My life has fallen at a hateful time. I have come into the world either too early or too late. Now, I do not feel comfortable; earlier, I should have enjoyed the time; later, I should have helped to build it up again; today I have to give my life to prop up this mouldering edifice. I should have been born in 1900, and I should have had the twentieth century before me.
That, famously, was Clemens von Metternich in 1820, conscious as he always was of the times he lived in and of his own place in them. And how intensely he lived through them. At the age of seven, in 1780, he accompanied his father Franz Georg on a diplomatic mission to Cologne. Pushing eighty, he returned from exile to Vienna to give advice to the impulsive young Emperor Franz Joseph. In between, he had been foreign minister to Francis I for twelve years and Austrian Chancellor for another twenty-seven. For his skill in driving through the Congress of Vienna, the French foreign minister Montmorency dubbed him “the coachman of Europe”. Castlereagh went a step further. After the crucial peacemaking session at Châtillon, he told him, “you are the prime minister of the world”. At least that’s what Metternich said Castlereagh had said. Like most great men, he was no stranger to self-promotion.
Yet precisely because he was so identified with the high politics of his age, he has attracted bucketfuls of venom from historians and biographers, reflecting both their own prejudices and the resentments of their epochs. Metternich is King Rat in the influential History of Germany in the Nineteenth Century (1879–94) by Heinrich von Treitschke, the father of German hypernationalism and antisemitism (“Die Juden sind unser Unglück” – the Jews are our misfortune). Treitschke denounced Metternich as “a man of calculating cunning”, “good-natured and smiling mendacity”, and totally lacking in German spirit. Treitschke’s follower, Viktor Bibl, an early convert to National Socialism, called him “the demon of Austria”. Of the thirty biographies, by authors ranging from Treitschke to Barbara Cartland, the most archivally rich and authoritative so far have been the two volumes by Heinrich von Srbik (1925, with a third volume of source material published in 1954 after his death).
Which is a pity. Because Srbik, too, became a fellow traveller of the Nazis. Originally from Vienna, he welcomed the Anschluss, took a seat in Hitler’s Reichstag, and reigned over Vienna’s Academy of Science until 1945. As late as 1951, he was still pleading for “a properly understood German racial theory”. For Srbik, Metternich was a softie, who lacked the Herrennatur, the iron and ruthless will to impress himself upon the age. He should have pushed to the East, “permeating a natural space with predominantly German culture”. As with Treitschke, Srbik’s ultimate indictment of Metternich is that he was “un-German”; “there was no place in his mind or heart open to the high values of a national German Reich”; he just didn’t get the idea of “a community of blood”, ie he wasn’t Hitler.
Postwar studies, especially in English – notably by Henry Kissinger, Paul W. Schroeder and Alan Sked – have done much to retrieve Metternich’s reputation as a master diplomat who tirelessly crisscrossed Europe to cement and re-cement the fragile alliances against Napoleon, who with Castlereagh insisted on a peace after Waterloo which was so generous to France that it baffled Napoleon on St Helena, and who kept the Concert of Europe playing from more or less the same hymn sheet for three decades after the war. But there hasn’t really been a prejudice-free biography based on the voluminous archives in Prague and Vienna which sets out to give us Metternich at full length, to explain, if not necessarily to explain away, who he was and what he was trying to do, a Metternich per se.
This is the achievement of Wolfram Siemann, emeritus professor of history at Munich and already author of monographs on several crucial episodes in Metternich’s long life: the Congress of Vienna, the beginnings of the German secret police, the 1848 revolution and Metternich’s Britain. Metternich: Strategist and visionary is thus the culmination and encapsulation of a life’s work, and despite its length, twice as long as anybody else’s except Srbik, it is a running joy, full of winking sidelights and delightful detours, many of which are not really detours at all – for example, Metternich’s endless struggles to recover or replace the princely estates which had been torn away by the war and then to restore the family finances which had been frittered away by Franz Georg.
Metternich’s father is only one of the lesser characters who is recast or partly rehabilitated by Siemann’s patient researches. Dismissed by Algernon Cecil in his skittish, pro-Metternich 1933 biography as “a prosy babbler, a habitual liar and a glittering spendthrift”, Franz Georg reappears here as a resourceful diplomatist who laboured long and hard for his Emperor, and whom Francis recalled in 1810 to stand in as foreign minister while his son was away in Paris negotiating with Napoleon. Again, Francis’s successor as Emperor, Ferdinand, has often been dismissed by earlier historians as “an imbecile” or “mentally retarded”. Siemann points out that though he suffered from epilepsy and hydrocephalus, Ferdinand spoke five languages and played the piano.
