The British ambassador at Vienna, Lord Ponsonby, sent a despatch to Lord Palmerston on 30 July. The chancellor had told him that there was a full-scale revolution in progress at Rome. When Ponsonby demurred and inferred politely that he was exaggerating, Metternich—clearly very agitated—replied, 'A revolution is made when the government of a state is deprived of all its powers, of all governmental action.' He informed the ambassador that 'the chief object of the party now successful at Rome is to establish the union of all Italy under one government. It could only be achieved by conquest, and conquest effected either by a monarchical or a republican force could not be permitted by the powers of Europe.' (In the event, all Italy would be conquered by Piedmont in 1860.) 'The Kaiser is determined not to lose his Italian territories,' he added. 'This empire may fall, but if it falls, it shall be on the field of battle.'
'The Pope shows each day that more and more he is losing all sense of what is practical,' the chancellor observed sadly to Count Apponyi on 7 October. 'Warm of heart and weak in understanding, since assuming the tiara he has allowed himself to be caught and tied up in a net from which he has no idea of how to disentangle himself, and if matters take their natural course he will be chased out of Rome.'
Amazingly, Metternich was able to find time in which to tutor the seventeen-year-old presumptive to the throne. 'Each Sunday afternoon Clemens gives lessons on diplomacy to the young Archduke Franz,' Mélanie recorded in October. 'He examines important events in contemporary history with him and shows him their real significance.' (Francis Joseph may have been putting these lessons into practice as late as 1916.)
There was trouble everywhere. In Switzerland on 11 November federal forces attacked the Sonderbund, whose cantons surrendered one by one; the Swiss civil war was over within less than three weeks, at a cost of twenty-eight killed on both sides. The chancellor expected the Swiss 'to place at the disposal of the Italian Radicals a rescue-party of 30,000 brethren and friends . . . We are going to reinforce our army in Lombardy heavily.' The Duchess of Parma, Marie Louise, died in the following month, depriving him of a dependable ally.
The defeat of the Sonderbund humiliated Metternich. Yet it is unlikely that diplomacy could have prevented the federal authorities from triumphing over the Catholic cantons, while military intervention was out of the question. 'Whatever happens, we'll think of a means of repairing the damage,' wrote Mélanie. 'Clemens hasn't let himself be discouraged. Danger only increases his energy, in spite of all the obstacles that Palmerston thinks up to stop the powers settling the problem by joint action. Unfortunately Clemens is quite isolated.'
He accepted that there would have to be change, in the Monarchy and in Germany. He did not object to reforms, if he could initiate and control them. He secured decrees which lightened the Galician peasants' labour obligations (the robot) and allowed them to appeal against decisions by manorial courts. He proposed that representatives of the Bohemian Diet should come to Vienna to discuss taxation, but was blocked by Archduke Ludwig and Kolowrat. In Hungary his alliance with György Apponyi's conservatives prospered, and he aroused considerable interest in the abolition of customs barriers; only the economic crisis saved Kossuth. He persuaded the Ministerkonferenz to set up a commission to explore closer links between Vienna and the regional Diets. He prepared new press laws. He stopped King Frederick William IV from cancelling the constitution he had recently granted and restrained the Grand Duke of Hesse from confronting the liberals.
Understandably he began 1848 in no very optimistic spirit. 'I shall start this letter by wishing you a happy New Year, without committing myself to guaranteeing that it will be a very good one,' he told György Apponyi at Paris on 2 January.
Mélanie echoes his gloom. 'This year is not beginning in a very reassuring way. At Milan great disturbance and uproar about cigars. Sadly, the civil government is weak and feeble. One would have said they wanted to blame Radetzky for letting his soldiers smoke cigars. They issue feeble proclamations which encourage the revolutionaries.' What had happened was that the Milanese, led by the young noblemen of the Jockey Club, had tried to enforce a boycott of tobacco, which was an Austrian state monopoly, in the belief that it would reduce the Imperial revenues. In retaliation Radetzky's men smoked liked chimneys, causing fights in the streets. The clergy were so hostile that the troops were ordered not to confess to them. Much of the opposition stemmed from the frustration of the nobility and the upper bourgeoisie at being excluded from the administration. However, in Italy Metternich was inflexible, convinced that even modest concessions would be taken for signs of weakness.
