The Diplomatic Background of the Congress

Abstract

The origins of the Congress of Verona are as important as they are obscure, stretching back, as they do, to the Laibach conference of 1821. There, on February 25, while the Austrian expedition was marching through the Papal States, the three eastern powers resolved to reunite at Florence in September of the following year to discuss Italian affairs. In April, after the revolts in Naples and Piedmont had been suppressed, the allies reaffirmed this decision and announced that the Florentine congress specifically would determine whether Austrian forces in these kingdoms should be continued, diminished, or withdrawn. For more than a year, the great powers assumed that this would be an Italian conference, since Austria had successfully opposed placing the Spanish revolution on its agenda, and Russian objections had effectively proscribed collective consideration of the Turko-Greek conflict.² Nonetheless, the statement is made repeatedly that the Congress of Verona was summoned originally to debate the Spanish and Greek revolutions. To make this assertion is simply to retroject later developments.³

Himself his moldering monument survives,

And sees his labors perish while he lives;

His fame is more contracted than his span,

And the frail author dies before the man.

How would he wish the labor to forbear

And follow other arts with more successful care?

Vida.¹