Petals in the Storm

Historical Note

Though the Congress of Vienna is well known, the Paris peace conference of 1815 is relatively obscure. Nonetheless, it was a vital event that finally concluded the Napoleonic Wars.

Though I have taken some liberties, the background events of the story are true. Paris in the summer and autumn of 1815 was a hotbed of conspiracies, assassination plots, and political crosscurrents. Lord Castlereagh was indeed kicked by a horse in mid-September, and for some days after, the important meetings took place in his bedchamber at the British embassy.

Both art and Bonapartist political prisoners became topics of great controversy, and the events at the Louvre and the Place du Carrousel are accurately depicted. The French, however, had the last laugh on this; while the final treaty sent the stolen art treasures in Paris home, no one thought to include the many fine works that had been sent to provincial museums.

Some of the top Bonapartist military men were executed, causing outrage throughout Europe. Marshal Michel Ney, "the bravest of the brave," died with great courage before a firing squad. With the aid of three British subjects, another high-ranking officer escaped from prison dressed in his wife's clothes, proving once again that art has nothing over life when it comes to farce.

The Congress of Vienna and the peace settlement of 1815 are sometimes called reactionary because the tsar's nonbinding Holy Alliance is confused with the Quadruple Alliance, which was the actual peace treaty signed on November 20th. It was the Holy Alliance that came to be used as a tool of reactionary forces, while the Quadruple Alliance had one splendid new idea: that in times of future trouble, the great powers would gather together and discuss the situation. This was the seed that flowered into the League of Nations and the United Nations in this century.

The statesmen who engineered the settlement were tough, pragmatic men who sought to have peace in their time, and who had to work with the materials available on a shattered continent. They succeeded better than any of them dreamed of: Europe did not experience another continent-wide conflagration until 1914.

Meanwhile, the British embassy is still housed in the mansion that Wellington bought from Pauline Bonaparte, the Princess Borghese, and I'm told that on great occasions her plate still graces the table.