Congress of Vienna

The Congress of Vienna was the gathering of European statesmen that met in the Austrian capital from September 1814 to June 1815 to settle the map of Europe after the defeat of Napoleon. Chaired by the Austrian foreign minister Klemens von Metternich, it redrew borders across the continent and set up a balance of power among the great states that, despite later wars, prevented a general European conflict for about a century.

Two decades of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars had swept away hundreds of old states and borders. After the allies entered Paris in March 1814, Napoleon abdicated and was sent to Elba, and the Bourbon Louis XVIII was restored to the French throne. The first Treaty of Paris, signed in May 1814, returned France roughly to its borders of 1792 and left the wider settlement to a congress to be held in Vienna.

Almost every European state and princely house sent representatives, and the city filled with balls, banquets and receptions. The real decisions, however, were taken by a few great powers. Austria was represented by Metternich, Britain by its foreign secretary Viscount Castlereagh and later the Duke of Wellington, and Prussia by its chancellor Karl August von Hardenberg. Tsar Alexander I directed Russian policy in person. Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand, representing defeated France, skilfully exploited divisions among the victors to win France a place in the inner discussions.

The most dangerous dispute concerned Poland and Saxony. Alexander wanted most of the Napoleonic Duchy of Warsaw as a Polish kingdom under his rule, and Prussia sought the whole of Saxony, whose king had stayed loyal to Napoleon. Austria and Britain feared both powers would grow too strong, and in January 1815 they signed a secret defensive alliance with France. A compromise followed: Russia received most of the duchy as the Kingdom of Poland, called Congress Poland, while Prussia took a large part of Saxony and was compensated with extensive lands in the Rhineland and Westphalia.

At the end of February 1815 Napoleon escaped from Elba, landed in France and quickly regained power. The powers declared him an outlaw and continued to negotiate. The Final Act, combining the separate agreements, was signed on 9 June 1815, nine days before his final defeat at Waterloo.

The aim was to contain France and to balance the great powers rather than simply to restore the old order. The former Dutch Republic and the Austrian Netherlands were joined as a new Kingdom of the Netherlands, a buffer on France's northern border. A German Confederation of 39 states, presided over by Austria, replaced the defunct Holy Roman Empire. Austria gained Lombardy and Venetia in northern Italy, while the Kingdom of Sardinia absorbed Genoa. Russia kept Finland, Sweden kept Norway, which it had acquired from Denmark in 1814, and Switzerland's neutrality was recognised. The British Empire kept, under separate agreements, strategic colonies taken during the wars, such as Malta, the Cape Colony and Ceylon. The congress also issued a declaration condemning the slave trade.

The great powers continued to meet in a series of conferences, a system later called the Concert of Europe. Critics have argued that the settlement ignored national and liberal aspirations, favoured monarchs over peoples, and helped provoke the Revolutions of 1848. Its defenders point out that no war involving all the great powers broke out again until 1914, and the congress became a model for later peace conferences.

Our 1815 map shows Europe as the congress left it, with the expanded Russian Empire, the Austrian Empire and the new German Confederation states; compare the 1800 map for the Napoleonic period.