Metternich- The First European

by Desmond Seward

  His grasp of foreign affairs remained as wide and vigorous as ever. His proposal in 1817 that the Knights of Malta be given Tangiers for their new headquarters and entrusted with policing the Mediterranean shows his ability to baffle both contemporaries and historians. Russia was seeking a naval base in the western Mediterranean, while Britain wanted a free hand to deal with North African pirates. Gentz refused to believe that Metternich was serious, suspecting that the proposal was a smokescreen. 'He would deliberately arrange for everything to be swallowed up in a discussion which was deliberately made complex and interminable' is the comment of Bertier de Sauvigny, one of the best among Metternich's modern historians. But was he really being insincere? Admittedly at the Congress of Vienna he had ignored the Knights' envoys, Commendatore Berlinghieri and Cavaliere Miari, when they pleaded for another Mediterranean island on which to build a hospital and from where they could continue the crusade against the infidel. Yet in 1816 he was promoted Bailiff Grand Cross by Lieutenant-Master de Giovanni and he always encouraged his family to join the Order of Malta. As for the idea being fanciful, it is said that as late as the 1950s General Franco contemplated offering Ibiza to the Knights.

  Metternich paid a second visit to Italy in June 1817, still far from well; Dr Jäger went with him. The ostensible reason for the trip was to escort Francis's daughter Archduchess Leopoldine, to Leghorn, where she would take ship to join her husband, the future Emperor of Brazil, but his real purpose was to inspect Italy. This time, like so many Germans, he fell in love with its landscape and climate though not its inhabitants. He wrote to Eleanor that while a Tuscan afternoon was too hot, 'the morning, the evening and the night are like what a day in Paradise will probably be'. Everywhere he went—Venice, Florence, Lucca—he was in raptures. Dr Jäger made him take a course of baths at Lucca, which seemed to do some good. Then he visited the little Habsburg capitals of Parma and Modena; at the former the Duchess Marie Louise gave a memorable banquet in his honour.

  On returning to Vienna, however, Metternich again collapsed. He had come home for the marriage in September of his favourite daughter Marie to Count Josef Esterházy, brother of the Austrian ambassador in London. During the wedding breakfast at the Kaunitz, he fainted.

  Nonetheless, on 27 October he began to send the Emperor a scheme for reforming the Monarchy's entire system of government. He wished to replace the Kabinettsweg system, by which Francis consulted ministers haphazardly, with a Staatsrat or advisory council, the decisions to be taken by the Emperor with his Ministerkonferenz or council of ministers. Metternich also proposed the establishment of a Ministry of the Interior and a Ministry of Justice. Most important of all was the proposal to set up four new chancelleries—for Austria, Bohemia-Moravia and Galicia, Illyria-Dalmatia and Italy—which would join those for Hungary and Transylvania, already in existence. He also suggested the creation of a Reichsrat, composed of delegates from the regional Diets, with a consultative function. Francis appointed three of the chancelleries and a Ministry of Justice, in the person of the unloved Count Saurau, but ignored most of the scheme—notably the Reichsrat.

  A week later Metternich handed in his report on the condition of Italy, which expressed concern about the secret societies, though adding that they had no effective leaders. He spoke bluntly in the report of northern Italy's fear that the Emperor wished to Germanise it: 'Italians see daily the appointment of German magistrates.' Even so, the province could easily be conciliated by appointing Italians to official posts and by winning over influential writers and clerics. Francis acted on some though not all of Metternich's suggestions. Archduke Anton (the Grand Master of the Teutonic Knights, who had no interest in Italy) was replaced as Viceroy by Archduke Rainer, who possessed a Piedmontese wife and undertook to hold court at Milan and Venice alternately; a Lombard, Count Mellerio, was appointed to head the Italian chancellery at Vienna; and Italian remained the official language.

