Rites of Peace: The Fall of Napoleon and the Congress of Vienna

In the course of September 1813, as it became increasingly likely that Napoleon would be in no position to defend them, most of the rulers within the Rheinbund began to look about nervously. The allied armies were drawing closer, and the stark choice that had faced Frederick William at the beginning of the year would soon be facing them. The prospects were anything but enticing.

Alexander’s public image preceded the westward march of the allies, growing as it went, and all but the most pro-French public opinion hailed him from afar as a chivalrous liberator and divinely inspired righter of wrongs. But his advance was also accompanied by news of Stein’s activities, by a wave of subversive muttering and plotting amongst students, junior officers and malcontents of one sort or another, and by a shiver of hopeful truculence on the part of dispossessed imperial nobles who saw the possibility of revenge, all of which made the rulers who had made their accommodation with Napoleon highly apprehensive.

Stein hoped to bring about the establishment of a strong unified German state on the back of a popular uprising fuelled by expectations of social reform as well as national rebirth. His wishful thinking was that a combination of Fichte’s lectures, Arndt’s poetry and Jahn’s gymnastics had produced a nation in the making ready to embrace this dream. His expectations on this score were unrealistic. But his agitation against ‘the thirty-six petty despots’, as he termed the Rheinbund princes, whom he saw as ‘ruinous for the civil liberty and moral fibre of the nation’, represented a very real challenge. The convention of 19 March, covering the administration of the occupied territories, had given Stein virtually unlimited powers, and he had established administrative organs answerable only to himself. As soon as he took control of liberated areas of Saxony he doubled the level of requisition imposed by Napoleon, introduced martial law and gave special powers to the police.

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Metternich had begun to view the Rheinbund as a useful structure that could be used to preserve Germany from Stein, which is why he dropped its dissolution from his demands to Napoleon during the Congress of Prague. Hardenberg, who viewed Stein’s doings with the same distaste as Metternich did, was nevertheless opposed to the preservation of the Rheinbund. He hoped to scoop as many frightened princes as possible into Prussia’s protective embrace, and repeatedly suggested to Metternich that they divide Germany along the river Main into a northern and a southern sphere in which they could impose their respective influence. But Metternich wished to preserve the integrity of Germany, and at the same time feared such an extension of Prussian and, by proxy, Russian power over it. As early as 5 April the Prussian minister at the court of Bavaria had tried to bully that power into joining the Russo-Prussian alliance, threatening dire consequences in the event of refusal. Bavaria’s immediate reaction had been to turn to Austria for protection, and Metternich had seized on the chance.

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He began to negotiate not only with Bavaria. Through Gentz, he orchestrated a campaign in the German press to oppose Stein and to advocate some kind of federation which could accommodate the existing states and their rulers. Pragmatic as ever, he was even prepared to entertain the possibility of the survival as King of Westphalia of Napoleon’s brother Jérôme, solely to keep that area out of Stein’s ambit.

Alexander had also yielded to pragmatic considerations. After protests from Count Münster, the plenipotentiary of Britain’s Prince Regent for Hanover, he softened the original convention on the administration of liberated territories, thereby clipping Stein’s wings a little. It had dawned on him that the national revival Stein hoped for might not only create unstable conditions which would be difficult to control, but might even breed hostility to Russian influence in the future. Such influence could best be exerted through pressure applied discreetly to grateful German princes, and Alexander gradually began to see himself superseding Napoleon as their protector. This seemed particularly apt; through his Holstein-Gottorp grandmother, his Württemberg mother and his Baden wife, many of the German princes were close relatives, and he had begun to receive covert requests for protection. They assumed a certain urgency when two of his relatives, the Dukes of the two Mecklemburgs, who had been the first to desert Napoleon openly, confident that they would be welcomed with open arms, had been treated by Stein as conquered enemies, and had in consequence appealed to Metternich for protection. Stein was becoming a liability to Alexander. While he kept him in place as a useful bogeyman, he excluded him from what was developing into a straightforward scramble between Russia, Prussia and Austria for influence in Germany.

These simplified family trees of the rulers of Russia, Austria, Württemberg and Baden only show the more important direct connections, and can therefore give only a very slight idea of the extraordinary degree to which all the rulers of central and eastern Europe were related by blood.

