Clemens Wenzel Lothar von Metternich-Winnelburg-Beilstein
The calculating statesman who came to be synonymous with nineteenth-century diplomacy after his performance at the
Congress of Vienna in
1815. Metternich was also one of the leading politicians in the
Habsburg Monarchy, dedicating himself to avoiding revolution at home and abroad; his career was effectively ended when revolution came to
Vienna in
1848.
Metternich was born in
1773 near
Koblenz, a small town on the River
Rhine, and was named Clemens Wenceslas after the Elector of
Trier, who ruled one of the many small territories that would not be fully amalgamated into
Germany for nearly a hundred years.
In
1794, the noble family were forced to flee to other lands they possessed in
Bohemia, after the
French revolutionaries won the battle of
Fleurus and went on to occupy the right bank of the Rhine.
It was not the young Metternich's first brush with revolution: he had been horrified to discover that his boyhood tutor,
John Simon, harboured
Jacobin sympathies, and, while studying at
Strasbourg University, he had witnessed a mob sacking the
town hall after receiving the news of the
fall of the Bastille.
98 Coaches in the Big Parade
Metternich had first made himself known in the Habsburg Monarchy when he and his father had attended the
1790 coronation of Emperor
Leopold II with a 98-coach
retinue. Now part of the Austrian court for good, his mother engaged on a vigorous campaign of social climbing, and ensured Metternich's marriage to
Eleonore von Kaunitz, whose impeccable noble pedigree included
Wenzel Anton Kaunitz, the diplomat who had orchestrated Austria's
diplomatic revolution and alliance with France in
1756.
Metternich made his own diplomatic début at the
Congress of Rastatt in
1798, as a member of the Austrian delegation attempting to make peace with France. He appears not to have enjoyed the experience, and complained of the vulgar clothes of his French counterparts, but prospered when he was sent as ambassador to
Saxony in
1801. Two years later he was moved to
Berlin, with the brief of encouraging the Prussians back into the war, and his Kaunitz connection secured him the
Paris embassy in
1806.
1809 saw Metternich replace
Johann Philipp von Stadion as foreign minister after Austria's disastrous defeat at the
Battle of Wagram. Stadion had argued for a war of revenge against France, relying on patriotic
élan; the more pragmatic Metternich preferred a
rapprochement with
Napoleon by marrying Emperor
Franz I's eldest daughter
Archduchess Marie Louise to the French Emperor.
During the negotiations for the marriage, Metternich was distracted when General
Andoche Junot threatened to challenge him to a duel for sleeping with his wife
Laura: a gossip at a masked ball had let the general into the secret. Junot attacked Laura with a pair of gilt scissors before dashing off to inform Eleonore, who had heard too many similar tales of Metternich's infidelities to be in the least perturbed.
Congress Man
Metternich's role organising the anti-French alliance made it no surprise that the reconstruction of Europe should be worked out at
Vienna, in a Congress that set the tone of diplomacy for a century. Metternich held fast to the
balance of power, paying off the victorious allies and restoring France to the borders of
1789.
Alarmed by the
Italian nationalism Napoleon had fostered on Austria's south-western border, he broke Italy up again into her component kingdoms, but would be troubled by nationalists in the Austrian provinces of
Lombardy and
Venetia throughout his career.
Metternich's fears of revolution, and of any one power gaining the upper hand in Europe as Napoleon had done, were not allayed in the years that followed. At the
Congress of Verona in
1822, he attempted to secure joint intervention in the civil war in
Spain, although was unable to prevent France going it alone in the following year.
The
Eastern Question, concerning the future of the moribund
Ottoman Empire, would also tax him to the limit, not least after Ottoman weaknesses were exposed by the
Greek War of Independence, which
Lord Byron transformed into an early example of
radical chic. Metternich and his old-school colleagues in other capitals preferred that the Ottoman Empire should survive,
knowing full well the tension that would result once Europe's great powers competed for the
Balkan lands the Ottomans would leave behind.
Meanwhile, Eleonore had died of
tuberculosis in
1825, and Metternich had taken up with the Russian princess
Dorothea Lieven. Lieven was not at all pleased to hear of his marriage to
Antoinette von Leykam in
1826, and neither was Metternich's snobbish mother Beatrice, who had picked out a more suitable match in a family friend,
Melanie Zichy-Ferraris.
Beatrice died in the winter of
1828, closely followed by Antoinette and Victor, his son by Eleonore. Tuberculosis had also accounted for his sisters Marie and Clementine, and he turned to the Zichy-Ferraris family for consolation, eventually marrying Melanie in
1831.
He almost certainly took to Melanie's arms on the night of the
French Revolution of 1830, which he saw as destroying fifteen years of painstaking effort: he collapsed at his desk on receiving the news, groaning that his whole life's work had been destroyed, although he rallied after it became clear that the
Orléans dynasty, rather than revolutionaries and commoners, would rule in Paris.
Grand Inquisitor
Metternich was appointed an Austrian
Chancellor of State in 1821, and his domestic influence increased after the mentally ill Emperor
Ferdinand came to the throne. At home, he took an emphatic stand against the nationalisms which were beginning to emerge among Austria's multi-ethnic population. Of most concern to him were the
Magyar nobility, who insisted on the independence of
Hungary within the Habsburg framework and began, during the 1840s, to be swayed by the fiery orator
Lajos Kossuth.
From time to time, Metternich even bit his lip and funded the
Illyrian movement of
Ljudevit Gaj, a
Croat whose visions of
Southern Slav unity necessarily impinged on Hungary's possession of
Croatia.
Kossuth's rise came at the expense of
István Széchenyi, a liberal aristocrat who had attempted to occupy himself with a series of economic reforms vetoed by Metternich, who feared they had political overtones. Even the scheme for a
Budapest toll bridge, in Metternich's eyes, could well be an underhand blow against
feudalism and the privileges of the nobility.
However, Metternich had recognised Széchenyi's influence in the 1820s and 1830s, but still refused to co-operate with him on the grounds that the least concession to Budapest would open the
floodgates and risk the
Hungarian Revolution that ironically broke out, under Kossuth's leadership, in
1848.
Metternich reacted with equal vehemence against liberals in Vienna, and orchestrated the
Karlsbad Decrees to crack down on German nationalism in Austria and the states of the
German Confederation. His secret police and press censorship earned him the nickname of 'the
Grand Inquisitor of Europe', although the institutions were underfunded and created a predictable resentment while delivering, by twentieth-century standards, rather little in the way of repression.
The revolutions of 1848 became Metternich's
annus horribilis in March, when unrest in Vienna resulted in his dismissal. Lombardy and Venetia, inflamed by the nationalist rebellion of
Daniele Marin and the encouragement of the new pope
Pius IX, had been troubling him since
1847, and a further French Revolution provided the last straw.
It was the last straw, too, for Vienna's
stock market, which feared that Metternich would insist on intervening in Paris and plunge Austria into a costly war.
Archduke Ludwig, effectively Ferdinand's stand-in, was unsettled enough by the financial panic even before a student demonstration, backed up by Vienna's rioting poor, demanded the Chancellor's dismissal.
Metternich and Melanie fled the country
incognito, staying in the
London suburb of
Richmond for a couple of years before returning to the Monarchy in
1851: the various revolutions had all fizzled out by
1849, Kossuth's Hungarians holding out the longest.
He provided unofficial advice, often unheeded, to his diplomatic successors for several years, and died in
1859, when his funeral was overshadowed by fresh Austrian military disasters against the Italians in Lombardy.
Read more:
Arthur J. May, The Age of Metternich
Alan Palmer, Metternich