The translation by Daniel Steuer is fluent and vivacious, though marred by several awkward choices of words in contexts where German has one word and English has several: “Herrschaft” is more naturally “domain” rather than “dominion” when describing Metternich’s estates; the revolutionary call to “a holy and healthy Empörung” is surely to “rebellion” rather than merely “indignation”; “Recht” is several times correctly Englished as “Law”, but elsewhere wrongly I think in the context as “Right”. Steuer is also inclined to translate “bürgerlich” as “bourgeois” in places where, ever since Rousseau and Marx roughed up the bourgeoisie, we would usually say “civic”.
Siemann points out how modern-minded Metternich could be. As a reward for his success at the Congress of Vienna, the Emperor had bestowed on him the glorious domain of Johannisberg, a former monastery overlooking the Rhine with a legendary vineyard. Instead of selling the wine by the barrel in the usual way and drinking the profits, he bottled it and sold it to selected grand clients, mostly monarchs. He also devised fancy armorial labels – Original Abfüllung der Fürstlich von Metternichschen Domäne – personally signed by the cellar-master. He was a pioneer high-end marchand de vins.
Similarly, when he got hold of another former abbey, at Plass on the edge of the Sudetenland, he lost no time in exploiting the estate’s extensive iron and coal deposits, using the latest cupola furnaces from England and patenting a machine for clearing tree trunks from the hillside. Soon the Plass works had more than 300 employees and were netting 280,000 guilders a year, enough to pay off most of Franz Georg’s debts all at once. To celebrate the arrival of a steamroller in 1854, the workforce choir sang an ode in Czech in Metternich’s honour, for he was a model employer, besides being a vigorous supporter of freeing up the land market from feudal restrictions. It is a piquant thought that Metternich’s efforts to industrialize Northern Bohemia (and indeed the rest of the empire) helped to make the Sudetenland so irresistible to Hitler.
Why then did this up-to-the-minute technocrat remain so stubbornly stick-in-the-mud in domestic politics? It is not as if he was unacquainted with democratic theory and practice. As a young man, he had fallen in love with England. “If I were not what I am, I would like to be an Englishman. If I could be neither the one nor the other, I would rather be nothing at all.” In London, he had made friends with Edmund Burke and Charles Grey. In his late seventies when Metternich was in exile in Brighton, Disraeli came and sat at his feet. Srbik claimed that it was not possible to say anything beyond “the level of the probable” about Metternich’s view of Burke. Cecil, too, says simply that “we cannot tell” whether Metternich inhaled Burke’s “matchless rhetoric”. But actually we can. Siemann finds in the library of Königswart, another of Metternich’s castles in Bohemia, a copy of Burke’s Reflections. Metternich has underlined several key passages, one about the nature of constitutional liberty, and also the celebrated riff about the maltreatment of Marie Antoinette, whose later execution we know from Metternich’s outburst at the time horrified him as much as it was to horrify Burke. And there is no doubt that he loved the English system of government. Coming back to England in 1848 after an absence of thirty-four years, he feels as if he had never been away: “This great country is the way it was, strong because of its unshakeable belief in the value of the law, of order, and the kind of freedom which, if it truly wants to exist, must be based on these foundations”.
On his first visit, his knowledge of England had been sketchy. He refers to Europe’s largest coachworks as “Hatched” (in fact John Hatchett of Long Acre), to “the Flemish artist John Bacon” who sculpted Chatham’s tomb in Westminster Abbey (Bacon was born in Southwark). The author of The School for Scandal would be surprised to hear himself described as “the Whig politician and poet”, as would Burke to hear himself called an “aristocratic Whig politician”, when he was a decidedly middle-class Irish lawyer who depended on aristocratic patronage for much of his political life. But there could be no doubt about Metternich’s enthusiasm for the hubbub of commercial London and the heated debates in Parliament, not least the trial of Warren Hastings, which he watched avidly.
