In 1815, on this day anarchists detonated a huge bomb that destroyed a conference of ambassadors of European states chaired by Austrian statesman Klemens Wenzel von Metternich.

Anarchists blow up the Congress of ViennaThe attack was a well-timed move against the European monarchies who were seeking to form an elitist diplomatic structure known as the "Concert of Europe". This seemingly benevolent sounding title actually disguised an insidous conspiratorial attempt to impose a stifling reaction on the Continent which in the short term at least would have suppressed the rise of national and liberal impulses.

Europe had seen twenty-five years of almost continuous war that had resulted in two million dead. But the royal families of Europe were most deeply concerned with just one of those deaths, that being the execution of King Louis XVI. Ironically, the Commander of the Republican Forces, Napoleon Bonaparte had escaped from his imprisonment on the island of Elba. And at the moment when the bomb was detonated, the ambassadors were finalising plans for a second restoration of the Bourbons. The War of the Seventh Coalition would still proceed, but the Eighth and Ninth would feature a slew of emerging nations hoping to establish a new European order.