Vienna, 1814: How the Conquerors of Napoleon Made Love, War, and Peace at the Congress of Vienna (18 page)

The Russian tsar, too, was suspected of exploiting Princess Bagration’s lingering resentment against the Austrian foreign minister. “Metternich never loved you,” Alexander was overheard saying, according to Agent Nota. “Believe me,” the tsar was said to have added, Metternich “is a cold fish who is quite incapable of love. Can’t you see this plaster-of-Paris figure? He loves no one.”

J
UST AS GOSSIPERS
predicted, Marie Louise had arrived in Vienna back on the seventh of October and moved into the west wing of Schönbrunn, the Habsburg summer palace located south of the town. It was a large residence with a facade in a shade of mustard yellow that the Viennese called “Maria Theresa Gold” after the eighteenth-century monarch who had redecorated the palace. Schönbrunn was originally intended to outshine Louis XIV’s Versailles, though the Austrians had run out of money long before they achieved that goal.

Marie Louise had returned to Vienna without fanfare, arriving purposely late to avoid the opening ceremonies of the peace conference. She looked only slightly older now than she did when she had been forced, four years earlier, to marry Napoleon. She still had a youthful face, as one put it, “like peaches and cream,” and a figure that looked crafted in a “turner’s workshop.” She also brought their son, the three-and-a-half-year-old Napoleon Francis, the former infant king of Rome and heir to the throne of France. This “little Napoleon,” who resembled his mother with his fair complexion, spoke often of his father and showed a great curiosity about any Frenchman he met. Their carriage still bore Napoleonic emblems, and her servants still dressed in Napoleonic livery.

It had been a stressful six months since Napoleon’s abdication, and eight months since Marie Louise had last seen her husband. They had parted in late January 1814, when Napoleon rode out for the brilliant though ultimately unsuccessful spring campaign. Marie Louise had remained in Paris presiding over a council of Napoleon’s foremost advisers and administering what was left of his empire. By late March, however, the Allies were closing in on the capital, and Marie Louise had to decide whether to stay or leave for safer territory. Uncertain, though inclined to remain in Paris, she had put the question to the council.

After a long discussion, a vote, and a letter produced at the last minute from Napoleon emphasizing that his family was not, in any circumstances, to “fall into the hands of the enemy,” Marie Louise had agreed to leave for temporary residence in Orléans. It was there, on April 12, that a bizarre race for the former empress took place: Napoleon had sent a cavalry escort to “liberate” Marie Louise, while some Austrian officers rode to “save” her and bring her back to her father. The Austrians arrived first.

“I am worried to death for you,” Marie Louise wrote her husband as she was forced to accompany the Austrian officers to the castle of Rambouillet, nearly thirty miles southwest of Paris. But once she saw her father, Emperor Francis, she promised Napoleon to make it perfectly clear that she was to join him on Elba, and “nobody is going to prevent me from doing that.” By most accounts, Marie Louise had meant every word.

Indeed, despite the politics that inspired their marriage, it is clear that Napoleon and Marie Louise had developed a loving relationship. This fact came as a surprise to most historians when a whole collection of Marie Louise’s personal letters was discovered in the twentieth century. “There’s no one in the world who loves you as much as your faithful Louise,” Marie Louise had written to her husband in one of many affectionate letters composed during this time.

Yet Marie Louise’s determination to join her husband on Elba had met some considerable opposition from her father. “He forbids me to come to you to see you,” she informed Napoleon. “I told him outright that it was my duty to follow you.” But her father had refused, and instead ordered her back to Austria, though he had assured her that she would soon have the freedom to choose her future herself.

Unhappily, Marie Louise had obeyed her father’s wishes and returned to Vienna for some five or six weeks before spending the rest of the summer at the spas of Aix-en-Savoie, which were supposed to cure her anxieties. Her doctor had prescribed “absolute rest and tranquility in some suitable spot where she can follow a strict course of treatment.” Still, as she left for the healing waters, she had assured Napoleon that she “loved him more tenderly than ever” and planned to come to Elba after that.

