Metternich- The First European Read online

  The High Contracting Powers have agreed to renew at fixed intervals, either under their own auspices or by their representative minister, meetings consecrated to great common objects . . . and for the maintenance of peace in Europe.

  In Gentz's words, the system was 'the last attempt to provide the transparent soul of the Holy Alliance with a body.' Its functions were to prevent wars and revolutions, and it was based on a general recognition that no state's survival should ever be threatened even if small, local wars of a fire-brigade nature might sometimes be needed to quell disorders or adjust minor disputes. But everyone hoped that all quarrels could be settled by negotiation at the periodic meetings by foreign ministers of the great powers.

  Admittedly any comparison between the European unity of the first quarter of the nineteenth century and that of the last decade of the twentieth must not be taken too far. As Henry Kissinger stresses,

  When the unity of Europe came to pass it was not because of the self evidence of its necessity, as Castlereagh had imagined, but through a cynical use of the conference machinery to defend a legitimising principle of social repression; not through Castlereagh's good faith, but through Metternich's manipulation.

  Even so, whatever reservations must be made, it was a remarkable achievement, a landmark in European history.

  The little city of Aix, normally a quiet watering place, had never seen so many distinguished visitors, even in Carolingian times. They included the Emperor, the Tsar, the King of Prussia and an army of German Princes, every one of whom had brought his minister for foreign affairs. In addition there was the French prime minister, the Duc de Richelieu, together with the British foreign secretary Lord Castlereagh, the Duke of Wellington and Mr George Canning—who would one day destroy the entire system. In emulation of Vienna there were balls, fireworks displays, balloon ascents and concerts by Metternich's favourite soprano, Angelica Catalini. There was also, he grumbled to Eleanor, an infant prodigy—a boy of four and a half who played the double bass excruciatingly. There were numerous balls at which his daughter Marie Esterházy had a dazzling success; the Emperor, the Tsar and the Prussian King all danced with her. Castlereagh's fat wife gave receptions once a week. 'I can't avoid mentioning the unimaginable sense of boredom inflicted by visiting that establishment,' the Austrian foreign minister observed unkindly of poor Lady Castlereagh's soirées. 'Everybody spurns milady's charms and has established themselves in my drawing room.' He himself gave a party every evening, but his letters give the impression that he took little interest in the congress's social life.

  He could not help laughing at the fascinated interest which he aroused. When his sovereign and he were confined to bed by colds he suspected that 'the whole city thinks the Kaiser and I have avoided a party [given by the King of Prussia] for political reasons of the most profound nature. We must see that they go on believing this and to keep the delusion I am going to behave today as though I were perfectly well.' He was no less diverted by a report that he had been seriously injured in a coach accident, remaining unconscious for many hours. 'All the English papers have correspondents here; they must write something and, having nothing to say about the progress of affairs, they amuse themselves by killing off the ministers.'

  He had not come for amusement. The congress's principal business was to discuss 'the internal state of France'. The French government had paid off most of the indemnity and borrowed the remainder from Baring, Hope and other British bankers. The four great powers swiftly agreed that all Allied troops should leave French soil by 30 November. A protocol was signed by which Austria, Britain, Russia and Prussia admitted France to 'the System which has given Peace to Europe and which alone can insure its duration'. In consequence the Quadruple Alliance became the 'Concert of Five'.

  Tsar Alexander behaved with his usual bewildering unpredictability. He was losing his Jacobin sympathies. He told the Duc de Richelieu, the French prime minister, that nine tenths of the French were violent revolutionaries and that with France in so precarious a condition it was stupid for her to join the Alliance. Yet he made no opposition to her doing so. His request that Spain too be admitted to the Concert was rejected, as were nearly all his other suggestions—including the offer of his army to put down revolution. He also proposed the creation of a European army, with its headquarters at Brussels and the Duke of Wellington as commander-in-chief. However, this remarkable foreshadowing of NATO was rejected, being seen as an attempt to establish a Russian military presence in Western Europe. Despite these refusals, he remained full of goodwill, enthusiastically committed to European unity.

