Vienna, 1814: How the Conquerors of Napoleon Made Love, War, and Peace at the Congress of Vienna (56 page)

Parisians were furious at this sacking of the Louvre by modern vandals. The museum director, Baron Dominique-Vivant Denon, tried to resist, and cited the exact terms of the capitulation of Paris that guaranteed French property (Article XI), but the Prussian officer in charge, von Ribbentrop (an ancestor of the Nazi ambassador and foreign minister), threatened to have him arrested and sent to a prison in Berlin. One British officer defended the Prussian action as just “plundering the plunderer.” Allied soldiers, meanwhile, had to hold back angry mobs who threatened violence over the desecration of their museum.

Pope Pius VII worked more legally to regain his lost treasures. On Cardinal Consalvi’s advice, the pope sent the renowned sculptor Antonio Canova to examine the Louvre carefully for the paintings, sculptures, and gems that belonged to the Vatican. The pope had arguments of legitimacy on his side. His treasures had been stolen, and the treaty that sanctioned that theft was invalidated, as it had been made under duress. The French countered that this treaty was a legal contract, and, moreover, the art better served scholars and students in the Louvre, where the museum was better lit, and the works categorized into galleries according to their style and carefully preserved in one place.

On September 20, the Allies decided that the art should be returned to its earlier and proper owners. The restoration began immediately. Soldiers carried the Venus de Medici, armless and feet first, out of the Louvre, to protests and cries of “Shame!” The four bronze horses that had been on the Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel for the last seventeen years were now taken down and returned to St. Mark’s Basilica in Venice, where they remain today. Metternich wanted the four bronze horses as a goodwill gesture to celebrate the return of Venice to Austrian rule.

The Vatican received the vast majority of its treasures, including the Apollo Belvedere and
Laocoön and His Sons.
Documents, too, were returned to other collections. Leonardo da Vinci’s secret notebooks, the Codex Atlanticus, and the manuscripts in the Ambrosiana Library, which Napoleon had stolen in 1796 and donated to the Institut de France, were now returned to Milan. For many of the transfers, such as the large statues and paintings going back to the Vatican, Britain magnanimously paid the expenses.

But Britain would gain a great deal of unpopularity in the process. Many Englishmen were booed in the streets or challenged to duels. Even the Duke of Wellington had to leave the theater one night because of the zeal of his hecklers. The official chosen to oversee the art restoration hardly helped matters. He was William Richard Hamilton, the career diplomat who had previously played a role in bringing several treasures to the British Museum, including no less than the Elgin Marbles and the Rosetta Stone. What was he going to seize now? Nothing, actually, but many officials at the Louvre feared the worst.

The French protested to the end. “All the best statues are gone,” one observer complained, “and half the rest” were as well. Officially, some 2,065 paintings, 289 bronzes, and 317 statues, busts, and wooden sculptures had been removed, along with another 2,432 miscellaneous works of art, as one of the Louvre’s founders tallied. The great museum now seemed only “full of dust, ropes, triangles, and pulleys.” It might as well close, another said. The museum curator, and chief looter during the wars, Baron Dominique-Vivant Denon, resigned in anger, having seen his beloved museum emptied of numerous treasures in a matter of weeks.

It was, at that time, history’s most comprehensive restoration of art. This was not, however, without some accidents and mishaps. Some of the works looted in the war, like Paul Veronese’s
Marriage at Cana,
were too big to transport safely and remained in the Louvre. (It had been ripped in two when the French removed it from Venice). Other paintings disappeared in transit, including Rubens’
Diogenes.
Rumors that the original masterpieces had been replaced with imitations would proliferate for years. One painting, Raphael’s
Virgin of Loreto,
was an obvious copy. Another one, Correggio’s
Leda with the Swan,
came back to its owners with the figure of Leda having a different head.

