Metternich- The First European

by Desmond Seward

  Max von Merveldt, the former Teutonic Knight from Westphalia and a much-decorated cavalryman, had by now become one of Metternich's right-hand men, a soldier-diplomat of the same mould as Schwarzenberg. A veteran negotiator, his diplomatic experience went back to Leoben in 1797, where he had impudently tried to persuade Bonaparte to change sides and enter the Austrian service.

  Aberdeen was the British ambassador to Austria, a priggish and conceited young Scot of twenty-nine who had joined Metternich at Teplitz (and who would one day be Britain's Prime Minister during the Crimean War). After presenting credentials to Francis I, Aberdeen wrote to his sister-in-law, 'I have had every reason to be satisfied with him.' He was completely taken in by Count Metternich, overwhelmed by flattery; in his opinion the Austrian foreign minister was vain and somewhat stupid but open and trustworthy: 'In such good society one forgets the horrors that are past,' he wrote of him. Metternich never let the Scot out of his sight, referring to Aberdeen behind his back as that 'dear simpleton of diplomacy'.

  Not everyone was so easy to deal with. Less than a fortnight after the victory at Leipzig the coalition was showing signs of falling apart. The Tsar was especially difficult. He had been enraged by Austria's refusal to let him become commander-in-chief instead of Schwarzenberg. Knowing that Francis wished to be the first to enter Frankfurt where he and his ancestors had been crowned, Alexander deliberately marched in two days before the Austrians. Although he had hitherto assumed a most friendly manner, at Weimar he had a noisy argument with Metternich which lasted for three hours, 'a terrible scene' according to Metternich. The Prussians, intoxicated by victory, were behaving with characteristic arrogance. There was a furious row at Frankfurt between Generals Blücher and Schwarzenberg, in which Metternich had to intervene.

  Far more worrying than Alexander's vanity or Prussian bullying were Allied plans to divide up the spoils. The Tsar wanted the Grand Duchy of Warsaw in its entirety while enlarging Prussia so as to make her a more useful ally in future. Understandably, the Prussians concurred wholeheartedly, regarding Saxony and the Saxon duchies as their share of the booty at the very least, treating the Saxons as a conquered people. What particularly alarmed Metternich was Alexander's insistence that Heinrich vom Stein should direct the administration of all liberated German territories. Stein's liberal and nationalist views, his wish for a unified Germany under Prussian rule, were only too well known. 'The revolutionary spirit', Metternich recalled, 'appeared among those advising the Russian Emperor in 1812, in Baron Stein, General Gneisenau and other Prussian and German fugitives.' There is no doubt that Stein wanted a radical, not to say revolutionary, solution; in November 1812 he had told the Tsar that German Princes should be treated as enemies who were at the disposal of the advancing Allied armies; fortunately Alexander rejected his suggestion. Gentz was so horrified by the spread of 'Jacobinical' sentiment that he began to argue that Napoleon's survival was necessary as a counterweight to Prussian ambition.

  The Allies paused at Frankfurt for six weeks. Metternich persuaded them to offer terms which would leave Napoleon France's 'natural' frontiers. No satisfactory reply was received, so the Allies prepared to invade, disregarding the convention that campaigning should cease in the winter. In December Metternich accompanied them to Freiburg, staying at the Kagenegg house, where his mother had been born. During the same month, against Alexander's wishes, Austrian troops entered Switzerland and occupied Basel. 'Harmony has never returned since that moment,' Gentz was to record in a memoir of February 1815. 'Angry and bitter discussions [between the Tsar and Metternich] took place almost every day during the latter part of the campaign.' Even so, Metternich rode by Alexander's side to watch the Cossacks crossing the Rhine on 13 January 1814. Three days later, Alexander announced that he would not rest 'until he reached Paris and could proclaim Bernadotte Emperor of France'. Even Frederick William of Prussia was horrified, begging him to wait for the arrival of the British foreign secretary. Metternich instructed Schwarzenberg to halt the advance unobtrusively—'Peace will have to be made in three weeks at most.' A Russian puppet on the French throne was a nightmare beyond Metternich's worst imaginings.

