against the Ottoman Empire. A number of Slavophiles were involved, and the Emperor formally recognized the organization, upon the active recommendation of Alexander Gorchakov, Minister of Foreign Affairs. In 1861 Pogodin became president and Ivan Ak-sakov secretary and treasurer, and for the next fifteen years the Committee was active in education, philanthropy, and a sometimes strident advocacy journalism.
In 1867 the committee organized a remarkable Panslav Congress, which went on for months. It involved a series of lectures, an ethnographic exhibition, and a number of banquets, speeches, and other demonstrations of welcome to the eighty-one foreign visitors from the Slavic world-teachers, politicians, professors, priests, and even a few bishops. But the discussions clearly demonstrated the suspicions that many non-Russians entertained of their somewhat overbearing big brother. No Poles attended, nor did any Ukrainians from the Russian Empire. Even to the friendly Serbs the Russian demands for hegemony seemed excessive.
Panslav agitation was growing at the turn of the decade, partly due to the bellicose Opinion on the Eastern Question (1869) by General Rostislav An-dreyevich Fadeev (1826-1884). In that same year appeared a more interesting Panslav product, Russia and Europe, by Nikolai Yakovlevich Danilevsky (1822-1885). It charted the maturation and decay of civilizations and foresaw Russia’s Panslav Empire triumphing over the declining West. The aims of the Slavic Benevolent Committee seemed closest to fulfillment during the victorious climax to the Russo- Turkish War of 1877-1878, when Constantinople appeared within the grasp of Russian arms. Yet, despite the imperial patronage that the Committee had enjoyed for over a decade, the government drew back from the seizure of Constantinople, and then was forced by the European powers at the Congress of Berlin (1878) to minimize Russian gains. Aksakov’s subsequent tirade about lost Russian honor resulted in the permanent adjournment of the Committee. Panslav perspectives lingered, but the movement declined into political insignificance during the course of the 1880s. See also: NATIONALISM IN TSARIST EMPIRE; OFFICIAL NATIONALITY; SLAVOPHILES
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Fadner, Frank J. (1962). Seventy Years of Pan-Slavism in Russia: Karazin to Danilevskii, 1800-1870. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Geyer, Dietrich. (1987). Russian Imperialism: The Interaction of Domestic and Foreign Policy in Russia, 1860-1914. New Haven: Yale University Press. Greenfeld, Liah. (1992). Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kohn, Hans. (1953). Pan-Slavism: Its History and Ideology. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame. Petrovich, Michael Boro. (1956). The Emergence of Russian Panslavism 1865-1870. New York: Columbia University Press. Tuminez, Astrid. (2000). Russian Nationalism Since 1856. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Walicki, Andrzej. (1975). The Slavophile Controversy: History of a Conservative Utopia in Nineteenth-Century Russian Thought. Oxford: Clarendon.
Facing an empty treasury, a new French naval ordnance that might pierce the Kronstadt walls, and possible Swedish and Prussian hostilities, Alexander II and a special Imperial Council accepted an Austrian ultimatum and agreed on January 16, 1856, to make peace on coalition terms and conclude the Crimean War. Even before Sevastopol fell (September 12, 1855), Russia had accepted three of the Anglo-French-Austrian Four Points of August 1854: guarantee of Ottoman sovereignty and territorial integrity; general European (not exclusively Russian) protection of the Ottoman Christians; and freeing of the mouth of the Danube. The details of the third point, as well as reduction of Russian Black Sea preponderance and additional British particular conditions, completed the agreement. The incipient entente with Napoleon III, who all along had hoped to check Russian prestige without fighting for British imperial interests, was a boon to Russia.
