Metternich- The First European

by Desmond Seward

  The marriage meant the loss of a supremely valuable contact for Darya, whose brother had just been appointed head of Tsar Nicholas's secret police, the Third Section. Furious, she quoted Mme de Coigny's pun with relish—'Le chevalier de la Sainte Alliance a maintenant fini par une mésalliance.'' Antoinette was certainly an odd choice for someone credited (wrongly) with thinking 'mankind begins with barons'.

  Metternich lamented 'the terrible catastrophe of Navarino', telling Apponyi that he had always known the Treaty of London could end only in complete inaction or war; he described Constantinople as 'defenceless against a combined invasion by [Russian] land forces supported by reinforcements echeloned along the Black Sea, and provisioned by a fleet'. The Emperor was so alarmed that he wanted to mass 100,000 troops in Hungary; there were rumours, reported by the Russian ambassador, that Austria intended to occupy Serbia, and perhaps Moldavia and Wallachia as well—the last two being regarded in normal times as Russia's preserve. The chancellor succeeded in dissuading his master. Not only were the Imperial finances too vulnerable, but the Carbonari in Germany and Italy would take advantage of the situation. Metternich continued urging the Porte to conciliate the Tsar by making peace with the Greeks. If war between Russia and Turkey did not come immediately, it was made inevitable by the obstinacy of the Turks, who even tried to reassert their grip over the Roumanians.

  By now the British were beginning to appreciate the unsoundness of Canning's policy. The last thing they wanted was Russia in possession of Constantinople. 'Goody' Goderich, Canning's successor, was correctly seen by Metternich as 'feeble'—George IV called his prime minister a 'blubbering fool'. However, the chancellor was reassured when Wellington became premier in January 1828. Unfortunately, like so many great soldiers, the Duke would scarcely prove a distinguished statesman.

  Metternich had other worries. 'For France there is nothing but the Republic or the Empire,' he observed to Victor in the same month. 'It is possible France may have to go through anarchy once again to reach order.' In February he repeated, 'The country that is most seriously ill is France . . . the country with the least promising future.'

  In a memorandum of March 1828, designed to be shown to Wellington, he expressed his fear of a religious war breaking out in the Near East which might engulf Europe, threatening 'the foundations of the peace so gloriously established and so happily maintained for fifteen years'. Yet 'measures which six months ago might have been considered more than rigorous may now be the Porte's salvation and expedient for Europe'. Metternich proposed that the Morea and the Greek Islands should be given autonomy, a realistic acceptance of the facts very similar to the solution eventually adopted. Nevertheless, both Wellington and the Tsar rejected it out of hand. At the end of the year the chancellor proposed a congress to discuss the entire Eastern Question, again to meet with a refusal.

  Russia invaded Turkish territory in April 1828, 'all that we have dreaded and foreseen'. Yet conciliatory approaches were made by Tsar Nicholas to the new Austrian ambassador at St Petersburg, Count Zichy. 'I shall always be the Holy Alliance's warmest supporter,' said Nicholas. 'I repeat that I abhor and detest the Greeks . . . I look on them as subjects in revolt against their legitimate sovereign.' But the losses inflicted on Russian commerce by the closure of the Bosphorus (and of the Black Sea ports), together with the refusal to evacuate the Danubian principalities, had forced him to go to war—no obstacle would stop him, even if the campaign meant the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.

  Metternich neither liked nor trusted Russians. He speaks of no other race with such detestation. 'That dung-heap of semi-humans, made up of the filthiest elements but gilded from top to bottom, totally ignorant and puffed up like balloons, aping fashion in such a way as to look ridiculous, that swarm of effeminates who try to push their way into every salon . . .' was his opinion in a despatch to Lebzeltern of February 1826. At about the same time he told a French statesman, the Duc de Damas, that if Russia's 'so-called civilised class' had a veneer of civilisation, it penetrated none of her institutions. She might have to pay dearly for this veneer, 'which creates two peoples out of a single empire, one belonging in the drawing room, the other tied to the soil'. As for the Russian army, it was 'a species of infernal machine [ie a bomb] placed halfway between the two extremes'. While Metternich thought that Russia was a strong and potentially very dangerous neighbour, he was convinced that many of her institutions were structurally unsound.

