Fighting Terror after Napoleon: How Europe Became Secure after 1815 by Beatrice de Graaf

Abstract

De Graaf’s Fighting Terror After Napoleon joins several recent scholarly studies that collectively transform our understanding of the new international order forged after Napoleon’s overthrow. Unlike most of the others, this one is written much from the perspective of current debates about matters relating to international co-operation and security. Such an approach is both a strength and a weakness. On the downside, it underplays the extent to which the main decision makers in this period—Robert Stewart (Lord Castlereagh), Klemens von Metternich, Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, and Arthur Wellesley (Duke of Wellington)—were products of the Old Regime, shaped by traditions and values that were pre-Revolutionary. More positively, de Graaf makes a strong case for re-habilitating a period not generally associated with innovation.This book makes a compelling case that Napoleon did Europe a great service by escaping from Elba in 1815. Through this act, he ensured himself a second even more resounding defeat, followed by an international military occupation of France that lasted three years. The management of this occupation, by a joint Allied Council under the direction of Wellington, created structures and a culture that contributed to the more peaceful management of European affairs over the longer term. This argument, underpinned by material from archives across the continent, matches common sense: Relationships are best forged through regular and frequent cooperation regarding practical day-to-day management issues in which everyone has a stake.Especially informative is the chapter dealing with French reparation payments to the Allies, which unlike the German case after 1919, encouraged good credit ratings and cooperation. Similarly original is another chapter concerned with international fortress construction. The idea is that the fortresses themselves proved rather pointless, but the international cooperation required in their production served the same purpose as a corporate team-building event. These practical activities reinforced the culture of moderation and restraint that this period admired, as revealed in works by writers like Jane Austen.Aside from the vengeful Prussians, with their craving to blow up Parisian bridges, the victors of 1815 emerge largely unscathed from de Graaf’s study. She dismisses the image of Restoration politics deranged by paranoid securocrats, proposed by some historians.1 Instead, de Graaf highlights the achievement of Wellington in striking a balance between, on the one hand, the need for international policing and, on the other, some tolerance of domestic political pressures that varied from state to state.Napoleon infamously dismissed Wellington as a “Sepoy General,” but de Graaf highlights the British commander’s Indian experience, which combined political and security considerations, as essential to his later success in Europe. This point about Wellington and India is one of several in the book that seek to give what is essentially a European study global significance. British wealth, accrued by its banking sector, was channeled into Europe where it proved instrumental in stabilizing the situation, and much of it derived from global commerce. However, comparing the policies of 1815 with later imperialism overseas stretches credibility, and the labeling of the European concert’s actions in places like the Rhineland as “colonial” ultimately stretches definitions of that word, robbing it of any explanatory potential. What is interesting, however, is the observation that Europeans came to see the culture of moderation and restraint, referenced above, as appropriate more to their own continent than beyond.This well-written, engaging book combines an international-relations and systems perspective with historical methods and approaches. Historians might quibble about what the inclusion of international-relations theory, and terminology familiar more to political scientists, adds to the argument. But to be fair, historians in the past, products of the nation-states in which they grew up, have often given rather short shrift to an innovative era of international cooperation that attempted to strangle those very same nation states at birth.