Victor Emmanuel did, in one case at least, close down a textile factory operating in a former convent and, having traced a dozen former members of its Capuchin community, restore it. But neither he nor the pope returned much religious property confiscated by the state under the French. Nor did they abolish the efficient fiscal systems introduced by them. Victor Emmanuel also retained the French peace-keeping Gendarmerie, under the new name of Carabinieri. Principles crumbled before convenience.
The Congress of Vienna made many casualties of convenience – sovereign rulers, aristocrats, bishops, monasteries and other institutions which had been dispossessed by a revolution or Napoleonic regime saw their property handed over to third parties. Invoking the principle of legitimacy in order to reinstate some offensive aspects of the old order and trampling it for the sake of expediency, the new order set up by the congress alienated large sections of the very nobility and aristocracy that should have been its greatest support. By riding roughshod over the rights of these and other, more humble individuals, the settlement placed the state in opposition to the individual to a greater extent than ever before, and in so doing profoundly contradicted the spirit of the age, which elevated the individual and deified the collective in the shape of the nation. Such sentiments transcended the parochial gripes of wronged minorities, and would unite wildly disparate elements in protest. The philosopher La Harpe went so far as to venture that the peace settlement contained ‘the germs of the disintegration of Europe’. The Italian statesman Camillo di Cavour termed it ‘a political edifice without any moral foundation’. Maistre also denied it legitimacy. ‘Justice, by its very nature, leads to peace,’ he wrote. ‘Injustice, by its very nature, leads to war.’ He would be proved correct, but it would be a very different kind of war from that he imagined.6
The ‘depraved’ wisdom Montlosier referred to was a new liberalism based on considerations of utility and practicality which had left behind the utopianism of the Enlightenment and the idealism of the Revolution, and set aside such grandiloquent concepts as the Rights of Man in favour of a more pragmatic approach intended to achieve the greatest good for the greatest number. It took for granted that much of what had been done in terms of political enfranchisement, social emancipation, secularisation, disestablishment and extension of the protection of the law in France and wherever French influence had penetrated represented a huge step forward on the march of human progress.
‘God has clearly indicated that He does not wish the order of royal generations to be interrupted,’ argued one of Tsar Alexander’s advisers, Sergei Semionovich Uvarov. But he believed the people had acquired ‘a right to the gratitude of the Sovereigns whom they so valiantly defended’. He suggested that kings and people should make ‘the mutual sacrifice of despotism and popular anarchy’ on ‘the tomb of Buonaparte’. Talleyrand took a similar line when he argued that legitimacy could no longer be based on Divine Right, but on the monarch’s ability to ensure the happiness of his people. ‘The general opinion today, and it would be pointless to try to change it, is that governments exist solely for the people,’ he explained, ‘and the consequence of this view is that legitimate power is that which can best assure their happiness and their peace.’7
History could not be rolled back. ‘Without despising or wishing to denigrate the ancien régime, I regarded as puerile any attempt to reinstate it,’ wrote the duc de Broglie, a twenty-nine-year-old aristocrat who had served as a minor diplomat under Napoleon. ‘In heart and mind I belonged to the new society, I believed fervently in its boundless progress; and while detesting the process of revolution, with all the violence that it gives rise to and the crimes that sully it, I regarded the French Revolution in globo as an inevitable and salutary affliction.’8
To the conservatively minded, this was heresy. The principal reason why the Treaty of Vienna was so flawed was, according to Maistre, that the monarchs and ministers ‘clearly allowed themselves to be penetrated by the philosophical and political ideas of the age’, which he saw as an opportunistic pragmatism. ‘The spirit of revolution is dressed up as the spirit of reason, and under this disguise it is very alluring,’ he warned in August 1815. For people such as him, the threat of a return to 1793 exerted the same compulsive fear as did to all reasonable people in the decades following the Second World War the possibility of a return of fascism: the slightest reference to the episode tended to be pounced on as evidence of ‘Jacobinism’, just as post-war bien-pensants tended to brand anyone with right-wing sympathies a ‘fascist’. The ultra-conservative politician Jean-Baptiste de Villèle referred to all liberals as ‘la Révolution’, a word that epitomised for him a living force, a giant conspiracy on the move.9
‘As long as the absurd and fatal (and also at first sight very plausible) dogma of the sovereignty of the people is more or less publicly recognised,’ warned Maistre in March 1817, ‘I do not think that a sensible man can rest easy.’ Those who shared his views saw the Revolution not so much as a past event, but as the beginning of a new era in the struggle between good and evil. If the Revolution which had had such a devastating impact on people all over the world had indeed been brought about by a conspiracy, the danger was by no means past. The conspiracy could not have merely petered out, and its spirit could not have been extinguished by the military victory over Napoleon. The Revolution had not been the culmination, but an explosion, and, whether or not Mount Tambora had a subliminal effect, the prevailing imagery was volcanic.10
‘The French volcano erupted,’ in the words of Tsar Alexander’s adviser Count Alexander Sturdza. ‘Out came and rose up the spirit of evil. Its path was frayed and widened by religious deviance, excess of luxury, dissolution of morals, abuse of power and perversion of reason.’ The conservative writer Louis de Bonald agreed, and warned that ‘even if the eruption has ceased, the volcano is still alight and rumbling’.11
‘It is not only peace that Europe needs,’ reflected Bonald at the end of 1815, ‘it is first and foremost order that she is in need of …’ But what kind of order? European society had been split along ideological lines to an extent not seen since the Reformation. One man’s order was another man’s prison. If the progressive forces in European society were split between liberals who believed in the gradual evolution of democracy by means of constitutional monarchy and the vociferous minority who called for violent revolution, the forces of conservatism were equally split between the constitutional monarchists and a strident faction which saw only revolution, murder and mayhem everywhere. And while some looked for spiritual solutions, those in power sought comfort in a dubious legitimacy and the security of bayonets. In the circumstances, the pursuit of ‘order’ was to become a self-defeating quest that would transform European societies and help to mould the modern state.12
8
What usually happened at the close of a war was that the defeated party ceded territory to the victors and undertook to pay them reparations in one form or another. The deal was often sealed by a marriage which made it difficult for the vanquished ruler to seek to take his revenge. It was not usual practice to overthrow a defeated monarch – at most, he might be forced to abdicate in favour of a less aggressive or capable son – which is what Napoleon proposed in 1814. But Napoleon was a highly unusual monarch. The British did not recognise him as one at all. Others did so only reluctantly, and while he had been crowned by the pope and had married the Emperor of Austria’s daughter, they could not quite bring themselves to accept him. It was not merely a question of his lineage. While some saw him only as its infamous spawn, for others he was the Revolution incarnate. They referred to him as ‘the Usurper’,