Section 11: Italy (1815–1871) and Germany (1815–1890)

The Congress of Vienna met from September 1814 to June 1815, bringing together the great powers of Europe -- Austria, Russia, Prussia, Britain, and eventually a restored France -- in the aftermath of Napoleon's defeat. Chaired diplomatically by the Austrian foreign minister Klemens von Metternich, the Congress was not simply a punitive settlement against France; it was a deliberate attempt to construct a lasting, conservative order for the whole continent. Its architects wanted three interlocking things: to restore legitimate monarchies toppled by revolution and Napoleonic conquest, to contain France within a ring of stronger neighbouring states so it could never again dominate Europe, and to prevent any single power from achieving the kind of hegemony Napoleonic France had briefly enjoyed. This is the background context for the entire prescribed period of Italian and German history from 1815 onward: the settlement created the political map -- and the political problem -- that nationalists and liberals would spend the next half-century trying to undo.

For Italy, the settlement meant a return to fragmentation: instead of any move toward unity, the peninsula was carved back into separate states, with Austria's direct control of Lombardy and Venetia giving Vienna a decisive say over Italian affairs generally. For the German lands, the settlement replaced the defunct Holy Roman Empire with the loose German Confederation, a body of 39 states presided over by Austria but with no real central government, army, or common law -- unity in name only. In both cases, the Congress prioritized restoring dynastic control and Austrian influence over any recognition of the nationalist and liberal sentiment that Napoleonic rule had, paradoxically, helped stir up across Italy and Germany. This is the direct link to the rest of the prescribed period: the revolutions of the 1820s-1848, the rise of figures such as Mazzini and the Carbonari in Italy, and the eventual unification movements led by Cavour, Garibaldi, and Bismarck are all reactions against the settlement fixed at Vienna in 1815.

When the Congress of Vienna convened in September 1814, the assembled powers -- Austria, Russia, Prussia, and Britain, alongside a restored France -- faced the urgent problem of preventing another two decades of French-driven war. Their solution regarding France was twofold: territorial reduction and dynastic restoration.

France was stripped of the extensive territorial gains made under the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars and returned to its 1792 borders, the boundaries that existed before French revolutionary armies had begun their campaigns of conquest across the Rhineland, the Low Countries, and Italy. This meant France lost all annexed territories acquired between 1792 and 1815, undoing more than twenty years of military expansion in a single diplomatic stroke.

Alongside this territorial reduction, the great powers restored the Bourbon monarchy, placing Louis XVIII (brother of the executed Louis XVI) on the French throne. This was central to the Congress's broader philosophy of legitimacy: overthrown royal dynasties across Europe were to be returned to their thrones wherever possible, reversing the revolutionary and Napoleonic disruption to the old dynastic order.

This background settlement for France sits within the same 1815 Congress that reorganized Italy into fragmented states under Austrian influence and grouped the German states into the loose German Confederation -- the wider context for Italian and German developments after 1815.

As part of the settlement negotiated at the Congress of Vienna (1814–1815), the victorious powers sought to prevent France from ever again threatening the peace of Europe. One of the central strategies for achieving this was to ring France with strengthened neighbouring states, so that no future French government could easily expand outward. On France's northern frontier, this meant merging two territories that had very different histories, religions, and languages into a single kingdom.

The United Kingdom of the Netherlands was created by joining the former Austrian Netherlands (roughly modern Belgium) with the Dutch Republic under a single monarch, King William I of Orange. This new kingdom was intended to be large and militarily capable enough to resist any renewed French aggression, functioning as a buffer state—a state positioned deliberately between two larger or more powerful rivals to absorb pressure and prevent direct confrontation. In this case, the buffer sat between France and the German states, reinforcing the broader Vienna settlement's aim of surrounding France with stronger, consolidated neighbours (a strategy also visible in the reorganization of the German Confederation to Austria's advantage).

However, this arrangement created serious internal tensions from the outset. The southern (Belgian) provinces were predominantly Catholic and largely French-speaking or Flemish-speaking, with an economy increasingly oriented toward early industrialization, while the northern (Dutch) provinces were predominantly Protestant, Dutch-speaking, and commercially oriented around trade and shipping. William I's government favoured Dutch political and administrative dominance, provoking resentment among Belgian elites who felt under-represented despite Belgium's larger population. These tensions eventually contributed to the Belgian Revolution of 1830, which split the union apart and led to Belgian independence—an event outside the 1815–1848 focus of this settlement, but one that illustrates how the Congress of Vienna's balance-of-power priorities could override genuine popular consent, a pattern that also shaped the failed nationalist revolutions of 1848 in Italy and Germany.

The Polish question was one of the most contested issues facing the diplomats at the Congress of Vienna (1814–1815). Napoleon had created the Duchy of Warsaw out of former Polish lands, and after his defeat the great powers had to decide its fate. Tsar Alexander I of Russia pressed hard to absorb most of these territories, and despite objections from Austria, Prussia, and Britain (who feared excessive Russian expansion into Central Europe), a compromise was reached: the bulk of the former Duchy of Warsaw became the 'Congress Kingdom' of Poland, formally attached to the Russian Empire under the Tsar, who also held the separate title of King of Poland.

Crucially, the Congress Kingdom was granted a degree of limited autonomy: it retained its own constitution, a separate administration, and even its own army, distinct from the rest of the Russian Empire. This was not genuine independence — the Tsar remained the ultimate sovereign and reserved the right to override Polish institutions — but it distinguished the kingdom from territories directly incorporated into Russia, Prussia, or Austria (which had also each retained smaller shares of partitioned Polish land from the eighteenth-century partitions, outside the scope of the 1815 settlement itself).

This arrangement is a clear example of how the Congress of Vienna's broader logic operated across Europe: territory was reassigned not according to the wishes of the people living there, but to satisfy the security concerns and rivalries of the great powers. Just as Austria was rewarded with Lombardy and Venetia to secure its dominance in Italy, and the German states were loosely bound into a Confederation under Austrian leadership to prevent any single power from dominating Central Europe, Russia's gain of most of Poland extended its western frontier and increased its influence in Eastern Europe while denying any other power the chance to control that strategically important territory. The arrangement satisfied the Congress's overriding aim of maintaining a balance of power, even though — as with Italy and Germany — it ignored the national aspirations of the Polish people themselves.