At the Congress of Vienna, much of the focus in our timeline of putting Europe back together was on awarding to one state or another ares the French had gained in the preceding fifty years or so. It occurred to me looking at another thread though that the map might be very different the postwar settlement had Napoleon accepted the Frankfurt Memorandum outlining acceptance of France within its "natural" borders along the Rhine though the Alps and across the Pyrenees. This would leave things up in the air and to be settled vastly differently with fewer parcels of land to redistribute and the war over early. Have at it.
Consequences for Europe of Napoleon accepting the Frankfurt Memorandum?
- Thread starter Wendell
- Start date
All of Upper Saxony? The Wettins who ruled that region IOTL could have been relocated to Westphalia and the Ruhr valley as compensation.
Prussia got zip since she was a minor partner (even at OTL Vienna if Alexander said jump! Friedrich Wilhelm would ask "how high?") Would Sasha accept it? @alexmilman might be in a better place to answer it. FWIII WASN'T a popular figure at Vienna, since all he could talk about was the Bible and the army. People (according to Zamoyski's Rites of Peace) actually avoided him to avoid being caught in convos he didn't quite seem to know when to end.
Alexander didn't cut a much better figure. Lady Burgersh compared him to her dentist in the way he peered at people. The Viennese aristocrats' daughters laughed at him and complained of his clammy hands as if "he were some subaltern and not the Russian emperor".
What Revolutionary Committees? This is 1813/1814, not a decade earlier. There might be a muttering going on, but its not Jacobin or Montagnard or whatever. Its Bourbon vs Bonaparte. Abd TBH, who looks like a better candidate - even losing - than a fat old man with no kids who hasn't set foot in France in 20 years?
Napoléon and Talleyrand are still on the outs, so France wouldn't magically do better than the 1791 borders the allies pushed at Chaumont and Châtillon. Napoléon could do FAR worse than the Frankfurt Proposals. At worst it'd likely turn into a sort of second Amiens, since Britain WASN'T in favour of anything but the ABSOLUTE removal of Napoléon by 1813.
Depends on the Russians. The term about Prussia's population compensation wasn't inserted until Vienna when everyone was interested in shoving France back behind the Rhine. If Russia doesn't back Friedrich Wilhelm, no one's going to be overly concerned. Saxony would still have a patron in Napoléon. He'll want to keep what alliances he can. So he'd most likely prefer Saxon steadfastness over Prussian fickleness. More than that, even defeated, Napoléon is still (to the allied mindset, even at Vienna) a force to be reckoned with. So, I could see them agreeing to this point.
Not necessarily. Prussia was regarded as a traitor by both sides. She'd accepted lands seized by Napoléon (which pissed the Allies off, whereas a cannier king would've inserted himself as mediator in the peace talks) and then declared war on him in the next breath. Friedrich Wilhelm was an idiot who if not for Alexander and Prince Hardenberg, would've been politely petted on the head and told "go play outside, the grown-ups are talking".
France just got the industrial rhine (which i think was majority catholic) and all of Belgium. The Pax Britannica is entirely butterflied, as France isn't shafted to a distant and shakey second and eventual third. France would still reign supreme in Europe, or at least coequal to London. and, say that Napoleon I's cancer is handled better with less campaigns and the wealth of being Emperor in tact, he would likely survives to Napoleon II's adulthood. Napoleon II would probably buddy up to Austria during the Brothers War, being related to the hapsburgs and all. So germany is likely butterflied.
"Not happy" is an understatement. Anything that leaves the ports of the Low Countries, especially Antwerp, in French hands is going to get a flat veto.
I could see them getting Prussia and Russia on board, just not Austria. Then again, public support would be heavily against war with a mon-expansionist France. Britain would easily become the aggressor in this scenario.
Until Napoleon came along and turned the place into the centerpiece of his attempt to rebuild the French navy.
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Probably a restoration of the prior order.
Or, since France came out of Frankfurt with pretty lofty gains, they make Napoleon abdicate in favor of a random german prince so there's a strong buffer between france and Austria
Or Austria gets even more than it did otl given that france, again, came out pretty bigl
Why would they want this? Napoléon's wife is Austrian, his heir the grandson of the emperor. Metternich's role at Vienna is often GREATLY exaggerated - a fact that Metternich's own son commented on: "It suited my father to present himself as the man who SINGLEHANDEDLY had defeated Napoléon in the peace as what Napoléon had humiliated Austria in the war" (or something like that).
Alexander of Russia, as @alexmilman pointed out, is such a clash of liberalism and conservatism that his personality is borderline bipolar. However, if his meeting of Madame de Krüdener is butterflied or delayed (he seems to have only met her AFTER Frankfurt but BEFORE arriving in Paris), then that means that the only dreamy eyed mystic at the TTL talks would by Friedrich Wilhelm of Prussia. Not saying Alexander WOULD be ANY more coherent in his policy, but lack of Krüdener might be as big a thing as removing Rasputin from Tsarina Alexandra's orbit.
Britain is the ONLY one who (at this point) really wanted Napoléon gone. And even some of their own politicians thought that this waa unlikely. So, quite possibly, Austria and Russia will sign peace treaties with France and politely ignore Britain's protests. And if the British object, I could see Metternich pointing out that "we [Austria/Russia] have to live next door to him [Napoléon], you are across the street [the Channel]. Its not YOUR house that he breaks into when he's pissed."
You make some great points @Kellan Sullivan , but it leaves me wondering whether Britain would fight France along while still waging the war with the United States.
Well, I would not go as far as to claim that meeting with Mme Keusener was the only factor triggering his conservative side: it always was there and importance of the “mysticism” part of his character is, IMO, overplayed. As far as I can tell, his policy toward Napoleon was dictated by a combination of a personal hatred (as an narcissist he hardly could bear somebody else being “great” and as an Anglophile he was viewing him from the fundamentally pro-British positions) and a pragmatism (hence Treaty of Tilsit but also undermining the CS not to alienate Russian nobility). Also don’t forget that while he initially surrounded himself with the liberal friends of his youth, he was also promoting Arakcheev whom he inherited from his father and who by 1810s was a much more influential figure.
So I’d assume that at any point he would be driven mostly by what he considered a practicality rather than mysticism. Of course, after 1812 “practicality” May include a notion of Napoleon as a permanent dangerous factor but this notion may be balanced by other considerations like Austrian position, potential unhappiness of the Russian nobility with a continued war for an abstract goal of “liberation of Europe”, etc.