The Congress of Vienna as a Missed Opportunity: Conservative visions of a new European order after Napoleon
Author:
Matthijs Lok
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Date:
2019
ISBN:
9781108597050
The European order created at the Congress of Vienna has often been characterised as an attempt to repress the revolutionary spirit inspired by a conservative ‘philosophy of fear’. This chapter presents an alternative vision of post-revolutionary conservative Europeanism, not as a local or national reaction to the universalism of Enlightenment and Revolution, but as a ‘counter-revolutionary international’ of ‘conservative cosmopolitanism’, embodied by anti-revolutionary émigrés, and those who contributed to an international coalition against Napoleon. More than longing for an imagined Ancien Régime or a distant medieval past, conservative Europeanism was inspired by ideas of spiritual as well as moral regeneration of a Christian European civilisation in decay, similar to notions of renewal proposed by progressive authors in the ‘European moment’ after 1814.
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