The Congress of Vienna’s 2014-2015 bicentennial brought renewed scholarly attention to both the Congress itself and the Concert of Europe it inaugurated. This wave of scholarship, as each of the four excellent reviewers of Glenda Sluga’s new book, The Invention of International Order: The Remaking of Europe After Napoleon, points out, is marked by a particular sort of revisionism. Prior scholarship debated whether the Congress marked a transformation or a restoration,[1] whether it founded something new[2] or reflected longstanding political dynamics.[3] The current wave of scholarship decenters those debates by, for example, uncovering different actors and forms of political agency[4]; mixing levels of action among state, non-state, national, and transnational[5]; and generating insights drawing on lenses informed by social and International Relations (IR) theory.[6] All of this work finds novelty in what had been a familiar event. On a deeper level, this scholarship aims to disrupt assumptions not just about how international politics works, but even what international politics is. As such, this wave of scholarship has found an audience among both historians and IR scholars. For the latter, this wave is part of a larger trend of attentiveness to the historical development of the forms of actors, institutions, principles, and practices that we see today.[7]
H-Diplo | Robert Jervis International Security Studies Forum
Roundtable Review 15-7
Glenda Sluga. The Invention of International Order: Remaking Europe after Napoleon. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021. ISBN: 9780691208213 (hardcover, $35.00).
9 October 2023 |PDF: https://issforum.org/to/jrt15-7 | Website: rjissf.org
Editor: Diane Labrosse
Commissioning Editor: Damien Mahiet
Production Editor: Christopher Ball
Copy Editor: Bethany Keenan
Contents
Introduction by Jennifer Mitzen, The Ohio State University. 2
Review by Ambrogio Caiani, University of Kent 6
Review by Erik de Lange, Utrecht University. 10
Review by Jennifer Mori, University of Toronto. 13
Review by Lien Verpoest, KU Leuven. 17
Response by Glenda Sluga, European University Institute; University of Sydney. 22
Introduction by Jennifer Mitzen, The Ohio State University
The Congress of Vienna’s 2014-2015 bicentennial brought renewed scholarly attention to both the Congress itself and the Concert of Europe it inaugurated. This wave of scholarship, as each of the four excellent reviewers of Glenda Sluga’s new book, The Invention of International Order: The Remaking of Europe After Napoleon, points out, is marked by a particular sort of revisionism. Prior scholarship debated whether the Congress marked a transformation or a restoration,[1] whether it founded something new[2] or reflected longstanding political dynamics.[3] The current wave of scholarship decenters those debates by, for example, uncovering different actors and forms of political agency[4]; mixing levels of action among state, non-state, national, and transnational[5]; and generating insights drawing on lenses informed by social and International Relations (IR) theory.[6] All of this work finds novelty in what had been a familiar event. On a deeper level, this scholarship aims to disrupt assumptions not just about how international politics works, but even what international politics is. As such, this wave of scholarship has found an audience among both historians and IR scholars. For the latter, this wave is part of a larger trend of attentiveness to the historical development of the forms of actors, institutions, principles, and practices that we see today.[7]
Among this group, Glenda Sluga’s scholarship has stood out for its attention to the voices and practices of those who usually remain in the background, especially women and bankers/financiers. The Invention of International Order draws on that prior work as well as new research to inform a set of novel thematic discussions. Some of the sixteen chapters are on familiar international politics concepts such as “Diplomacy,” “Multilateralism,” and “War and Peace.” Others treat themes not usually associated with the Congress, such as “Science,” “Credit and Commerce,” and “Society.” In each chapter, rulers and diplomats share the stage with many other actors, all of whom are integral to the political outcome of transformed Europe.
The result is a different sort of history book whose contributions are on multiple dimensions, as each of the reviewers points out. Sluga relies on new primary source material (Jennifer Mori) and offers a “new way of writing international history” (Erik de Lange), resulting in a “beguiling” account (Ambrogio Caiani) that sheds new light on familiar academic debates on this period’s diplomatic history (Lien Verpoest). The reviewers especially highlight three themes.
First, all of the reviewers praise Sluga’s recovery of female agency. As in her prior scholarship, Sluga pulls women from the shadows, as Verpoest notes, “taking their contributions as a given and placing female agency on a par with that of males.” This results in a complex reading of male and female roles in postwar peacemaking, where, for one, “salon sociability” is inseparable from diplomacy. Verpoest calls it an intersectional account, in its foregrounding of the mix of social categories, power, and privilege. Mori uses the terminology of soft power, then goes further to suggest that Sluga is challenging the very meaning of diplomacy. In Mori’s words, Sluga urges us “to consider politics and diplomacy as a collective, ongoing, and low-key set of social processes rather than a series of momentous events and personal triumphs.”
The reviewers also note that the chapters bring to life the “gender work” in the post-Napoleonic period of producing some forms of international political action as feminine—philanthropy—and other forms as masculine — geopolitics and diplomacy. They point, as well, to Sluga’s discussion of the historiographical gender work later in the nineteenth century. While the story of women’s exclusion from public life over the course of that century is well-known, as Verpoest points out, the “transnational diplomatic dimension,” which is Sluga’s focus, has not been. Verpoest singles out Sluga’s juxtaposition in Chapter 11 of two kinds of memory as a productive conceptual device for organizing this knowledge. De Lange concurs, noting that “[t]he main strength of Sluga’s book is how deeply it investigates this paradox in women’s political agency, and how thoroughly it situates the opening and closing of possibility in its temporal context.”
Second, the reviewers praise Sluga’s account of the crucial role of financial actors in the Congress period. She tells the story of the first sovereign debt in a way that is both narratively engaging and exceptionally through, as Mori points out, going even farther than her previous scholarship in breaking down the barriers between economic and political spheres, and showing how the political production of peace entails economic actors and action. Caiani finds the chapters on credit and commerce and international finance to be “especially fascinating” and “the most original sections.”
Third, the reviewers note the distinctiveness of the book’s form. As de Lange puts it, this book “does things differently.” Caiani finds the approach somewhat off-putting, particularly Sluga’s use of present tense and her interweaving of narrative with analytic history. For Caiani, switching between the forms is “disorienting” and results in a book that “fails to coalesce into a cohesive whole.” De Lange disagrees. For him, Sluga’s stylistic choice to circle “around the Congress of Vienna, repeatedly looking at it from slightly different conceptual angles,” helps “capture the sense of potential and possibility of the times” and results in a book whose “content and presentation dovetail completely, [and] the novelty of the argument is reinforced by the novelty of the form.”
The reviewers do point out some omissions. For all of its focus on “unseen” actors and practices, important phenomena remain unthematized. Verpoest notes that Sluga’s treatment of Russia and Tsar Alexander reflects a Western perspective, then identifies sources overlooked and how their inclusion would affect Sluga’s narrative. De Lange discusses the lack of sustained attention to empire. Sluga follows Paul Schroeder in largely bracketing European colonial holdings, adopting the same pragmatic rationale for doing so.[8] But colonial empire did play a role in the great powers’ post-Napoleonic peace, not least because leaving colonial issues out of the Settlement ensured that those sources of wealth were not regulated by it. Moreover, as de Lange points out, the practice of European imperialism changed after the Congress. Working together to avoid great-power war held in place, if not strengthened, their imperial domination. This means that what we know of today as multilateralism—the mainstay of contemporary global governance—emerged in an imperial context. It therefore cannot be understood without confronting that structure of domination. With this in mind, Sluga’s linking, in the epilogue, of France’s experience as sovereign debtor in the post-war period to its own treatment of Haiti’s sovereign debt in the 1820s is an invitation to probe more deeply the inseparable themes of domination, race, and empire.[9]
In her response, Sluga takes on board nearly every critique, with one exception. Caiani’s review opens by contextualizing Sluga’s book relative to what could be called a Congress scholarship “malestream,” in which a few “woman worthies” scholars have recently entered, following male leads.[10] In Caiani’s view, “the works that have emerged since 2013 can hardly be described as fundamentally revisionist. They sought out neglected aspects of the Vienna settlement rather than radically rewriting previous interpretations about the significance of this European peace conference.” Given Sluga’s scholarly accomplishment, this is an ironic frame. By treating a wide range of correspondence as political discourse, normalizing the presence of women’s voices, and approaching the salon as a political space, Sluga goes well beyond adding women to and stirring up early nineteenth-century history. Her deep historicizations of concepts and relationships that have been long taken for granted add complexity to the Concert event, while disrupting conventional understandings of core concepts in two disciplines, History and IR. This book and the wave it is part of are a positive step toward redefining how we understand our fields, and international politics itself.
Contributors:
Glenda Sluga is Joint Chair in International History and Capitalism, in History and the Schuman Centre at the European University Institute; she is also ARC Kathleen Fitzpatrick Laureate Fellow and Professor of International History at the University of Sydney. She is most recently the author of Inventing an International Order (Princeton University Press, 2021), Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013); Internationalisms: A Twentieth-Century History (ed. with P. Clavin, Cambridge University Press, 2018). In 2020, she received a European Research Council Advanced Grant, overseeing a five-year research program on “Twentieth Century International Economic Thinking and the Complex History of Globalization.”
Jennifer Mitzen is Professor of Political Science at Ohio State University. Publications include Power in Concert: The Nineteenth Century Origins of Global Governance (University of Chicago Press, 2013), which received the 2015 Best Book Award from the International Security Studies Section (ISSS) of the International Studies Association (ISA); and the forthcoming “The Congress of Vienna in History and IR Theory” (co-author Jeff Rogg), in Mlada Bukovansky, Edward Keene, Chris Reus-Smit, and Maja Spanu (eds.), Oxford Handbook on History and International Relations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming). She is North American Regional Editor of European Journal of International Security and Co-Chair of the International Relations Theory Section of the American Political Science Association.
