What Sort of Peace?
Following Napoleon’s refusal to accept the favourable conditions offered him by the Allies after his defeat at the Battle of Leipzig in October 1813, Napoleon is said to have sighed: ‘I’m tired of this old Europe! I refuse to rule over a withered empire!’Footnote 1 After 1815 the imperial dream of a united Europe under one military ruler came to an end. In its stead came something different: changes that did not revert back to the fragmented world of the ancien régime, but that expanded on a fateful sense of solidarity that the European powers nolens volens had been subjected to during the Napoleonic Wars. That over twenty-year-long period of insecurity and unstable alliances gave rise to a new community linked by the fear of terror and violence on the one hand, and the dream of peace and repose on the other.
Napoleon’s reference to that ‘old, withered Europe’ expressed his lack of comprehension and frustration with the leading princes and ministers who had allowed him to play them off against each other multiple times, but who had still got the better of him. What he found even more difficult to fathom was why the victors of 1815 did not pick up where he left off and stretch their sway over Europe in their turn. He simply could not comprehend why the head of the largest and most successful contingent of allied troops in history, the Duke of Wellington, submitted himself after the glorious victory at Waterloo to the authority of a government official, the British foreign secretary Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh (1769–1822), instead of ascending to the throne in France, or anywhere else for that matter: ‘Can it be possible that the modern Marlborough has linked himself in the train of Castlereagh, and yoked his victories to the turpitude of a political mountebank? It is inconceivable!’Footnote 2 What were they, Wellington and Castlereagh, thinking? ‘What sort of peace has England concluded? Lord Castlereagh had the whole Continent at his disposal, and yet what advantage, what indemnity, has he secured to his own country? He has signed just such a peace as he would have signed had he been conquered.’Footnote 3
Indeed, what sort of peace was this, a peace that had to be enforced with the blood of so many casualties and battles? It was certainly not the quiet of the churchyard, with a new hegemonic power stepping up to claim the now empty imperial throne. Every European power was acutely wary of any other power aspiring to hegemony again. What united them was their abhorrence of the ‘iron sceptre’ of (French) domination on the one hand and revolutionary terror on the other. That infernal chaos – of revolutionary and Napoleonic warfare – had to be prevented from recurring ever again. The question was how.
This book unpacks a rather forgotten story out of the mothballs of European history: the story of the first collective European fight against terror in peacetime. This fight can be considered a unique and innovative security experiment, that for a variety of reasons only lasted a couple of years and only partially succeeded. This first experiment in collective and institutionalized security management foreshadowed the future European system of mutual security as we know it today. Waging peace can be as complex as waging war, if only because post-war peace objectives may present far larger challenges for a coalition to pursue than fighting a joint enemy. This exceptional period of transition – from concluding a war to consolidating a new order – presents us with a setting and a stage on which very remarkable, well-known and lesser-known figures of military, political, diplomatic or administrative distinction engaged each other in something unheard of.
An (Anti-)Revolutionary Security Experiment
In 1815, the four great powers of Europe – the United Kingdom, Prussia, Austria and Russia (Fig. 1.1) – embarked on a unique experiment: the implementation of a collective security system, via the creation of an Allied Council, and by the leverage of an Allied Army of Occupation.Footnote 4 The French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars had achieved something unprecedented. Not only had they forged the European states together into a wartime alliance against the Bonapartist Grande Armée. But even after the conclusion of the armistice and the first peace treaty, the Grande Peur that survived after all these years of warfare pushed the powers closer together than ever before.Footnote 5 The philosopher Immanuel Kant had speculated on the possibilities of world peace; pundits and publicists had designed blueprints for a post-war federation of European states. But these plans had never reached the baize-covered tables of Europe’s diplomats and ministers. The Vienna Congress, convening from September 1814 until June 1815, consolidated the existing wartime alliance and deliberated on the new, post-war peace order. However, contrary to received wisdom, rather than the Vienna Final Act, it was two other treaties that were to be concluded a couple of months later that contained and cemented the real revolutionary requisites for this new post-war security system: the Treaty of the Quadruple Alliance and the Second Treaty of Paris, both signed on 20 November 1815. When the lights of the Vienna spectacle went out and the princes and their diplomats left, the peace in Europe had not been secured at all. Napoleon had to be fought and beaten once again, after his staggering return in March 1815. The post-Napoleonic security of Europe only found its real shape and framework through the consistent efforts of the ministers of the four great powers, who – after Waterloo – came together in Paris to monitor and enforce the execution of the treaties and encompassing agreements. Only thus, via the persistence of this Allied Council in waging their security efforts in peacetime, could the double-headed serpent of revolution and despotic hegemony be tamed and domesticated.
Figure 1.1 The Allied entry into Paris, 31 March 1814. By Thomas Sutherland, 1815.
The innovative part of this anti-revolutionary security system was fourfold. First of all, the ministers of the four great powers introduced a new reading of that classic principle, the ‘balance of power’. Well known in European international relations, it was reinterpreted in the early nineteenth century and renovated to match the challenges of the new international system – not by reverting back to the unstable alliance of the ancien régime of the 1740–89 period, when the so-called balance was highly volatile, unpredictable and transient and aggressive, both towards weaker states and each other, but in a novel, more structured and institutionalized way.
Secondly, the victors of 1815 established an Allied Council, the so-called Paris Conference, or Ministerial and later Ambassadorial Conference, to enable the day-to-day deliberation on and management of the post-war peace and security arrangements. Castlereagh (and Wellington) fondly referred to this council as the ‘Allied Machine’.Footnote 6 Herein lay the most far-reaching and revolutionary aspect of the peace arrangements – a revolutionary aspect that remained rather unnoticed at the time, and even thereafter, but in practice transformed the European scene of interstate relations into a new system of collective security. Rather than leaving the stage, the generals, princes and their ministers did not go home, but remained in place to translate their fight against terror into new and continuous practices of security management. The great advantage of such an administrative body was its novel and relatively informal format. The participants were not obliged to engage in complicated formalities and protocol that normally characterized official congresses, stately and royal get-togethers, nor did they need to invest in receptions, balls and other pomp and circumstance. The protocols of the Paris Conference, moreover, were understood as binding international law. Once they were accepted and agreed upon, the Allied courts would have to sign up to these commitments and translate the Paris stipulations into national law. Mostly, the foreign minister of the country that hosted such a ministerial or ambassadorial conference would chair the meetings. During the nineteenth century, many more conferences would follow suit.Footnote 7 Yet this one, the Parisian conference, as the first of its kind, was not presided over by the French, but the British ministers. First Castlereagh, later Wellington and Charles Stuart.
