Talk:Concert of Europe

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    • Opening Paragraph of This Article **

The opening paragraph of this article makes sense only after reading several other articles and rereading the opening paragraph to put it into context... The article listed below (where it comes from I have no idea) seems to make more sense and have greater authenticity to it. Although, the principles of this article have merit, there is little beyond opinion to substantiate it. It may all in fact be true, but it seems disorganized in concept. Stevenmitchell 20:20, 17 November 2006 (UTC)


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The Concert of Europe describes the broad co-operation between Europe's great powers after 1815. Its purpose was to maintain the peace settlement concluded at the Congress of Vienna following the defeat of Napoleonic France. Centered on the 1815 Quadruple Alliance of Britain, Austria, Prussia and Russia (expanded in 1818 to include France's restored Bourbon monarchy in the Quintuple Alliance), the Concert was divided throughout by the differing ideological perspectives of its principal participants. While the Continental powers sought to maintain the political status quo in western and central Europe to the extent of armed intervention against revolutionary outbreaks which might threaten conservative order, British statesmen from the 1820s pursued a less reactionary policy, notably in opposing any threat to the revolutions against Spanish and Portuguese rule in Latin America. Britain similarly stood aside from the Continental monarchies' authorization of Austrian military intervention in the 1821 Italian Carbonari insurrections and French intervention in Spain in 1823. The July Revolution of 1830 eroded the unity of the Continental powers by bringing France under a more liberal monarchy. The Concert's principal accomplishments were the securing of the independence of Greece (1830) and Belgium (1831). In 1840 the powers (except France) intervened in defense of the Ottoman Empire (against which they had supported Greece) to end Egypt's eight-year occupation of Syria. Fatally weakened by the European revolutionary upheavals of 1848 with their demands for revision of the Vienna frontiers along national lines, the last vestiges of the Concert expired amid successive wars between its participants - the Crimean War (1854-56), the Franco-Austrian War (1859), the Austro-Prussian War (1866) and the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71).

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[edit] Confusion

I'm told in a homework assignment the CONGRESS SYSTEM and the CONCERT OF EUROPE are the same thing, yet in this article, they are different. this could use a little more clarification. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by SBKT (talk • contribs) 16:51, 27 March 2007 (UTC).

[edit] Securing Belgian independence?

I'm by no means an expert on the topic, but shouldn't the assertion that the Congress System securred Belgian independence be somewhat revised? I say this because under the Congress of Vienna it was agreed that Belgium should be absorbed into, what would become, the United Kingdom of the Netherlands. Belgium had hitherto been under Austrian control as the Austrian Netherlands and afer 1815 it was under the rule of the Dutch King William I. The Belgian Revolution in 1830 was, amongst other things, a backlash against Dutch hegemony. Belgian indepenence may have been a consequence of the Congress System, but to say that it was secured by the Great Powers is a bit of an overstatement. If anything, it is an example of how flippantly lesser powers and peoples were treated by the Quadruple Alliance, illustrating one of the major flaws of the Congress System.

More broadly, too, the article seems to describe the Congress System as something positive and uses unspecified generalisations, e.g. "most historians agree...". I find that in much historiography the Congress System is seen as reactionary and as an attempt to suppress nationalism in many European provinces (an example being the Troppau Protocol, November 19, 1820). A number of historians including E.L Woodward, Howard Nicholson and L.C.B. Seaman, and even Karl Marx regarded the Congress System as a failure. Perhaps this article could be more balanced. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Themitfords (talk • contribs) 14:30, 2 May 2008 (UTC)