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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 February 2009
It is nearly one hundred years since the Congress of Vienna met, yet there has not been produced a standard work to which we can turn with confidence for a complete and detailed exposition of transactions which rearranged the whole map of Europe. Often as its errors have been exposed and its principles criticised, the exact methods by which it sought to achieve its purposes are to a certain extent still unknown. The mass of evidence has slowly but surely accumulated, but since Sorel attempted to do once more what Thiers had already done, to write the history of the Congress from the French point of view, no historian has given us any considerable description of its work. By Treitschke and Oncken we have valuable but by no means complete accounts, and meanwhile much work has been done on parts of the Congress which makes it probable that the time has arrived for a reconsideration of its whole scope to be attempted, and perhaps some commonly accepted judgments to be revised. The fascinating articles, which Professor Fournier has given us, as preliminaries to his great work on the Congress, show how much new evidence is at the disposal of the historian.
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page 58 note 2 Ibid. November 21. F.O. Continent, 8.Google Scholar
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page 69 note 1 Castlereagh, to Liverpool, , 02 6. Appendix, p. 50.Google Scholar
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page 69 note 3 Ibid. February 6. Appendix, p. 51.
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