On the 16rh he defeated Blucher at Ligny. On the 18th he met Wellington at Waterloo, and after a desperate struggle went down in utter defeat. All day long the French and British had fought without victory for either, but the arrival of Blucher with his Prussians turned the scale. The French army broke and fled in disastrous rout, three-fourths of its force being left on the field, dead, wounded, or prisoners. It was the great soldier’s last fight. He was forced to surrender the throne, and was again exiled, this time to the island of St. Helena, in the south Atlantic. No such mistake as that of Elba was safe to make again. Here ended the days of Napoleon Bonaparte, the greatest soldier the world had ever known. His final hour of glory came in 1842, when his remains were brought in pomp to Paris, there to find a final resting place in the Hotel des Invalides.
THE CONGRESS OF VIENNA
This Congress of the rulers and statesmen of Europe, which opened in September, 1814, and continued its work after the fall of Napoleon at Waterloo, occupied itself with map-making on a liberal scale. The empire which the conqueror had built up at the expense of the neighboring countries, was quickly dismembered and France reduced to its former limits, while all the surrounding Powers took their shares of the spoils, Belgium and Holland being combined into a single kingdom.
As for the rights of the people, what had become of them? Had they been swept away and the old wrongs of the people brought back? Not quite. The frenzied enthusiasm for liberty and human rights of the past twenty-five years could not go altogether for nothing. The lingering relics of feudalism had vanished, not only from France but from all Europe, and no monarch or congress could bring them back again. In its place the principles of democracy had been carried by the armies of France throughout Europe and deeply planted in a hundred places, and their establishment as actual conditions was the most important part of the political development of the nineteenth century.
THE HOLY ALLIANCE
Map-making was not the whole work of the Congress of Vienna. An association was made of the rulers of Russia, Austria and Prussia, under the promising title of the “Holy Alliance.” These devout autocrats proposed to rule in accordance with the precepts of the Bible, to govern their subjects like loving parents, and to see that peace, justice and religion should flourish in their dominions.
Such was the theory, the real purpose was one of absolute dominion, that of uniting their forces against democracy and revolution wherever these should show themselves. It was not long before there was work for them to do. The people began to move. The attempt to re-establish absolute governments shook them out of sluggish acceptance. Revolution lifted its head in spite of the Holy Alliance, its first field being Spain. Revolt broke out there in 1820 and was quickly followed by a similar revolt in Naples.
These revolutionary movements roused the members of the Alliance. An Austrian army invaded Italy, a French one, under the influence of the Alliance, was sent to Spain, and both the revolutions were vigorously quelled. The only revolt that succeeded was one in Greece against the Turkish power. There was no desire to sustain the Turks, and a Russian army was finally sent to aid the Greeks, whose freedom was attained in April, 1830.
Such were the chief events that followed the fall of Napoleon. Reaction was the order of the day. But it was a reaction that was to be violently shaken in the period now reached, the revolutionary year of 1830.