The document discusses the Concert of Europe and the conservative order established after the Napoleonic Wars. Key figures like Metternich, the Austrian foreign minister, sought to maintain peace and suppress revolutionary ideas emerging in Germany and elsewhere. The Great Powers issued declarations supporting conservative principles and repression of dissent. Throughout the 1810s and 1820s, various decrees and laws cracked down on radicals and imposed censorship. The goal was to prevent the spread of revolutionary philosophies and protect the existing political order in Europe.
5. The Concert of Europe and the
Conservative Order
• Before ten years
have passed, all
Europe will be
Cossack or
republican.
--Napoléon, 1816
6. The Concert of Europe and the
Conservative Order
• Austria is Europe’s
House of Lords: so
long as it is not
dissolved, it will keep
the Commons in
check.
-Charles Maurice de
Talleyrand, 1815.
7. The Concert of Europe and the
Conservative Order
• You see in me the chief
Minister of Police in Europe.
I keep an eye on everything.
My contacts are such that
nothing escapes me.
-Prince Klemens von Metternich,
1817
11. The Concert of Europe and the Conservative Order
• (The Great Powers) desire nothing but to maintain peace, to free
Europe from the scourge of their revolution and to prevent, or to
lessen, as far as in their power, the evil which arises from the
violation of all the principles of order and morality. On these
conditions they think themselves entitled, as the reward of their
cares and exertions, to the unanimous approbation of the world.
- Protocol addressed to the chancelleries of Europe by Austria, Russia, Prussia, 1820 .
12. The Concert of Europe and the Conservative Order
• Regicides and sans-culottes do not suddenly appear. In France
there were first Encyclopedists, then Constitutionalists, next
Republicans, and finally regicides and high traitors. In order
not to have the last type one must prevent Encyclopedists and
Constitutionalists from becoming established.
- Austrian minister to Prussia, 1824
20. A View of England 1819
An old, mad, blind, despised and dying king,
Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow
Through public scorn - mud from a muddy spring,
Rulers who neither see, nor feel, nor know,
But leech-like to their fainting country cling,
Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow,
A people starved and stabbed in the untilled field,
An army which liberticide and prey
Makes as a two-edged sword to all who wield,
Golden and sanguine laws which tempt and slay;
Religion Christless, Godless - a book sealed;
A Senate, Time's worst statute unrepealed,
Are graves, from which a glorious phantom may
Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day.
Percy Bysshe Shelley, Poetical Works
21. Postwar Repression in Great Britain
The Six Acts
•
•
•
•
•
•
December 1819
Large public meetings
forbidden.
Fines for seditious libel
raised.
Trials of political agitators
expedited.
Increased newspaper taxes.
Prohibited the training of
armed groups.
Allowed for the search of
private homes in certain
disturbed counties.
23. The Concert of Europe and the Conservative Order
•
If we ask what will become of Europe as a result of the unleashing of thirty
millions serfs and an army of 300,000 men, the revolutionaries ask
themselves the same question, and they see in the prospect life and triumph
of their cause, whereas we, and all the enlightened leaders of Europe, can
only see death.
-Metternich on the Decembrists, 1826
24. The Concert of Europe and the
Conservative Order
• It is Our duty to think
of our security. When I
say Ours, I mean the
tranquility of Europe.
- Tsar Nicholas I to his
brother, 1830