The third novel dimension of this post-war security system was the invention and implementation of a series of standardized and centrally conceived security practices in peacetime. The participating ministers and diplomats in the Paris Conference – in the main council as well in the subordinated committees – discussed, developed and disseminated new, professional and institutionalized governmental practices geared towards engendering stability and security.Footnote 8 Tedious and bureaucratic as that may sound, the invention and proscription of passport regulations, a joint Allied security service and military police and border controls contributed to an emergent European security culture that made itself felt throughout the continent (as Louisa Adams, the travelling wife of diplomat John Quincy Adams, experienced not to her detriment). These collective exertions in the security field also included substantial military efforts. Together, the Allied powers instigated an immense project for the construction of fortresses along the borders of France. Conceived as the material foundation for the newly re-established balance of power, or perhaps better put, for the balance of deterrence, this project was initiated by the Allied Council, executed under supervision of the British generals, most notably Wellington (Fig. 1.2), with assistance from Dutch and German experts, and financed predominantly through the French reparation funds.
Figure 1.2 Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington. Portrait by Thomas Lawrence, 1815/16.
Rather than working towards a restoration, these immediate post-war years saw a gigantesque, unheard of (and soon to be dissolved) attempt to join forces in the fight against terror. Obviously, such a system could only be enforced. Hence, the Allied Council’s crucial leverage was the Allied Army of Occupation – the fourth novelty of the post-war system. Between 1740 and 1815, warfare had been directed towards expansion, and the balance of power had hinged on land-grabbing battles amongst the five great powers – wars in these decades were often waged to partition specific countries or solve succession disputes (Austria, Prussia or Poland). In 1815, the Allied powers opted for another solution. They decided to leave the troops in France after the Battle of Waterloo, in June 1815, and not repatriate them for the time being. Prussian thirst for revenge aside, the other victors had no intention of cutting up the country or dividing the invaded provinces. An overwhelming total of 1.2 million troops remained deployed in France, occupying at first two thirds of the French territories, to be scaled back, but still leaving a substantial number behind from early 1816 until late 1818. The Allied courts appointed the Duke of Wellington as supreme commander of this army of occupation, which was from the beginning conceived as a temporary occupation, in order to guarantee France’s compliance with the stipulations of the peace treaties that needed to be concluded. With his authority and his ultimate allied force, the Paris Conference’s leverage was assured.
After twenty-six years of unprecedented revolutionary upheavals and endless fighting, with the unspeakable consequences of invasion, occupation, exploitation and suppression of their countries in mind, the victorious powers craved stability. The revolutionary changes that Napoleon had pushed through in the wake of his armies had left them pining for peace and quiet. At the same time, the position of France in Europe made it necessary to invite the country back into the circle of great powers in the long run – a stable balance of power without France was hardly imaginable strategically. Given this conundrum, a new settlement, and a dynamic one, involving a temporizing of France’s position, needed to be designed. And indeed, where Napoleon had tried and overplayed his hand, the anti-Napoleonic coalition exited the long, winding wars not only as victors but also as custodians and managers of a new system of unified rule. With the threat of war and revolutionary terror still looming large, the necessity to combat these threats together kept the coalition united after 1815. At least in these very first post-war years (far more than ever accounted for) the ‘horseback diplomacy’ (Fig. 1.3), the battle-hardened solidarity and the shocking experiences of the emperor’s return had ripened hearts and minds for a new type of peace.Footnote 9 The vagaries of fate ushered in a multilaterally discussed, arranged and secured peace that we may interpret as the birth of the first modern system of collective security in Europe: a system that in the numerous nationalist and patriotic historiographic accounts that were produced throughout the nineteenth century has found little acknowledgement. Long before commercial interest and economic considerations about scale and productivity dictated and inspired the project of European integration, the common denominator behind this first impulse for a unification of Europe in norms and institutions was the collective fight against terror.
Figure 1.3 Meeting between Blücher and Wellington after the Battle of Waterloo, 1815. By Reinier Vinkeles, 1815/16. This image illustrates the so-called ‘horseback diplomacy’.
A New History of Terror and Security
This first experiment in European collective security management, in the form of the Paris Conference, has been almost completely lost in oblivion.Footnote 10 The reasons for this oblivion are not illogical. The Allied Council convened behind the scenes and did not last long: it dissolved in 1818. The council had completed its main task: to mitigate the threat of war and terror and to design and consolidate a system of deterrence. France was less of a threat in 1818, and the surrounding countries had regained much of their stability. The council could have lasted longer but was downscaled to the level of an ambassadorial (and less effective) conference for reasons of diverging national interests and domestic power changes. Purely coincidental developments, such as the early demise of some of its main agents, precipitated this dissolution of Allied unity.
Moreover, those historians who worked themselves up into a professionalized guild and academic discipline in the nineteenth century predominantly concerned themselves with the historiography of their own nations and national peculiarities. In the wake of the rising power of national movements, they became the heralds of the newly (re)discovered or created national identity. As chroniclers of a supposed European unity and collaboration, they would have stood little chance of making a name for themselves at home. The history of terror and security as a collective, European history therefore remains to be written. This book makes a first start in presenting, assembling and interpreting the protocols of this first collective European undertaking – the Allied Council – as they have been painstakingly collected and contextualized from various archives in European capitals.