  Metternich was convinced that the rest of the peninsula should stay divided into small states, though not until 1847 did he comment, 'Italien ist einer geographischer Begriff.' (Ironically, the Italy of autonomous regions which has developed since 1945 is much nearer Metternich's concept than the Italy of the Risorgimento.) Italians needed disunity 'to plunge their hands into public funds, and take what salaries and pensions they want'. In 1833 Metternich observed, 'The regime which still corresponds most closely to the opinions of today's Italians is general administrative disorder.' Their rulers stubbornly opposed his call to join in an Italian confederation on the German model, so that he had to fall back on military alliances with Tuscany and Naples. The Neapolitans were not entirely well disposed. Given to understand that His Highness Prince Metternich would not be averse to a Neapolitan dukedom, after much delay they announced that King Ferdinand had bestowed on him the title 'Ducca de Macaroni'. It took months of angry remonstrance before the name was changed to Portella.

  It has been suggested that Metternich regarded Germany too as no more than a geographical expression; admittedly he saw the Germanic confederation as an association of European rather than German states. Yet he was perfectly sincere when referring to 'the Fatherland'. Beyond question, he thought of Germany as a nation, but in cultural, not political, terms, fully accepting the unity imposed by the cultural and artistic heritage. For him political unification implied the triumph of Prussian values, which in his day meant liberalism as well as militarism, besides the end of Austrian hegemony. He encouraged the Princes to revive the old consultative 'estates' of local nobles, clergy and burghers, while fiercely resisting the granting of constitutions based on popular sovereignty.

  In practise Vienna and Berlin ran the Germanic confederation between them, though the Monarchy, with thirty million subjects as opposed to Prussia's ten million, was very much the senior partner. Nevertheless, Metternich always treated Prussia's envoy to the confederation with the utmost tact; before every meeting to the federal Diet (Bundestag) he arranged with him what business should be discussed. Even so, to begin with, Metternich did not entirely trust King Frederick William, fearing that he might replace the eight Prussian Landtage (regional estates) by a single national assembly.

  Meanwhile, the student fraternities, the Burschenschaften, had spread from the University of Jena in Saxe-Weimar to fifteen other universities. Their inspiration was the heady nationalism which Germany had known during the War of Liberation, and their members duelled, drank and sang—harmless enough activities. But in October 1817, on the anniversary of Luther posting up his theses and of the battle of Leipzig, 30 professors and 800 students marched in procession to the Wartburg. A student made a fiery speech, claiming that after the defeat of the French, a 'meeting of despots' had established 'a system of brigandage and injustice', urging his hearers to swear that they would die rather than suffer tyranny. The crowd responded with shouts of 'Long live liberty!' and 'Down with the tyrants and their traitor ministers!' A bonfire was lit and, thrown onto it with manure forks as symbols of reaction, were the acts of the Congress of Vienna with 'Legitimist books', a police manual, a corporal's swagger stick, and a pigtail.

  Not only university students but Princes were giving cause for alarm, above all the septuagenarian Charles Augustus, Grand Duke of Saxe-Weimar—once Goethe's patron. Besides granting a constitution based on popular sovereignty in 1816, he allowed freedom of the press. King Maximilian of Bavaria followed suit in 1818, as did the King of Württemberg the year after.

  In 1818 Gentz put on paper the fear which inspired his patron until the very end:

  All European countries, without exception, are tormented by a burning fever, the companion or forerunner of the most violent convulsions which the civilised world has seen since the fall of the Roman Empire. It is a struggle, it is war to the death between old and new principles, and between the old and a new social order . . . the equilibrium of authority is threatened; the most solid institutions are threatened, like the buildings in a city trembling from the first shocks of an earth
quake which in a few instants will destroy it. If in this dreadful crisis, the principle sovereigns of Europe were disunited in principles and intentions; if one approved what the others condemned; if but one among them looked on the embarrassments of his neighbours as a means of advancing his own interests, or if he regarded the whole prospect with blind or criminal indifference; if in short, the eyes of all were not open to the revolutions which are preparing, and the means which remain to them for preventing or retarding the explosion, we should all be carried away in a very few years.