  By the end of September, with winter approaching, the Russian advance into the Balkans—directed by the Tsar in person—was grinding to a halt. Nicholas had expected the Turks to be overcome by fear and rise in revolt against the Sultan Mahmud II. Instead, they were fighting back with the utmost gallantry while, overextended, the Tsar's own troops were starving and disease-ridden. The Austrian chancellor was nonetheless extremely worried. 'If the war should be renewed in 1829, then Europe will have to face a dreadful prospect of troubles and revolutions.' What was at stake was 'the survival of the old political order or its fall'.

  A harrowing year of bereavement began for Metternich with the death of his mother in December 1828. Although resigned—the old princess had been ill for some time—he was saddened. 'If my mother had not been my mother, she would still have been a life-long friend,' he wrote to Molly Zichy. 'Our minds had so much in common.' Much to his joy, in January 1829 Antoinette gave birth to a son, Richard; twelve days later she died of puerperal fever. He was shattered. 'The Emperor, who is certainly my best friend, wants me to go to the palace,' he told Victor. (He declined, since he would have to come back to his house anyway.) 'Adam Müller heard of the death,' he recounts in the same letter. 'He looked up to heaven and said solemnly "Now, for the first time, I know man's fate" and fell, struck dead by an apopleptic fit.' He ended, 'After this tale of death and mourning what more can I say. You are my nearest friend, and you must share my only too natural sorrow. May God keep you and my other children and help me drag out the rest of my miserable existence as He sees fit.' Antoinette had been not quite twenty-three. He had a portrait of her painted posthumously, keeping it in his study for the rest of his life.

  His relationship with his first son was an unusually close and happy one. They corresponded regularly. 'I take refuge from myself in the troubles of Europe,' he told Victor three weeks after Antoinette's death, and related how he was at his desk by nine o'clock in the morning, often working a fifteen-hour day. 'I hope we shall come to an end in the East, but what are we going to see in the West? Poor France is in a very, very bad way!' By contrast he was delighted by the passing of the Catholic Emancipation Bill in England in April, prompting Emperor Francis to send 'His Britannic Majesty sincere congratulations on the issue of an affair which will add a fresh flower to the glory of his reign'. (George IV had given his assent with the utmost reluctance.) During the same month he noted that the Russian army was having to recruit sixteen-year-old boys. He was uneasy, however, at the number of spies in the Balkans—'Serbia and Albania are full of Russian agents.' He was also concerned about who would become King of Greece. In his opinion Leopold of Coburg (later to become King of the Belgians) 'must have been stung by a tarantula to want the job'.

  Victor had never been strong, having inherited his mother's tuberculosis. In the latter part of 1828 he had been coughing so much that his father made him leave the Paris embassy and spend the winter in Italy. In July 1829 he returned to Vienna, where the doctors' treatment produced a temporary improvement so that in August the chancellor was able to visit his new château of Plass. He wrote to his son about the hordes driving out from Marienbad to inspect it: 'Thirty or forty carriages are parked round the little inn every fine afternoon . . . Among visitors in 1829 were the Queen of Haiti and the Princesses Amethyst and Athenaïs, her august and very black daughters.' He spoke with melancholy about his new chapel and family vault but joked about Gentz, who had accompanied him—'Gentz is more innocent in the country than in the town'—and how fascinated Gentz was by Metternich's
iron foundry.

  When the chancellor returned to Vienna in September, he found Victor much better. Suddenly the young man's condition deteriorated. During his final illness he would not let his father leave his bedside. 'I have seen many men die, in various ways—I have never seen one depart as my poor son departed,' he confided in Molly Zichy. 'Death itself was for him, and for us all, a deliverance.' Victor died at the end of November, aged twenty-six. Within twelve months Metternich had lost his mother, his wife and his son.

