The Year Without a Summer (1816 to 1824)

It was 1816, and after almost 25 years of unrelenting warfare, Europe had been at peace

for one year.

The reprieve had been a blessing.

In England, one could see a familiar sight.

The wind was still bitterly cold and the sky was still grey, but the snow was finally starting

to retreat from the hills and the trees had just begun to bloom.

Farmers shuffled about in their fields, fretting over whether they planted too early.

They took inventory of their winter stores, and wondered if they might go hungry before

the first harvest came in.

These were all normal sights for the early spring, but this year, something had gone

terribly wrong.

This was all happening in June.

They called 1816 “The Year Without a Summer.”

It happened for complicated reasons, but basically there was an unlucky combination of volcanic

eruptions that altered global weather patterns for 2 or 3 years.

In some parts of the world the changes were relatively minor and went by unnoticed, but

in others, the changes were catastrophic.

In Europe, they happened to be catastrophic.

That July turned out to be the coldest July on record.

That summer turned out to be the coldest summer on record.

That decade of the 1810s would be the coldest decade in 500 years, all the way back to the

1300s.

You might be thinking to yourself “okay, so it was unusually cold,” but the problem

waosn’t that it was cold.

The problem was that nothing grew.

Most plants don’t really grow unless the temperature is above 10°C. In London, England,

it’s below 10° for about 66 days on the average year.

In 1816, it was below 10° for 146 days, which meant that there were significant non-growing

periods scattered throughout the spring and even the summer.

That fact alone would have been bad enough, but there was another issue.

The changes to the weather caused most of Europe to be unusually overcast and rainy.

Farmers in France usually had to deal with 8 days of rain per month in the summer.

In 1816, they had 20 days of rain per month.

In England, crops had just begun to sprout when they got 8 straight weeks of rain.

The rain led to flooding, and wherever there was flooding, crops failed.

Northern France and the Netherlands basically turned into one giant swamp.

On average, the cold temperatures and the rain pushed the harvest one month later than

it should have been.

In France, it was more like 2 months.

Farmers relied on early harvests to replenish their stores and get them through the summer,

but this year, with the harvest pushed back a month or more, you instead saw widespread

famine in the early summer.

It became common to see people picking through abandoned fields that had been lost to flood,

eating unripened or rotten plants straight out of the mud.

This was how Europe’s century of peace began.

After 25 years of war, after sending an entire generation of young men into the meat grinder,

people were reduced to picking through the fields for rotten food.

What was it all for?

The environmental catastrophe was nobody’s fault, but people were furious at their own

governments for allowing this to happen.

And nowhere were they more furious than in France.

France was broke, the people were starving, and the country was in the middle of an environmental

catastrophe.

The restored King Louis XVIII had come to power promising to lift a bunch of unpopular

taxes on the poor, but he was immediately forced to break that promise.

The grumbling began immediately.

Conditions in France had never been this bad under Napoleon.

As part of the compromise that restored the King to power, France operated under a new

Liberal constitution.

But the constitution was weak.

France now held regular elections, but the King had the power to throw out the results

whenever he wished.

His ministers did not answer to the public, they answered to him.

This actually made the new system weak and fragile.

Say what you will about the British system, but at least the British Prime Minister took

most of the heat.

If things were going really badly, replacing the Prime Minister was an uncomplicated and

yet meaningful act.

Now the French had a Prime Minister too, but their Prime Minister was just an extension

of the King’s will.

If things were going really badly, replacing the Prime Minister would not be enough.

They may need to replace the King.

The restored King Louis XVIII wisely selected a centrist Liberal named Richelieu as his

first Prime Minister.

The centrists in France at this time were extremely supportive of the new French Constitution,

were comfortable with many of the reforms of the French Revolution, and also favoured

the restoration of the monarchy.

They were trying to split the difference between the Ultra-Conservatives, who favoured increasing

the power of the King and the aristocracy, and the Republicans, who wanted to disseminate

more power to the people and continue the work of the French Revolution.