The story of this Allied Council, this Paris Conference, is not merely presented as an organizational or institutional history, but is embedded and historicized within the context of considerations, emotions and sentiments as experienced and voiced by the main protagonists and contemporaries that made up this council – or became the object of its manifold activities. Terror and security are highly contested concepts and can only be correctly understood within the web of meanings, emotions and associations that were attributed to them at the time. From a distance of over two centuries, the salience of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars stands out as deeply incisive in the development of national and European identities. Those years of turmoil and distress ushered in a new European notion of common destiny – albeit a notion that was predominantly fostered by the European elites and that echoed their concerns and sentiments. These elites, the princes and their entourage, had come to realize that they depended on each other in the joint fight against the double-headed terror of revolution and despotism. Their populaces were equally aware of having entered into a new era of transition. Old monarchs returned; new ones equally stepped out of the shadows of their previous marginal dynasties and pedigrees. Historical privileges of the nobility and clergy were not completely, or only haphazardly restored; confiscated properties and territories were not returned. Neither were the manifold achievements of the Napoleonic rulers in centralized and professionalized governance turned back. A volatile and confusing combination of a desire for normalcy and an end to war and deprivation on the one hand, and the still floating hope for (gradual) change and reform on the other, kept the European continent on alert in 1815. Subsistence crises further deepened the feelings of distress and social unrest in countries that were already suffering from the complicated transition from wartime to peace economies.Footnote 11 The discussions, decisions and statements regarding terror and security within the Allied Council should therefore also be read as an expression of the collective sentiments of that time – conflicting and incompatible as they oftentimes seemed.Footnote 12 Security is never only a category of governance, management or physical protection, but always also an expression of desire and sentiment. To approach these sentiments, and the way they were channelled by the Allied Council, this book’s narrative is enriched with the accounts of individual travellers, women, diplomats and ordinary citizens that commented upon the coming of this new European system of peace and security.
Finally, a junction is established between security in Europe and beyond the continent. The security threats envisaged and confronted by the Allied Council did not only manifest themselves in and around France, or at other vulnerable places in Europe where crises had not subsided after 1815. They also raised their radical heads in the colonies and on the open waters. Timewise, the great powers’ efforts to implement a collective security system in Europe coincided with the process of colonizing and stepping up imperial efforts outside Europe. What is more, these internal European and external imperial security efforts underwent a process of cross-pollination: what happened in France was translated into lessons learned elsewhere in Europe, or in the colonies. And vice versa: imperialist and hierarchical notions on security, the division into categories, the political sorting of groups and countries, gleaned while governing intercontinental empires, was implemented at home as well. The security managers of 1815 were not only highly innovative, but elitist and imperialist in the way they developed new methods and techniques of inclusion and exclusion, blacklisting and espionage. They shared their best practices and deployed their best professional agents and experts in trimming the new collective system of security in and beyond Europe. A brief elaboration on these four aspects – the historiographical deficiency in addressing the Allied Council, the need for historicizing security, the importance of applying a cultural and emotional approach, and the imperialist nature of this post-war order – is called for, and will be offered below.
A Forgotten History Reconstructed from Forgotten Archives
The bicentennial commemorations of the Congress of Vienna have produced a wealth of new publications on that Congress.Footnote 13 From these manifold studies, it transpires that the Congress did not only concern itself with the protection of the status quo, nor was it merely the platform on which a restoration of the ancien régime order was contemplated. The Congress demonstrated a spirit of renewal and reform: new norms and institutions in international relations, international and constitutional law were created – to which an increasing number of states subscribed voluntarily.Footnote 14 These novel studies seem to uphold the findings in the pioneering work of Paul Schroeder from 1994.Footnote 15 Where some still interpret the international relationships in the years around 1815 from the perspective of power realism and bellicism,Footnote 16 many experts have come to approach matters from the constructivist–institutionalist angle and underline the role of norms and institutions in the international arena, and the importance of multilateralism and joint deliberation.Footnote 17 The Congress was not merely about protecting the status quo, it was an attempt to design a dynamical order, geared to produce ‘repose and tranquillity’ in times of change and turmoil.Footnote 18 How should the Pax Europeana be waged in the future? What treaties and arrangements were called for to enable gradual reform and improvement?Footnote 19
Significant questions remained, however. Neither Schroeder nor Ikenberry (who, from a political scientist perspective, also pondered on the post-war collective security system)Footnote 20 elaborated on how exactly that stable order after 1815 was put together, consolidated and operated in the following years. Ikenberry’s main concern was to develop and defend a more schematic take on the institutionalization of post-war power systems, while Schroeder, because his eye was on the entire period from the 1760s to the 1840s, gave scant attention to the years immediately after 1815. In addition, for both scholars, any kind of long-term international cooperation was ultimately merely a matter of strategic considerations and cost–benefit analyses. They left little room for the more principle and sometimes even moral and spiritual weight that those around the table in 1815 gave to their collective security ambitions.Footnote 21 In reconstructing the deliberations of the Allied Council, the tentative and hesitant attempts to create such a post-war security system – and to make it function over time – will be fleshed out, as well as the underlying moral values and emotional beliefs attached to this emerging order.
The main source for this study are the records of the Allied Council, formally called the Paris Conference of Ministers (later also Ambassadors), including the subcommittees attached to it. These records have never been properly investigated before and were retrieved from various archives in Europe, including London, Berlin, Nantes, Vienna, Paris and Amsterdam. They had been quite mistakenly neglected, since this council tasked itself with the supervision of the execution of seminal aspects of the Vienna Congress’s Final Act, was invoked to negotiate the Second Treaty of Paris and acted as the interstate control council (and inter-court communication centre) to oversee the deployment of the Allied Army of Occupation in France, as well as being a platform for Quadruple Alliance communications. The Paris Conference decided on borders, arrearages, debts and reparations, on returning looted artworks and on matters pertaining to property rights – not only with respect to France but also regarding the rest of Europe and beyond. It was, in short, the bedrock to the European post-war security system.
The council also deliberated on legal, constitutional and police matters, such as whether European-wide censorship or gag orders on the press needed to be implemented. The records of the council are supplemented by correspondence, often even published in print form, between the diplomats involved and other key figures, like Metternich, Castlereagh, Wellington and Alexander I, as well as with eyewitness reports and journals, inasmuch as they could be retrieved. On the activities of the occupying forces and the repayment of debts a number of specialized studies and papers have been published.Footnote 22 A number of articles in French, from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, deal with the military occupation from a local or regional perspective.Footnote 23 Notwithstanding these insightful publications, the broader security–political and intellectual–cultural framework of the post-war European ‘Allied Machine’ has, however, never been investigated properly.
