The Four Great Powers had previously formed the core of the Sixth Coalition. The Congress functioned through formal meetings such as working groups and official diplomatic functions.

Other partial settlements had already occurred at the Treaty of Paris between France and the Sixth Coalition, and the Treaty of Kiel that covered issues raised regarding Scandinavia. The Treaty of Chaumont became the cornerstone of the European Alliance that formed the balance of power for decades. They included the establishment of a confederated Germany, the division of Italy into independent states, the restoration of the Bourbon kings of Spain, and the enlargement of the Netherlands to include what in 1830 became modern Belgium. The Treaty of Chaumont in 1814 had reaffirmed decisions that had been made already and that would be ratified by the more important Congress of Vienna of 1814–15. what is the congress of vienna Preliminaries The Congress of Vienna settlement formed the framework for European international politics until the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. On the other hand, the Congress was the first occasion in history where, on a continental scale, national representatives came together to formulate treaties instead of relying mostly on messages among the several capitals. Instead, most of the discussions occurred in informal, face-to-face sessions among the Great Powers of Austria, Britain, France, Russia, and sometimes Prussia, with limited or no participation by other delegates. In a technical sense, the “Congress of Vienna” was not properly a congress: it never met in plenary session. Negotiations continued despite the outbreak of fighting triggered by Napoleon’s dramatic return from exile and resumption of power in France during the Hundred Days of March to July 1815. The immediate background was Napoleonic France’s defeat and surrender in May 1814, which brought an end to 23 years of nearly continuous war. Russia gained the central and eastern part of the Duchy of Warsaw.

Prussia added smaller German states in the west, Swedish Pomerania, 60% of the Kingdom of Saxony, and the western part of the former Duchy of Warsaw Austria gained Venice and much of northern Italy. In the settlement, France lost all its recent conquests, while Prussia, Austria and Russia made major territorial gains. More fundamentally, the conservative leaders of the Congress sought to restrain or eliminate the republicanism and revolution which had upended the constitutional order of the European old regime, and which continued to threaten it. The goal was not simply to restore old boundaries but to resize the main powers so they could balance each other and remain at peace. The objective of the Congress was to provide a long-term peace plan for Europe by settling critical issues arising from the French Revolutionary Wars and the Napoleonic Wars. It was a meeting of ambassadors of European states chaired by Austrian statesman Klemens von Metternich, and held in Vienna from November 1814 to June 1815. The Congress of Vienna (French: Congrès de Vienne, German: Wiener Kongress) of 1814–1815 was an international diplomatic conference to reconstitute the European political order after the downfall of the French Emperor Napoleon I. This post is about “ what is the congress of vienna“.

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