Posts : 4902 Join date : 2012-01-02 Location : Belgium
Subject: 1815 Vienna Congress and restoration. Sat Jun 20, 2020 11:45 pm
When I searched in Google with "restoration" while on French sites it is a period mentioned as "restauration", I came of course with the "restoration" after Cromwell...
My interest was sparked, while I wondered that Napoleon came that well off (no treated as mass murderer as in some nowadays media) He was even offered in 1813 a peace plan to become the leader of a France reduced again to its natural boundaries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankfurt_proposals
But now I see that the British had misunderstood the Austrian Metternich's proposals... Nevertheless Napoleon seems never to have had a bad press among the allies... In my impression of that time he was not that exceptional, if one sees for instance a Louis XIV seeking for expansion of his kingdom or the British to build their Empire?
I wondered also recently in my thread about Prussia that Prussia received that much territory in the West
But as I see now in the Congress it was giving and taking, while each of the four big powers Russia, Prussia, Austria and Britain had a specific agenda. On the page under the title "Congress of Vienna" in: "Europe 1783-1914" by William Simpson https://www.amazon.com/Europe-1783-1914-William-Simpson/dp/0415470668
And the clever Talleyrand achieved to cut out a position for France as Fifth member and a restoration of the old order, where the ultra-royalists did a deadly purge of members of the Napoleon regime. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congress_of_Vienna