more complicated.

20:31 Years of careful diplomacy had laid the groundwork

20:34 for a coordinated attack against the French,

20:37 and Napoleon's disastrous invasion of Russia was simply the catalyst.

20:41 Had Napoleon been successful in Russia, the rest of Europe's Great Powers would

20:46 have just waited for the next opportunity.

20:48 But when the French started losing to Russia, most of Europe sprang into action.

20:54 The plan was for every major European army to advance on Paris at a steady pace,

20:59 but to pull back whenever opposed by the French army.

21:03 The allies knew that they couldn't defeat Napoleon on the battlefield,

21:06 but with all of Europe's armies advancing as one, they wouldn't have to.

21:12 Napoleon couldn't be everywhere at once.

21:14 Even if he won every possible battle, the allies would still take Paris.

21:19 The point is that no one country defeated Napoleon.

21:22 Every country defeated Napoleon.

21:25 But Tsar Alexander didn't see it like this.

21:28 In his mind, it was all his doing.

21:31 As part of their plan, the allies had developed lists of key French

21:35 towns to capture on the way to Paris.

21:38 The allied armies would need their logistical support,

21:41 especially with several French armies coming up behind them.

21:45 Tsar Alexander was personally in command of the Russian army,

21:48 and once he was within spitting distance of French territory,

21:52 he abandoned this plan and broke off

21:54 from his allies and advanced on Paris alone.

21:59 Alexander later said that this was a matter of personal honour.

22:02 He had made a commitment to his people that there

22:02 would be Russian soldiers marching down the streets of Paris.

22:04 Never mind the commitment he made to his allies to all advance as one.

22:06 Apparently personal honour can only go so far.

22:11 It was Tsar Alexander of Russia who took Paris,

22:14 and it was Tsar Alexander who accepted Napoleon's surrender.

22:19 Since Alexander placed himself in the center of the action,

22:22 the fact that he liked to tell conflicting narratives

22:25 about himself suddenly became very important to world history.

22:29 On one hand, Alexander styled himself as the grand enemy of the French,

22:35 as Napoleon finally meeting his match on the field of battle.

22:39 On the other hand, Alexander still believed

22:42 that he was the honourable man in Europe.

22:45 Spin the randomizer and what do we get?

22:48 Honour.

22:49 Today, Alexander would treat Napoleon not

22:51 as the enemy of Europe, but as his equal.

22:55 The Emperor of Russia meeting with the Emperor of France.

23:00 It was as equals that Alexander negotiated Napoleon's surrender,

23:05 and as equals, Alexander gave Napoleon almost everything he wanted.

23:11 Napoleon would be allowed to retain the title of Emperor,

23:14 and would be permitted to remain an independent monarch until his death,

23:18 ruling over the small island of Elba off the coast of Italy.

23:23 He wouldn't be allowed to leave, but on the island he would be a free man.

23:28 The allies were apoplectic.

23:31 This was not what they had agreed to.

23:33 This put the British in particular in a terrible position,

23:36 since they had deliberately never recognized

23:39 Napoleon as the legitimate Emperor of France.

23:42 Now, for some reason,

23:44 the Russian Tsar was forcing them to legitimize Napoleon only in defeat.

23:50 It was humiliating.

23:52 When the rest of the allies arrived in Paris,

23:55 several of their leaders got up in Alexander's face and went ballistic.

24:00 Alexander was in a different mood that day, and gave them a placid response,

24:05 saying that it was his duty, as a Christian, to forgive his enemies.

24:10 This is what made Alexander impossible to deal with.

24:14 Today he was saying that Napoleon had

24:16 to remain an Emperor for religious reasons.

24:19 Yesterday it was because of honour and tradition.

24:22 Tomorrow?

24:23 Who knows!

24:24 The Austrian Foreign Minister summarized these events

24:27 in a report to his monarch, in which he called Alexander,

24:31 (this is a real quote,) "the biggest baby on earth." He continued,

24:37 "he has started out by doing a great deal of harm.