Parallels with the Allied Control Council in Berlin after 1945 come to mind. That council oversaw the denazification, democratization, decartelization and demilitarization of a defeated Germany, but soon fell apart into a communist and a liberal–capitalist camp.Footnote 24 Another obvious point of comparison would be the committees charged with implementing the peace treaties with Germany, Hungary and the Ottoman Empire after 1918, and the conditions for reparations, the occupation of parts of Germany and the division of the Austro-Hungarian Empire that they imposed on these vanquished powers.Footnote 25 Other points for comparison may be provided by the League of Nations’ attempts to design the governance of previous Ottoman provinces in the Middle East, or the former German colonies in Africa and the Pacific region.Footnote 26 Even the creation of the European Economic Community or the aborted plans for the European Defence Community in the 1950s are material for comparison. Although some after 1918 have sought to draw lessons from experiences booked during and after the Congress of Vienna, the effect and results of the Allied Council between 1815 and 1818 have yet to be plumbed as a possible blueprint for or counterpoint to later occupation statutes or defence communities: something this book will also seek to do.
In order to comprehend the breadth and the depth of the history of collective security, due attention is given to the physical security measures adopted by the Council. These measures materialized not just in the paperwork of treaties or the bayonets of the occupation army, but also in the brick and mortar of physical barriers and fortresses. The Allied Council’s deliberations repeatedly reverted back to the creation of a so-called Boulevard de l’Europe – the largest and most lasting project undertaken by the Allied ministers. This metaphor both indicated the importance the victorious courts attributed to the erection of a series of fortresses throughout Europe, in order to contain France and deter her from new military adventures, and the pivotal position the council had in mind for the Low Countries within this new collective security system. For the ‘Wellington Barrier’, as the band of fortresses came to be known, stretching from the North Sea coast along the French northern frontier as far as the German city of Mainz, was to be erected on Dutch territories. The United Kingdom of the Netherlands, at one point offhandedly described by Metternich as the ‘lapdog’ of the European powers, would therefore become the main theatre of and even one of the main actors in these security plans. The Netherlands comes off rather poorly in the historiography of the European Concert. Aside from a few standard works in Dutch – particularly and in fact exclusively the work of Van Sas – little attention has been given to the crucial role of the Low Countries in the post-war security system. But ever since the French Revolution, the Netherlands – whether it was the Batavian Republic, the Kingdom of Holland or the United Kingdom of the Netherlands (including Belgium) – in its ‘special relation’ with Britain, had a significant role to play in the strategic plans for the post-war order.Footnote 27 Not only were the Netherlands, after Prussia, the second largest stakeholder in the French arrear payments. But the Netherlands were also key to the new system of collective security: In March 1815, the Allied powers enabled the Sovereign Prince Willem to proclaim himself King Willem I and become the head of a kingdom that was literally given the task of bolstering Fortress Europe by building this first collective European defensive work, the Wellington Barrier. The history of the Wellington Barrier and the Boulevard de l’Europe has never been properly understood for what it was: one of the vital pillars under the new European security architecture.Footnote 28 Although most of the archives in the twenty fortified Belgian cities along this barrier were destroyed in the First or Second World War, the archives in the city of Oudenaarde do still contain very extensive – and completely unused – records from this time period. They contain unique material about the aftermath of the wars for liberation, the impact of the Battle of Waterloo and especially about the internationally monitored building of the Wellington Barrier and the presence of Allied occupation forces nearby; sources also include the voices of some of the ordinary citizens of the Belgian provinces, who had to deal with billeting, unpaid debts, receivables and about 120,000 soldiers passing through in a few months’ time.
Historicizing Security
An appeal is called for here, to not immediately disqualify the ideas and blueprints on security that resurfaced around 1815 as authoritarian and restorative. Oftentimes epitaphs such as ‘conservative’, ‘romantic’ or ‘reactionary’ are applied to people like the Austrian chancellor and foreign minister Klemens von Metternich, the Irish philosopher and politician Edmund Burke, or Friedrich Gentz, the secretary and nigh spiritus rector of the Congress of Vienna. These categories, however, were mostly devised later by early twentieth-century historians such as Meinecke, Mannheim and Schmitt. Contemporaries did not see them, or themselves, that way at all. Gentz, for example, a student of Immanuel Kant, considered himself a liberal.Footnote 29 Tsar Alexander and Metternich were considered quite liberal by compatriots and diplomats alike in the ambition they unfolded to advocate new constitutions for France and Poland, and political reforms in France. Yet in a good deal of (older) historiography this period is often discussed under the category ‘restoration’. The doyen of the history of Europe during and after Napoleon, Michael Broers, speaks explicitly about ‘the men of the Restoration’.Footnote 30 Many popular books continue to describe the Congress of Vienna and the resulting Concert of Europe as a ‘system of illiberal oppression’,Footnote 31 as anachronistic and unjustified as this generalized qualification may be.
In our current era of the ‘War on Terror’, some recognition is needed for the undoubtedly alarmist manner in which European monarchs and ministers dealt with opposing voices and the lingering threat of revolution and terror. With Europe still shaking from the revolutionary earthquake, administrative tolerance for (alleged) sedition and conspiracy was hard to come by in 1815. Virtually every country maintained a network of spies and informants to keep their eye out for those kinds of plots. For instance, the Dutch King Willem I, without batting an eye, took over most of the informants and agents of his predecessor, Louis Napoleon.Footnote 32 Still, it is going too far to dismiss the post-war security system as a closed bastion of despotism. The majority of the populations of the liberated countries, and even large parts of the French populace, were initially relieved and grateful towards the Allied generals for having defeated Napoleon and tamed the spirit of chaos and revolution. The European security order was indeed an imperialist project (as will become clear), but more idealist, reformist and moral motives also lay at the bottom of these plans – motives that were recognized and shared by many citizens in France and beyond.
