Book Review: Rites of Peace

I have been reading Rites of Peace: The Fall of Napoleon and the Congress of Vienna by Adam Zamoyski. I posted on the book on Friday, but it seems to me I did not do the author justice.

I recently thought about the old idea:

What one remembers from one's college education after ten years would only take about 15 minutes to communicate. Unfortunately, while you are going to college you don't know which things will show up in memory ten years later.

I have also been telling my students to figure out the paragraph they would want other students to write as a synopsis of their class presentation, and plan the hour presentation and hour discussion to make that paragraph both inevitable and credible.

So what is the paragraph that Zamoyski left in my mind, and how credible is it?

The Thesis

The end of the Napoleonic wars was a critical period in European history, marked by the conflict between liberal and reactionary ideas and by the disparity between constitutional monarchies with some expansion of participation in government versus the remaining monarchical governments based on a narrow aristocratic constituency. In France the conflict between revolutionary and reactionary forces was resolved by a constitutional monarchy; Prussia emerged as the unifying power in the early stages of creation of a German nation; Italy remained fragmented. The making of the peace, while it perhaps contained seeds of a united Europe, was the product of a relatively small number of influential people; these people were not only working out the future of Europe, but also dealing with the complexities of the political decision making within their own countries, feathering their own nests, and often living messy and complicated personal lives. The culture within the aristocratic international community of their time was much different than ours, not looking back on Victorian culture as we do, and filled with excesses.

The Credibility

I can only judge the credibility on the basis of appearances, lacking the historical background to compare the picture with that painted by other historians. On that basis the book seems credible, filled with detail and supported with footnotes and references. The general argument made by Zamoyski seems intuitively credible. The portraits of the people he provides seem credible, although they are perhaps not so different as people today as the author seems to believe. On the other hand, I have read reviews of the book which suggest there are factual errors and misinterpretations.