  Ironically, the system was undermined by the very success of the Aix problem. With the French problem solved, few Englishmen could see any point in England being represented at such meetings. Only Castlereagh was convinced of their value. 'It really appears to me to be a new discovery in the European Government, at once extinguishing the cobwebs with which diplomacy obscures the horizon' was his view. The meetings gave to the counsels of the great powers 'the efficiency and almost the simplicity of a single state'.

  Castlereagh's opinion was born out by the way in which so many lesser questions were settled at Aix. Mediatised German Princes recovered some of their privileges, rulings were given on disputed successions, the Elector of Hesse was not allowed to turn himself into a King. The rights of German and Austrian Jews were confirmed. A plea from Napoleon's mother for the release of her son from St Helena was rejected on the grounds that he must have dictated the letter. Negatively, there was failure to secure cooperation on measures to suppress the slave trade or to deal with the pirates of North Africa. Even so, the congress acted as a species of European supreme court, so much so that the King of Sweden accused it of 'dictatorship'. On 15 November the five powers affirmed 'their invariable resolution never to depart, either among themselves or in their relations with other states, from the strictest observation of the principles of the law of nations; principles, which, in their application to a state of permanent peace, can alone effectually guarantee the independence of each government, and the stability of the general association'.

  The Austrian foreign minister's verdict was that 'a prettier little congress never met'. He had begun to rebuild his bridges with the Tsar, by adroit flattery. 'We have found one another again, as in 1813,' he told Eleanor. Observers were astonished to see the two former enemies strolling arm-in-arm. (Marie, who understood her father perfectly, found it very funny.) Metternich sent King Frederick William two secret memoranda warning him of the spread of revolutionary activities in Prussia and dissuading him from granting a constitution. He intended to enlist both monarchs in his counterrevolutionary crusade, whose principal weapon was to be the Congress System.

  He was certainly not the 'Robespierre of Conservatism', as more than one modern historian has called him. There was nothing of the zealot in his makeup, and he resigned himself to losing a good deal of the past. 'A new regime can only be made out of new materials, even if they include re-shaped or adapted elements from previous regimes, but it can never take their shape,' he once wrote. For him conservatism meant a strategy of carefully planned actions in defence of the traditional order. The enemy were 'financiers who stop at nothing to ensure their profits, bureaucrats, writers, and the persons who run public education', he told the Tsar in 1820. He added that they recruited very few members of the working class but a fair number of misfits from the upper. The slogan of all these people was, 'Get out, so we can take your place.' Consciously or unconsciously, he was echoing Babeouf, who defined the purpose of the Revolution as ôte-toi de là que je m'y mette'.

  He thought much in the same way as Edmund Burke. 'Is our monarchy to be annihilated, with all the laws, all the tribunals, and all the ancient corporations of the kingdom?' Burke had asked. 'Is every landmark of the country to be done away in favour of a geometrical and arithmetical constitution? Is the House of Lords to be voted useless?' Metternich's distrust of capitalists and intellectuals had been encapsulated b
y Burke. 'They felt with resentment an inferiority, the grounds of which they did not acknowledge,' Burke had written of 'the monied interest' in 1790. 'There was no measure to which they were not willing to lend themselves, in order to be revenged of the outrages of this rival pride, and to exalt their wealth to what they considered as its natural rank and estimation.' Burke prophesied, not altogether accurately, that the new constitutions would exclude landowners from government, replacing them by 'the money manager'. Like Burke, Metternich saw the landowning aristocracy not only as society's natural rulers but as a buffer between the state and the people. (Nevertheless, he believed that if an aristocracy lost power, as it would in France, then a strongly based, propertied urban middle class might take its place as both hierarchy and buffer.) 'Along with the monied interest, a new description of men had grown up, with whom that interest soon formed a close and marked union; I mean the political men of letters,' Burke had also observed. 'Men of letters, fond of distinguishing themselves, are rarely averse to innovation . . . They become a sort of demagogue. They served as a link to unite, in favour of one object, obnoxious wealth to restless and desperate poverty.' This is how Metternich saw them as well.

