Abstract
It seems a particularly apposite time to read works on the reasons why and processes by which societies emerging from age-defining calamities reorder and reorganize themselves, so as best to face the uncertain future to come. In the case of the works under review here, those calamities were the French Revolution, the wars that followed it, the ascension of Napoleon Bonaparte to imperial power over France and, eventually, most of continental Europe, and the attendant military struggles that accompanied this: all in all, a good quarter-century of upheaval that, among other things, left the maps of central Europe irrevocably altered. What followed has conventionally been termed ‘Restoration’, as though this irremediable change could, in fact, be reversed and Europe reset to a pre-1789 status quo. As Ambrogio A. Caiani notes in his introduction to the first volume, however, this linguistic trick was not matched by the reality of the times. It is difficult to speak of Restoration because the ‘civic identities of Europeans’ had been ‘completely altered’ but, at the same time, it was not possible for Europeans, from the statesmen and leaders to the burgeoning bourgeoisie and peasants, to ‘escape the ruins and debris of the regimes they had supplanted’ (1). Nor, indeed, if we ignore the problems implicit in the term ‘Restoration’, can the developments of post-1815 Europe be considered in the singular. There was no one process by which societies remade or reasserted themselves. France, defeated on the battlefield and relieved of its belligerent Corsican, remained remarkably intact territorially, and many of the familiar faces of politics once more took to the stage. The same could not be said for the German states, which now numbered one-tenth of how many there were before the wars took place; Poland once again suffered near-arbitrary partition; Habsburg power in western Europe all but melted away as the Holy Roman Empire faded into history.
The story of the Restoration has been told countless time, and so much so that it has become a rote canon, taking the position of a tedious placeholder between crises, marking time between Napoleon and yet more revolutions in the 1830s and 1840s. This hardly does it justice, in much the same way that historians of the twentieth century have tended to dislike the use of the term ‘interwar’ to describe the period between 1918 and 1939. Just as the latter has the effect of streamlining the 1920s and 1930s into a ‘waiting room’ between wars, so too the Restoration carries the implication of a doomed attempt at reversal, which could only limp along until revolution stopped play. The structure of these edited collections, however, gives the lie to this, drawing attention to the fact that the far-reaching consequences of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic years were not limited to statecraft, but rather the whole gamut of politics, social development, culture and religion. This allows space for a number of topics that might otherwise be neglected. Rhys Jones’ thoughtful contribution on the nature and perception of time in the post-Napoleonic years is one such example, and apposite for the objectives of the volumes as a whole: in seeking to ‘turn the clock back’, Europe emphasized the passage of time in some cases and elided it in others, consigning decades to being little more than a ‘punctuation mark’ in a grand narrative that spanned centuries.
To this end, the editors have managed to incorporate a number of chapters that differentiate this series from other works. Maartje Abbenhuis’ opening chapter to the first volume is a good example of this: while much of the historiography of the post-Congress of Vienna European order tends to focus on the balancing of the great powers, Abbenhuis demonstrates the vital importance of neutrality and neutral powers built into that system. Indeed, it is only on account of this ingrained neutrality that Paul Schroeder could claim that the 1815 peace agreement was the most successful treaty of its type in human history (18). In a similar vein, Beatrice de Graaf’s chapter, ‘An Imperial Affair’, challenges the narratives of ‘legitimacy’ and the foundation of a supra-state imperial order that transcended national boundaries. At only 12 pages this is among the shortest of the essays in the collections but, to my mind, one of the most incisive and, certainly, relevant to our current age as we re-evaluate the international sense of ‘order’ and ‘propriety’ in the face of existential threats that do not limit themselves to merely one state. The editors are also to be congratulated for soliciting excellent work on smaller states that tend to be forgotten in the grand narrative of the military thrusts of Wellington and Blücher or the diplomatic flourishes of Castlereagh and Metternich. The small Kingdom of Württemberg is given its own chapter, courtesy of Georg Eckert – especially fitting, given that the Congress was largely devoted to redrawing the map of Germany after it had been torn apart by Napoleon. The southern German Mittelstaaten are indeed rather well represented here, in both volumes, and it is heartening that they are afforded their own agency, where they have often traditionally been interpreted as passive actors who had actions done to them by the Great Powers. Among the most welcome chapters are those that cast an eye to Scandinavia, whose contributions to the Napoleonic Wars were not insignificant but are largely forgotten in the historiographical canon. Bård Frydenlund’s analysis of the extraordinary career of Jean Baptiste Bernadotte – Revolutionary soldier, Napoleonic marshal of France, and then (as Charles XIV John) king of Sweden and Norway and unifying monarch – acts as a fascinating linchpin to this effort to re-centre Scandinavian Restoration history not as an odd sideshow but as front-and-centre in the Europe of the early nineteenth century.
Here, however, we must recognize the limits of these two edited collections. They set out to provide a more comprehensive picture of the European Restorations. Yet while they admirably tackle the implications and meanings of the term ‘Restorations’, a similar reckoning with ‘Europe’ is almost totally absent. This is a regrettable oversight, and especially peculiar given the emphasis many of the contributors place on the dramatis personae being empires. The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars were world-historical events, with an emphasis on globality. While most (but by no means all) of the fighting was confined to the European continent, the combatants were for the most part extraterritorial European empires, with influence, interests and controls across the world. The nature of these empires and their vassals was challenged and altered, sometimes violently so, across a quarter of a century. One example of this was Haiti, whose independence in the early part of the first decade of the 1800s was not ‘merely’ (and here I use the term extremely loosely) an internal matter, but preoccupied and tied up resources and the attentions of the French, the British and the Spanish, to say nothing of the anxieties of the fledgling United States, watching with increasing alarm from the sidelines as formerly enslaved peoples in the French colony revolted and grasped for their own power. It is true that not every instance of colonial and imperial engagement was quite so dramatic as the example of Haiti, but at the same time it cannot be said that the end of the wars led to an immediate re-imposition of a colonial-imperial status quo in the extra-European territories of the European empires. Even closer to home, there are some peculiar oversights. British concerns over Ireland, for example, were stoked to a great degree by the events of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic years. Yet Ireland is alluded to only in passing, and never explicitly. It could be argued, of course, that the British state was never dismantled in the first place, and thus required no Restoration but, given the contention of the works that Restoration took many forms and that a normative, singular definition of the term is misguided, this would seem to be at odds with what the editors have set out to accomplish. (Moreover, that British politics went through a significant period of upheaval both as a result of and in the aftermath of the Wars and the Congress is not in contention; Ambrogio A. Caiani makes reference to the Great Reform Act of 1832 in his introduction, which – especially given its Irish implications – makes the absence of Ireland even more curious.) In short, the editors have admirably engaged with the Restorations, and to some degree have consciously modified the standard narrative of what it is to be European, but extending these ideas to the colonial sphere remains an arena characterized for the most part by silence.
In sum, there is much promise to A History of the European Restorations, and its impressive cast of contributors have made important interventions. At the same time, however, we are well past the point at which we can write about Europe and ignore its many entanglements away from the continent itself. These two volumes will no doubt be of great benefit for scholars wishing to challenge the intellectual borders of the Restorations; a reckoning with the geographical borders, however, and an acknowledgement that writing about a European topic does not in and of itself demand exclusive Eurocentrism might have to wait for a future work.