Vienna, 1814: How the Conquerors of Napoleon Made Love, War, and Peace at the Congress of Vienna (60 page)

Henrich Graf zu Stolberg-Wernigerode’s
Tagebuch über meinen Aufenthalt in Wien zur Zeit des Congresses
(2004) is also essential, as is the diary of a government official, Matthias Franz Perth’s
Wiener Kongresstagebuch, 1814–1815
(1981). Karl August Varnhagen von Ense, who had planned to write a history of the congress, has many valuable comments in his
Denkwürdigkeiten des Eignen Lebens,
II (1987), as well as Rahel Varnhagen’s
Briefwechsel,
Volumes 1–4, ed. Friedhelm Kemp (1979), and most recently in Karl August’s
Varnhagen von Ense und Cotta: Briefwechsel, 1810–1818
, I–II, ed. Konrad Feilchenfeldt, Bernhard Fischer, and Dietmar Pravida (2006). The Swiss banker who represented Geneva, Jean-Gabriel Eynard, wrote a two-volume journal of his stay in Vienna during the congress,
Au Congrès de Vienne: journal de Jean-Gabriel Eynard
I–II (
1914–1924
), and his wife, Anna Eynard-Lullin, a diary, many passages of which can be found in Alville’s
Anna Eynard-Lullin et l’époque des congrès et des révolutions
(1955). Baronne du Montet, a French émigré living in Vienna who attended many of the congress celebrations, which she described in
Souvenirs, 1785–1866
(1904), and Baron Méneval, named secretary to Marie Louise by Napoleon in 1812, was present with the former empress at Schönbrunn, leaving a valuable memoir of the time. Another enjoyable source is from the delegate of Hesse, the philologist Jacob Grimm. As usual, Grimm stayed in close touch with his brother Wilhelm, and their correspondence reveals more than his
Selbstbiographie: Briefwechsel zwischen Jacob und Wilhelm Grimm aus der Jugendzeit
(1963).

The semiofficial court newspaper
Wiener Zeitung
was also valuable for understanding the setting of the Congress of Vienna, as was the rare
Guide des étrangers à Vienne pendant le Congrès contenant les noms des souverains présents dans cette capitale ainsi que ceux des ministres et chargés d’ affaires des differentes cours auprès de celle de Vienne au mois d’ octobre 1814
(1814), and its supplement,
Supplement du Guide des étrangers au quel on a joint La Liste Générale des cavaliers employés par sa Majesté l’Empereur et Roi en qualité du grand maitres, aides de camp generaux, adjudants, chambellans et pages auprès des augustes étrangers a Vienne 1814
(1814).

One of the most pleasant discoveries was the richness of the records of the Vienna police and censorship office, led by Baron Franz von Hager. The existence of this collection is well-known among scholars, but for a variety of reasons, they have been underused as a historical source. All the documents of this police ministry were, of course, destroyed in the early twentieth century, but fortunately, there were two historians, almost one hundred years ago, who combed the archives and managed to publish their research before their destruction: August Fournier, ed.,
Die Geheimpolizei auf dem Wiener Kongress: Eine Auswahl aus ihren Papieren
(1913), and Commandat Maurice Henri Weil, ed.,
Les Dessous du Congrès de Vienne d’après des documents originaux des archives du ministère impérial et royal de l’intérieur à Vienne,
I–II (1917).

Of course much gossip, rumor, innuendo, and sometimes outrageous misinterpretations can be found in these some two thousand pages of police dossiers, but they are a gold mine for understanding the daily life of the Vienna Congress. After all, it is not only confirmed facts that influence the actions of statesmen and decision makers. To overlook the rumors, gossip, and intrigue that circulated because they might clash with what we now know, or think we know, is in many ways to underestimate the uncertainties of the time and risk simplifying the past. Besides that, the police reports are not as bad as often claimed (as an examination of both their reputation and their actual contents in these collections will show, on the whole, how unfairly they have been dismissed). Sure, the quality varies from time to time, and some agents are clearly better than others. But many of the agents were keen observers who immersed themselves in the swirl of the congress, took advantage of an extensive network of social contacts, and often show many insights into the conference. Especially valuable in these dossiers, too, are the hundreds of confidential letters that the police agents intercepted from the British, French, Prussian, Russian, and indeed just about every major delegation in town, and several of the minor ones as well.

