What Was the Treaty of Paris of 1856?
The Treaty of Paris was signed on 30 March 1856 in the salon of the French foreign ministry on the Quai d’Orsay, with the plenipotentiaries of France, Britain, the Ottoman Empire, Sardinia, Prussia, Austria, and Russia ranged around the same green baize table. For Russia, the signature was an act of accepting a defeat that the army of Tsar Nicholas I had brought on the field at Sevastopol the previous September. For the rest of Europe, the treaty was the formal closing of a long chapter of nineteenth-century diplomacy and the opening of a new one.
The road to Paris
The Crimean War opened in October 1853 with the Ottoman declaration of war on Russia, the Russian destruction of the Ottoman fleet at Sinop the following month, and the British and French entry into the war in March 1854. Sevastopol, the Black Sea naval base, fell to the allies on 9 September 1855 after a 349-day siege. The Russian armies had been mauled at the Alma and Inkerman; the supply crisis was acute; and Tsar Nicholas, who had insisted that Russia could fight the combined powers alone, had died in March 1855, leaving the peacemaking to his son Alexander II.
The congress opened in February 1856 under the chairmanship of Count Alexandre Walewski, the French foreign minister. The Russian delegation was led by Baron Alexander Brunnow and the future chancellor Alexander Gorchakov. Britain pushed for harsh terms; France, anxious to reopen a relationship with St Petersburg, pushed for moderation; the upshot was a compromise that humiliated Russia without destroying her (see Figes, The Crimean War, 2010).
The main provisions
The treaty’s central innovation was the demilitarisation of the Black Sea. Articles 11 and 13 closed the sea to all warships, including Russian and Ottoman, and prohibited Russia from maintaining arsenals on its coast. The Ottoman capital’s protection now depended on an international guarantee rather than a Russian one — a reversal of two centuries of Tsarist naval policy.
Russia was also required to renounce its protectorate over the Orthodox Christian subjects of the Ottoman Empire — the basis of the pre-war Russian claim to a special role in the Holy Land. The Danubian Principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia were placed under the collective guarantee of the seven signatories, and the Danube itself was internationalised: the river would be policed by a European Commission, a small but striking breach of sovereignty.
A separate convention, signed the same day, closed the Bosporus and the Dardanelles to all warships in peacetime. The Straits were not yet an Anglo-Russian question; they would become one.
The impact at home and abroad
In Russia the treaty was read as a national disgrace. The censor quietly suppressed the most inflammatory foreign press coverage, but the argument that defeat in the Crimea proved the autocracy itself to be obsolete passed openly through educated society. The phrase “we are not strong enough to be proud” was widely attributed to Gorchakov, who became foreign minister in April 1856 and would spend the next twenty-five years patiently waiting for the moment to overturn the Black Sea clauses.
That moment came in 1870, when the Russian government, citing the changed balance of power in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War, simply repudiated Articles 11 and 13. A London protocol of 17 March 1871, signed by all the great powers, recognised the Russian action. The Straits convention survived until 1914; the Black Sea clauses did not.
The treaty also accelerated the Great Reforms. The freed peasant of 1861, the new judicial system of 1864, the zemstvos, the railroad boom, the reformed military — all were responses, in different ways, to the strategic argument that the Crimean defeat had been a verdict on an un-modernised state.