For three days his body lay in state. His farewell was worthy of one who remembered the pomp of the Holy Roman Empire. The huge hearse bearing his coffin to the Karlskirche was emblazoned with the arms of Metternich quartering Austria, while on top were four black cushions on which lay his orders—Malta, St Stephen of Hungary, the Golden Fleece, the Saint Esprit, St Anne of Russia, San Gennaro of Naples, the Black and the Red Eagle of Prussia. The hearse was escorted through the streets by rows of friars carrying tapers. Archdukes, Princes of the Empire and Knights of Maria Theresa were waiting for him in the vast church, which was draped in black. After a great Mass for the Dead with the Dies Irae and ending with the Götterhalte, the coffin was taken to the Nordbahnhof for his last journey. He was interred quietly at Plass beside the three wives and eight children who had gone before him.
20
After Metternich
Der Weg der neuern Bildung geht
Von Humanität
Durch Nationalität
Zur Bestialität
FRANZ GRILLPARZER
The Austro-Hungarian Empire still looks better as a solution to the tangled problems of that part of the world than anything that has succeeded it.
GEORGE KENNAN
Metternich's worst fears came true. Germany was unified under Prussia in 1870. If it seemed for half a century after his death that he had been wrong to think revolution marched behind liberalism, he would be hideously justified. The conflict of 1914 destroyed the 'Northern Powers': Rousseau's totalitarian disciples took over Russia, and very nearly Western Europe as well, while nationalism poisoned Germany.
'The most celebrated statesman in Europe has lived just long enough to see all the objects of his life frustrated, or if not yet wholly frustrated, still in such jeopardy that their doom cannot be long averted,' The Times pronounced when he died. Historians considered him a failure. Treitschke, the 'Apostle of Prussianism', accused the chancellor of placing 'the foot of the House of Austria on the neck of the German Nation'—Metternich had been 'filled with black hatred of a law abiding people'. His reputation declined still further after the publication in 1880 of a collection of his diplomatic and personal papers, which included an 'autobiographical fragment'. The historian Paul Bailleu published an attack on the fragment the same year, showing that occasionally the chancellor's vanity had made him rewrite history.
Disraeli always remained a firm admirer. When he met Pauline Metternich in London in 1879, just after a war over the Eastern Question between Britain and Austria on one side and Russia on the other had been narrowly averted, he at once began to talk about her grandfather. 'All his predictions have come true,' said the prime minister. 'He really did have the gift of prophetic insight.'
During the early 1920s hope in the League of Nations revived interest in the Congress System and in Prince Metternich. His ideas attracted considerable attention, especially his attitude to Europe. His ally Gentz had written in an essay famous in its day:
Because of their geographical position, and the similarity of their customs, laws, requirements, way of life and culture, the states of this continent form naturally a great political league, which with good reason has been called 'The European Commonwealth' . . . The members of this natural league of nations are in such constant close contact that none of them can remain unconcerned by what is happening in one another. It is not enough to say that they live side by side. If they are to survive, then they can only survive because of one another and through one another.
The words may be those of Gentz, but it is the chancellor's voice.
An Austrian, Heinrich von Srbik, was the first historian to defend him, in Metternich, der Staatsmann und der Mensch (1925). While admitting Metternich's shortcomings—wishful thinking and inability to see any good in the new forces—Srbik argued that he had nonetheless been 'one of the very greatest masters of international politics in the history of modern Europe'. Even liberals were impressed by Srbik's book. Sir Llywellyn Woodward conceded that the chancellor's 'care for European peace, his refusal to take the loud-spoken claims of nationalists at their own valuation, or to think in terms other than those of the well-being of many millions of men of different nationality and place and language, may redeem much of his narrowness and some of his mistakes'.
However, the renewed interest died away when the world grew disillusioned with the League of Nations. Ironically, at the very time that Metternich's views on European unity were being reexamined, the Monarchy's successor states were embarking on aggressively nationalist policies and demanding the revision and enlargement of their frontiers—a scenario which may well recur before the end of the present century.