  A strange figure arrived at Allied headquarters in Basel on 18 January, a tall, unsmiling, pompous man in bright red breeches and a gold-braided fur bonnet—Metternich joked that he looked like a bishop on his travels. Coldly good-looking, frigidly formal, Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh, was undeniably impressive; a contemporary referred to 'that splendid summit of bright and polished frost'. Few realized the strain of maintaining so stiff a manner, how highly strung he was beneath. He had earned a grim name in Ireland, as a member of the Dublin Parliament who played a key role in the bloody repression of the 1798 rebellion and in forcing through the union with England. Four years older than Metternich, he had been the British foreign secretary since February 1812.

  However, Castlereagh's daunting exterior concealed great talent and, although he spoke no German and very poor French, he and the Austrian foreign minister took to each other immediately. No two men could have been less alike. Yet both wanted a stable Europe before all else, if from different motives, and a Europe which would not be dominated by any one power. 'A few hours conversation was quite enough to create a feeling of trust between this upright and enlightened statesman and myself,' wrote Metternich. He informed Schwarzenberg that 'we concur on the stupidity of a certain person' [the Tsar]. Both were in seeming agreement that Napoleon and his son must go and that the only man to replace them was Louis XVI's brother—even if Metternich was not telling the truth. Before the end of the month he was comparing Castlereagh to an angel.

  On 25 January Metternich and Castlereagh moved with the headquarters to Langres, on the edge of the flat plain of Champagne. It was the coldest winter in living memory and wolves attacked an Austrian courier's coach horses just outside the town. Secretly, Metternich contacted Napoleon—whatever he may have told his new British friend, he was trying to save the half-Habsburg dynasty at Paris. On 5 February a conference met at Chatillon. Caulaincourt asked for the terms offered at Frankfurt, France's 'natural' frontiers. Metternich, by then at Troyes, would have agreed, but Castlereagh was adamant that France must revert to her frontiers of 1792, surrendering Belgium, the left bank of the Rhine, Savoy and Nice. At first the French Emperor took the conference seriously, since the combined Austrian and Prussian forces had recently defeated him at La Rothière. However, on 9 February the Tsar suddenly withdrew from the talks, recalling Razumovsky. The next day, Alexander informed Metternich at Troyes that he intended to march on Paris without further delay, where he would summon an assembly to elect a new ruler in place of Napoleon.

  In mid-January Metternich had written to Gentz that 'the Emperor Alexander believes that he owes it to Moscow to blow up the Tuileries'. He was determined to avoid both this scenario and the summoning of a such an assembly, arguing forcefully that the only alternative to Napoleon—if he had to go—was Louis XVIII, since were the French people allowed to choose their ruler for themselves it would undermine the foundations of every throne in Europe; it might also end in another social revolution. And he dreaded the prospect of an overmighty Prussia, backed by an even stronger Russia in Eastern Europe, an axis which could well dominate the entire continent. Kaunitz's disciple as always, he wanted France as a counterweight, not to crush her or leave her in anarchy.

  In the days before radio communications it was very difficult for such large armies as those of the Allies to achieve coordination; to some extent their enormous superiority in numbers worked to Napoleon's advantage. In the second week of February Napoleon won five amazing victories against huge odds, defeating separately Russians, Prussians and Austrians. He was intoxicated by his success, writing to Emperor Francis after winning what was really only a skirmish at Montereau in the same tone he had used in the wake of some great victory. He broke off negotiations at Chatillon, still hoping to drive the Allies out of France.

  A sudden change in the for
tunes of war had a profund effecton the unstable Alexander. 'But it is the characteristic of a policy which bases itself on purely military considerations to be immoderate in triumph and panicky in adversity,' observes Henry Kissinger when discussing the Tsar's behaviour during the campaign. So horrified was Alexander by Napoleon's apparent recovery that he joined the Austrians in offering the French an armistice.

  The Chatillon conference began all over again. The Allies were only too anxious for peace but Caulaincourt was instructed by the French Emperor to hold out for the natural frontiers. The run of French victories had been halted by the end of February. Even so, Napoleon still believed that he could force his opponents to accept his terms. Metternich tried hard to make him see reason. 'Has he placed beyond recall his destiny and that of his son on his last gun-carriage?' he asked Caulaincourt in a letter of 30 March. If Francis I had been able to surrender the Tyrol in 1809, why could not the French Emperor surrender Belgium in 1814?