Ambrogio A. Caiani is Senior Lecturer at the University of Kent in the UK. His research has focused on high politics, religion, and diplomacy in the age of revolutions, especially France and Italy. He is the author of Louis XVI and the French Revolution 1789-1792 (Cambridge University Press, 2012) and more recently To Kidnap a Pope, Napoleon and Pius VII 1800-1815 (Yale University Press, 2021). He is currently working on a history of the politics of religion and the Catholic Church during the age of revolutions.
Erik de Lange is an Assistant Professor in International History at Utrecht University as well as a visiting research fellow at the History and War Studies departments of King’s College, London (2021–2024). His current research project on military presence and imperial cooperation in the nineteenth-century Mediterranean is funded by the Dutch Science Organisation (NWO). He obtained his PhD within the ERC-funded project “Securing Europe, Fighting its Enemies: The Making of a Security Culture in Europe and Beyond, 1815-1914” at Utrecht University in 2020. His first monograph, Menacing Tides: Security, Piracy and Empire in the Nineteenth-Century Mediterranean, is under contract with Cambridge University Press. Articles of his have appeared in Journal of Modern European History (2023), The Historical Journal (2021), Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis (2016) and several edited volumes, including Securing Europe after Napoleon: 1815 and the New European Security Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2019), Das Meer: Maritime Lebenswelten in der Frühen Neuzeit (Böhlau, 2020) and Shaping the International Relations of the Netherlands, 1815-2000: A Small Country on the Global Scene (Routledge, 2018).
Jennifer Mori took her DPhil from Worcester College, Oxford in 1992. She has taught at the University of Toronto since 1996 and is the author of William Pitt and the French Revolution, 1785-1795 (St. Martin’s Press & Keele University Press, 1997), Britain in the Age of the French Revolution, 1785-1820 (Longman Pearson, 2000) and The Culture of Diplomacy. Britain in Europe, c.1750-1830 (Manchester University Press, 2010). She is currently finishing up a monograph on British popular print in the long eighteenth-century, after which she will return to diplomatic history.
Lien Verpoest studied Slavonic languages, Eastern European history and International Politics at the universities of Leuven, Lund and Saint Petersburg. She is an Associate Professor at the research group Modernity and Society 1800-2000 at the History Department of the KU Leuven Faculty of Arts. She is a member of the Steering Committee of Metaforum, the interdisciplinary think tank of KU Leuven; senior member of the Leuven Institute on Cultural Heritage; and board member of the Leuven Institute of Advanced Studies (LIAS) and the Dutch-Belgian Working Group on Eighteenth Century Studies. Her research lies at the intersection of history, area studies, and comparative politics. Within this context she works from a contemporary as well as an historical perspective. This translates itself in a research focus on diplomatic history and East-West relations, and the development of relations between various regional and subregional networks and organisations on the Eurasian continent. Verpoest mainly publishes in the field of diplomatic history, with a focus on East-West relations, informal diplomatic agency and unacknowledged diplomats. She is currently working on a biography of Marie-Caroline Murray, La Muse Belgique, who took on such an unacknowledged role in Brussels (1770–1798) and Vienna (1798–1830).
Review by Ambrogio Caiani, University of Kent
Centenaries and bicentenaries inevitably produce an efflorescence of reassessments of great events. This certainly has been the case with the French Revolution and First World War, where teams of researchers have come together to vanquish stale orthodoxies and seek out new paths through seemingly well-trodden ground. The Napoleonic Wars and the Congress of Vienna confirm the rule. The treaty that ended the wars has, since 2013, been reinvigorated by a barrage of new studies. These publications have shed much new light and created new interpretations in a field that seemed saturated: Jean-Baptiste Capefigue, Albert Sorel, Charles Webster, Harold Nicolson, Guglielmo Ferrero, Henry Kissinger, and Paul W. Schroeder represented the male hegemonic interpretation of the Vienna Settlement.[11] In their orthodox view, they argued that the negotiators who met in the Habsburg capital in 1814 and 1815 established a new international order based on concert diplomacy, realpolitik, and statehood over dynastic ambition, and heralded the incipient beginnings of international law. This system, they argued, ultimately allowed peace to endure for nearly a hundred years. Their archival research focused on elite diplomats and state papers. There was little room in their approach for non-state actors, informal influencers, and “soft power.”
This mainstay of diplomatic history has withstood the test of time remarkably well; the works that have emerged since 2013 can hardly be described as fundamentally revisionist. They sought out neglected aspects of the Vienna settlement rather than radically rewriting previous interpretations about the significance of this European peace conference. The most original contribution is that of Brian Vick.[12] His study of the Congress situated the diplomacy of Vienna within a broader European public sphere. This approach is refreshing, having extracted the Congress from the vantage point of elite diplomacy and placed it in a much broader context. Thanks to Vick’s pioneering work, we now have great insight into how international civil society lobbied, influenced, and argued about the potential outcomes of the Congress. It is clear that issues surrounding gender, religion (especially Jewish emancipation), nationality, and slavery were not incidental, but highlighted how public opinion (for want of a better term) demanded a voice in the deliberations of the “statesmen” (2–7) at Vienna. Beyond the negotiators there lay an impressive fauna of lobbyists, salonnières, intellectuals, philanthropists, and jurists who nudged the final outcomes of 1815 towards their humanitarian aspirations. As Vick shows, their influence was far wider than anyone had hitherto suspected.
Vick’s important book is by no means the only contribution to this rediscovering of the forgotten aspects of the age of Congress diplomacy. Munro Price provided the definitive account of how Napoleon’s inflexibility doomed his Empire.[13] His work has the great merit of illustrating how the meetings at Châtillon laid the groundwork for the future Concert of Europe. Without the experiences of campaigning in 1813-1814, the Allies might never have found the unity of purpose that brought them together to reshape the future of Europe in common accord. This viewpoint is reinforced by Mark Jarret, who places Vienna in its wider diplomatic context. [14] He revealed that 1815 was just the first Congress in a series of summits among the great powers which would continue until the Congress of Verona in 1822. The non-European repercussions of 1815 are now much better understood thanks to Miroslav Šedivý and Pierre Caquet, who investigated how the Eastern Question put unprecedented stress on the Vienna settlement.[15] Šedivý published a second book exploring how the recasting of Italy’s pre-unitary states, far from ending inter-state competition, actually exacerbated tensions between France, Vienna, Britain, and Sardinia-Piedmont throughout the Restoration period.[16] There have also been some wonderful new biographies of key “statesmen,” like John Bew’s magnificent study of Castlereagh and Wolfram Siemann’s magisterial analysis of Metternich’s life work.[17]
Unlike previous schools of interpretation, the bicentenary has had the welcome and unexpected outcome of gathering a more diverse team of women scholars who have published splendid work on Vienna’s repercussions and the post-war conditions that emerged after the Congress of 1815. Beatrice de Graaf examined with intriguing perspicacity the development of a new security culture through her analysis of the ambassadors’ council that operated in Paris after the fall of Napoleon in 1815, and Christine Haynes studied in minute detail how the Allied occupation of France foreshadowed that of Germany in 1945.[18] Stella Ghervas charted the rise of a new peace-making mentality that has remained with us since 1815, and Maartje Abbenhuis investigated how neutrality metamorphosed from being disparaged as cowardice to becoming an internationally recognised guarantee for buffer states.[19] Jennifer Mitzen highlighted, from the vantage point of International Relations theory, that Vienna provided a template for how to bring into “concert” diplomatic actions in a multipolar world. She notes astutely that this practice left a legacy that survived well beyond the nineteenth century.[20] Many continue to see in the Congress as an important turning-point in the history of international relations. Most scholars have abandoned the simplistic interpretation that celebrates Vienna as leading directly to the League of Nations and United Nations. Yet for all this new sophistication, there is still a consensus that 1815 ushered in a less conflictual understanding of international relations among the Great Powers of Europe.
It is within this historiographical fermentation that Glenda Sluga’s “invention of international order” situates itself. Her book is an enriching synthesis of the works discussed above. It will be deeply useful to university educators in seminar rooms. Equally, it will promote much debate amongst scholars and experts in the field. For Sluga, Vienna seems in some ways to be the dog that did not bark. Behind the scenes in the Habsburg capital, women, liberals, utopians, and humanitarians argued for a more humane, just, and economically harmonious world. Many of the plenipotentiaries listened to these pleas, but the world order they created was paradoxical in failing to reconcile progressive aspirations with the naked realities of hard power. The imagined liberal and tolerant future could not quite be squared with conservative present. This viewpoint represents a beguiling synthesis of the historiographical debates that have characterised the bicentenary of Vienna. It is surprisingly close to the pessimistic and classic overviews of post-Napoleonic Europe by Jacques Droz and Adam Zamoyski.[21]
Recovering female agency is among Sluga’s principal objectives for this book. Her sketches of well-known female influencers and thinkers like the Swiss Baroness Germaine de Stael, the Baltic Duchess Wilhelmine Sagan, the Russian mystic Sophie Swetchine, the Baltic Princess Dorothea Lieven, and the Moldavian Countess Roxandra Sturdza bring to the fore what many historians had suspected for a long time, namely, that diplomats had wives, mistresses, and female advisors. These elite ladies drove them to temper their negotiating stances. Building on the work of previous historians, like Vick and Ghervas, Sluga foregrounds this gendered dimension by placing extremely familiar female historical actors centre stage in her narrative.
As stated, this book deploys a complex historical narrative which recovers a multiplicity of perspectives from non-state actors. It charts melancholically the failure of liberal internationalism to emerge in the aftermath of 1815. This focus, one suspects, stems from Sluga’s previous work in this sub-area.[22] She highlights how assumptions about gender, authority, empire, nationhood, politics, and international order came to be defined tightly in the post-Napoleonic world. Her book has merit in showcasing how science, statistics, religion, and slavery were debated at the Congress. Lurking behind the negotiating tables of plenipotentiaries, women and intellectuals deployed new scientific knowledge, economic theory, and humanitarian imperatives to exhort the great powers to strive for a better and fairer international order. Here Sluga uses the findings of the recent bicentennial literature to anchor her argument. Her priority is to argue that beyond the diplomacy and high politics of “statesmen,” an alternative vision was advocated by a much more diverse group of non-state actors who imagined a liberal internationalist order that would outlive the nineteenth century. Despite this, there was the ever-present danger that progressive rhetoric could be a mere garnish that hid from view the continuing male and European domination of politics.
