AP® European History · Unit 6 · Topic 6.5
The Concert of Europe and Conservatism
The Concert of Europe was a system of great-power meetings after 1815 meant to crush liberal and nationalist revolts and preserve monarchy, but by the 1830s it could no longer hold that line everywhere.
After Napoleon's defeat, the great powers of Europe, Austria, Russia, Prussia, Britain, and later France, agreed at the Congress of Vienna in 1815 to keep meeting rather than let rivalries drift back into war. This became the Concert of Europe. Its guiding idea was conservatism: monarchy, hereditary privilege, and the Church were the natural, stable basis of society, and the liberal and nationalist ideas unleashed by the French Revolution were a disease to be contained wherever it broke out. So when revolts flared in Spain, Italy, and elsewhere through the 1820s, the eastern powers treated each one as a shared emergency. Austria's foreign minister Metternich pushed this hardest, using the Carlsbad Decrees of 1819 to censor the press and put police into German universities, catching nationalist and liberal student groups before they could organize.
Britain never fully bought into this. It wanted a balance of power, not a crusade against every liberal movement, so it backed away from authorizing further armed interventions by the late 1810s and 1820s while Austria, Russia, and Prussia kept pressing. That split weakened the concert's unity right as new tests arrived.
Those tests proved the limits of the whole system. Greece won independence from the Ottoman Empire by 1830, and Belgium broke from the Netherlands in 1830 and 1831, both times with acceptance or active help from powers that were supposed to defend the 1815 settlement. The concert could slow revolution, not stop it everywhere, and its selective enforcement set the pattern for the bigger wave of 1848 revolutions that follows.
Key terms
- Concert of Europe
- The system of recurring great-power congresses after 1815 meant to settle disputes and prevent revolutionary change.
- Conservatism
- The post-1815 political outlook favoring monarchy, hereditary rank, and established churches over liberal or nationalist change.
- Carlsbad Decrees
- An 1819 set of laws Metternich pushed through to censor the press and police German universities against nationalist and liberal activity.
- Congress system
- The practice of great powers meeting at congresses to coordinate responses to revolts and territorial disputes.
Watch it explained
- How it worksShow me the congress system responding to each revolt between 1815 and 1848 as a feedback loop.
- How it worksHow did Metternich use censorship, police, and the Carlsbad Decrees to hold the settlement together?
- How it worksWalk me through why Britain stepped away from intervening while the eastern powers pressed on.
- Going furtherWhat happens to the concert once Greece and Belgium win independence anyway?
Check yourself
End of topic.