Yet he remained obdurate against any suggestion that any Continental nation should take even a tiny step on the road to popular participation. The much- admired and imitated Spanish Cortes Constitution of 1812 he denounced as “the work of caprice or of a wild delusion”. In 1819, he offered to help King Friedrich Wilhelm III of Prussia to deal with dissenters but only on condition that he promised “not to introduce a representation of the people in your state, which is less suited to it than any other”. Siemann makes much of the elaborate plan for reorganizing the imperial Apparat, which Metternich presented to the Emperor on October 27, 1817 – and which the Emperor left lying on his desk for years, only toying with it again on his deathbed. Metternich himself in old age told his protégé Alexander von Hübner that “if the Emperor had adopted my ideas on the reorganization of the Diets, we would perhaps be in a better position to face the tempest”. True, Francis was ineradicably hostile to change, and Metternich was ultimately only his servant. But we cannot ignore the fact that Metternich never attempted to nudge him in the direction of popular representation. For all Siemann’s pleas that we should see Metternich as a reformer by stealth, the 1817 plan looks like a mega reshuffle of the bureaucracy across the constituent parts of the Empire, with no hint of democracy about it. In fact, Metternich told Hübner explicitly that the heart of his scheme, the new council sitting in Vienna, would be a council of the provincial estates, “and not a chamber of deputies, a Volkshaus, whose members would be elected”.
In Metternich’s view, the Germans couldn’t handle political parties or deal with a free press, although when in England he himself lapped up the newspapers and even founded one himself, the Spectateur de Londres, which flopped. There’s a weird kinship here between Metternich and the later Marx, who, after his years in London, reluctantly came to the conclusion that Britain, the United States and perhaps Holland might well evolve peacefully towards socialism, but that elsewhere on the Continent violent revolution was inevitable.
Hence the succession of repressive measures over thirty years – the “Metternich system” – most notably the Carlsbad Decrees of 1819 – of which he was rather proud: “a great act, the most important act of my life”. Here Siemann is indulgent to his subject, pointing out that Metternich was responding to vociferous public outcry after the murder of the pro-government poet August von Kotzebue by the firebrand Karl Ludwig Sand. All over Europe, the respectable classes were in a state of high panic that another great revolution was looming. In England at the same time, the government of Lord Liverpool was passing the no less repressive Six Acts. Both sets of laws were time-limited, but the Six Acts expired quicker and anyway they had been watered down by the Whigs.
By contrast, the Carlsbad Decrees seemed to become more stifling with time, and Metternich’s opposition to any form of democratic representation more entrenched. While Charles Grey, the friend of Metternich’s youth, was finally shoving the Great Reform Bill through Parliament – to Metternich’s dismay – the Austrian Chancellor was setting up his own secret police, the Mainzer Zentralpolizei. The family had form in this department. In 1810, Franz Georg had set up the empire’s first formal censorship bureau to cope with the secret agents that Napoleon left behind in all the larger cities he occupied. This new “political police” defined itself as “a counter-police which moved in step with the other police” – thus a forerunner of all modern counter-terrorism departments.
But Clemens’s objection to democracy went deeper than his agonized concern for Ruhe – the word always on his lips – calm/rest/peace. An elected central parliament could only be “a composition of individual, mutually alien and hostile deputies who are far from being united for the One purpose of being a state”. Democracy was “always a dissolving, decomposing, principle; it tends to separate men, it loosens society”. Echoes here of Rousseau and the ideal of organic unity within a state: for Rousseau, to be found in the Calvinist semi- theocracy of Geneva; for Metternich, only in the non-racial, multinational kaiserlich und königlich monarchy he served.
His obsession with Ruhe is not hard to understand. He had known little of it in his early life, starting with his education. Franz Georg was not such a stuffy character as you might think. He was a Freemason and a member of the Illuminati, and he chose as his son’s first tutor a fellow Illuminatus, Johann Friedrich Simon, a young Protestant pastor with advanced ideas, so advanced in fact that as soon as the French Revolution broke out, he shot off to join it, leading the storming on the city hall in Strasbourg, going on to style himself “the Grand Inquisitor of France at Mainz”, joining forces with Saint-Just in Paris and as a member of a revolutionary tribunal passing sixty-two death sentences. The next year, 1794, Franz Georg, the Emperor’s governor-general in the Austrian Netherlands, was forced to flee from Brussels for the second time when Austrian rule collapsed there. Soon Napoleon was chasing princes out of their palaces and estates all over Europe – the Metternichs included. New statelets were formed with idealistic republican constitutions only to have Napoleon’s siblings dumped on them as pop-up monarchs. After Austerlitz, the Austrian army was almost wiped out. As Metternich coolly remarked on his first great promotion four years later, “It is no minor task to be the foreign minister of Austria in 1809”.
