The statesmen who gathered at Vienna to bring back peace to a war torn continent set themselves to restore the conditions which had prevailed before the wars began. This proved impossible; too many of the changes of the previous decades were irreversible. This was especially the case in Germany, where the number of separate and autonomous political units was reduced from more than three hundred to thirty-nine. The German empire was snuffed out in 1806, without as much as a whimper. In 1815 it was restored, no longer under the auspices of the Austrian Habsburgs, but as the German Confederation, or Bund, dominated by Brandenburg-Prussia (Fig. 10.1). In western Europe, political boundaries were smoothed out, and much of its feudal debris of enclaves and exclaves was tidied up. France lost marginally and, in retrospect, significantly. Much of the Saar coalfield and of the ironworking Sambre Valley were lost respectively to Prussia and the United Netherlands. Savoy and Nice were restored to the Sardinian kingdom, only to be regained in 1860. Fear of renewed French aggression led to the incorporation of the southern Low Countries, previously Austrian, in the United Netherlands, the purpose being to create a powerful buffer to French expansion. This settlement proved to be unacceptable in the southern Low Countries, which in 1831 broke away to form the kingdom of Belgium, its independence and inviolability guaranteed by the powers.

Changes were more fundamental in eastern Europe. Napoleon's Grand Duchy of Warsaw, a kind of revived Polish state created from the Prussian and Austrian shares of the Partitions, was given to the Russian tsars in their personal capacity.