Chapter 1 offers a reappraisal of the pathbreaking efforts of the peacemakers of the Congress of Vienna (1814–15) to establish a more durable European peace order, and a new European concert, after the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. It then shows how the 19th century’s Vienna system provided novel mechanisms, rules and understandings to preserve peace and a new, more legitimate international equilibrium in and beyond Europe, thereby also creating essential conditions for the rise of the United States. Yet it also illuminates how changes in international politics and competing nationalist aspirations eventually led to the disintegration of the peace order of 1814–15 and the European concert in the aftermath of the trans-European revolutions of 1848–49 and the Crimean War of 1853–56.