Holy Alliance

views updated

HOLY ALLIANCE

The term Holy Alliance refers to several related phenomena. In the narrowest sense, the Holy Alliance was a treaty signed in Paris on 26 September 1815 by the emperors Francis I of Austria (also ruled as Francis II, Holy Roman Emperor), Alexander I of Russia, and Prussian king Frederick William III "in the name of the Most Holy and Indivisible Trinity." More broadly, the treaty represented an attempt by its composer, Alexander I, to establish new principles for international and domestic politics in Europe following the Napoleonic Wars. By the early 1820s, the expression came to mean the reactionary policies pursued by the three "eastern" empires against the threats of social and national revolution that persisted after the Napoleonic era. Despite occasional conflicts among the allies, this conservative coalition endured as a bulwark of the international order until 1854, during the Crimean War.

The "Holy Alliance of Sovereigns of Austria, Prussia, and Russia" departed from convention in emphasizing an overarching vision of international relations rather than concrete mutual obligations among the signers. The opening paragraph stated that the three sovereigns had recognized the "necessity" of basing their relations "upon the sublime truths which the Holy Religion of our Saviour teaches." They had reached this recognition during the preceding three years, when "Divine Providence" had showered blessings upon "those States which place their confidence and their hope on it alone." The treaty's only object was to announce that the allies would take guidance from Christianity's "precepts of Justice, Christian Charity, and Peace" in their domestic administration and relations with other states. As the text stated, Christianity must apply not only to "private concerns" but must also exercise "an immediate influence on the councils of Princes" as the only way to consolidate and improve "human institutions."

With these stipulations, the treaty then laid out three articles. The first stated that, following "holy Scriptures," the three rulers would be united by "a true and indissoluble fraternity," regarding one another as compatriots, obligated to help one another "on all occasions and in all places." They also pledged to act as "fathers of families" in relation to their subjects and armies, leading them in a "spirit of fraternity," to defend "Religion, Peace, and Justice." Article II declared that the only principle governing relations among the governments and their subjects "shall be that of doing each other reciprocal service." All rulers and subjects would regard themselves as "members of one and the same Christian nation." Thus, the monarchs would consider themselves as "merely delegated by Providence" to rule "three branches of the One family," since the Christian world had "no other Sovereign than Him to whom alone power really belongs." Additionally, the three rulers would advise their people to strengthen themselves in Christian principles and duties. The third article invited all powers recognizing the "sacred principles which have dictated the present Act" to join "this Holy Alliance."

The treaty had originated in the "great events which have marked the course of the three last years in Europe," a reference to a period in which Alexander had undergone an intense spiritual and political crisis that revolutionized the Russian ruler's understanding of politics and history. Napoleon's invasion of Russia in June 1812 and occupation of Moscow that autumn had confronted the Russian emperor with a mortal threat to his throne. Alexander defied his enemies' expectations by refusing to parley with Napoleon's representatives. By 19 October, events in Spain obliged Napoleon and his forces to evacuate Moscow and retrace their invasion route, crossing Russia's western border in mid-December, badly depleted by harsh winter weather, partisan detachments, and the following Russian army led by Prince Mikhail Kutuzov and Alexander. Having expelled the usurper from Russia, Alexander defied his advisors and allies by embarking on an all-out campaign to dethrone Napoleon. At the head of a broadening alliance, Alexander liberated the German lands in 1813 and led an international army into Paris at the beginning of April 1814. When the victorious allies—led by Russia, Great Britain, Austria, and Prussia—gathered at the Congress of Vienna in the fall of 1814, Alexander's power and influence had reached their zenith.

The turnabout in Alexander's fortunes reinforced an equally profound shift in his religious views. Previously an Enlightenment freethinker, Alexander had found consolation in Bible reading during the Napoleonic invasion at the prompting of his friend Prince Alexander Golitsyn. Golitsyn and others at court, including Roxandra Sturdza, soon introduced Alexander to a developing vein of Christian mysticism that had arisen in the Germanies among Catholics and Pietist Protestants alike. Such thinkers as Franz von Baader, Jakob Böhme, and Johann Jung-Stilling (whom Alexander visited in July 1814) saw the upheaval of the current age as the precursor to a new epoch of enlightenment and harmony under God's guidance. This new regime would replace the decadent old order destroyed by the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. By the time he reached Vienna for the peace conference, Alexander seemed to believe that God had chosen him as the instrument for the creation of a new order of things. Many attributed this view to Baroness Barbara Juliane von Krüdener, an "awakened" Lutheran from Livonia who figured very visibly in Alexander's entourage.