It is therefore high time to ‘historicize’ notions such as balance of power and security, implying that these notions need to be contextualized and embedded in the sentiments, interpretations and associations attributed to them at the time.Footnote 33 More often than not, political scientists and historians alike tend to define the concept of security either in far too normative a fashion, in the moral vernacular of their own times, on the basis of presentist aversions and sympathies. Or, on the other hand, they inadvertently cast this contested concept in much too generalized, seemingly objectified and quantitative terms. Both readings overlook the importance of contemporary interpretations of seemingly similar semantic concepts.Footnote 34 Eckart Conze, Martti Koskenniemi and Matthias Schulz, in his pioneering work Normen und Praxis, have already laid an important foundation for such a historicizing approach to security, international relations and international law.Footnote 35 So, too, David Reynolds shows late in his book Summits that a communicative and cultural, but also very detailed historical approach to international high-level meetings between state leaders, diplomats and their entourage can garner new insights on how security was understood at the time.Footnote 36 When peace is the absence of war, then security is the dynamic operationalization and protection of this state of peace over time. Again, it needs to be understood that the concept ‘security’ is not to be read here with its post-Second World War connotations in mind – as the policy field of intelligence and security agencies and national security councils. For our purposes and in this context, security is a concept that needs to be placed and historicized in time itself, when it had not yet been institutionalized into narrowly defined bureaucratic units of domestic, foreign, legal or economic security. In 1815, security could include all of these aspects at the same time, both international and national, ‘moral’ and military, and was used in a similarly broad vein.
Therefore, to avoid the pitfalls of anachronistic interpretations and presentist normative evaluations, the notion of a European security culture is introduced here.Footnote 37 As will transpire, the emergence of such a culture was an open and contested process, propelled by the community of diplomats, publicists and politicians who together thought about and reflected on their (purported) shared interests and imagined threats. These ‘men of 1815’ developed a shared political and emotional vocabulary, and derived from that a series of political, juridical, financial, administrative and military practices. These three elements – the security community, their shared vocabulary and the political and administrative actions that followed from these (including the reactions and protestations) – will allow us to give detailed historical clout to the abstract category of security. This definition and application of the notion of a European security culture helps us both to abstain from ventriloquism – making historical figures voice our present-day normative security concerns – and from resorting to excessively statist, non-dynamical and abstract categories.Footnote 38
An Imagined and Sensed European Security Community
The old, shrivelled Europe seemed to have shed its skin and, though still recognizable, emerged in a new form from the ashes of the Napoleonic firebrand. As the French Revolution had unleashed ideas on human rights, freedom and solidarity into world history, Napoleon had with his wars and occupations let loose an enormous range of transformations in politics, state and society and accelerated ongoing ones. The emperor had willed an ‘inner Empire’ into existence, consisting of comparable and synchronized institutions, such as codes of laws, judicial courts, systems of registration and identification, land registries and fiscal systems.Footnote 39 The revolutionary and Napoleonic transformations had already done away with many of the ‘withered’ institutions the emperor had lamented so much. However, the real push towards new post-war transformations came from the fight against exactly this revolutionary and Bonapartist terror. Post-war notions about peace and security were designed and ordained from above, by the new and returning royals and their ministers. But they were also conceived and disseminated within the societies of Europe, produced by experiences, emotions and impressions of so many citizens who lived through the chaos and turmoil of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars and suffered their part.Footnote 40
The post-war European security culture, therefore, can be understood as part of an ‘imagined security community’. Although Benedict Anderson has set up a monument for the invention of nationalism, his concept can in many ways also be applied to the continent of Europe as a whole, and in particular to the network of elites that during and after the Napoleonic Wars tried to construct a stable framework for collective security.Footnote 41 Anderson applied his concept to a community of peoples who could not possibly know each other personally, but nevertheless experienced a sense of solidarity. These individual citizens shared a common notion of belonging to the same imagined nation, and translated this feeling of belonging together into symbols, traditions and practices of patriotism or nationalism – a process that underwent an acceleration in the nineteenth century, according to Anderson. His claims may mutatis mutandis also be attributed to the community of European states and their elites, with their shared sense of common destiny and responsibility in 1815 – and common abhorrence of war and terror.
Here as well, this European security community became palpable in collectively expressed, diverging and oftentimes conflicting sentiments, statements and artefacts (such as monuments). Emotions do not only indicate a state of psychological being, inasmuch as they can empirically be verified in letters, statements and writings; they should also be read as social and cultural practices of understanding and communication. Emotions vary through time and space; some are enlarged, others repressed in specific cultural and social settings. Fear for loss of honour, anger directed at monarchical repression or Bonapartist despotism were recurring themes in public discourse across the continent in the early nineteenth century. Without aiming to write a history of emotions of 1815, some of the insights produced by the recent ‘emotional turn in history’ will be gratefully applied here. The discourse on terror and security in 1815 cannot be understood without identifying the emotional juxtapositions that it employed explicitly or implicitly: the contradistinction between passion and reason, for example, or between jealousy and moderation – with ‘emotional’, ‘hysterical’ or ‘jealous’ intended as disqualifications. Specific sentiments – relief, fear of revolution – were, moreover, wilfully channelled to mobilize the European security community into giving consent or legitimacy to certain administrative interventions. ‘The passions of the masses are not irrational,’ as one researcher quipped, ‘they are political’.Footnote 42
The great unifier that brought the diverging community of European states and elites together was the overriding fear of terror. This primordial fear fuelled and shaped the cultural climate of the immediate post-war order. It consisted of the dual nightmare of, on the one hand, the terror of the French Revolution: the unleashed chaos and violence, the decapitation of princes and noblemen, the upending of existing social structures, the expropriation of estates and clerical properties and the ensuing dynamics of ongoing war and despotism. That was the other part of the nightmare: the rise to power of the people’s tribune and warmonger Bonaparte with his Grande Armée, unleashing military invasions, revolutionary changes, usurpations, occupations, war reparations, and looting and pillaging wherever he went. Especially the last years of Napoleonic rule had aggravated this collective fear of terror. In the perception of contemporaries in 1815, terror was not a narrowly defined criminal paragraph (such a paragraph did not exist), but a continuum ranging from revolution to invasions, expropriations and despotism. Terror comprised a whole range of fluctuating threats and enemies. The Allied Council spoke about ‘revolutionaries’, ‘Jacobins’, ‘radicals’, ‘republicans’, terroristes or ‘Bonapartists’ – categories that were not well defined or judicially circumscribed, but mostly lumped together in a vague and general pejorative manner. ‘Terror’ was in this context read as a ‘set of concrete facts’; it was the ‘product of a political culture’, an ‘emotion’.Footnote 43 More than 300,000 people, including the French king and queen, had fallen victim to a small group of radicals coming from the middle classes, in conjunction with the sans culottes. The continuous slaughter, the judicial avarice, the persecution of nobility and clergy alike, the ruthless transformation of society and the military crusade spreading the gospel of the Revolution through the world had given way to the rise of Napoleon’s military dictatorship and unbridled aggression. This whole threat complex was surmised under the hellish header ‘war and terror’. The post-war European security community had to relate itself to this double-headed monster. Contrary to Zamoyski’s account, the fear of terror cannot therefore be discarded merely as a ‘phantom’ fear, or a ploy wielded by conservative statesmen to push their political agendas.Footnote 44 Especially during these first, transitional and forgotten years, the revolutionary and Napoleonic period left real marks and scars, and continued to do so, be it in more or less violent plots hatched by supporters of the revolutionary or Bonapartist causes, or by their adversaries. Sentiments of collective fear, the dread of losing house and property, of being expelled from the society of respectable citizens once again, were the real and strong undercurrents that kept the Allied ministers’ diverging deliberations together for at least this transitional period.