Metternich's irritation at the situation must have been deepened at news of the Milanese singing, on every possible occasion, Bellini's 'Guerra! Guerra!' from Norma, surely the silliest of all songs of war. He had no reason to expect an armed rising in Lombardy, which had a most formidable garrison commander in Field Marshal Radetzky. 'If the Lombards had been Poles, we would have had at the beginning of 1848 the same scenes south of the Alps which we deplored in Galicia at the start of 1846,' he told Ficquelmont on 8 January. (Ficquelmont, his most trusted colleague, had been at Milan since the previous year.) The chancellor favoured harsh measures, for him a sign of extreme uneasiness:
We must make some examples, and the most fruitful will unquestionably be among those who aspire to the most gangrenous class of the Lombard population, that of the loiterers, the 'lions', that bastard race of decayed aristocracy, and after or with them the briefless barristers and letterless litterati.
This uncharacteristically bad-tempered tone betrays his anxiety.
He was relying more and more on his wife. 'Clemens has told me to file his papers,' she noted in January. 'It's a labour of Hercules.' Her testimony grows increasingly alarmed:
The news from Parma and Naples is very bad. Felix Schwarzenberg thinks that the King of Naples is so frightened that he won't put up a fight. What is certain is that royal troops have been repulsed at Palermo and there's no more army properly speaking. A few days later a constitution was proclaimed, although it didn't stop Sicily seceding. The King of Sardinia is following suit: he has granted a constitution too; the Grand Duke of Tuscany is doing the same. Italy is breaking up.
She was proud of her husband's steady nerve—'Clemens is admirable. Fear has no place in him, though sometimes he gets very excited.' She was very bitter at England's behaviour—'It is totally incomprehensible how an entire nation can be so infatuated with such a man as Palmerston, who makes Great Britain look like the great power of shiftiness and intrigue.' (Some historians agree with her about Britain: 'Whether, as in Palmerston's day, she allied herself with the revolutionaries, her aim was always to divide and weaken the Continent,' says Jacques Droz.) 'One thing is clear to me,' continues Mélanie, 'which is that a general hatred has been unleashed against us, and that our enemies' strength, together with the unbelievable weakness of our friends, will end by destroying us.'
Metternich began to suspect that the French Revolution might be repeated in Italy. On 29 January, writing to Ficquelmont at Milan, he quoted a letter from the Grand Duchess of Tuscany to her sister. (No doubt intercepted in the post.) 'We are in an unspeakable position here. Everything is lost and we are at the people's mercy. We await the fate of Louis XVI and his family.' However, the most immediate danger came from Piedmont. Would the Piedmontese army attack? Yet if Austria could hold out long enough, Italian liberalism was bound to fail. 'So, let us govern in the Kingdom of Lombardy-Venetia!' he exhorted Ficquelmont.
On 22 February Count Josef von Hübner, a young Attaché at Milan, breakfasted with the chancellor and Princess Mélanie at the Ballhausplatz, the day martial law was declared in LombardyVenetia. He was instructed to ensure that the press made clear to every Italian state that the Austrian army would not hesitate to restore order as it had once done in Naples. On the evening of 28 February, Hübner discussed Guizot's troubles with Mélanie. 'If he falls,' she cried, shaking, 'we're all lost!' They did not know that Guizot
had fallen four days earlier and that Louis Philippe had fled.
On 29 February, copies of the Augsburger Zeitung reached Vienna with news of a revolution at Paris. Financial panic ensued, with a heavy run on the banks. Metternich went white when he read that a republic had been declared in France. He telegraphed Berlin, asking that Prussian officials be sent to Vienna to discuss means of containing the upheaval.