The King favoured the Ultra-Conservatives, but he correctly assessed that there would

be a popular uprising if he came out of the gates pushing their agenda.

The centrists would have to do for now.

The selection of Richelieu was perhaps the wisest decision the King ever made.

Richelieu was a steady hand, and inspired trust abroad.

In 1818, he successfully negotiated with the Great Powers for the removal of the armies

that were occupying France, and for the end of France’s reparation payments.

In only 3 years, Richelieu had returned France to its rightful place as an equal Great Power,

and it had all been done diplomatically.

France didn’t even have to fight a war to re-establish itself on the international stage.

A small miracle.

But Richelieu was not rewarded for his hard work.

For 3 years in a row, the French Republican Left made substantial gains in their annual

elections.

The King was forced to dismiss Richelieu in favour of a Prime Minister that could draw

support from the Republicans.

Obviously this went against everything that the King stood for, and without the King’s

support this new Prime Minister was not able to achieve anything meaningful.

Let’s pause here for now.

France had successfully re-integrated itself back into the international system by forging

a moderate path led by centrist Liberals like Richelieu.

France’s politics had settled around a grand compromise between the royalist Ultra-Conservatives,

the Liberal centrists, and the Radical Republicans.

France would have a monarchy, and a Liberal Constitution, and it would keep the reforms

of the French Revolution.

France would have an aristocracy, but it would also have elections.

It wasn’t quite a democracy yet, but it was on that path.

Hold all of this in your head because it will become important in a future video.

While Liberalism was taking hold in France, that wasn’t necessarily true in the rest

of continental Europe.

Over in the newly formed German Confederation, German Nationalism was on the rise, and the

other Great Powers were getting nervous.

The two German Great Powers had different reactions to the Nationalist movements within

their borders.

In the multi-ethnic Austrian Empire, the instinct was to tamp it down.

In the mostly German-speaking Prussia, they decided to lean into it.

The King of Prussia sent Hardenberg, his Prime Minister and Foreign Minister, to meet with

Metternich, the Chancellor and Foreign Minister of Austria.

The Prussians wanted to reform the German Confederation, to which both Prussia and Austria

were members.

Riding the wave of German Nationalism, the Prussians wanted to revive talks of a united

German Empire, uniting the German-speaking peoples of central Europe under one state.

This new state would instantly become a new Great Power, with enough strength on their

own to rival France.

Hardenberg proposed that Prussia and Austria roll their territory into this new Empire,

but if that proved to be impossible, he alternately proposed that they could create a smaller

German Empire from the various small German states.

In this scenario, Prussia and Austria could remain independent and control this new smaller

German Empire as allies from the outside.

Metternich was horrified by this idea.

After such careful and difficult negotiation at the Congress of Vienna to create the German

Confederation, Prussia wanted to blow it all up after only 3 years?

Why?

What was wrong with how the Confederation was working?

The German states had agreed to band together for military defense and to resist outside

meddling.

It was working.

Central Europe was at peace.

Prussia and Austria had the strength and the leverage to force their tiny German allies

to do whatever they wished.

Wasn’t that enough?

Why on Earth would Prussia want to start negotiations all over again?

Metternich’s analytical mind went to work.

Both Prussia and Austria controlled substantial Polish-speaking provinces in the east.

If their new German Empire was home to a large Polish population, it’s obvious what would

happen next, isn’t it?

Poland would ask to join the German Empire.

Don’t you think the Tsar of Russia would have something to say about that?

The Tsar of Russia was the King of Poland, he had threatened a war in order to pull Poland

into Russia’s sphere of influence only 3 years earlier.

The new German Empire would instantly be on the brink of war.

To what purpose?

Because a bunch of young Germans in Berlin got caught up in the nationalist mood of the

moment and thought that a German Empire sounded cool?

What a mess.

In order to appease Hardenberg and the German Nationalists back in Prussia, Metternich proposed

some minor reforms to the existing German Confederation so that it might feel a little

more like a unified Empire.

The Confederation would operate a federal secret police to monitor any revolutionary

activity.

