European Reunion: Making a Lasting Peace at the Congress of Vienna

Following Napoleon's first defeat in 1814 and the subsequent Peace of Paris, European rulers and statesmen converged on Vienna in order to complete the task of Europe's reconstruction. This talk will trace the interplay between the social and cultural exchanges at the Congress of Vienna and the diplomacy, suggesting in this way the role of "influence politics" alongside power politics, amid a much wider range of political actors, male and female, governmental and non-governmental. The talk will also outline the efforts to construct a lasting framework for peace that could stave off both international conflict and revolution, distinguishing between crisis management and crisis prevention, and highlighting the nature of the international system, the constitutional settlements, and the concern for public opinion from 1815 through the 1830s.

Brian Vick is Professor of History at Emory University. He is the author of essays on German nationalism, historicism, and ideas of race, and of the books Defining Germany: The 1848 Frankfurt Parliamentarians and National Identity (Harvard University Press, 2002), and The Congress of Vienna: Power and Politics after Napoleon (Harvard University Press, 2014; winner of the 2015 Hans Rosenberg Prize of the Central European History Society of the American Historical Association).