Holy Alliance

The Holy Alliance was a coalition treaty signed by Russia, Austria, and Prussia at the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815. One of the greatest battles of the early-modern period, known as the Battle of Nations, took place near Leipzig on October 16–19, 1813. The clash involved over 600,000 soldiers in two coalitions; the French army of Napoleon Bonaparte with Polish, Lithuanian, Italian, and some German troops fought against the allied troops of Russia, Austria, Prussia, and Sweden. Defeated, Napoleon had to retreat and abdicate; the victorious monarchs met eleven months later in Vienna to discuss the future of Europe and ways to restore the old order. In particular, they were interested in returning to the status quo before the French Revolution.

The Congress of Vienna took place between September 1814 and June 1815, although it was never formally opened or closed and the participants never met together at a plenary session. On September 26, 1815, the three monarchs who formed the core of the alliance against Napoleon—the Russian czar Alexander I Romanov, the Austrian emperor Franz I Habsburg, and the Prussian king Friedrich Wilhelm III Hohenzollern—signed the act of the Holy Alliance in Paris. All European monarchs except the Turkish sultan were invited to join the alliance. Pope Pius VII and George III of Great Britain declined to sign, though they accepted the principles of the alliance. There was no formal act abolishing the alliance, and historians vary in providing the date of its end (placing it between the death of Alexander in 1825 and the start of the Crimean War in 1853).