The Age of Napoleon

by Will Durant

  Meanwhile he resisted the attempt of French émigrés and European kings to involve him in war with Revolutionary France. He felt for the plight of his younger sister, Marie Antoinette, but he feared that war with France would mean his loss of still unreconciled Belgium. Nevertheless, when the flight of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette was stopped at Varennes, and they were led back to Paris to live in daily danger of their lives, Leopold proposed to his fellow monarchs that they take united action to control the Revolution. Frederick William II of Prussia met with Leopold at Pillnitz, and signed with him a declaration (August 27, 1791) threatening intervention in France. Louis XVI made this awkward by accepting the Revolutionary constitution (September 13). But disorder continued and rose, again endangering King and Queen; Leopold ordered the mobilization of the Austrian Army; the French Assembly demanded an explanation; Leopold died (March 1, 1792) before the message arrived. His son and successor, Emperor Francis II, aged twenty-four, rejected the ultimatum; and on April 20 France declared war.

  II. FRANCIS II

  That story has been told from the French corner; how did the Austrians view it and feel it? They heard of their Archduchess—whose beauty had sent Edmund Burke into a delirium of eloquence—being scorned by the Parisians as “L’Autrichienne,” being in effect imprisoned in the Tuileries by the mob, and then deposed and imprisoned by the Assembly. They heard of the September Massacres, and how the severed head of the Princesse de Lamballe was paraded on a pike in view of the Queen who had loved her. They heard of her, white-haired, riding captive in a tumbril through a taunting crowd to her death under the guillotine. Nothing more was needed to make the people of Austria rally to the young Emperor who was to lead them in war against those French murderers. It did not matter that he was a middling mind, a bungling though benevolent despot, choosing incompetent generals, losing battle after battle, surrendering part after part of the body of Austria, and leaving his capital to the mercy and use of the conqueror. These defeats made the Austrians love Francis all the more; he seemed to them their appointed ruler by divine right, by papal consecration, and by the unchallenged legitimacy of royal descent; and he was defending them as well as he could against murderous barbarians and then against a Corsican devil. His repudiation of every liberal measure left by his uncle and his father, his restoration of feudal dues and the corvée, his rejection of any move away from autocracy to constitutional government—all this seemed forgotten when, after Austerlitz and Pressburg, he reentered his capital beaten and despoiled. He was acclaimed with wild devotion by his people.2 In all the crowded events of the next eight years they saw only the triumph of the wicked, and the scandalous humiliation of a God-given ruler, who, as surely as God existed, would in due time be revenged upon Austria’s enemies, and be restored to his full birthright of possessions and power.

  III. METTERNICH

  The man who guided him to that fulfillment was born at Coblenz on the Rhine May 15, 1773, and was christened Klemens Wenzel Lothar von Metternich. He was the eldest son of Prince Franz Georg Karl von Metternich, Austria’s representative at the courts of the Prince-Archbishop Electors of Trier, Mainz, and Cologne. The boy received his first two names from the first of these ecclesiastical rulers, and he never forgot his religious connections and loyalties through all his Voltairean youth and Machiavellian ministries. He was given also the name Lothar to remind Europe that an ancestor so called had ruled Trier in the seventeenth century. Sometimes he added “Winneburg Beilstein” to indicate the properties that had belonged to the family for eight centuries, and whose seventy-five square miles provided ground for the noble preposition von. Obviously he was not made to love or guide revolutions.

  He received the education normal to his status from a tutor who initiated him into the French Enlightenment,3 and then from the University of Strasbourg. When this institution felt some tremors from the fall of the Bastille, Klemens was transferred to the University of Mainz, where he studied law as the science of property and precedent. In 1794 the French seized Coblenz as a hive of buzzing émigrés, and nearly all the Metternich estates were “nationalized.” The family found refuge and comfort in Vienna. Tall, athletic, elegant, Klemens wooed and won Eleonore von Kaunitz, rich granddaughter of the statesman who had married Hapsburg Austria to Bourbon France. Almost inheriting from his bride the diplomatic arts of noncommittal courtesy and of gracing appropriation with righteousness, he was soon fit for stratagems and spoils.

