The Old World Order

If you could choose to be a fly on the wall at any event in history, you could do worse than to pick the ball that inaugurated the Congress of Vienna, on October 2, 1814. Adam Zamoyski, whose fascinating new book "Rites of Peace" (HarperCollins, 634 pages, $29.95) is a history of the spectacle as well as the substance of the Congress, uses the words of some of the less famous attendees to set the scene. What struck them first was the light. Sixteen thousand candles and thirty-two chandeliers lit up two ballrooms in the imperial palace, where the glass windowpanes had been replaced with mirrors, redoubling the splendor. The event spilled over into the huge indoor chamber of the riding school, "which was covered in parquet and ringed on three sides with rows of seats like an amphitheater," as the young wife of the Danish ambassador wrote.

Still more brilliant than the illumination, however, were the guests. Emperor Francis of Austria, King Frederick William of Prussia, and Tsar Alexander of Russia led the list of monarchs, followed by dozens of lesser kings, princes, and grand dukes. They were accompanied by the ministers who tried to translate their wishes into reality: Metternich, Hardenberg, Talleyrand, and Castlereagh, some of the greatest statesmen in European history.

They had all come together that night to celebrate the opening of the peace talks that would restore order to Europe after a quarter-century of war and revolution. Six months earlier, in April, the allied armies of Russia, Prussia, and Austria had finally done the impossible, defeating Napoleon Bonaparte and driving him into exile. For almost two decades, Napoleon had managed to defeat these great powers again and again, in battles whose names still decorate the streets of Paris: Jena, Austerlitz, Wagram, Marengo, and on and on.

But his decision to invade Russia, in 1812, was the moment when the world historical gambler's luck began to change. Refusing to listen to his generals, he wagered his whole empire on one last campaign, and he lost. Even burning Moscow couldn't force the Russians to surrender. As the Grande Armée, decimated by cold and hunger, headed westward back to France, the Russians, Prussians, and Austrians — funded by the British, Napoleon's most hated enemy — pursued it across the continent.

Mr. Zamoyski, an American-born historian who bears the name of one of Poland's most illustrious families, chooses to begin "Rites of Peace" at this critical moment. The book opens with one of those improbably dramatic scenes in which Napoleon's life was so rich. Mr. Zamoyski shows us the emperor sneaking back into his own palace in Paris, surprising the guards who thought he was still thousands of miles away at the front. There was still time for one last counterattack, and Napoleon set to work replenishing his army with underage recruits. But his attempt to turn the tide failed at the battle of Leipzig, in October 1813, known as the Battle of the Nations for the sheer number of countries whose troops were involved.

One year after that crushing defeat, Napoleon was biding his time on Elba, the French were governed by a king for the first time since 1793, and the victors gathered in Vienna to celebrate themselves and divide the spoils. But as Mr. Zamoyski writes, with typical dry humor, "The opening ball might have been a success, but there was no opening." The chief diplomats of the four major Allies, along with Talleyrand representing the new French government, had been wrangling for weeks over how the Congress would be run, which issues would be on the agenda, and who would get the final say.

The contrast between the splendor of the ballroom and the frustration of the conference room could not have been greater. Indeed, as the weeks lengthened into months, and the parties grew ever more extravagant — Mr. Zamoyski's pages are filled with descriptions of pageants, banquets, orgies, even a medieval joust — the thousands of aristocrats and hangers-on who had descended on Vienna began to get frustrated. "The Kings are like children who need to play after a period of application," one courtier wrote. "History is taking a rest."

The problem was that the Congress was supposed to be making history, and a new kind of history at that. Like the peace-makers at the end of every great war, the powers who assembled at Vienna promised the world that its sacrifices would not go for nothing. Napoleon had redrawn the map of Europe according to his own wishes, erasing a country here and creating one there, turning monarchs into paupers and his relatives and henchmen into kings. But the Allies, led by the moralistic and self-mythologizing Tsar Alexander, had vowed that they were fighting to return the principles of justice to international affairs. Mr. Zamoyski, who finds Alexander a repellent but irresistible subject, writes that the tsar "had come to view his struggle with the French Emperor not only as a personal contest, or as a clash between two empires, but as a veritable Armageddon between good and evil."

The problem was that good did not defeat Napoleon; the armies of three monarchs did, and each of those monarchs had his own vision for postwar Europe. Combining impressive scholarship — "Rites of Peace" cites sources in English, French, Russian and German — and a gift for clear narrative, Mr. Zamoyski unravels the tangle of motives and propaganda to show just what was at stake for each participant in the Congress. France, ironically, had the least to gain or lose. Her borders had been decided on months earlier, when the allied armies entered Paris. Instead, the major problems had to do with Poland and Germany, whose political arrangements had been thrown into complete chaos by the war.

Geographically, the problem at Vienna was roughly the same as the one facing the Allies at Potsdam in 1945. Russia, which bore the brunt of the war against Napoleon, had marched its armies across Europe and was now effectively in control of Poland and much of Prussia. Alexander, who had a messianic dream of restoring Poland to the map as a kingdom under his control, refused to give back the parts of Poland that had formerly belonged to Prussia. As a result, Prussia sought compensation to the west, demanding to annex the independent kingdom of Saxony. Austria, meanwhile, under the wily conservative Metternich, hoped to maintain a balance of power, to rein in Alexander's ambitions, and to keep Prussia from dominating the smaller German states. It was a thoroughly unedifying spectacle, in which the great powers swapped cities and provinces like horse-traders, while the claims of small nations were ruthlessly ignored.

By the time the Congress produced its Final Act, in June 1815 — after a hiatus for Napoleon's Hundred Days, a romantic episode to which Mr. Zamoyski devotes little attention — no one could still believe that a fairer world was in the offing. "We are completing the sad business of the Congress," wrote one diplomat, "which, by its results, is the most mean-spirited piece of work ever seen." As in 1945, power trumped justice, especially in Eastern Europe. Mr. Zamoyski has little patience for the argument, made by Henry Kissinger in his 1957 study "A World Restored," that at least the Congress established a workable international system that could guarantee peace.

In fact, he insists, the settlement of Vienna — which frustrated national aspirations in Germany and Italy, and installed "legitimate" autocrats in Spain and elsewhere — guaranteed an endless cycle of repression and revolution, which finally issued in the cataclysmic wars of the 20th century. "The peacemakers of Vienna," Mr. Zamoyski concludes, "had attempted to reconstruct a European community in total disregard of the direction in which the Continent was moving," and rulers and peoples alike paid the price.

Mr. Zamoyski expertly leads the reader through this incredibly complicated diplomatic dance, which began well before the Congress formally opened. At the same time, he devotes plenty of space to the holiday side of the Congress, which is where the real difference between 1814 and 1945 can be seen. The diplomats at Vienna were in charge of the destiny of nations, but they were not public servants, as are the appointees of a democratic, or even a communist, government. They were aristocrats, entitled to the best of everything, and they were always willing to combine business with the most florid and exotic kinds of pleasure.

Mr. Zamoyski draws on the archives of Metternich's secret police, which dug up dirt on everyone at the Congress, to show what the kings and princes got up to when they weren't at meetings. (The Grand Duke of Baden, one of Mr. Zamoyski's favorite miscreants, once tried to underpay a famous prostitute, handing her only twenty-five florins; she was so insulted that she took 50 florins out of her own wallet and handed them back to him.) Out of this mixture of luxury and power and appetite, Mr. Zamoyski has produced a completely engrossing book. Anyone who enjoys reading history should read it.

akirsch@nysun.com