On 1 March Hübner spent the morning at the Ballhausplatz, where the chancellor gave him an analysis of the situation. 'Everyone tells me "something must be done." But what?' He explained how Emperor Francis had rejected his proposals for reform in 1817, 1826 and 1835. He went on:
Certainly it's essential to adapt our provincial diets to the needs of the time and increase their powers. But that's not enough. There will also have to be a central body sitting at Vienna (leaving Hungary aside for the moment), composed of delegates from the diets. It should be a chamber of provinces, not a chamber of deputies, a Volkshaus whose members will be elected in the same way as those of the provincial diets . . . We must be careful not to destroy the separate identities of the provinces. That would mean an end of the personal bonds which join them to the dynasty and with them the most effective way of supporting the Crown by preventing enmity and quarrels between the different races which comprise the Monarchy.
Metternich was not indulging in an idle fancy. Kübeck had already proposed summoning an Imperial Diet to Vienna, to discuss financial problems. 'Such a move would have been of incalculable importance and might have paved the way for constitutional change within the Monarchy,' observes their colleague Hartig, writing at the end of 1849. But while the Ministerkonferenz was favourable in principle and the plan was under serious discussion, nothing had been done. 'Save for this delay the regime could have faced the impending revolution with far greater confidence,' says Hartig. 'It could no longer have been accused of ignoring the wishes of the Diets, whose members wanted to play the role of representatives of the people, and the transition from absolute to constitutional monarchy would have been less hasty and destructive.'
As for censorship, the chancellor went on to tell Hübner that he blamed it on the late Emperor:
Kotzebue's assassination in 1819 by a fanatical young German bigot influenced him deeply. Ascribing too much importance to the secret societies, which were then undermining Italy and to a lesser extent Germany, he believed he had found a cure for the evil by keeping the so-called intelligent classes under meticulous police surveillance . . . The result has been a covert irritation with the government, as well as vague yearnings for political reform on the model of the Liberal constitutions in some minor German states.
He had often pointed this out to Francis, who had remained obdurate.
'The Emperor's death altered my position profoundly,' continued Metternich. 'From the accession of the present Emperor I have felt myself paralysed.' However he could not resign without wrecking the structure of which, together with the Emperor Francis during his reign and, since the latter's death, by himself, he had been the main prop:
Remove the column and the vault it supports will collapse. If in 1817, or later, in 1826, the Emperor had adopted my ideas on reorganising the Diets, we might perhaps be in a position to face the storm. Today it's too late . . . But I can tell you something which I want you to remember. My resignation will mean the Revolution.
On the same day that he saw Hübner, the chancellor wrote an anguished letter to György Apponyi at Paris:
France has returned to the follies of the first Revolution . . . What has happened has thrown out all my calculations, if impressions deserve the name of calculations. Europe has been put back to 1791 and 1792. Will 1793 be absent? Austria is no longer alone in having to face the Revolution. But the peril which we share is enormous. There is good reason to despair of the social fabric's survival!
What was happening confirmed only too brutally his conviction that the political stability of Europe was indivisible.
On 3 March, Kossuth made a fierce speech in the Hungarian Diet, demanding that Hungary should manage her own finances and that similar Diets should be set up in every province of the Monarchy to control what he termed Vienna's 'extravagance'. On 7 March, news reached Vienna of riots at Frankfurt, Karlsruhe and Stuttgart. 'They want to dissolve the Germanic Confederation and chase away the Kings' was Mélanie's comment. 'Everywhere there is upheaval and madness.' Yet it still seemed as if Vienna would stay quiet. However, on 10 March Baron Sieber, a chancellery official, advised her to deposit her diamonds in a secure place, as they would not be safe in her own house. Another official warned her to be on her guard 'because hatred for Prince Metternich has reached its peak'. Nevertheless, Sedlnitsky told them on the following day that nothing would happen. The situation began to deteriorate on Sunday. Members of the Diet of lower Austria drew up a petition for debate the following morning; it complained of being cut off from the Emperor by his advisers—a thinly veiled reference to the chancellor. Also on Sunday, students at the university drew up their own petition, which they handed in at the Hofburg the same afternoon; this demanded more representative government and an end to censorship—clearly they had read Andrian.
