Originally Metternich had favoured the Czech revival. But Frantisek Palacky, once a conservative, began to seem threatening when his great History of Bohemia displayed nationalist undertones in those volumes which appeared in the 1840s, with their glorification of the Czech heresiarch Huss. Palacky's friend, the journalist Pavel Havelicek, was a liberal who stridently demanded a constitution for Bohemia. Metternich declared that 'Czechism is a tendency which, if things take their ordinary course, only leads to small aberrations, but in an epoch of general excitement it works like bean-salad in a cholera epidemic'.
The Croats were a special case, since he hoped to play them off against the Magyars. When it was purely linguistic and literary, he had encouraged Ljudevit Gaj's 'Illyrian' revival (which enjoyed the backing of Croatia's greatest magnate, Count Draskovich of Trakostjan), allowing him to publish a newspaper called Illyrian News. But Gaj developed into a pan-Slavist, seeking a Kingdom of Croats, Slovenes, Serbs and Bulgars within the Monarchy; it implied just the sort of destabilisation of the Balkans most dreaded by Metternich, who remained totally convinced that Austria had reached saturation point and could not absorb any more territory. In 1840, Gaj tried to persuade the Bosnians to rise against the Turks; he had been largely financed by Russian agents in Serbia, whose Prince looked to St Petersburg rather than to Vienna. In 1841 the chancellor ordered Gaj to stop his activities, whether political or cultural. Two years later he relented, to some extent, while in 1847 the Croat Diet was permitted to use the 'Croatian-Slavonian' tongue.
The years 1843–5 were comparatively peaceful for Metternich as far as foreign affairs were concerned. The Eastern Question had died down for the moment, while Germany and Italy remained more or less tranquil. The only cause for concern was the new King of Prussia. The chancellor's old friend Frederick William III, who during the latter part of his reign took Vienna's advice on liberalism almost reverently, had died in 1840. If charming and kindly, Frederick William IV was also vain and unstable, a fervent romantic whose fantasies would ultimately drive him insane. Inspired by his vision of medieval Germany, he had a sneaking sympathy for nationalists; Arndt had been allowed to resume his lectures at Bonn while, more ominous, Jahn had been released from police surveillance. For the moment, despite the anti-French outburst which had convulsed Germany in 1841, the mischief went no further. Even so, it grew increasingly clear that the King was turning his back on conservative advisers and was toying with the idea of a constitution.
In August 1845 King Frederick William IV came to Stolzenfels in the Prussian Rhineland, very near to Johannisberg. He had a long and revealing conversation with Metternich, who afterwards observed bitterly, 'Prussia's greatest weaknesses lie in having a King who, while wanting the best, is eccentric and in the undeniable fact that the old Prussian political machine has been demolished. Meanwhile a new machine still remains to be constructed . . .'
Queen Victoria and Prince Albert were also staying at Stolzenfels, together with the King and Queen of the Belgians. Metternich had hoped Victoria would prove a good conservative, though he feared the influence of her uncle, King Leopold. The chancellor considered that if the King's advice to her about Britain's internal affairs might do no damage, his meddling in foreign affairs could be very unhealthy indeed:
Leopold will support revolutionary principles in the [Iberian] peninsula and he's going to fuel the fire in any business which involves Russia. He won't be exactly anti-Austrian but on the other hand he won't support our particular brand of politics.
These had been Metternich's views in 1837. He was irritated by Leopold's dynastic ambitions. The Coburgs had married the Queen of Portugal and the English Queen, as well as the Duke of Orleans, heir to the throne of France. 'This is a family produced by our times, which mirrors their spirit,' Metternich observed disapprovingly to Neumann at the embassy in England in 1843. 'During an epoch when so many thrones are tottering an association has emerged to cast a speculative eye over them. The Coburgs constitute the association . . .' He expressed ironical surprise that they did not have designs on the Ottoman succession. He grumbled that Victoria's 'species of cult' for her husband's family was really too much—she was 'not at all English but totally Coburg'. He dined with her informally in her private apartments at Stolzenfels, finding her rather childish, shy and seemingly a little bored; with hindsight we know that for her part the Queen thought him prosy but pleasant enough. Her reserve was almost certainly due to her beloved Uncle Leopold having warned her to say little. The chancellor was at least able to have a lengthy conversation with Prince Albert, who expressed his deep uneasiness about what might happen in Prussia.
