Prince von Metternich

Austrian politician and diplomat

• Born: May 15, 1773
• Birthplace: Coblenz, Archbishopric of Trier (now in Germany)
• Died: June 11, 1859
• Place of death: Vienna, Austro-Hungarian Empire (now in Austria)

As Europe’s preeminent champion of post-French Revolution conservatism, Metternich was the chief architect in the reconstruction of the European map after the fall of Napoleon I. As minister of foreign affairs, and, later, as Austria’s state chancellor, he presided for more than three decades over the political and diplomatic workings of the continent he had restored until the revolutions of 1848 swept him from power and ushered in a new generation of leaders.

Early Life

Clemens Wenzel Nepomuk Lothar von Metternich (MEHT-ehr-nihk) was born, not within the vast hegemonous region that made up the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but in the small German state of Trier, ruled by prince-bishops, one of whom, during the early seventeenth century, had been a Metternich. His father, Count Franz Georg Karl von Metternich, had represented the elector of Trier at the Imperial Court of Vienna, and, at the time of his son’s birth, had reversed that role and was representing the Austrian emperor in his homeland. As a result, young Clemens was reared in the Rhineland, and he remained fond of this region all of his life. His mother, Countess Beatrix Kagenegg, was a woman of considerable culture, intelligence, and charm, whose sophistication and elegance were more French than Germanic. These qualities she passed on to her son, who was always more at home with the language and Old World manners of the country of his greatest adversary, Napoleon I, then he was with his own.

In 1788, at the age of fifteen, he was sent to study diplomacy at the University of Strasbourg. There, he studied under a celebrated professor, Christoph Wilhelm Koch, who was an ardent proponent of creating a conservative counterbalance that would oppose the growing nationalist sentiment in Europe. The following year saw the outbreak of the French Revolution, which spread to Strasbourg in 1790. Abhorring the destructive violence of the Revolution, Metternich left Strasbourg for Mainz, where he enrolled in the university. He abandoned that city before the arrival of the French revolutionary troops to join his father in Brussels, where the count was prime minister of the Austrian Netherlands. From there, young Metternich was sent on a minor diplomatic mission to England in 1794, the first of his career. Upon his return later that year, he rejoined his family in Vienna, where they had fled after the ever-growing fury of the French Revolution had deprived them of their position in Brussels and their home in Coblenz.

In September, 1795, Metternich married Eleonore von Kaunitz, but it was not a love match. While a student at Mainz, Metternich had been initiated into the erotic privileges of a young nobleman, and he was to show a lifelong predilection for the company of a great variety of attractive women that his steadily increasing political status made available to him, even using some of these amorous liaisons to great diplomatic advantage. His was not merely a marriage of convenience but of opportunity as well, for his bride was the granddaughter of the powerful Wenzel von Kaunitz, state chancellor to the late Empress Maria Theresa. By marrying into this family of tremendous political and social prestige, Metternich at last had entrée into the exclusive imperial inner circle of influence from which he could make his bid for high office.

Life’s Work

During his first ten years of service as an ambassador for the Austrian emperor, Metternich witnessed the final dissolution of the ancient Holy Roman Empire, whose (by this time) symbolic and powerless crown had traditionally rested on the head of the reigning Habsburg monarch in Vienna. After serving as Austrian minister to the Saxon court in Dresden and the Prussian court in Berlin, where his anti-French efforts were thwarted, Emperor Francis I placed his young ambassador in the front ranks of the battle, and in 1806 Metternich presented his credentials to France’s newly self-declared emperor, Napoleon, at Saint Cloud.

In Paris, he became well informed as to the internal workings of the French Empire through his many important connections and his vast network of spies, which became legendary. For all of these advantages, his initial diplomatic efforts with the brilliant French tyrant proved to be a costly failure to his own country. Overestimating the effect of the 1808 Iberian uprising against the Bonapartes, he precipitated Austria into a war against France that ended disastrously for the Austrians in the Battle of Wagram (1809). Recalled to Vienna by the emperor, Metternich was appointed minister of foreign affairs, in which capacity he bought time for an exhausted Austria by giving Napoleon one of Francis’s daughters as a bride. The match with the Archduchess Marie Louise (ironically a grandniece of Louis XVI’s tragic queen, Marie Antoinette) was a calculated psychological maneuver to flatter Napoleon, whose character Metternich had closely studied during his tenure in Paris. Austria could now remain independent from the seemingly invincible French Empire, preserving the autonomy it needed to recoup its losses.

While Napoleon turned his attention and his Grande Armée from Austria to Russia, Austria quietly rearmed and Metternich tried to preserve the shaky balance of power in Europe, striving to keep the momentary status quo he had bought at so high a price. Austria now needed France to remain strong. Fearing the creation of a Prussian empire after French assault had awakened a dormant sense of German nationalism, and mindful of the threat of a Russian invasion of Europe if France collapsed, Metternich needed to counterbalance these threats with French power until Austria was again fit to face its dangerous adversary.

Metternich found his moment with France’s catastrophic and surprising defeat in Russia in 1812. Confident of Austria’s rejuvenation, he concluded a treaty with Russia and Prussia in June, 1813. Metternich negotiated with France for a separate peace treaty, but Napoleon hesitated, and in August of that year Austria declared war on France. During the following October, Francis bestowed on his most illustrious subject the hereditary title of prince. Holding close the South German states as allies to block any Russo-Prussian aggrandizement during this final conflict with France, Metternich arrived in Paris in May, 1814, after Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo and subsequent abdication, with the upper hand to sign the Treaty of Paris and open the way to the Congress of Vienna (September, 1814, to June, 1815).

