Sexual Congress

Half a century ago the Austrian historian Hilde Spiel recognised the Vienna Congress as one of the few historical events in which ‘a group of statesmen and politicians ... laboured so extensively and decisively under the influence of women’.

In a period when the relatively new term ‘international’ was established, the Congress of Vienna enabled new ways of thinking about the universal relevance of morality and politics enacted in a sphere that was imagined as truly international. Although we could not know it from reading mainstream accounts of the remaking of the European order after Napoleon, these transformations occurred in an era in which exceptional women, empowered by money or title, exerted influence over diplomacy and political ideology.