The most original sections in this book are those dealing with credit and commerce and international finance (chapters 10 and 13 respectively). This is an aspect that few others have explored in any great depth, and it is much to Sluga’s credit to have spotted what so many others have missed. Many of those on the fringes of the negotiations taking place in the Habsburg capital were deeply anxious about whether Europe could resume peaceful commercial relations and raise sufficient funds to meet the burden of the debt that had been accumulated during two decades of warfare. It seemed difficult for governments to re-establish their credit in a time of ongoing fiscal crisis, recession, and agricultural downturn. This was certainly a moment when financiers grew in their role as purveyors of credit and as currency agents. There was much discussion at Vienna about the role banking in stabilizing public debt.
Sluga’s research is especially fascinating when it comes to how, after the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1818, bankers facilitated the floatation and speculation around sovereign debt. The London-based bankers Barings (160 and 207) and others catalysed and accelerated the internationalisation of investment in the bond markets to an unprecedented extent. Such investments did not only flow into the coffers of “legitimist” polities, but also benefited the Greek rebels of the 1820s, who received much leverage from speculators in the city of London who funded their revolution through an opportunistic mixture of liberal internationalism and greed (something recently described with panache by Mark Mazower).[23] This increased role for bankers and financiers did not go unnoticed. A toxic juxtaposition that linked unscrupulous speculators with Jewish financiers gave rise to conspiracy theories that would have a noxious afterlife. More positively, utopians like the entrepreneur and philanthropist Robert Owen lobbied the “statesmen” of Europe’s chanceries to foster a more economically and socially just world order. They warned against the dangers of unrestrained industrialisation and unregulated markets. It is in this realm of economic history and international finance that Sluga exerts a complete mastery of her material.
Readers of The Invention of International Order are presented with a narrative/synthesis of the recent scholarship interpreting the nature and legacy of the Congress of Vienna. University students no doubt will welcome this cogent distillation of some of the best scholarship produced in the last decade. I admire Sluga’s ambition and desire to find something original to say about the international order that emerged in the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars. My biggest reservation relates to the decision construct this vast argument as a historical narrative written in the present tense. Sluga fuses a traditional analytical monograph with an easy-to-follow narrative which caters for the “beginner.” I am not entirely convinced she succeeds in this honourable purpose. It is conceivable that Sluga’s decision to use the present tense is based upon an attempt to add immediacy and vibrancy to her narrative. I appreciate the intention, but it can be confusing and grating at times. Stylistically, the ambition to write for both the expert and lay reader does not quite work in these pages. The narrative and analytical sections, simply put, fail to coalesce into a cohesive whole. The abrupt switches from storytelling to analysis are disorientating. More careful editing and advising from Princeton University Press might have avoided this pitfall.
Despite this reservation, the epilogue detailing the paradoxes and dichotomies that arose from the new international order provides food for thought. Rather than the liberal internationalism advocated by many of the individuals discussed in these pages, a more authoritarian, nationalistic and Eurocentric order emerged after 1815. Ultimately, the “statesmen” of Vienna created a conservative world that fitted their instincts and desire for stability. Yet utopian dreams of non-state actors for a liberal and humanitarian international system survived. Sluga’s book charts the uneasy relationship between hard politics and aspiration. Although her heroines and dreamers did not win the day in 1815, their legacy lived on. How far their visions would influence later periods and international institutions will elicit much debate.
Review by Erik de Lange, Utrecht University
Rare is the work of history in which content and presentation dovetail completely, where the novelty of the argument is reinforced by the novelty of the form. Yet Glenda Sluga has pulled off this feat. In a study concerned with how nineteenth-century women and men redefined what inter-state relations could be, Sluga actively reimagines what a work of international history can be.
It is not the topic that makes The Invention of International Order so innovative. The book certainly fits neatly within the recent surge of publications on diplomacy in the post-Napoleonic period. Much like those other works, the book shows that the actors involved in the effort to bring peace and security to a war-ravished Europe were inventive, creative, and forward-thinking.[24] It thus flies in the face of the old, but seemingly insurmountable and rather Whiggish assumption that these people were all archconservatives, hell-bent on turning back the clock to some pre-revolutionary status quo. Still, Sluga finds new aspects of the period to uncover and has many tantalizing things to say—not just on nineteenth-century international relations, but also on the ways in which historians can write about that subject.
The Invention of International Order does things differently. While most works on the topic adopt a broad chronological overview, following the familiar protagonists from battlefield to battlefield and congress to congress, Sluga takes another approach. Her chapters are snappy and thematic in focus, centered on a dozen concepts that contemporaries used as they ordered and delineated the scope of international relations. The author circles around the Congress of Vienna, repeatedly looking at it from slightly different conceptual angles. She writes in the present tense to try and capture the sense of potential and possibility of the times. Most importantly, Sluga consistently directs the spotlight from the well-known culprits to figures who have remained in the shadows of historiography. An innovative chapter on the Holy Alliance shifts attention from Tsar Alexander I to the savvy Baltic German mystic Barbara von Krüdener. Coalition warfare against Napoleon becomes less about the men on horseback and more about the itinerant salon of the French Madame de Staël or the letter-writing Duchess of Sagan, a German noblewoman from present-day Lithuania.
As the reader learns, it is no coincidence that many of these forgotten or underappreciated figures were women. Sluga expertly unpacks the paradox that women were present at all the crucial moments of post-Napoleonic diplomacy, but rarely feature prominently in the works of historians—a historiographic intervention that she is perfectly placed to make, following a range of previous publications that highlighted the role of women in international relations.[25] Indeed, the book’s main argument is that the post-Napoleonic period was rife with contradictions: “at this same moment of possibilities, the parameters of politics, whether within or between states, were being closely defined or “ordered” to determine what counted as politics and who could be political.” (3-4) While men, whether they were monarchs or meritocratic upstarts, reimagined and reshaped interstate relations through new cooperative means and peacemaking practices (for example, ambassadorial conferences, sovereign debt bonds), women were increasingly pushed aside. They could only be legitimate diplomatic actors within a narrow bandwidth of “acceptable” activity, relating to notions of patriotism, humanitarianism, and religion. The opening up of possibilities for men brought women a heavily corseted room for maneuver.
The main strength of Sluga’s book is how deeply it investigates this paradox, and how thoroughly it situates the opening and closing of possibility in its temporal context. She presents an insightful account of what it meant to engage in inter-state politics at this specific point in time. Contemporaries’ awareness of living through unique times, where experience and expectations had become unmoored and old concepts were in flux, permeate the pages. This work hence brings German historian Reinhart Koselleck’s notion of the Sattelzeit (“saddle period,” i.e. the pivotal era of 1750-1850) to bear on diplomatic history, much like other cultural studies of post-Napoleonic peacemaking have done.[26] In Prince Klemens von Metternich, Robert Stewart (Viscount Castlereagh), and Tsar Alexander, this sense of timeliness inspired grandiose ideas of being a “walking giant” (68) or “saviour” (195). But not everything was new. Old, informal practices of diplomacy continued to hold sway. Underneath the veneer of rationality, emotions featured heavily in political decision-making. Sluga shows how the main characters in her narrative grappled with anxiety, ambition, relief, and despair. She also shows how they comported their bodies and how those bodies were perceived and commented on by others. This brings multiple factors into the analysis of international relations that are normally left aside. As a result, familiar figures start to look different, as the author casts them in a light that is indeed “perhaps all too human” (55).
Here, The Invention of International Order most clearly hints at new ways of writing international history. Sluga convincingly positions gender, class, religion, and “civilization” (9) at the front of her analysis—not as separate factors, but as intertwined concerns that together steered the “ordering” of international relations (6–10). One example is the increasing marginalization of the Ottoman Empire as a sovereign entity, on par with Europe’s other Great Powers. As Sluga argues with reference to Orientalist stereotypes of effeminacy and harem politics: “that empire’s marginalization in the developing manner of politics between states is in part a modern story, not unlike nor unconnected to the exclusion of women as legitimate political actors on that same international scale” (21). With attention to such interrelations, and Sluga’s emphasis on the blurry boundaries between the public and the private, the contours of an alternative type of diplomatic history begin to be discernible.
One might term this an intersectional approach to the history of international relations. But Sluga shies away from doing so, which feels like a missed opportunity. It is obvious that the intersection of different social categories and related systems of power, privilege, and discrimination form the analytical core of this work. The conclusion reads: “Once we begin to layer our historical themes we find intriguing social intersections, some more familiar than others.” (278) Following that strand, I would have been curious to hear which thinkers and methodological tools have inspired the author. Who does she see as her methodological or theoretical forebears? Or, perhaps more pressingly, where does Sluga envision we might take her approach to international history next?
When it comes to rewriting the history of the specific post-Napoleonic moment in Europe, empire is another avenue that could have been explored further. Although “imperial politics” (8) are among the paradoxes that Sluga unpacks, her discussion of the post-1815 international order is less unconventional in relation to this subject. She repeats the argument that colonial affairs were kept out of the new frameworks of multilateral deliberation (222). This might be true for the established colonial holdings of the European powers. But if we are to understand the post-1815 international order as inter-imperial, then we also need to realize that European imperialism took on a new form after the end of the Napoleonic Wars. It became more dependent on cooperation and condominium, on avoiding mutual conflict through mediation and negotiation.[27] As a result, the new international order had a deep impact on imperial thinking, colonial rule, and European expansionism long before the powers allegedly threw their “conferencing ambitions” into the “moral abyss” (260) at the Berlin Conference of 1884-85.
