A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD BY H. G. WELLS
56.THE UNEASY PEACE IN EUROPE THAT FOLLOWED THE FALL OF NAPOLEON
Two main causes prevented that period from being a complete social and international peace, and prepared the way for the cycle of wars between 1854 and 1871. The first of these was the tendency of the royal courts concerned, towards the restoration of unfair privilege and interference with freedom of thought and writing and teaching. The second was the impossible system of boundaries drawn by the diplomatists of Vienna.
The inherent disposition of monarchy to march back towards past
conditions was first and most particularly manifest in Spain. Here
even the Inquisition was restored. Across the Atlantic the Spanish
colonies had followed the example of the United States and revolted
against the European Great Power System, when Napoleon set his brother
Joseph on the Spanish throne in 1810. The George Washington of South
America was General Bolivar. Spain was unable to suppress this revolt,
it dragged on much as the United States War of Independence had dragged
on, and at last the suggestion was made by Austria, in accordance with
the spirit of the Holy Alliance, that the European monarch should
assist Spain in this struggle. This was opposed by Britain in Europe,
but it was the prompt action of President Monroe of the United States
in 1823 which conclusively warned off this projected monarchist
restoration. He announced that the United States would regard any
extension of the European system in the Western Hemisphere as a hostile
act. Thus arose the Monroe Doctrine, the doctrine that there must be
no extension of extra- American government in America, which has kept
the Great Power system out of America for nearly a hundred years and
permitted the new states of Spanish America to work out their destinies
along their own lines.
But if Spanish monarchism lost its colonies, it could at least, under
the protection of the Concert of Europe, do what it chose in Europe. A
popular insurrection in Spain was crushed by a French army in 1823,
with a mandate from a European congress, and simultaneously Austria
suppressed a revolution in Naples.
In 1824 Louis XVIII died, and was succeeded by Charles X. Charles set
himself to destroy the liberty of the press and universities, and to
restore absolute government; the sum of a billion francs was voted to
compensate the nobles for the chateau burnings and sequestrations of
1789. In 1830 Paris rose against this embodiment of the ancient
regime, and replaced him by Louis Philippe, the son of that Philip,
Duke of Orleans, who was executed during the Terror. The other
continental monarchies, in face of the open approval of the revolution
by Great Britain and a strong liberal ferment in Germany and Austria,
did not interfere in this affair. After all, France was still a
monarchy. This man Louis Philippe (1830-48) remained the
constitutional King of France for eighteen years.
Such were the uneasy swayings of the peace of the Congress of Vienna,
which were provoked by the reactionary proceedings of the monarchists.
The stresses that arose from the unscientific boundaries planned by the
diplomatists at Vienna gathered force more deliberately, but they were
even more dangerous to the peace of mankind. It is extraordinarily
inconvenient to administer together the affairs of peoples speaking
different languages and so reading different literatures and having
different general ideas, especially if those differences are
exacerbated by religious disputes. Only some strong mutual interest,
such as the common defensive needs of the Swiss mountaineers, can
justify a close linking of peoples of dissimilar languages and faiths;
and even in Switzerland there is the utmost local autonomy. When, as in
Macedonia, populations are mixed in a patchwork of villages and
districts, the cantonal system is imperatively needed. But if the
reader will look at the map of Europe as the Congress of Vienna drew
it, he will see that this gathering seems almost as if it had planned
the maximum of local exasperation.
It destroyed the Dutch Republic, quite needlessly, it lumped together
the Protestant Dutch with the French-speaking Catholics of the old
Spanish (Austrian) Netherlands, and set up a kingdom of the
Netherlands. It handed over not merely the old republic of Venice, but
all of North Italy as far as Milan to the German-speaking Austrians.
French-speaking Savoy it combined with pieces of Italy to restore the
kingdom of Sardinia. Austria and Hungary, already a sufficiently
explosive mixture of discordant nationalities, Germans, Hungarians,
Czecho-Slovaks, Jugo-Slavs, Roumanians, and now Italians, was made
still more impossible by confirming Austria’s Polish acquisitions of
1772 and 1795. The Catholic and republican-spirited Polish people were
chiefly given over to the less civilized rule of the Greek-orthodox
Tsar, but important districts went to Protestant Prussia. The Tsar was
also confirmed in his acquisition of the entirely alien Finns. The
very dissimilar Norwegian and Swedish peoples were bound together under
one king. Germany, the reader will see, was left in a particularly
dangerous state of muddle. Prussia and Austria were both partly in and
partly out of a German confederation, which included a multitude of
minor states. The King of Denmark came into the German confederation
by virtue of certain German-speaking possessions in Holstein.
Luxembourg was included in the German confederation, though its ruler
was also King of the Netherlands, and though many of its peoples talked
French.
Here was a complete disregard of the fact that the people who talk
German and base their ideas on German literature, the people who talk
Italian and base their ideas on Italian literature, and the people who
talk Polish and base their ideas on Polish literature, will all be far
better off and most helpful and least obnoxious to the rest of mankind
if they conduct their own affairs in their own idiom within the
ring-fence of their own speech. Is it any wonder that one of the most
popular songs in Germany during this period declared that wherever the
German tongue was spoken, there was the German Fatherland!
In 1830 French-speaking Belgium, stirred up by the current revolution
in France, revolted against its Dutch association in the kingdom of the
Netherlands. The powers, terrified at the possibilities of a republic
or of annexation to France, hurried in to pacify this situation, and
gave the Belgians a monarch, Leopold I of Saxe-Coburg Gotha. There
were also ineffectual revolts in Italy and Germany in 1830, and a much
more serious one in Russian Poland. A republican government held out
in Warsaw for a year against Nicholas I (who succeeded Alexander in
1825), and was then stamped out of existence with great violence and
cruelty. The Polish language was banned, and the Greek Orthodox church
was substituted for the Roman Catholic as the state religion ....
In 1821 there was an insurrection of the Greeks against the Turks. For
six years they fought a desperate war, while the governments of Europe
looked on. Liberal opinion protested against this inactivity;
volunteers from every European country joined the insurgents, and at
last Britain, France and Russia took joint action. The Turkish fleet
was destroyed by the French and English at the battle of Navarino
(1827), and the Tsar invaded Turkey. By the treaty of Adrianople
(1829) Greece was declared free, but she was not permitted to resume
her ancient republican traditions. A German king was found for Greece,
one Prince Otto of Bavaria, and Christian governors were set up in the
Danubian provinces (which are now Roumania) and Serbia (a part of the
Jugo-Slav region). Much blood had still to run however before the Turk
was altogether expelled from these lands.