Vienna, 1814: How the Conquerors of Napoleon Made Love, War, and Peace at the Congress of Vienna (3 page)

The merchant class, if that term can be used about such a small group, was not that visible in Vienna, and the town’s artisans overwhelmingly geared their production to meeting the demands of court and society, making saddles, harnesses, carriages, clocks, musical instruments, and other luxuries. The biggest source of production was still wine, which always found a ready market in a town where residents, as one historian put it, “lunched until dinner, and then dined until supper.”

The vast majority of the events at the peace congress would take place in the old town, still encircled by its city walls, which ran roughly along the lines of today’s sweeping boulevard, the Ringstrasse. According to legend, the thick stone walls had been constructed using ransom money for King Richard I, “the Lion-Hearted,” who was captured in 1193 on his way to the Second Crusade. In reality, the walls were built and rebuilt almost incessantly over the centuries, as they withstood various sieges, including two particularly frightful ones from the Turks. After the last attack from the French in 1809, the city walls were not being reconstructed, and the remaining bastions would serve at the congress mainly as a fashionable walkway affording some excellent views of the town.

Vienna was built on a large plain where the Danube divides and can be easily forded, as the Romans who founded a camp there in the first century discovered. During the Middle Ages, the small town lay on the exposed eastern rim of Charlemagne’s empire, a fact that survives in the German name for Austria, Österreich. Historically, Vienna has long served as a crossroads between east and west. Crusaders, merchants, friars, and many other travelers would pass through the town, traveling east along its river—the mighty, muddy Danube, flowing on its two-thousand-mile journey from the Black Forest to the Black Sea.

With a population reaching some quarter of a million, and ranked third in size behind London and Paris, Vienna enjoyed a reputation for being a joyous and sensuous, if also irritable and somewhat cranky, place. “Vienna is the city of the world where the most uncommon raptures are experienced,” as the French émigré Baronne du Montet put it. Another admirer, the songwriter Count Auguste de La Garde-Chambonas, who had traveled extensively in his search for adventure, called Vienna enthusiastically “the homeland of happiness.” That autumn, the visitors to the peace conference would see exactly what he meant.

Hosting the congress officially was the emperor of Austria, Francis I, the last person ever to be crowned Holy Roman Emperor. Born in Florence, Italy, Francis was head of the Habsburg family, Europe’s oldest and arguably most illustrious dynasty, occupying the throne in virtual unbroken succession since the thirteenth century. The single exception to this six-hundred-year dominance was Charles VII of the Wittelsbach family, who ruled briefly in the early 1740s, before the crown reverted to the Habsburgs (or more correctly, as they were known, from then on, the House of Habsburg-Lorraine).

Emperor Francis stood about medium height with high, sharply chiseled cheekbones, snow-white hair, and the infamous Habsburg jaw that jutted out from his bony face. He was only forty-six years old, though he looked considerably older. He had already weathered twenty-two stormy years on the throne, facing first the French Revolution and then Napoleon. Indeed, Emperor Francis looked tired and worn-out, or as one put it, “If you blew hard, you’d blow him to the ground.”

As insiders knew, Francis was popular among the people and the court. He was called “Papa Franz” and “the father of his country,” and was celebrated in music, including Joseph Haydn’s “God Save Emperor Franz!” (the melody still used for the German national anthem). Some family members called the white-haired emperor Venus, the goddess of love. This was admittedly something of a Habsburg eccentricity, though the emperor was a well-known lover of statues, seals, and antiquities, and he looked out with a gaze as dreamy and blank as any ancient sculpture.

When the emperor was not trying to make order out of the managed chaos of the administration, which far too often seemed to run in circles after yet another rubber stamp, Francis enjoyed the music of this great
Musikstadt.
The emperor played the violin in the family string quartet, sometimes accompanied by his foreign minister, Metternich, on the cello. Francis also liked to make candy, tend to his plants in the palace hot-houses, and study the large collection of maps in his library. The emperor possessed a knowledge of continental geography that, among the sovereigns coming to the congress, was unmatched. His large book collection, which at his death reached forty thousand volumes, would form the core of the Austrian National Library.

The headquarters for the social maelstrom of the Vienna Congress would be Emperor Francis’s palace, the Hofburg, or as it was known, the Burg. Originally a functional four-tower fortress built into the old city wall as part of the city’s defenses in the late thirteenth century, the rambling palace had grown to occupy several blocks in the city center as the Habsburg rulers continually added new wings and courts.

Emperor Francis had decided to open up this palace to his fellow sovereigns. After some consideration about rank and status, in order not to ruffle any royal feathers, the emperor had offered the Russian tsar the fanciful white and gold paneled rococo suites on the third floor of the Amalienburg, a late-sixteenth-century addition to the palace named after the wife of Emperor Joseph I, and recently renovated. It was a superb suite with extravagant gilded mirrors, crystal chandeliers, and damask-covered chairs atop shining parquet floors.

