The Treaty of Paris of 1815, also known as the Second Treaty of Paris, was signed on 20 November 1815, after the defeat and the second abdication of Napoleon Bonaparte. In February, Napoleon had escaped from his exile on Elba, entered Paris on 20 March and began the Hundred Days of his restored rule. After France's defeat at the hands of the Seventh Coalition at the Battle of Waterloo, Napoleon was forced to abdicate again, on 22 June. King Louis XVIII, who had fled the country when Napoleon arrived in Paris, took the throne for a second time on 8 July.
The 1815 treaty had more punitive terms than the treaty of the previous year. France was ordered to pay 700 million francs in indemnities, and its borders were reduced to those that had existed on 1 January 1790. France was to pay additional money to cover the cost of providing additional defensive fortifications to be built by neighbouring Coalition countries. Under the terms of the treaty, parts of France were to be occupied by up to 150,000 soldiers for five years, with France covering the cost. However, the Coalition occupation under the command of the Duke of Wellington was deemed necessary for only three years; the foreign troops withdrew from France in 1818 (Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle).
The total financial burden on France, including interest and upkeep for 150,000 soldiers, approached 1.7 billion francs, the most expensive war reparation ever paid by a country (in proportion to its GDP). In addition to the definitive peace treaty between France and Great Britain, Austria, Prussia and Russia, there were four additional conventions and an act confirming the neutrality of Switzerland, signed on the same day.
The 1815 peace treaties were drawn up entirely in French, the lingua franca of contemporary diplomacy. There were four treaties, between France and each of the four major Seventh Coalition powers: Austria, Great Britain, Prussia and Russia. All four treaties were signed on the same day (20 November 1815), had verbatim stipulations, and were styled the same way (for example the "Definitive Treaty between Great Britain and France").
While the first treaty of Paris had been signed after two months of negotiations, the second treaty took five months of heated and bitter discussions before being signed. The British and the Prussians, the victors of Waterloo, dominated discussions among the allies, while the Austrians, the Russians and the French took a back seat. The treaty could have been much harsher than it could have been since the Prussians, led by the general staff and supported by Marshal Blücher, adamantly demanded the cession of Alsace, Lorraine, the Saarland, Luxembourg and Savoy as well as a war indemnity of 1 200 000 000 francs. Thanks to Castlereagh, who now occupied the dominant position that had been held by the Tsar of Russia in 1814, and whose primary concern was to avoid the alienation of the French toward the restored Bourbons, the treaty of 1815 was only moderately harsher than the Treaty of 1814, which had been negotiated through the manoeuvre of Talleyrand.
With the new treaty, France lost the territorial gains of the Revolutionary armies in 1790–1792, which the previous treaty had allowed France to keep; the nation was reduced to its 1790 boundaries, plus the enclaves of the Comtat Venaissin, the County of Montbéliard and the Republic of Mulhouse, which France was allowed to keep, but minus a few patches of territory along the northern border, including the former duchy of Bouillon, annexed to France 1795, Landau and the Saarlouis exclave, which had been French since 1697, as well as six communes in the Pays de Gex which were ceded to the Canton of Geneva so that it be connected to the rest of Switzerland. France was now also ordered to pay 700 million francs in indemnities, in five yearly instalments, and to maintain at its own expense a Coalition army of occupation of 150,000 soldiers in the eastern border territories of France, from the English Channel to the border with Switzerland, for a maximum of five years. The twofold purpose of the military occupation was rendered self-evident by the convention annexed to the treaty outlining the incremental terms by which France would issue negotiable bonds covering the indemnity: in addition to safeguarding the neighboring states from a revival of revolution in France, it guaranteed fulfilment of the treaty's financial clauses.
The treaty was signed for Great Britain by Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh and the Duke of Wellington and by Armand-Emmanuel du Plessis, Duc de Richelieu for France; parallel treaties with France were signed by Austria, Russia, and Prussia, forming in effect the first confederation of Europe. The Quadruple Alliance was reinstated in a separate treaty also signed 20 November 1815, introducing a new concept in European diplomacy, the peacetime congress "for the maintenance of peace in Europe" on the pattern of the Congress of Vienna, which had concluded 9 June 1815.
The treaty is brief. In addition to having "preserved France and Europe from the convulsions with which they were menaced by the late enterprise of Napoleon Bonaparte", the signers of the Treaty also repudiated "the revolutionary system reproduced in France".
The treaty is presented "in the desire to consolidate, by maintaining inviolate the Royal authority, and by restoring the operation of the Constitutional Charter, the order of things which had been happily re-established in France". The first Treaty of Paris, of 30 May 1814, and the Final Act of the Congress of Vienna, of 9 June 1815, were confirmed. On the same day, in a separate document, Great Britain, Russia, Austria, and Prussia renewed the Quadruple Alliance. The princes and free towns, who were not signatories, were invited to accede to its terms, whereby the treaty became a part of the public law by which Europe, with the exclusion of the Ottoman Empire, established "relations from which a system of real and permanent balance of power in Europe is to be derived".
An additional article appended to the treaty addressed the issue of slavery. It reaffirmed the Declaration of the Powers, on the Abolition of the Slave Trade, of 8th of February 1815 (which also formed ACT, No. XV. of the Final Act of the Congress of Vienna) and added that the governments of the contracting parties should "without loss of time, ... [find] the most effectual measures for the entire and definitive abolition of a Commerce so odious, and so strongly condemned by the laws of religion and of nature".
Convention on pecuniary indemnity
A convention on pecuniary indemnity regulated the mode of liquidating the indemnity of 700 millions francs to be paid by France, in conformity to the fourth article of the treaty. The sum was to be paid, day by day, in equal portions, in the space of five years, from 1 December 1815.
Thus, France was required to pay on account of this convention 383,251 francs every day for five years, equal to about 16,000 pounds sterling at the exchange rate of the day. For this daily quota, the French government had to give assignations on the French treasury, payable to bearer, day by day. In the first instance, however, the Coalition Commissioners were to receive the whole of the 700 million in fifteen bonds of 46+2⁄3 million each; the first of which was payable on 31 March 1816, the second on 21 July 1816, and so on, every fourth month. In the month preceding the commencement of each of these four monthly periods, France was to redeem successively one of these bonds for 46+2⁄3 millions, by exchanging it against the first-mentioned daily assignations payable to bearer, which assignations, for the purpose of convenience and negotiability, were again subdivided into coupures, or sets of smaller sums. As a guarantee for the regular payment of these assignations, and to provide for deficiencies, France assigned, moreover, to the allies, a fund of interest, to be inscribed in the Grand Livre of her public debt, of seven millions francs on a capital of 140 millions. A liquidation was to take place every six months, when the assignations duly discharged by the French Treasury were to be received as payments to their amount, and the deficiency arising from assignations not honoured would be made good, with interest, at five percent from the fund of interest inscribed in the Grand Livre, in a manner specified in this convention.