Vienna, 1814: How the Conquerors of Napoleon Made Love, War, and Peace at the Congress of Vienna (9 page)

Already that autumn, as Metternich pranced, the tsar strutted, and Talleyrand limped, the crowds came to gawk. Notice was taken of the smallest detail—who went to which café, inn, or tavern, and who left the “monstrous tip.” Even the most insignificant gesture could attract the curious onlooker. As one observer, Friedrich Anton von Schönholz put it, “Wherever a scaffold went up, equipment was carried in and out, a glass carriage washed, a rug beaten, the pushing crowd was sure to gather.”

Indeed, the advertisement about the holding of a congress to decide the future of Europe had stimulated imaginations and brought a whole stream of delegates into town, even from the tiniest principality and the smallest Swiss canton. The pope was sending his secretary of state, Cardinal Consalvi, and the sultan of the Ottoman Empire his adviser, Mavrojény. Even Napoleon’s marshals sent an agent to bargain on their behalf for their right to maintain the generous property endowments that the former French emperor had given them, before almost all of them had betrayed him.

Napoleon’s stepson, Prince Eugène de Beauharnais, the former viceroy of Italy still in his Napoleonic uniform, had come to safeguard his interests—he had been promised a state by the Treaty of Paris, though it had not yet been specified where it would be. Among the countless German princes, there was Karl August, the Duke of Weimar, the generous patron of Goethe, Schiller, Herder, Wieland, and many other poets and writers who made his small duchy a literary Arcadia.

There were also several members of the Reuss family, whose ancestors had ruled the tiny principality of Reuss since the eleventh century. Every male had been named Henry (at first Henry the Tall, Henry the Short, Henry the Brave, and so on, though by the seventeenth century they had started using numerals, planning to continue until one hundred and then start over again). The family had also split into an elder branch, represented at the congress by Prince Henry Reuss XIX, and a younger branch, by Prince Henry Reuss XXII. Other members of the family who came to Vienna for the congress included Henry LII and Henry LXIV.

Far less conspicuous, of course, was a young erudite twenty-nine-year-old representing the small delegation of Hesse-Cassel named Jacob Grimm. He and his brother Wilhelm had just published, two years before, the
Kinder-und Hausmärchen,
better known as
Grimm’s Fairy Tales,
and Jacob Grimm would use his free time in Vienna to work on another collection of folktales that would be published after the congress.

Excitement was indeed in the air, and there was a scramble to participate in the lavish peace conference in any way possible. Vienna’s most distinguished families angled to secure a place, as Schönholz noted with surprise, even offering “to don servants’ garb only to be close to the wondrous events to come.” Prince de Ligne had said that he would not have missed the Vienna Congress for 100,000 florins.

M
INGLING, TOO, AMONG
these throngs were some spectators with a special mission. Vienna’s chief of police, the fifty-four-year-old Baron Franz von Hager, was running an extensive, intrusive, if sometimes highly inept espionage service. He had many agents already watching, following, and befriending the visitors streaming into Vienna. Hager answered directly to the Austrian emperor, Francis, who, like many enlightened despots before him, was particularly keen to stay enlightened about what his people were doing, saying, and thinking.

Austria had considerable experience in the art of surveillance, letter snatching, cipher breaking, and snooping in general. Habsburg agents had honed their skills under the watchful eyes of Joseph II. Emperor Francis would take up where his uncle had left off, increasing the cloak-and-dagger budget by a staggering 500 percent and vastly expanding its activities. An energetic class of agents was recruited, showing the emperor’s talent for selecting officers who were, in the words of one well-placed archduke, “repulsive to all decent-minded people.”

Stationed in the Hofburg Palace, in a suite of offices in the Imperial Court Chancellery wing of the palace, placed, conveniently, next to the emperor, the Vienna spies would need much more than repulsive qualities to meet the expectations placed upon them. There was indeed a great sense of urgency as the police system finalized its preparations for a large peace conference.

Spies had in fact just uncovered a ring of disaffected Italian patriots who had plotted to open the Vienna Congress by assassinating the Austrian emperor. The suspects were not happy that their homeland would once again fall under foreign rule—passing, as one put it, from the purgatory of Napoleon to the hell of Austria. By the middle of August, however, the police had quietly foiled this conspiracy and expelled the suspects.

Regardless of how dangerous the threat of an assassination actually was, the police acted with quick diligence, and seized upon this occasion to bargain for additional resources to prevent tragedy at the peace conference. It was imperative, they argued, to keep a close eye on the activities of everyone and provide real security for their many royal guests. The emperor agreed.

The official instructions, promulgated at the end of August 1814, suggest the growing ambitions of this revamped espionage network:

Since a certain number of representatives of the different powers attending the Congress have already arrived in Vienna and the rest will be following them in a steady stream, you should not only keep me informed of the arrival and address of each one, but by virtue of a secret watch intelligently maintained you should also make it your business neither to lose track of their whereabouts nor of the company they keep.

Daily reports, it was added, were to be written and delivered to the emperor’s office. Francis would read them closely every morning.

Baron Franz von Hager had entered police administration after his promising career as a cavalry officer, leading a regiment of dragoons, had been cut short by a riding injury. He had been president of the Ministry of Police and Censorship since 1812, and he had hounded rebels, radicals, secret societies, and many other threats to the government, real or suspected. But he would now face a series of challenges in providing security and intelligence that would enervate the most intrepid and dedicated spymaster.

How was he, for instance, to infiltrate the many foreign delegations—French, British, Russian, Prussian, and probably about two hundred sizable others—with all their exotic languages and customs? Even before he could deal with this issue, which he would soon do with zeal, there was another concern. All of Baron Hager’s tireless efforts would further be complicated by the fact that the emperor sometimes issued orders and made decisions that quite frankly obstructed the tasks already assigned.