It was during that time apart that Marie Louise’s resolution apparently began to waver. She had been promised the duchies of Parma, Piacenza, and Guastalla, and this had been written in the Treaty of Fontainebleau (confirmed, too, in the Treaty of Paris). To her great dismay, however, Marie Louise now learned that this might not be a guarantee after all. Her father and Metternich had both written to inform her that there was a movement to return those duchies to the Spanish Bourbon dynasty that had owned them before the war, and several states supported this view, including Bourbon Spain and France. Marie Louise’s presence in Vienna would be vital, they emphasized, or no doubt overemphasized. She should make plans to return home to look after the interests of herself and her son, not to mention her duties as an Austrian archduchess.

So it was back to Vienna for the congress. “What a sad prospect,” she had confessed to her secretary as she had made her slow, leisurely ride to a town filled with her husband’s conquerors.

A
MONG THE MANY
unofficial delegates still arriving every day, Johann Georg Cotta and Carl Bertuch were representing some eighty-one publishing houses and book dealers in Germany. Cotta was head of a major publishing house in Stuttgart, which owned the newspaper
Allgemeine Zeitung,
and Bertuch was the son of a publisher in Weimar who printed the works of many literary giants. Together they hoped to persuade the Vienna Congress to correct many of the ills that plagued the publishing business. Specifically, they would petition against censorship and stifling governmental controls of the press, and, at the same time, appeal for more protection against rogue printers who pirated their work. The first problem damaged the quality of publication; the second ate substantially into the profits.

This was not an easy argument to make with monarchist governments comfortable with the control of the press, whether by censorship or the licensing of official printing houses. In Austria, for example, a government edict of September 1810 justified the need for “a cautious hand,” as it called censorship, to protect the “heart and head of immature persons from the corrupting products of a depraved imagination, from the poisonous breath of self-seeking seducers, and from the dangerous phantoms of perverted minds.” Besides this self-interested paternalism that very often squashed dissenting opinion, the state had other incentives to maintain the status quo. After all, the printers who forged and plagiarized works also paid taxes and fees.

But a great deal was at stake, Cotta and Bertuch argued. Without basic freedom and protection, few authors would undertake any serious work, and even fewer firms would be willing to risk publishing them. Only songbooks and prayer books would be published, they argued, with some exaggeration. At any rate, it would be a shame to miss an excellent opportunity for scholarship and commerce in the newly emerging Germany. There was a large population, growing wealth, and a common vernacular that transcended state boundaries—in short, a potentially large market of readers.

Vienna’s police department was leery of many foreign delegations, but these publishers seemed particularly suspicious. Agent Goehausen believed that both Cotta and Bertuch belonged to a banned secret society, the Tugendbund, or “League of Virtue,” that flourished amid the patriotism that swept Germany in the wars against France, and promoted unsettling patriotic aims like the unification of Germany. “Agent H”—almost certainly Wilhelm Hebenstreit, the theater critic and future editor of the fashion magazine
Wiener Modenzeitung
—was recruited to keep a close eye on their activities.

Agent H knew that the publishers already enjoyed support among major delegations. The Prussians, in particular, were favorable. Hardenberg and Humboldt had championed liberal and reform policies for years, and Bertuch gained a meeting with the latter, thanks to a friendly letter of introduction written by no less a person than Goethe. Baron vom Stein of Nassau, then serving the Russian delegation, was another easy sell. He saw copyright protections as part of a package of basic rights that he wanted enshrined in the new German constitution: equality of all citizens, the right to study at any university, the right to choose occupations, the right of emigration, and protection against crimes ex post facto, among others.

Both Cotta and Bertuch were engaging, well-rounded conversationalists who could make a strong case, all the while peppering their arguments with anecdotes about famous writers they knew, such as Goethe. They also dangled tempting offers of publishing contracts before some people in town, such as the Swiss strategist serving on the Prussian delegation, Henri Jomini. Cotta, in particular, was someone to watch, being, as Agent H put it, a rich man with many important and diverse contacts.