Several art collections already dispersed from the capital were overlooked in the sweeping restoration. There were also difficulties with the archives, and one of the many people looking for treasures stolen by the French was Jacob Grimm. Vatican files before AD 900, which Napoleon had stolen in 1810, were particularly difficult to retrieve. Many had been destroyed or sold to cardboard manufacturers, and authorities tried everything to resist. The documents surrounding Galileo’s trial in 1633 were also a problem. None of these were returned by the time the Allies left Paris; heated disputes continued for years. By 1817, the Vatican had recovered many files, though some estimate as much as two-thirds had been destroyed in the ordeal. Records continued to trickle in for years, including one Galileo Codex kept by the Duke of Blacas and returned after his death in 1843.

M
EANWHILE, IN A
dark salon near the Élysée Palace, Tsar Alexander was enjoying nightly discussions with Baroness Krüdener, the mystic adviser whom someone dubbed the “Ambassadress of Heaven.” They were working on one of the tsar’s cherished projects, which he had apparently begun back in Vienna during December 1814 and would now officially propose. It was to be “a pact of love,” as he put it. Historians call it the Holy Alliance.

This was an attempt to create a new style of diplomacy that would end war, revolution, and the old diplomatic practices, such as secret treaties and balance-of-power politics, that strained relations between states. The tsar now called on the leaders of the world to commit themselves to guiding their actions by “the precepts of that Holy Religion; namely, the precepts of Justice, Christian Charity, and Peace.” The Russian tsar, the Austrian emperor, and the king of Prussia all signed on September 26, 1815.

The three monarchs—Roman Catholic, Protestant, and Russian Orthodox—would cooperate as “three branches of the One family” under the Sovereign of Heaven, the source of all “love, science and infinite wisdom,” and they would view all the peoples of their kingdoms as citizens of this international brotherhood. The leaders would protect “Religion, Peace, and Justice” and other powers would be welcome to join this league if they accepted these “sacred principles.” As Henry Kissinger noted, the occasion of the Holy Alliance was, in fact, the first time that Europe’s leaders had signed an international treaty binding themselves to “a common mission.”

In 1919, some historians already saw hints of Woodrow Wilson’s Covenant in this condemnation of old diplomacy, in the emphasis on the family of states, and in the attempt to end war and replace it with a permanent system of international cooperation. There were many hints, but the Holy Alliance was very much in the spirit of the early nineteenth-century Romantic revival, that is, as interpreted by the tsar and his prophetess, who was undoubtedly influencing him heavily at this time.

Winning over the king of Prussia was not difficult, but Emperor Francis had been skeptical, and consulted Metternich, who called the tsar “a madman to be humored” and advised that they accept. Britain, however, refused to sign the treaty. The government did not trust Russia or its tsar. Castlereagh dismissed the document as “a piece of sublime mysticism and nonsense.” The pope, Pius VII, was also skeptical of the activities, and the sultan of Turkey, of course, was not invited.

The tsar had hoped that the Holy Alliance would be his crowning achievement of peacemaking that year, but it was to be overshadowed by a second treaty, completed in Paris in November 1815, that included the same three eastern powers, in addition to Great Britain. This was the Quadruple Alliance—consisting of the Big Four who signed the military pact at the end of the Napoleonic Wars and organized the committees at the Vienna Congress. The hope was to maintain the vigilance, cohesion, and strength of the wartime alliance that defeated Napoleon as a way to guard the peace in the postwar world.

Most significantly, Article VI of the Quadruple Alliance treaty specifically called for periodic meetings of the great powers to manage international relations. This “diplomacy by conference” would examine policies “most salutary for the repose and prosperity of the peoples and for the peace of Europe.” The goal was to prevent any potential threat from erupting into a full-scale crisis, and then respond by consensus, using force only when necessary. This “great experiment” was attempting to establish an institutional framework for managing international anarchy. There was even talk of creating an “office of Europe” and appointing Friedrich von Gentz the first “Secretary-General of Europe,” though this idea was soon abandoned.

But with the Quadruple Alliance, the powers had guaranteed the peace settlement. No act of aggression was to be tolerated, unless the Great Powers collectively gave their assent. This was one of the most significant achievements. By this treaty, the veterans of the Vienna Congress had launched what diplomatic historian Sir Charles Webster rightly called the first ever attempt “to regulate international affairs during a time of peace.”