  Allied morale recovered. At Chaumont on 4 March, Austria, Russia, Prussia and Britain signed a treaty which formally committed each of them for twenty years, to put 60,000 troops in the field should France ever again threaten European harmony. They pledged themselves not to make peace separately with Napoleon. It was a treaty of general alliance against the Emperor, the brainchild of Castlereagh, who was able to secure the Allies' agreement by promising a subsidy of five million pounds to be divided among them. Yet above all it was a triumph for the Austrian foreign minister; there was an additional clause guaranteeing the establishment of a Germanic confederation of independent states—he had outwitted both the Prussians and the Tsar, thwarting their designs on Germany, while securing at the same time a foundation on which to build European cooperation. Those who signed did so at a whist table, observing (according to Castlereagh) that no whist party had ever seen such high stakes. They were referring to the outcome of the war, not to Metternich's gains.

  Until the very last moment Metternich hoped to secure much more, even if on 17 March he drafted a proclamation, promptly issued by the Allies, that they were no longer prepared to negotiate with the French Emperor. But on the same day, Metternich wrote to Caulaincourt begging him to persuade his master to give up Belgium and the left bank of the Rhine, pointing out they would rise in revolt if France tried to keep them. 'Austria still wishes to preserve a dynasty with which it is so closely connected.' It was the first time he had shown his hand clearly, revealing that he really wanted Napoleon to survive—if on a limited scale. Yet Castlereagh would not have allowed peace at this late stage; British public opinion had grown increasingly opposed to it. In any case, the French Emperor would never have agreed. Metternich, essentially a rationalist committed to equilibrium, did not understand that Napoleon could not permit himself to be tamed into becoming just another Louis XVI.

  The Allies had been contacted by the French opposition to Napoleon. In mid-March Talleyrand's envoy, the royalist Baron de Vitrolles, reached Allied headquarters disguised as a Swiss merchant, bringing a letter in invisible ink dictated by Talleyrand; this advised the Allies to march on Paris at once. Vitrolles's own message was that the French wanted to be freed: 'There can be no peace with Bonaparte and there can be no peace without the Bourbons.' Metternich seemed sceptical. The baron had several conversations with him, being impressed by 'his handsome, amiable face, his noble and indeed elegant carriage, his engaging, natural and most attractive manner.' He never guessed that Metternich would have preferred the Bonapartes to the Bourbons, though he noticed Metternich was evasive. 'He knew how to wait for events to unfold and take them as they came, rather than try to make them happen.' The baron was impressed by Metternich's loathing of war and lack of any desire for revenge, by his wish to end the destruction and save France from further misery.

  Clearly the French Emperor was doomed, even if he would not admit it. On 9 March he had been defeated by the Prussians at Laon, as he was again ten days later by the Austrians at Arcis-sur-Aube. He had only 30,000 troops left, exhausted scarecrows. He withdrew to the east, intending to find reinforcements, after which he meant to attack the Allies when they turned to pursue him. Their missions' headquarters lay in his path, their members fleeing before him. Metternich went with Francis, they and their suites travelling in two post-chaises, taking refuge at Dijon on 25 March. News came that Bordeaux had declared for the Bourbons. By now everyone, including Metternich, saw that the only possible ruler for France was the late king's brother, Louis XVIII. On 28 March Allied leaders drank his health at a dinner given by Castlereagh.

  Freiherr von Wessenberg, Austrian envoy in London, arrived unexpectedly, dirty and unshaven; trying to reach Metternich, he had been caught by French partisans and taken to the Emperor's headquarters, where he was recognised. Napoleon sent him to Francis at Dijon with a message that he was ready to accept the Allies' peace terms and would leave the arrangements to Austria—'If the Austrians don't save me, I'm lost!' He even hinted at a regency. He also sent a warning to Metternich, telling him to beware of Russia and Prussia.

  Metternich wrote ruefully to his wife that if only the Emperor had realized he was beaten a fortnight earlier he could have had peace. 'But now his last army is destroyed, negotiations are broken off and the Bourbons have been proclaimed at one of the Empire's principal towns.' He added, 'How many chances has he had of staying in the saddle, of remaining at the head of the most beautiful country in the world . . .'

