The Diplomatic Revolution

MAY 01 1756 · 12:00

Wenzel Anton von Kaunitz-Rietberg, Austrian chancellor and architect of the 1756 Franco-Austrian rapprochement. Place: Château de Versailles, Kingdom of France Figures: Wenzel Anton, Prince von Kaunitz-Rietberg, Austrian chancellor, the architect · Abbé Bernis, French foreign minister · Maria Theresa of Austria · Madame de Pompadour, intermediary at Versailles Two and a Half Centuries Inverted Habsburg and Bourbon have fought each other since Charles V and Francis I in the 1520s. The opposition is the deep structure of European politics: Westphalia (1648), the Spanish Succession (1701 to 1714), the Polish Succession (1733 to 1738), the Austrian Succession (1740 to 1748) are all variations on it. Kaunitz, ambassador to Versailles from 1750 and chancellor from 1753, becomes convinced that the deep structure is the problem. Maria Theresa wants Silesia back from Prussia, which Frederick II seized in 1740. To take it she needs a continental coalition; the obvious partners are the Bourbon courts. Kaunitz's project is to persuade Louis XV to drop a 250-year alliance pattern with Prussia and the German Protestants and to ally instead with Austria. The Convention of Westminster, an Anglo-Prussian treaty signed in January 1756 to neutralize Hanover, provides the pretext. The Treaty of Versailles, signed on 1 May 1756, is the result: France and Austria pledge defensive support. The System Reveals Itself Within a year a second Treaty of Versailles makes the alliance offensive. France commits 100,000 troops and a large subsidy; Austria's war for Silesia becomes a French war as well. Russia under Elizabeth joins the Franco-Austrian side. Britain and Hanover join the Prussian. Sweden and most German states fall in behind the larger coalition. Within twelve months the alignment of European powers has been inverted in nearly every direction. Two things are revealed. First, the Westphalian system is genuinely indifferent to confession: a Bourbon-Habsburg alliance against a Protestant Prussia, backed by Orthodox Russia and Lutheran Sweden, is now possible without anyone pretending it has a religious shape. Second, the system is infinitely reconfigurable on instrumental grounds. Alliances follow interest, calculated treaty by treaty; the longue durée of dynastic enmity is, when sufficient pressure is applied, just policy. The Concert of Europe at Vienna sixty years later will inherit both of these lessons. Video: House of History on the 1756 reversal of alliances that put Austria with France and Britain with Prussia, the inversion that made the Seven Years' War possible.