  Despite problems with supplies and sickness, the Russian army in the Balkans regained the initiative in the spring and summer of 1829. The Tsar's chief-of-staff, General Count Diebitsch, routed Hussein Pasha's troops, reaching Adrianople with a small force early in August. 'The future existence of the Ottoman Empire is in doubt,' Metternich warned Eszterházy in a despatch of 21 September. 'No power is more interested than Austria in preserving what is left of this empire.' He was relieved by the mild terms secured by the Turks in the same month at the peace of Adrianople; they had to complete their withdrawal from Moldavia and Wallachia, leaving the entrance to the Danube under Russian control, and accept a Greek state. But Turkey-in-Europe remained and the Russians did not, as feared, annex large areas of the Balkans. 'The end of the Turkish monarchy could only be survived by Austria for a short time,' Gentz had written in 1815. He called the peace of Adrianople 'the greatest piece of luck Europe might hope for'. The Austrian chancellor informed the Emperor that the peace was 'to be regarded as a moment of repose'.

  In the same report of 9 October he lamented that the Alliance no longer existed; otherwise the crisis of 1827–9 might have been avoided. He was still confident that, sooner or later, the European powers would join Austria in rebuilding the Alliance which alone could ensure peace.

  Initially Metternich (and Gentz) welcomed the appointment of Prince Jules de Polignac as head of the French government in November 1829. In August the chancellor had written that a reform in the electoral laws or the press laws was essential for France but very difficult, in October that there would be either a revolution or a new and more effective restoration. But he was disturbed by Polignac's ambitious foreign policy and preference for Russia as opposed to Austria. Nor did he like the announcement in March that France was sending an army to conquer Algiers, though later he contemplated the possibility of a congress assembling there to recreate the Alliance.

  Clearly with the unpleasant possibility of a Franco-Russian axis in mind, but also with real sincerity, in May 1830 he had lectured the French ambassador at Vienna, the Comte de Rayneval, about the danger of 'bilateral' alliances. 'Europe's salvation depends on general, not partial alliances,' he explained:

  I'm not thinking in terms of the Holy Alliance, which in any case was never anything more than a pious fiction; nor in terms of the Treaty of Chaumont which was for a single special occasion; nor in terms of the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle. What I want is a moral understanding between those five powers whose strength and standing make them the natural arbiters of Europe's fate. I only ask that they take no important step, do nothing which might put the general peace at risk, without first reaching a joint understanding. I want them, before all else, to be guided by the reflection that nowadays ideological considerations are not always the most important, that each country has to take its own particular domestic circumstances into account. The tranquillity of every state is menaced by a spirit of innovation, though a better name for it would be disorder. We must oppose it, with a determination to preserve, and we have to try to strengthen and stabilise all our existing institutions. It makes no difference whether they are old or new—if they are institutions with proper legal standing, then they deserve our support.

  In part this was intended to warn Rayneval that, if the French government meant to increase its power, it should do so on the basis of the Charter of 1815, much as Metternich disliked constitutions. Yet the outburst was also a good summary of both his European philosophy and his conservatism.

  Throughout the first half of the year 1830 the chancellor had been growing increasingly uneasy. In his eyes Wellington was just as ineffectual as Polignac and he saw grave disorders ahead in both their countries; on 15 June he described London and Paris as 'madhouses'. The only hope lay in a revival of the Alliance.

  15

  The New Restoration Europe, 1830–35

  The present state of Europe is disgustful to me.

  METTERNICH to George Ticknor in 1836

  For, since Austria was a European necessity, Europe was an Austrian necessity. Austria could not follow a policy of isolation, or even of independence; she had always to be justifying her existence.

  A. J. P. TAYLOR, The Habsburg Monarchy

  Restoration Europe gave every sign of coming to an end during the early 1830s. In France the Bourbons fell, through their own folly. In England revolution was only averted by the Reform Bill. Poland and Belgium rose against foreign masters, while liberal monarchies were established in Spain and Portugal. It looked as though the Vienna settlement had been smashed. 'The gaze of the impartial and informed observer rests at the present time on a world in ruins,' Metternich commented during the last months of 1830. Yet Austria, Germany and Italy were unaffected, and the Triple Alliance was reforged, while most of the 1815 frontiers survived. The Restoration proved to be far from dead.