The remarkable thing about this community was that its participants, from high to low, were in many ways ‘joined at the hip’ for years. Castlereagh, Alexander I, the Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm III, Wellington, and their ambassadors and diplomats were away from home for at least a year. Tsar Alexander was in Europe from October 1813 through September 1815; Castlereagh left London on 28 December 1813 and remained on the continent, except for two short trips back home, until the end of November 1815, albeit much to the increasing chagrin of parliament. The physical presence of government leaders during the lengthy negotiations on peace and security from 1813 on reflects a sense of how much value was attached to these ongoing discussions, and of how much the physical absence of these leaders and their ministers was deemed in their homeland to be in the interest of national security. In that light, this period of high-profile, well-documented and, for that time, widely reported-on series of consultations almost qualified as a modern form of ‘summitry’, understood as the frequent, high-level meetings of state leaders and ministers enabled by plane travel and televised to the public. Obviously, 1815 was still an era far away from twentieth-century plane diplomacy, but the number of congresses, which had been few and little in the four previous centuries, increased rapidly in the nineteenth. Statesmen continued to spend protracted periods in each other’s capitals, with their deliberations reported on extensively in the newspapers and periodicals of the day; reviewing contemporary journals reveals that the ‘news sky’ was already quite global.Footnote 45
Such common notions on terror and security, and the overriding need to combat such extremities, were not only shared amongst the elites. Most of the citizens of Europe, especially those who read newspapers and feuilletons, had to adjust themselves to new ideas on power, law, peace and security. The dawn of the European peace after 1814 shone over a wide array of post-revolutionary states and traditional dynasties. Some states boasted their newly gained autonomy and sovereignty; here and there a first glimpse of nationalism and patriotism surfaced, as in Prussia and the German lands, or in Poland for example. The new state of peace was, however, also celebrated by citizens who realized that peace and security were obtained only through Allied cooperation – a reckoning that at least in the first immediate post-war years was cogent and strong. The rise of nationalism in the early nineteenth century cannot therefore be set apart from the development of a transnational sense of security and the need for cooperation.Footnote 46 The sentiments as expressed just below the surface of the international elites will therefore be traced, and the stories narrated by lower-level experts, diplomats, professionals, bankers, policemen, journalists and ordinary citizens within this transitional time frame will be excavated as well.Footnote 47 Where they are available, this book also draws on travelogues and diaries kept by women – a specific apt and useful category for mapping the cultural climate of those years. It was common usage for noblewomen to report on their experiences and sentiments in their diaries, writing as much on their personal sense of well-being as on the state of the roads, the dangers ahead and the ways of the land, as Louisa Adams did.Footnote 48
Through the high-level meetings, in Paris, at the British embassy where the Allied Council convened, or in all those other places where experts and professionals from various nations combined forces to rebuild the post-war order, a circulation of new ideas, notions, emotions and concepts originated. Old notions were reinterpreted and given new meanings, such as the principle of the balance of power.Footnote 49 The leading statesmen and diplomats of the day were united in their collective digestion of those treatises, notions and ideas coming from the Enlightenment – they had all read their Voltaire, had been educated with Montesquieu, Diderot and the Encyclopédie and were open to gradual and moderate reforms.Footnote 50 Ministers and experts enjoyed the same novels and writings, for example those by Sir Walter Scott (of whom Castlereagh was a friend), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe or Madame de Staël.Footnote 51 They started to emulate each other’s manners and clothing, something described by Bayly as the spread of ‘uniformities’, for example in the standardization and transfer of certain ‘bodily practices’. The European nobility and wealthy citizenry started to sport portable watches, adjusted their times, visited each other’s city palaces and developed a type of modern European court culture. When Lady Castlereagh joined her husband in Vienna, she was ridiculed because of her outdated clothing, which made her seem at odds with the sophisticated Viennese society.Footnote 52
This European security community developed a specific vernacular to identify danger and insecurity, something that came close to a veritable ‘emotional vocabulary’. The Allied ministers extensively debated on the level of someone’s or some country’s state of ‘jealousy’, ‘irrationality’ or ‘unreasonableness’. They also discussed the definition of ‘piracy’, ‘terror’ and terroristes. Who merited the epitaph ‘radical’, ‘Bonapartist’ or ‘Jacobin’, and when and how should these identifications translate into administrative practice? The Congress of Vienna had produced a series of detailed regulations and stipulations on commercial matters, navigation on the Rhine, the status of diplomatic representatives and the metrics of power and influence (in square kilometres, in economic profits or in the number of ‘souls’). These processes of juridification – increased centralized and legal regulationFootnote 53 – continued after 1815 and brought about an alignment of the participating countries at least on sectoral levels – sometimes even pitching them against their own postulated national interests, as when the riparian states of the Rhine held each other accountable in lowering or abandoning toll tariffs altogether. This European security community, with its emotional vocabulary of security, reason and moderation, hence affected real, incremental or more substantial transformations and created its own acquis communautaire.
This course of juridification was intrinsically connected to the phenomenon of securitization: the process of putting something on the security agenda, of framing and presenting an issue as threat or endangered interest.Footnote 54 From 1815 onwards, this process, which captivated the Allied ministers present in Paris alike, was markedly Janus-faced in the dissemination of power and protection across the continent. With their interventions, the Allied ministers did initiate a dissemination of new standards and practices of security, order and predictability, especially in those first post-war years. This dissemination, however, was explicitly lopsided: it operated through processes of inclusion and exclusion. Some persons and parties profited far more from the new security system than others, who were crushed beneath its weight and fell prey to its repressive effects – a process of securitization that intensified once the openness of these first years was over, and a more repressive turn set in.
