The End of the Napoleonic Era

I have been reading Rites of Peace: The Fall of Napoleon and the Congress of Vienna by Adam Zamoyski. It is a good read, although it provides more detail than I really want.

Zamoyski seems convinced that the sexual peccadillos and the social rounds in Vienna and Paris affected the outcome of the treaty negotiations, I suppose he is right. The fact that so many of the principals were writing to both their wives and their mistresses certainly provides more material for historians of the Congress. But perhaps if the principals had been less distracted, the negotiations would have been better conducted. Or perhaps not!

I wonder whether our current crop of diplomats and Chiefs of Government would be less likely to be distracted by their personal lives in similar negotiations. Perhaps not!

The assumption of the title of Emperor by Napoleon and the restoration of Louis XVIII may represent a step backward in the lengthly process of replacement of monarchy by democratic government in Europe. However, it is this process that seems to motivate the movement in the book. France's revolutionary model, and I suppose that of the United States, threatening the King of Prussia, the Emperor of Austria, the Czar of Russia, and Regent of England, and a throng of petty kings and princes is contraposed with their retaliation. I suppose that the circumstances make Marxian analysis more intelligible. The growth of industry and trade in the late 18th century may well have empowered others than the aristocracy.

It is hard to believe that people who rise to national power in our more meritocratic society could be as silly as the hereditary monarchs as portrayed by Zamoyski.

The end of the Napoleonic wars was a critical period in the process of nation building for the Germans and the Italians, which France, Britain and Spain had gone through that process earlier. The throngs of petty rulers in the German and Italian lands were clearly fighting for their continued status, and the concomitant power and wealth.

All in all, an interesting time.