  In 1801, aged twenty-eight, he was appointed minister to the court of Saxony. There he met Friedrich von Gentz, who became his mentor and mouthpiece for the next thirty years, arming him with the most telling arguments for the status quo ante revolution. Faithful to the mores of the Ancien Régime, he took a mistress, Katharina Bagration, the eighteen-year-old daughter of a Russian general whom we shall meet again. In 1802 she bore Klemens a daughter, who was acknowledged to be his by his wife.4 Impressed by his progress, Vienna promoted him (1803) to the Austrian Embassy at Berlin. During his three years in Prussia he met Czar Alexander I, and formed with him a friendship that lasted till they had overthrown Napoleon. This, however, was not in Bonaparte’s vision when, after Austerlitz, he asked the Austrian government to send him “a Kaunitz” as ambassador to France. Count Philipp von Stadion, then head of the Foreign Ministry, sent him Metternich. The thirty-three-years-young Kaunitz-in-law reached Paris on August 2, 1806.

  Now began a nine-year battle of wits between diplomacy and war, in which the diplomat won by the cooperation of the general. For relaxation from encounters with Napoleon’s penetrating eyes—and finding his illustrious wife intellectually unstimulating and physically toujours la même—Metternich amused himself with Mme. Laure Junot, wife of the then governor of Paris. But he did not forget that he was expected to probe Napoleon’s mind, discover his aims, and explore all possibilities of guiding them to Austria’s advantage. Each man admired the other. Napoleon, Metternich wrote to Gentz in 1806, “is the only man in Europe who wills and acts”5; and Napoleon found in Metternich an intellect as penetrating as his own.6 Meanwhile the Austrian learned much by studying Talleyrand.

  He spent some three years as ambassador in Paris. He saw with concealed satisfaction the ensnarement of the Grande Armée in Spain. He tried and failed to hide from Napoleon the rearming of Austria for another attempt to unseat him. He left Paris on May 25, 1809, joined Francis II at the front, and witnessed the Austrian defeat at Wagram. Stadion, his martial venture thwarted, resigned his leadership of policy. Francis offered the post to Metternich, and on October 8, 1809, Metternich, aged thirty-six, began his thirty-nine years’ career as minister of the imperial household and of foreign affairs.

  In January, 1810, General Junot found in his wife’s desk some love letters from Metternich. He nearly strangled her, and vowed he would challenge the mettlesome Minister to meet him in a duel at Mainz. Napoleon ended the fracas by dispatching the general and his wife to Spain. The story apparently did no damage to Metternich’s reputation, nor to his marriage, nor to his position in the Austrian government. He shared in arranging the marriage of Napoleon with the Austrian Archduchess Marie Louise. He was delighted to hear that this sudden rapprochement between France and Austria had angered Russia. He watched the tension grow between those opposed nuclei of European force. He hoped and planned that some weakening of both empires would let Austria regain the lands she had lost, and the high place she had held in the clashing concert of the Powers.

  IV. VIENNA

  Behind the walls of war lived the peaceable and amiable people of Vienna, a reasonably tolerant mixture of Germans, Hungarians, Czechs, Slovaks, Croats, Moravians, French, Italians, Poles, and Russians—190,000 souls. The great majority were Roman Catholic, and, when they could, worshiped the city’s patron saint in St. Stephen’s Church. The streets were mostly narrow, but there were some spacious and well-paved boulevards. A congeries of majestic buildings focused on the palatial Schönbrunn, which housed the Emperor, his family, and the main off
ices of the government. The “blue” Danube passed along the edge of the city, carrying commerce and pleasure in amiable confusion. Sloping toward the river, the park called the Prater (meadow) gave old and young a place for carriage drives or promenades. And just outside the city gates the Wienerwald, or Vienna Woods, invited those lucky walkers who loved trees and trysts, the smell of foliage, the song and chatter of winged residents.

  All in all the Viennese were a docile and well-behaved people, quite unlike the Parisians, who, with or without revolution, lived on excitement, resented marriage, hated their nobles, suspected their King, and doubted God. There were nobles here too, but they danced and musicked in their palaces, respected pedestrians, indulged in no snobbery, and died gallantly, however ineffectually, before Napoleon’s businesslike warriors. Class consciousness was keenest in the upper middle class, which was making fortunes by supplying the Army, or lending to aristocrats impoverished by a feudalism without stimulus, or to a state always fighting and losing wars.

