Talk:Quadruple Alliance (1815)

Holly allaince

08 2409:4063:6E11:174A:0:0:5988:E602 (talk) 05:05, 20 March 2022 (UTC)

Revision 10 September 2020

@user:IWPCHI I think there are problems with your rewrite as Revision as of 00:54, 10 September 2020 your long edit history stated:

disservice by ignoring the reactionary political purpose and ramifications of the Quadruple Alliance. It said nothing about its having been a direct result of the War of the Seventh Coalition which decisively defeated Napoleon at Waterloo, leading to the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy and thus allowing France to *be* a party to the even more reactionary Quintuple Alliance. I hope it's seen as an improvement

The first problem is that you group the four powers together as "monachist". This is not accurate because Britain had been, since the Glorious Revolution, a constitutional monarchy. In no way was it a monachist regime. Prior to this, to avoid that complication the article simply listed the states leaving the links there for people to follow them if they wished to see what the constitutional arrangements the four states had. Your edit introduced biase which previously did not exist.

You added:

to counter the military and revolutionary republican political threats posed by the expansion of the First French Empire under Napoleon I and to fight the War of the Seventh Coalition.

Bonaparte was a tyrant in British eyes. From the prespective of British and the Protestant ascendency in Ireland, the war against Bonaparte was not formost a war against a revolutionary republic. It was a war that since Britain declared war on France on 18 May 1803, was a war against a tyranical regime. And BTW the British did not recognise Bonaparte as an emperor and calling him "Napoleon I" introduces another bias statement.

So what you are expressing with this expansion is a Poit of View (POV previously the article simpley expressed it as an "alliance was first formed in 1813 to counter the military threat o France". If you wish to include such POVs you need to attribute it.

You also added:

and pledged each signatory to a military alliance that ultimately aimed to crush any recurrence of revolutionary outbreaks like those that led to the French Revolution if they occurred anywhere in Europe.

Where is the primary source is such an pledge made?

-- PBS (talk) PBS (talk) 16:21, 1 July 2022 (UTC)

It's an interesting edit and one I don't remember doing. I can only assume that the information I added to the article came from studies I made while reading A.J.P. Taylor's "Struggle for Mastery in Europe" and other references I also read - primarily in other Wikipedia articles. It's very odd that I didn't cite any source(s) for the statement at all. Unfortunately, I didn't take notes for those readings and so I have no way to retrace my steps and add relevant sources. I assume I must have intended to cite sources but didn't have the time to include them when I wrote the additions to the article. Bad form!

The fact is that the goals of the alliance went much further than simply "restraining" "France"; the monarchists - which includes Great Britain, which had become far more monarchistic and repressive in the wake of the American and especially the French Revolutions = sought to crush republicanism throughout the continent. In 1815, Great Britain was still attempting to restore its monarchy in the USA through war with the Americans.

From 1789 on, the counter-revolutionary forces of Europe - encompassing ALL the monarchies of Europe, England included - sought not just to crush the Revolution in France but also to crush domestic sympathy for the Revolution. Repressive legislation against Jacobinism and the banning of pro-Revolutionary literature and political groups was the order of the day - including in "constitutional" England. "In England, habeas corpus had been suspended since 1794, and "seditious" associations and publications had been prohibited. In 1799 Pitt made printers profess their allegiance, and he had members of illegal societies sent to penal colonies for seven years." "Austria (Georges Lefebvre, "Napoleon - From 18 Brumaire to Tilsit"). It was not "France" or "Napoleon" that needed "restraining: it was the radical socially levelling ideals of the Revolution that "France" and "Napoleon" *represented* among the lower classes that the Quadruple Alliance was actually trying to crush throughout the continent - IMO. I need to do more research on this and get some good quotes to back up my assertions. Thanks for the criticism; I accept your revision and until I find some excellent sources to back up my statements I will leave it at that. IWPCHI (talk) 02:23, 8 July 2022 (UTC)IWPCHI

I had started to quote more from Lefebvre and hit "reply" too early... more from the same book: "Austria [created] an obscurantist police state for which Metternich later claimed credit [...] in Prussia, Wollner [...] had attempted to set up the same system [...] At Jena, Fichte, accused of atheism and abandoned by the Duke of Weimar, had been forced to surrender his chair in 1799." The Holy Alliance was a war against everything the French Revolution represented, ideals which were carried throughout Europe on the bayonets of Napoleon's troops and which had inspired revolutionary movements throughout the continent among the peasants and serfs and among the working class generally. THIS is what the counter-revolutionaries sought to crush by crushing "Napoleonic France". IWPCHI (talk) 02:32, 8 July 2022 (UTC)IWPCHI