It was a pleasure, too, to read the historians and diplomats who have previously studied this peace conference. Enno E. Kraehe’s
Metternich’s German Policy,
I–II (1963–1983), is outstanding, and Charles Webster’s
The Foreign Policy of Castlereagh, 1812–1815: Britain and the Reconstruction of Europe
(1931) is likewise a model of scholarship. Henry Kissinger’s
A World Restored
(1957), deriving from his PhD dissertation, is an insightful analysis that covers the ten-year period with the conference at its middle. Another valuable dissertation is Hannah Alice Straus’s
The Attitude of the Congress of Vienna Toward Nationalism in Germany, Italy and Poland
(1949). The congress has attracted many statesmen to its study, including in France, for example, Gaston Palewski, who edited Talleyrand’s letters to the Duchess of Courland, Dominque de Villepin’s
Les Cent Jours
(2001), and diplomats like Jacques-Alain de Sédouy,
Le Congrès de Vienne: L’Europe contre la France, 1812–1815
(2003).

Karl Griewank’s
Der Wiener Kongress und Die Neuordnung Europas, 1814–15
was long viewed as perhaps the best researched history of the conference itself, particularly the 1954 edition, which was retitled
Der Wiener Kongress und die europäische Restauration,
and happily discards the early 1940s agenda that accompanied the first edition (1942). Gregor Dallas’s
The Final Act: The Roads to Waterloo
(1997) is a well-written scholarly work, with many valuable insights, and contributions to the understanding of the period. Susan Mary Alsop’s
The Congress Dances
(1984) is another good read and one of the best on the social life, though at just over two hundred pages, some one hundred of which are in Vienna, it is brief. Webster’s
The Congress of Vienna 1814–1815
(1919) is likewise helpful, though also short and written with an emphasis on helping guide the British delegation at Versailles.

Adam Zamoyski’s
The Rites of Peace: The Fall of Napoleon and the Congress of Vienna
(2007) is a good, recent study that surveys European diplomacy in the decade between December 1812 and the Congress of Verona in the autumn of 1822. Edward Vose Gulick’s
Europe’s Classical Balance of Power: A Case History of the Theory and Practice of One of the Great Concepts of European Statecraft
(1955) also analyzes coalition diplomacy, arguing that the balance of power served as the most important strategy in guiding the statesmen—a well-researched thesis, though by no means the only way to interpret the proceedings. Freiherr von Bourgoing’s
Vom Wiener Kongress: Zeit-und Sittenbilder
(1943) has more on the social events than most histories, and remains a valuable contribution. The most widely known book on the congress is Harold Nicolson’s
The Congress of Vienna: A Study in Allied Unity, 1812–1822
(1946), commissioned to coincide with the end of World War II. Despite its many factual errors and its reliance on only a fraction of the primary sources, this book has many good insights from an erudite former diplomat.

Vienna, 1814
also draws on the work of many other scholars who have written biographies of the statesmen at this conference, studied its diplomacy, or examined international relations or some aspects of early nineteenth-century Europe, as will be clear from the notes below. Paul Schroeder’s eight-hundred-page study of the eighty-five-year period from 1763 to 1848,
The Transformation of European Politics,
is magisterial. For the lives of some of the women at this conference, too often ignored in accounts of the congress, Dorothy Guis McGuigan has written an excellent study of the Duchess of Sagan, and Philip Zeigler, Françoise de Bernardy, and Micheline Dupuy have written biographies of her younger sister, Dorothée. Rosalynd Pflaum has an account of that remarkable family,
By Influence and Desire: The True Story of Three Extraordinary Women—The Grand Duchess of Courland and Her Daughters
(1984). These have also aided greatly, as have museums all over Vienna that have helped me reimagine the setting for this pageant. Catalogs of previous museum exhibits on the congress have also been valuable in this regard, particularly the spring 2002 exhibit at Christiansborg Palace in Copenhagen, Denmark, edited by Ole Villumsen Krog (cited above) and enriched with many excellent scholarly articles. This is also true of the 150th anniversary exhibit at the Hofburg,
Der Wiener Kongress Ausstellung, 1 Juni bis 15 Oktober 1965
(1966), and the 1896 exhibit at the Hofburg,
Der Wiener Congress: Culturgeschichte die Bildenden Künste und das Kunstgewerbe Theater—Musik in der Zeit von 1800 bis 1825
, ed. Eduard Leisching (1898). The British historian Alan Palmer has the distinction of writing the biographies of Prince Metternich, Tsar Alexander I, Empress Marie Louise, Bernadotte, as well as histories of the Habsburg dynasty and of Russia during the time of the Napoleonic invasion.

Historians sometimes use the term
Congress of Vienna
to refer to a number of negotiations that took place between 1812 and 1822. The Congress of Vienna, however, was much more specific than that. It had no existence before May 30, 1814, when Article XXXII of the Treaty of Paris stipulated that a “general congress” should be held in Vienna. Its opening date was scheduled for July 1814, though this would be postponed again and again—in fact, the congress never really met, at least not in the way most people had expected. On June 9, 1815, the European Treaty, or “Final Act,” was signed, and nine days later Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo. By then, the Congress of Vienna was well on its way to becoming a legend.