The imperialist bend to the new “ordered” politics of multilateral negotiation was present from the very beginning. It featured in a short pamphlet that the mayor of Bremen directed to the Congress of Vienna, calling for a coalition war against the Ottoman Empire and its subsequent division among the European powers.[28] Or in the deliberations of the Congress of Aachen, where the Russian delegates proposed the creation of a shared territorial base on the coast of North Africa, to help civilization “develop” there.[29] The practices of cooperation and concertation also loomed large in military interventions and wars of conquest. When the French government announced its invasion of Algiers in 1830, it proposed to organize a conference on the future of that territory if the troops were victorious.[30] That idea was lost with the July Revolution and the unrest that followed on the European continent. Still, and especially when one underlines contingency as thoroughly as Sluga does, it is problematic to argue that a conference on the imperial issue of Algiers fell outside “the Concert of Europe’s remit” (273) and thus could never have happened.
If anything, these questions and remarks show the realm of possibility opened up by The Invention of International Order. Sluga has made significant headway in the ongoing effort to shed new light on a seemingly exhausted subject. Her work allows us to see the oft-recounted events of the post-Napoleonic era anew, with an intersectional focus, and in all their unsettledness. Going beyond the elite circles of diplomacy that Sluga studied, we can also wonder how this moment of “ordering” played out within colonial administrations or consular posts. There would certainly be much to gain from following the leads that Sluga sets out. It is therefore to be hoped that this work finds its way into many bibliographies, essays, and, especially, undergraduate syllabi. What the French author and Napoleonic court favorite Madame de Rémusat wrote about the salon of de Staël, might also be said about this inventive monograph: it encourages people “to think who have never thought before, or who had forgotten how to think” (37).
Review by Jennifer Mori, University of Toronto
This long-awaited monograph is a welcome addition to the growing body of revisionist scholarship on the Congress of Vienna.[31] This conference, famous for keeping the peace in Europe from the defeat of Napoleon until the Crimean War, has long been perceived as retrograde in both effects and intentions. As late as 2007, Adam Zamoyski’s Rites of Peace denounced the Congress for reviving “a particularly stultified form of monarchical government,” and institutionalizing “social hierarchies as rigid as any that had existed under the ancien régime.”[32] Sluga, like other scholars of the Congress since its bicentenary, prefers to focus on its positive features: cosmopolitanism, sociability and—within the limits of its time—inclusivity.
This book is pathbreaking in its discovery and use of new primary material: women’s writings, their personal papers, the correspondence of minor diplomats, and the sources generated by middle-class financiers. Sluga conducted both primary and secondary research in five languages: English, French, German, Russian, and Italian. All this material illustrates the contributions of women, intellectuals, and bankers to the Congress and its many effects. As sources go, these new ones are very different from the state papers, dispatches, and ministerial memoirs which have long informed histories of the Congress, be they in the print or manuscript collections housed in Europe’s national record repositories.
Sluga has, of course, consulted the old male-authored primary sources. Her methodology is similar to that of Brian Vick, who brought music, material culture, salon memoirs, and newspapers to bear upon his re-evaluation of the proceedings at Vienna.[33] The result is an assemblage of narratives told from unsung points of view. Like Vick, Sluga shines a spotlight upon long-forgotten issues dealt with through Congress-era diplomacy, such as: religion and the rights of religious “others” (183-188), the abolition of the slave trade (114 and 131-134), and Barbary piracy (227-228).[34] Unlike Vick, who sees the Congress as a lens “through which to examine the nineteenth-century world,” Sluga asks what lessons we might learn today from the international order that conducted European diplomacy between the late eighteenth- and mid-nineteenth-century (282).[35] Because women and the kinds of influence they wield lie at the centre of her analysis, this is a history of political sociability, soft power, and what we call public relations.
Sluga has been instrumental in writing women back into the histories of diplomacy and international politics.[36] Her primary focus in this book is on the work of French salonnières, most notably Germaine de Staël.[37] Mme de Staël, who was united in a marriage of convenience to a Swedish diplomat, the Baron de Stael-Holstein, has long been famous for her novels, but until recently was not seen as a major diplomat or liberal political theorist in her own right.[38] Salons and the international Republic of Letters, however, are now known to have been integral to ancien régime politics: the former constituting a forum for the advocacy of all sorts of causes; and the latter for spreading news all over Europe.[39] Sluga consequently reconstructs de Staël’s networks, both male and female; thus bringing to light her influence over other women, such as the Prussian ambassadrice Caroline von Humboldt, and their hold over her. De Staël’s relationships with her better-known male correspondents, such as President Thomas Jefferson, Tsar Alexander I, and the Duke of Wellington, are also assessed from a political and intellectual—rather than literary—point of view. De Staël and her “intrigues” are thereby revealed to have been important forces in the formation of the final coalition against Napoleon and the advocacy of pragmatic constitutional liberalism in Congress diplomacy (29, 39-40, 119, 144, 255). Her husband, the baron, is notable for his absence from this book.
Although de Stael was immensely wealthy, acquired a title through marriage, and behaved in her love life like one of the old aristocracy, Sluga identifies her as a bourgeoise salonnière because her father, Jacques Necker, had been a financier. This book breaks new ground in its rehabilitation of other such women as diplomatic actors: notably the German intellectual Rahel Levin Varnhagen, who, like de Staël, had been born into banking; and Anna, the minor noble wife of the Genevan financier Jean-Gabriel Eynard-Lullin. Levin and Eynard operated more on the margins of diplomacy than de Staël—and as what women’s history calls “incorporated wives,” or spouses absorbed through marriage into their husbands’ professions—than as free agents (5, 25).[40] Levin thus sent her brother exchange-rate data from Vienna on a regular basis while Anna worked its soirées in partnership with her husband in the representation of their republic. While the Congress introduced the bourgeois Eynards to high society and, thus, high politics, bourgeois diplomacy, reveals Sluga, had a flavour of its own (152-155). It was infused with moral and egalitarian values and a high regard for social and sexual propriety. As a result, the Eynards stayed aloof from Wilhelmina, Duchess of Sagan, and the Princess Ekaterina Bagration, despite the fact that these nobles ran important salons in Russia’s interest at the Congress. Sagan and Bagration, however, were famous for their love affairs with Austrian Foreign Minister Prince Klemenz von Metternich; it is upon this sexual aspect of female power that historical treatments of women in diplomacy have hitherto focused (62-65 and 141-142). Zamoyski still gives some space to the bed-hopping that took place in Vienna. The moral aspect of bourgeois diplomacy, says Sluga, was one of the factors that made emotional issues, such as religion, suitable for representation by subaltern envoys through soft routes (158). Issues like Christian fraternity or the rights of Jews in German states could thus be espoused via informal promotion in salons or by a Pietist like Barbara Juliane, Baroness Krüdener, who happened to be a diplomatic wife (198-204).[41]
Elite, or aristocratic, salon diplomacy of the kind practiced by Sagan and Bagration was suspicious to outsiders because it was governed by the manners and mores of courtiers, the ties of hierarchical patron-client relations as opposed to the co-operation of independent and, thus, comparatively equal free agents. There was little, however, to choose between elite and bourgeois salons in terms of their social mechanics. All salon diplomacy was ultimately about putting people together, whether to promote the direct discussion of specific objectives or more subtle and informal kinds of advocacy. Had salons failed in the duty of general sociability, they would have perished. Sluga succeeds admirably at illustrating from sources like the Eynards how these coteries were used for different kinds of lobby-work by their guests.
Her account is, nonetheless, much stronger on the political agency of the salonnières, limited though it was by our standards. Accustomed as we are to male-authored accounts of politics and diplomacy, it is women with decided views and agendas that we find most attractive: whether liberals like Staël who were seeking to free Europe from the shackles of tyranny or intelligent conservatives like Krüdener and Dorothea, Princess Lieven. From 1812 to 1834, Lieven was the Russian ambassadrice, though some would have said ambassador, in England. Sluga conducts a long overdue re-assessment of the latter two women that transforms Krüdener from “a kind of mystic” (191) into an assiduous petitioner of the Russian crown. Lieven, who has long been depicted as an arch-intriguer and yet another of Metternich’s lovers,[42] becomes in turn Krüdener’s successor as “the champion of the Christian-centred international order” (205) and a ten-year champion of Greek independence. Women—whether liberal, conservative, Christian, or Jewish—emerge from Sluga’s work as the custodians of sentimental causes, notably faith, humanitarianism, and kinship (230-231, 243, 252). Sluga employs insights from the history of emotions, specifically the deconstruction and analysis of “romantic” feeling, to explain how new concepts of allegiance and community came to be advocated by men and women in the world of Congress diplomacy.[43]
Emotion and gender intersect with class in Sluga’s updated account of high finance, which has also been some time in the making. In 2017, she published a pioneering article that depicted how Europe’s stockjobbers became integrated into the making of war, peace, and multilateralism through the trading and underwriting of sovereign debt.[44] In this book, the complete story is told, from the participation of the bankers in the 1814 Chaumont subsidy-finance that united Europe against Napoleon to their backing of Greek independence in the 1820s. The increasing participation of the Rothschilds, Barings, and Eynards in the Congresses of the great illustrate their gradual assimilation into the international order.[45] To what extent these activities or the order were “new” is questionable: “transitional” would be a better adjective, given the continued operation of ancien régime sociopolitical norms and practices alongside new players and ideas, such as nationalism and egalitarianism. Old and new agents, Sluga demonstrates, often operated in tandem with each other, with common ground frequently found between paradoxically opposing people and ideas. Bourgeois republican Jean-Gabriel Eynard and aristocratic arch-royalist Dorothea Lieven were thus united in the promotion of Greek independence (230-1).
