Power Is Spelled G.O.D.

              Year after year on the first day of school, I’ve received a handout explaining the stages of punishment in the classroom. You know what I’m talking about: it starts with a verbal warning and ends with you and your parents in the principal’s office. Teachers like us to know we can’t get away with acting out in their classes. But can you blame them? They can’t let their students walk all over them; they need to keep us in line. This past week in class, we discussed what people in power should do when their power is threatened. To start off, we went through a background reading that describes the representatives from each country that attended the Congress of Vienna. We then looked at a reading that focuses on the problems the Congress of Vienna was trying to solve and chose which solution we thought would be best. We worked in small groups and posted our reasons for choosing our desired solutions on our class padlet. After seeing how we, as a class, would solve the problems, we took notes on how these problems were actually solved. The way my classmates chose to handle the 19^th century loss of power were not the ways those actually present in the 19^th century chose to handle it.

1815: The Holy Alliance
http://www.voltairenet.org/article170096.html

              Napoleon, as you can read about in my past post, defeated most European countries, which meant most European countries belonged to France. Although Napoleon was a great fighter, he was also a ruthless one, which left the people of Europe with enough warfare to last them a life time. How would the Quintuple Alliance (Russia, Austria, Prussia, Britain, and France) prevent future revolutions and violence in Europe? They decided to establish a Holy Alliance. This stated that monarchs had the divine right to rule and that any revolution was treason against God. At this time, people were heavily concerned with their afterlife and the idea of doing something that would wind them up in Hell terrified them.

              In my opinion, this was a brilliant way to stifle rebellions. The leaders needed to force people into compliance without the violence used by Napoleon. By saying it as a sin to rebel, people kept themselves in line. God was most important in society and the representatives at the Congress of Vienna knew that the ever present eye of God would shield them from any outbreaks by the citizens. If there came a time when it was evident that those in power were unfit to rule, then those rulers should sacrifice their power for the good of the country. But, seeing as the Congress of Vienna was mostly successful in what they had set out to do, I don’t think these rulers would have to make any sacrifices like that.