To the same end, freedom of the press would be standardized across the different German

states and heavily restricted.

Similarly, student associations at Universities, traditionally a friendly home to revolutionary

thought, would be outlawed across the Confederation.

To allow for all of this, the Confederation as a whole would now be able to force individual

states to modify their domestic laws in the name of preserving order.

Of course in practice these modifications would not be coming out of the small German

states.

The modifications would be coming out of Prussia or Austria.

All of these reforms have a certain flavour to them, don’t they?

Metternich was the conservative architect of the post-war order, and it’s clear where

his priorities lay.

His singular focus was on preventing a French-style Revolution from breaking out in Germany.

An understandable fear having just lived through 25 years of war, but I would argue that it

was a preoccupation that drove him to distraction.

We have the advantage of knowing what would happen in the future, and we know that debate

over a potential German Empire would be one of the key questions of the 19th century.

Metternich had no way of knowing this, but there would be 3 wars fought over this issue,

to say nothing of what happened in the 20th century, my God.

I have no idea if Metternich’s intervention at this point could have prevented any of

those wars, but I do know that Metternich was a lot smarter than me, and when presented

with this problem, he totally shrugged it off.

He was so distracted thinking about 18th century France that he wasn’t really thinking about

19th century Germany.

As part of the 1815 post-war settlement, Austria got control of Northern Italy.

As the Austrians moved into Northern Italy, it fundamentally altered their national priorities.

Before the war, Austria had been a pretty conservative and inward-looking power.

Northern Italy turned Austria into an occupier and a colonizer.

A role that Austria was ill-equipped to handle.

Historian Paul W. Schroeder argued that Austria’s expansion into Northern Italy “forced Austria

to lead and organize Italy, yet did not really empower her to do so.”

Austria had to pump Italy for taxes just to offset the massive costs of occupying it in

the first place.

It was like a snake eating its own tail.

The more difficult the occupation became, the more they taxed.

The more they taxed, the more difficult the occupation became.

Metternich was the mastermind of the occupation of Italy, and as the occupation began to deteriorate,

he began to micromanage Italy’s domestic policies.

Another distraction.

He brought in a wave of Germans from Austria to help administer the Italian occupation,

which only further alienated the Italians and made the situation deteriorate even further.

On the one hand, he was telling the German administrators to defer to the Italians whenever

possible, while on the other hand he was having the Austrian bureaucracy micromanage everything

from Vienna.

Colonization makes hypocrites of us all.

Dissent was growing, and soon Austria found itself sitting atop a genuine nationalist

movement calling for Italian unification.

This was way more than the Austrians had bargained for.

Metternich set up a robust spy network targeting Italian Nationalists, but this did not make

the Austrians any more popular.

Even the more moderate Italians who were willing to tolerate the Austrian occupation began

calling for a Liberal Italian Constitution.

This was not a thing that the conservative icon Metternich could contemplate.

Even geopolitically, the occupation of Italy made a mess of things for Austria.

The Italian Kingdom of Piedmont had been set up as kind of a neutral buffer state so that

Austria and France didn’t have to share a border, but Austrian paranoia over Italian

Nationalism and their goonish spy network had soured relations with their Italian neighbour.

For their own protection, Piedmont sought to establish deeper relations with France.

This sent the Austrians into a paranoid tailspin.

The French were establishing a beachhead in Italy, in Austria’s backyard.

Were the French behind the rising tide of Italian Nationalism?

The occupation of Italy had made Austria totally neurotic.

This was a lesson that every Great Power would have to learn in the 19th century.

The Austrian expansion into Italy may have looked good on a map, but the occupation did

not generate any income, did not increase Austrian military prowess, and did not benefit

Austria geopolitically.

In the end, it was a total distraction from the important issues in Europe that were threatening

the fragile peace.

With Metternich up to his eyeballs with problems of his own making, it would fall to others

to prevent the next Great Power Conflict.

The post-war international order faced its first

major test in the early 1820s.