In the 1930s European Jewry had reason to regret that the world was no longer ruled by men such as Clemens von Metternich. If opposed to much of what he stood for, Heinrich Heine had written of his respect for him. The poet also shared his distrust of German nationalism, approving of the 'Demagogenverfolgung', which had bridled Jahn and the Burschenschaft. 'Although I am a radical in England and a carbonaro in Italy, I am emphatically not a demagogue in Germany, purely and simply because if such men were triumphant several thousand Jews would die.' Heine prophesied:
Should the subduing talisman, the Cross, break, then will come roaring forth the wild madness of the old champions, the insane Berserker rage of which the northern poets sing. The talisman is brittle and the day will come when it will break pitifully. The old stone gods will rise from their long-forgotten ruin and rub the dust of a thousand years from their eyes; and Thor, leaping to life with his giant hammer, will crush the Gothic cathedrals.
Even the Nazis accepted the accuracy of Heine's prophecy.
New admirers of Metternich arose in the aftermath of the Second World War, arousing the wrath of A. J. P. Taylor. He sneered at them as 'renegade American liberals' seeking a hero with which to inspire the 'Western Union' in the Cold War. His anger did not dissuade Henry Kissinger from expressing deep (if far from unqualified) admiration of the chancellor in one of the best of all books about him.
While one can chart fluctuations in Metternich's reputation, it is not so easy to assess his achievements. 'It was the greatness and the strength of Metternich during these fateful years [of the French Revolution and Napoleon] to have foreseen that human contrivances, however clever and beneficial, would not endure, and to have understood the peculiar elasticity with which men would finally revert to former habits,' writes Sir Lewis Namier. 'The failure of struggling, striving men brings the heir of ages back into his own.' That is the measure of the chancellor's one unalloyed triumph, outwitting Napoleon.
The positive and negative elements in Metternich's later career are far harder to judge. Certainly he knew how to identify his enemies. 'In Germany the attack still comes from the middle class against the throne and the upper class; in France, where these two latter elements have disappeared, the mob is now rising against the bourgeoisie,' he observed in 1831. 'That is the logical sequence.' There were later nineteenth century conservatives who, like Metternich, saw liberal regimes as phases acted out by dupes. In Dostoyevsky's opinion too, the revolution was undoubtedly going to be millennarian and anti-Christian. (The chancellor would have recognised Buonarotti in Dostoyevsky's Piotr Verkhovensky [in The Devils] and his views—'The need for culture is an aristocratic need. As soon as you have family or love you acquire a need for property . . . Everything must be reduced to complete equality.') In the next century Weimar Germany, Third Republic France, Republican Spain and Giolitti's Italy confirmed Metternich's fears, while Russia took Buonarotti's ideas to their logical conclusion—just as Nazi Germany realized the aspirations of Jahn and the student 'martyrs' of the Carlsbad Decrees.
What is beyond dispute is that Metternich enabled the Habsburg Monarchy to go on being what it wanted to be for over three decades. He convinced the world that Austria was the successor to the Holy Roman Empire and the pivot of Europe, even if she was always too poor to wage war; Russia and Prussia thought her ind
ispensable. Dominating Germany and overawing Italy added to the appearance of strength. For thirty-three years he preserved the Monarchy from revolution.
He has been castigated for offering no alternative, no hope of change. Kissinger portrays him as a victim of the 'conservative dilemma', citing his own word: 'I claim to have recognised the situation, but also the impossibility to erect a new structure in our Empire.' Admittedly, whether the plans for constitutional reform rejected by Emperor Francis would have made very much difference is questionable. However, Metternich's 'system' did at least prolong the life of what he regarded as the best of all possible worlds; as Namier puts it, 'Metternich was sincerely Attached to the Habsburg Monarchy because, like no other State, it was bound up with the time and world in which he would have chosen to live.'
Yet he refused to despair of the future. 'Quibbling, whether called theology, philosophy or politics, when it usurps the role which belongs to principles and practicality, brings down societies,' he wrote in 1850. 'It may dissolve empires but it does not kill the human race. Principles are imperishable . . . after the crisis they come back into their own. The process is slow but sure.'
