The Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle of 1748 ended the War of the Austrian Succession following a congress assembled at the Imperial Free City of Aachen—Aix-la-Chapelle in French—in the west of the Holy Roman Empire, on 24 April 1748. The resulting treaty was signed on 18 October 1748.
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Britain and France dictated the treaty, and other nations followed the proposed terms which had previously been agreed at the Congress of Breda. The terms were:
For the most part, the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle and the War of Austrian Succession concluded status quo ante bellum. In the commercial struggle between Britain and France in the West Indies, Africa, and India, nothing was settled; the treaty was thus no basis for a lasting peace.
In France, there was a general resentment at what was seen as a foolish throwing away of advantages (particularly in the Austrian Netherlands, which had largely been conquered by the brilliant strategy of Marshal Saxe), and it came to be popular in Paris to use the phrases Bête comme la paix ("Stupid as the peace") and La guerre pour le roi de Prusse ("The war for the king of Prussia"). By the same token, British colonists in New England and merchants back in Great Britain resented the return of Louisbourg to the French after they had captured the stronghold in a 46-day siege. This resentment was an early seed of the later American Revolution. In fact, Britain had exchanged Louisbourg so that France would withdraw from the Netherlands. Madras, captured by French Admiral La Bourdonnais in 1746, was returned to Britain likewise.
In Britain itself, George II and his ministers were seen as having conducted the war and the peace to the best advantage of Brunswick-Lüneburg (of which George was Elector) rather than Britain, and so the main British celebrations of the peace were only held six months later, with a fireworks display in Green Park for which Handel wrote his Music for the Royal Fireworks. This celebration was deliberately held near the royal residence of Buckingham House so as to present the king in a better light, as a British king and as the prime mover in a peace that was successful for Britain. (The display proved less successful than the music - the enormous wood building from which the fireworks were to be launched caught fire due to the fall of the bas relief of George II). George and Britain did gain from the treaty in one respect: that one clause of it had finally compelled the French to recognise the Hanoverian succession to the British throne and expel the Jacobites from France.
In contrast to French and British unhappiness with the treaty, Italy gained stability for the first time in the 18th century. The new territorial settlement and the accession of the pacific Ferdinand VI of Spain allowed the Aachen settlement to last until the outbreak of the French Revolutionary Wars in 1792.