Back in February 2007 (see February 15th in the other place), I read and liked a book about Napoleon's march on Moscow by A. Zamoyski. The march which, as it turned out, marked the beginning of his end.
And in February 2011 (see February 21st), I read and liked a book about the treaty of Versailles by M. MacMillan.
Then a few weeks ago I accepted an offer from Surrey Libraries for a book about the Congress of Vienna by the same A. Zamoyski, despite being vaguely aware of unkind reviews which suggested that he was not really up to the tricky business of diplomatic history. Perhaps I was swayed by C. Clark, himself the author of a successful but rather long history of how the Congress was ultimately trashed in 1914, presently being read (rather slowly), saying that the Congress book succeeded 'brilliantly ... with intelligence and grace'. I think I paid £1.50 for 569 pages, exclusive of notes, compared with the 557 of the Moscow book. And one fat wadge of pictures rather than three thin ones.
Book now finished and the Congress turns out to have been an interesting business, a long drawn out squabble on four fronts: about who beds who, dividing the spoils, jostling for place & position and about trying to set up a reasonably stable Europe, reasonably free from sanguinary menaces of the Napoleonic variety. Zamoyski gives rather a lot of space to the first front and to the bedroom and epistolary antics that went with it, all of which became a bit tedious after a while. But I soldiered on and in the end felt that I had a reasonable grip on the whole business. He closed with something of a rant about how awful it all was, which made me rather cross, but he then proceeded to back-pedal for the last few pages, granting that the Congress did provide peace of a sort for close on a hundred years. And I suppose one must make allowances for the facts that Zamoyski is a plastic Pole (that is to say a person of Polish extraction but who has never lived there. Properly styled Count Adam Stefan Zamoyski) and Poland got properly squeezed, once again, between her congressional neighbours.
My take is that is was all rather grubby, with plenty of greed dressed up in fine clothes. But that was the way the world was at the time. And at least there was a Congress and the emerging great powers did come to an agreement of sorts. It was better than the sort of things which had gone on before, when might was right and no-one asked too many questions about it. It was progress.
Whereas at Versailles, despite the facts that much less energy was dissipated in bedrooms (at least I do not recall MacMillan even mentioning that kind of thing) and that some of the players were trying quite hard to come to decent and fair solutions to the many problems that they faced, they failed in so far as the whole thing ended in tears some twenty years later. Although, on that, I think it unhelpful to place the whole blame on Versailles, to scapegoat Versailles for all the mistakes made by Britain, France and others afterwards. And taking the long view, France trashed Germany in the 18th century, Germany trashed France in the 19th century and then we had the dreadful mess of the first half of the 20th century, but with Germany ending up back on top by the end of it. There was history for the vindictiveness displayed at both Vienna and Versailles.
I close with a the new-to-me fact that the rather vain and stupid Murat (aka Marshal of France and Grand Admiral of France Joachim-Napoléon Murat), but the most dashing leader of cavalry of his day, came to a rather sorry, if brave, end in front of a firing squad somewhere near a place called Pizzo in Calabria, the natal town of Pizza.
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