  The Tsar, exceptionally complex even by Russian standards, gave constant cause for concern. He possessed great intelligence and even greater imagination, together with a well-attested personal magnetism; none of his contemporaries ever made the error of taking him for a mediocrity, let alone a fool. Yet his many talents were undermined by an inherent indiscipline and instability—he never quite knew what he wanted. The fact that he had nearly a million men under arms (in theory) made him particularly alarming. Gentz declared in 1818 that nothing could stand up to the first onslaught of such an army.

  Alexander's vain and unpredictable character was reflected in his foreign policy. In Germany his agents encouraged the liberal Princes and the Jacobin students, but in Spain they supported the bigoted tyranny of Ferdinand VII. They offered to sell Russian warships to the Spanish navy for use against the South American rebels; in part this was done to provoke Britain, who was most anxious that Spain should not recover her colonies and once more challenge British commerce in the New World. The Tsar's policies produced deep and widespread uneasiness. In a memorandum of 10 June 1818 the Austrian ambassador to Paris, Baron Vincent, wrote (in terms anticipating the Cold War) that St Petersburg was seeking to dominate all Europe

  by affecting the language of moderation, by veiling the preparation of a great permanent military force under a display of evangelical abnegation, and by employing in turn the language of mysticism and of inspiration for the support of its maxims of government.

  A month later Metternich was disturbed by Alexander's announcement that he intended to improve the lives of his Polish peasants—the Austrians feared the Tsar might cause an uprising which could spread to Galicia.

  Alexander's assistant foreign minister, Gian Antonio Capo d'Istria, was seen as a very dangerous man. By origin an Italian from Dalmatia, he had been born in Corfu, where his father was a doctor, and he had studied medicine at Padua, after which he became a minister in the short-lived Ionian Republic of the Seven Islands. When it was occupied by the French he had entered the Russian diplomatic service, where his abilities so impressed the Tsar that he began to supplant Nesselrode, whom Alexander thought too close to the Austrians. His earlier career had committed him to constitutionalism and Greek nationalism, and he was a friend of Prince Ypsilanti, a Graeco-Roumanian officer in the Russian army. As soon as Capo d'Istria's appointment as assistant foreign minister was announced, the Hetaeria, the Greek patriot society, began to make overtures to him.

  Metternich was increasingly anxious for another congress. Fortunately, the second Treaty of Paris had provided for a review of France's situation by the Quadruple Alliance after three years. In the summer of 1817 the Tsar agreed that a meeting should take place in the following autumn, at Aix-la-Chapelle.

  Castlereagh was just as concerned. He had been receiving dispatches from the British Embassy at St Petersburg, which spoke of Russian xenophobia and feelings of inferiority, especially towards Britain. In May 1817 he nonetheless politely rejected Metternich's offer of a secret pact between Austria and Britain against Russia, arguing that it would only be necessary to take action against the Russians if they became 'a real and obvious danger'. Although most British politicians distrusted Metternich and disliked what they considered to be meddling abroad, the Duke of Wellington, commander-in-chief of the army of occupation, had reported growing bitterness in France, together with rumours of a projected Franco-Russian alliance.

  Still not fully restored to health, Metternich took a short holiday in preparation for the congress. In July 1818 he went to Carlsbad in Bohemia, accompanied by Dr Staudenheim, a strict disciplinarian who made him go to bed supperless. However, the patient was in excellent spirits. He informed Eleanor that Mme Catalani, a diva whose singing he much admired, was at the spa and was going to give a concert; the orchestra's leader had been there for three years curing a liver complaint, while Prince Biron, who played the clavichord, invariably told lies except when he said he played it badly; a Saxon colonel was first violin, a Prussian captain second violin and a Prussian general cello.

  Then he drove to Königswart, where he learnt of his father's death; in a letter to his mother he claims that he had never given Franz-Georg a moment's unhappiness.

