Ok, so I was curious. There were those at the Congress of Vienna who wanted to treat France harshly. So what I am wondering is what would have to happen for France to be treated harshly in the peace negotiations. What would a harsh peace look like? What might be the results and reactions to a harsh treaty?
This a puzzling question because it absolutely does not take into account facts, reality, the reasons why there were those 23 years of european wars, why each country waged war, what were their national interests, goals and situations.
The peace conditions were in fact quite harsh for France, but being harsh does not mean being unrealistic. France paid 700 hundred million francs in war reparations. It was a high price (probably close to 15% of its GDP, and 7 times as much as what Prussia paid at the peace of 1807) but it was perfectly sustainable ofr France given the weight of its economy.
It lost all territories conquered since 1792, and even a few territories it possessed before 1792.
So I could reformulate your question this way : what if the european powers hated so much France for itself that they wanted to destroy this country after the revolutionnary and napoleonic wars ?
Your WI omits that peace was not harsher because not being harsher was the condition of peace itself.
France was the country which had the strongest sense of national unity. It is even the country which created the concept of nation state.
In 1814, it was fighting on its own national territory the same way Russia was in 1812. This was, at the time, an enormous logistical advantage.
In 1792-1793, when it was in civil war and in a total mess, with a completely disorganized army, France won the war on its national territory. In 1814 and 1815, France still had the means to defend itself from harsher conditions.
The peace of 1814 was a negotiated one, because not only France but also the allies were exhausted by 2 decades of war. Some french generals negotiated to get rid from Napoleon because they understood that Napoleon had become an untrustable partner for a peace with the coalition. For a year (1813), Napoleon had rejected all previous opportunities to make peace at better conditions because he had become a gambler who preferered to risk everything in order to make good his losses rather than to write off his losses.
Your WI omits that the members of the 6th coalition had an agreement in nothing more than ridding the european continent from the french domination. Only Prussia, who was at the time the weaker member of the coalition wanted to weaken France but Prussia did not have the means to have the other allies agree on its harsher conditions.
It is in fact Russia who did the biggest part of the job against Napoleon in 1812-1814, then Austria, then only after Prussia who was the most "junior" member of the coalition.
I do not forget the UK, but the UK had played a different part : it was the country that made sure to end victoriously its new hundred wars against France for world domination (1688-1815).
Your WI omits that there was a great defiance between the UK and Russia because :
- the UK did not want Russia to become the dominant power in Europe,
- and Russia was perfectly aware that the UK had profited from the revolutionary-napoleonic wars to get rid of its competitors (the french, the dutch, and to another extent the spanish) and establish a domination outside Europe that was never seen before.
Your WI omits that France did not commit the kind of crimes that would have justified harsher conditions. If war lasted for 22 or 23 years, it is because the UK never really wanted to make peace at other conditions than France contained in its 1789 frontiers.
Your WI omits that, in the late 18th century, France and the french culture influenced all european aristocracies. The european ruling elites spoke french.
And if perhaps the UK hated France because it had been its main rival for more than a century, the UK was also a very realistic country.
Your WI omits that the war goals of the UK on the european continent, as far as France was concerned, were to prevent the french from controlling what was finally going to become the artificial State of Belgium and from dominating the small states and principalities of Germany (It goes without saying that the UK and Austria did not want want France to dominate Italy and Spain).
The UK's goal was to have a lastable peace, which means a peace acceptable by France too, and a peace that did not risk to create a new threatening big power in Europe, such as the holy roman empire of the Ottonian or Salian dynasties.
In fact, it even turned out that, as repeatedly in its History, the UK was remarkedly short-sighted and fought for short-sighted and anachronical peace conditions. It based the peace conditions on the fact that France had been the number one power on the european continent from the middle on the 17th century on.
Russia's most clever statesmen of the time were aware that France's overextension was mainly the result of very personal and contingent factors : the personnality of Napoleon Bonaparte. Once Napoleon dead or out of power, France would quite fastly and naturally have lost much of its relative power.
But if french power had actually been based on agricultural and craftmanship economy and on demography (France was the most populated country in Europe), France was anyway losing ground because :
- economic power was shifting to an industrial economy based on iron and coal on which France had not many natural ressources in its 1789 frontiers,
- France almost stopped its demographic growth one century before other european countries and was quickly caught up on this field.
Demogragraphically, the population of France was 30 millions in 1789/1815.
In 1800, the UK was then only 15 (among which 10 million british and 5 million irishmen), the Habsburg empire was around 22/25, Prussia around 10 million (with a very important polish minority) and the whole of Germany (Habsburg territories excluded) around 22 millions, Italy around 15 million and Spain around 10 million.
One century later, in 1910, the french population was only 40 millions and french immigration had been weak while quite many italian, polish and spanish people had emigrated to France.
In 1910, the population of other european countries was 45 million for the UK, 65 million for Germany, 50 million for Austria-Hungary, 35 million for Italy and 20 millions for Spain. And besides many millions of people from these countries emigrated.
As far as industry is concerned, though was a very innovative country (in the early 20th century, France was number one in Europe for the auto industry, and number 2 in the world far behind the US), France was quickly losing share in the world industrial production because the peace of 1814/1815 had deprived it of the key industrial ressources of Belgium, Luxemburg and Rhineland. There could no be an industrial balance of power because Prussia which already had control of what was going to become (in the mid 19th century) the strong industrial center of Silesia also xas given control of the Ruhr and most of the Rhineland which was going to become the other (and in fact most) important industrial center of Germany.
In 1910, the industrial productions of the UK and Germany were respectively 2 times and 2,5 times as important as that of France.
The UK and Prussia could hardly know it in 1814/1815, but by depriving France from the left bank of the Rhine which it had conquered before Napoleon came to power, the UK in fact created the conditions for France to be structurally weaker than Germany and for Germany to become the great and dominant continental power that it was from the mid 1860's on and is still today.
The UK made the same mistake in 1918 with France and Germany. It did not want Germany to be too much weakened in order to prevent ... a new french domination on the continent !
This time, it was a clearly absurd calculation since France (and Belgium) had been ruined much more than Germany. Most of the fightings on the western front took place on the french (and belgian) territory on which the german army inflicted heavy damages when they were forced to retreat.
So 15 years later, german nationalism brought Hitler to power and we got a WW2 in which a 40 million people France (same figure in 1940 as in 1910) was not able to face almost alone the power of an 85 million people third Reich (including 5 million czech annexed in march 1939 who were a very good labor force submitted into de facto slavery). I remind you that the British expeditionary force sent on the continent to fight Germany in 1939-40 at the side of the french army represented only 10% of the strength of the french army.