462 Chapter 24The allies also protected the conservative order by
planning regular meetings to discuss international prob-
lems. This led to a series of small congresses, also
shaped by Metternich, during the next decade. In 1818
a congress met at Aachen to recognize that the French
had paid the indemnity and to welcome the govern-
ment of Louis XVIII into a Quintuple Alliance to main-
tain the status quo. A more important congress met in
1820 at Troppau, where the three eastern powers (Aus-
tria, Prussia, and Russia) adopted the Troppau Protocol,
asserting the right of the allies to intervene in smaller
countries if the conservative order were threatened. A
congress of 1821 used this principle to justify an Aus-
trian invasion of the Italian states to suppress radical
rebels. The congress system faced a difficult decision in
1822 when a liberal revolution occurred in Spain. The
Troppau Protocol called for armed intervention to
crush the revolution, but that meant a French invasion
of Spain. The allies decided that they were less afraid of
a French army than of a French constitution and ac-
cepted the ironic position of cheering French military
victories.
Protecting the Old Order: Religion
The conservatism of the post-1815 world is especially
clear in the religious revival of that era. After an age in
which philosophes satirized churches and the educated
classes became skeptics, after a revolution in which
churches were closed and their property seized, after an
economic revolution that dechristianized many work-
ers, and after a cynical conqueror imprisoned the pope
and used religion as an instrument of political policy,
many Christians were eager for their own restoration of
old values and institutions.
The Vatican was a leader of the new conservatism.
Pope Pius VII had slept in French jails during the revo-
lutionary era and now retaliated against French ideas.
He restored the Jesuit order, reestablished the Inquisi-
tion, and reconstituted the Index of prohibited books.
Catholics were forbidden to believe that the Earth ro-
tated around the Sun or to read Gibbon’s The Decline and
Fall of the Roman Empire. In the papal states, Pius annulled
Napoleonic laws of religious toleration and reintro-
duced persecution of the Jews, who were returned to
the ghetto and compelled to attend mass once a week.
Pius ended freedom of speech and the press, outlawing
statements of heresy, radicalism, or immorality. His
criminal code permitted torture but outlawed vaccina-
tions and street lighting as radical innovations.Pope Pius VIII continued this effort to return to the
Old Regime. As he explained in the encyclical Traditi
humilitati nostrae(1829), the church must combat secular-
izatism in all its forms, including public schools, civil
marriage, and divorce. Catholics must return to a reli-
gion based upon faith and Christian mysteries. A lead-
ing Catholic intellectual, the viscount René de
Chateaubriand, had championed this in The Genius of
Christianity(1802). Christians, Chateaubriand argued,
must reject rationalism because it rejected religious
mysteries: “It is a pitiful mode of reasoning to reject
whatever we cannot comprehend.”
Even political liberals embraced religious conser-
vatism in some countries. In Spain, liberals fought an
obsessively religious monarch, King Ferdinand VII,
who was so devout that he personally embroidered
robes for statues of the Virgin Mary in Spanish shrines.
Yet Spanish liberals shared his religious beliefs. When
they imposed a constitution in 1820, they rejected reli-
gious freedom. Article 12 said simply, “The religion of
the Spanish nation is, and shall be perpetually, Apos-
tolic Roman Catholic, the only true religion. The na-
tion protects it by wise and just laws and prohibits the
exercise of any other religion whatsoever.”
A somewhat different conservatism characterized
Protestantism. Evangelical churches (especially Pietists
in Lutheran countries and Methodists elsewhere) de-
nounced the evils of the modern world and taught obe-
dience to established authority, as did the Vatican.
Methodist governing statutes stated: “None of us shall,
either in writing or in conversation, speak lightly or ir-
reverently of the government.” Prince Metternich could
not have said it better. Even hymns could be counter-
revolutionary: “The rich man in his castle, The poor
man at the gate, God created both of them, And or-
dered their estate.” An evangelical “awakening” swept
Britain, the north German states, and Scandinavia and
even won converts in such Catholic regions as Belgium,
Switzerland, and France. This development was so im-
portant that some historians have argued that the
spread of Methodism in the British working class was a
reason why Britain never experienced a major revolu-
tion during industrialization.
Protestants stressed another element in conser-
vatism: Puritanical restrictions upon behavior. Evangeli-
cals insisted upon strict sexual morality, campaigned for
the prohibition of alcoholic beverages, and fought blas-
phemous language. The most famous illustration of the
Protestant effort to supervise morals is the work of Dr.
Thomas Bowdler and his sister Harriet. The Bowdlers
worked so avidly to censor immoral literature that they