An Imperial Situation
One of the seminal questions of this book touches upon the highly elusive and slippery notion of ‘success’ of the Allied Council’s machinations. Did the Allied ministers in Paris succeed in bringing about an effective state of peace and security in Europe, and if yes, how did they manage to achieve this? The post-war years may have witnessed the above-mentioned unique experiment in collective security management, but what did this experiment yield, and for whom? As it turned out, the ‘Allied Machine’ was a highly exclusive and hierarchical gathering of gentlemen, representing a commonly understood alignment of first-, second- and third-rank powers. The Sixth and Seventh Coalition had been assembled from a range of Allied powers. In Vienna, all of these powers and more dispatched their envoys to the deliberations. The Final Act of Vienna was the first general peace concluded as a multilateral treaty, and could be considered a type of ‘constitutional order for Europe’.Footnote 55 This order was, however, highly exclusive – Christian, European, and ‘civilized’ in its character. The Ottoman Empire was, for example, squarely placed outside this order.Footnote 56
The Paris Conference was, if possible, an even more imperial set. With their far-reaching interventions, the Allied ministers waged peace and managed collective security. But they did so in governing over the heads and on the backs of smaller nations, minorities, specific factions and regions. With their centralizing and imperial policies, they managed to tame the terror in France in the short run, but sowed the seeds of discord and discontent for the near future, not just in France, but also elsewhere in Europe and beyond. Many a minister or general that convened on a daily basis in Paris to ponder France’s and Europe’s destiny had made his career in the colonies. What they had learned and achieved in India, Crimea or the newly colonized Prussian lands in the east, they put into practice in Europe in turn: the colonizing of hearts and minds, the implementation of new institutions and the administration of indigenous populations. This also indicated a policy of identifying those considered radical, seditious, revolutionary, or simply ‘immoderate’ or ‘jealous’, be it individual citizens or countries, cities or minorities in Europe or far beyond, in the Americas. Enlightened theories on modern governance and management, on security and the common good went hand in glove with authoritarian, imperialist and exclusive attitudes.
The trend of decoupling colonial issues from European questions at the Congress of Vienna, as demanded and enforced by the British representatives at the time, has continued in the past two hundred years of historiography. While initial approaches towards an ‘integrated historiography’ have been made, for example with Bayly’s masterpiece The Birth of the Modern World, no book as of yet has investigated the nexus between the European security system and international relations on the one hand and the history of imperialism and colonialism in the nineteenth century on the other.Footnote 57 Some experts on the history of empire and colonialism have pointed out that imperial logics were relevant to the process of creating the European states system of the nineteenth century. But this era is still mostly characterized as an ascending line of ‘interempire competition’ from 1815 to the outbreak of the First World War.Footnote 58
Naturally, competition between consolidated, emerging and declining empires stood out. But there were equal attempts to cooperate, and to converge the different imperial strategies. These attempts were inspired not just by ‘strategies of disinterest’,Footnote 59 or alleged love of peace, but also by the wish to assist other countries in living their imperial dream and receiving support for one’s own colonial adventures in turn, or the wish to embark on joined inter-imperial projects. Security proved to be a single, outstanding unifying principle in bringing together the empires in their quests for power and consolidation. Inter-imperial ambitions started in France, in colonizing the unruly hearts and minds together, or along the Rhine, where the first inter-empire security regimes were established to protect navigation and free trade, but they also spread to the Mediterranean, North Africa and the New World, where, for example, piracy and rebellion in the Americas provided a common threat to foil. Security provided joint instances and techniques ‘to exercise power, inflict rules and generate violence not only for the purposes of actual conquest but also with regard to conducting civilizing missions’,Footnote 60 be it on the land, on the seas or in border regions. The European security culture cannot, therefore, be dissected into an inner and outer one. The fight against terror started in the heart of the European continent, in France, but the above-mentioned spread of ‘uniformities’ went far beyond the continent.
This empire–security nexus, therefore, needs to be pondered by starting with one of its very beginnings: the Allied occupation in France. These years of collective occupation immediately following the Congress of Vienna, more often than not left out of the textbooks, were formative for the making of this new, European, collective and imperial security culture. The essential characteristic of colonization, or of the colonial situation, is that it entails a situation of ‘coercive incorporation’ of one or more entities into an expansionist other.Footnote 61 Such a state of affairs may lead to the rise of an ‘informal empire’ – a phenomenon that Barton defines as ‘a relationship in which a national or regional imperial elite intentionally or unintentionally exercises a dominant influence over the elite formation, identities and conditions of exchange of the subjected elite in another nation or region with none of the formal structures of empire’.Footnote 62
In the light of this, the occupation of France between 1815 and 1818 can be seen as a transitory, ‘imperial situation’, where the indigenous population was subjugated to Allied rule. The four great powers directing the European Concert set up the occupation and the management of collective security on the basis of shared notions of hierarchy and inequality amongst the states and populaces of Europe. Those who had carried the day during the Napoleonic Wars felt perfectly entitled and justified to subjugate states and peoples – Poland, Saxony, parts of Italy, the Belgian provinces – to their rule, and to exclude others from the dividends of peace. Although a temporary military occupation cannot be fully equated to a colonial situation,Footnote 63 the Allied ministers were wholly convinced of their superiority and responsibility vis-à-vis the restoration of peace and security in France, in the novel states of secondary rank and power, or even in the rest of Europe for that matter. Their shared ‘imperial idiom’ was just as powerful, and even more influential, than the nationalistic and patriotic strains that sounded here and there already at that time.Footnote 64
Thus, a new inter-imperial security community emerged, its centre situated in France, where protagonists from far-away capitals lorded over French elites, created a kind of informal empire and applied experiences gained at their previous colonial posts. In sum, the history of the new beginnings of the European states system in 1815 cannot be understood without accounting for the way the Allied Council functioned as a platform on which imperial experiences, convictions and attitudes circulated.
