6.5 The Concert of Europe and European Conservatism

Conservatism as a political ideology grew directly out of reaction to the French Revolution. Edmund Burke, a British politician, argued in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) that societies are like living things built up slowly over generations. Tearing down institutions in the name of abstract reason, as the revolutionaries did, would lead to chaos and tyranny. Change should be gradual and respect tradition.

Joseph de Maistre, a writer from Savoy, went further. He defended absolute monarchy and the authority of the pope, arguing that order rested on throne and altar, and that human reason alone could not hold society together.

Underneath both views was a belief that human nature is flawed and cannot be perfected, so people need the restraint of tradition, religion and authority. In short, conservatives valued hereditary monarchy, a social order led by landed nobles, an established church, and stability over individual rights. Restored governments after 1815 often strengthened the churches' role in education and public life.

The Congress of Vienna (1814–1815) redrew the map after Napoleon (5.7). To protect that settlement, Britain, Austria, Prussia and Russia renewed their alliance as the Quadruple Alliance in November 1815, and in 1818 France was welcomed back into the circle of great powers. The powers agreed to meet regularly in congresses to settle problems together. This system of great-power cooperation is called the Concert of Europe.

Separate from that, Tsar Alexander I proposed the Holy Alliance (September 1815), in which Russia, Austria and Prussia pledged to rule by Christian principles. It became shorthand for the three eastern monarchies' commitment to crushing revolution. Britain refused to join.

Klemens von Metternich, Austria's foreign minister from 1809 and chancellor until 1848, saw liberalism and nationalism as deadly threats. His reason was practical: the Austrian Empire contained Germans, Hungarians, Czechs, Poles, Italians, Croats and others, so the idea that each nation should govern itself could tear it apart.

In 1819 a nationalist student, Karl Sand, murdered the conservative writer August von Kotzebue. Metternich used the crime to push the Carlsbad Decrees through the German Confederation. They censored newspapers and books, placed inspectors in universities, dismissed liberal professors and dissolved the student nationalist societies called Burschenschaften.

• Britain: the Corn Laws (1815) kept grain prices high to protect landowners; in 1819 cavalry charged a peaceful reform rally in Manchester, killing about 15 to 18 people (the Peterloo Massacre), and Parliament passed the repressive Six Acts.
• France: the restored Bourbon kings ruled under a limited charter, but Charles X (1824–1830) tried to restore older royal and church power, which led to the 1830 revolution (6.6).
• Russia: Nicholas I (1825–1855) crushed the Decembrists, ruled by the motto “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality,” put down a Polish uprising in 1830–1831 and helped Austria defeat the Hungarians in 1849.

The Concert's great success: there was no war among the great powers from 1815 until the Crimean War of 1853. Its weakness: the powers disagreed about intervention. Britain, under foreign secretaries Castlereagh and then Canning, refused to police revolutions in other countries and helped block any attempt to restore Spain's rebellious American colonies. Revolutions in Greece and Belgium in the 1820s and 1830s were accepted when they suited the powers' interests, and the revolutions of 1848 swept Metternich himself from power. The Crimean War (7.1) finished off the cooperative system.