The Bungling Tinkers; or Congress of Blockheads! who battered a hole in Great Europe’s kettle. This cartoon by George Cruikshank (1792–1878) is a commentary on attempts by the rolling Congress of Vienna (1814-15) to restore order to Europe during the Napoleonic Wars. Europe is a dented and pitted kettle breached by a great hole around Elba in Italy, through which Napoleon (‘Bonjour, messieurs!’) pokes out his head — a reference to his daring escape in March 1815. The leaders of Britain (Foreign Secretary Lord Castlereagh, left on the stool), Austria (Emperor Francis I, below him), Russia (Emperor Alexander I) and Prussia (King Frederick William III) try to mend the pot for their own advantage while blaming each other for the state of it.
Part 1 of 2
THE Europe which sought to rearrange its affairs after the revolutionary and Napoleonic era* was seething with the ferment of democracy and nationality. Unhappily the soldiers and diplomatists who reconstructed the map* in haste at the Congress of Vienna* thought more of the rights of kings than of the rights of peoples; they feared democracy much more than despotism; they looked upon a nation as the result of treaties and royal marriages rather than the product of natural and spiritual forces; they endeavoured to restore the highly artificial system, based on “scraps of paper,” themselves often the result of successful force, dynastic intrigue, and historical accident, which was the legacy of the nineteenth century from the eighteenth. They refused to repair the misdeeds of the past, or to provide for the evolutionary growth of the future, considering — no doubt honestly enough — that a mechanical external order was more likely to secure the welfare of the various communities than the satisfaction of those perilous aspirations which so often lead to turmoil and unrest. So they left the larger part of Europe a chaos of divided peoples, imperfect states, and subject nationalities. [...]
Low probably has in mind the famous remark of the ailing William Pitt (1759-1806), Prime Minister during the early years of the Napoleonic Wars, who after Napoleon’s emphatic victory at Austerlitz over a combined Austrian and Russian force on December 2nd, 1805, glanced at a map of Europe hanging on the wall and said “Roll up that map; it will not be wanted these ten years!”
From 1803 to 1814, French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte threw Europe into turmoil with a series of military conquests that redrew the map of Europe. His humiliating Retreat from Moscow led to defeat and banishment to the island of Elba, but in March 1815 he reappeared in Paris to resume his career. He was finally overcome at Waterloo in Belgium by a combined British and Prussian force, leaving behind a chaos of bloodied and broken European states which had lost their hereditary rulers and were unsure how best to proceed. See posts tagged Napoleonic Wars (1803-1815) (21).
The Congress of Vienna was a series of discussions aimed at remaking Europe following the banishment of Napoleon Bonaparte to Elba in 1814. It did not take the form of a formal political summit in plenary session, but was spread over many months, and delegates often met in select groups at glittering Vienna’s famous balls. The Treaties of Chaumont (March 1814) and Paris (May 1814) had already been signed before Napoleon’s spectacular escape from Elba; the Congress began in September that year, and deals were were still being made on June 9th, 1815, just nine days before the decisive Battle of Waterloo at which Napoleon’s dream ended. As Low indicated, the Congress was an Oriental bazaar of European lands bartered among princes and potentates, conducted with little consideration for their peoples and on the assumption that propaganda and the gendarmerie would eventually reconcile them to the new order arranged for them by their betters.
Précis
Sir Sidney Low laid the blame for the outbreak of the Great War on the Congress of Vienna in 1814-15. He argued that the military and diplomatic figures who had sought to restore order to Europe after the Napoleonic Wars had consulted their own self-interest rather than public sentiment, leaving the Continent resentful and still divided. (56 / 60 words)
Part Two
A Map of Europe, 1871 to 1914, by William Robert Shepherd (1871-1934). The unification of Germany in 1871 under Chancellor Otto von Bismarck brought several small states together to form the German Empire; but far from ending fractious nationalism, it so nurtured Germany’s pride and power that soon it seemed to Kaiser Wilhelm II that Europe too must be united and brought to order by a superior culture. Admittedly, had Britain and other states thrown in with him, there would have been an orderly peace across Europe. But it would have been the order and peace that arises from an abject surrender of reason and will, not from unconstrained forbearance, co-operation and respect.
SUCH a “settlement” could not endure. The wars and rebellions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were attempts to unmake its articles or to repair its omissions. The revolutionary outbreaks of 1848, the Hungarian war of independence of 1849, the Polish insurrection of 1863, the Crimean war [of 1853-56], the Franco-Austrian war of 1859, the war between the Germanic Powers and Denmark in 1864, and that between those Powers themselves two years later, the Franco-Prussian war, the wars between Russia and Turkey and Greece and Turkey, and those of Serbia, Greece, and Bulgaria against their Ottoman enemy and one another, from which this last and greatest war of all has developed, — these are episodes in the struggle to attain, or to repress, national aspirations after unity or freedom, or both.
Précis
The legacy of the Congress was a ferment of dissatisfaction, said Low, which had manifested itself in sixty years of revolution and war; the Great War itself was only the last and most catastrophic in a series of conflicts to arise out of the political elite’s vain efforts to snuff out national, democratic and liberal movements across the Continent. (59 / 60 words)