The Holy Alliance embodied Alexander's vision of the new international order. Its promulgation followed the deliberations of the Vienna congress, where Alexander's efforts to reshape Europe's territorial arrangements—especially in regard to Poland and Germany—had faced strong resistance from Lord Castlereagh, the British ambassador, Austrian chancellor Clemens von Metternich, and the French representative Charles Maurice de Talleyrand. The treaty's high-flown language inspired bemusement from Castlereagh, who called it "sublime mysticism and nonsense," while Metternich dismissed it as "a loud-sounding nothing." The latter, however, requiring Alexander's support in other matters, agreed to sign the document alongside Prussia. Britain's prince regent politely declined to adhere, while the Ottoman sultan (ruler of a considerable Christian population in the Balkans) and the pope were not invited to take part. Contemporaries and later historians saw in the Alliance a cover for Russian designs on European dominance, yet Alexander's own correspondence with friends and advisors suggests that he took his transformative mission very seriously.

Alexander's original vision for the Holy Alliance became more concrete after the Vienna congress, especially as unrest continued to challenge the post-Napoleonic settlement in Italy, Spain, and central Europe. In particular, Alexander showed a growing concern for the maintenance of domestic order, within the post-Vienna states (often restored monarchies), in addition to promoting harmony among them. These emphases solidified in the course of a series of international congresses among the leading European powers: at Aix-la-Chapelle in 1818, Troppau in late 1820, and Laibach in early 1821. At Aix, Alexander aroused British and Austrian opposition by urging the victorious allied Great Powers, now joined by Restoration France, to establish concrete terms for joint action in guaranteeing the new status quo. The British objected to the principle of intervention, while Metternich wished to avoid the reap-pearance of Russian troops in Europe, following their recent evacuation of France. By late 1820, however, Metternich moved closer to Alexander's interventionist position for the maintenance of order in Europe, as unrest broke out across the Continent, including nationalist agitation in Germany and Italy, as well as rebellions in Spain, Portugal, and Greece. Alexander himself moved closer to Metternich's legitimism at this time, following the October mutiny by his beloved Semyonovsky regiment in St. Petersburg, which he saw as a sign of a revived spirit of revolution that he had conquered only six years earlier.

At Troppau and Laibach, the Holy Alliance took on new form as a coalition comprising Russia, Austria, and Prussia—often opposed by Britain and France—united in their claim that defense of the "monarchical principle" justified intervention against any and all rebellion. Alexander's ideal of a new international order had thus become a reactionary weapon against all apprehended disorder, as Austrian troops suppressed rebellion in Italy while the allies imposed a conservative regime on the German states. This new orientation was reinforced in 1825 when Alexander was succeeded by Nicholas I, who shared his brother's hatred of disorder, if not his mysticism. Until the 1850s, the allies acted whenever they could against threats to the political status quo: against revolution in Poland in 1830–1831, against constitutionalism in the Germanies before 1848, and against revolutionary Hungary in 1849.

Nonetheless, general ideological accord masked deeper-lying and more practical tensions that ultimately broke the alliance in the 1850s. Austro-Prussian contention for dominance in the German lands became particularly acute after the revolutions of 1848, while chronic ferment in the Ottoman Balkans led to Austrian fears of Russia in that arena. These latter concerns compelled the Austrian government to support—with Prussia's assent—Britain, France, and the Ottoman Empire in the Crimean War. This fundamental shift in Austrian policy ended the Holy Alliance and inaugurated an enduring Austro-Russian rivalry that culminated sixty years later in the outbreak of World War I.

See alsoAustria-Hungary; Congress of Vienna; Conservatism; Crimean War; French Revolutionary Wars and Napoleonic Wars; Prussia; Russia.

bibliography

Primary Sources

Hertslet, Edward, ed. "Text of the Holy Alliance." In The Map of Europe by Treaty: Political and Territorial Changes since the General Peace of 1814. London, 1875.