  At the end of July he set out for his new estate of Johannisberg. En route he visited the Prince of Hesse Homburg, who consulted Staudenheim about 'a disease which Staudenheim says is flying gout, but which in the Prince's case looks like almost anything—meaning that it strongly resembles insanity'. He adds,

  The point on which negotiations between doctor and sick man broke down was the sick man's breakfast. The Prince did not want to forego the half-yard of sausage on which he normally starts the day. Then Staudenheim flew into a rage, the Prince began to swear, and they appeared to have the sausage by both ends, each struggling to wrest it from the other. Staudenheim ended by carrying off the sausage and the cure is about to commence . . .

  Johannisberg delighted him when he arrived there in the evening.

  I came early enough to see from my balcony twenty leagues along the Rhine, eight or ten towns, a hundred villages, and vineyards which this year will yield twenty millions of wine, interspersed by meadows and fields like gardens, beautiful oak woods, and an immense plain covered with trees which bend beneath the weight of delicious fruit.

  The abbey could be made into a fine château. He was charmed by the priest who managed the estate and did not drink, judging the wine entirely by his nose. He spent a day at Johannisberg nearby, writing to his mother that their old house was dilapidated and filthy, its riding school demolished and the garden a field; almost all their old friends had gone. He was consoled by Johannisberg, and sorry to have to leave it so soon.

  When he entered Cologne on his way to Aix-la-Chapelle (once the Imperial capital), he was mistaken for the Emperor. Bells rang and the crowd attempted to take the horses out of the carriage shafts. 'I was furious and Gentz trembled in every limb.' (Gentz had joined him at Bonn.) At the house where he was staying the women insisted on kissing him, crying how they hated being ruled by Prussians. 'I realized that my efforts were futile in the face of such determination, and delivered myself up to their kisses with heroic abandon.' At last, however, the Emperor arrived at his own house, two doors away, and the crowd and the kissing moved farther on.

  Metternich's relationship with Francis has baffled many historians. Viktor Bibl argued fluently but mistakenly that the Emperor was the author of Metternich's policies; in reality Francis never had an original idea in his life. He admired his foreign minister until the day he died and would never have allowed him to resign. Yet if he usually agreed with Metternich on foreign affairs, his attitude towards internal affairs was often obstructive; sometimes he tried to steer a middle course between his advice and that of other ministers or else he simply ignored the issue. Srbik quotes an instance of the foreign minister's irritation with his 'august master': the Emperor, Metternich wrote, 'handles matters as though he were a drill, penetrating deeper and deeper, till suddenly, to his immense surprise, he comes through on the other side having done nothing except bore a hole in the memorandum'. However, Metternich fully accepted that his survival in office depended on Francis: 'If he overwhelms me with kindnesses, if he has confidence in me, it's because I go along the road he wants. Should I have the misfortune to stray away from that road, then Prince Metternich would not be foreign minister of Austria for another twenty-four hours.'

  The t
wo men genuinely liked each other. In old age Metternich would recall how on some evenings the Emperor had played the cello while he himself played the violin. 'At times the joint performance was somewhat halting and would not exactly have been a feast for the ear had anyone else been there to listen.'

  When monarch and minister rode together to Aix-la-Chapelle in the autumn of 1818, it must still have seemed that everyone agreed with Metternich in believing that what Europe needed was 'le plus grand des bien-faits, le répos'.

  11

  Europe United: The Congress System, 1818–22

  What characterises the modern world, and distinguishes it fundamentally from the ancient, is the tendency of nations to grow closer to each other and enter into a league of some form.

  METTERNICH, Memoirs

  Perhaps never again has European unity been so much a reality as between 1815 and 1821 . . .

  HENRY KISSINGER, A World Restored

  Metternich's capture of what became known as the Congress System was arguably an even greater triumph than outwitting Napoleon Bonaparte. He did so almost imperceptibly at Aix, transforming the system into a weapon against revolution. For the next five years he more or less kept control of the system.

  The Congress System was the first true attempt at European unity. It had emerged partly from the military alliance forged at Teplitz in 1813 and partly from the mystical dreaming of the Tsar in 1815. Its real foundation, however, was the sixth article of the second Treaty of Paris: