The period of European history immediately after Napoleon's demise is often caricatured as the Age of Restoration—a disappointing bookend to the world historical Age of Revolution that preceded it. In the words of U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, these years witnessed a “reactionary and shortsighted” defense of an old imperial order against “the emerging ‘liberal spirit of the age’” (quoted on p. 3). Glenda Sluga's study of the invention of international order presents a fascinating and richly variegated portrait of the political and cultural history of this underappreciated and profoundly transformative era.
Sluga's book builds on the findings of recent works by Paul Schroeder, Beatrice de Graaf, Mark Jarrett, Brian Vick, and others, who in recent decades have led a reassessment of the politics and diplomacy of the post-Napoleonic era. In Schroeder's judgment, this period witnessed a metamorphosis of “the governing rules, norms, and practices of international politics” that proved more significant than the 1789 French Revolution itself (The Transformation of European Politics, 1763-1848 [1994], 803). Sluga expands the field of view to emphasize the multiple dimensions of international order, including issues such as the hardening of bourgeois gender norms, the institutionalization of international finance, the shifting relations between European powers and their colonies, the tensions between universalist and Christian moral codes, and the birth of modern humanitarianism.
The book's focal point is the series of diplomatic congresses and conferences from Paris and Vienna (1814-1815) to Verona (1822), at which continental leaders mapped out their vision for the Concert of Europe and a new “society of states” in Europe to secure international peace. During this “moment of modern possibility,” writes Sluga, “the borders between forward- and backward-looking political imaginaries” were blurred (282, 267). This political fluidity “encouraged the engagement of a broader community of non-state actors than historians have tended to notice; these actors engaged new political possibilities in unprecedented ways, to diverse ends.” Yet paradoxically, the events of these years culminated in “the official exclusion of women's political engagement in this international sphere and, eventually, a civilizational ordering that reinforced the interests of a few imperial powers and the conflation of Europe and international society” (282).
Sluga's narrative brings to the fore the stories of a wide range of unofficial participants in the “informal sociability of postwar congressing” (6), including networks of banker and capitalist families along with influential women such as Germaine de Staël and Rahel Varnagen who played pivotal roles as salonnières (hosts of social events) or ambassadrices (wives of ambassadors). The book's whimsical dust-cover illustration of dancing princes at the 1815 Congress of Vienna offers the first hint of the interpretive surprises to come. The image of Vienna as a “dancing congress” is often invoked to depict “the end of the Napoleonic wars as the restoration of pre-revolutionary political values, aristocratic indulgence, and dissipation” (138). Sluga turns this stereotype of Old Regime debauchery on its head, asserting that the informal sociability of the post-Napoleonic congresses facilitated an outpouring of creative energy that enabled the imagination of new possibilities for political and diplomatic relations within the “society of states.”
Preeminent among the figures discussed in the book is the salonnière Staël, nemesis to Napoleon, of whom it was written that “of whom Victorine Chastenay wrote that ‘in Europe one had to count three Great Powers: England, Russia, and Madame de Staël’” (27). After Napoleon's invasion of Russia in 1812, Staël's diplomatic efforts played an indispensable role in weaving together the coalition of European powers that defeated him. At the Paris peace conference of 1814, Staël railed against the slave trade and persuaded Tsar Alexander to promise the abolition of serfdom in Russia. The conversations in her Parisian salon mapped out a vision of “a liberal cosmopolitan-national Europe” with “constitutional guarantees against abuses of political power and in defense of freedom of religion, press, and association,” along with “parliamentary institutions on the British model” and “a thriving public sphere” (113-114). Staël's 1814 Parisian gatherings would be “the last such celebrated salon in the new model of peacemaking,” as the cosmopolitan sociability of the Enlightenment era gave way to “the rise of national diplomats and a masculine bureaucratic sociability” (113, 24).
Each of the book's sixteen chapters is devoted to a specific theme, such as “Diplomacy,” “Public and Private,” “Multilateralism,” “Science,” “Religion,” “Credit and Commerce,” “Humanity,” and “History.” The study's eclectic and sweeping scope makes it difficult to discern a clear interpretive throughline. Instead of advancing a central overarching argument about the political and cultural transformations of the post-Napoleonic era, Sluga highlights a series of paradoxes and questions that are as germane “at our own moment of unmoored, uncertain transformation, on the cusp of losing the ‘international order’ as we know it,” as they were two centuries ago: “What and whom” does the international order serve (282), and how can this concept expand rather than constrict the horizon of human freedom?