A
FTER HER EXPERIENCES
at the Vienna Congress, Dorothée returned to Paris in early July as a new woman, “a sort of queen of the diplomatic world.” She was determined, more than ever, to take a new direction in her life. For one thing, this meant the end of her marriage. Although she could not divorce, as a Catholic, she managed to obtain a legal separation from Edmond and continued her love affair with Count Clam-Martinitz.

Despite the cool reserve that he presented to the world, Talleyrand also seemed in love—deeply in love—and the object of his affections, many of his friends agreed, was Dorothée. Indeed, few had seen Talleyrand act this way in years. “It was a frantic passion,” his young friend Charles de Rémusat wrote. Another friend, the minister of justice, Pasquier, agreed that this “all-devouring ardor” had “entirely deprived him of all presence of mind.”

But Talleyrand was now experiencing the unusual sensation of not having his affections returned. Dorothée clearly preferred Count Clam-Martinitz. At the end of the autumn, when the count joined the Austrian army in Italy, Dorothée followed him, leaving a despondent Talleyrand back in Paris. The French foreign minister began to resemble Metternich the previous autumn, when he had been shattered by the rejection of Dorothée’s older sister. Now Talleyrand lost his famous composure, “devoured by a slow fever caused by the absence of his mistress, and began to die, quite literally, of disappointed love.”

As if that were not difficult enough, Talleyrand was also concerned about the future of France. The Prussians and many others were demanding many changes to the map, and many leading diplomats were listening. Even the Allied declaration, back in March, that specifically named Napoleon as the enemy, not France, was being ignored. The Prussian delegation now shrugged it aside, arguing that the French had rallied to Napoleon’s side, thus proving that they were his collaborators, not his victims. It was time for punishment, many argued, and for making demands also in the interests of security, so France would not disturb the peace again. The terms for France, in other words, would be much harsher this time.

As the treaty was hammered out, France would lose territory that had been awarded in the spring of 1814 (its borders would no longer be what they had been in 1792, but rather what they were in 1790). Alsace and Lorraine remained French, but not the Saar valley, and much of the Rhine was sliced off and given to its neighbors. France was effectively ringed by the enlarged states of the Kingdom of Netherlands, Prussia, Piedmont-Sardinia, Bavaria, and the neutral Switzerland. France was also forced to surrender key fortresses guarding the entrances to its kingdom, and pay 700 million francs’ indemnity, along with the expenses of a large occupation army for five years. According to the treaty, 150,000 Allied soldiers were garrisoned in fortresses around the country, at an expense already estimated at some 1.75 million francs a day. This was to last until 1820, though it ended in 1818.

Napoleon’s flight from Elba and the Hundred Days had cost France dearly, and many were upset at how harsh the terms had become. Gentz looked on with disillusionment, blaming the Prussians first, and then the English for not standing up to the Prussians more effectively. The peace treaty was, as Russia’s Pozzo di Borgo summed it up, “a masterpiece of destruction.”

The terms made no sense, Talleyrand also protested. “To demand concessions,” he said, “there has to be a conquest. To have a conquest there has to be a state of war,” and the Great Powers were
not
in a state of war with France. As the Vienna Congress had declared, the war was only against Napoleon, and he was gone. The king had been an ally. Why now were they treating France this way? The Allies were only making matters more difficult for the king.

“I refuse to sign,” Talleyrand said of the document. Such an unjust treaty, he added, “would leave us neither France nor a king!” Talleyrand was so appalled with the way events were developing that on September 24 he offered his resignation. He had hoped that this gesture would alarm everyone to the folly of this treaty. But instead, much to his surprise, the king accepted his resignation.

Talleyrand had played a crucial role in returning Louis XVIII to his throne in 1814, advancing the king’s interests at the Congress of Vienna and then helping restore him a second time that summer. Now his dismissal was painfully abrupt. There was no formal ceremony, not even a few words of thanks. The king’s ingratitude, Talleyrand said, was “not disguised enough.”