  A proletariat was beginning to form. By 1810 there were over a hundred factories in or near Vienna, employing in all some 27,000 men and women, nearly all at wages that sufficed to keep them alive and multiplying.7 As early as 1811 there were complaints that oil refineries and chemical plants were polluting the air.8 Commerce was developing, helped by access to the Adriatic at Trieste, and by the Danube that touched a hundred towns plus Budapest and reached the Black Sea. After 1806 Napoleon’s attempt to exclude British goods from the Continent, and French control of Italy, hampered Austrian commerce and industry, and left hundreds of families to unemployment and penury.

  Finance was mostly managed by Jews, who, excluded from agriculture and most industry, became experts in the handling of money. Some Jewish bankers in Austria rivaled the Esterházys in the splendor of their establishments; some became the cherished friends of emperors; some were honored as saviors of the state. Joseph II ennobled certain Jewish bankers in appreciation of their patriotism. The Emperor liked especially to visit the home of the financier Nathan von Arnstein, where he could discuss literature and music with the banker’s pretty wife. This was the versatile and cultivated Fanny Itzig, who maintained one of the most favored salons in Vienna.9

  The government was administered by the nobility with middling competence and inconsiderable honesty. Jeremy Bentham, in a letter of July 7, 1817, mourned this “utter moral rottenness of the Austrian state,” and he despaired of finding “an honorable person.” No commoner could rise to a commanding post in the armed services or the government; consequently there was little stimulus to soldiers or bureaucrats to take pains or risks for promotion’s sake. The ranks of the Army were filled by shiftless volunteers, or by conscription through lottery, or by the impressment of beggars, radicals, or criminals;10 no wonder these Austrian armies were periodically routed by French legions in which any private might rise to leadership, and even join Napoleon’s covey of dukes.

  Social order was maintained by the Army, the police, and religious belief. The Hapsburg rulers rejected the Reformation, remained loyal to the Catholic Church, and depended upon its well-trained clergy to man the schools, censor the press, and bring up every Christian child in a creed that sanctified hereditary monarchy as a divine right, and comforted poverty and grief with the consolations and promises of the faith. Great fanes like the Stefanskirche and the Karlskirche offered a ritual solemn with song and censer and collective prayer, and exalted by Masses that Protestants like Bach and skeptics like Beethoven were eager to provide. Religious processions periodically brought drama to the streets, renewing the public memory of martyrs and saints, and celebrating the merciful mediation of Vienna’s queen, the Virgin Mother. Aside from the disciplinary fear of hell, and some unpleasant pictures of saintly tortures, it was as comforting a religion as has ever been offered to mankind.

  Education, primary and secondary, was left to the Church. The Universities of Vienna, Ingolstadt, and Innsbruck were manned by learned Jesuits. The press was strictly controlled; all Voltaireana were stopped at the nation’s borders or the city gates. Freethinkers were rarities. Some Freemason lodges had survived Maria Theresa’s attempt to destroy them; but they confined themselves to a moderate anticlericalism which even a good Catholic might allow, and a program of social reform which an emperor could endorse. So Mozart, a firm Catholic, was a Freemason; and Joseph II joined the secret order, approved the principles of reform, and made some of them laws. A more radical secret society, the Illuminati—which Adam Weishaupt, an ex-Jesuit, had founded at Ingolstadt in 1776—survived, but in comparative decay. Leopold II renewed his mother’s prohibition of all secret societies.

  The Church accomplished well the task of training the people to patriotism, charity, social order, and sexual restraint. Mme. de Staël reported in 1804: “You never met a beggar…. The charitable establishments are regulated with great order and liberality. Everything bears the mark of a parental, wise, and religious government.”11 Sexual morals were fairly firm among the commonalty, much looser in the upper classes, where the men had mistresses and the wives had lovers. Beethoven, Thayer tells us, protested against “the practice, not uncommon in the Vienna of his time, of living with an unmarried woman as a wife.”12 But family unity was usual, and parental authority was maintained. Manners were genial, and gave little welcome to revolutionary sentiments. Beethoven wrote, on August 2, 1794: “It is my belief that as long as the Austrian has his dark beer and sausage he will not revolt.”13

