They hoped to restrain French ambition and stave off the threat of another revolution.
They sought to create lasting conservative order in France itself. The powers that defeated Napoleon had a few specific goals at the conference. They did, however, redraw the map of Europe. Instead, the victors deprived the French of their conquests and imposed a modest indemnity, but they did not dismember the country. Much of the credit was due to a wily diplomat, Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, himself a former official under Napoleon, who convinced the other representatives to include France as an equal partner rather than an enemy to punished. Once it had been agreed to place Louis XVIII, the younger brother of the executed Louis XVI, on the throne of France, the powers that had defeated Napoleon had the good sense to see that it would be illogical to punish the French (not least because the French might opt to have yet another revolution in response).
But unlike the conference that ended the First World War a century later, the Congress of Vienna did not impose a huge penalty on the aggressor. While various states in Europe, including the Ottoman Empire, sent representatives, the Congress was dominated by the five “great powers”: the Austrian Empire, Great Britain, Prussia, Russia, and (by the end) France itself.īy its conclusion, the Congress of Vienna had redrawn the map of Europe with the goal of preventing France from threatening the balance of power again. The conference, known later as the Congress of Vienna, was then re-convened, finally concluding in 1815. Napoleon’s escape from Elba and inconvenient attempts to re-establish his empire forced the representatives to suspend their meetings while British and Prussian armies finally ended his reign for good. When Napoleon was first defeated in 1814, representatives from the victorious states gathered in the Austrian capital of Vienna to establish what was to be done in the aftermath of his conquests. This period of peace began as a product of the post-Napoleonic order.
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