The King of Spain, restored to power after the defeat of Napoleon, turned out to be an

absolutist ruler in the old 18th century style.

This turned out to be a problem.

Eighteenth century Spain was dead and gone.

When Napoleon was in power he imposed a Liberal constitution upon Spain, one that granted

real political rights to its citizens.

Virtually all adult men were given the right to vote, and with this change, political life

within Spain flourished for the first time.

Elections, newspapers, political debate, all of these things popped up within a few years,

and the people loved it.

So when the absolutist Spanish King was restored to the throne, his first move was to tear

up the Spanish Constitution and return things to how they had been in the 18th century.

The Spanish Legislature, which was full of proud Spanish Liberals who loved their new

Constitution, were extremely vocal in their opposition.

Radical Republicans and Revolutionaries quickly joined forces with the more moderate Liberals,

which created a genuine political movement.

Pretty soon, even generals in the Royal Army were coming out in support of the Liberal

Legislature and the Constitution.

The King was losing control of the country.

Virtually overnight, Spain was on the brink of civil war.

At the urging of his advisors, the King reluctantly - very reluctantly - stepped back from his

position.

He would sign onto the Liberal Constitution.

The King of Spain would become significantly less powerful, and most of the business of

the country would be run through the Spanish Legislature, which would be freely elected

by the people.

Spain would become one of the most Liberal countries in Europe, with stronger political

institutions than even Britain.

The King said all of that, but he lied.

Instead, he began exerting his power by vetoing every little thing that came out of the Liberal

Spanish legislature.

He fired all of his elected Liberal ministers and replaced them with unelected men who were

loyal only to him.

He then appealed to the 5 Great Powers and called for an international coalition to march

into Spain and restore him to his full powers.

A civil war now seemed inevitable, and by making an international appeal, the Spanish

King was taking an awful risk.

Once the Great Powers got involved, Spain could turn into the arena for the next Great

Power Conflict.

The country could be destroyed.

Inspired by the courage and the success of the Spanish Liberals, there were uprisings

in Naples and Piedmont, calling for Liberal Constitutions of their own.

This movement had jumped international borders, which freaked out the Great Powers.

It was their worst fears realized.

It reminded them of the French Revolution.

Everybody needed to be careful here.

Metternich was particularly freaked out by the uprisings, not only because of his conservative

ideology, but also because the countries in revolt happened to be Austria’s neighbours.

In correspondence with the other Great Powers, he expressed his fears that this may spark

a wave of Revolution across Europe.

Since Italy was in Austria’s sphere of influence, the other Great Powers agreed to give Austria

a free hand to deal with the uprisings however they wished.

In 1821, Austria marched into the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies to the south and the Kingdom

of Piedmont-Sardinia to the west.

In both cases they came to the rescue of the existing Conservative regimes.

In short order, they put down the uprisings that were calling for new, Spanish-style Liberal

Constitutions.

The copycat uprisings were resolved, but the central

problem of Spain remained.

Of all of the Great Powers, Britain greeted the calls for a Spanish intervention with

the most skepticism.

The Liberals in the British Parliament wholeheartedly supported the Spanish Liberals, but even the

British Conservatives were sympathetic to their cause.

They had gone through their own crisis with the monarchy in the 17th century, and even

the most hardcore Conservatives believed that Britain was better off for it.

They viewed what was happening in Spain as a part of a natural political evolution that

every country must go through at some point.

The Conservatives were in government in Britain, and the Conservative Foreign Secretary, Castlereagh,

was dead set against any Spanish intervention.

He publicly declared that he had never intended the Quadruple Alliance, by which he meant

the 4 Great Powers that had brought down Napoleonic France, to be a “union for the government

of the world or for the superintendence of the internal affairs of other states.”

He argued that the Spanish situation was not a threat to the peace in Europe.

Prime Minister Liverpool agreed.

The Emperor of Russia, Tsar Alexander, was on the opposite end of the spectrum.

He believed that the uprising in Spain was the result of a coordinated international

conspiracy, and that this conspiracy was an active threat to European stability.

