Metternich- The First European

by Desmond Seward

  Metternich

  The First European

  Desmond Seward

  All Rights Reserved

  Copyright © Desmond Seward 1991, 2015

  First published in 1991 by Viking Penguin

  This edition published in 2015 by:

  Thistle Publishing

  36 Great Smith Street

  London

  SW1P 3BU

  www.thistlepublishing.co.uk

  For Karl Eibenschütz

  For a long time now, Europe has had for me the value of a mother country.

  METTERNICH in 1824

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  Family Tree: The Metternichs

  Introduction

  1. On the Edge of the Abyss

  2. From Attaché to Ambassador

  3. A Back Seat

  4. Kaunitz's Man

  5. 'In the Lion's Den'

  6. 'Tacking and Turning, and Flattering,' 1809–12

  7. Statesman against Soldier, 1812–13

  8. The Colossus Falls, 1814

  9. Rebuilding Europe, 1814–15

  10. Saviour of Europe

  11. Europe United: The Congress System, 1818–22

  12. The End of European Unity: The Congress of Verona, 1822

  13. The End of the Alliance: The Congress of St Petersburg

  14. War?

  15. The New Restoration Europe, 1830–35

  16. 'A Continuous Chain of Rearguard Actions,' 1835–43

  17. Metternich at Seventy

  18. The Storm, 1846–48

  19. The Sage of the Rennweg

  20. After Metternich

  Sources and Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  My first debt is to Dr Karl Eibenschütz, to whom this book is dedicated. It owes its origin to many discussions with him over the years.

  I have benefited from the criticisms of Dr A. S. Ciechanowiecki, who read the typescript. I am also grateful to Susan, Viscountess Mountgarret, for help at every stage, including some very useful suggestions. I owe a particular debt to Comte Christian and Comte Hadelin de Liedekerke Beaufort for presenting me with a copy of their ancestor's invaluable memoirs, privately printed and not in the British Library or the Bibliothèque Nationale; they contain a wealth of information about Metternich's visit to England in 1794 which has been available to no previous biographer.

  As so often before, I must thank the staffs of the British and London Libraries for their courteous and patient assistance. Also Mrs Joanna Barnes, who found the pictures.

  Family Tree: The Metternichs

  Introduction

  A man who came to dominate every coalition in which he participated, who was considered by two foreign monarchs as more trustworthy than their own ministers, who for three years was in effect Prime Minister of Europe, such a man could not be of mean consequence.

  HENRY KISSINGER, A World Restored

  Looking back, converted though we cannot be to the ancien régime, to the 'system Metternich' or to Tsarism, we no longer exult over the age of nationality and democracy and its victories. All past social superiorities have been wiped out behind the Iron Curtain, and most of the cultural values which the educated classes had created. Anti-Socialist, clerical peasant communities may yet arise in States now satellites of Russia.

  SIR LEWIS NAMIER in 1955

  Clemens von Metternich, the elegant patrician who smiles sardonically from Lawrence's portrait is not everyone's image of a master of Europe. Yet he brought Austria through the Napoleonic wars in such a way as to dominate Russia and Prussia and make her seem the greatest of the powers. In 1822 Lord Castlereagh declared that 'Austria is the pivot of Europe'.

  His hostility to liberalism must be put in context if his good qualities are to be appreciated. He opposed it because for him it meant revolution and war. A philosopher of the right, Louis de Bonald, points out that behind all the seductive grace of the Enlightenment which created it, there had lurked the mentality of the Terror and the guillotine. In our own century, J. L. Talmon stressed (in The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy) that the French Revolution gave birth to two forms of democracy, the liberal and the totalitarian. In Prince Metternich's time Europe had seen democracy only in France—Britain was an oligarchy—where liberal turned into totalitarian very quickly.

