‘Our aim is the Rhine frontier’: the emergence of a French forward policy, 1815-1830

Abstract

The Bourbon restoration’s foreign policy is traditionally seen as cautious and conservative, broadly accepting the Vienna settlement, and doing little to recover France’s great-power status lost in 1815. In this view, such acts of assertion as the 1823 Spanish expedition were very much exceptions to the rule. This article argues that, on the contrary, the restored Bourbons’ will to challenge the verdict of 1815 has been significantly underestimated. In particular, it uses neglected archival sources to reconstruct the strenuous efforts made by Charles X and his ministers in the late 1820s to achieve this through an alliance with Russia. The role of domestic considerations in this developing forward policy, above all the perception that retrieving France’s position abroad was the best way of strengthening the regime at home, is also underlined.