Vienna, 1814: How the Conquerors of Napoleon Made Love, War, and Peace at the Congress of Vienna (4 page)

In the center of the bustle was Austria’s foreign minister, Prince Klemens von Metternich. He was forty-one years old with curly blond hair, pale blue eyes, and the slender toned physique of a fencer. He stood above medium height, and had a handsome, delicate face and a gift for sparkling conversation. Metternich was hailed as the “Adonis of the Drawing Room.”

It was hard to believe that this elegant and sophisticated man who had spun so many webs of intrigue for the Austrian Foreign Ministry had not been born in the country whose policy he was now crafting. He had not even seen Vienna itself until after his twenty-first birthday. Metternich was a Rhinelander. He was a native of the city of Koblenz, located on the bank of the Rhine in a region renowned for its towering cathedrals, its terraced vineyards, and its creative blend of Franco-Germanic culture that fostered such an easygoing lifestyle.

Metternich’s real name was a tongue-twisting mouthful: Klemens Wenzel Nepomuk Lothar von Metternich-Winneburg-Beilstein, each designation harkening back to a distinguished ancestor or an extensive family estate somewhere in central Europe. Metternich’s father, Franz Georg Karl, had been an imperial count of the Holy Roman Empire, one of only four hundred families that enjoyed a privileged status. His mother, Maria Beatrix von Kagenegg, had been a lady-in-waiting for Empress Maria Theresa. Yet by the standards of the time, the Metternichs barely ranked among the elite. There was a definite pecking order, and a number of princes, margraves, dukes, and electors all floated on a social plane high above the count. For many years, Vienna’s crème de la crème would not let Metternich forget this tenuous status.

He had gained a social boost, however, when he married into one of Vienna’s most distinguished families. His wife, Countess Eleanor von Kaunitz—or Laure, as he called her—was a granddaughter of Prince Wenzel Kaunitz, the famous Austrian minister who guided foreign policy for some forty years in the eighteenth century. “I cannot understand at all how any woman can resist him,” she had said of Metternich, swept away by his charm. After overcoming her family’s considerable resistance to the match, they had married in September 1795. By most standards, this was not a happy marriage.

Metternich, a notorious harlequin, would have many love affairs over the years, including one with Napoleon’s younger sister Caroline, and another with the wife of the French marshal Jean-Andoche Junot. Metternich, indeed, never overcame his weakness for romantic liaisons, those “secret dashes in hired cabs, rendezvous in ghostly grottoes, and moonlight scampering in and out of upper-storey windows.” Laure had to settle for amiable compatibility.

While this arrangement was certainly not uncommon among aristocratic families, Metternich was considerably more affectionate with their children. The oldest, seventeen-year-old Marie, was his favorite, with her wit, charm, and good looks that already reminded many of her father. Victor, aged fourteen, was the only surviving son in the family, an excellent student already tapped for a career in the Austrian bureaucracy (two other boys had died in infancy). The two youngest were ten-year-old Clementine and three-year-old Leontine. “If I had not been a minister of state,” he said, “I would have been a nursery governess.”

What had brought Metternich to Vienna for the first time, in November 1794, was the turmoil of the French Revolution. Fanatical armies had swarmed into the Rhineland on a rampage of destruction, intent to wage war on the aristocracy and its sleek, lacy decadence. The Metternichs, epitomizing this target, were forced to flee for their lives. The family estate on the Rhine was ruined, and their property plundered.

No surprise, Metternich would long be horrified of war, “that hateful invention” that released humanity’s most savage urges and almost invariably ended with all sorts of barbaric crimes. Later experience only confirmed these early impressions. In 1809, when the time had seemed right to attack Napoleon, Austria was quickly squashed and almost annihilated as a power. Next time, Metternich knew, Austria might not survive.

It was during that same year of defeat that Metternich was given his chance to manage foreign policy. After a grand tour through the embassies of Dresden, Berlin, and then Paris, Metternich had been named Austrian foreign minister. His career in the five years before the congress had certainly been controversial.

