The Congress of Vienna, 1815
An 1819 engraving after Jean-Baptiste Isabey's group portrait of the diplomats assembled at the Congress of Vienna.
With Napoleon defeated and exiled to Elba, the great powers of Europe gathered in Vienna from September 1814 to redraw the continent's map and, they hoped, prevent another generation of revolutionary war. Austria's Metternich, Britain's Castlereagh, Russia's Tsar Alexander I, and — remarkably, for a defeated power — France's Talleyrand dominated the negotiations, trading territory and thrones to restore a balance of power among themselves, with little regard for the nationalist movements stirring beneath them. The settlement they produced kept Europe largely free of general war for nearly a century, and is still cited as a model of pragmatic great-power diplomacy. Read more in our article on the Congress of Vienna.
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