Metternich- The First European Read online

  Only the British troops in Belgium and the Prussian in the Rhineland were available, but on 18 June Napoleon was beaten at Waterloo. 'Even if the battle had not been the success it was, owing to the English commander's iron resolution and Marshal Blücher's gallant assistance, Napoleon's cause would have been doomed,' wrote Metternich in 1853. 'The Austrian and Russian armies, together with troops from the Germanic Confederation, were advancing towards the Rhine and would have overrun all France.' Britain was ready to finance an Allied army of a million men.

  Nevertheless, the speed of Wellington's victory came as a relief. Admittedly the four Allied powers, supported by Spain, Portugal and Sweden, had promised to help Louis XVIII help restore order, but since then he had been driven into exile. The Tsar began to talk again of an alternative regime in France, perhaps a republic. It had looked very much as though the Allies would not merely be divided, as they had been in the previous year, but that the harmony established at Vienna would be lost, together with the vital principle of legitimacy. Fortunately, Castlereagh stood firm on the need to bring back Louis XVIII, and Wellington and Blücher reached Paris before Alexander. The National Assembly restored Louis to the throne for a second time.

  The Austrian army crossed the Rhine only a week after Waterloo, Metternich following. 'When one is on horseback seven or eight hours a day, under a burning sun, on a perfectly white road in the midst of 25,000 men and 6000 cannon etc, one has a foretaste of the delights of one of Lucifer's courtyards,' he wrote from Saar-burg on 2 July to his daughter Marie. 'Every moment a man or horse falls, dead or dying, one from apoplexy and the other from that noble spirit which makes a horse go on pulling till he dies.' Ten days later he was in Paris and went to the Opera, where he was amused to hear the King cheered. He felt a certain nostalgia—'I was back in my box as if I had been eight years younger.' Blücher gave him dinner at St Cloud; strolling through the palace afterwards, old 'Marshal Vorwärts' commented, 'That man must have been a regular fool to leave all this and go running off to Moscow.'

  If Metternich was no admirer of the French at this moment, he did not go as far as the Prussians, who tried to blow up the Pont de Jena because it commemorated their defeat. Blücher and Hardenberg wanted not just Alsace-Lorraine and the Saarland, but Burgundy and Franche Comté. To be fair, the war was not over until the last Napoleonic garrison, Longwy, surrendered in September after 400 Prussians were killed during the siege.

  Despite the 'ravings of the Prussians' (a phrase of their former compatriot Gentz), the imperturbable Castlereagh talked them into a reasonable peace settlement, warmly supported by Metternich. The Tsar, 'in a cordial, contented, and reasonable disposition' according to the British foreign secretary, was now 'disposed to keep the Jacobins at arm's length'. This was due to the influence of a pious lady from Livonia, Lord Castlereagh reporting to his prime minister, Lord Liverpool, that since the Autocrat of all the Russians had come to Paris 'he has passed a part of every evening with Madame de Krüdener, an old fanatic'. The second Treaty of Paris was signed in November. France was reduced to the frontiers of 1790, losing Savoy, and was to be occupied for three years besides paying the Allies an indemnity of 700 million francs; in addition she had to restore the art treasures looted during Napoleon's campaigns.

  In acknowledgement of Metternich's services the Allies presented him with the former abbey of Johannisberg on the Rhine, which grew the best hock in the Rheingau. It was a graceful recompense for the loss of his ancestral patrimony. Emperor Francis gave him the right to quarter the arms of Austria-Lorraine, together with a large sum from Austria's share of the French indemnity, and Alexander presented him with an annuity of 50,000 francs.

  On 26 September, two months before Metternich left France, the Tsar had held a great review of the Russian army on the plain of Vertus near Épernay, at which 150,000 troops marched past. 'That day was the finest of my life,' Alexander told Baroness Krüdener. It was also the day on which the Tsar proclaimed his brainchild, the 'Act of the Holy Alliance'. Signed by Russia, Austria and Prussia a fortnight before, it stated that 'the three consenting monarchs will remain united by the bonds of a true and indivisible fraternity and, regarding each other as fellow-countrymen, will, on all occasions and in all places, lend each other aid and assistance.' Soon it was signed by every European ruler save for the Pope, the Sultan of Turkey and the Prince Regent—though the latter wrote to express his entire sympathy.

