As though all this were not enough, Nature contributed the greatest volcanic eruption in recorded history, more than four times greater than Krakatoa’s in 1883. On 10 April 1815, as Napoleon was mustering the army that would be undone at Waterloo, Mount Tambora on the island of Sumbawa in the Indonesian archipelago exploded into what contemporaries described as a mass of liquid fire and sent volcanic ash twenty miles into the atmosphere. The eruption was heard more than 1,600 miles away, and the whole area within a radius of some four hundred miles was plunged into pitch darkness for two days. The death toll was somewhere between 70,000 and 90,000. Winds sent the particles of ash around the globe, and Londoners were astonished by brilliantly coloured sunsets at the end of July. But the real effects would only make themselves felt later.
There would be no summer in Europe in 1816. Constant rain and persistent cold would destroy harvests across the Continent, causing famine in parts of Ireland, Wales and northern Italy, where people were reduced to eating grass, berries, boiled vegetable peelings and animal manure. In Germany they made bread from the bark of trees. This would precipitate a mass migration of people to less affected parts of Europe, to Russia and to America. Weather patterns would return to normal in the course of 1819. But nothing else did. ‘The volcano is not burnt out,’ the British home secretary Lord Sidmouth wrote to a friend on 13 August 1815, and he was not referring to Mount Tambora.2
There were many at every level of society and in every region to whom peace was unwelcome, and who would take every opportunity to stir up old passions. Some out of ideological conviction, others out of loyalty to a defeated cause, others out of a desire to reverse a situation which had cost them wealth and or rank, others still because peace had no use for their talents. All over Europe, young men who craved adventure, glory and status faced a bleak and boring future. At the same time, the nature of the wars had transformed armies from the eighteenth-century model of pressed or indentured soldiers and mercenaries into citizens-in-arms and champions of the nation. The army had acquired a distinctive place in every European society, and would become a factor in the internal politics of every state in Europe. In recognition of this, almost every European monarch henceforth appeared in uniform.
Long periods of war, with their hardship and suffering, invariably raise expectations of the longed-for peace, often giving rise to dreams of a fresh start or a better world which might make up for and to some extent justify some of that hardship and suffering. In 1815 this phenomenon was magnified by concurrent spiritual awakenings which had been taking place over the past two decades, in Germany and other parts of central Europe, in England and in North America. Such dreams are almost as invariably dashed. But in this instance, it was not only the millenarian dreamers who were disappointed.
The peace settlement reached at the Congress of Vienna in 1815 had been the work of some of the most distinguished statesmen of the day, achieved at the cost of nearly two years of laborious negotiations. The peacemakers had set out with respectable, if not the best, intentions. These had been overtaken by the priority of creating a balance between the major mainland states, Russia, Prussia and Austria, henceforth designated as the great powers, and of making it strategically impossible for France to threaten them again. The final settlement failed to fulfil the expectations and longings of large numbers of people, and it injured cultural and religious sensibilities. It also offended the sense of justice of people at every level of society all over Europe: while many who had prospered from the Revolution and military aggression were dispossessed and criminalised, others were rewarded, and few of the victims obtained satisfaction. Not surprisingly, the peace was widely denounced as unjust and immoral. The complaints of those left out in the cold were, as far as the peacemakers were concerned, irrelevant. But in ignoring them, they were creating causes dedicated to the overthrow of the system they had put in place.
Among the unsatisfied longings torturing various parts of Europe was the aspiration to independent nationhood. Many Italians, Poles, Hungarians, Irishmen, Belgians and above all Germans were unhappy to see their homelands divided or ruled by foreigners, and longed to give them life as independent nations.
Another longing strongly felt in various parts of the Continent, under different guises in every country, was for a return to a simpler and spiritually purer way of life. This had surfaced in the German Enlightenment and the Pietist movement in German religious life, and been taken up in the writings of the Russian journalist Nikolai Ivanovich Novikov, the mystic Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin, the German poet Novalis, the mining engineer Franz von Baader and Tsar Alexander’s spiritual mentor Baroness von Krüdener. Underlying this trend was the belief not only that the Christian faith should be practised more in spirit than in traditional ritual, but also that love should transcend laws, and that the rights of rulers must be earned through the application of virtue. Some went so far as to see in the French Revolution a punishment for Europe’s abandonment of Christian values, and therefore a salutary lesson which the supposedly Christian monarchs had failed to learn. Such views coincided with a strain in German Romanticism which had identified the Middle Ages as a time of purity and heroism. Writers such as Adam Müller called for a return not to the ancien régime obtaining before 1789, but to an imagined age of chivalry, untainted by the evils of the Reformation and the Enlightenment. In his Advice to Young Noblemen, Tsar Alexander’s friend the duc de Richelieu propounded that the Revolution had been in large measure the consequence of the shortcomings of the French nobility, and enjoined their descendants to forget the ‘false grandeur’ of the eighteenth century and to reach back to the ‘age of chivalry’ for models.3
Inchoate as such ideas might have been, they drifted through sections of European society demanding attention and action. The frustrated emotions expressed by French poets such as Vigny and Musset, and later Lamartine and Hugo, came to be known as ‘le mal du siècle’. Those of their Russian counterparts Pushkin and Lermontov gave rise to the notion of the ‘lichnii chelovek’, the superfluous man for whom there was no role in the ugly realities of the existing world order.
‘A reputedly invincible revolution has just been vanquished,’ wrote the conservative historian and former émigré soldier François Dominique de Montlosier as he considered the state of France in 1815. But this had solved nothing, since the victors were beset by ‘both the old vices which produced the revolution and the new ones which the revolution produced’ as they tried to rebuild the state. ‘What plan is to be followed? The wisdom of past times is no longer applicable to the present; it is foreign to it: the wisdom of modern times is even less applicable; it is depraved.’4
The problem is well illustrated by what happened when, on recovering his temporal dominion, Pope Leo XII tried to turn the clock back. When the French occupied the Papal States in 1809 they reorganised the administration, lifted the disabilities on various groups, abolished the privileges of others and modernised the infrastructure. The pope sacked all those who had worked in the administration under the French, brought back the Inquisition and the Jesuits, and sent the Jews back to the ghetto. Other casualties included unholy revolutionary novelties such as street lighting and vaccination.
King Victor Emmanuel I of Sardinia took a similar line. He had been forced to flee his mainland capital Turin at the approach of the French in 1798. When he returned, he expelled all French nationals from his realm, even those married to Sardinian subjects, and closed down the botanical gardens created under the French, uprooting and burning plants as though they carried seeds of corruption. He too sacked officials wholesale. Clutching the court almanac of 1798 and muttering ‘Novant’Ott!’ (ninety-eight), he reinstated people in the posts and ranks they had held then, with the result that grandfathers became pages once more. To the joy of breeches- and wig-makers he revived the fashions of the past, and the arch-conservative Sardinian minister in St Petersburg, Joseph de Maistre,