By the middle of October, the publishers had already secured an audience with Prince Metternich, which was no small feat given his preoccupations at that time. During the conference, held in the afternoon of the fourteenth, Metternich promised his support. He seemed sincere, as he often did. The question was, however, what exactly did his support mean? Metternich sometimes promised assistance, and then the matter went on to die a quiet, mysterious death. The publishing delegates would be well advised not to stop their lobbying.

Among other groups actively seeking support at this time were the Jewish delegations, which came from several cities in Germany and central Europe. During the French occupation, many old laws discriminating against Jews had been repealed, and new ones enacted that extended the rights of Jews. After the war, however, several German states and towns were rebelling against the French legislation, and some were on the verge of reenacting the old discriminatory regulations. The Jewish delegations were working to preserve their equality, which, however incomplete, was still preferable to a return to repression.

There were several different Jewish delegations in town, each working largely independently of the others. Jakob Baruch and J. J. Gumprecht represented the Jews of Frankfurt, and the banker Simon Edler von Lämel represented the Jewish community in Prague. Dr. Carl August Buchholz, a Christian lawyer, worked on behalf of Jewish communities in Bremen, Hamburg, and his native Lübeck. Buchholz was also completing a 157-page booklet advocating Jewish rights, which would soon circulate among congress dignitaries. Fortunately, these delegations had valuable support networks in town, which included some of Vienna’s most influential bankers: Nathan von Arnstein, Salomon Mayer Rothschild, and Leopold Edler von Herz.

But the Vienna police were suspicious of these delegations, ordering special surveillance in July 1814, even before the conference had begun. One official in the police bureau responsible for Jewish affairs had been asked to submit a list of names of prominent Jews in town, who were to be investigated; when the delegates began arriving in the autumn, they, too, were followed and their activities scrutinized. Police suspicions were not easily dispelled, and in late October, one agent discovered that Frankfurt’s Jewish delegates were posing as “merchants” and tried to have them expelled from town.

It was long suspected that Metternich was behind the harassment, but as the distinguished scholar Enno Kraehe has shown, it was probably the Austrian foreign minister who intervened to prevent their expulsion. He was a friend of one of the delegates in question, Jakob Baruch, whom he had met at the coronation of Emperor Francis in 1792.

The police continued to follow the new arrivals closely, and the more prominent figures were announced in the court newspaper,
Wiener Zeitung.
By the beginning of October, the Grand Duke of Baden had arrived, and his dossier was soon filled with reports of nightly outings at the theater and his pursuit of women, including actresses, maids, and eventually a daughter of an orange and lemon seller. Prince Thurn und Taxis was here as well, hoping to secure a family monopoly on running the postal service in the Habsburg empire. The Prince of Piombino brought a portfolio of arguments explaining why he deserved the island of Elba, rather than its current occupant, Napoleon Bonaparte.

Some tiny rulers indeed had grand pretensions, and one of the most notorious was the Prince of Nassau-Weilburg. The Russian officer and “army historiographer” Alexander Ivanovich Mikhailovsky-Danilevsky described one such audience. Entering into the prince’s suite, he had to pass many footmen and chamberlains in gold livery standing at the double doors. The prince, in a distant room, stood completely still, receiving his supplicants like the Sun King. “I nearly laughed out loud,” he said, surprised by the ridiculous sight.

Many others slipped into town that autumn for profit and adventure: rogues, charlatans, courtesans, actors, and gamblers, including one of the Continent’s most talented whist players, Mr. O’Bearn, and Mr. Raily, a notorious cardsharp, who would die impoverished. The salon run by Madame Frazer was said to be a favorite with many seasoned gamblers. Her gaming tables—“candle snuffers of conversation,” as one young socialite said disapprovingly—were the draw, not the tea, which was cold. Two small barking dogs often greeted the guests who arrived hoping to make a fortune.