Occupation and the Concert of Europe

Just as the turmoil of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars had set the framework for the emergence of the concept of military occupation, so too the European settlement embodied in the Vienna Conference and the arrangements for its perpetuation set the framework for the development of the concept and practice of military occupation in Europe and to some extent beyond it. The Vienna Conference and associated alliance system not only provided for a specific territorial settlement which the negotiators intended should endure but also committed the Great Powers, as they were now recognised, to the management of that settlement through the periodic coordination of those Great Powers. Initially that promise of coordination had been tied up with a commitment to the defeat of France, in the Treaty of Chaumont of March 1814. The later Quadruple Alliance of 20 November 1815 reaffirmed their will to oppose the ‘Revolutionary Principles which upheld the last criminal usurpation’, namely the 100 days of Napoleon Bonaparte, and ‘might again, under other forms, convulse France’. Yet France had regained admission to the club of the Great Powers during the Conference at Vienna, membership that was explicitly reaffirmed after Napoleon's final defeat at the time that the Allies agreed upon the early termination of the occupation of French territory, at the Conference of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1818. A British memorandum, invoking and summarising these various agreements concluded that they ‘may be considered as the great Charte, by which the Territorial System of Europe, unhinged by the events of war and Revolution, has been again restored to order’.

While far from entailing any principled renunciation of conquest, as the revolutionary principles of the French once had, the practical effect of these arrangements was to create a considerable predisposition against territorial change and especially territorial change by conquest entailing an immediate displacement of sovereignty. The consequence was that whereas before 1815 it was fundamental disagreement about the territorial settlement of Europe that shaped the emergence of the concept and practice of occupation, after 1815 it was the, albeit fragile, agreement about the territorial settlement that provided the framework for occupation.