He was fully prepared to mobilize the Russian army and march it all the way across Europe

in support of the Spanish King.

This freaked everybody out even more than the uprisings in Italy did.

Nobody - and I mean nobody - wanted this.

Metternich was particularly disturbed.

He wanted to restore the Spanish King to his full powers, but not if it meant having the

Russian army muddy their boots all over Europe.

For some time, nobody was quite sure what to do about Spain.

The Great Powers were all afraid to do anything, and hoped that maybe Spain would just come

to a compromise on their own.

During this pause, something unexpected happened.

British Foreign Secretary Castlereagh unexpectedly took his own life.

He was replaced by a politician named George Canning.

Internationally, the news came as a thunderbolt.

Castlereagh and Metternich had a special relationship, and the two were kinda the co-authours of

the post-war international system.

Now Metternich was on his own.

He had no idea how this new fellow Canning might approach the post-war settlement.

This news was equally distressing to Britain’s political class.

The current government was a moderate Conservative government, and Castlereagh had been thought

of as a pragmatic Conservative that had good relations with the British Liberals.

Canning had a different reputation.

He was known as a Conservative-Conservative, kind of an attack dog, rabidly ideological

and not that well disposed toward the moderates currently leading the government.

Castlereagh and Canning never really saw eye-to-eye.

In fact, Castlereagh…

um, how do you say this, shot him.

Things got so heated at one point during the war that the two exchanged pistol shots.

Canning lost.

So you can understand everybody’s surprise when Canning replaced his longtime enemy as

Foreign Secretary.

Many legitimately wondered whether Canning would tear up all of Castlereagh’s peace

agreements and throw British foreign policy into chaos.

But everybody was wrong about Canning.

Everybody.

In the immortal words of Robert Caro, power doesn’t corrupt, it reveals.

What did Canning’s newfound power reveal about him?

Well, before Castlereagh’s death, Castlereagh had been consumed with the project of disentangling

Britain from continental European affairs.

Castlereagh didn’t want to be sending the British army all over Europe to put down minor

uprisings from people that were only asking for quite sensible reforms.

To the surprise of all of his contemporaries, the supposed ideological attack dog Canning

shared that vision.

No armies in Europe.

In fact, Canning went even further.

He shared Castlereagh’s belief that British prosperity depended upon how well they did

out in the colonies, but unlike Castlereagh, he thought that trade, rather than colonialism,

was really the thing that set Britain apart.

Colonies were only useful in so far as they facilitated trade, they were not an end unto

themselves.

To that end, British interests lay in the pursuit of peace.

Peace facilitated trade, and trade made Britain prosperous.

Unlike his predecessor, Canning was agnostic when it came to the colonies, and outright

noninterventionist when it came to war.

This makes Canning pretty unique in an era that was dominated by colonial obsession.

Colonialism can make a country prosperous, but it can also be a trap.

Canning was one of the few people who could see this clearly.

There is one other thing that set Canning apart.

He was a deeply committed slavery abolitionist.

This didn’t make his life any easier, it was a controversial stance for a British Conservative

to take, and in fact most abolitionists lived in the Liberal Whig party.

Canning just felt it deep in his bones, which makes him cool, or at least as cool as a 19th

century British politician can be.

British politicians of this era liked to talk a big game when it came to political rights,

but unlike many of his contemporaries, including his predecessor Castlereagh, Canning wasn’t

a goddamned hypocrite.

Canning had just become Foreign Secretary when the Spanish Crisis finally boiled over.

In 1823 the Spanish Legislature, backed by the military, removed the King from power.

The victorious Spanish Republicans got very excited by this move, and began calling for

a Revolutionary Spanish Republic.

This was bad.

A Spanish Revolution so soon after the French Revolution threatened to plunge all of Europe

into war again.

The Great Powers would have preferred to sit back and wait for Spain to resolve its own

crisis, but they couldn’t ignore this development.

France acted first.

After briefly consulting with the other Great Powers, the Conservative King of France sent

the French Army into Spain.