  At first Metternich saw little practical use in the agreement, persuading his Emperor to sign it only to avoid upsetting the Tsar. He told Francis that the act was no more than an 'empty, echoing monument'. Both were convinced that Alexander was quite mad; he invited the Austrian foreign minister to dine, together with Mme Krudener and one other—the fourth place being laid 'for our Lord Jesus Christ'. Castlereagh too thought it a 'piece of sublime mysticism and nonsense'. Yet behind the act lay the Tsar's not unworthy dream of a united Europe.

  More important was the renewal of the Grand Alliance of Chaumont by the second Treaty of Paris. This bound the four great powers to take joint action should France restore Napoleon or try to enlarge her frontiers, committing them to intervention if there was a revolution. The 'High Contracting Powers' agreed to meet regularly to discuss measures for preserving peace.

  Few observers (except Gentz) realized quite how much the Vienna settlement of 1814-15 had been shaped by Metternich. At one level it reflected his vision of a united Europe whose five great powers lived in constructive harmony; at another level it reflected his concept of Central Europe as a community of states, German and Italian, grouped around two powers, Austria and Prussia—a firm alliance between Vienna and Berlin would discourage any aggression by France or Russia. Instead of the old Reich he had created a federal union, to hinder the emergence of a new, warlike world power. As Srbik stresses, the Deutsche Bund appeared to most contemporaries as 'the start of a new brotherhood of nations, a lasting union for peace between states'. (A plan for a 'Lega Italica', modelled on the Germanic Confederation, on which Metternich is known to have been working in autumn 1814, was rejected by the Italian Princes.)

  The settlement's overriding concern was peace—unlike that of Versailles in 1919, when thirst for revenge ensured a Second World War. It was this absence of any hint of retribution, demonstrated by refusal to take Alsace-Lorraine from France, which makes it so impressive.

  10

  Saviour of Europe

  Kings have to calculate the chances of their very existence in the immediate future; passions are let loose, and league together to overthrow everything which society respects as the basis of its existence; religion, public morality, laws, customs, rights, and duties, are all attacked, confounded, overthrown, or called in question.

  METTERNICH to the Tsar, 15 December 1820

  Kings will be tyrants from policy, when subjects are rebels from principle.

  EDMUND BURKE,

  Reflections on the Revolution in France

  The months immediately after the second Treaty of Paris were the zenith of Metternich's career. So far he had achieved almost everything for which he had hoped and was the most admired man in Christendom. Yet, as he saw it, his life's work was only just beginning, a challenge bewildering in its complexity—the preservation of Restoration Europe.

  At forty-eight his once plump face had grown long and narrow, due to the extraction of his molars, while his hair had receded, turning grey, almost white. In the portrait painted by Lawrence in 1818 the impression is of a languid, amiable aristocrat, but he had instructed the painter to remove his sardonic expression; also absent are tired blue eyes—he suffered regularly from eye strain. The glossy self-satisfaction remarked on by hostile critics may not have been so obvious in real life, since Lawrence invariably gave sitters the same glossiness.

  Admittedly Metternich had much to be pleased about. He had built his powerful Central Europe. Austria now ruled more territory than she had in 1792. She had secured all Galicia, her borders extending as
far as Russia. Not only had she recovered Trieste, formerly her sole port, but Venice as well, together with the entire Dalmatian coast, so that she was free to expand down the Adriatic. She dominated all Germany outside Prussia; the federal Bundestag was little more than an assembly of diplomats whose president was invariably the Austrian ambassador, while Austrian influence was asserted by envoys in every German capital. The relationship with Berlin was excellent. Besides controlling the Habsburg territories in Italy, Austrian troops garrisoned a string of fortresses in the Papal States and occupied Naples.

  However, Austria's armed might was an illusion. 'She has reduced her military resources even beyond the limits that prudence allows,' wrote Gentz. 'She has neglected her army in all respects.' He adds that the Monarchy possessed insufficient funds or sources of credit to wage a full-scale war—'Everything conspires to fasten Austria to systematic peace.'