24:42 We have repaired some of it, but we will suffer for some time as a result

24:45 of the things he got up to in those first

24:51 moments when he ran away from us!" Alexander's stated priorities

24:58 going into the peace conference kinda depended on his mood,

25:02 but it mostly had to do with the future of France.

25:05 As previously discussed, the allies had all agreed to restore

25:09 the old Bourbon dynasty to the French throne.

25:11 The problem was that Alexander didn't like the Bourbon kings.

25:16 If you look at France's position in Europe,

25:18 France had an interest in making sure

25:20 that central Europe remained fragmented and weak,

25:22 and outside of the influence of any other Great Power.

25:27 To these ends, France had a long history of aligning

25:30 itself with countries like Poland and Saxony and the Ottoman Empire.

25:34 This was of course a geopolitical thing,

25:37 but Tsar Alexander thought that it was a personal thing,

25:40 and that the Bourbon kings uniquely had a problem with Russia.

25:45 Alexander's immediate priority was to keep the Bourbon

25:48 Louis XVIII off of the French throne.

25:51 He suggested making Napoleon's 4 year old son the king of France,

25:55 but Talleyrand patiently explained to him that this would

25:58 allow Napoleon to pull the strings from exile.

26:01 Alexander then tried to put a man named Bernadotte on the French throne.

26:05 Bernadotte was a former French marshall who had turned against Napoleon,

26:09 and was singlehandedly responsible for bringing

26:11 Sweden into the coalition against France.

26:14 In the late stages of the war

26:17 Bernadotte and Alexander had worked closely together,

26:19 and Alexander viewed him as the one Frenchman that he could trust.

26:24 Alexander pushed hard for Bernadotte, but Talleyrand wouldn't budge.

26:27 He and the allies had all agreed to a Bourbon restoration,

26:31 and they all saw Bernadotte for what he was.

26:34 An attempt to put a Russian puppet on the French throne.

26:37 Talleyrand explained to Alexander that they couldn't be

26:40 placing whomever they wished on the French throne,

26:43 or they were no better than the Revolutionaries.

26:45 The new king needed to be a legitimate French king of royal blood.

26:50 Alexander got desperate.

26:51 What about a distant cousin?

26:52 A younger brother?

26:54 Anybody but Louis XVIII.

26:56 Talleyrand held firm, and Alexander backed down.

26:58 An impressive feat, considering that the Russians

27:02 had Paris under military occupation.

27:04 A Bourbon king would return to the French throne,

27:08 and Alexander's dream of a grand Franco-Russian alliance withered and died.

27:19 I mentioned the Austrian Foreign Minister before,

27:23 and how he had a rather dim opinion of the Russian Tsar.

27:30 "Biggest baby on earth," and all that.

27:33 The Austrian Foreign Minister's name was Klemens von Metternich,

27:36 and the period we're beginning to cover today is sometimes called

27:40 "The Age of Metternich." That's a clue as to his importance.

27:44 Metternich would become the architect of the postwar international system,

27:48 and one of the 19th century's most preeminent figures.

27:52 Metternich's task was vastly harder than it seemed,

27:55 because not only was the international system undergoing

27:59 a stark transformation at this time, but so was Austria.

28:03 Of course what I'm referencing here is the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire.

28:08 And now my punishment for bringing up the Holy Roman

28:11 Empire is that I have to explain what it was.

28:16 We should begin with the French philosopher Voltaire's famous

28:19 quip that the Holy Roman Empire is neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire.

28:25 So what was it?

28:26 The Holy Roman Empire was a central European...institution...that had

28:30 existed in one form or another for over 1,000 years.

28:35 I say institution because the Holy Roman Empire was by no means a state.

28:40 Each member of the Empire conducted its own foreign

28:42 policy with its own military under its own laws.

