On 18 June 1815, the Allied forces defeated Napoleon's French forces at the Battle of Waterloo. This finally brought an end to the extended nightmare that the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars had represented for the Habsburg Monarchy. The Monarchy had embodied for much of that period the staunchest counterpart to France's revolutionary modernity, and it is perhaps fitting that the territory on which the battle was fought had been Austrian before those wars, part of the Austrian Netherlands. But no longer. Nor were the troops that finally defeated Napoleon Austrian, but British and Prussian. There were good reasons for this. The Habsburgs had already ceded their territories in the Netherlands to the Dutch, and the Austrian forces were not in the immediate theatre of combat when Napoleon's final campaign commenced, nor were the Russian forces. As it turned out, neither were required to bolster the victorious British and Prussians. It is still ironic that the battle that secured Europe and the Monarchy against further French depredations took place on formerly Austrian ground, but with no Austrian troops present.

The Habsburg Monarchy was in many ways still the indispensable power it had been before 1789, and the first couple of decades after Waterloo were to prove a highpoint in Austria's role in European affairs, as the ‘coachman of Europe’. Yet the quarter-century of war had unleashed a whole set of dynamic forces that brought immense change, not only in the geographic composition of the Monarchy and its place in the European states system but also within Austria's society and economy, and this was both ongoing and deeply threatening to the powers that be, or at least it was seen that way. How the Monarchy's ruler, Franz I, and his main advisor, Prince Clemens Metternich, responded – or not – to the new developments, was to shape decisively the whole of the Monarchy's subsequent career.

A World Restored?

From an Austrian perspective, 1815 was not so much about Waterloo as about the Congress of Vienna. The war had appeared to be over in the spring of 1814, with the Treaty of Paris of 30 May.