  On 31 July 1830 Metternich informed Emperor Francis that August was going to be a landmark in European history. 'Whatever happens, one will be able to say that a whole new order has been born.' He was referring to French ordinances altering the electoral system and abolishing freedom of the press. While he thought them 'the most important thrust at Liberalism since the Carlsbad Decrees', he had grave misgivings about Polignac's capacity to stage such a coup when the French army was away in Algiers.

  On the evening of 4 August a French newspaper, sent posthaste to him by the Austrian ambassador at Frankfurt, who had been given it by the Rothschilds, arrived at Königswart. It contained a report of the July Revolution ('Les Trois Glorieuses', the Three Glorious Days) and the fall of Charles X, commenting, 'Any return of the Bourbons would seem difficult since, to judge from public opinion in Paris and the surrounding departments, the nation is ready to be cut to pieces rather than let itself be ruled by them again.' When he read it, Metternich fainted. Dr Jäger, summoned to revive him, heard him mutter, 'My entire life's work has been destroyed.' His despair is understandable. A cleverer man than King Charles could have survived. Now it looked like 1792 all over again, as if anarchy and then dictatorship would follow, spreading the Jacobin creed throughout Europe in the wake of appalling wars.

  On 7 August the Duke of Orleans, the son of Philippe Egalité and head of the younger branch of the Bourbons, was proclaimed King of the French. If, as Gentz puts it, King Louis Philippe I at least represented the monarchical principle, the Austrian chancellor thought that 'a royal throne surrounded by republican institutions' was quite meaningless. Indeed, his view of the July monarchy in France is of the utmost importance for an understanding of his opposition to liberal democracy. Metternich did not oppose long-established constitutions, such as that of the British; what he feared were new constitutions which, he believed, must inevitably lead to chaos. He was convinced that the Orleanist régime was a repetition of the French constitutional monarchy of 1791–2, no more than a halting place on the giddy downward slope into full-scale revolution—in modern terms, that liberal democracy would swiftly be replaced by totalitarian democracy. As late as May 1832 he wrote to Apponyi (who remained as Austrian ambassador at Paris) that 'France in 1832 resembles France in 1792'. He was always certain that Louis Philippe could not last, and ultimately events would prove him right.

  He was soon on his feet again, writing to the Emperor at midnight on 4 August that he was going to see Nesselrode—providentially, the Russian foreign minister was taking the waters at Carlsbad, only a few hours drive from Königswart. Two days later they agreed on what to do, written down by Metter
nich on a small sheet of paper which became known as the chiffon de Carlsbad, 'the scrap from Carlsbad'; Austria and Russia would not intervene unless the new French government threatened the rest of Europe. The chancellor hoped it would be 'a basis of union between the great powers and in particular the old Quadruple Alliance'. However, the Tsar wanted to take military action, calling Louis Philippe 'a vile usurper'. (Even in England the new monarch, William IV, referred to the King of the French as an 'infamous scoundrel'.) Russian troops in Western Europe were one of Metternich's nightmares, so Austria and Prussia recognised the Orleanist regime, forcing Nicholas to follow suit.

  'The extraordinary influence exercised by the Revolution of July over men's minds, far beyond the boundaries of France, is shown by what happens every day,' the chancellor wrote in October. The Belgians had risen at the end of August, demanding independence from their Dutch rulers. In November the Poles threw the Russians out of Warsaw. In the same month Wellington resigned, refusing to have anything to do with parliamentary reform, and a Whig government came in with Lord Grey as prime minister; an increasingly violent period of political agitation began in England. Revolt threatened in Germany and Italy.

  Chaos in the world of diplomacy, let alone the menace of revolution, required strong nerves. Metternich wisely took steps to ensure feminine support, proposing to Mélanie Zichy-Ferraris in October 1830. He was fifty-seven, she twenty-five, but she accepted with alacrity. They were married in Vienna on 30 January 1831 by the Papal Nuncio, 'all Vienna making an appearance' at the reception, according to the bride's diary. Next day she was received in audience by the Emperor at the Hofburg. 'Make him happy' said Francis. 'He forgives all his enemies and never bears a grudge'—an odd compliment for the Grand Inquisitor of Europe. He praised his chancellor again and again. Despite discrepancy in age, and despite her overbearing temperament, the marriage proved a great success. The couple's physical relations were clearly most satisfactory, resulting in four children.