  Metternich's adopted country was Central Europe, the Habsburg Monarchy, the only state which ever brought lasting order to the Danubian lands. Not an easy empire to understand in retrospect, it was more than a group of territories inherited accidentally by a single family, as is often suggested. In varying degrees its Germans, Magyars and Czechs, its Croats, Poles, Romanians and Italians were united by loyalty to their Emperor and King which, despite its people's sense of its own identity, made for a feeling indistinguishable from patriotism; in 1795 Heinrich vom Stein thought the Monarchy a far more cohesive state than Prussia. As Alan Sked has recently reminded us, it was able to survive the 1848 Revolution, only disappearing because it lost the Great War. Nowadays it can be regarded more sympathetically, as a supranational association.

  Metternich's insistence on Austria's European role, not just in Central Europe, Germany or Italy, but in Europe as a whole, has been interpreted as cynical opportunism. Yet this sort of self-interest, if self-interest it can be called, is precisely why so many nations are committing themselves to the European Community.

  Few men have been more hated. 'Metternich, mitternacht über Mitteleuropa' was how some liberals thought of him. Enemies were baffled by his many masks, his flippancy and his weakness for women. (His friend Gentz said that he knew how to love women, not how to rule them.) On the other hand, Disraeli's verdict was, 'A profound head and an affectionate heart.'

  British historians tend to dislike him. A. J. P. Taylor showed an extraordinary aversion for this 'dessicated aristocrat'. In The Habsburg Monarchy he contrasted Tito's Yugoslavia with obvious admiration:

  Only time will show whether social revolution and economic betterment can appease national conflicts and whether Marxism can do better than Counter-Revolution dynasticism in supplying central Europe with a common loyalty.

  Almost half a century later one is entitled to ask if Metternich's way was so ineffectual after all. In the opinion of Alan Sked, a more modern historian (1989), it would be mistaken to see his domestic policy as a failure—the greatest of his achievements being that the Monarchy avoided revolution for thirty-three years.

  In a shrewd analysis of Metternich's diplomacy, Henry Kissinger has written:

  Metternich's policy was . . . one of status quo par excellence, and conducted, not by marshalling a superior force, but by obtaining a voluntary submission to his version of legitimacy. Its achievement was a period of peace lasting for over a generation without armament races or even the threat of a major war.

  Although one of the most conservative statesmen in European history, Metternich was never static, never an apostle of reaction. 'Stability is not immobility,' he told Tsar Alexander I. He detested fanaticism. 'The red and white doctrinaires shun me like the plague,' he wrote proudly in 1825. He looked forward to a Europe whose countries would live in peace and harmony, instead of a continent of rival, aggressively nationalist states, though he thought it could only evolve at some future date. He knew that his own Europe was doomed; he warned a Russian foreign minister that 'between the old order and the new there lies a long period of chaos'.

  In the words of his greatest biographer, Heinrich von Srbik, 'He raised Austria from the lowest depths to the proudest heights, and for decades directed its foreign policy with the utmost success, despite enormous obstacles.' The quality of his statesmanship is evident when the peace
settlement of 1815 is compared with Versailles or Yalta. The social order which he defended has passed away, but not the need for international solidarity he defended with no less conviction—which is why he is of such interest to Europe during the last decade of the twentieth century.

  This book tries to understand the man by seeing the world as he saw it. If at times it may seem partisan, that is not the intention. Its aim is to provide fresh insights into his personality and career.

  1

  On the Edge of the Abyss

  The wild gas, the fixed air, is plainly broke loose . . .

  EDMUND BURKE,

  Reflections on the French Revolution

  The French Revolution . . . that monstrous social catastrophe . . .

  METTERNICH, Memoirs

  Many people consider the world of their youth superior to that of their middle or old age. Metternich is famous for his attempt to rebuild the world which he had known as a young man. It is essential to realize what it had been and what it meant to him.

