THE CONGRESS OF VIENNA: two interconnected dimensions of politics

Remembering a Congress that 

worked more than it waltzed

By Aram Bakshian Jr. 

THE CONGRESS OF VIENNA: 

POWER AND POLITICS AFTER NAPOLEON

By Brian E. Vick

The Congress of Vienna, begun in September 1814 and concluded in June 1815, was unique, an unprecedented Pan-European conference that laid the foundations for the post-Napoleonic age. It was also the first superpower summit. Never before had the monarchs and senior diplomats of all the great European powers — Russia, Austria, Prussia, England and France, plus representatives and rulers of second-tier Scandinavian, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and German kingdoms and principalities — gathered together in one place in pursuit of a lasting peace settlement designed to stabilize long-contested borders and prevent another major European conflagration.

On a lighter note, it is the only peace conference to inspire an operetta. Johann Strauss Jr.’s “Wienerblut,” a posthumous confection that bundled together many of the Waltz King’s most popular tunes, wrapped up in the flimsiest of plots, is an appropriate tribute to theCongress‘ frivolous side. The fact that “Wienerblut” was produced eight decades after the Congress took place, by which time the shimmering waltz had replaced the stately polonaise in Viennese ballrooms, may explain why so many people misquote that worldly old courtier, the Prince de Ligne, as saying, “The Congress doesn’t work, it waltzes.” What he actually said, in the impeccable French used by most cultivated Europeans of his generation, was “le congress ne marche pas: il danse,” and the dance it danced most was the polonaise. As the distinguished British diplomat and author Harold Nicholson rather archly observed in his 1946 history of the Congress, de Ligne first made the crack “before the Congress had even assembled,” and repeated it “on every successive occasion until on December 13 he died … from a cold contracted while waiting for an amatory assignation at a street corner in his eightieth year.”

The image of frivolity has endured, partly because the social whirl and the decision-making were inextricably intermingled. In the words of one eyewitness, kingdoms were “cut into bits or enlarged at a ball; an indemnity was granted in the course of a dinner; a constitution was planned during a hunt … . Everyone was engrossed with pleasure.” Engrossed, but not altogether distracted. While Czar Alexander II, Prince Metternich and countless lesser crowned or noble celebrities spent many of their evenings in pursuit of pleasure — sometimes competing for the same society beauty — they didn’t neglect their day jobs, either. Indeed, as a then-not-very-well-known academic named Henry Kissinger would argue in his doctoral thesis, the Congress was responsible for 100 years of overall European peace. Plenty of relatively brief conflicts occurred involving a few major players — notably the Crimean War pitting England, France and Turkey against Russia, and the bilateral Austro-Prussian and Franco-Prussian wars — but none of these engulfed all of Europe in the kind of long, bloody strife characterizing the Napoleonic era or, for that matter, the wars of France’s Louis XIV a century earlier.

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