  Napoleon's ruse to decoy the Allies eastward failed. Instead they marched on Paris. After a short but bloody resistance at Montmartre by 13,000 weary and outnumbered troops, Marshal Marmont surrendered the city to save it from destruction. The Allies rode in on 31 March, led by the Tsar and the King of Prussia. On 3 April, Talleyrand, recognised by the Allies as head of a provisional government, secured the Emperor's deposition by the Senate. On the following day Napoleon abdicated at Fontainebleau and was promised the island of Elba for his new domain. On 6 April the Senate proclaimed the accession of Louis XVIII.

  At Dijon Metternich did not learn of the fall of Paris until 4 April. He and Castlereagh took three days and nights to reach Paris. He was horrified by the cession of Elba; not only was it too near the European mainland, but it had belonged to Habsburg Tuscany. The result 'will be to bring us back onto the field of battle in under two years', he prophesied (no one can say he was wrong). Not only Schwarzenberg but Castlereagh were inclined to agree with him. In the end he gave way reluctantly, after securing Parma for Marie Louise.

  He was in low spirits. He believed that Napoleon would have been better at containing the revolutionary currents which lurked beneath the surface in France. From a window in the Rue Montmartre he watched Louis XVIII's entry into Paris. 'It made a most painful impression,' he recalled. He noted the gloomy faces of the Imperial Guard who escorted the King, the sullen silence of all too many in the crowd. He was given a private audience by Louis in his study at the Tuileries, the King joking that Napoleon had been a very good tenant who had left everything in excellent order.

  Metternich was amazed by the city's peaceful appearance. No one would have thought there had been a war. 'The boulevards are full of people,' he reported to Wilhelmine de Sagan, 'dandies, hussars, ladies in masks, cossacks . . . everybody seeming to know everyone else and greeting each other in the friendliest way'. He also marvelled at such extraordinary contradictions as the King's brother, the Comte d'Artois, in the uniform of the National Guard or Napoleonic marshals wearing the royalist white cockade. He grew more cheerful. He refused to renew his friendship with Mme d'Abrantès, but Wilhelmine arrived early in May. There was an orgy of balls and receptions, most of which he seems to have attended. He saw much of the Duke of Wellington, to whom, with his undoubted flair for getting on with the British, he took a great liking; he wrote to Eleanor that the Duke was 'Austrian in his soul'. He took the Emperor Francis and General Bubna on a tour of demimondaine Paris, including the Palais-Royal, which they thoroughly enjoyed. He sent dresses and hats i
n the latest Parisian fashion to his wife at Vienna. They were chosen for her by Wilhelmine, though their affair was beginning to make him very unhappy; Wilhelmine was sleeping with a young man from the British Embassy, Frederick Lamb (Lord Melbourne's brother). He laughed at the female Anglo-Saxons who flocked over the Channel, writing to Eleanor, 'You should see the Englishwomen's unbelievable appearance and clothes'.

  Meanwhile, supported by Castlereagh on most questions, he achieved a good deal. If he could not have a Habsburg-Bonaparte France, then at least he was able to ensure that the new Bourbon France was not crushed out of existence. As he wrote afterwards, the Peace of Paris signed on 30 May 1814 bore the unmistakeable stamp of moderation, 'a moderation which did not stem from weakness but from a resolve to secure lasting peace in Europe'. France lost its 'natural' frontiers, returning to those of 1792, but regained most of its colonial empire. There was no crushing indemnity of the sort inflicted on Austria in 1809, no army of occupation. The French were not even asked to disarm what was left of the Grande Armée. 'The treaty of Paris was thus a peace of equilibrium,' comments Henry Kissinger. 'In this manner the war against Napoleon ended, not in a paean of hatred but in a spirit of reconciliation, with a recognition that the stability of an international order depends on the degree to which its components feel committed to its defence.' In view of Russia's and Prussia's thirst for revenge, this was a far from modest achievement.

  Much to Metternich's satisfaction, the fate of Saxony and Poland was postponed. At the end of April, Hardenberg had proposed that Prussia should annex Saxony while most of Poland should go to Russia. However, the Tsar insisted on delaying any decision about these states; he wished to wait for a full discussion at the congress which, as stipulated by the Peace of Paris, was shortly to take place in Vienna to determine the future balance of power. In Gentz's view, Alexander, though determined to have the Grand Duchy of Warsaw, wanted to cut a figure at the congress as 'arbiter of Europe's destiny'.