Holy Alliance

The Holy Alliance (German: Heilige Allianz; Russian: Священный союз, Svjaščennyj sojuz), also called the Grand Alliance, was a coalition linking the monarchist great powers of Austria, Prussia, and Russia, which was created after the final defeat of Napoleon at the behest of Emperor (Tsar) Alexander I of Russia and signed in Paris on 26 September 1815.^[1]

The alliance aimed to restrain liberalism and secularism in Europe in the wake of the devastating French Revolutionary Wars and the Napoleonic Wars; it nominally succeeded in this until the Crimean War. Chancellor Otto von Bismarck managed to reunite the Holy Alliance, as League of the Three Emperors, following the unification of Germany in 1871; the alliance again faltered by the 1880s over Austrian and Russian conflicts of interest over the decline of the Ottoman Empire.^[2]