He conceived that task in brutally undeceived terms: “From the day when peace is signed we must confine our system to tacking, and turning, and flattering. Thus alone may we possibly preserve our existence, till the day of general deliverance … for us there remains but one expedient, to preserve our strength for better days”. Accusations of inconsistency or weakness simply bounced off him. Between 1809 and 1813, he pursued the most brilliant defensive strategy in diplomatic history. only after the French had lost 700,000 men in the snows, could he steer Austria away from alliance with France and into the final great coalition to destroy Napoleon.
He was undeceived, but he was not cynical. His tears were not shed simply for the loss of his own family estates or the unhorsed monarchs. He admitted that he was cold-blooded and thought that he needed to be. But he was not short of human feeling. He loved his numerous children by his three wives. His first wife Eleonore was an heiress and, in Metternich’s rather chilling words, “was never pretty and she is charming only to close acquaintances”. He added – this was in a letter to one of his many high-born mistresses, the legendary Dorothea von Lieven – “Those who know her really well cannot fail to love her; the majority of people find her stiff, unpleasant, and this is just what she wants. There is nothing in the world I would not do for her”.
Except stay faithful. He took an unseemly delight in his reputation as a ladies’ man. You can almost hear his lips smacking as he wrote to Dorothea: “Many women have been mentioned in connection with me who were not even in my thoughts. By contrast, I have entertained relationships with many women that were anything but romantic, without the public ever learning anything about it”. Srbik pursed his lips at Metternich’s Weibergeschichten. Siemann is rather soppy about it all. But there is no doubt about the depth of Clemens’s grief at the deaths of his wives, all of whom he outlived, and several of his children.
Nor was he unmoved by the horrors of the battlefield. one of Siemann’s finest passages brings together Metternich’s laments for the terrible scenes he had witnessed rattling across Europe along roads littered with corpses. In 1815, following Karl Philipp Schwarzenberg’s army along the same route that Napoleon had taken after the Battle of Leipzig with the remnants of his army, Metternich wrote to his mistress Wilhelmine von Sagan:
You cannot take ten steps without coming across someone dead or dying, or a prisoner whose face looks worse than those of the dead. Dear God, this man has no right to reproach you, who sacrificed the blood of so many millions out of a vain feeling of misguided fame. How is it possible that having witnessed a scene like this, just once, he does not recoil from himself in horror! Napoleon has also strewn the road from Moscow to Frankfurt with wreckage.
Few men can have spent more time than Metternich in private talk with Napoleon, notably as foreign minister in Dresden when he was shuttling to and fro between the emperors. There in the Chinese room at the Palais Marcolini on June 26, 1813, they talked for eight or nine hours on the trot. By then, he had long foreseen that Napoleon’s desire for European domination would prove insatiable. Yet he always found that the Emperor’s conversation “had a charm that was difficult to define”. He had a way of stripping a subject down to its essentials, listening carefully and bringing the topic to a point, while fobbing off any attempt to pin him down to any specific commitment. As the Comte de Las Cases was to find on St Helena, you could say anything to him. Both men asked Napoleon why he told such lies in his military bulletins. To Metternich, Napoleon replied with a smile: “They are not written for you, the Parisians believe everything”. Then towards the end, he would launch into the most furious and intimidating tirade. At Dresden, Metternich pointed out to him how the nature of war had changed to become total war: “today, it is a whole people that you have called to arms”; mere children were being pressed onto the battlefield. Enraged, Napoleon retorted: “You are no soldier and you do not know what goes on in the soul of a soldier. I was brought up in military camps, and a man like me doesn’t give a fuck about the lives of a million men”.
