I was anxious that the Imperial government should not lose dignity. You must be aware of the sort of life led by political prisoners. I might as well tell you that when the Spielberg had the honour of housing the Carbonari's leaders I literally did the best I could, so far as was in my power, to give them an existence which was at least bearable, materially and spiritually. Men with imagination, the absence of books, writing paper and lighting deprived them of all intellectual activity. They were fastidious and found the rough if nourishing prison food revolting. As persons of a certain social standing, life in the cells was torment for them. After obtaining the Emperor's permission, I ordered that they should be given books, candles and writing materials. I also ordered that they should have the sort of food to which they were used, and be allowed to talk to each other. But I would not make any concessions on prison uniform, which sent Count Confalonieri nearly mad. The soul of this noble conspirator recoiled at the touch of prison garb.
All these men had their sentences reduced.
Although many Carbonari were caught plotting to murder both Emperor and chancellor, not one was executed. In England, by contrast, the Cato Street conspirators were hanged in public, after which they were quartered, their bodies being cut apart by medical students. Time and again Metternich interceded for political prisoners.
Yet he despised his opponents, and not just Carbonari who offered to betray accomplices in return for a bounty—'heroes at ten louis d'or'. He held all liberals in contempt. 'I should have liked Robespierre much better than the Abbé de Pradt, Attilla better than Quiroga.' (The Abbe, who had been one of Napoleon's less effective diplomats, was now a liberal pamphleteer, while General Quiroga was a leading Spanish liberal.) 'Tyrants don't frighten me. I should know how to survive their wrath or at any rate how to endure it honourably. But the lunatic Radicals and boudoir philosophers nauseate me.' He was equally contemptuous of those who compromised. When informed by a Portuguese that the King of Portugal was contemplating a constitution on French lines, he told his informant, 'You're faced with death so you take poison—our ancestors' attitude was "If you're poisoned, take an antidote." '
M de Chateaubriand was a particular bête noire. It gave Metternich real pleasure when Villèle, whom he respected, sacked his eccentric foreign minister in June 1824. 'I know a "bonnet man" when I see one, and I don't care if the bonnet's red or white' was Metternich's comment. 'In fact I prefer the demagogue to the royalist version of Jacobin; one attacks the monarchy from the front, the other ends by strangling it.' Later he observed of Chateaubriand that 'unbalanced by excessive vanity and wild ambition, he worked under M de Villèle for just as long as he thought that he could control the prime minister.' When Chateaubriand attacked Villèle, the chancellor commented, 'No one, in my opinion, ever prostituted himself in the way that the vicomte has done. More of a revolutionary than any real revolutionary, falser than any of them, and more extreme than the men of the Terror . . .'
When Metternich heard of Chateaubriand's imminent downfall he was at Johannisberg. 'My table is generally laid for twenty-five, though often I entertain forty or fifty,' he wrote to Gentz. His guests must have been discussing the renewal of the Carlsbad Decrees—that 'vindictive act of a frightened despotism', as a liberal historian has described them. No doubt much to the chancellor's satisfaction, a group of revolutionary students from the university of Erlichingen were being tried in Munich; the horrified Bavarians heard of a plot to overthrow their monarchy and establish a republic after subverting the army. He had no trouble whatever in persuading the Bundestag to renew the decrees, since the German rulers with liberal tendencies, those of Baden, Württemberg, Hesse and Weimar, offered no resistance. A new law banned the press from reporting the Bundestag's debates. Metternich had already written to Baron Lebzeltern at St Petersburg in February that 'the Restoration is progressing [in Germany]', arguing that constitutions were unpopular in the states which had them because of the increased taxation needed to pay the deputies.
At Ischl, where Metternich went to take the waters in July, a crowd mobbed him, all trying to shake his hand—'from the same sort of curiosity which impels a mob to run after a camel or an ape', he commented. He returned to Johannisberg in excellent spirits. 'Finishing all one has to do, overcoming all the difficulties which accompany it, to be wonderfully fit, breathing pure, wholesome air and living in a heavenly place, these are what make the brighter side of life,' he wrote to Floret at the beginning of August.
