Talleyrand in Vienna

The great Italian historian, author of a monumental history of Rome, exiled to Switzerland not long after Mussolini's coming to power, dedicated several works to the study of the French Revolution and the Empire.
This one is the history of the Vienna Congress during which, between November 1 1814 and June 9 1815, the major victorious powers (England, Austria, Russia) and the conquered nation, represented by Talleyrand, tried to lay the foundations of a new European order, to forge a lasting peace and to put an end once and for all to the “great terror”, which for twenty-five years had reigned on the continent.
The author states his intentions as follows
“In the book which precedes this one (Bonaparte en Italie), I related how the Revolution and the Court of Vienna, at Campo-Formio, launched Europe into the task of sharing out Italy, a move which throughout the whole of Europe demolished the Ancien Régime by bringing about one of the most monumental wars and one of the greatest terrors in history. This new book, which is the companion to the first, traces Europe's bid, under the supervision of three men – two Frenchmen and one Russian – to reconstruct the world order, destroyed by the Campo-Formio episode and by the great terror which that event had brought about, a more poignant, more profound drama, richer in lessons to be learned than the preceding process of destruction.”
He concludes as follows:
“We have a duty to recognise that the Vienna Congress was a success. it is true that the solutions which it offered for the main problems posed by the Revolution were not all good, some of them were mediocre, and they posed new problems – the Italian and the German ones for example – which continue to beset the world and will go on doing so for some time yet. However, it did free Europe from the great terror; this was its splendid, undying success. 1815 to 1914 was a century during which Europe suffered least from those fears which caused humanity to tremble and rave, and which had the most confidence in the present and future, the essence upon which all real civilisations must be based.”
This is a historian's book, because of the wealth of documents exploited or revealed, and the portraits and analyses of this great moment of international diplomacy. However, it is also a book by a philosopher of history, who attempts to understand the past in the light of the present and to shed light on the present through a study of the past.
It is significant indeed that this work was completed by the author on December 31, 1939, and that the author demonstrates in it how a peace treaty can lay the foundations for a lasting equilibrium and how it can also, like the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, contain the seeds of large-scale future conflicts.
Guglielmo Ferrero was the first to understand that the 19th and 20th centuries were part of the same process, and that humanity is condemned to the work of Sisyphus – destroying and then rebuilding – which it most often accomplishes without understanding it.
Born in Portici in Italy in 1871, Ferrero died at Mont Pèlerin in 1942, near Geneva, where the University granted him the Chair for the History of the French Revolution. Using the material which he taught there, he constructed a trilogy: Aventure, Reconstruction, Pouvoir “a real philosophical testament” to use the terms of Louis Rougier in “La France en marbre blanc. Ce que le monde doit à la France”, Geneva, 1947.
“Aventure” was republished under the title Bonaparte en Italie (Edition de Fallois, 1995, cf RSN 407). Talleyrand à Vienne is the title of the new edition of Reconstruction. These more historical works, relevant to the current importance of the Napoleonic commemorations, are somewhat simplistic in relation to the ambitious nature of the author's political and philosophical project. They should be compared with Jean Dutourd's book, Le feld-maréchal von Bonaparte (cf RSN 408).
 
Reviewed by Jacques Jourquin