Every other Great Power signed off on this intervention.

Everyone except Britain.

Metternich signed off on the intervention, but he wasn’t happy about it.

The international system was on the brink of collapse.

One false move now and all of Europe would be at war.

France restored the Spanish King to the throne, and then urged him to hammer out a compromise

with the Spanish Liberals.

This was their big plan to resolve the crisis.

Give the King everything he wanted, and then say “pretty please will you do the thing

that you have been refusing to do all along?”

Why would he do that?

It was an incoherent plan, and it turned out to be a catastrophic failure.

Having received from the French everything he wanted, the Spanish King refused to even

meet with his political opponents.

Not only that, but now the Spanish Liberals, Republicans, and Revolutionaries knew that

there could be no political solution to this crisis.

Any negotiated settlement would just be thrown out by the Spanish King and the French Army.

Now the only way forward was through force of arms.

It really was a bone-headed move by the French.

They had hoped to force a compromise, but instead, they had picked sides in a civil

war and were now stuck occupying parts of Spain.

This was the first great test for the new British Foreign Secretary Canning.

In a speech before Parliament, he reaffirmed British neutrality over this matter, but noted

at the end of his speech that he dearly hoped that the Spanish Liberals would be victorious

in their struggle against the tyrannical Spanish King and the French Army.

This was a shocking statement to the other Great Powers.

They had all assumed that they were all on the same page, but apparently not!

Apparently the conservative government in Britain was sympathetic to the Spanish Liberals

and Republicans and Revolutionaries!

It was a clever move by Canning.

It sent a strong signal to the other powers that they could not necessarily count on British

support if they wanted to march all over Europe putting down Liberal uprisings.

If they pulled a stunt like this again, they might find Britain on the other side of the

fight.

British Liberals, who up until now had looked at Canning with trepidation, heaped praise

upon the Conservative Foreign Secretary for orienting Britain as a defender of Liberal

movements all across Europe.

British Liberals were now confident that they had one of their own in the Foreign Office.

Out on the streets, the people rushed to support Canning’s declaration.

Only 8 years after the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the question on everybody’s mind was

would France’s recklessness lead to another Great Power Conflict?

The consensus on the streets was that by standing up to France and those other European tyrants

who were eager to invade their neighbours over petty political disputes, Canning was

the only person working to prevent another war.

This made him unexpectedly popular with the British people.

Before the speech, there had been a whisper campaign to remove Canning from power.

After the speech, he was untouchable.

In the midst of all the chaos, something special was happening out in the Spanish colonies.

In rapidfire succession, the following Spanish colonies declared independence.

Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Peru.

Ecuador, Bolivia, and Uruguay would declare independence a little bit later, as would

the Portuguese colony of Brazil.

South America was having a moment, you might say.

While all of this was going on, the Spanish King, backed by France, predictably refused

to negotiate with any of the South American Revolutionaries.

He refused to make even symbolic concessions that might have kept them under the Spanish

Crown.

Canning saw an opportunity.

He wanted Britain to be the first to recognize these newly independent states.

He believed that having some friends in South America might prove to be a useful counterbalance

against any other power trying to push into the region.

And there was one other thing.

Canning mistrusted the French.

When it came to Spain, their true intentions were not yet clear.

Why would they recklessly march into Spain like that?

It made no sense.

Canning feared that they may try to restart the lost French Empire by seizing all of Spain’s

colonies in the name of stability.

If Canning saw to it that these newly independent states were recognized by the British government

and supported by the British fleet, maybe France would think twice before doing something

foolish like that.

Canning began the process of recognizing the new South American states, and sent a message

to France saying that any French adventurism in South America would be interpreted by Britain

as an act of war.

The French fell all over themselves assuring Canning that this was never their intention.

Regardless as to whether that was true or not, they heard the message loud and clear.

Canning’s diplomatic maneuver was remarkably successful.

At a later international conference, the question of reconquering Spain’s lost colonies was

floated.

When France informed the other Great Powers of Britain’s threat, the matter was immediately

dropped.

