Political Books

Following Napoleon's defeat and exile in 1814, the future of the European continent hung in the balance. Eager to negotiate a lasting, workable peace, representatives of Britain, Austria, Prussia, and Russia—along with a host of lesser nations—gathered in Vienna for an eight-month-long political carnival, combining negotiations with balls, tournaments, picnics, artistic performances, and other sundry forms of entertainment for the thousands of assembled aristocrats. While the Congress of Vienna resulted in an unprecedented level of European stability, the price of peace would be shockingly high, with many crucial questions ultimately decided on the battlefield or in squalid roadside cottages amid the vagaries of war.

A book about French Exiles in England written from the English perspective.

As its title states, Napoleon and His Collaborators is an attempt to assess the men who made the Napoleonic regime possible. Woloch seeks to explain the success of the Consulate and Empire in attracting a diverse group of Frenchmen to Napoleon's banner. Woloch focuses much of his attention on a few "figures of particular interest": Boulay de la Meurthe, Théophile Berlier, Antione Thibadeau, and Jean-Jacques-Régis Cambacérès.

Leaders from the world's five major diplomatic forces—Great Britain, France, Austria, Prussia and Russia—convened in Vienna in 1814 to found a new order for post-Napoleonic Europe. Historian King (Finding Atlantis) calls it the greatest and most lavish party in history, at which delegates would plot, scheme, jockey for position, and, in short, infuriate each other as they competed in affairs of state and the heart. King covers the diplomatic wrangling well, particularly over the fates of Poland, Saxony and the Kingdom of Naples. His greater strength is in depicting the personalities and motivations of the key players, such as Metternich's daring love affair with a baroness and Czar Alexander I's growing reliance on a German mystic. Despite endless parties, the Congress achieved pioneering work in culture and human rights, including Jewish rights and a vote to abolish slavery. Most important, it established alliances that defeated Napoleon's attempt to regain power in 1815 and helped foster a spirit of cooperation that, in some ways, has still not been surpassed. King's fine work is not quite as scholarly as the book it recalls, Margaret Macmillan's Paris 1919, but it is more deftly paced and engagingly written.

Between 1814 and 1852 Paris was a city of power and pleasure, a magnet for people of all nationalities that exerted an influence far beyond the borders of France. Paris was the stage where the great conflicts of the age, between nationalism and cosmopolitanism, revolution and royalism, socialism and capitalism, atheism and Catholicism, were fought out before the audience of Europe. As a contemporary proverb put it: when Paris sneezes, Europe catches cold. PARIS BETWEEN EMPIRES tells the story of this golden age, from the entry of the allies into Paris on 31 March 1814, after the defeat of Napoleon I, to the proclamation of another Bonaparte, his nephew Louis-Napoleon, as Napoleon III in the Hotel de Ville on 2 December 1852. During those years, Paris, the seat of a new parliamentary government, was a truly cosmopolitan capital, home to Rossini, Heine and Princess Lieven, as well as Berlioz, Chateaubriand and Madame Recamier.