It has been suggested that he saw stagnation as the sole alternative to chaos. He sometimes gives this impression: 'The late Abbé de Pradt thought he had said everything in announcing "Mankind is on the march"! I permit myself to ask the question "Towards what"?' But here he was simply reacting to Pradt, one of the most superficial if widely read political writers of the day. Undoubtedly he believed in progress, as he made clear in December 1849: 'There are two sorts of men in the world; those of the past and those of the future. The second sort, and I claim to be among them, are the only ones who matter, since yesterday no longer exists—one must be involved with tomorrow, with what's going to happen.'
Personally he disliked the term 'Metternich system', calling it a 'fausse dénomination'. In 1852 he defined it as 'not a system but the application of the laws which rule the world.' Stripped of its verbiage, this means that it was a strategy rather than a system, to ensure the survival of the traditional social order and the 1815 settlement. 'From his own perspective it is difficult to see where Metternich went wrong' is Alan Sked's verdict. 'What is really amazing is how much he achieved . . . The Europe of his day came closer to his ideals than to those of his opponents or his rivals.'
It can be argued that Metternich's grandeur lies in accepting the possibility of failure. Bertier de Sauvigny prefaced his remarkable study of the chancellor with a quotation from an unfashionable philosopher of the right, with whom Metternich had little in common. 'Nothing is easier than Revolution,' wrote Charles Maurras. 'What is splendid and difficult is to avoid the shock, to guard against upheaval. To sail and reach port, to endure and make others endure is the miracle.' If the chancellor never reached port, he endured for astonishingly long.
His greatest historian, Srbik, insists that he was a political thinker in the grand manner. In Srbik's opinion, Metternich's significance at the deepest level lies in his 'constant and consistent opposition throughout the world of European civilisation to the levelling by democracy and the rule of the mobilised masses, which threatened the historical order of state and society as well as individual culture'. He has sometimes been compared to Disraeli. While he shared that eccentric Englishman's timelessness—he would have been home at the siege of Vienna or in modern New York—he lacked Disraeli's cynicism and pessimism. If he too looked back, Metternich's vision of history had much more hope in it. In some ways it was akin to that of Giambattista Vico, who, in the Scienza Nuova, divides history into cycles (an age of gods, an age of heroes and an age of barbarians), arguing that each cycle passes on its skills.
'The mistake was in accepting the would-be philosophic and scientific character which Metternich gave to his harangues' is how Namier explains the decline in the chancellor's reputation. 'These were songs in which the music mattered and not the text.' The emergence of a united Europe in the 1990s, together with the crumbling of the Russian Empire in Central and Eastern Europe, gives Metternich fresh relevance today. For he always looked beyond mere national interest. (Viereck stresses his rejection of what Nietzsche calls 'atavistic attacks of soil attachment'.) He believed in national traditions contributing to a joint heritage, as opposed to nationalism. A modern Austrian admirer, Hugo Hantsch, singled out the federal system as his most creative concept: Austria was to be a federation of its historic lands; Central Europe a federation of sovereign states; and Europe as a whole a federal system based on the principle that great powers are equal. 'It was an approach pointing to the future,' says Hantsch, 'and it sets Metternich among the ranks of truly great statesmen.' Even Sked, who sees Metternich as a centralist, admits that he 'viewed the Empire as a European microcosm'.
His advice to Kübeck at the end of 1849 is undeniably topical. At Frankfurt the German nationalists whom he had always distrusted were trying to create a single Grossdeutschland, a state which would contain every German-speaking land, including Bohemia and Prussian Poland; some Frankfurt deputies even wanted the German community at Paris to be represented. Metternich totally rejected Grossdeutschland. 'There is only one way in which Germany can make good her nationhood, which is by forming a confederation of states,' he told Kübeck. 'Prussia proposes a single state instead of a confederation . . . Should Prussia succeed in implementing her plan, a very skilfully constructed plan—and she has an excellent chance of doing so—the consequences will of necessity be incalculable, in view of the danger it will create not only for Prussia herself but for the entire European community.'