  Metternich was even more pessimistic than Burke. 'In revolutions those who demand everything always get the better of those ready to bargain,' he remarked in 1831. Extremists must invariably triumph over moderates, totalitarians over liberals. He knew that his world was going to die, and sooner rather than later. 'Our society is on a downward slope,' he acknowledged, writing in 1830 that 'the old Europe is nearing its end'. He thought that its true successor would take a long time to emerge.

  There was nothing rigid in the way Metternich used the new in defence of the old, even new men of 'obnoxious wealth'. During the congress at Aix, prompted by Gentz, he invited Karl and Salomon Rothschild to dinner. At that date no Frankfurt burgher would deign to sit down to a meal with the Rothschilds, while even Gentz referred to them as 'vulgar, ignorant Jews, outwardly presentable', but it was in the Monarchy's interest to be on good terms with M. A. Rothschild & Sons. Metternich encouraged them to set up a branch at Vienna, making a friend of Salomon Rothschild—who soon endeared himself by lending the impressario Domenico Barbaia 50,000 gulden with which to lease the Kärntnertor Theater and bring Italian opera to the capital. Metternich was responsible for all five brothers being created barons, an excellent investment. Not only did they ensure Austria's financial viability, but more than once they helped Metternich personally; in 1822 they were to lend him nearly a million gulden, though there was never any hint of bribery. He had little sense of money, in matters of state or his own affairs; more than one historian has observed that he placed foreign policy above any considerations of finance.

  He responded to Salomon's plea that he should encourage Jewish emancipation, ordering Count Buol, ambassador to the Bundestag, to tell the notoriously anti-Semitic Frankfurt senate that it must improve the conditions of Israelites. He also made a point of dining at Amschel Rothschild's house at Frankfurt. In 1822 the senate bowed to his wishes, abolishing the ghetto and giving Jews full municipal rights.

  The connection did not go unnoticed by Metternich's enemies, who tried to beat the anti-Semitic drum. Articles attacking the Rothschilds began to appear in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. After an especially vicious piece in 1822, Metternich banned the paper in Austrian territory. Gentz wrote angrily to the editor that 'the constant attacks on the firm of Rothschild invariably, and sometimes outrageously, reflect on the Austrian government by necessary implication, since everyone knows it is transacting important financial business with the firm, which is not only unimpeachable but honourable and thoroughly respectable'. Eventually the foreign minister's link with the Rothschilds grew so strong that they called him 'Uncle Metternich'.

  At Aix Metternich began the strangest romance of his entire life. On 22 October he was introduced to the wife of the Russian ambassador at London, Countess (later Princess) Lieven, at a reception given by Mme Nesselrode. Thirty-four, born Dorothea Benckendorff, she was a Baltic German whose mother came from Württemberg. However, her family had served the Tsars for a century and she had been educated at the Smolny Institute in St Petersburg, while both she and her husband were close to the Imperial family. In England Mme Lieven was a friend of everyone, from the Prince Regent—who was half in love with her—to Castlereagh and the Duke of Wellington, even of the Whig leader Lord Grey. Lawrence (who invariably flattered his sitters) immortalised her as a delicate, gazellelike creature with huge dark eyes; in real life she was a hard-looking woman, thin and bony, with ugly red arms. Yet she clearly possessed enormous charm, a compound of vivacity, intelligence and wit; she had made herself popular in London by introducing the waltz. Her consuming passion was power politics, and her only other great love was to be the French Prime Minister Guizot. For Darya Lieven, Metternich's supreme attraction lay in his being one of the most powerful men in the world.

  Metternich must have realized immediately that she was extremely dangerous. In modern language (or the language of yesterday), Darya was a top-level Russian agent, always seeking to influence politicians in favour of Russia, always looking out for vital information; she specialised in being on close terms with world leaders. Yet the foreign minister met a woman who, besides possessing a brilliant mind, shared his interests; to a middle-aged man her understanding of his work and her enthusiasm for it was flattery of an intoxicating sort. Moreover, he knew how to handle women in the enemy camp, as he had shown with Caroline Murat; he was able to distrust without disliking. He would give away nothing which would be of use to St Petersburg.