28:46 Hundreds of tiny states were members of this club,

28:49 this institution, and together they loosely supported a central Emperor.

28:55 The Holy Roman Emperor was a prestigious

28:58 title with very little actual power behind it.

29:01 He could call for aid if one of the member states was attacked,

29:03 but it was up to each independent state whether or not they would respond.

29:07 In fact, each state had its own unique deal worked out with the Imperial Crown,

29:12 which put further limits on the Emperor's power.

29:16 Some were expected to contribute money to military campaigns, but no soldiers.

29:21 Some were expected to contribute soldiers, but no money.

29:24 Some were under no obligation to offer anything at all.

29:27 By the 17th century the Holy Roman Emperor could

29:30 no longer even have an option on religious matters,

29:33 which kinda defeats the purpose of the "Holy" part of their title.

29:38 Although the Imperial Crown of the was remarkably weak,

29:41 the Holy Roman Emperor usually controlled

29:43 the most powerful state within the Empire.

29:47 Beginning in the 15th century and continuing up until the Napoleonic Wars,

29:50 that meant that the Holy Roman Emperor was the Archduke of Austria.

29:55 Since the 13th century, Austria had been controlled by the Habsburg family.

30:00 The Habsburgs were one of the most powerful families in Europe,

30:03 and at times over the last 500 years had controlled Portugal,

30:07 Spain, the Netherlands, the kingdom of Germany, parts of northern Italy,

30:12 Austria, Hungary, Croatia, Bohemia, I could go on.

30:15 The dynasty was remarkably successful.

30:18 And what made it especially remarkable was that very

30:21 little of this territory was gained through conquest.

30:24 It was instead gained diplomatically.

30:27 The Austrian Habsburgs had a family motto:

30:30 "let others wage war, but thou, happy Austria, marry;

30:34 for those kingdoms that Mars gives to others,

30:37 Venus gives to thee." Others conquer through war.

30:41 The Habsburgs conquer through marriage.

30:45 Fast Forward to the 19th century.

30:48 The Holy Roman Emperor was still an Austrian Habsburg,

30:51 now facing an expansionist France under Napoleon.

30:54 He learned too late that the Holy Roman

30:57 Empire was not equipped to face a direct attack.

31:00 A victorious Napoleon demanded the abolition of the Holy Roman Empire,

31:05 and the Habsburg Emperor,

31:07 having decided that this powerless husk was no longer worth defending, agreed.

31:14 With that, Austria became fully independent under its first Emperor, Francis I.

31:26 I lay all of that groundwork because by 1814, Austria was at a crossroads.

31:35 The new Empire of Austria had played a critical

31:38 role in the defeat of Napoleon Bonaparte, but now what?

31:42 They could re-form the Holy Roman Empire if they wished, but...did they wish?

31:47 When push came to shove,

31:49 some of the largest members of the Empire sided with Napoleon.

31:52 If the Holy Roman Empire wasn't a military alliance, what good was it?

31:57 Yes, the title was prestigious, but you could argue that the restrictions

32:01 within the Empire only slowed Austria down, with no clear benefit.

32:06 Francis, the former Holy Roman Emperor and current Austrian Emperor,

32:11 was sympathetic to this point of view, as was his Foreign Minister, Metternich.

32:16 Metternich is sometimes described as a conservative or a reactionary,

32:20 but that's not quite right.

32:22 A true reactionary would have fought to re-form the Holy Roman Empire,

32:27 but Metternich happily allowed it to die.

32:30 He was a Realist, not that concerned with ideology

32:33 so long as it protected his hard-won peace.

32:36 In his excellent and definitive biography of Metternich,

32:40 Wolfram Siemann writes that "this [the question

32:43 of whether Metternich was a reactionary] disregards

32:47 the experiences of human beings who were looking

32:51 back at twenty-five years of war and revolution.