Perhaps the most widely recognized feature of the Congress of Vienna is its extravagant social life, and this, ironically, is one of the least understood. This is unfortunate, because it is difficult to understand the peace conference without setting it in the context of the ballrooms, bedrooms, and palaces in which much diplomacy, and many of the intrigues, took place. The Congress of Vienna was a spectacular nine-month drama that unfolded when the world came to town.

P
REFACE

The HMS
Undaunted
making entrance into harbor and the cheering crowds come from the memoir of the ship’s captain, Thomas Ussher, “Napoleon’s Deportation to Elba” published in
Napoleon’s Last Voyages, Being the Diaries of Admiral Sir Thomas Ussher, R.N., K.C.B. (on board the “Undaunted”) and John R. Glover, Secretary to Rear Admiral Kockburn (on board the “Northumberland”),
(1895), 50–51, and Neil Campbell,
Napoleon at Fontainebleau and Elba; Being a Journal of Occurrences in 1814–1815
(1869), 216; the number of rowers are in Gregor Dallas,
The Final Act: The Roads to Waterloo
(1997), 263. The excitement is also in Norman Mackenzie,
The Escape from Elba: The Fall and Flight of Napoleon, 1814–1815
(1982), 74, and Robert Christophe,
Napoleon on Elba,
trans. Len Ortzen (1964), 36. Napoleon on deck and his well-known uniform are from Campbell (1869), 215. The emperor’s rapid pacing and snuff habits were described by Campbell (1869), 157, as well as by three of Napoleon’s secretaries, Bourrienne, Méneval, and Fain. Napoleon’s suicide attempt, once controversial, is now widely accepted by scholars and can be found in many sources, including General Armand Augustin Louis Caulaincourt’s
Mémoires
(1933), III, 357–377; Baron Claude-François de Méneval’s
Memoirs Illustrating the History of Napoleon I from 1802 to 1815
, edited by Baron Napoleon Joseph Méneval (1894), III, 255–257; and Baron Agathon Jean François Fain’s
Souvenirs de la campagne de France (Manuscrit de 1814)
(1914), 240ff.

One list of representatives, though incomplete, can be found in Angeberg,
Le Congrès de Vienne et les traités de 1815
(1864), I, 255–256, and II, 257–264. The sense of a new era with high expectations and hope for avoiding a flawed peace, is in Abbé de Pradt,
Du Congrès de Vienne
(1815) I, iv–vi, 6ff, 11. Metternich’s prediction of the congress lasting three weeks is from his letter to Duchess of Sagan, April 23, 1814,
MSB,
252, and the prediction of six weeks from his letter, September 19, 1814, 264. Castlereagh also thought the congress would be finished by the autumn, with the embassy home for Christmas, Castlereagh to Liverpool, September 3, 1814,
BD
191, and the tsar thought six weeks at most, Report to Hager, September 18, 1814, no. 106, and Agent Schmidt, October 1, 1814,
DCV,
I, No. 222. Many others shared these assumptions; for example, Steinlein to King of Bavaria, August 6, 1814,
DCV,
I, no. 58, and Baron Braun, September 14, 1814,
DCV,
I, no. 98. The phrase “sparkling chaos” comes from Henri Troyat’s
Alexander of Russia: Napoleon’s Conqueror,
trans. Joan Pinkham (1982), 215. That making peace was proving more difficult than defeating Napoleon, Princess Bagration had told Metternich himself, Agent Nota [Carpani] to Hager, February 5, 1815,
DCV,
II, no. 1513.

Metternich’s account of how the news of Napoleon’s flight reached Vienna and his actions immediately afterward come from his
NP
I, 209–210 and 328. Writing many years after the event, Metternich mistakenly traced the dispatch back to Genoa, and this has long been repeated in Metternich biographies as well as histories of the congress. The correct sender was Livorno, as reported at the time in several sources, from the semiofficial
Wiener Zeitung
to the correspondence of the secretary of the Vienna Congress, Friedrich von Gentz, in a dispatch written that day to Karadja, March 7, 1815, in the first volume of
Dépêches inédites du chevalier de Gentz aux hospodars de Valachie pour servir a l’histoire la politique européene (1813–1828
), ed. Le Comte Prokesch-Osten fils (1876), 144. This is also confirmed by the officer named in the dispatch, Sir Neil Campbell, whose journal records that he first landed at Tuscany, as he believed that Napoleon was on the way to Naples.