The Paris Treaty did not make any major territorial changes to the map of Europe. To many at the time, the outcome did not appear worthy of a war in which so many people died. Russia ceded southern Bessarabia to Moldavia. But otherwise the treaty’s articles were statements of principle: the independence and integrity of the Ottoman Empire were confirmed and guaranteed by the great powers (the first time a Muslim state was recognized by international law, the Congress of Vienna having specifically excluded Turkey from the European powers regulated by its international laws); the protection of the non-Muslim subjects of the Sultan was guaranteed by the signatory powers, thereby annulling Russia’s claims to protect the Christians of the Ottoman Empire; Russia’s protectorate over the Danubian principalities was negated by an article confirming the autonomy of these two states under Ottoman sovereignty; and, most humiliating of all for the Russians, Article XI declared the Black Sea to be a neutral zone, open to commercial shipping but closed to all warships in peacetime, thus depriving Russia of its naval ports and arsenals on this crucial southern coastal frontier.26
But if the Paris Treaty made few immediate changes to the European map, it marked a crucial watershed for international relations and politics, effectively ending the old balance of power, in which Austria and Russia had controlled the Continent between themselves, and forging new alignments that would pave the way for the emergence of nation states in Italy, Romania and Germany.
Although it was Russia that was punished by the Paris Treaty, in the longer term it was Austria that would lose the most from the Crimean War, despite having barely taken part in it. Without its conservative alliance with Russia, which never quite forgave it for its armed neutrality in favour of the allies in 1854, and equally mistrusted by the liberal Western powers for its reactionary politics and ‘soft-on-Russia’ peace initiatives during the war, Austria found itself increasingly isolated on the Continent after 1856. Consequently it would lose out in Italy (in the war against the French and Piedmontese in 1859), in Germany (in the war against the Prussians in 1866) and in the Balkans (where it steadily retreated from the 1870s until 1914).
None of that was yet apparent in April 1856, when Austria joined France and Britain in a Triple Alliance to defend the Paris settlement. The three powers signed an agreement that any breach of the Paris Treaty would become a cause of war. Palmerston saw it as a ‘good additional Security and Bond of Union’ against Russia, which he fully expected to re-emerge in due course as a major threat to the Continent. He wanted to expand the
Unlike Nesselrode, a firm supporter of the Holy Alliance and its legitimist principles, Gorchakov took a pragmatic view of Russia’s role on the Continent. In his opinion, Russia should not form alliances that committed it to general principles, such as the defence of legitimate monarchies, as it had done before the Crimean War. The war had shown that Russia could not rely in any way on the solidarity of legitimate European monarchies. Nesselrode’s policy had made Russia vulnerable to the failings of other governments, Austria in particular, a power Gorchakov despised from his time as ambassador in Vienna. Instead, Gorchakov believed Russia should focus its diplomacy on its own national interests, and ally with other powers regardless of their ideology to further those interests. Here was a new type of diplomacy, the realpolitik later practised by Bismarck.
The Russians tested the Paris Treaty from the start, focusing on minor issues which they could exploit to open up divisions in the Crimean alliance. In May 1856 they claimed ownership of a lighthouse on tiny Serpent Island, in Turkish waters near the mouth of the Danube delta, and landed seven men with an officer to take up residence in the lighthouse. Walewski was inclined to let the Russians have the insignificant island, but Palmerston was adamant that they had to be ejected, on the grounds that they were infringing Turkish sovereignty. When the captain of a British ship made contact with the Turks on Serpent Island, he was told that they did not mind the Russians being there: they saw them as guests and were happy to sell them their supplies. Palmerston put his foot down. ‘We must avoid the fatal mistake made by Aberdeen in permitting the early movements and indications of Russian aggression to go on unnoticed and unrepressed,’ he wrote to Clarendon on 7 August. Orders were prepared to send the gunboats in to remove the Russians physically, but John Wodehouse, the British envoy in St Petersburg, was doubtful whether Britain had the right to do this, and the Queen shared these doubts, so Palmerston backed down and diplomatic pressure was used instead. Gorchakov insisted that the island had been owned by the Russians since 1833, and appealed to the French, who were thus manoeuvred into a position of international mediation between Britain and Russia.28
Meanwhile, the Russians launched a second challenge to the Paris Treaty in connection with the border between Russian Bessarabia and Turkish-controlled Moldavia. By an accident of mapping and confusion over names, the allies had drawn the border running to the south of an old village called Bolgrad, 3 kilometres to the north of New Bolgrad, a market town situated on the shores of Lake Yalpuk, which runs into the Danube. The Russians made use of the lack of clarity, claiming that they should be given both Bolgrads, and thus joint ownership of Lake Yalpuk. Palmerston insisted that the border should remain at the old village – the intention of the treaty having been to deprive the Russians of access to the Danube. He urged the French to remain firm and show a united front against the Russians, who would otherwise exploit their differences. But the French were happy to concede the Russian claim as a matter of good faith, though they then proposed that the boundary should run along a narrow strip of land between the market town and Lake Yalpuk, thereby granting more territory to the Russians but depriving them of access to the lake. Once again, the French acted as intermediaries between Russia and Britain.
By mid-November the Duc de Morny had persuaded Gorchakov to give up Russia’s claim to Serpent Island, provided Russia was given New Bolgrad, without access to the lake, and territorial compensation for their loss in a form decided by the French Emperor. The deal was linked to a proposal by the Tsar and Gorchakov (drawn up with the help of Morny in St Petersburg) for a Franco-Russian convention for the protection of the neutrality of the Black Sea and the Danubian principalities, as set out in the Paris Treaty, but now necessitated, it was claimed by the Russians, ‘by the fact that the treaty has been violated by England and Austria’, who had ‘tried to cheat’ the Russians of legitimate possessions in the Danube area. Morny recommended the Russian proposal to Napoleon and passed on to the French Emperor a promise made to him by Gorchakov: Russia would support French acquisitions on the European continent if France signed the convention. ‘Mark well,’ Morny wrote, ‘Russia is the only power that will ratify the territorial gains of France. I have already been assured of that. Try and get the same from the English! And who knows, with our demanding and capricious people, one day we might have to come to Russia for their satisfaction.’ Details of the Russian attitude to French territorial acquisitions had been outlined in a secret instruction to Count Kiselev, the former governor of the Danubian principalities who became ambassador to France after the Crimean War: protocol required that a senior statesman represent the Tsar’s new policy of friendship towards France. Should Napoleon direct his attention to the Italian peninsula, Kiselev was told, Russia ‘would consent in advance to the reunion of Nice and Savoy with France, as well as to the union of Lombardy with Sardinia’. If his ambitions were directed to the Rhine, Russia would ‘use its good offices’ to help the French, while continuing to honour its commitments to Prussia.29
A conference of the powers’ representatives in Paris brought about a speedy resolution of the two disputes in January 1857: Turkish ownership of Serpent Island was confirmed with an international commission to control the lighthouse; and New Bolgrad was given to Moldavia, with Russia compensated by a boundary change elsewhere in
