Dealing with people in power is extremely difficult because of all of their individual egos, wants, and needs for themselves as well as the needs of their countries. Throughout class, we were able to learn about each specific member of the Congress of Vienna, which helped us to answer the essential question, what should people in power do when their power is threatened?, by showing us what each of their motivations and decisions was. We started off by outlining the basics of the congress, and the members who attended it. Klemens von Metternich of Austria hosted the congress, and met with Napoleon because of Napoleon's desire for peace based on his loss of troops in Russia. Metternich agreed to have peace, but only if Napoleon would give up his conquest and return to the original boundaries. Napoleon refused and responded by threatening to destroy Vienna if Austria waged war on France; he escaped exile and did just that, returning to Paris and continuing his conquest until his final defeat on June 18,1815 at the Battle of Waterloo. Following Metternich's encounter with Napoleon, the Congress of Vienna was called to order on September 1, 1814. As a class, we had to put ourselves in the shoes of the representatives and make decisions regarding the future of France and other countries following the end of Napoleonic domination. After we put in our best educated guess about the decision they would have made, and stated a reason why we believed they would have made that decision, we found out what they really decided to do. The Congress of Vienna, made up of Prince Klemens von Metternich of Austria, Prince Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand of France, King Frederick William III of Prussia, Viscount Castlereagh of England, and Czar Alexander of Russia, decided to return the original boundaries to how they were prior to the expansion, restore the lawful monarchs, and issue a statement against the slave trade, and civil rights protections for Jews. Although the Congress of Vienna's decisions they made helped to keep war between the five major powers of Europe (Russia, Prussia, England, France, and Austria) at bay up to 1853, there were many revolutions including the revolutions of 1848 in which Metternich lost power and fled Vienna.
One crucial principle introduced by members of the Congress of Vienna was the Holy Alliance. The Holy Alliance was initiated by Czar Alexander of Russia, and said that monarchs had the divine right to rule, and that any revolution was treason and against God. All of the countries that partook in the Congress of Vienna also partook in the Holy Alliance, except for England. The Holy Alliance allowed the representatives who held and lost a lot of power to regain it because it ensured that "another Napoleon" would not come into power, considering that Napoleon was an illegitimate leader because he was not an heir to the French throne. Keeping only rightful, blood-related leaders in power who followed specific rules and stuck to the traditional monarchy system, would avoid any issues with the one ruler gaining too much power because of all of the experience they had with monarchs in all of the countries in the past.
I believe that all-in-all, the Congress of Vienna made the right choices in order to get all of the countries united and calmed down once again after all of the chaos caused by Napoleon. In some situations, the representatives were able to put aside their personal feelings and do what was right, for example, not punishing the French people because they saw Napoleon as the enemy, and providing restitution for countries damaged by Napoleon's conquest. But, I believe that the representatives could have focused more on the task at hand, than having an enjoyable, fun time at the conference, which according to one of the articles that we read in class (The Congress of Vienna Decisions Making Process), they clearly did. The article says, "The Vienna peace conference soon degenerated into a glittering vanity fair: masked balls, medieval-style jousts, and grant formal banquets- a "sparkling chaos" that would light up the banks of the Danube," (2). This excerpt shows how richly they indulged in themselves, when the conference should have been focused on the people of struggling countries and their needs.
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