Later that month the Emperor asked Metternich to his personal retreat, Schloss Persenburg, a clifftop castle which overlooked the Danube. He had not seen 'my Imperial master' for nearly four months, for the first time in his fifteen years as a minister. 'Prince Kaunitz had the longest ministry,' he reflected. 'He held office for forty years and reached the age of eighty-four. I should have had as long a career at seventy-four but I shan't live to see it.' He was struck by his host's simple way of life at Persenburg, that of a little country squire. He was bored when he came back to Vienna—'My one amusement is the opera . . .'
In September, King Frederick William wrote to Prince Metternich to congratulate him on his success in renewing the Carlsbad Decrees. It had 'confirmed the most perfect unity in the views and interests of Prussia and Austria'. The chancellor replied that he based his policy 'on complete unity between two states whose regrettable mistakes [in the past] had resulted in a mutual rivalry which had seemed almost insurmountable . . . As long as Prussia and Austria are united, and the unity is obvious to all, then every benefit is possible for Europe.' Undoubtedly he believed sincerely in partnership with Prussia in dominating Germany—as long as he could dominate Prussia. He considered that at present he enjoyed a decisive moral superiority over its government.
In October 1824 he wrote 'I feel wonderfully well', laughing at Dr Jäger's comment that good health made him look 'less like a scholar'. But only a few days before, he had written apprehensively that the 'miserable Eastern Question' was once more demanding attention, and that he might even have to contact Mr Canning.
The situation had been worsening since Byron's death at Missolonghi in April, which captured the imagination of all Europe. Tsar Alexander found himself in an increasingly difficult position. While agreeing that the Ottoman Empire should be allowed to survive, and that many of the Greeks' supporters were dangerous revolutionaries, he was uncomfortably aware that the Greek cause was popular in Russia; not only were the Orthodox clergy eager that he go to the assistance of persecuted Christians, but his troops were restless. 'Your Emperor does not know what to do with his army to stop disaffection,' George IV had pointed out to Darya Lieven the previous year. 'It's to his advantage to use it.' In May 1824 the Tsar proposed that a conference take place at St Petersburg, followed by a full-scale congress. He sent a memorandum to European governments, suggesting that Greece be divided into three autonomous principalities on the model of Moldavia and Wallachia. Plainly Russia hoped to establish a protectorate over them, as it had over the Danubian principalities. It was equally clear that no great European power was going to tolerate such an extension of Russian influence.
Metternich accepted an invitation to the conference, but no firm date was fixed. Nor did he reply to the memorandum for three months, and then with a Sybilline note stating that its 'fundamental arrangements' accorded with 'essential conditions for a generally acceptable pacification.' He was playing for time, hoping that Mehemet Ali, Pasha of Egypt, who was laying waste the Morea, would bring the Greeks to heel. Unexpectedly, Mehemet Ali failed. At the end of October, Metternich wrote gloomily to Esterházy that he doubted 'whether the pacification of Greece could be brought to a satisfactory conclusion by negotiation since all elements for success are lacking'. The situation worsened when Canning refused to send a representative to the conference on the grounds that the Greeks themselves objected to Russia's proposals, a refusal which angered Austria as much as Russia; Metternich knew very well that the British foreign secretary was determined to
prevent any revival of the Congress System. The conference assembled at the Russian capital at the close of the year—in practice several discussion groups—and achieved nothing. Metternich could see no point in the two other partners of the Triple Alliance, Austria and Prussia, attending a full-scale 'Congress of St Petersburg' and Austria was only represented by the Austrian ambassador, Lebzeltern. It was a grievous disappointment for the Tsar.
What made the Eastern Question nerve-racking was Alexander's unstable temperament. 'He will feel, as his people will wish him to feel, the ignominy of being ruled by an Austrian minister,' Capo d'Istria had prophesied to Darya Lieven in 1823. However, Metternich never lost his nerve. 'One's hair need not grow grey because of the views or idiocies of the Russian Cabinet, since it's so impractical that these can never take a practical form,' he would comment in April 1825 after receiving alarming reports from Lebzeltern.
