Holy Alliance, The
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
The, a league formed by the sovereigns of Russia, Austria, and Prussia soon after the downfall of Napoleon. The name by which the league is known belongs properly to an agreement entered into at Paris a month or two earlier. This earlier league was proposed by the Czar, possibly in much such a fit of religious exaltation as led his successor in the twentieth century to propose a peace conference at The Hague. Coming back to the political league, a formal document was signed September 26, 1815. The professed purpose was to unite sovereigns in a holy brotherhood. Signers agreed to govern their peoples as "branches of one Christian nation, following the precepts of justice, charity, and peace." The agreement was signed by all the rulers of Europe, save the pope and the king of Great Britain and Ireland. The real purpose was to perpetuate the reigning families and resist republican tendencies. A special clause forbade any member of the Napoleonic family to ascend a European throne. Metternich, the arch foe of constitutional government, was the leading spirit of the real, the working alliance. Absolute princes whom Napoleon had deposed were restored. Constitutions were abolished, notably that of Spain by armed intervention in 1823. The evident disposition of the Alliance to interfere in the affairs of the newly formed Spanish-American republics led to the enunciation of the Monroe Doctrine . The inability of the czar to resist the temptation to aid the Greeks in throwing off the yoke of their enemy of old, the Turk, almost disrupted the Alliance. The Alliance crumbled after the French Revolution of 1830.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
The events Aiton's set down in 1910 are still the events historians record: Alexander I's mystical document of September 26, 1815, the restorations, the French intervention in Spain in 1823, the drift apart over Greece. What has shifted is the framing. Modern accounts keep the Holy Alliance distinct from the Quadruple Alliance signed in November 1815 and from the congress system Metternich actually worked through, whereas Aiton's runs the three together as one "real, the working alliance"; the pious text itself is now usually treated as a near-dead letter, closer to Castlereagh's dismissal of it as sublime mysticism than to a functioning treaty. And where Aiton's could only compare Alexander's "fit of religious exaltation" to the Hague conferences, later writers read the Alliance as an early and cautionary ancestor of the League of Nations and the United Nations.
Written for this edition, 2026.