On Monday 13 March, the Landtag—the Diet—met at the Landhaus in the Herrengasse, where further demands for reforms of the sort urged by Andrian were debated noisily. Hundreds of students gathered outside, joined by a growing crowd. It then moved on to the Ballhausplatz. Watching from a window, Mélanie joked that all it needed to be happy was a sausage stall. It was far from menacing and Metternich was unalarmed. As Hartig pointed out, while Metternich had long realized that an explosion of some sort was unavoidable, he did not think that it would occur quite so quickly or so spontaneously, since the supposedly all-seeing police gave him no warning.
Yet there was very serious financial unease, expressed in an accelerating run on the bank—all too many had been frightened by Beidtel's alarmist book. If the government went to war with France, it might cause a state bankruptcy—as might the looming campaign in Italy. 'Gentlemen from aristocratic circles joined the revolutionary movement and on the morning of 13 March appeared at my grandfather's with the deputation which informed him in the most brutal manner that he must resign,' Pauline tells us. They were fearful of being ruined, remembering the bankruptcy of 1811. Their concern had spread to court circles. The old man was unshaken, but this fear of general financial disaster played a crucial part in his downfall. He had become a liability.
Meanwhile, the crowd outside the chancellery went on growing. Escorted by soldiers, Metternich walked over to the Hofburg at midday to discuss the situation with Archduke Ludwig. They agreed that it should be announced that a commission would study ways of increasing the Diets' powers, and that troops should be brought in to clear the streets. When the troops arrived, fighting broke out. Order was restored, but at 5.00 p.m. officers of the Civic Guard, led by a wine merchant named Scherzer, together with a delegation from the Diet, went to the Hofburg; they warned Ludwig that unless the troops returned to barracks at once and the chancellor resigned, Vienna would erupt.
Metternich was summoned to the Hofburg. He seemed calm enough, in a bottle-green coat and black stock, carrying a gold-topped cane—he wore a noticeably sardonic smile. He brought with him his friend Field Marshal Prince Alfred Windischgrätz, commanding officer at Prague, who happened to be staying with him; Windischgrätz was ready to fight, and went home to change into uniform when the chancellor told him he would have to take command in Vienna. Leaning against a windowsill, Metternich then addressed the Ministerkonferenz, the entire Imperial family being assembled in an adjoining room. He spoke of the common peril facing Europe and it was plain that he had no intention of yielding. At about 7.00 p.m. his old enemy Archduke Johann interrupted, seconded by Kolowrat. Was he aware that his resignation had been demanded by representatives of the people? It became clear that everyone present wanted him to go. Another delegation had got into the palace and was shouting for
his resignation in the corridors outside.
If the Ministerkonferenz had supported the chancellor, he would almost certainly have weathered the storm. Afterwards Grillparzer wrote that two battalions would have been quite sufficient to disperse the demonstrators. No doubt Metternich was old, but Radetzky, who eventually triumphed in Italy, was eighty-four. The chancellor was prepared for the struggle, the army was loyal and Windischgrätz was a most capable commander. But the Archdukes and Kolowrat had lost their nerve.
Archduke Ludwig took Metternich by the hand and told him the safety of Vienna depended on his going. Abandoned by all, he answered that he did not want to be the cause of any bloodshed or embarrass the government, and would therefore resign. However, he insisted that each Archduke must release him from the oath in which he had sworn to Emperor Francis to serve Ferdinand. (The significance of the oath has been overlooked by historians, yet it illustrates Metternich's essentially feudal attitude to his sovereign, explaining much about his conservatism, why he never forced through his reforms.) The Archdukes released him. Then he went into an anteroom and wrote out his resignation:
My sentiments, my ideas, my solutions have never altered. Throughout my whole life those have been forces which can never die within me. I embodied them in the motto I have left for my descendants so that they will never forget them. That motto is 'strength through right'.
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