Russia was ably represented in the Paris congress (February 25-April 14) by the experienced extraordinary ambassador and privy councillor Count Alexei F. Orlov and the career diplomat and envoy to London, Filip Brunov. They were joined at the table by some of the key statesmen in the diplomatic preliminaries of the war from Turkey, England, France, and Austria, as well as Camilio Cavour of Piedmont-Sardinia. Russia’s chief concession was to remove its naval presence from the Black Sea, but they worked out the details of its neutralization directly with the Turks, not their British allies. The affirmation of the 1841 Convention, which closed the Turkish Straits to warships in peacetime, was actually more advantageous to Russia, which lacked a fleet on one side, than to Britain, which had one on the other. Russia’s sole territorial loss was the retrocession of the southern part of Bessarabia to Ottoman Moldavia, the purpose of which was to secure the Russian withdrawal from the Danubian Delta.
In addition, the Russians agreed to the demilitarization of the land Islands in the Baltic, a provision that held until World War I. The Holy Places dispute, the diplomatic scrape which had led directly to the war preliminaries, was settled on the basis of the compromise effected in Istanbul in April 1853 by the three extraordinary ambassadors, Alexander Menshikov, Edmond de la Cour, and Stratford (Canning) de Redcliffe, before Russia’s diplomatic rupture with Turkey. The Peace Treaty was signed on March 20, 1856.
The British at first did not treat the Russians as complying and kept some forces in the Black Sea. However, the 1857 India Mutiny, due in part to Russian-supported Persian pressure on Afghanistan, led to British withdrawal and facilitated the unimpeded success of Russia’s long-standing campaign to gain full control of the Caucasus.
As some contemporary observers noted, adherence to the naval and strategic provisions of the treaty depended upon Russian weakness and coalition resolve. During the Franco-German war of 1870-1871, Alexander Gorchakov announced that Russia would no longer adhere to the “Black Sea Clauses” mandating demilitarization, and a London conference accepted this change. During the Turkish War of 1877-1878, Russia re-annexed Southern Bessarabia to the chagrin of its Romanian allies. See also: CRIMEAN WAR; NICHOLAS I; SEVASTOPOL
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Baumgart, Winfried. (1981). The Peace of Paris, 1856: Studies in War, Diplomacy, and Peacemaking. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO. Mosse, Werner. (1963). The Rise and Fall of the Crimean System, 1855-71: The Story of a Peace Settlement. London: The English Universities Press.
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After the disastrous military campaigns of 1813 marked in particular by the severe defeat of Leipzig, Napoleon’s political and military power was on the decline. The emperor was unable to avoid the entry of the Allied powers in Paris on March 31, 1814, and was forced to abdicate in April 1814. On May 30, 1814, following the restoration of Louis XVIII, Charles Maurice de Talleyrand, the plenipotentiary of the new king, signed the first Treaty of Paris with representatives of King George III of England; of Fran?ois I, emperor of Austria; of King Frederic- William III of Prussia; and of Tsar Alexander I. This treaty, which put an end to the war between France and the Fourth Coalition and to the French hegemony in Europe, covered both territorial and geopolitical matters.
France retained its boundaries of January 1, 1792. Thus it was allowed to keep Avignon and the Comtat- Venaissin, a large part of Savoy, Mont-beliard, and Mulhouse, but had to surrender Belgium and the left bank of Rhine as well as territories annexed in Italy, Germany, Holland, and Switzerland. No indemnity was requested, and England gave back all the French colonies except for Malta, Tobago, St. Lucia in the Antilles, and the Isle of France in the Indian Ocean. In addition, the Allied powers had to withdraw from French territory. Last, the treaty included secret clauses that ceded the territory of Venetia to Austria and the port of Genoa to the Kingdom of Sardinia.
On the political level, the treaty called for a general congress to be held at Vienna to settle all questions about boundaries and sovereignty and to confirm the decisions taken by the Allied powers: Switzerland was to be independent, Holland was to be united under the House of Orange, Germany was to become a federation of independent states, and Italy was to be composed of sovereign states.
The relative leniency of the treaty was largely due to the diplomatic ability of Talleyrand; yet, despite its moderation, the document was badly received by the French public opinion and it contributed to the discredit of the Bourbons.
At the time the treaty was signed, Napoleon I was prisoner on the island of Elba and separated from his family. He escaped from the island and landed on March 1, 1815, at Golfe Juan with nine hundred faithful soldiers.