For some time Eleanor had been spending part of the year at Paris, as the climate seemed to suit her delicate constitution. On 12 January Metternich wrote, 'I begin to have serious fears for my wife's health'; on 30 January, 'My anxiety about my wife's health grows greater and greater'; and on 8 February, 'The news I have of my poor wife from the physicians has made up my mind to go to Paris.' When he reached her, he saw there was no hope; the tuberculosis she had passed on to her children was killing her. 'I am troubled to the very depths of my heart and just now am good for nothing,' he confided on 14 February. 'Face to face with a catastrophe, the thought of which fills me with sorrow, after thirty years of undisturbed married life I find myself reduced to a fearful loneliness. How am I going to look after my daughters?' She died a Christian death on 19 March. He commented, 'It was the leave taking of a beautiful soul.'
George IV and Wellington invited Metternich to England, but he did not want to meet Canning. 'Wellington came to tell me that he was going to write to you suggesting a new plan of travel, which is this; you would embark at Dieppe and come to Brighton, where I should be and Wellington also,' Darya wrote enthusiastically on 25 March, after her first letter of sympathy. 'From there you would go to Windsor, and you could leave England without going to London and consequently without seeing Mr Canning. He thinks it an admirable plan, as it would please your friends and infuriate your enemy.' However, her lover was much too diplomatic to accept such a scheme, although it had King George's warm support.
Restoration Paris gleamed with prosperity and elegance. The court was even more imposing than before 1789, while the new King, Charles X, was dignified and charming. France was richer than at any time for a hundred years, administered more efficiently than ever before. The prime minister, the Comte de Villèle, had stabilised the franc at the value which it kept until 1914; the machinery of government installed by Napoleon was run by noblemen genuinely loyal to their sovereign. The morale of the Bourbon army was excellent after its triumph in Spain. Even men of letters tended to be convinced royalists—at this date Victor Hugo, Lamartine, Alfred de Vigny and Balzac were all legitimists.
At bottom, Metternich, for all his cosmopolitan outlook, was too Teutonic to sympathise with the French. He had always been uncomfortably aware that their regime's foundations were unsound. 'There was only one Frenchman who ever understood how to master the Revolution, and that was Bonaparte,' he had observed in August 1823. 'The King's government inherited the Counter Revolution from him, not the Revolution . . . today France is like a ship in a storm steered by inexperienced pilots.' As for the King, 'Charles X is frank, loyal, amiable, chivalrous and religious but at the same time weak, too open to suggestion, self-willed and even violent in his prejudices.' In the chancellor's view the regime was fatally flawed as a consequence of Bonaparte having granted a constitution in 1815, undoing everything he had achieved—'The power which France possessed under the Empire was totally destroyed by the ruinous concessions Napoleon had to make during the Hundred Days.' Some may disagree with his analysis, but no one can deny his accuracy in predicting the Revolution of 1830.
When he was received by King Charles at the Tuileries, he recalled tactfully how, in the very same room fifteen years before, Napoleon had told him, 'If ever I disappear as a result of some catastrophe no-one but the Bourbons could sit here.' The King was at his most amiable, investing him with the Order of the Saint-Esprit (the Cordon Bleu) and inviting him to dinner, 'a distinction which, I believe, has since the establishment of the monarchy been accorded to only two other private persons, the Duke of Wellington after the battle of Waterloo and Lord Moira as a personal friend of the late King', he reported proudly to the Emperor. 'The dinner was quite en famille, with only the King, the Dauphin, Madame la Dauphine and the Duchesse de Berry. The royalists praise the gesture to the skies while the revolutionists believe that all is over with freedom of the Press.' Everyone made him welcome. Visitors came flocking—'Ultras, Bonapartists, Jacobins and Jesuits, a complete valley of Jehosaphat,' he told Gentz. Even the Archbishop of Paris, Monseigneur de Quélen, called on him, a prelate famous for preaching that not only did Our Lord come from a very good family indeed on His father's side, but there was good reason to believe that through His mother He was the rightful legitimist Prince of Judea. He enjoyed meeting the conservative thinker Louis de Bonald, one of the 'Prophets of the Past'. 'I see a great deal of Bonald,' he reported. 'He interests me very much and is far more down to earth than I had expected.'
