The peace conference of 1814-1815, hosted by Austria and steered by its foreign minister Metternich, where the powers that had defeated Napoleon redrew the map of Europe on two old principles, legitimacy and the balance of power, restoring monarchies the Revolution had toppled and arranging territory so no single state could dominate again. Conservatives remember it for buying Europe roughly a century without a general war; liberals and nationalists remember it as a graveyard of liberty that handed peoples between thrones and crushed the hopes of freedom and nationhood.
One of the most ambitious peace conferences in modern history set out to do something close to impossible: restore the old order after revolution and war. In 1814, after a quarter-century of revolution and Napoleonic war, the kings and ministers who had beaten Napoleon gathered in Vienna to rebuild a shattered continent on the foundations the Revolution had blown apart. They restored toppled dynasties, redrew borders to pen France in, and traded provinces between crowns as if the peoples living in them had no say. It worked, in one sense. Europe went roughly a hundred years without a general war between its great powers, the longest such stretch in its modern history. It failed, in another. The liberty and nationhood the Revolution had promised were suppressed and forced underground, and the men who did it spent the next decades policing the continent against their return. Both judgments are true at once, and the argument between them has never ended.