Metternich had arranged the marriage of the Austrian emperor’s oldest daughter, Archduchess Marie Louise, to Napoleon, a move highly unpopular in many Viennese circles, which still regarded Napoleon as the devil incarnate and the match as a bitter humiliation. For Metternich, this was a necessary evil that would strengthen Austria, ally it to the continent’s strongest power, and allow more time to heal her wounds. Equally controversial, when the French empire started to unravel, Metternich seemed slow to abandon Napoleon and the alliance that, he believed, had kept Austria alive.

Critics were indeed quick to point out Metternich’s many shortcomings. He seemed a flippant and frivolous lightweight. One year’s essential priority in his foreign office might be discarded the next with an astonishing ease, suddenly dismissed as “antediluvian,” as the prince referred to outdated concerns. His policy had a tendency to fluctuate and infuriate, with Metternich bouncing back and forth between colleagues, flittering about like a “butterfly minister.”

All the while, Metternich displayed an unshakable confidence in his own abilities—a shocking and annoying arrogance that, as a colleague said, confused “haughtiness for dignity.” How easily he brushed aside criticisms, and how little, really, he seemed troubled by the magnitude of the problems he often faced. For many, Metternich was a sly, superficial, and shallow fop, hopelessly out of his league.

Metternich’s admirers, on the other hand, were unmoved by this criticism. Sure, there was a kernel of truth in each charge. Metternich seemed lazy, vain, and irreverent, but it was also true that he deliberately cultivated his image of gentlemanly nonchalance. He liked to pose as a playful and idle dabbler, while at the same time he waged diplomacy like a game of chess and did whatever it took to win. His rivals, continuing to underrate his abilities, went right on being checkmated.

In his five years as foreign minister, Metternich had carefully and skillfully guided Austrian diplomacy through a maze of challenges, advancing stage by stage from Austria’s utter defeat and subservience to Napoleon in 1809 to becoming an ally of significance, and then, finally, at the right moment, in August 1813, defecting to the Allied coalition that would eventually defeat Napoleon. Austria had helped tip the balance. One historian has called this subtle craftsmanship one of the most remarkable feats in the history of diplomacy.

It was certainly dangerous to underestimate this charming foreign minister with his less than scrupulous means—he himself once summed up his approach as “hedging, evasion and flattery.” Austria had benefited tremendously from Metternich’s diplomacy, and, on the eve of the congress, seemed poised to do so again.

T
HE IDEA OF
holding a peace conference in Vienna dated back one year to the middle of October 1813, when the Allies achieved a monumental victory over Napoleon at the Battle of Leipzig, the largest single battle in the Napoleonic Wars. Historians call the three-day slaughter the “Battle of Nations” Metternich called it the “Battle of the World.” It was there, at Leipzig, that the Russian tsar Alexander first proposed Vienna as the location for the future gathering. The Austrian emperor immediately agreed, before the unpredictable tsar changed his mind.

Originally, the intention was to invite only the sovereigns of the victorious powers. But in the spring of 1814, the British foreign secretary, Lord Castlereagh, had urged that the conference be expanded to include the representatives of all the states who had fought in the war. Article XXXII of the Treaty of Paris specifically adopted this interpretation, calling for a “general conference” of “all the participating nations” to open in Vienna no later than the fifteenth of July. This date, however, had been pushed back over the summer in response to the tsar’s wishes to return first to his capital at St. Petersburg, where he had long been absent. The new opening date for the congress was set for the first of October.

Austria, of course, realized it would be expensive to host a peace conference and celebration worthy of the Allied victory, and it would certainly strain the government’s already shaky finances. Austria had, only three years before, declared bankruptcy. Its new banknotes, issued in 1811, had already lost four-fifths of their value, and the government was heavily in debt. Austria had fought France more constantly, since 1792, than any other power except Great Britain, and its governmental income had been severely reduced during the war.

Twice, Vienna had been captured and occupied by Napoleon; twice, the aristocracy and the court had been forced to pack up their valuables and flee the capital. From Ulm to Wagram, the sweeping plains of central Europe seemed to be dotted with names of villages commemorating some defeat or another. Vienna wits had adapted the motto emblazoned on Julius Caesar’s chariot to fit Emperor Francis’s army:
Venit, Videt, Perdit
(“he comes, he sees, he loses”).