No less topical, in the context of the new Russian revolution, is his dictum that 'once it has taken the first step, revolution tends to run the whole course', and his conviction that political strife is an inevitable consequence. 'When anarchy comes to a head in any state, it invariably ends in civil wars or in foreign, and often in both at the same time.' He saw no peaceful solution—'In a great social crisis the people cannot be both sick man and doctor.'
Metternich's formula of legitimacy (minus the dynastic element) and tradition may still be helpful in Central Europe, where, as in post-1815 Europe, unless secured by peaceful negotiation any changes in the 1945 frontiers could spell disaster. Kissinger has rephrased legitimacy as depending on 'acceptance, not imposition', while tradition (cultural nationalism instead of the linguistic and racial sort) is equally capable of redefinition. Nor is it inconceivable that Metternich's Austria may reappear, in the form of a loose Danubian federation (Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland and northern Yugoslavia), as a counterweight to the economic might of the new Germany.
If chauvinist nationalism still lingers on viciously, it looks as though Metternich's other great enemy, Messianic socialism, is all but moribund, the most significant development in political thought since the French Revolution; the great Utopian movement to reconstruct the world which began in 1789 finally collapsed in 1989. There has been a return to the policy of conserving existing frontiers and constitutions, albeit liberal constitutions. One cannot deny that the great chancellor was himself overtaken by history. Yet his hatred of war and chauvinism, his faith in the old Christian Europe and his diplomatic genius are worth remembering at a time when Europe is striving for unity.
Sources and Bibliography
Since Metternich was in power for nearly thirty-nine years and lived to be eighty-six, the documentary material is on a scale scarcely surpassed by that on Napoleon. The most important sources are the archives of the Staatskanzlei and the Kabinettsarchiv, both in the Haus-Hof-und Staatsarchiv at Vienna. (In 1959 the Haus-Hof-und Staatsarchiv published a catalogue of the documents concerning his life.) There are also the personal papers and Princess Mélanie's diary—forty volumes—which were discovered at Plass in 1949 by Dr Marie Ulrichova and transferred to the Czech State Archives at Prague. Additional material is to be found in the archives of almost every foreign ministry in Europe. Needless to say, he figures prominently in countles
s contemporary memoirs and collections of correspondence. A study which makes full use of all this is beyond the capacity of the most industrious historian. Those who have consulted it to greatest effect are Srbik, whose monumental Metternich der Staatsmann und der Mensch has not been superseded since its appearance in 1925, and Bertier de Sauvigny, whose Metternich et son Temps came out thirty years ago but remains indispensable.
The foundation for any book on the chancellor is the collection of Metternich's papers, which he intended to take the place of a biography and which were published at Vienna in 1880. Admittedly, the autobiographical fragment is not always reliable. The account of his duel with Napoleon in 1813–15 was written fourteen years after, and that of his later career was written in 1844 and 1852; his memory is sometimes at fault, while sometimes he distorts the facts so as to flatter himself—notably in the account of the famous interview with the French Emperor at the Marcolini Palace in 1813. Albert Sorel's comment on the fragment is sometimes quoted by very superficial historians: 'He makes himself the light of the world; he dazzles himself with his own rays in the mirror which he holds perpetually before his eyes.' But, as Pieter Geyl showed in Napoleon: For and Against, Sorel's intention was to discredit the chancellor in support of his thesis. ('In Sorel's reading,' says Geyl, 'all Metternich's negotiations [in 1813] had no other aim than to win time and to put Napoleon in the wrong with Europe and with France. One has only to look at the realities of Austrian conditions and of Metternich's policy to understand that the mediation was meant seriously, at any rate at first.') Moreover, the material in these eight volumes consists mainly of letters, memoranda, and despatches, with extracts from his wife's journal, the autobiographical fragment amounting to less then a single volume. In Bertier de Sauvigny's view the collection 'has always been and remains, in spite of its imperfections, the basis of every study of Metternich.'
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