32:54 The question contemporary witnesses asked themselves

32:56 was whether the more than three

32:59 million dead on the battlefields of Europe had died for any meaningful goal.

33:04 In many peasant families, there were no male youths left." That three million

33:11 number is on the lower end of the spectrum,

33:14 I've seen credible estimates of 5 to 7 million when you include civilians.

33:19 Unthinkable loss.

33:21 Nobody who lived through this period would ever be the same.

33:24 Across France, 20% of the men born between 1790 and 1795 were dead.

33:32 An entire generation of young men had been wiped out.

33:37 In that same book, Siemann provides the best

33:40 summary of Metternich's worldview that I've ever seen.

33:43 "In Metternich's case,

33:44 coming to terms with the war meant considering the suffering he

33:48 had witnessed endless times on the battlefields

33:52 and along the roads- unnecessary, pointless, even a crime,

33:57 caused by human delusions of grandeur that, he thought,

34:01 could pull down the walls protecting civilization and the law

34:05 (as he understood it) at any time and in any place.

34:09 It was the duty of politics to erect enduring barriers against this possibility.

34:16 He opposed this catastrophe on humanitarian grounds,

34:20 and his lasting commitment was:

34:23 never again." Metternich saw balance between Great Powers as the answer.

34:30 He feared a Second French Revolution, or something like it,

34:33 but he couldn't clearly see how Austria could possibly prevent one.

34:38 However, with a balanced international system,

34:40 any state seeking to dominate could simply be slapped down by everybody else.

34:47 This theory for peace played into Austrian strengths.

34:50 Ever since the French Revolution, Austria had positioned itself as the defender

34:55 of precedent and tradition and the rule of law.

34:58 Accordingly, they began to expand their diplomatic

35:01 influence and cultivate a following of smaller states,

35:05 especially in central Europe,

35:06 who feared being swallowed up by the regional instability

35:10 that would inevitably follow the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire.

35:21 Before proceeding, it would be helpful

35:23 to discuss what the Austrian Empire actually was.

35:27 What we're really talking about here are

35:30 the personal holdings of the Habsburg family,

35:32 which included the lands that had been the duchy of Austria,

35:35 but it also included the Kingdom of Hungary, the Kingdom of Bohemia,

35:39 the Kingdom of Croatia, along with a hodgepodge of other titles.

35:43 It may be helpful to look at the ethnic breakdown of the Austrian Empire,

35:48 because this will tell you you everything

35:50 you need to know about Austrian politics.

35:53 First and foremost there was the German speaking core,

35:57 centered around Vienna and the old duchy of Austria.

36:01 Then there were the Magyars of Hungary, who smoke Hungarian.

36:04 The third major group were the Bohemians, who spoke Czech.

36:08 Then, in the borderlands, there were Croats, Serbs,

36:12 Slovaks, and others who spoke various Slavic languages.

36:17 To the east there was Transylvania, whose inhabitants spoke Romanian.

36:21 There were also regions where the majority spoke Polish and Ukrainian.

36:25 And although this wasn't the case at this exact moment,

36:28 the Austrian Empire would soon have a large Italian minority as well.

36:32 By one count, the Austrian Empire consisted of 14 ethnic groups,

36:36 speaking 17 different languages.

36:39 The Austrian Empire was really an incredible experiment,

36:42 one that you don't see anywhere else during the 19th century.

36:46 This was not the case of one ethnic group dominating their neighbours.

36:50 This was a true synthesis of cultures and ethnicities,

36:55 united under the Habsburg Emperor.

36:57 In the eyes of the Habsburg Emperor,

37:00 all of these holdings were (at least theoretically) co-equal,

37:02 which made administering the Empire the world's most complicated balancing act.

37:08 The constraints within the Habsburg system become clear when you

37:12 look at the Crown's relationship with the Kingdom of Hungary.

37:16 The Kingdom of Hungary was home

37:18 to more than just the ethnic Hungarian population,

37:21 and when you add everyone together it accounted

37:24 for 35 to 40% of the Austrian Empire's population.