Nonetheless, the France of 1825 made Metternich thoroughly uneasy. 'My feeling of a dreadful state of affairs here is so strong that I cannot possibly express it,' he informed the Emperor. 'Everything sacred has been undermined . . . It is a society ruined by conflicting passions.' One third of the population was unbaptised, there was a flood of antireligious and pornographic literature. The upper classes were greedy for money and titles.
Yet he was impressed by the prime minister, Joseph de Villèle, a charmless nobleman from Toulouse, former naval officer and sometime slave trader. 'The present ministry is definitely the best since the Restoration,' he confided to Gentz. 'But it consists of only one man . . . Villèle's strength lies in something he said to me the other day. When I asked him bluntly "Are you going to stay or will they turn you out?" he answered "I'm determined to stay and a determined man isn't easily put on one side" '— words which might easily have been spoken by the Austrian chancellor, who was also reassured by the eagerness with which his views were sought. 'People look on me as a kind of lantern to light up a dark night . . . Villèle is always running in and out with questions which, God knows, are easy enough to answer.' Although full of foreboding, he was more than satisfied with his visit, telling the Emperor, 'It would be difficult for me to give Your Majesty any idea of the good effect which my stay here has had on all political matters.' He was able to report that 'in the Eastern Question France goes along with us entirely'. At the beginning of April he learnt that, at the conference still dragging on at St Petersburg, France had joined Austria and Prussia in rejecting armed intervention in the Balkans. The 'English-Spanish Question'—the future of Spain's former colonies in Latin America—proved more complicated, but before leaving Paris on 20 April the chancellor had a last meeting with Villèle, after which he wrote to the Emperor, 'Now there is not a single dark area here in diplomatic affairs.'
His visit to Lombardy was made memorable by the offer of a Cardinal's hat from Leo XII. This unwordly but impeccably conservative pontiff believed that he wished to enter the Sacred College, an illusion which had arisen from his often expressed preference for the colour red. It was one of the few honours ever declined by Metternich. If a ludicrous episode, it shows the position which he now occupied in Europe.
Undoubtedly he was vain, though his conceit has been exaggerated. He would have been inhuman not to take pride in his achievements. His real weakness was excessive optimism. At the end of June he assured Gentz that the Eastern Question could be solved to Austria's satisfaction, stressing that an envoy sent by Canning to Nesselrode (to see if Russia and England could settle the Gre
ek problem between them) had been told that Alexander would never desert his allies. Austria must go on temporising, 'wade through the mud . . . If we get past September and October safely, we shall have won.' His reason for thinking so was that Ibrahim Pasha, Mehemet Ali's son, looked to be winning the war in the Morea. He was also convinced that the Tsar would never unleash his troops because he did not trust them. (Lebzeltern had got wind of the liberal officers who would launch the Decembrist coup at the end of the year.) Metternich's warnings to Alexander about worldwide Carbonarism had been based on more than cynical alarmism.
Yet the Tsar was on the point of making a volte-face. The St Petersburg conference had adjourned without reaching a decision; it was quite clear that the Austrians had been playing for time. And during his visit to Paris, in a rare moment of indiscretion, Metternich had boasted that he knew how to handle the Tsar. His words were reported to Alexander, who ordered Nesselrode to reconsider Russia's relations with Austria.
Darya Lieven played a key role in the ensuing realignment. She was fully aware that her husband, a very limited man, only kept his embassy because of her astonishingly close links with the men who ruled England. Even so, she lived in constant dread of Lieven's recall. That summer she had gone back to St Petersburg alone to ingratiate herself with the Tsar and Nesselrode. In the meantime she had learnt of the growing rift between Alexander and her Austrian lover.
The Duke of Wellington once observed of Darya, 'She can and will betray everybody in turn if it suits her plans.' As soon as she saw Tsar Alexander, she informed him that he was the dupe of Metternich, who had tricked him by inventing imaginary difficulties. She suggested that the time had come to break with Austria over the Eastern Question, denied that Canning was a 'Jacobin' and proposed an alliance with England. Anxious to preserve her valuable relationship with 'my Clement', she tried to cover her tracks by warning Lebzeltern that Russia might declare war on Turkey if Austria was not more cooperative. To her astonishment, the ambassador replied that the Tsar dared not go to war—he would be in more danger from his own troops than from the Turks.
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