  On 9 October 1790 the seventeen-year-old Clemens von Metternich attended the coronation at Frankfurt am Main of the Holy Roman Emperor of the German nation, successor to the Roman Emperors of the West and the Sword Temporal of Christendom. Leopold II had made his solemn entry into the city on the previous day. First came the Frankfurt cavalry, then the envoys of the six lay Electors with their escorts, then, amid their bodyguards the three ecclesiastical Electors of Cologne, Trier and Mainz, bareheaded and riding sidesaddle—the suite of the first occupying ten state carriages, that of the last, twenty. Behind them marched ten Imperial footmen, forty lackeys and ten hayduks in Hungarian dress. These preceded a gilded, red-roofed glass coach, topped by a crowned double-headed eagle, in which sat the Emperor and his son and heir, the twenty-two-year-old Archduke Francis, who had just returned from fighting the Turks; its coachmen and outriders were in black and yellow, Swiss pikemen marching at each side. Behind rode the Marshal of the Empire bearing the Saxon sword, at the head of the Field Marshals, after whom came the Imperial Guard in gold-braided surcoats over red tunics. The aldermen of Frankfurt brought up the rear, in smaller coaches, the city clerk carrying golden keys on a red cushion.

  Metternich rode with his father. Their suite filled not less than ninety-eight carriages whose coachmen and footmen wore a splendid red livery. 'Count Metternich's . . . retinue was the most brilliant among those of the Austrian court', recalled a spectator, the Comte de Bray.

  On the coronation day fountains in the shape of double-headed eagles poured wine from their beaks—red from one, white from the other. In the cathedral the Archbishop-Duke of Salzburg anointed Leopold, then placed the crown on his head. The air rang with 'Vivat Imperator!' On either side of the altar sat mitred prelates together with Knights of Malta in black cloaks and Teutonic Knights in white; beneath the altar steps were the Knights of the Golden Fleece in purple and gold. In a Knight of Malta's red uniform, the young Metternich had an excellent view of the ceremony, in his capacity as a Marshal of the College of Westphalian Counts. 'Everything down to the smallest detail pulled at the heartstrings, by appealing to one's instinct for tradition and by the sheer splendour of the spectacle,' he wrote many years later. After his crowning, Leopold rode to the banqueting hall beneath a jewelled canopy, 'like the ghost of Charlemagne'. Metternich was one of the noblemen who waited on the Emperor's table. (Among the crowd outside was Mozart, who had come to Frankfurt hoping to find a commission for a new opera.)

  Clemens-Wenzel-Lothar-Nepomuk von Metternich-Winneburg-Beilstein had been born on 15 May at the family residence in the Münz Platz at Coblenz. His father, Count Franz-Georg, is dismissed by some historians as a garrulous fop, 'an old-time courtier in opera bouffe'. In reality he was an extremely professional diplomatist, of whom Prince Kaunitz—the greatest Imperial statesman of the eighteenth century—had a very high opinion.

  Metternich's mother, Maria Beatrix von Kagenegg, came from Freiburg in the Breisgau, in those days a Habsburg enclave. She was a protégée of Empress Maria Theresa, who always chose amusing and intelligent girls for her ladies-in-waiting, and who had arranged the marriage with Kaunitz's aid. Metternich inherited her handsome, curiously masculine features. She had two other children who survived infancy, Pauline—the eldest—and a younger boy, Josef or 'Pepi'.

  'You nobles merely take the trouble to be born,' Figaro tells the count in The Marriage of Figaro, and by any reckoning Metternich was a very great nobleman indeed. His father was a Reichsgraf or Count of the Empire, a member of the Council of Counts of the Westphalian 'Circle'. (The many states of what is now Germany were grouped in ten Circles.) His family claimed to have been noble since Carolingian times and had certainly been so since the thirteenth century. Both parents possessed seize quartiers, all their sixteen great-great-grandparents having been noble, so that it was impossible for them to have a commoner relation nearer than a fifth cousin. German society was stratified almost geologically, in a system far more rigid than that of ancien régime France, the Bürgertum or middle class accepting its inferiority in a way which no French bourgeois would have tolerated; a merchant's daughter did not dare presume to the aristocratic 'Fräulein' but was content to be styled 'Jungfer'. Only the higher nobility could aspire to senior posts in the army or the Church. The Metternichs belonged to the Reichsunmittelbar, the sovereign aristocracy.