A Journey through Time
This book tells the story of these forgotten years – this window of threats, opportunities and reforms – by following the workings of the Allied Council, that unique security experiment conducted in the footsteps of the Allied forces and their entourage from 1813 onwards. From all directions, commanders, generals, princes and their diplomats headed to Paris. There they remained until late 1818, with some ambassadors continuing their deployment until 1823. Several persons will be followed on their journey, with the Duke of Wellington standing out as the embodiment of the new security order. He was considered, and attacked, as l’homme de l’Europe, in his command of the Allied Army of Occupation and presidency over the Allied Council. With his military and strategic talents, diplomatic skills and British pounds, he kept the Allied ministers together and managed to hold the French King Louis XVIII on board as well, while overseeing the execution of sometimes quite harsh occupation measures. Wherever Wellington went, he was assured attention from admirers and supplicants, causing hubbub among his equally numerous critics. The Allied ministers’ and generals’ visibility and performances inevitably also provided a screen for the projection of the vehement protests caused by the pervasive security interventions.
Chapter 2 explains how the Allied ministers arrived in Paris, what they brought with them in lessons learned and experiences, and how the Allied experiment unfolded along an unpredictable journey full of surprising turns. During this trajectory, unwinding from early 1813 until June 1815, the many imperial ambitions frequently clashed. All sorts of ideas about revenge, retribution, mercy and providence played out, and were entertained by the protagonists of the day: Tsar Alexander, Metternich, Castlereagh and the Prussian general Blücher. The Allied partners deliberated and compromised, with the management of security being very much a case of leadership and charisma, as demonstrated by the ascent of Wellington within the community of ministers.
Chapter 3 outlines the cultural climate of those days in 1815, as a range of diverging and oftentimes conflicting sentiments. Napoleon was defeated, leaving many of his supporters disillusioned and alienated, and trying to flee the country. Elsewhere, many more felt liberated and free to pick up their trade again after the continental blockade had been lifted. A new emotional vocabulary of peace, security and order was wrought, with old concepts being redressed and adjusted to the new state of affairs. The peace of 1815 was not just a realignment of power, it was as much an idea, a principle, filled with new meanings, emotions and collective sentiments. To repair the ‘break in time’,Footnote 65 and restore peace, repose and order – such desires were common throughout society, but they were translated into a range of different sentiments and voiced in a variety of collective emotions.
Chapter 4 describes how the Allied Council set out to fulfil its tasks and negotiated the Paris Peace Treaty. The Allied infrastructure was now in place and the ‘machine’ turned on. The council provided a platform for a well-structured and closely knit conference diplomacy, calibrating inputs from the various courts and parliaments, and supported by military force. This chapter unpacks how pervasively, and how equivocally at the same time, this imperial peace was waged and gained traction. The defeated French did not easily subjugate themselves to these attempts at Allied colonialism. The fight against terror was as much a project of converging Allied cooperation as one that started to expose underlying tensions and differences. Allied ministers and diplomats clashed on how heavily France should be punished, how draconian the reparation payments were to be, how much of the looted artwork needed to be returned, and how much of a say the other, second-rank powers would have in the matter.
Chapters 5 and 6 deal with the police-related, political side of security – the most controversial dimension of the Allied occupation efforts. How inclusive or exclusive was the European security community to be? What would set boundaries to the newly achieved freedoms? It did not take long before the management of international peace turned inward. All sorts of spectres of revolutionary, Bonapartist or patriotic rebellion were invoked and a specific Allied security service established to coordinate the joint fight against terror. Real or perceived attacks against representatives of the Allied force were discovered and thwarted – not just in France, but also beyond its borders.
Security came with a price, and would cost France a lot. Chapter 7 reconstructs how the Allied occupation was secured financially. Security without justice was a possibility, but without funding, altogether unthinkable. Financial security had to be invented and purchased with the help of the emerging international European financial markets. The Allied Council was therefore also very much a capitalist machine, linking political and military security to financial securities. The greatest common effort that brought the Allied powers and France together was the conception and realization of a huge sum of reparation payments. With the help of European bankers, financiers, and investors from France, Britain, the German lands and the Netherlands, France was able to procure immense loans to relieve its debts and meet the treaty conditions in 1818. The new peace and security – materialized in the fortresses, settlement of debts, maintenance of the army of occupation – was paid for with these loans. The French treasury administered the loans, and paid them, but the European powers, with their army of occupation, acted as guarantors.
The evacuation of the Allied Army of Occupation in late 1818 was directly dependent on the completion of the Wellington Barrier along the French northern frontier. Chapter 8 retells its conception, execution and functioning. The fortresses were the most concrete and physical pillar under the new security architecture. They were as such explicitly mentioned and circumscribed in a secret protocol to the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle Final Act, signed in November 1818. At the eponymous congress, France was invited to accede to the ring of first-rank powers again. The gathered princes and the ministers of the Quadruple Alliance announced the Allied army’s departure and the completion of the Allied Council’s tasks. With that meeting, this first experiment in inter-imperial European security management came to a temporary end. Chapter 9, however, continues with a reconstruction of the aborted attempt to expand the Allied Council’s military interventions to South America.
The threat of revolutionary terror and Bonapartist military aggression seemed to have been mitigated and domesticated in France, but now appeared to raise its ugly head again beyond France, elsewhere in Europe and even beyond the continent. The spectre of the resurrection of terror outside France increasingly captivated the European powers – as did the strenuous relation with representatives of that new, upcoming power of the United States, which most Allied ministers wanted to keep outside the Concert of Europe. On this, Napoleon had made some shrewd observations. At St Helena, he cynically quipped about that old Europe, which did not realize that his ‘favoured country [the United States] grew rich by our follies’. Out of dissatisfaction with the regimes of the restoration, according to the former emperor, many highly educated artisans and students left for the New World. The European powers did not realize they were fighting a rearguard action in trying to keep Washington at bay while clinging on to colonial rule in South America. Europe had to acknowledge, Napoleon allegedly and quite hypocritically declared, that ‘their emancipation [of the colonies] was inevitable; that when children had attained the size of their fathers, it was difficult to retain them long in a state of obedience’. In the tenth, concluding chapter, the balance of Europe’s fight against terror will be drawn, and Napoleon’s judgements on Europe’s rearguard actions will be evaluated.Footnote 66
Map 1.1 General map of Europe in 1815. Together, the dark-coloured countries form the Allied Council. The shaded country is occupied France. Some of the light-coloured countries were coalition partners of the Quadruple Alliance, but did not count as ‘first-rank powers’.