Despite the considerable influence women could wield in the Congress world, there were limits to their authority. Staël’s most influential publications were anonymously authored, and Lieven’s diplomatic career contains few concrete achievements. Instead, the latter’s life illustrates what Sluga calls “the force of women’s political ambitions and the appeal of diplomacy as a site of political agency” (252). This research invites us to consider politics and diplomacy as a collective, ongoing, and low-key set of social processes, rather than a series of momentous events and personal triumphs. Like other revisionist scholars, Sluga is keen to rehabilitate the reputation of the “Congress system,” the series of conferences that followed the meeting at Vienna, as a peace-keeping success. The process involved small ambassadorial conferences as well as big summit meetings, the former helping to professionalize the practice of nineteenth-century diplomacy.
Although this book devotes some attention, as it should, to political-science topics like cameralism, these are not its forte. Comparatively little, moreover, is said of major Congress figures like Metternich and the English Foreign Secretary, Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh, apart from their connections to, and relationships with, women. Where men are concerned, Sluga and other revisionist scholars are more interested in shedding light upon lesser-known diplomats such as Francis d’Ivernois of Geneva and Count Ioannis Capodistrias of Russia. Sluga’s feminist contention is that the new bureaucratic diplomacy of the nineteenth century excluded women and the salons to become a largely closed-shop of official meetings. While the diplomatic world slowly opened to bourgeois men, by the 1810s it had begun to sideline aristocratic women. This process was largely complete by the 1856 Congress of Paris (26 and 270-272). The exclusion of women from the realms of a modernizing “public” life in the west is, however, a well-known story in women’s history.[46] By adding a trans-national diplomatic dimension to this master narrative, Sluga has made a significant contribution to what could be called the international political history of women. Students of today’s “new” histories will find much to admire and emulate in her study of diplomacy as an extension of social interests, forces, and milieux.
Review by Lien Verpoest, KU Leuven
While never fully off the radar since its bicentennial in 2014-15, the long history of the Congress of Vienna has received renewed attention through a plethora of interesting publications, of which Brian Vick’s The Congress of Vienna and Beatrice de Graaf’s Fighting Terror after Napoleon are the most noteworthy.[47] These publications set the tone for broadening the scope of the history of international relations and introducing new perspectives, with a focus on security and networks respectively. Glenda Sluga firmly places her research in this innovative approach, while at the same time offering a rich overview of the process leading up to and the consequences of the Vienna Congress. With The Invention of the International Order, Sluga has written the most comprehensive account of the genesis of conference diplomacy and inter-state relations yet, combining a chronological overview of the Napoleonic wars and the Vienna peace process with a thematic approach that reaches beyond the narrow confines of high diplomacy. Chapters like “Public and Private,” “Humanity,” “Society,” and “Liberties” complement discussions of “Diplomacy,” “War and Peace,” “Realpolitik,” “Science,” and “Religion.” At the outset, Sluga professes her intention to interweave the analysis of “individual lives and relationships” with that of “structural developments,” (9) and she does so with great skill.
Sluga, as she points out in the introduction (5-6), intends in the book to give female agency its due place in the history of diplomacy in the first half of the nineteenth century. Female actors, who were “determined to be beyond the pale of legitimate political agency” together with “marginalized” non-European and non-Christian actors (4), were not visible in the traditional field of high politics and negotiations but made key contributions to intellectual discussions, knowledge dissemination, and diplomatic communication in the run-up to the Congress. The greatest merit of the book involves its taking their contributions as a given and placing female agency on a par with that of males. This achievement entails a diversified approach to policymaking and an attention to previously discarded source material that might have been dismissed as petticoat history and salon talk. The manner in which Sluga has fulfilled this ambition is more than impressive: because of her extensive research in almost every important archive in Western and Central Europe, the book contains profuse quotations from a vast array of correspondence that reveals the political and diplomatic agency of certain women. Sluga stresses the importance of letters as a medium for women, noting that “their contents run against many of our conventional expectations about the past” (46).
A good example is the correspondence of the Baltic Duchesse de Sagan with the Austrian Foreign Minister Klemens von Metternich, which, as Sluga rightly points out, was only discovered in the 1960s and therefore does not figure in the traditional historiography on the Napoleonic period (59). Through this important correspondence, Sluga accounts for the interesting exchange of political views between Sagan and Metternich and Sagan’s reports about the conferencing in Ratiborschitz in the run-up to the Reichenbach Treaties of 1813, during which time she “host[ed] the more difficult conversations among the core group” of diplomats (65). In broaching political subjects, Sagan “actively negotiate[d] the gender register of being political” and her writings illustrate how subtle yet effective female informal diplomatic agency worked. While time and again stressing that politics was not her cup of tea or interest (66), shielding herself against Metternich’s effort to circumscribe her political “métier” to “the bandaging kind,” or humanitarian relief (69), Sagan managed to suggest and communicate her political views which, Sluga points out (65), inexorably influenced Metternich.
Sluga pays similar attention to other women as diplomatic, cultural, or scientific actors. While celebrated author Germaine de Staël’s influence in the societal debates had diminished by the time the Vienna Congress took place, de Staël remained one of the most consequential female voices in the Napoleonic period, and her travels also made sure that this voice was heard in many a European salon. Sluga’s extensive expertise on the political thought of de Staël and how this fed into the Vienna Congress provides the basis for her crucial and innovative addition to the current field of diplomatic history. De Staël is the central character of Sluga’s chapter on “war and peace” (27-42), where the links between formal and informal diplomatic agency also receive more scrutiny than before. Apart from the focus on de Staël and Sagan, the role of “informal diplomats” shows most clearly in her analysis of Russian salonnières and ambassadresses Barbara von Krüdener, Dorothea Lieven, and, to a lesser extent, Roxandra Stourdza. While Krüdener, like Sagan, claimed “never [to] mix herself up in politics” (199), Sluga offers a neat list of her political and diplomatic maneuvering with Tsar Alexander from 1815 to 1825 that belie this statement (199-201). Conversely, Ambassador Lieven’s wife Dorothea made no apologies for her political role. Her many decades of relentless diplomatic agency outshine many a male diplomat: Sluga dubs her the “diplomatic sybil” (237, after Krüdener’s historical nickname as the “Livonian sybil”). Like Krüdener, she converted salon sociability into “soft-power diplomacy” (243) through her close relationship with the Russian tsar, and like Sagan, she struck up an intimate correspondence with Metternich. Dorothea Lieven convinced Tsar Alexander I to prioritize Russian foreign policy over the quintuple alliance and, after his death, she went on to strengthen her informal diplomatic networks all over Europe, becoming in Sluga’s words “the epitome of a nineteenth century multilateralist” (236), the difference with “formal” diplomats being that “without office, she was answerable to no one” (236).
In the last chapter, “History,” Sluga skillfully explores the trajectory from the real legacy of female diplomatic agency to its memory, and the role of narratives in this process. She does so by using Jasper Heinzen’s approach to distinguish between “communicative” and “cultural” memory. Heinzen defines communicative memory as a concept that “designates the living, embodied memory of social groups with first-hand knowledge of certain historic events.”[48] Cultural memory, which emerges “when these personal networks faded away with the passing of their members,” is defined as “an abstract mode of commemoration more reliant on mediation through official rituals and symbols that were liable to semantic change.”[49] Thus, Sluga points out not only how contemporaries framed diplomatic actors (male and female), but also how memoirists spun their narratives in retrospect. In this light, Sluga also discusses the reinvention of these narratives by linking them to the creation of the League of Nations, a topic on which her expertise is unparalleled.[50] She connects the invention of the League of Nations “to the allied commissions and the Napoleonic wars and consequent peacemaking, melded with the influence of popular wartime League of Nations’ associations made up of women and men supporting peace through law, international government and ‘international thinking’” (263). Even more interestingly, like the Vienna Congress, women disrupted this setting too, Sluga adds, as replacement and sometimes national delegates, “but mostly working in the bureaucracy behind the scenes and networking for representation in humanitarian and social justice questions” (263).
In light of the wide range of topics discussed and the new insights this books offers, critical comments do not detract from the impressiveness and merit of this academic masterpiece. They should therefore be seen rather as nitpicking instead of fundamental criticism. Three minor comments came to mind while reading this book with regard to: perspective; the linking of Alexander’s turn to religion with reports of his “effeminacy” (54) and his “propensity to talk with and listen to women” (181); and the longevity of narratives.
First of all, perspective. Whereas this volume excels in broadening the research scope in thematic and gendered aspects, its perspective remains primarily a Western one, which is problematic when discussing Tsar Alexander’s diplomatic and political agency in extenso. When discussing other countries and empires, Sluga quotes and discusses many other important figures apart from the sovereign, but for Russia the narrative focuses on the person of Alexander I, with brief mentions of the diplomat and advisor Alexander Stourdza and of the tsar’s sister Ekaterina Pavlovna. The foreign policy preferences of the Russian elite in Moscow and Saint Petersburg receive little attention; Sluga writes that there were very few real “Russians” in Alexander’s entourage (16). Sluga identifies Andrey Razumovsky as the only Russian-born foreign policy adviser of the tsar when, in fact, Razumovsky was a prominent Ukrainian, the son of the last Cossack hetman of Ukraine, with his family seat in Baturyn, Southern Ukraine. Indeed, the author correctly points out the cosmopolitan character of most Russian foreign-policy advisers who worked with Alexander, especially during the Congress of Vienna. Russia was after all a multi-ethnic empire: many of these men (like Sergei Uvarov, Nikolai Rumiantsev, and Karl Nesselrode) grew up in Russia without ever learning the language, preferring to speak French or German.