In December 1845 the Tsar came to Vienna to discuss the proposed marriage of his daughter, Grand Duchess Olga, to Archduke Stephen, the Palatine of Hungary's son; the Austrians insisted that the girl should abandon her Orthodox faith and become a Catholic, which at once put an end to the match. Metternich may well have wished to prevent it taking place; he had no desire to see a Hungarian pretender-in-waiting who could count on Russian support. Mélanie found Tsar Nicholas very much altered when he called on her. 'His features wear an even harder expression while the terrible severity of his glare is in no way softened by the set of his mouth.' The Tsar was still talking to her when the chancellor entered the room. As soon as Metternich changed the subject and began discussing foreign affairs—the Tory Cabinet in London—Nicholas broke in, 'Not a word about politics! I'm only here to talk to your wife.' However, he agreed to have a meeting with Metternich next day, during which he appeared to be much more relaxed.
The Tsar's grim manner may have been due to seeing the Emperor Ferdinand at the parade which he had just left; the Tsar had watched Ferdinand being hoisted onto the saddle of his charger 'with all the precautions normally taken to help a frightened woman'. The poor lunatic gave Nicholas the impression that the Habsburgs and their entire Monarchy were completely finished. He wrote to the Tsarina, 'I have to tell you that everything here goes very badly. Metternich is only a shade of his former self; Kolowrat too is old; the Archduke Ludwig is more irresolute than ever . . . Hungary is sullen, Galicia on the point of bursting into flames.' Even so, he paid the chancellor a grudging, backhanded compliment: 'This régime will only survive as long as you do.'
Mélanie worried more than ever about her husband's health. He was now seventy-two, yet he still worked for fifteen hours a day. His face was increasingly lined, while he was growing very deaf. Partly to keep him away from his place of work, and no doubt partly to have an equally imposing home when his death should cause her departure from the Ballhausplatz, his wife persuaded him to build a palace on the Rennweg, designed, as she put it, 'to shelter the whole family when he who is the sole reason for our existence has been taken from us'. Metternich enjoyed telling the architects precisely what he wanted. It was to be on a suitably grand scale, with a frontage containing forty windows. Work began in 1846.
In January of that year he had realized a lifelong ambition, presiding over the foundation of an 'Imperial and Royal Academy of the Sciences' at Vienna. His old enemy Archduke Johann became its principal trustee. He assured the Archduke that he was 'much considered in the learned world', which did not make Johann any fonder of him.
The chancellor had grown increasingly worried about Galicia, where the szlachta—landowning nobles, great and small—still dreamt of a new Kingdom of Poland, while on the border the Republic of Cracow continued to be a hotbed of conspiracy. His agents in Paris discovered that emigre Poles were organising a coup at Cracow and revolts in Poznan and Galicia, to take place in 1846. On 17 February news came that an uprising in Poznan had been forestalled, the Prussian authorities arresting the leaders. But next day revolutionaries seized Cracow and declared a 'socialist' republic. General Wrbna marched in swiftly to occupy the city.
What now took place is among the gravest charges ever levied against Metternich. Undeterred by what had happened at Poznan, the szlachta tried to revolt on 17 February. The tradition
al Polish version of what ensued has been given recently by Count Adam Zamoyski:
Premature action in Galicia alerted the Austrian authorities, who reacted with speed and perfidy. They appealed to the mainly Ruthene peasantry, explaining that the Polish lords were plotting a rising which would enslave them and offering cash for every 'conspirator' brought in dead or alive. The result was a terrible night of butchery in which bands of peasants attacked over 400 country houses, killing about a thousand people, few of them conspirators.
While admitting that 'nobles had been slaughtered in their thousands by the local peasantry, apparently under the illusion that this had been ordered by the Emperor', Dr Alan Sked is convinced that 'the Habsburg authorities—despite later charges of connivance—knew nothing about what was going on, and were appalled at the results of the blood-lust'. Yet if there is not a shred of evidence to implicate the chancellor, there is plenty which points at petty officials on the spot.
Some of the leaders of the would-be uprising seem to have promised the peasants, poor even by Eastern European standards, that if they joined in the uprising they would be given the property of all Austrians and Jews—whom they must first murder. As Sked points out, 'The description of the Gallician serfs as "work-animals" goes a long way to explain what happened in 1846.' A mob armed with scythes and flails informed the Austrian Kreishauptmann (town governor) at Tarnow, Baron von Breinl, of what it had been told to do; almost certainly he ordered it to defend the Emperor's government and attack the szlachta. In consequence, 1,458 members of the landowning class were murdered or seriously wounded, together with 80 priests in the Tarnow area; for three days carts came into Tarnow filled with mutilated bodies, the peasants being under the impression that there was a price on the heads of their victims. The official Prussian gazette printed a letter emanating from Polish exiles in Paris; it claimed that the Austrians had connived at the massacre and rewarded its perpetrators.