  Accompanied by Floret, Metternich left Paris on 20 November for a working holiday in Italy, where they were to join the Emperor at Venice. During the journey, which took a fortnight, he had time to reflect on his plans. His carefully thought out strategy is worth examining in detail.

  He was determined that a French Revolution and a Napoleon should never plague Europe again. The former was 'the volcano which must be extinguished, the gangrene which must be burnt out, the hydra with jaws open to swallow the social order'. He had seen it arouse hysterical expectations drowned in blood, and the ensuing 'saviour' turn into a tyrant whose ambition had caused the death of millions.

  Srbik supplies a basic definition of Metternich's political creed:

  a world doctrine which saw the new century and its forces as hostile, a doctrine heir to the international attitude of pre-Revolutionary days, which was at the same time a classic expression of the ultra-conservative thought of the Restoration era.

  Henry Kissinger qualifies this by stressing that Metternich was a conservative, not a reactionary.

  However, Kissinger goes too far in portraying Metternich as a survivor of the Enlightenment waging a lonely battle in an uncomprehending new century, as 'an intellectual contemporary of Kant and Voltaire'. He ignores the mental climate of the Restoration, dismissing his Catholicism. 'Metternich was not irreligious,' he writes, 'but he admired the Church more for its utility and its civilising influence than for its "truth".' He turns Metternich into a political philosopher, although Metternich's pretensions to treat politics as a science and references to 'immutable laws' must never be taken too seriously. Above all, Kissinger's excessive emphasis on Metternich's rationalism obscures a natural affinity with Edmund Burke. His conservatism was based no less on history than the Irishman's, if it was European rather than British history. He agreed wholeheartedly with such Burkian maxims as 'People will not look forward to posterity who have no time for their ancestors' and 'You can never shape the future by the present.' Metternich adopted many of Burke's ideas reformed; where Burke had seen revolution as violating Britain's historical constitution, the Austrian saw it as destroying the traditional structure of Christian Europe.

  From 1815 until the late 1820s, Metternich's views were very fashionable. Tradition and the past had become a popular craze, fuelled by the novels of Sir Walter Scott, which were translated into every European language. Catholicism revived, the upper classes abandoning Voltairean free-thinking and rediscovering a religion which was fiercely antagonistic towards the new doctrines. The liberals (to use a later term) hated the Church even more than monarchy because of its belief in original sin, that human nature was flawed and no moral progress could be achieved without clerical guidance. The liberal version of legitimacy was the sovereignty of the people, who had the right—indeed, duty—to rebel against monarchs who would not give them constitutions.

  Chateaubriand's Genie du Christianisme, harnessing something very like Rousseau's appeal to emotion, made religion attractive to Romantics. Two formidable if eccentric political thinkers, the Vicomte de Bonald and the Comte de Maistre, were widely read as 'prophets of the past' who argued fluently for a traditional and hierarchical society, their ideological base being ultramontane Catholicism, their solution partnership between 'Throne and Altar'. Joseph de Maistre condemned both the Enlightenment and the Revolution as Satanic. If many German writers were nationalists, others were attracted by the Holy Alliance, such as Adam Müller, a convert to Catholicism who advocated a neomedievalist society buttressed by Church and aristocracy, championing traditional as opposed to natural rights. A close friend of Gentz, he was a keen supporter of Metternich, who made him consul at Leipzig. Müller's friend, the literary historian Friedrich von Schlegel, was appointed editor of the semi-official Österreichischer Beobachter besides serving as counsellor at the Austrian embassy at Frankfurt. Another supporter was the Swiss Carl Ludwig von Haller, a Catholic convert and former professor of law at Bern, whose Restauration der Staatswissenschaft (1824) gave the period its name. A disciple of Bonald, he wrote to refute Rousseau's social doctrines and to 'crush the Jacobin reptile'. However, he never belonged to what has been called 'Metternich's stable of conservative ideologues', since he was not entirely trusted—he had implied that governments might be resisted in certain circumstances.

  Müller and Schlegel joined forces with Gentz and the Austrian foreign minister in contributing articles not only to the Beobachter but to the Wiener Jahrbücher der Literatur and the Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung. Metternich took ideas from all three men, many of them communicated by Gentz. However, he regarded religion as the ultimate ally in his battle against revolution. 'I read one or two chapters of the Bible every day and discover new beauties daily,' he wrote to Nesselrode in 1817. He confessed to having once been an atheist, but 'now I believe and make no more criticisms'. (He added that the Bible he used was Luther's translation, 'the best done in any country into a living language'.)