37:28 That fact alone should make it clear why there

37:32 was tension between the Austrian Germans and the Hungarians.

37:36 The Habsburg Emperor ruled Hungary as their king, but he was not one of them,

37:40 and so he was bound by severe constitutional limitations.

37:45 One of these limitations was that the Hungarian King

37:48 was not allowed to tax the people of Hungary.

37:51 The local Hungarian aristocracy was allowed to tax the people,

37:54 but they were under no obligation to pass that money along to their King.

37:59 Again, this was 35 to 40% of the Empire's population we're talking about.

38:04 This exemption created a massive hole in the Imperial

38:08 budget that Austria was constantly trying to fill.

38:11 Over the centuries, this arrangement resulted

38:14 in the Hungarian aristocracy becoming extremely rich,

38:18 even though the Hungarian people remained quite poor

38:20 compared to the German speaking population to the west.

38:25 The Hungarian King was also constrained when it came to military recruitment.

38:30 Despite being home to 35 to 40% of the Austrian Empire,

38:34 Hungarian subjects only made up like 5% of its military.

38:38 This number could fluctuate,

38:39 during the Napoleonic Wars it climbed as high as 20%,

38:42 but in order to accomplish that, the Habsburg Emperor had

38:46 to go to the Hungarian aristocracy and give them whatever they wanted.

38:51 This tenuous constitutional relationship meant that Austria was cursed

38:54 in a way to be in constant negotiations with itself.

38:59 The Hungarians were always suspicious of any territorial

39:03 gains that added more ethnic Germans to the Empire.

39:06 The whole political system was a delicate balance, and if the ethnic Germans got

39:11 something the Hungarians always wanted something too.

39:15 Despite all of its contradictions,

39:17 the Austrian Empire had a lot of credibility on the international stage.

39:22 Whatever the reasons, the fact that Austria was not primarily

39:26 concerned with territorial expansion mattered a lot,

39:28 especially to all of those tiny central European states who had

39:33 recently been made vulnerable by the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire.

39:37 It meant that despite having the weakest military of the Great Powers,

39:41 Austria had a lot of friends at a time when

39:44 having a lot of friends was a valuable thing to have.

39:49 None of this was true of the other German Great Power,

39:53 in many ways Austria's mirror opposite.

39:56 Where Austria was old, they were young.

39:59 Where Austria was defined by its diversity,

40:02 they were defined by their Germanness.

40:05 Where Austria was weaker militarily than they could be,

40:08 they were stronger militarily than they ought to be.

40:11 Where Austria was not that interested in territorial expansion,

40:15 they were obsessed with it to the point where they thought of very little else.

40:20 The two German Great Powers were brothers,

40:28 but they were brothers that did not get along.

40:38 In 1814, the thing that defined Prussia was its precarity.

40:43 It was the smallest of the Great Powers in every way.

40:45 It had a tiny population of only 10 million people,

40:48 3 times less populous than France and almost 5 times less populous than Russia.

40:54 It was also small geographically, as you can see,

40:57 its tiny population was crammed into a bunch

40:59 of isolated pockets that weren't even connected to each other.

41:03 It was also precarious in its positioning.

41:06 As I've already discussed,

41:08 central Europe was no longer under the protection of the Holy Roman Empire,

41:12 which meant that tiny Prussia was now vulnerable to its much larger neighbours.

41:17 "Vulnerable" might be under-selling it.

41:20 The Prussians had enlisted Russian help against the French,

41:24 but now there were Russians everywhere.

41:26 Poland was under joint Russian and Prussian occupation,

41:29 but there were also Russian occupying

41:31 the Polish speaking areas of Eastern Prussia, and they weren't leaving.

41:36 The Russians were also occupying Saxony along Prussia's southern border,

41:40 and these guys weren't leaving either.

