Rites of Peace: The Fall of Napoleon and the Congress of Vienna - Softcover

Zamoyski, Adam

Softcover

ISBN 10: 006077519X ISBN 13: 9780060775193

Publisher: Harper Perennial, 2008

Synopsis

Traces the epic events following Napoleon s exile in 1814 and the subsequent Treaty of Paris, examining how the eight-month Viennese carnival brought thousands of aristocrats to the Austrian capital and established the Congress of Vienna, an effort that the author contends exacted a substantially high price in exchange for a century of peace. Reprint. 20,000 first printing.

About this title

Review:

Praise for 1812: Napoleon’s Fatal March on Moscow:

‘An utterly admirable book. It combines clarity of thought and prose with a strong narrative drive.’ Daily Telegraph

From the Back Cover:

In the wake of his disastrous Russian campaign of 1812, Napoleon's imperious grip on Europe began to weaken, raising the question of how the Continent was to be reconstructed after his defeat. There were many who dreamed of a peace to end all wars, in which the interests of peoples as well as those of rulers would be taken into account. But what followed was an unseemly and at times brutal scramble for territory by the most powerful states, in which countries were traded as if they had been private and their inhabitants counted like cattle.

The results, fixed at the Congress of Vienna in 1815, not only laid the foundations of the European world we know; it put in place a social order and a security system that lie at the root of many of the problems which dog the world today. Although the defining moments took place in Vienna, and the principle players included Tsar Alexander I of Russia, the Austrian Chancellor Metternich, the Duke of Wellington and the French master of diplomacy Talleyrand, as well as Napoleon himself, the accepted view of the gathering of statesmen reordering the Continent in elegant salons is a false one. Many of the crucial questions were decided on the battlefield or in squalid roadside cottages amid the vagaries of war. And the proceedings in Vienna itself were not as decorous as is usually represented.

Drawing on a wide range of first-hand sources in six languages, which include not only official documents, private letters, diaries and first-hand accounts, but also the reports of police spies and informers, Adam Zamoyski gets below the thin veneer of courtliness and reveals that the new Europe was forged by men in thrall to fear, greed and lust, in an atmosphere of moral depravity in which sexual favours were traded as readily as provinces and the 'souls' who inhabited them. He has created a chilling account, full of menace as well as frivolity.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 006077519X
• ISBN 13: 9780060775193
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 672