  The typical Viennese preferred to be entertained rather than reformed. He readily surrendered his kreuzers or groschen (pennies) for simple amusements, such as watching Niklos Roger, “the incombustible Spaniard,” who claimed to be immune to fire.14 If he could spare a bit more he might play billiards or bowl. Vienna and its outskirts abounded in cafés—so called from the coffee that was now rivaling beer as the favorite drink. These were the clubs of the poor; Viennese of ascending status went to Bierhallen, which had gardens and fine rooms; the well-to-do could lose their money in gambling halls, or go to a masquerade ball—perhaps in the Redoutensaal, where hundreds of couples could dance at the same time. Even before the days of Johann Strauss (1804–49) the men and women of Vienna lived to dance. The restrained and stately minuet was yielding to the waltz; now the man might enjoy electric contact with his severed half, and lead her into the exciting whirl that had given the dance its name. The Church protested, and forgave.

  V. THE ARTS

  The theater flourished in Vienna, in all degrees from twopenny sketches on impromptu stages to classic dramas in sumptuous housing and décor. The oldest regular playhouse was the Kärntnerthor, which had been built by the municipality in 1708; here the actor-playwright Joseph Anton Stranitsky (d. 1726), building on the Italian Arlecchino (Harlequin), created and developed the character of Hanswurst, or John Boloney, the hilarious buffoon in whom the Germans, north and south, satirized their own beloved absurdities. In 1776 Joseph II sponsored and financed the Burgtheater, whose classic façade promised the best ancient and modern plays. Most sumptuous of all was the Theater-an-der-Wien (on the River Wien), built in 1793 by Johann Emanuel Schikaneder, who wrote the libretto for—and acted Papageno in —Mozart’s Magic Flute (1791). He equipped his theater with every mechanical device known to the scene shifters of his time; he astonished his audiences with dramatic spectacles outmatching reality; and he won for his playhouse the distinction of presenting the premiere of Beethoven’s Fidelio.

  Only one art now rivaled drama in Vienna. It was not architecture, for Austria had finished by 1789 its golden age of baroque. It was not literature, for the Church weighed too heavily on the wings of genius, and the age of Grillparzer (1791–1872) had yet to come. In Vienna, Mme. de Staël reported, “the people read little”;15 as in some cities today a daily newspaper supplied their literary needs; and both the Wiener Zeitung and the Wiener Zeitschrift were excellent.

  Of course the supreme art of Vienna was music. In Austria and Germany —as
befitted a people who cherished the home as the fount and citadel of civilization—music was more a domestic and amateur art than a public performance by professionals. Almost every educated family had musical instruments, and some could offer a quartet. Now and then a concert was organized for prepaying subscribers, but concerts open to the general public for an admission charge were rare. Even so, Vienna was crowded with musicians, who starved one another by their number.

  How did they survive? Mostly by accepting invitations to perform in private homes, or by dedicating their compositions—with or without prearranged payment—to wealthy nobles, clerics, or businessmen. The love, practice, and patronage of music had been a tradition with Hapsburg rulers for two centuries; it was actively continued in this period by Joseph II, Leopold II, and Leopold’s youngest son, the Archduke Rudolf (1788–1831), who was both a pupil and a patron of Beethoven. The Esterházy family provided a succession of generations supporting music; we have seen Prince Miklós József Esterházy (1714–90) keeping Haydn for thirty years as conductor of the orchestra maintained in the Schloss Esterházy, the “Versailles of Hungary.” His grandson Prince Miklós Nicolaus Esterházy (1765–1833) engaged Beethoven to compose music for the family orchestra. Prince Karl Lichnowsky (1753–1814) became an intimate friend and patron of Beethoven, and for a time gave him lodging in his palace. Prince Jose Fran Lobkowitz, of an old Bohemian family, shared with Archduke Rudolf and Count Kinsky the honor of subsidizing Beethoven till his death. To these we should add Baron Gottfried van Swieten (1734–1803), who helped musicians not so much with money as with his energy and skill in getting engagements and patrons; he opened London to Haydn and received the dedication of Beethoven’s First Symphony; and he founded in Vienna the Musikalische Gesellschaft—twenty-five nobles pledged to help bridge the gaps between composers, music publishers, and audiences. It was in part due to such men that the most disagreeable composer in history survived to make himself the unchallenged music master of the nineteenth century.