CEVAP:

Following the Battle of Waterloo, the major powers signed two separate alliance treaties consecutively, the Holy Alliance and the Quadruple Alliance. The former, signed on 18 September 1815, was a proclamation of the three East European monarchies, that is, the royal houses of Habsburg, Hohenzollern, and Romanov. The scheme of the alliance was proposed by Alexander I of Russia and appeared as a manifesto of absolute monarchy. Its content refers to a spectrum from divine right of the kings that appear in Holy Scriptures to Christianity’s value system in which a king was to rule with justice and love his subjects as the shepherd of a flock or a family father (Mowat, 1922: 23-24). The alliance was proposed as a spiritual formation of the three sects of Christianity. The three monarchs would remain united by the bonds of a true fraternity. With the Alliance, all three monarchs accepted each other as equals and brothers. The monarchs promised to rule their subjects based on Christian values such as charity, justice, and peace as well as to stay united in helping each other to fulfill the role given to them by their God. Under such an agreement, the parties accepted to employ any effective measure toward helping one another. The content of the Holy Alliance was an explicit manifesto for the legitimacy of the absolute monarchy’s sovereignty over the people who had recently experienced wthe French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. Almost all European powers were forced to muster huge armies to fight against the citizen army of the French Republic and then Napoleon’s French Empire. Such an experience elevated the submissive subjects of the monarchical regimes to a higher consciousness of liberty and to a sense of nationality. Therefore, the Eastern monarchies built a bloc to counter any liberal or nationalist uprising by their “subjects.” As the three absolute monarchies, Russia, Austria and Prussia formed the foundation of Holy Alliance, all European states were called to adhere to its principles in order to be accepted as equals. Except for England being a liberal monarchy that could not affiliate with the rhetoric of the Holy Alliance, all the other monarchies responded positively to the call and signed the alliance. Following the restoration of the French monarchy, the Holy Alliance was born as the second successful formation of the restoration following the Napoleonic Wars. As such, the rules of the Holy Alliance provided the basis on which the new peace in Europe would be established. However, Britain also decided to join the alliance. As a result, the treaty establishing the Quadruple Alliance was signed on 20 November 1815. However, this does not mean that Britain embraced the values of the absolute monarchies, nor did Britain and other members of the Quadruple Alliance stop seeing France and the effects of the French Revolution as a threat to their regimes. Yet, despite all these, once again, peace came to Europe.