However, there is no discussion of the reaction that developed, from 1801 onwards, against this type of men and their “Gallomania” among the Russian elite. Sluga hints at this when she remarks that “we know that there is a longer, thicker history of ideas motivating the tsar” (202). In this sense, the book is lacking Russian sources or, if these might have been a problem, English language secondary sources like Alexander Martin’s Romantics, Reformers, and Reactionaries and Derek Offord, Vladislav Rjéoutski, and Gesine Argent’s The French Language in Russia,[51] which discuss conservatism in early-nineteenth century Russia and the patriotic reaction against the Francophile cosmopolitan elite at court. Conservative military figures and statesmen like Aleksandr Semenovich Shishkov, Gavrila Derzhavin, and Fyodor Rostopchin played a crucial role in the run-up to the 1812 war and 1814 Congress of Vienna, and kept the Tsar’s actions after Tilsit in check. Shishkov stressed patriotism and Christianity through his literary society Beseda Liubitelei Russkogo Slova (Society of the Lovers of the Russian Word, 1801-1817). Derzhavin hosted the literary evenings of the society, which were attended by many Russian statesmen and the high nobility.[52] Antiliberal views permeated Russian high society (Ekaterina Pavlovna was a great supporter), and Rostopchin became known for reactionary gallophobic pamphlets with titles like Okh Frantsuzy! (Oh, the French!).[53]
The claim that “Tsar Alexander’s opinions of peace, historians tend to agree, were cultivated by ideas of enlightenment and Genevan republicans” (84) is questionable in light of the internal criticism Alexander I was confronted with after 1807 and which influenced his decision-making. Although Alexander had surrounded himself with liberal compagnons de route at the outset of his reign, he could no longer ignore these conservative forces by the time Napoleon posed a threat. Both Shishkov and Rostopchin were appointed in key positions by the tsar in 1812. Sluga briefly mentions Shishkov merely as Tsar Alexander’s “secretary,” but actually Shishkov was State Secretary and replaced the liberal Michael Speransky at a crucial moment, in April 1812 (until 1814).[54] Rostopchin was appointed governor of Moscow in May 1812, and is rumored to have given the order to burn the city during Napoleon’s invasion of the empire.[55] The absence of a discussion of this Russian internal perspective, and how this patriotic conservatism had come to affect the tsar’s decisions by1812, results in a more liberal depiction of the Russian tsar than is warranted.
The second issue concerns the rather strange representation of a link between Tsar Alexander’s purported “effeminacy” (54), his “preference for discussing politics with ladies” (55), and the influence of de Staël on his liberalism (35-36) and de Krüdener on the text of the Holy Alliance (202-205). On the basis of Danish Foreign Minister Niels Rosenkrantz’s diary from the Congress of Vienna, Sluga further claims that the tsar’s “critics, particularly those from rival states […] took the tsar’s allegedly compromised masculinity as emblematic of his Russian-ness” (55), a statement which is not clarified or corroborated by additional references or quotes. Later on in the book Sluga returns to this topic, claiming a bit bewilderingly that “enemies depicted the Holy Alliance text as […] a manifestation of the tsar’s overly emotional feminized self” (181). Sluga often stresses importance of Stourdza and de Krüdener in the origination of the Holy Alliance, but omits the clear link with crucial elite figures in Saint Petersburg and Moscow like Joseph de Maistre (who largely ignored in the book and misspelled Le Maistre on 180) or (as mentioned above) Rostopchin and Shishkov. Sergei Uvarov, who had been a diplomat in Vienna and later became famous as the author of the Russian triad of “autocracy, orthodoxy, patriotism,” is another influential figure in Saint Petersburg society who is not discussed in the book.[56]
The Holy Alliance text, which the book depicts as a creation of Krüdener and the Russian sovereign’s exalted spiritualism, could have been situated within Russia’s internal politics and mainstream Russian conservatism, where it also found its origins. In this light, the text is perfectly in line with the average patriotic discourse that one would find in speeches at the Beseda meetings discussed above and could for example have been compared to Alexander Shishkov’s text O liubvi k otechestvu (On the love of the Fatherland).[57] Shishkov read this text during an 1811 meeting of the Beseda literary society and was afterwards congratulated by the tsar himself, who found the document inspiring.[58] The parallels between the values discussed in this text and that of the Holy Alliance are striking.
Conversely, the book overestimates Germaine de Staël’s connection with the tsar and her popularity in Russia. Sluga’s discussion of de Staël’s correspondence and machinations to form an anti-Napoleonic coalition in Europe rightfully places her among other diplomats and nemeses of Bonaparte, like Friedrich Gentz and Pozzo di Borgo, who similarly worked tirelessly and sent the same type of letters all over their networks in Europe. Sluga describes the “German patriot” Heinrich Friedrich Karl vom und zum Stein as transfixed and “moved to tears” by de Staël’s recitation of De l’Allemagne during her visit to Russia in 1812 (34), but this does not mean that Stein, who served as an advisor to Alexander on foreign policy and German affairs, took her political views seriously. In March 1813, Stein wrote to Sergei Uvarov that de Staël had asked him in a letter to report her conversation with Crown Prince Bernadotte to the tsar, but he doubted the value of her information, adding: “I’d rather have Madame de Staël limit herself to literature, and not interfere in politics. In any case, I have no interest at all to become mixed up in her politics.”[59] Staël was met with criticism by other important figures like Fyodor Rostopchin, who ridiculed the fact that she went on incessantly about her fear about Napoleon drawing near and made it sound like Bonaparte had personally sent the cavalry after her, continually repeating that he “had no idea what that man was capable of.”[60] Since Napoleon was still “800 verst away” from Moscow at that time (the verst being Russia’s unit of length at the time), Rostopchin found de Staël’s character too dramatic, and her presence in Moscow a nuisance. De Staël moreover was snubbed altogether by the Russian diplomats she had previously encountered in Vienna in 1807, including Sergei Uvarov, who did not even bother to reply to her many letters as she tried to arrange a meeting in Saint Petersburg.[61]
This brings me to a third and last minor comment, about the longevity of narratives. In the introduction, Sluga convincingly argues for the inclusion of women and other marginalized non-state actors in the history of international relations (5-7). In this sense, it is important not only to look beyond the Congress of Vienna, but also to stress the importance of studying more in detail the foreshadowing of Napoleon’s Russian invasion. Did pre-Vienna diplomacy start with the Sixth Coalition (12), or is it the product of a longer strategic narrative that originates and took form in the first decade of the nineteenth century? If sociability played such a role, should we also not take into account the conservative and anti-Napoleonic networks that formed in the early 1800s in Vienna (in which the prince de Ligne, Andrey Razumovsky, Gentz, de Staël, Pozzo di Borgo, and Stein were all active) and in Russia (around Shishkov, Ekaterina Pavlovna, Joseph de Maistre, Rostopchin)? In this light, descriptions of Alexander I by de Staël and von Krüdener as the “saviour of Europe” (199) become less exceptional. In 1806 already, de Maistre, who was then a diplomat in Saint Petersburg, wrote that “public opinion from all sides turns to the Emperor of Russia and designates him as the true protector of European freedom…while we die of heat here, everyone counts on a favorable North wind.”[62] That very same year, Friedrich Gentz wrote to Adam Czartoryski: “Russia and England are now the only two countries on which all resources and hopes focus: it’s on them that any man worthy of life must set their eyes, and it’s there that he must recognize his homeland.”[63]
The epilogue of the book, titled “Paradoxes,” is a fascinating and poignant read. Sluga discusses the results of what the Congress of Vienna brought European society. Most importantly, the author points out that some of the paradoxes were the results of the choices that the “heads of great forces” made, not in the least “a version of political modernity that came at a cost to women’s authority and legitimacy as political actors” (270). Sluga’s book is an exceptionally rich study of this “conjunction of political modernity and the political marginalization of women” (270), and, in my opinion, the most valuable contribution that has so far been made to the academic debate on the diplomatic history of the first half of the nineteenth century.
Response by Glenda Sluga, European University Institute; University of Sydney
What is the future of international history? Erik de Lange proposes this question at the end of his keen reading of The Invention of International Order. Given what I have learnt from the H-Diplo discussion of my book, more dialogue and collaboration across areas of regional expertise is a vital part of that future.
When I wrote The Invention of International Order—a study of peacemaking in the wake of the Napoleonic wars—my interest was, as it remains, the long history of how Europe and a handful of European imperial powers assumed authority for the world; who got to “do politics” and “to be political;” what was understood as legitimate terrain of politics; and how that changed (9). As I show, this period saw the expansion of political actors and of political agenda. Into this landscape entered bankers, some of them Jewish, whose roles as war-time credit suppliers to governments and courier systems gained them political access, and their wives and families, as well as the bourgeois and aristocratic women who touted divergent political ambitions, from overtly “liberal,” to anxiously “conservative.”
The reviewers have taken my aims and arguments in fascinating directions. Lien Verpoest’s deep knowledge of Russian history adds nuance and new information to my own assessment of the importance of Russia’s influence at this crucial moment of Europe’s past (invoked by Russian President Vladimir Putin himself in a short-lived phase when he strategized the political capital of Alexander I’s European leadership). For thematic as well as practical reasons, I focused on using the changing status of the Tsar, and how he was perceived by others: from evocations of his role as a liberal emancipator, to the anti-Russian orientalism invoked by his allies, and then French thinker Germaine de Staël’s attempts to defuse attacks on Russia’s difference through her writing. I wanted to track Russia’s shift from the center to the margins of Europe as a somehow common political, social, cultural, and even economic space. Then there is what we learn about Europe’s other statesmen, whether the Austrian chancellor Prince Metternich or the British foreign secretary Lord Castlereagh, as they disparaged the Tsar’s too friendly behavior with women, and about the political thinking of Russian aristocratic women who criticised him for being too liberal, or even too weak. In the main I relied on published primary sources, as well as the secondary material Verpoest mentions.
Verpoest is right too to point out the uncomfortable position which the exceptional Germaine de Staël often negotiated as a woman, despite her wealth and the recognition of her genius: she engaged in politics, and simultaneously denied her political agency; she received European-wide acclaim, and found herself resented. My concern was to understand her agency, its limits, how contemporaries viewed her, and what this tells us about the importance of cultural and gendered norms in the dictation of political behavior: who got to do politics and how. The insights of both Jennifer Mori and Verpoest also reinforce my contention that even if aristocratic women’s diplomatic agency was diminished in the course of the invention of the international order, there was no ideal ancien order in which women acted with impunity, just as there was no modern order in which women’s formalized exclusion prevented them from being political.