  He wrote an account of his family for the Almanach de Gotha of 1836:

  The ancient princely house of Metternich descends from a very old noble family of the Juliers region. Lothar [Metternich] was Archbishop Elector of Trier from 1599–1623. The branch of the Barons of Winneburg and Beilstein became extinct in 1616 whereupon its lordships of Winneburg and Beilstein (on the Hundsrück and the Moselle) reverted to the Emperor as Imperial fiefs. Lothar bought part of them, acquiring a seat in the College of Westphalian Counts and the right to speak in it; he then transferred them to his cousins, the Barons Karl Heinrich (Elector of Mainz from 1679) and Phillip Emmanuel, whom the Emperor raised to the rank of Count on 20 March 1679.

  Clemens descended from Phillip Emmanuel.

  The Metternichs owned estates all over the Rhineland, amounting to seventy-three square miles of farmland and vineyards which produced an income of £25,000 a year, even if Winneburg and Beilstein were crumbling feudal keeps. Despite its Baroque palaces and churches, the Germany into which Metternich was born was still all but medieval, the world of the Tales of Hoffmann (whose author was three years younger), a sleepy country of ruined castles, rich abbeys and walled towns with narrow, crooked streets and timbered houses, where custom and tradition meant everything. This ancient, wine-drinking southern Germany was untouched by the Emperor Joseph II's reforms, let alone by Spartan innovations from Prussia.

  Three Rhineland cities, each the capital of an archbishop-elector, loomed large in the family's life during Metternich's early years, even if he seldom visited them. His father was Imperial envoy to the courts of Cologne, Mainz and Trier, whose rulers, together with six lay princes, elected the Emperor. Cologne flourished as a river port for the barges which plied between Frankfurt and Holland, though the Elector only visited his capital on great festivals to say Mass in the cathedral; the citizens would not let him stay for more than three days a year and normally he lived at Bonn, a few miles away. Outwardly Mainz too seemed prosperous, as it was where all merchandise along the Rhine was transferred to fresh barges, yet in the year before Metternich's birth the Elector had to buy grain from Poland to avert famine while one in three of its women was said to be a beggar or a prostitute. The third, and in some ways most distinguished, electoral city was Trier on the Moselle, whose imposing palace had been built by Archbishop Lothar von Metternich. (All male Metternichs were hereditary chamberlains to the Electors of Mainz.) These three little states formed the heart of the Rhineland, the proximity of France giving them considerable strategic importance. Count Metternich's post as envoy was one of some eminence; in 1777 he received the additional appo
intment of Minister to the Circle of Westphalia, becoming the Emperor's personal representative in the greater part of western and southern Germany.

  There was also a Metternich estate in Bohemia, won 130 years before by a soldier ancestor. The family seem to have looked on it much as eighteenth-century English peers did their lands in Ireland. Clemens visited Königswart for the first time in 1786, very briefly. Like the Irish, apart from a few great families who had been absorbed by their conquerors, the Czechs were a subject race speaking a despised tongue. Mozart's Prague was a German city where only servants spoke Czech, if one or two intellectuals dreamt of reviving the language. Bohemia was very much a part of the 'Roman Empire of the German Nation'.

  Eighteenth-century Germany was (as Metternich would one day say of another land) a geographical expression rather than a country, its myriad states ranging from the Habsburg domains down to the estate of a Reichsritter (Imperial Knight) no larger than an English manor. There were duchies, margravates, principalities, counties, baronies, bishoprics, abbacies, free cities, each a sovereign domain—Kaunitz referred to their rulers as 'the humming-bird kings'. Yet though the Emperor held only nominal sway, no one ever forgot that he was Emperor of the German nation. In the Habsburg lands, in what are now Slovenia and Croatia as well as Austria, in his Hungarian and Bohemian realms, in Belgium and Lombardy, he ruled directly. Vienna was the spiritual capital of Germany, every great German nobleman learning to speak the language of the Austrian court, Schönbrunner Deutsch.

  Even so, there was considerable distrust and resentment of Vienna throughout the Reich, especially when the Emperor was a tactless innovator such as Joseph II. Count Franz-Georg's embassy was far from being a rococo sinecure. In 1778 Joseph attempted to annex Bavaria but was deterred by Prussia. When he tried again in 1785 Prussia formed a League of Princes to stop him, consisting of seventeen states. Among them was Mainz, normally a staunch ally of Vienna. The Count cannot have had an easy task soothing him down.