Employing his own great charm and worldliness along with the music for which Vienna is legendary, Metternich attracted Europe’s most powerful and glamorous figures to the Austrian capital for the “Congress that Danced,” giving that city for the first and only time in its history the distinction of being the center of European politics. It was a splendid social occasion with an unending round of balls and festivities. It was also the most important political congress in a generation, and Europe’s future hinged on the negotiations that took place there during those nine months.

Conservative by temperament, upbringing, and education, Metternich was further persuaded by the horror of two decades of pan-European war to restore the Continent to its pre-Napoleonic form. Additionally, he sought to replace the Habsburgs’ traditional but meaningless role as the preeminent monarchs of Europe by establishing for them a real leadership over loose confederations of German and Italian states. To this end he proposed the creation of an imperial German title to be borne by the Austrian emperor. Furthermore, he wanted to restore France to its pre-Revolutionary War status with the old royal house of Bourbon, giving it equal footing with its conquerors to counter the threat of Russian dominance.

Metternich failed in Germany and in Italy, primarily through the archconservatism of his own emperor. Francis embraced the idea of power in Italy, where Austria was initially welcomed with enthusiasm, but he mishandled it and only succeeded in agitating the feeling of national unity that his foreign minister had thereby tried to avoid; he refused the title of German emperor, leaving Austrian influence in the German states on an equal footing with Prussia. With France, Metternich was successful. France’s Talleyrand and England’s Castlereagh concluded an alliance with Metternich to keep in check the Russo-Prussian pact that had taken place.

That was the essential balance of power when the Congress broke up, and it established a European order that lasted well into the middle of the century. During most of that time Metternich was custodian of that order, making him the virtual prime minister of Europe. With patience, insight, and an uncanny ability to see through the heated rhetoric and quickly shifting currents of the time, Metternich triumphed over the more imposing figures of his generation, yet he was unable to defeat the new ideas that they had helped unleash. With England withdrawn from continental politics, republican restlessness in France, and nationalistic fervor in the German and Italian states, Metternich, by now Austrian state chancellor, could not prevent in 1848 the eruption of revolutions that swept through the great European capitals. Hated by now as a reactionary and the leading figure of repressive government, Metternich was forced to resign on March 13, 1848. He went into exile in England for three years but returned to Vienna, where he died in 1859 in his eighty-sixth year.

Significance

A cursory investigation of Metternich’s many and varied achievements could give the impression that the subject was a genius. This, however, would do him an injustice because, though he may have possessed a kind of genius, the genius of his day was Napoleon and Metternich was his enemy. Although Metternich and his ilk eventually triumphed over Napoleon, it was the more prosaic qualities of patience, industry, and levelheadedness that won for him the war after losing most of the battles.

Metternich was not a visionary, but a practical man. Imagination, great style, and charm he did possess; indeed, he often depended on these qualities. Beyond this, however, Metternich was built to last long after the dust had settled and there was work still to be done. He saw his age through to its end and beyond, living long enough to see himself vilified by the very generation whose future he had striven to preserve. The conservatism he reimposed on Europe lasted nearly forty years until it was swept away forever by men such as Napoleon III, Giuseppe Garibaldi, and Otto von Bismarck, who were, if not his political heirs, certainly his successors. Seen from a modern, liberal perspective, it is easy to label those four decades as reactionary and oppressive. They were also four decades of a desperately needed peace, perhaps the longest such period that Europe has ever known.

Bibliography

Bertier de Sauvigny, G. de. Metternich and His Times. Translated by Peter Ryde. London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1962. Written one hundred years after its subject’s death, this biography is a good introduction to Metternich and his world. Most of this work is devoted to the comments of Metternich and his contemporaries, while the author serves as a guide to the Austrian minister’s life.

Cecil, Algernon. Metternich, 1773-1859: A Study of His Period and Personality. London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1933. A thorough and engaging biography of Metternich and his times. The great statesman’s life is recounted with an imagination that counterbalances its frequently difficult scholarly approach. Inaccessible to the lay reader, this book of moderate length is a penetrating account of Metternich’s professional life.

Haas, Arthur G. Metternich, Reorganization, and Nationality, 1813-1815: A Story of Foresight and Frustration in the Rebuilding of the Austrian Empire. Wiesbaden, Germany: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1963. For those interested in a detailed, documented, blow-by-blow account of the crucial negotiations and renegotiations that followed the resettlement of Europe after Napoleon’s fall, this book is thorough and easy to understand.

Kissinger, Henry A. A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh, and the Problems of Peace, 1812-22. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957. A biography of a celebrated nineteenth century statesman by a celebrated twentieth century statesman before the latter was well known. This is a good, if somewhat dry, introduction to Europe after Napoleon.

Metternich, Prince Clemens von. Memoirs of Prince Metternich, 1773-1835. 5 vols. Edited by Prince Richard Metternich. Translated by Mrs. Alexander Napier and Gerard W. Smith. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1880-1884. Completed in 1844 by Metternich himself and brought to publication twenty years after his death by his son, Prince Richard, here is an account of his life from his birth to the Congress of Vienna. Recounted with the clarity and arrogance for which he was well known. Contains important documents and correspondence.

Schroeder, Paul W. Metternich’s Diplomacy at Its Zenith, 1820-1823. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1962. An account of Metternich’s years of diplomatic supremacy following the Congress of Vienna. Using maps to help illustrate this history, Schroeder describes the first years of Metternich’s chancellory when his plan for Europe was most successful.

Seward, Desmond. Metternich: The First European. New York: Viking Press, 1991. Seward portrays Metternich as the consummate statesman of his time, and describes how he sought to sustain a framework for European nations to live in relative harmony. The author argues that Metternich’s concepts of unity anticipated the more recent creation of the European community.