Canning’s threat worked.

Peace in South America was preserved at no cost to Britain.

The other Great Powers were also put on notice.

If they wanted to go around the world opportunistically snapping up colonies, they would need to go

through Britain first.

Pax Britannica at its finest.

At this time I would like to ask all Americans to leave the room.

Shortly after the wave of revolutions in South America, Canning began collaborating with

the American Secretary of State John Quincy Adams.

What came out of this collaboration was the Monroe Doctrine in 1823.

The Monroe Doctrine, really developed by Secretary of State Adams, stated “the American continents

[...] are henceforth not to be considered as future subjects for colonization by any

European power.”

The funny thing about this declaration was that at the time, it was completely unenforceable.

Or, I should say, it was completely unenforceable by the Americans.

But you know who could enforce it?

The British.

The Monroe Doctrine declared no new colonization of North or South America.

No new colonization meant that the current colonization was locked in place.

Who did that help?

Britain at this time was by far the #1 European power in North America, and with these new

Revolutions in the Spanish colonies, it was fast becoming the #1 European power in South

America.

If Spain or France or any other power attempted to move back into South America, the Monroe

Doctrine stated that the United States would resist, which in effect meant that the United

States would defend British interests.

Pushing the Americans in this direction was a master stroke by Canning.

They didn’t really understand at the time that this declaration committed the American

Navy to defending British sugar plantations on Jamaica, but it did.

And in exchange for this, the British gave the Americans nothing.

Canning said of the Monroe Doctrine when it was first announced, “the effect of the

ultra-liberalism of our Yankee co-operators on the ultra-despotism of our [...] allies,

gives me just the balance I wanted.”

By this he meant that yes, the British and the French were playing nice at the moment,

but if that ever changed, the Americans would serve as a useful counterbalance against French

overseas expansion.

Canning felt free to speak more plainly a year later, after all the dust had settled.

He described the Monroe Doctrine as “an act which will make a change in the face of

the world almost as great as the discovery of the continent now set free.

The Yankees will shout in triumph, but it is they that lose most by our decision.”

It must be said that Canning didn’t get everything he wanted.

The Monroe Doctrine contained a massive loophole that allowed for American colonialism, which

did make Canning nervous, especially when he looked at the American ambitions toward

the Caribbean and the newly independent Mexico.

But as a general principal, Canning had secured American support against any European power

moving into North or South America.

It was a diplomatic coup for the British.

Okay, the Americans can come back into the room now.

The Great Powers never went to war over Spain, but it was a very near thing.

France would end their misguided occupation after 5 years, and political instability within

Spain would persist for the next 40 years.

Or 80 years.

Or 120 years.

Or… let’s just say that political instability in Spain would persist.

However, the Spanish Crisis proved that the post-war peace was more fragile than anybody

realized.

The Great Powers walked away having learned several lessons.

First, Metternich was beginning to lose his grip on Europe.

He had been the Great Man during the post-war settlement, but after 8 years, he was becoming

increasingly distracted by the Austrian occupation of Italy and by the festering issues within

the German Confederation.

The international system that he had helped design was still intact, but with France’s

reckless invasion of Spain it had entered a new phase, one where he was no longer the

main character.

Second, Britain under Canning’s stewardship had fully emerged as the greatest of the Great

Powers.

The Spanish Crisis taught everybody that when Britain put its foot down, every other Great

Power hesitated.

It was a new world.

And then lastly, there was France.

What to say about France?

They got off to such a great start by successfully reintegrating themselves back into the international

system under Richelieu, but after that, it seems like they were bonked over the head

with an idiot stick.

Well, in a way they were.

I’ve talked around this point up until now, but right around the time that France recklessly

invaded Spain, the government of France underwent an abrupt ideological shift.

They abandoned the grand compromise that had restored the monarchy to power, and decided

to lurch quite suddenly in a Conservative and autocratic direction.

This decision set up a chain of events in France that would have profound consequences

for the rest of the 19th century.

And we’ll discuss all of that in the next video.