Metternich gave his own version of what happened in a letter to Apponyi of 18 March. When a number of Polish landlords had appeared in Polish national dress, armed and bearing the flag of Poland, and ordered their peasants to join in the rising, the men had refused, saying that they would not commit a crime:
The plotters then had the most stubborn bastinadoed, and when it did not have the desired effect, pistolled several. This lunatic behaviour acted like a signal to the mob. They rushed at their aggressors and struck them down . . . News of what had taken place in the [Tarnow] region spread to other regions, brought by the fugitives themselves, resulting in scenes scarcely less bloodthirsty.
Although horrified as a landowner, he was not entirely displeased. Significantly, Breinl was ennobled after the rising. In the same letter to Apponyi, Metternich writes:
It was not the government which crushed the attackers: the local population took it on themselves . . . Two facts stand out in this story. One is the quite incomprehensible frivolity with which the Polish emigration embarked on a scheme as vast as it was fantastic. The other is the resistance which the united aristocratic and democratic parties have met from our people. What is a democracy without the people?
'An event of extraordinary significance has just occurred,' he informed Marshal Radetzky in Lombardy. 'The attempt by Polish émigrés to start a second Revolution in former Polish territories has been frustrated. The attempt was crushed by the Polish peasantry.'
Even so, he had no intention of relying on peasants to keep order in Galicia. His panacea was 'Develop the German element.' He did not dislike Poles as Poles. What he feared was 'Polonism':
Polonism is only a formula, a word behind which hides the Revolution in its most brutal form . . . Polonism declares war not only on the three powers occupying the territory which was once Poland, it declares war on every existing institution . . .
Even if the chancellor exaggerated, undoubtedly a fair number of Polish émigrés subscribed to the ideals of Buonarotti or Mazzini.
Just as he had tried to arm the Belgian peasants against the French Revolution fifty years before, Metternich now saw new allies for the Monarchy throughout the Empire. He was convinced that 'the ordinary man' distrusted liberalism and nationalism, and 'the uncertainties of abstract ambitions'. After the Galician jacquerie he observed, 'The masses are conservative and always will be.' He advised using peasants against Hungarian and Italian nationalists. In consequence, Radetzky made a real effort to enlist the Lombard country people against the upper classes, promising reforms which would benefit them at the landowners' expense. Threats of a Galician-type upheaval in Italy were made in the Austrian press. (The theory was not altogether groundless—the 1848 Revolution would fail throughout Europe partly because of its inability to recruit the peasantry.)
The old man was showing surprising stamina. 'Clemens took charge of the affair at once,' Princess Mélanie records after the Polish insurrection. 'The chancellery quickly began to look like a military headquarters.' She adds, 'My poor Clemens, who had to take all the strain during the crisis, was additionally afflicted by a heavy chest cold which ended by exhausting him completely, so that he ran a high temperature for three days, but it didn't stop him working.' It was an impressive performance by a man of nearly seventy-three, whom the Tsar had just dismissed as 'a shade'.
Music meant as much to him as ever, the operas of Donizetti being a fresh enthusiasm. In March 1842 the composer called on him, with a letter from Rossini, and was promptly asked to dinner. In May, Metternich gave a supper party in his honour. Donizetti was enchanted, writing:
I found Princess Metternich the most amiable woman you could imagine so far as I was concerned, though others may say the reverse. She said she didn't like me because I had made her cry too much in Linda [di Chamonix], but that's a compliment.
The Metternichs also invited him to their annual party at the Rennweg on the Emperor's birthday, where he was overwhelmed by his reception. He wrote a romanza for cello or horn specially for the chancellor, 'Più che non m'ama un angelo'. In February 1843, he conducted a concert at the Ballhausplatz performed by an orchestra of aristocratic amateurs.
In 1846 the chancellor was saddened at hearing of Donizetti's mysterious illness (probably undiagnosed syphilis), telling Apponyi, 'Donizetti is much liked here and everybody wants to know what has happened to him.' He asked the ambassador to look after the composer, as there were rumours that he was in a lunatic asylum and being robbed—'in any case the loss of Donizetti is a sore blow to opera.' An Austrian agent visited the asylum at Ivry almost every day, sending reports on the patient's health to Vienna until his death in 1848.