The king of Prussia was to have a suite on the third floor of the Schweizerhof, the old medieval center of the castle, the courtyard of which had originally been intended for jousts. At its entrance stood the sixteenth-century Renaissance “Gate of Virtue” with a crowned Habsburg eagle flanked by two large resting lions. This wing had served as the favorite dwelling of the Austrian empress, Maria Ludovika, who moved to another part of the palace in order to make room for this royal guest.

Three other kings, two empresses, a queen, and many princes would also be housed in the palace. The king of Denmark, the tall, thin, and talkative Frederick VI, would also be lodged in the Schweizerhof, and the large, stern, melancholy king of Württemberg on the second floor of the Amalienburg. By the end of the month, the king of Bavaria, Maximilian I Joseph, the popular “Good King Max” and the founder of the Oktoberfest celebration, would take over suites in the early eighteenth-century wing known as the Reichskanzlei, or the Imperial Court Chancellery.

Every night at the palace, some forty or fifty banquet tables would be set at a cost that, it was whispered, ran to wildly exorbitant amounts. They were certainly elaborate affairs, sometimes involving as many as eight courses. The first was usually soup and hors d’oeuvres, brought out in large tureens and platters by wigged and liveried servants, and placed on tables adorned with court silver, crystal, and often gigantic gilded bronze centerpieces that incorporated many flowers and candles.

Guests progressed through a number of other dishes, usually including beef, ham, venison, pheasant, partridge, or some other meat. Years later, the choice of wine and entrée became much more standardized: oysters with Chablis, boiled beef with Rhenish wine, roast meat with Bordeaux or perhaps Tokay, the delicate dessert wine from imperial vineyards in Hungary. Fruits, sweets, cakes, and a wide variety of pies, cheeses, or jellies often followed. Ice cream was served only when Emperor Francis was present, and some six hundred rations of coffee, in mammoth kettles, were set aside daily for the sleep-deprived guests.

The kitchens that turned out such feasts for the congress were a sight unto themselves. In the main kitchen, accessed by a staircase underneath the court chapel, there was a giant spit, large enough to roast an ox, and joined with several other spits that could turn a few geese, ducks, hares, or pheasants. Cauldrons and copper pots and charcoal fumes dominated in the scorching heat—the fire on the largest spit so large, one said, it seemed a vision of hell. In other smaller rooms, a team of chefs, under-chefs, cooks, and other kitchen staff chopped, spiced, and diced on “the poor animals like the devil treats the soul of the damned.”

To make sure that his elegant guests were entertained in style, the emperor had appointed a Festivals Committee, and made it responsible for planning, promoting, and managing all the official entertainment. The committee would set the busy social calendar that, as the emperor insisted, should be lively and fresh. The Festivals Committee would be continually challenged to find new or more interesting ways to enhance the “pursuit of pleasure” and make sure that the mood of “universal rejoicing” did not falter—all this for an elite crowd used to the very best and sharply critical when their high standards were not met.

The Festivals Committee was, by most accounts, one of the hardest-working committees at the congress. It would organize a series of lavish balls, banquets, masquerades, hunts, and the whole “preposterous extravagance” that later, more sober generations would come to associate with the Congress of Vienna.

Catering to the whims of their houseguests for an uncertain length of time would sometimes be exasperating. Vienna wits soon put these difficulties in perspective, while also poking fun at the early impressions made by the celebrated guests who would so readily accept Emperor Francis’s generosity.

For a short time, indeed, Vienna would be the capital of Europe, the site of a massive victory celebration, and home to the most glamorous gathering since the fall of the Roman Empire. Palaces and parks, opera houses and ballrooms—the entire town would turn into a shimmering baroque playground. There had been large peace conferences before, but never anything like this. The Vienna Congress was to be the most spectacular peace conference in history. It was also, with its extravagance and decadence, going to be one of the most controversial.

Chapter 2

T
WO
P
RINCES

Good heavens, Madame. Who could resist loving a man with so many vices?

—C
OUNT
F
RANÇOIS
-C
ASIMIR
M
OURET DE
M
ONTROND, DESCRIBING HIS FRIEND
T
ALLEYRAND TO ONE OF HIS MISTRESSES

S
ilverware was hastily polished, white tablecloths were pressed, and napkins starched and folded. The wine cellars were stocked with the region’s finest wines, including some bottles of Tokay, one hundred years old, costing about a year’s salary for a junior lecturer at the University of Vienna. Many distinguished arrivals would soon pour into town, as one put it, “like peasants to a country fair.”

Imperial carriages received a fresh coat of paint, dark green with a yellow coat of arms on the door, and their coachmen were outfitted in matching yellow livery. All three hundred of the carriages, soon to be placed at the disposal of the guests, would sport a uniform appearance, which would hopefully help avoid unpleasant squabbles over precedence. This was a wise decision, though at least one member of the Naples delegation, Signor Castelli, would have preferred more glitz, comparing his carriage to a “slow-rolling maid’s chamber.”