41:44 Central Europe was in a state of flux.

41:46 It was clear to everybody that Russia saw opportunity here,

41:50 which was entirely antithetical to the balance of power principal.

41:53 If Russia sought to dominate Prussia,

41:55 the other Great Powers would have no choice but to respond.

41:58 In the eyes of people like Metternich and Castlereagh,

42:01 Russia had to remove itself from central Europe if there was ever to be peace.

42:06 Prussia had to become the kind of Great

42:10 Power that was capable of resisting Russian influence.

42:14 This was the priority of the Prussian Prime

42:19 Minister and Foreign Minister Karl August von Hardenberg.

42:24 The experience with Napoleon had taught Hardenberg

42:27 that Prussia was not yet a true Great Power.

42:30 It was powerful regionally, but too small to have a global impact.

42:34 In order to graduate from a regional power to a Great Power,

42:39 Prussia needed people, Prussia needed resources, and Prussia needed territory.

42:46 This line between a strong regional power and a weak Great Power is a fuzzy one.

42:52 Eric Hobsbawm writes that "Austria and Prussia were

42:56 really Great Powers by courtesy only," continuing later,

43:01 "their chief function was to act as European stabilizers." It's true

43:08 that Austria and Prussia could not march the global influence of France,

43:12 Britain, and Russia.

43:13 I would quibble slightly and say that Austria's diplomatic

43:16 influence at this time made them a Great Power,

43:19 but it's true that Prussia lacked the global reach of any of the other powers.

43:25 The only reason everybody else decided to treat

43:27 them as a Great Power was their formidable military.

43:32 By the end of the war, on a per capita basis,

43:36 Prussia was fielding 6 times more soldiers than Austria,

43:39 which meant that despite their relative weakness,

43:41 they were capable of going toe-to-toe with any other Great Power.

43:47 Hardenberg saw in Prussia an urgent need for territorial expansion.

43:52 All of these isolated enclaves would not do,

43:54 they were just asking to be swallowed up by some stronger power.

43:59 In the upcoming peace conference,

44:01 Prussia hoped to gain some territorial coherence,

44:05 and become a true Great Power with global influence.

44:21 The original plan was for the four victorious Great Powers,

44:25 Britain, Russia, Austria, and Prussia, to dominate the peace conference

44:30 and impose their will upon everyone else.

44:33 But Tsar Alexander's behaviour had begun to make people nervous,

44:37 and Russia's creeping domination over Prussia

44:40 seemed a disaster waiting to happen.

44:43 If there was a serious split at the conference,

44:46 with Britain and Austria on one side and Russia and Prussia on the other,

44:50 it was difficult to imagine how they could

44:53 possibly resolve it without descending into another war.

44:57 Metternich and Castlereagh saw this looming crisis before them,

45:00 and so they approached Talleyrand and asked him to represent France at Vienna.

45:07 France remained a Great Power, and so it made very little sense

45:10 to exclude them from shaping the post-war world.

45:14 Besides, Napoleon Bonaparte had been defeated and removed from power,

45:18 which meant that France was theoretically a normal country again.

45:22 Naturally, nothing could have pleased Talleyrand more.

45:27 Castlereagh and Metternich pulled in Hardenberg of Prussia,

45:30 who was still keen on finding a way to resist Russian influence,

45:34 and got him to agree.

45:36 This left Tsar Alexander isolated.

45:38 When the four other Great Powers came to him

45:41 and demanded that France be given a seat at the Congress,

45:44 he of course threw a fit, but then reluctantly agreed.

45:49 Over the summer, everybody travelled to Vienna.

45:57 And by everybody I mean everybody.

45:59 Virtually every state in Europe sent delegations,

46:02 and some states that didn't even exist anymore sent delegations as well.

46:08 After decades of war, a festive, slightly euphoric mood took over the city.

46:14 Peace was at hand.

46:16 When September rolled around, the real work began.