  Until their meeting on 22 October he seems to have known her by sight but ignored her, while she had thought him cold and haughty. The ice was broken three days later when he accompanied the Nesselrodes and the Lievens on an excursion to Spa, where the party spent the night; on the way back he insisted on riding in the same carriage. Later he remembered, 'I began to see why those who described you as "an agreeable woman" were quite right.' The next day he called on her at Aix, spending an hour sitting on the carpet at her feet. On 13 November she found a pretext to return his call without impropriety at the house where he was staying. Saying that she felt feverish, she asked if she might lie down, and they became lovers. The affair was interrupted after a few days, when she had to go to Brussels with her husband. Metternich soon joined her there, on the pretence of 'official business', and they spent four days together. On 27 November the Lievens returned to London. Darya told her family that the Congress at Aix-la-Chapelle had been a great success and that 'I made some interesting acquaintances, of whom I shall always retain a pleasant memory'.

  The affair was to be resumed briefly on only two occasions, yet they wrote to each other regularly for nearly eight years. He tells 'Dorothée' in one of his letters that he has had two other 'liaisons' and many affairs. 'I've never been unfaithful; the woman I love is the only woman in the world for me. When I'm not in love I take a pretty woman who wants anything but love.' He writes with passion—'I've found you only to lose you again' . . . 'a man of ice melted when he touched you.' He wishes that she was sitting on his knee. (A vision of the Russian ambassadress sitting on the Austrian minister's lap is irresistible.) On 1 December he sent her his autobiography in miniature in which he describes Eleanor:

  My wife has never been pretty; she is loveable only to those who know her well. Everyone who does loves her; the world finds her disagreeable [maussade], which is just what she wants. There is nothing in the world which I would not do for her.

  He told Darya that after Julie Zichy's death 'I reached a stage in my life when I thought that I would never be able to fall in love again.'

  One wonders what this cold, hard woman made of the frivolous side of the great man's nature. In February 1819 he reports that the burgomaster of Judenburg in Upper Styria had complained to him that mice had been ravaging the fields about the town ever since the French occupation; it was because
the troops had dropped bread over the entire countryside. 'I believe that never since the world began has a plague of mice been explained in this way,' Metternich informed Darya. 'There must have been a French camp in Egypt in Pharaoh's day.'

  Throughout his affair with Mme Lieven he continued to send his weekly letter to Eleanor. Three days after the affair had begun, he wrote, 'I spend my days working and all I can tell you is that I am wonderfully well and not yet driven out of my mind.' When he was reunited with his children at Vienna he was so exhausted that he confused his two youngest daughters, forgetting who was who.

  In March 1819 Metternich set out for Italy again, where he was to join the Emperor Francis on a series of state visits. He took his daughter Marie and Dr Staudenheim with him. He was overwhelmed by Rome—'I was literally terrified at the first glimpse of my accommodation. It is twenty-five magnificent rooms.' He had a long, pleasant audience with the aged Pius VII, discussing the battles they had had with Bonaparte and making the old pontiff laugh. He saw much of Cardinal Consalvi, the secretary of state, whose brilliant diplomacy at the Congress of Vienna had secured the restoration of the Papal States, whom Metternich found most congenial. Yet he told Gentz that now he understood how Martin Luther must have felt. 'As a botanist, you would find great happiness here,' he said, adding, 'What glorious plants! The flowers compare with ours as Rome does with Vienna as a city. I'm bringing a lot back with me and am sending you some beautiful seeds.' As will be seen, there was more to this amiable letter than meets the eye.

  Then he travelled down to Naples with the Emperor. The Bay of Naples enchanted him, though not the Neapolitans. He went to the San Carlo every night, hearing eight Rossini operas in succession. Pompei fascinated him, but the fiery crater of Vesuvius pleased him best—'I could scarcely tear myself away from a spectacle so full of indescribable beauty, awesome in a way it is impossible to describe.