Does my interest in “adding” women and “stirring” render this an intersectional history?[64] De Lange suggests this potential framing. I am grateful for the provocation, and wonder if more radical accounts than my own might embed international history in the entangled classed, raced, and especially gendered national histories we know much better. At this moment, however, as the reviews inadvertently remind us, simply adding women to the international past remains a surprising and unusual venture.
When I started thinking about this project, I was motivated by the confusion of historical claims that hover over this period regarding both the fate of conservatism and liberalism, and the relative status of cosmopolitanism and nationalism. As an historian who has long been critical of the presumptions about the naturalness of difference (national and gender difference in particular) that have guided how we write about the European past, I saw a historiography that often took for granted the inevitability of nationalism as modern and liberal, and women as either irrelevant or as sexualized actors. I resisted putting ‘women’ in the title of the book precisely because I wanted to normalize their presence in the political past, where they have always been. It is the male historians who dominate the field who have rendered these women invisible. When Harold Nicolson authored his history of diplomacy, he objected almost too strenuously that diplomacy had nothing to do with salons.[65] By contrast, I argue that once we add women to this history, it is absolutely clear that the salon was the heart of diplomacy, until the modern era, and after.
Do I differ with these reviewers on any points? Only really with Ambrogio Caiani’s reading of the field and where it is going; indeed, I interpret it as symptomatic of the methodological problem I am trying to unknot. He dissects my book’s place in the historiography of this period by describing the male historians who define the field and the women who then enter belatedly. While that may hold as a general observation of the gendering of international history, it does not account for his specific summation of my contribution as a synthesis or distilling of men’s labor (as useful as syntheses can be). Certainly, I have tried to build on what has gone before, most significantly, Paul W. Schroeder’s important conceptualization of peacemaking history as the Transformation of European Politics.[66] However, unlike Schroeder, my point is precisely the wider world of agents, and sites of politics, the expansion of actors and issues, and institutions, and their often paradoxical fates.
Brian Vick and I found ourselves thinking about the Congress of Vienna and its women, and political culture in these broader ways, at the same time.[67] As I mention in the book’s introduction, I believe that our coinciding interests, arrived at from different subfield perspectives, is evidence of a post-cultural history geist that has taken us, independently, and in response to very different historical questions, in intersecting field-redefining directions. In my own case, as a result of this research, I am more convinced than ever of the importance of studying the often unpredictable ways in which the political and institutional instruments of international ordering both generated and inhibited the politics between states. I am no adherent of the idea of an intrinsically liberal international order; rather, I am an historian of the use humans have made of its potential, for better and for worse. Some of these humans were women, sometimes they were self-consciously liberal, at other times vehemently conservative. Together, they also changed history.
Finally, thank you, H-Diplo, for reminding me that the future of international history now rests increasingly with scholars who bring Europeans into deep conversation with the non-European world. This includes de Lange, whose draft manuscript was so useful to me in the later chapters,[68] and Ozan Ozavci, whose book on Ottoman diplomacy came out only after mine was in production.[69] The outputs of these thoughtful historians reflect, like the work of Verpoest, the extent to which the Netherlands has become a hub of nineteenth-century scholarship at the intersection of international history and international politics. This is not least because of the influence of Beatrice de Graaf, another crucial interlocutor when I was writing.[70] There are many things we agree on, including, I would venture, that in the future, historians, male and female, should find it normal to study women as political actors, just as they should consider economic actors part of political history. The result might be more intersectional histories. Or, even, more international histories of politics and democracy that challenge the premise that individuals only think about politics within states, or that advances in political culture area always national and the international is purely the space of states, or statesmen.
[1] The debate is discussed in, for example, Katherine B. Aaslestad, “Review: Serious Work for a New Europe: The Congress of Vienna after Two Hundred Years,” Central European History 48: 2 (2015): 225-237.
[2] See, for example, Paul Schroeder, The Transformation of European Politics 1763-1848 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994).
[3] See, for example, Sheldon Anderson, “Metternich, Bismarck, and the Myth of the Long Peace, 1815-1914,” Peace and Change, 32:3 (2007): 301-328; Korina Kagan, “The Myth of the European Concert: The Realist-Institutionalist Debate and Great Power Behavior in the Eastern Question, 1821-41,” Security Studies 7:2 (1997/98): 1-57.
[4] Glenda Sluga, “On the Historical Significance of the Presence, and Absence, of Women at the Congress of Vienna, 1814–1815,” L’Homme 25:2 (2014): 49–62; Sluga, “Madame de Stael and the Transformation of European Politics, 1812-1817,” International History Review 37:1 (2015): 142–166; Sluga, “Who Hold the Balance of the World? Bankers at the Congress of Vienna and the in International History,” AHR Forum (December 2017): 1403–1430; Christine Haynes, Our Friends the Enemies: The Occupation of France after Napoleon (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018).
[5] Brian Vick, The Congress of Vienna: Power and Politics after Napoleon (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014).
[6] Stella Ghervas, “The Long Shadow of the Congress of Vienna: From International Peace to Domestic Disorders,” Journal of Modern European History 13:4 (2015): 458–463; Ghervas, Conquering Peace: From the Enlightenment to the European Union (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021); see the H-Diplo roundtable on Conquering Peace at https://issforum.org/roundtables/PDF/Roundtable-XXIV-23.pdf; Marieke de Goede, European Security Culture: Preemption and Precaution in European Security. Inaugural lecture University of Amsterdam (Amsterdam: Vossius Press, 2011); Beatrice de Graff, Fighting Terror After Napoleon: How Europe Became Secure after 1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020); Beatrice de Graaf, and Cornell Zwierlein. “Historicizing Security—Entering the Conspiracy Dispositive,” Historical Social Research, 38:1, 2013): 46-64; and De Graaf, Ido de Haan, and Brian Vick (eds.), Securing Europe after Napoleon: 1815 and the New Security Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019); Matthias Schulz, “The Construction of a Culture of Peace in Post-Napoleonic Europe: Peace through Equilibrium, Law and New Forms of Communicative Interaction,” Journal of Modern European History, 13:4 (2015): 464-474.
[7] Mlada Bukavansky, Edward Keene, Christian Reus-Smit, and Maja Spanu, “Introduction” in Bukavansky, Keene, Reus-Smit, and Spanu, eds., Oxford Handbook on History and International Relations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming); Glenda Sluga and Carolyn Jones, eds., Women, Diplomacy and International Politics since 1500 (London: Routledge, 2016).
[8] Paul Schroeder, The Transformation of European Politics, 1763-1848 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994).
[9] Adom Getachew, “Universalism After the Post-Colonial Turn: Interpreting the Haitian Revolution,” Political Theory 44:6 (2016): 821–845.
[10] Karen J. Warren, “Rewriting the Future: The Feminist Challenge to the Malestream Curriculum,” Feminist Teacher 4: 2/3 (1989): 46-52.
[11] Jean-Baptiste Capefigue, Le congrès de Vienne dans ses rapports avec la circonscription actuelle de l’Europe (Paris: Au comptoir des imprimeurs unis, 1847); Albert Sorel, L’Europe et la Révolution française, t. VIII, (Paris: Plon, 1904); Charles Webster, The Congress of Vienna (London: Published by H.M. Stationary Office, 1920); Guglielmo Ferrero, The Reconstruction of Europe: Talleyrand and the Congress of Vienna, 1814–1815 (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1941); Harold Nicholson, The Congress of Vienna: A Study in Allied Unity, 1812–1822 (London: Constable, 1946); Henry Kissinger, A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace, 1812–1822 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957); and Paul W. Schroeder, The Transformation of European Politics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994).
[12] Brian E. Vick, The Congress of Vienna: Power and Politics after Napoleon (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014).
[13] Munro Price, Napoleon: The End of Glory (Oxford, 2014).
[14] Mark Jarrett, The Congress of Vienna and its Legacy: War and Great Power Diplomacy after Napoleon (London, 2013).
[15] Miroslav Šedivý, Crisis Among the Great Powers: The Concert of Europe and the Eastern Question (London: Bloomsbury, 2016); Pierre Caquet, The Orient, the Liberal Movement, and the Eastern Crisis of 1839-1841 (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2016).
[16] Miroslav Šedivý, The Decline of the Congress System: Metternich, Italy and European Diplomacy (London: I.B. Tauris, 2018).
[17] John Bew, Castlereagh, from Enlightenment to Tyranny (London: Quercus, 2011); Wolfram Siemann, Metternich, Strategist and Visionary (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019).
[18] Beatrice de Graaf, Fighting Terror after Napoleon, How Europe Became Secure after 1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020); & Christine Haynes, Our Friends the Enemies: The Occupation of France after Napoleon (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018).
[19] Stella Ghervas, Conquering Peace, From the Enlightenment to the European Union (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021); & Maartje Abbenhuis, An Age of Neutrals: Great Power Politics, 1815–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).
[20] Jennifer Mitzen, Power in Concert, The Nineteenth-Century Origins of Global Governance (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2013).
[21] Jacques Droz, Europe between Revolutions 1815-1848 (New York: Harper & Row, 1967); Adam Zamoyski, Rites of Peace: The Fall of Napoleon & the Congress of Vienna (New York: Harper, 2007).
[22] Glenda Sluga, Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism (Pennsylvania, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013).
[23] Mark Mazower, The Greek Revolution: 1821 and the Making of Modern Europe (London: Penguin Press, 2021).
[24] For instance, Maartje Abbenhuis, An Age of Neutrals: Great Power Politics, 1815-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Beatrice de Graaf, Fighting Terror after Napoleon: How Europe Became Secure after 1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020); Jennifer Mitzen, Power in Concert: The Nineteenth-Century Origins of Global Governance (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2013); and Matthias Schulz, Normen und Praxis: Das Europäische Konzert der Groβmächte als Sicherheitsrat 1815-1860 (München: Oldenbourg, 2009).