  Having reconstructed Europe, he hoped to do the same with the Monarchy. For many years it was assumed that he meant to build a federal Austria, but recently Dr Alan Sked, after examining Metternich's notes for 1817, has concluded that he wanted to centralise it, behind 'a constitutional façade which would have appeared to give a voice to local interests'; he had been 'tempted to balance appearance against reality in domestic affairs'. Sked cites the view of the Hungarian historian Erzsébet Andics that 'one of the fundamental aims . . . of Metternich's proposals was in reality to take away from Hungary her ancient rights; not, however, to endow other peoples with similar rights'. Yet it has to be said that Metternich learnt to live with Hungary's ancient rights, while his outburst to Count Hübner in 1848 (see p 222–224) seems to argue against Sked's interpretation; Metternich would have had to be very optimistic indeed to hope to 'balance appearance against reality' during that year. He was to tell Hübner in 1850 'Zentralisation ohne Despotismus ist eine Fantasmagorie' and he did not believe in despotism.

  Metternich accepted that all the Monarchy's peoples were entitled to keep their languages and traditions. He wished to preserve the local Diets, which embodied 'reasonable, long-existing differences sanctioned by speech, climate, manners and customs in the various regions of the Monarchy'. It may be, as Sked argues, that originally he intended to give them institutional personalities without political powers. Even so, as he himself suggested in 1848, such a structure could have been developed politically. Had his proposals been implemented, a Danubian confederation might exist today in place of the chaos which looms in Central Europe.

  When he reached Mestre in the early morning of 4 December, it was raining and the boat taking him into the city was caught in one of the frightening little storms which strike the lagoon in winter. Depression provoked the comment, 'Venice resembles one vast ruin.' He found Francis delighted at being welcomed so warmly; what the Venetians were really cheering was the revival of seaborne trade. Francis's courtiers were bored—'There is nothing to do'—but his foreign minister was busy with the fate of northern Italy. 'These lands must be ruled from here and their government must be .
. . represented at Vienna,' Metternich urged Francis in a memorandum of 29 December, when they were at Milan proposing a semi-independent state under a Habsburg Viceroy. The police minister Count Saurau opposed the idea, arguing that Lombardy-Venetia should be Germanised; even Gentz wrote from Vienna to disagree with his patron. The Emperor listened to Saurau and made him civil governor of Milan. Some observers thought that the foreign minister was facing dismissal. However, Francis then appointed a Viceroy, Archduke Anton, with very limited powers.

  When Metternich returned to Vienna in May after spending the winter in Italy with the Emperor, he was exhausted and collapsed with a 'fever'. His eyes were so inflamed that the doctors feared he might lose his sight. Gentz informed Wessenberg that 'Metternich is said to be very badly run down indeed and thoroughly depressed. He does not dare to read, to write, to go out into the sunlight, to drink, to make love . . .' His eyes continued to give cause for alarm until he found an excellent occulist, Dr Friedrich Jäger.

  He had further cause for misery in 1816 at the death of the young Countess Julie Zichy. A Hungarian and the wife of one of Metternich's closest friends, she was one of Vienna's leading hostesses and known as 'The Celestial Beauty'. Metternich had fallen in love with her during the last wretched stages of his affair with Wilhelmine de Sagan; she converted him to her own ardent Catholicism and the romance remained chaste. 'She died the death of a saint,' he wrote two years later. 'She left me a little sealed box; opening it, I found the ashes of my letters, with a ring she had broken . . . My life ended then, I had no wish to go on living.'

  He had to go on working. There were alarming reports from Italy, where the liberal secret society known as the Carbonari was plunging Naples into anarchy and spreading northward fast. In Germany nationalist student fraternities known as Burschenschaften were causing concern. The Monarchy's finances were still thoroughly unhealthy; English subsidies had stopped, but not the need for an expensive defense budget. He had take part in the work on currency reform, going through column after column of figures despite his poor eyesight.