Leadership of the Congress of Vienna of Klemens von Metternich

The Congress of Vienna (September 1814–June 1815) was the climax of Metternich’s work of reconstruction. The very fact that it was held in Vienna was in itself a great success for him. He had precise ideas about the basis for a new order in Europe but knew from the start that he would have to modify them substantially if he was to salvage even a small part of his plans against the opposition of self-interested princes. He wanted to secure Austria’s predominance by forming two confederations, one German and the other Italian, with Austria as the leading power in both. Within Germany, he proposed the creation of a hereditary German imperial title, and he thought that Austria and Prussia should share the task of protecting Germany’s western frontier. Friendship with Prussia on the one hand and with Bavaria on the other thus seemed to him to be the prerequisite of success. Supported by the British foreign secretary, Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh, Metternich sought to prevent the elimination of France, which he saw as a necessary counterweight against Russia. Likewise, he resisted the territorial aggrandizement of Russia and Prussia and objected in particular to Prussia’s designs for annexing all of Saxony.

The congress became a splendid social event. By an unbroken chain of festivities, Metternich kept the visiting monarchs in a mood that made them disinclined to interfere very persistently in the real work of the statesmen. Facile and not averse to amorous adventures, Metternich brilliantly mastered his dual role of social representation and political leadership.

Yet Metternich only partly succeeded in his plans: the German imperial project came to nothing because Francis steadfastly refused to support it; the Italian confederation did not materialize; and the German confederation, when it at last did come into being in June 1815, was based only on a brief and noncommittal federal act derived from a Bavarian compromise proposal. In European affairs, however, Metternich was more successful: he achieved equality of status for France; he obtained a reduction of the Prussian demands on Saxony; and, in particular, he blocked the farther reaching demands of Russia. Both Russia and Prussia, in fact, were held in check by the common front of Austria, England, and France that Metternich had created.

Metternich’s moderation produced a long-lasting European order. That, however, must be ascribed to his diplomatic capability rather than to his political foresight. Austria’s status in the German confederation had been strengthened, but the emperor’s refusal of the German crown meant that Prussia, with equal status in the confederation, would be able to counterbalance Austria.

Role in the German confederation

Not even within the Austrian Empire was Metternich able to prevail with the idea (already at the root of his plans of 1811) of overcoming the spirit of national revolution by revitalizing the old historical regions and the privileges they enjoyed in pre-absolutist times. His attempt to organize the newly acquired Italian provinces according to historical principles was frustrated by the emperor Francis, who, though accepting Metternich’s ideas, united two incompatible regions in a completely unhistorical “Lombardo-Venetian kingdom” and so destroyed Metternich’s hopes of counteracting pan-Italian nationalism. Moreover, as Metternich had feared, the initially strong pro-Austrian mood turned into its opposite.

The reconstruction of Austria took shape entirely in the spirit of the emperor Joseph II, on centralist and absolutist lines, without regard to national differences and without the establishment of departmental ministries, which Metternich had demanded. After many futile remonstrances Metternich eventually yielded to the obstructionism of the emperor, who detested innovation and stood jealously on his dignity. The reestablishment of the ancient diets of the estates of Tirol and Galicia complied to some extent with Metternich’s idea of resurrecting the provincial diets in order to create a counterweight against the growing forces of liberal and nationalist opinion that was demanding a central parliament. He condemned, however, the repressive measures by which the police minister tried to achieve these aims.

The domestic affairs of Austria created difficulties for Metternich at the Frankfurt am Main Bundestag (federal assembly), which opened in 1816. He had originally intended to use this assembly to oppose revolutionary thought all over Germany. Pointing to the examples of Tirol and Galicia, he attempted in 1817–18 to encourage the German states to introduce constitutions resurrecting the historical provinces and to set up their own diets instead of a central parliament. In summer 1818, however, Bavaria and Baden promulgated constitutions that reflected not Metternich’s ideas but those of limited monarchy similar to that outlined by the French charter of June 1814; and in 1819, when revolutionary activity culminated in the murder of the dramatist August von Kotzebue and when the opening sessions of the Bavarian and Baden assemblies proved stormy, Metternich decided to stifle these unmanageable liberal currents.

He managed to convince the Prussian chancellor Karl August, Fürst von Hardenberg, that his prescription for provincial diets was right. Then, assured that Prussia would not follow the South German example, he could quietly watch how parliaments created against his advice fulfilled his predictions and discouraged the liberal inclinations of German princes. Consequently, at the ministerial conferences of Carlsbad and Vienna in 1819–20, Metternich, to the surprise of the South German states, did not attempt to undo the new constitutions but simply curtailed the activity of the federal assembly, which had become an inconvenience to him. Reorienting his German policy, he began to rely not on the assembly but on the common interest of the princes whom he led to share his point of view by personal contact. Henceforth it was no longer the privileges of Austria as granted by the federal act but Metternich’s personality that guaranteed Austria’s predominance in the German confederation.

Years of decline

Metternich had hoped that a system of congresses, at which the great powers would concert their actions, would maintain order and peace in Europe. At the congresses of Aix-la-Chapelle (1818), Troppau (1820), Laibach (1821), and Verona (1822), his international reputation was at its zenith, but the disruption of the forum of great powers became evident when Great Britain abandoned the policy of intervention against revolutions in other countries: Viscount Castlereagh prepared the way for this change at Troppau, and George Canning, his successor as British foreign secretary, brought Metternich’s influence on western Europe to an end by insisting on the right of national self-determination for the South American colonists in revolt against Spain and for the Greek insurgents against Turkey. With Alexander I’s death (1825) it seemed likely that Metternich’s influence on Russia would likewise come to an end, and Prussia’s jealousy of Austria’s dominance was causing further difficulties, when in 1830 the July Revolution in France, followed by insurrections in Belgium, Poland, and Germany, appeared to justify again Metternich’s dismal prognoses and served to convince the eastern powers, Austria, Prussia, and Russia, that they should stand together by his principles.

Metternich had been appointed Austrian state chancellor on May 25, 1821, but his influence in Austria was decisively restricted by the appointment of Franz Anton, Graf von Kolowrat, as minister of state and head of the cabinet conferences (1826). Kolowrat opposed an orderly governmental organization and won great ascendancy over the emperor Francis. Metternich, as his influence dwindled, yielded to an increasingly irritating vanity and to a passion for theorizing that caused his utterances to become increasingly prolix and, at times, to verge on the ridiculous. For the sake of legitimacy and despite general apprehensions, he gave Francis the disastrous advice to recognize his feebleminded eldest son, the archduke Ferdinand, as heir to the throne. In 1835, therefore, when Ferdinand succeeded his father, Metternich, at first together with the archduke Louis (Ludwig), took the chair at the “conference,” or council of state that assumed the functions of a regency. In 1836 it seemed as if he would at last be able to carry out his idea of well-ordered government, but at the decisive moment Kolowrat managed to convert the archdukes John and Louis to his own theories. Thenceforth Metternich’s authority was confined to external affairs. His vanity tempted him to disguise the waning of his influence by accepting responsibility for decrees that neither came from him nor accorded with his views. He thus became a hated symbol of repression and reaction and, eventually, on March 13, 1848, had to resign, as the first victim of the revolution. He made his way with difficulty into exile in England but returned to Vienna in 1851, where he died eight years later.

After his first wife’s death in 1825, Metternich married Baroness Antoinette Leykam in 1827. After her death in 1829, he married Gräfin Melanie Zichy-Ferraris in 1831, who died in 1854. His son by his second marriage, Richard, Fürst von Metternich, was Austrian ambassador in Paris from 1859 to 1870 and one of the foremost diplomats of his time.