Gregor Dallas - 1815: The Roads to Waterloo

The seventeen months from April 1814 to August 1815 were an extraordinary period in European history; a period which saw two sieges of Paris, a complete revision of Europes political frontiers, an international Congress set up in Vienna, civil war in Italy and international war in Belgium.

Gregor Dallas tells the story of these days through the perspectives of three very different European cities: the great metropolis of London, post-revolutionary Paris and baroque Vienna. The writing is almost cinematic in its power to evoke and bring to life the Europe of Tolstoy: the ebb and flow of power, of armies and of peoples across Europes northern plains. Working essentially from primary sources, Dallas is as interested in the weather conditions before battle as in the way cartoonists reacted to court intrigues and fashions.

It is also Europe seen through the eyes of its central players: Castlereagh, who travels from one capital to another in pursuit of peace; Talleyrand, who has served nearly every French regime since the Revolution of 1789; Metternich, who devises new plans for a Germany that does not yet exist and for a Europe that remains devided; Wellington, who reveals himself a diplomat as well as a soldier; Tsar Alexander, an idealist seeking to impose a uniform plan for all Europe; and Boney himself, who has his own ideal of Europe and, though banished to Elba, does not abandon his dream to realise it.

The result is a highly entertaining yet flawlessly researched history of the times. Through 1815s narrative we understand the machinations of state against state, each players different political and ethical viewpoints, and how the decisions and emotions of men and women helped form a fragile Europe in a time of flux.

The Roads to Waterloo

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Epub ISBN 9781448103294

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Published by Pimlico 2001

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Copyright Gregor Dallas 1996

Gregor Dallas has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publishers prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

First published in Great Britain by Richard Cohen Books 1996
Pimlico edition 2001

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ISBN 0-7126-6785-7

To Christine

Gregor Dallas was born in London in 1948, attended Sherborne School in Dorset, received a BA at the University of California at Berkeley and a PhD at Rutgers University in New Jersey. He now lives in France. He is interested in peasants as well as presidents and kings. His first book was on rural life in France, his second on Clemenceau, the French war leader. His most recent book is 1918, covering the establishment of peace at the end of the First World War.

Some ten years ago, a friend of mine in Paris told me I should drive to Berlin. In twenty-four hours youll be facing the Red Guard, he said, and you will understand what Europe is all about. A week later, I was on the flat fast road to Berlin; over a stretch of seven hundred miles nature had erected no obstacles apart from the Rhine. And, sure enough, by nightfall my car was being inspected by a tall customs official of the German Democratic Republic. On the approach to the checkpoint between East and West all one could see in an evening were piles of rubble, a few unadorned modern square blocks, and the yellow haze of burnt cheap petrol.

No visitor could fail to be impressed by the way a new Berlin had grown out of the ruins. No one who passed through Checkpoint Charlie could ignore the sudden change in the urban landscape; the architects of East Berlin still practised a gigantism that had long been abandoned by the West. And nobody crossing Berlin for the first time could avoid thinking of war. It was in East Berlin that I started to reflect on this book. There was that flat plain I had just driven across; the old debris of war; and a city regenerated but divided against itself.

It was the transition from war to peace that intrigued me. What I had in front of me was a living document, a city that had experienced and experienced horrifically that transition. Berlin set me thinking of different cities in different wars.

Berlin itself was a statement on war and peace in the twentieth century and could, as one wandered through its streets, be read like a book. The road from Paris to Berlin, on the other hand, was a statement on every century. In Berlin, one thought of 1945 and 1918; on the road to Berlin, one thought of 1815 I had driven, in a summers morning, across the plains of Belgium.

That strange story of a British commander from Ireland, who, at the head of a European army, defended the town of Brussels, clung to my imagination when I was in Berlin. It was the story behind the story of the ruins before me; a story, moreover, that had not been entirely recounted before.

Of course, there existed plenty of books on the Battle of Waterloo. But not many of them related the battle to the reorganisation of Central Europe, which took place that same year. Very few told how Wellingtons European army had been recruited. Virtually none spoke of the mutinies of May 1815 and what had caused them. Most books on Waterloo concentrated either on the military manuvres of June or on the fall of Napoleon Bonaparte. But there were other roads to Waterloo and I wanted to write about them.

Many books had also been written on the peace settlement of 181415. They were nearly all diplomatic histories, which reduced the military history to a paragraph and completely ignored the life of the cities where most of the diplomatic events had occurred.

In both the military histories of Waterloo and the diplomatic histories of the European peace, there was, in addition, the almost unavoidable problem of national prejudice. The works of C.K. Webster and Harold Nicolson were quintessentially English. Henry Houssaye was unashamedly French. Henry Kissinger and Enno E. Kraehe Central Europeans who had adopted America of course made Metternich their hero. The list of examples was very long.