Some idea of the septuagenarian Metternich's pleasures may be learnt from an entry in Mélanie's diary for May 1846:
For six weeks Viennese society has been busy applauding a Swedish singer whom we've already heard in Germany, and who turned many heads at Berlin. Mlle [Jenny] Lind . . . sings very well, which means there are moments when she's charming, and she could become a great singer. She is incapable of expressing passion but she knows how to convey sentiment . . . The one artist who in my opinion deserves the prize for the [opera and ballet] season is Fanny Elssler, who danced the part of Esmeralda with incomparable grace and irresistible talent. Liszt too had his moments of brilliance . . .
They often went to see Fanny Elssler, a close personal friend of whom they were very fond and who visited them frequently. As for Liszt, Mélanie was once worsted in an exchange with him, when he was playing at the Ballhausplatz. 'You must make a lot of money,' she observed in her loud, carrying voice. 'No Madame, I merely make music,' he replied. Another composer whose operas they enjoyed was Bellini; there are references to visits to the Kärntnertor Theater to hear Norma. They listened to a good deal of Schubert at musical evenings, though Metternich's favourite song always remained Rossini's 'Mira la bianca luna'. Johann Strauss the Elder dedicated a 'Grazien-Tanze' for the piano to the Princess.
There was music throughout Vienna in the Biedermeyer heyday. 'To any sensible obse
rver the Viennese look as if they're permanently intoxicated,' wrote a critic of the regime, Franz Schuselka, in 1843:
Eat, drink and be merry, are the virtues and pleasures which count most here. For them it's always a Sunday, always Carnival. There's singing everywhere. The many, many taverns are full of revellers all day long and all night long. Everything, whether ordinary every day life, art or literature, is dominated by sly, clever, joking. For a Viennese what matters most about any important event is to be able to make a joke of it.
What angered this particular observer was that revolution appeared to be so unlikely. Metternich's policy of 'repose' still seemed most effective.
His family was his own principal pleasure. Watching his great-granddaughter, aged eighteen months, playing at the feet of his granddaughter Pauline, he exclaimed, 'What I was really meant to be was a children's nurse.' 'I can't imagine anyone more easy and more pleasant,' Pauline recalls. 'It isn't given to everybody to understand instinctively, as he did, how to be at home with children, young people and simple, even humble, folk in general.' She describes how they spent Christmas evening at the Ballhausplatz:
At seven o'clock, after the family dinner which, as the custom was in those days, began at five o'clock, the doors of the great reception room in the State Chancellery, with a superb, gigantic Christmas-tree in the middle, were flung open, and we rushed in, to revel in the countless lovely toys with which the huge room was crammed. The most beautiful toys came from old Salomon Rothschild . . .
She remembered her grandfather in spring at the Rennweg, and his delight if the lilac was in blossom. 'He was a passionate lover of nature and of flowers and would go into such raptures over the loveliness of spring as I have never, or hardly ever, heard from the lips of anyone else.'
It was a peculiar irony that one of the most savage blows which Metternich received during his entire career should be dealt by the Catholic Church. In June 1846 Gregory XVI died and a 'liberal' Pope was elected, the fifty-four-year-old Cardinal Mastai-Ferretti, Bishop of Imola, who became Pius IX—better known to history, even among Anglo-Saxons, as 'Pio Nono'. The Church had tried to come to terms with the ideas of the French Revolution as early as the election of Pius VII in 1800, but when Bonapartism and then the Restoration were seen to be more powerful, as always she had opted for what seemed to be the stronger ally, in the partnership of 'Throne and Altar'. (Only in the 1960s did the ideas of the Revolution finally penetrate Catholicism and the Papal monarchy become a totalitarian democracy, the people of God the people of the social contract.) The new pontiff was scarcely a liberal, simply a naïve and warmhearted priest who wanted to please everybody; he would have to learn painfully the truth of the chancellor's definition of liberal aims—'Get out, so that we can take your place.' To begin with, he seemed harmless enough. If Mélanie could write in her diary for June that year 'Politics look as though they're taking on a more menacing air in Italy and the Holy Father's death may have been the signal for the long planned revolution', a few weeks later she would write of Pio Nono's amnesty for political prisoners and exiles, 'It's an act inspired by just the same ideas as those of my husband.' The chancellor too saw no cause for alarm as yet.
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