The Principle of Non-Intervention Reconsidered: the French July Monarchy, the Public Law of Europe and the Limited Sovereignty of Secondary Countries

Abstract

The issues of intervention and non-intervention played a significant role in diplomatichistory and became popular topics of political-legal debates as well as scholarlyworks. It is all the more surprising that no complex analysis of France’s application ofthe non-intervention principle after the July Revolution in 1830 has been written,at least in connection with the Italian countries. This principle became an importantdoctrine in French foreign policy during the early 1830s that served as a weaponagainstAustria’s predominance in Italy; the cabinet in Vienna as well as those of Italiancountries were warned from Paris that any military intervention of the former in theinternal affairs of the latter, even if formally requested by their monarchs, would beregarded by the French government as a violation of the non-intervention principle,even as a casus belli. As this article attempts to prove, with this approach the Frenchpolitical and diplomatic elites in no way wished to support the liberalisation of Italyby offering a shield to local political radicals against Austria’s intervention but merelyto establish a sphere of influence in designated states of secondary power. The practicaloutcome of this geopolitical game would have been the restriction of the sovereigntyof some Italian states if the non-intervention principle had been accepted, a similaroutcome as witnessed later by history with Brezhnev’s famous Doctrine of 1968 aboutthe limited sovereignty of the socialist countries in Europe