The Austrian emperor had opened up his palace to many sovereigns, a hospitable gesture that brought many guests into close proximity, but it also created a number of problems for the spy baron. For one thing, the royal palaces were technically off limits to his team’s prying activities. For another, even assuming that they could overcome this situation with some creative infiltration, there were still serious problems posed by the palace itself.

The Hofburg was a meandering, labyrinthine structure with many back doors, side entrances, and secret passageways—a nightmare situation for even the most skilled surveillance team. Worse still for the information-hungry agents, much of the action at the Congress of Vienna would take place in just these locations—that is, sealed off in the bedrooms where the young delegates would soon, as some grumbled, turn Emperor Venus’s palace into a gilded brothel.

A
S
V
IENNA PREPARED
to stage an unprecedented house party for the royal mob, Talleyrand found the lack of discussion frustrating and disturbing. He had good reason to worry.

Talleyrand had arrived a week before the congress was scheduled to open, but he discovered, just as he had feared, that Prince Metternich had already been busy arranging secret meetings around the green-baize-covered table in his office at the Chancellery. Only a few countries had been invited. “The Big Four,” as they were called, were Austria and its major allies at the end of the war: Great Britain, Prussia, and Russia.

In these meetings, Metternich represented Austria and Castlereagh Great Britain. Russia sent Count Karl Nesselrode, a German by birth who had risen spectacularly from a sailor in the Russian navy to the tsar’s trusted adviser. Representing Prussia was the state chancellor, Prince Karl von Hardenberg, a sixty-four-year-old who had a head of white hair and was nearly completely deaf. He was joined by the Prussian ambassador to Vienna, Wilhelm von Humboldt, an exemplary classical scholar and linguist who had previously redesigned the Prussian educational system and founded Berlin University. His brother Alexander was a famous explorer and naturalist.

Article XXXII of the Treaty of Paris had called for a “general congress” consisting of representatives from “all the powers that have been engaged on either side in the present war.” But in a secret article attached to this treaty, the Big Four had given themselves the authority to organize the peace conference and establish the rules for the deliberations. This had proved more difficult than expected, and the group struggled to agree.

Ever since their first secret meeting, a five-hour affair on September 15, Metternich had emphasized the problems of a congress in the usual sense of a parliament-style assembly. First of all, it would be too large and unwieldy. Too many states with too many demands would hopelessly complicate the negotiations and cause the whole affair to degenerate into a sorry spectacle of disorder. They could, as Metternich put it, poison diplomacy by rekindling “all the maneuvers, intrigues, and plots, which had so great a share in causing the misfortunes of late years.”

It was much better, Metternich argued, to adopt a more confidential style of diplomacy, with the four powers making all the decisions themselves, as a cabinet meeting behind closed doors. Compromise-friendly exchange would be much better than a wild free-for-all diplomatic bazaar. The Prussians and the Russians agreed completely. Castlereagh, on the other hand, was skeptical.

While the British foreign secretary also wanted to maintain control over the actual decision making, he advocated establishing a congress of states that would ratify or sanction their decisions. This was more in line with the public articles of the Treaty of Paris, and besides, was not all of Vienna being filled with delegates, who had come on this pretense, and expected to see the congress open soon, presumably in one of the large ballrooms of the imperial palace?

Yes, Metternich conceded, but there were messy problems. Who exactly would be allowed to participate in such an assembly? Take Naples, for example. Would the representative of the current king, Joachim Murat, a former Bonaparte marshal who received his crown from Napoleon, be recognized as the official delegate, or would it be the representative of the exiled King Ferdinand IV, who claimed his throne on the grounds of legitimacy? What about all the princes and knights of the former Holy Roman Empire? There were hundreds of them—or “millions of them,” as someone scoffed—and each had a representative. Would every self-proclaimed delegate in Vienna be permitted in the congress?

On September 22, the day before Talleyrand’s arrival in Vienna, the four powers had finally agreed on the organization of the conference. Castlereagh had been outvoted. The Vienna Congress was not in fact going to be a congress. It was no parliament of equal sovereign states, and certainly not any kind of a “deliberate assembly of Europe.” Rather, the congress was simply the “site of many individual negotiations.” It was only a “Europe without distances.”

As for the management of the diplomacy, the Great Powers had agreed simply to take it upon themselves to appoint the Central Committee, or Directing Committee, that would facilitate all the negotiations. More exactly, this committee would control everything from selecting the agendas to making the final decisions:

This committee is the core of the congress; the congress exists only when the committee is in being, and it is terminated when the committee dissolves itself.

This central committee, further, would be staffed only with members of the four Great Powers—the idea of a “Great Power” enjoying its own special privileges was about to be born in this secret protocol.

This arrangement was only fair, they reasoned. The Big Four were the ones who had carried the brunt of the fight against Napoleon, and, as a result, earned the right to decide Europe’s future. All the other states could, of course, voice their opinion, but this would only take place
after
a “final decision” had been reached and the Allied powers had arrived at “a perfect agreement among themselves.” The consulting powers could only give “comment and approval.” They would have no power to initiate or change anything. Decision making was about to be sealed up in the hands of the Big Four alone.

But there was one glaring obstacle to this plan: How would they inform all the people who had arrived to deliberate in the assembly, or watch its proceedings from the gallery? The French minister, for one, was not likely to respond favorably to this idea of “a congress that was not a congress.”

Castlereagh had been pressing his colleagues to include France in their discussions, or at least inform the embassy of their plans. It was not long before Metternich realized that Castlereagh had a point. According to gossip, both in salons and in the spy dossiers, Talleyrand had spent his first week in town whipping up discontent and alarm among the many states about to be shut out of this scheme. Reports also suggested that many were listening.