Congress of Vienna

The Congress of Vienna was the post-Napoleonic political settlement of 1815. In the book, it marks a moment of reaction against Jewish emancipation, but not a return to the previous order: although the settlement brought reverses, it could not undo the Rothschild family’s escape from Frankfurt’s ghetto or the commercial opportunities that had followed.

Context: Emancipation and upheaval

French revolutionary rule had begun to unsettle restrictions on Jewish life. In 1791, the French National Assembly emancipated French Jewry; French armies also occupied the Rhineland and emancipated Jews in western Germany. Their impact in Frankfurt was more abrupt. In 1796, French bombardment demolished half of the Judengasse, leaving around two thousand Jews homeless and forcing them to move outside the ghetto. The Rothschilds were among those displaced.

Outside the ghetto, the Rothschilds were freed from numerous regulations that had barred them from entrepreneurship. They could pursue opportunities previously closed to them, including a contract to supply grain to the Austrian army. By the end of the decade, Mayer Amschel Rothschild had become one of Frankfurt’s richest Jews and an established businessman. The opening was thus not simply a change in formal status: a violent political upheaval had altered where the family could live and what business it could conduct.

The 1815 settlement and its limits

Full emancipation in Frankfurt came later. In 1806, Napoleon’s reorganization of Germany made Karl von Dalberg Grand Duke of Frankfurt; in 1811 Dalberg finally implemented full emancipation. Mayer Amschel told his son that he was now a citizen. The sequence—from the destruction of part of the ghetto in 1796, through new commercial possibilities, to formal emancipation in 1811—preceded the Congress of Vienna.

The Congress of Vienna, convened in 1815 to establish the post-Napoleonic political settlement, brought subsequent reverses in the struggle for Jewish emancipation. The book does not specify the measures or describe the Congress’s proceedings; it uses the settlement to show that emancipation remained contested after its formal implementation. Yet the reversal had a limit: there was no going back to the ghetto for the Rothschilds.

A turning point that could not be erased

The family’s trajectory demonstrates how an institutional opening can persist even when political change later turns against it. The Congress of Vienna represented a reaction in the wider struggle over emancipation, but it did not restore the Rothschilds’ former constraints. Mayer Amschel and his sons went on to build the largest bank in nineteenth-century Europe, with branches in Frankfurt, London, Paris, Naples, and Vienna.

The Congress’s significance in this account is therefore less a detailed diplomatic history than a contrast between reversal and irreversibility. Political settlements could check emancipation, but the earlier disruption had already enabled the Rothschilds to establish themselves outside the ghetto and enter commercial life on a new footing. The settlement did not simply reset the institutional world to its earlier state.