[25] Most recently, Glenda Sluga, “From F. Melian Stawell to E. Greene Balch: International and Internationalist Thinking at the Gender Margins, 1919–1947,” in Patricia Owens and Katharina Rietzler (eds.), Women’s International Thought: A New History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 223–243.
[26] Brian E. Vick, The Congress of Vienna: Power and Politics after Napoleon (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), as well as the relevant essays collected in Matthijs Lok, Friedemann Pestel, and Juliette Reboul, eds., Cosmopolitan Conservatisms: Countering Revolution in Transnational Networks, Ideas and Movements (c. 1700‒1930) (Leiden: Brill, 2021).
[27] David Todd, “A French Imperial Meridian, 1814-1870,” Past & Present 210 (2011): 155–186, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtq063; Ozan Ozavci, Dangerous Gifts: Imperialism, Security, and Civil Wars in the Levant, 1798-1864 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021).
[28] [Franz Tidemann], Wass könnte für Europa in Wien geschehen? Beantwortet durch einen Deutschen (n.p. 1814).
[29] The National Archives, Kew (TNA), FO 139/41, ‘Protocol no. 25,’ Aix-la-Chapelle 07-11-1818, with annexes attached, fp. 209-246.
[30] Erik de Lange, “The Congress System and the French Invasion of Algiers, 1827–1830,” The Historical Journal 64:4 (2021): 940-962, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X2000062X.
[31] Mark Jarrett, The Congress of Vienna and Its Legacy: War and Great Power Diplomacy after Napoleon (London & New York: I.B. Tauris, 2013); Brian Vick, The Congress of Vienna: Power and Politics after Napoleon (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014); Vick, Ido de Haan, and Beatrice de Graaf, eds., Securing Europe after Napoleon: 1815 and the New Security Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019); Stella Ghervas, Securing Europe after Napoleon. 1815 and the New European Security Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019) and Conquering Peace: From Enlightenment to the European Union (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021), Chapter 2.
[32] Adam Zamoyski, The Rites of Peace: The Fall of Napoleon and the Congress of Vienna (London: Harper Press, 2007), 569.
[33] Vick, Congress of Vienna, 2.
[34] Vick, Congress of Vienna, 144-146, 141-143, 202-203, and Vick, “Power, Humanitarianism and the Global Liberal Order: Abolition and the Barbary Corsairs in the Vienna Congress System,” International History Review, 40:4 (2018): 939-60.
[35] Vick, Congress of Vienna, 332-333.
[36] Sluga with Barbara Caine, eds. Gendering European History, 1780-1920 (London & New York: Leicester University Press, 2000); Sluga with Carolyn James, eds. Women, Diplomacy and International Politics since 1500 (Abingdon & New York: Routledge, 2016).
[37] Sluga, “Mme. de Staël and the Transformation of European Politics, 1812–1817,” International History Review 37:1 (2015): 142-166.
[38] Angelica Gooden, Madame de Staël: The Dangerous Exile (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Biancamaria Fontana, Germaine de Staël: A Political Portrait (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016).
[39] Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters. A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994); Hilary Brown and Gillian Dow, eds. Readers, Writers, Salonnières. Female Networks in Europe, 1700-1900 (New York: Peter Lang, 2011); Robert Darnton, The Forbidden Bestsellers of Pre-Revolutionary France (New York & London: W.W. Norton, 1995).
[40] Georges Solovieff, Rahel Varnhagen: Une revoltée féministe à l’époque romantique (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2000); Shirley Ardener and Hillary Callan, The Incorporated Wife (London: Croom Helm, 1983).
[41] Zamoyski, Rites of Peace, 308-12.
[42] Priscilla Zamoyska, Arch-Intriguer: A Biography of Dorothea de Lieven (London: Heinemann, 1957); John Charmley, The Princess and the Politicians: Sex, Intrigue and Diplomacy (London: Viking, 2005); Judith Lissauer Cromwell, Dorothea Lieven: A Russian Princess in London and Paris, 1785-1857 (Jefferson: McFarland & Co., 2007).
[43] Sluga, “Passions, Patriotism, and Nationalism, and Germaine de Staël,” Nations and Nationalism, 15:2 (2009): 299-318; William M. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling. A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
[44] Sluga, “ʻWho Hold the Balance of the World?ʼ Bankers at the Congress of Vienna, and in International History,” American Historical Review, 122:5 (2017): 1403-1430. See also “Chapter 15: Economic Insecurity, ʻSecuritiesʼ and a European Security Culture after the Napoleonic Wars,’ in Securing Europe: 288-305.
[45] Egon Corti, The Rise of the House of Rothschild (London: Victor Gollancz, 1928); Niall Ferguson, The House of Rothschild: Money’s Prophets, 1798-1848 (New York: Viking, 1998), 173; Philip Ziegler, The Sixth Great Power: A History of One of the Greatest of All Banking Families, the House of Barings, 1762-1929 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988).
[46] Joan Scott, Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1996).
[47] Brian Vick, Congress of Vienna: Power and Politics After Napoleon (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), and Beatrice de Graaf, Fighting Terror after Napoleon: How Europe Became Secure after 1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).
[48] Jasper Heinzen, “Transnational Affinities and Invented Traditions: The Napoleonic Wars in British and Hanoverian Memory, 1815–1915,” The English Historical Review 127:529 (2012): 1407–1408.
[49] Heinzen, “Transnational Affinities and Invented Traditions.”
[50] Glenda Sluga, Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013); Sluga and Patricia Clavin, eds., Internationalisms: A Twentieth-Century History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017) and Sluga, “Remembering 1919: International Organizations and the Future of International Order,” International Affairs 95:1 (2019): 25–43.
[51] Alexander M. Martin, Romantics, Reformers, Reactionaries: Russian Conservative Thought and Politics in the Reign of Alexander I (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 1997); and Derek Offord, Vladislav Rjéoutski, and Gesine Argent, The French Language in Russia: A Social, Political, Cultural, and Literary History (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018).
[52] Martin, Romantics, Reformers, Reactionaries, 294.
[53] Fyodor Vasilevich Rostopchin, Okh Frantsuzy! (Moskva: Russkaia Kniga, 1992).
[54] David Christian, “The Political Ideals of Michael Speransky,” Slavonic and East European Review 54:2 (1976): 192–213.
[55] Derek Offord, Vladislav Rjéoutski, and Gesine Argent, The French Language in Russia..
[56] Andrei Zorin, “The Cherished Triad: S.S. Uvarov’s Memorandum of 1832 and the Development of the Doctrine Orthodoxy – Autocracy – Nationality” in Andrei Zorin, ed., By Fables Alone: Literature and State Ideology in Late Eighteenth andEearly Nineteenth-Century Russia, trans. Marcus Levitt (Brighton, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2014).
[57] А. Шишковъ. Разсужденіе о любви къ Отечеству. // Чтеніе въ Бесѣдѣ любителей Рускаго слова. Книжка пятая. (СПб.: Въ Медицинской Типографіи, 1812). [A. Shshkov. Razsuzhdenie o liubvi k otechestvu. // Chtenia v Besede liubitelei Ruskago slova. Knizhka piataia (SPB.: V Meditsinskoi Tipografii, 1812)].
[58] Martin, Romantics, Reformers, Reactionaries, 294.
[59] Baron Vom und Zum Stein to Sergej Uvarov, Kalisz, 28 March 1813, Arkhiv S.S. Uvarova, GIM.
[60] Sergey Nikolaevich Durylin, “Gospozha de Stal’ i ee russkie otnosheniia,” Literaturnoe Nasledstvo, 33–34 (Moskva: 1939), 268.
[61] Durylin, “Gospozha de Stal’ i ee russkie otnosheniia.”
[62] “Il est certain que [l’]opinion se tourne de tout côté vers l’Empereur de Russie et qu’elle le désigne comme le véritable protecteur de la liberté Européenne. (…) Nous mourons ici de chaleur, mais chacun compte sur un vent favorable du Nord,” dated 12 Octobre 1806, in de Maistre, Oeuvres Complètes, Correspondance II 1806-1807, tôme dixième (Lyon: Vitte et Perrussel, 1885), 219–222.
[63] “La Russie et l’Angleterre sont maintenant les deux seuls pays, qui concentrent toutes les ressources et toutes les espérances de l’Europe; c’est sur eux, que tout homme, digne de vivre, doit fixer ses yeux; c’est-là qu’il doit reconnoitre sa patrie.” Letter by Friedrich Von Gentz to Prince Adam Jerzy Czartoryski, Gentz; Czartoryski, Teplitz, 27– 30 October 1806. National Museum, Krakow. Czartoryski-Library, Manuscript Department, 5534 III, Bl. 25-61 1806.
[64] Glenda Sluga, “Add Women and Stir: Gender and the History of International Politics,” Humanities Australia 5 (2014): 65–72.
[65] Harold Nicolson, The Congress of Vienna: A Study in Allied Unity, 1812–1822 (New York: Grove Press, 1946), 159.
[66] See Sluga, “Madame de Staël and the Transformation of European Politics, 1812–1817,” International History Review 37:1 (2015): 142–166.
[67] Brian Vick, The Congress of Vienna: Power and Politics after Napoleon (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014).
[68] The manuscript builds on de Lange’s doctoral work: Erik de Lange, “Menacing Tides. Security, Piracy and Empire in the Nineteenth-Century Mediterranean,” PhD diss., Utrecht University 2020.
[69] Ozan Ozavci, Dangerous Gifts: Imperialism, Security, and Civil Wars in the Levant, 1798–1864 (Oxford University Press, 2021).
[70] Among other publications, see Beatrice de Graaf, Fighting Terror after Napoleon: How Europe Became Secure after 1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).