title: How Conservative Was the Holy Alliance Really? Tsar Alexander’s Offer of Radical Redemption to the Western World
abstract: s This chapter argues that tsar Alexander’s Holy Alliance of 1815 was far less conservative and far more revolutionary than it was later understood to be. To make this point, the chapter reconstructs how this “secret plan” came to be understood as “conservative” and how this reading of the Holy Alliance Treaty was influenced by latter-day interpretations and machinations far more than by its concrete substance at the time. Subsequently, the origins and constitutive elements of the plan are delin