The First Allied Occupation – France 1815-18

Beatrice de Graaf, Utrecht University

When most people think about occupation, it is the twentieth-century occupations that spring to mind, most notably the occupations by Germany and Japan before and during the Second World War, and the Allied occupations of Germany, Austria, Italy and Japan after 1945. Before 1900, occupations were mostly military, and intended to extract resources – material, manpower or money – from a conquered country. There is however a remarkable precursor to the Allied occupation of Germany and Austria in 1945, and that is the occupation of France in 1815 by a similar group of allies that included Britain and Russia, but with Austria, Prussia and other members of the German confederation as occupiers, not occupied. This occupation of 1815 is now largely forgotten, but merits more interest for three reasons: 1) It was the first international, even supranational occupation regime in peace time; 2) it was not intended to conquer but to pacify; and 3) it followed the rules of international law. This article explains how it worked, and why it was forgotten.

On 3 July 1815 the Allied forces concluded an armistice with the remains of Napoleon’s Grande Armée just outside Paris. From that moment on, large swathes of France’s northern and eastern territory were officially occupied. While the peace of 1815 rested on an unconditional surrender, a maxim still held that came to be largely abandoned in the course of the nineteenth century: that not destroying a vanquished enemy entirely was good for the balance of power in Europe. ‘The war of 1815 is not a war of conquest’, Metternich urged his Prussian counterpart Hardenberg in a memorandum dated 6 August 1815. For the Allies, ‘the double aim’ of the war was ‘bringing down the usurpation of Napoléon Bonaparte’ on the one hand, and installing a government in France that would guarantee repose and order for both France and the remainder of Europe on the other. A state like France could not just be wiped off the map; Napoleon had already shown that obliterating states was most likely to produce chaos. That is why French territory was occupied and controlled by Allied forces, but occupation was always considered to be a temporary expedient: a means to the end, not an end in itself.

Yet, unlike the armistice and peace treaty that had been concluded just a year earlier, in 1814, the victors in 1815 realized that this time something more than simply formulating courteously worded reciprocal obligations was required. A paperwork of treaties was not enough; something more was necessary to enforce the peace. That is what the cutting-edge discussions among the Allies in Paris between June and September 1815 were all about. The eventual outcome of these discussions (recounted in my book Fighting Terror) was the decision to implement a temporary occupation of France, intended to secure peace in Europe and to secure the establishment of the newly restored government of Louis XVIII. This was a novel element: an occupation not to further military-strategic or purely tactical goals, but to consolidate peace and secure the transition to a stable constellation of power. The Allied administrators took over control over the territory of the conquered country, temporarily assumed supreme authority, put an occupation force in place and created a European condominium over France (see map) – all of which seems more like 1945 than either the end of the War of the Spanish Succession a hundred years earlier in 1713, or the Treaty of Versailles of 1919.

The Allied occupation of France, July – December 1815. (Erik Goosmann © 2020 Mappa Mundi Cartography).

Initially, in July 1815, two thirds of France was in Allied hands, and 1.2 million Allied soldiers were deployed within its borders. This, the Allies agreed, would be reduced to an occupation of one sixth of the territory by 150,000 troops from November/December 1815 until 1820 (in the end, only until late 1818).

While a formal international convention regarding the rules governing an occupation regime would only arrive in 1907 with the Hague Regulations, in 1815, authoritarian-ruled, imperial powers called the shots and together negotiated a collective security system. Yet, they made sure that they underpinned their occupational rule with two treaties: the Treaty of Paris, of 20 November 1815, regulating the principle of reparations, repayment, and also conditions for the projected end of the occupation; and the Treaty of the Quadruple Alliance, concluded that same day, to underwrite the fact that this occupation was carried out by a consortium of four Allied Powers – Britain, Russia, Austria and Prussia – that committed themselves to their own agreed written international legal terms and conditions, and joined together in an Allied Council to oversee the occupation on an almost daily basis, producing protocols that were intended to have the same force as international positive law.  Although no democratic values or international human rights provided the foundations for this system, the treaties gave a sense of legitimacy and accountability to the occupation.

The Allied occupation according to the Treaty of Paris, December 1815–18. (Erik Goosmann © 2020 Mappa Mundi Cartography).

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