Admirers of Napoleon, such as Andrew Roberts in Napoleon the Great, cast doubt on whether he actually made this last shocking remark, although Metternich records it in a handwritten note not for publication, “se fout de la vie”. Siemann points out that Napoleon had used very similar language in a talk with Schwarzenberg’s deputy, Count Ferdinand Bubna, a few weeks earlier:
A man who was a simple private person and has ascended [parvenu] to the throne, who has spent twenty years hailed with bullets, is not afraid of projectiles, he does not fear any threats at all. I do not value my life above all else, nor that of others very much. I do not waver to and fro to save my life; I do not rate it higher than that of a hundred thousand people. I sacrifice a million if necessary.
Metternich’s accounts of his talks with Napoleon recall Sir Eric Phipps’s accounts of his conversations with Hitler as Ambassador in Berlin between 1933 and 1937 (Our Man in Berlin, edited by Gaynor Johnson, 2008). There are the same apparent candour and approachability, even charm, the same refusal to be tied down to any international commitment, and then after the fobbing off comes the great rant, a mixture of aggression, self-pity and national resentments which forms a staged finale to the encounter.
Out of that quarter century of bloodshed and destruction, Metternich’s world view emerges, never to change for the remaining forty years of his life. It is permeated not only by his great longing for Ruhe but also by an ingrained suspicion of national passions. Democracy is to be distrusted because it legitimizes and inflames those passions, exciting racial paranoia and the urge for racial separation.
Even Metternich’s modern admirers find this attitude hard to swallow. Kissinger concludes that Metternich’s virtuoso performance was ultimately futile: “Unable to adapt its domestic structure, unable to survive with it in a century of nationalism, even Austria’s most successful policies amounted to no more than a reprieve, to a desperate grasping to commit allies, not to a work of construction, but to deflect part of the inevitable holocaust”. Schroeder, too, ticks off those who swallow claims of their hero’s claims to modernity: “Metternich was basically a rigid absolutist whose political outlook was tied to a system of government and society which may once have had its grandeur and fitness, but which even by Metternich’s time was becoming outworn, and by our own is completely anachronistic”.
Sked, though, in his dazzling Metternich and Austria, denounces Kissinger’s views as “fantasy” and asserts that Schroeder “gets almost everything wrong”. The empire was not brought down by the aborted revolution of 1848 and was unhorsed only by the First World War. The Emperor continued to reign for another sixty years, as popular as ever. Railways were built, glass and chemical factories constructed. The censorship was annoying but understaffed and rather indulgent; ditto the police state. Nor was there much popular unrest; the only mass slaughter, in Galicia in 1846, was carried out by local Polish peasants in support of their emperor. Sentences of death were usually commuted, and the waltzing and winemaking continued unabated. At the very least, Sked declares, “Metternich by 1848 had had an exceptionally good run for his money”.
Ironically, Dr Sked’s own experience would have offered Metternich yet another opportunity to practise his favourite pastime of saying “I told you so”. It was Sked who in 1993 founded the United Kingdom Independence Party to take Britain out of the European Union in the interests of democracy and honest governance. In no time, he found to his horror that the new party had been invaded by out-and-racists and hardliners from the far right.
He resigned his leadership, but the party went on to get 3.8 million votes in the 2015 general election and to provide the essential impetus for Brexit, threatening not only to separate Britain from the Continent, with bitterness on all sides, but to break up her own multinational state, with potentially even more bitterness to come.
What modernity required, Metternich thought by contrast, was a drawing together of nations, a Völkerbund, to take the edge off national ambition. Europe needed not the sort of “deals” which could be torn up whenever it suited any of the parties but an abiding, law-governed structure of co-operation. This is of course exactly what Napoleon did not want, any more than Donald Trump does today. As Metternich told him in one of those frank exchanges: “your peace is never more than a truce”. The Grande Armée had to keep marching to pastures new to graze on.
For three decades after the Napoleonic wars, there were other leaders in Europe who mostly shared Metternich’s concerting instincts: Castlereagh, Aberdeen and Peel in Britain, Guizot and Molé and indeed King Louis Philippe in France, latterly Tsar Alexander and Nesselrode in Russia (who deserves to be remembered by more than a pudding in Proust). Then came Palmerston and the age of national assertion began all over again. If Metternich really had been born in 1900, I don’t think he would have enjoyed what he was destined to witness.
Ferdinand Mount is a former editor of the TLS. His most recent book, Prime Movers: From Pericles to Gandhi, was published last year