Each time after a defeat—1797, 1801, 1805, and 1809—Napoleon had inflicted humiliating terms on the Austrians, demanding enormous cash payments and large amounts of territory. Austria had lost Belgium, Lombardy, Tuscany, Venice, Trieste, Tyrol, Vorarlberg, Croatia, Istria, Dalmatia, and Kraków, along with other former Polish lands and many princely dependencies on the left bank of the Rhine. The 1809 treaty alone had removed 3.5 million Habsburg subjects, sliced off forty-two thousand square miles, and imposed a harsh penalty of 85 million francs. The emperor had been forced to melt down much of the court plate and silverware to pay the sums demanded by Napoleon.

Realistically, Austria had little hope of regaining all of this lost territory, and, actually, the Austrians did not want it all back. They were content to abandon Belgium because of its distance and its proximity to France, and they were also resigned to relinquishing the crown of the Holy Roman Empire, deemed too cumbersome with its limitations on the emperor’s power. But Austria did want northern Italy, along with Dalmatia and other territory on the Adriatic coast, which had been completely removed by Napoleon.

So a country whose fortunes had fallen low in the war had been selected to host the peace conference. Despite their country’s much-reduced state, and the fact that it was still dangerously close to bankruptcy, Emperor Francis and Prince Metternich were happy to accept responsibility for the congress. The reasoning was clear. As host, Austria hoped to take advantage of its well-deserved reputation for hospitality, and gain as much as possible from the goodwill of its guests.

S
EVERAL BLOCKS AWAY
from the Hofburg Palace, France’s chief delegate, Prince Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand, had slipped into town around midnight on September 23. After a six-hundred-mile journey from Paris completed in only seven days, the traveling carriage dropped him off at the stately and stylish yellow-gray Kaunitz Palace, centrally placed at 1029 Johannesgasse, right off the busy Kärtnerstrasse and down from St. Stephen’s Cathedral. This was to be the headquarters of the French embassy at the Vienna Congress.

Despite the excellent address, with its spectacular limestone staircase and its stocked wine cellar, the house had needed a thorough whipping into shape. Indeed, the French staff, which arrived one week before, was appalled. White sheets still covered furniture in the drawing rooms, and dark cloth shielded the portraits from the sun. The red damask hangings had long faded from their original splendor. Crystal chandeliers, still encased in their protective dust bags, needed polishing. Every room, it seemed, needed a good cleaning and airing out, right down to removing the moths from the mattresses.

The mansion was named after Prince Kaunitz, the most versatile Austrian diplomat of the eighteenth century, and the man who had played a major role in achieving the “diplomatic revolution” of 1756 that brought the bitter enemies Austria and France together for the first time in centuries. Talleyrand liked the thought of working in the house of a man who had accomplished such a dramatic reconciliation, and he hoped to achieve his own miracles. But, at the same time, he was very much aware of the challenges that his embassy faced.

“I shall probably play a wretched role,” Talleyrand sighed, as he imagined his prospects at the peace conference. He was asked to represent a country that had both launched and lost the war that left Europe in a mess, and many were sure to blame France. Yet despite his concerns for his country’s diplomatic position, which he labeled “singularly difficult,” Talleyrand was well suited for this mission. He had the talent, the connections, the charisma, and the reputation, not to mention the razor-sharp instincts that had been honed working with nearly every leading figure of the Napoleonic age. In diplomacy as well as society, Talleyrand was a living legend.

Approaching his sixty-first birthday, he stood about five feet eight inches and had a mop of wavy light brown hair tucked under his powdered wig. His face was thin, delicate, and unscarred, despite a dangerous bout of smallpox as a child. He had a slight snub nose, a high forehead, thickset eyebrows, and blue eyes that often fell half closed in boredom. His lips seemed locked in a perpetual smirk. His face, otherwise, was almost expressionless. One might kick him twenty times in the backside, it was said, and not a single muscle on his face would flinch.