Personal Power, and the People

Once Napoleon Bonaparte was exiled to Elba, Europe had many issues to now elaborate on. To fully answer these questions each powerful country sent a representative to meet up and discuss the future of the continent. This monumental meeting is and was referred to as the Congress of Vienna. The whole time, representatives did not look for the best of the people rather, there was an unspoken question at this meeting.  What should they do when their power is threatened? In class, we were given options to topics to choose from and we had to pick the most logical one to us based on that question. We then compared and contrasted our least popular and most popular votes to the actual decisions during the Congress of Vienna.

One of these concepts was the Principle of Intervention. This was the ideology that allowed the more powerful countries to send troops to a country whose people are demanding a revolution. Metternich and the other people of power used this concept to keep their power stable so that they were never overthrown by the people. The stronger country would come in and cause an abrupt end to the revolution, sufficiently lowering the peoples' future motivation to revolt. Thus, protecting the power that the monarchy was trying to protect. The impact of this concept was that it limited the success of revolutions made within countries. It kept the order of Monarchy in place because since no one had a successful revolt to gain a constitution the government stayed.

Overall, the impact of the Congress of Vienna was that they reinstated monarchy and took power from the common people and gave it to the wealthy. Basically, everything that Napoleon had worked for was thrown away as if it did not even occur. Which lead to many revolutions from the people that were shut down for the most part due to the Principle of Intervention mentioned earlier. The Congress of Vienna also reconstructed country boundaries that Napoleon had destroyed.



There were many other ways the leaders of the Congress of Vienna could have done that would have had a more positive impact. Instead of reintroducing monarchy completely they could have picked bits and pieces of monarchy to reinforce. Also, the Principle of Intervention should not have been enacted. It is just proving to the people that they do not trust them and shows that they were aiming to limit their power. If they had made it look like they did allow them to have some say and trust they would have been less likely to think of even forming an revolution. People of power could really have benefited from the saying "You have to lose some to get some". This means that even if they did give up some control it would have worked out in the end since the people would not have a reason to rebel. So then their title and wealth would not ever be jeopardized.