![]() Russia retained most of the Napoleonic duchy of Poland (called ‘Congress Poland’), but could not unite it with the parts of Poland Russia had already acquired in the 1790s. The French were initially exiled from the ‘top table’ of Britain, Russia, Austria and Prussia Talleyrand, the French Foreign Minister, became a spokesmen for second-tier attendees like Portugal, Sweden and Bavaria, engineering a deterrent alliance with England and Austria against Russia, which forced Tsar Alexander to the negotiating table over Poland. ![]() Negotiations began at the end of the summer 1814. Even more heinous than the two decades of war instigated by the French was the threat posed to the established order by the principles of Revolutionary France and Napoleonic imperialism. In 1815, Europe had endured the military domination of one power, Napoleonic France, and was determined to avert its recurrence. Fortunately, Wellington prevailed, so the preceding nine months of high diplomacy and intrigue did not go to waste, while the repercussions of Waterloo would be meted out in a subsequent second Treaty of Paris, a few months later. The Final Act of the Congress of Vienna was signed on 9 June 1815, with remarkable sang-froid as Napoleon’s still to be defeated army was then converging on Waterloo. The years of Napoleonic upheaval and conflict, and the changing alliances, precarious regimes and shifting borders that accompanied the Emperor’s dazzling rise and fall, formed the backdrop to the Congress of Vienna in 1815. Meanwhile, Russia had enraged Napoleon through its lethargic prosecution of the war with Britain and the ill-fated invasion of Russia in June 1812 precipitated the Empire’s downfall, with coalition victories against Napoleon at Leipzig (1812) and Waterloo (1815). ![]() ![]() Napoleon’s demands for compliance with the Continental System ultimately backfired the refusal of Portugal and Russia to cooperate triggered the Peninsular War (1807–14) Wellington’s victory at Salamanca on 22 July 1822 led to the liberation of Madrid, dashing Napoleon’s designs in Spain. While this caused economic distress to the British economy and fomented internal discontent, it rebounded on Napoleon the British counter-blockaded and used their naval superiority to prevent US ships from delivering goods to the continent. Napoleon, determined to starve Britain of money and destroy its economy, implemented the Continental System: an embargo on trade with Britain, which prohibited Britain from trading with his empire and its allies. His fraught relationship with the papacy had resulted in his excommunication, and his subsequent kidnapping and imprisonment of Pius VII.īritain, whom he dismissed as a ‘nation of shopkeepers’, continued to fight Napoleon and paid European coalition members to field armies against him. While Napoleon abhorred feudalism, he practised wholesale nepotism his siblings Caroline, Jerome and Louis were either ineffective governors or actively conspired against their brother. From 1811, France experienced a prolonged economic crisis exacerbated by Britain’s economic blockade, poor harvests and the collapse of French textiles and banking industries. On the eve of his invasion of Russia in 1812, the French military commander and emperor Napoleon was notionally at the height of his power, presiding over an empire of 130 departments and 70 million people, but ominous cracks were already appearing in his imperium.
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