The Alvensleben Convention was a treaty between the Russian Empire and the Kingdom of Prussia, named after general Gustav von Alvensleben. It was signed in St. Petersburg on 8 February 1863 by Alvensleben and Alexander Gorchakov. [1]
The Alvensleben Convention was a treaty between the Russian Empire and the Kingdom of Prussia, named after general Gustav von Alvensleben. It was signed in St. Petersburg on 8 February 1863 by Alvensleben and Alexander Gorchakov. [1]
In January 1863 an uprising against the Russian rule in Congress Poland occurred. Prussia immediately closed its border and mobilized the Prussian Army to secure its eastern provinces against a similar event. Initiated by Prime Minister Otto von Bismarck, Alvensleben, the Prussian King's personal adjutant, was dispatched to Tsar Alexander II of Russia’s court to negotiate common measures with regard to the insurgents. [1] [2] The two powers agreed on the right of each of their military forces to cross the border in pursuit of Polish revolutionaries and to extradite them to Russian military courts. [1] [3] [4]
The convention was never implemented as Russia dealt on its own with Polish uprising. [5] [6]
Bismarck, who had just been appointed Prime Minister in September 1862 and ruled without a parliamentary majority, was however criticized by the Prussian liberal politicians like Hans Victor von Unruh and Heinrich von Sybel, who sympathized with the Poles although far less than in 1848. [2] [4] [7] [8] [9]
The treaty led to clashes in the Prussian Landtag and after the president of the parliament interrupted Bismarck during a dispute over his Polish policy, he stated that he answered only to the king and was “not subject to the disciplinary authority vested in the president of the parliament.” The struggle between Bismarck and the diet continued and on 22 May 1863 the diet sent a sharp note to the king: "The House of Deputies has no further means of coming to terms with this ministry.... Every further negotiation only strengthens our conviction that a chasm separates the advisors to the crown and the country." As a result, the king finally dissolved the diet. [10]
Meanwhile, Bismarck backed down and on his instigation Gorchakov declared the convention has never been in force. [3]
The convention was criticized by western liberals and led to a serious diplomatic crisis. [3] Great Britain and the Austrian Empire protested and especially Napoleon III, Emperor of the Second French Empire, showed his sympathies towards the uprising and suggested the dismissal of Bismarck as Prussian Prime Minister. [2] Empress Eugenie already showed a map of Europe to the Austrian ambassador, which contained an independent Poland and a major realignment of European frontiers. [8] [11]
The convention improved Russo-Prussian relations, while Franco-Russian relations were strained by the open sympathy Napoleon III had shown towards the Poles. [2] [12] Bismarck himself later saw it as a precondition for the Russian neutrality in the Austro-Prussian and Franco-Prussian War. [12]
Otto, Prince of Bismarck, Count of Bismarck-Schönhausen, Duke of Lauenburg, born Otto Eduard Leopold von Bismarck, was a conservative German statesman and diplomat. From his origins in the upper class of Junker landowners, Bismarck rose rapidly in Prussian politics, and from 1862 to 1890 he was the minister president and foreign minister of Prussia. Before his rise to the executive, he was the Prussian ambassador to Russia and France and served in both houses of the Prussian Parliament. He masterminded the unification of Germany in 1871 and served as the first Chancellor of the German Empire until 1890, in which capacity he dominated European affairs. He had served as the chancellor of the North German Confederation, the precursor to the German Empire, from 1867 to 1871, alongside his responsibilities in the Kingdom of Prussia. He cooperated with King Wilhelm I of Prussia to unify the various German states, a partnership that would last for the rest of Wilhelm's life. The King granted Bismarck the titles of Count of Bismarck-Schönhausen in 1865 and Prince of Bismarck in 1871. Bismarck provoked three short, decisive wars against Denmark, Austria, and France. Following the victory against Austria, he abolished the supranational German Confederation and instead formed the North German Confederation as the first German national state, aligning the smaller North German states behind Prussia, while excluding Austria. Receiving the support of the independent South German states in the Confederation's defeat of France, he formed the German Empire – which also excluded Austria – and united Germany.
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Prussia was a German state on the southeast coast of the Baltic Sea. It formed the German Empire under Prussian rule when it united the German states in 1871. It was de facto dissolved by an emergency decree transferring powers of the Prussian government to German Chancellor Franz von Papen in 1932 and de jure by an Allied decree in 1947. For centuries, the House of Hohenzollern ruled Prussia, expanding its size with the Prussian Army. Prussia, with its capital at Königsberg and then, when it became the Kingdom of Prussia in 1701, Berlin, decisively shaped the history of Germany.
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Prince Antoni Henryk Radziwiłł was a Polish and Prussian noble, aristocrat, musician, and politician. Initially an hereditary Duke of Nieśwież and Ołyka, as a scion of the Radziwiłł family he also held the honorific title of a Reichsfürst of the Holy Roman Empire. Between 1815 and 1831 he acted as Duke-Governor of the Grand Duchy of Posen, an autonomous province of the Kingdom of Prussia created out of Greater Polish lands annexed in the Partitions of Poland.
The Second Schleswig War also sometimes known as the Dano-Prussian War or Prusso-Danish War was the second military conflict over the Schleswig-Holstein Question of the nineteenth century. The war began on 1 February 1864, when Prussian and Austrian forces crossed the border into Schleswig. Denmark fought the Kingdom of Prussia and the Austrian Empire. Like the First Schleswig War (1848–1852), it was fought for control of the duchies of Schleswig, Holstein and Lauenburg, due to the succession disputes concerning them when the Danish king died without an heir acceptable to the German Confederation. The war started after the passing of the November Constitution of 1863, which integrated the Duchy of Schleswig into the Danish kingdom in violation of the London Protocol.
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Gustav von Alvensleben was a Prussian General der Infanterie.
Events from the year 1870 in Germany.
alvensleben convention napoleon.