The proclamation issued by Alexander and Frederick William in Kalisch had made clear that any German rulers who were still allies of Napoleon when their states were overrun by the allies would be likely to lose their thrones, leaving their territory free to be incorporated into some kind of new Germanic state of Stein’s or Alexander’s fancy. Metternich considered it essential to get all the princes of the Rheinbund to change sides and become allies of Austria before their states were overrun. This would not only prevent those states being made available to Stein, Prussia or Alexander, it would also have the pleasing effect of turning them into grateful clients, and therefore future supporters, of Austria.

Metternich’s negotiations with the various princes had to be conducted in secret both by him, since they contravened Austria’s undertakings under the Treaty of Toeplitz not to enter into any talks with the enemy without mutual consultation, and by the princes, each of whom had a resident French minister looking over his shoulder. As their substance was betrayal, the negotiations were necessarily devious and unedifying.

‘My fate is bound to that of France, nothing could detach me from her; I will survive with her or perish with her, but I will never subscribe to any infamy,’ King Maximilian of Bavaria declared to the French minister at his court on 15 September, by which time negotiations had been going on with Austria for a couple of months and all essentials had been agreed. Although his own son the Crown Prince, most of the army and the majority of the population had been clamouring against the French for some time, Maximilian, who was a faithful ally of Napoleon and whose daughter was married to Napoleon’s stepson Prince Eugène, waited until the very last moment.

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Neither he nor any of the other princes was going to switch alliances without a reward, or at the very least a guarantee that they would not have to give up any of the gains they had made thanks to Napoleon. In the case of Bavaria, these were considerable. For one thing, her ruler, a mere Elector of the Holy Roman Empire, had been made a King by Napoleon in 1806. He had benefited from the process of mediatisation, acquiring a great deal of territory, and had done well out of the wars of 1805 and 1809 between France and Austria, relieving the latter of Salzburg, Berchtesgaden, the Inn and Hausrück districts, the Tyrol, Vorarlberg, Brixen, Trent and various smaller enclaves in Swabia.

Metternich needed Bavaria. If Maximilian were to cast himself on the mercy of Alexander or make a deal with Prussia the whole of southern Germany would be wide open to their interference. He therefore agreed to almost all of Bavaria’s demands. By the Treaty of Ried, signed on 8 October, Bavaria undertook to leave the Rheinbund and ally herself with Austria, contributing 36,000 men who would operate under Austrian command. In return, Austria pledged her protection and that of her allies, which she had no right to do.

It is the secret articles of the treaty which are significant. One, which was to cause Metternich and indeed all the other statesmen of Europe many sleepless nights in the following year, guaranteed to Bavaria her current territorial extent and, recognising that certain areas would need to be returned to Austria, full compensation to be negotiated later. But by far the most important article was the one stating that ‘The two High Contracting Parties regard one of the principal objects of their efforts in the present war to be the dissolution of the Confederation of the Rhine and the total and absolute independence of Bavaria, so that, unfettered and placed beyond all foreign influence, she may enjoy the fullness of sovereignty.’

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The Treaty of Ried was a triumph for Metternich, who had managed to enlist an invaluable ally as well as deny one to Alexander. It also overturned Stein’s plans for a unified German state. But the struggle for control of Germany was by no means over, and one of its first and greatest victims was King Frederick Augustus of Saxony.

When Napoleon abandoned Dresden the King had been obliged to take refuge in his second city, Leipzig, where Napoleon concentrated his forces, and on which all the allied armies were now converging – even Bernadotte had been browbeaten, by Pozzo di Borgo and Stewart, into joining in the action. The attack opened on 16 October.

The battle for the city, which came to be known as the Battle of the Nations because of the number of nationalities involved, was the largest engagement of the Napoleonic Wars, involving well over half a million men, who were pounded by more than 2,000 pieces of artillery, and lasting three days.

Although heavily outnumbered, Napoleon held his own throughout the first day, delivering some heavy blows at the allies. On the second, the French were gradually obliged to give ground as Blücher appeared in their rear and the full weight of the allied forces was brought to bear. On that day the Saxon contingent in the French army defected and joined the allies, further depleting Napoleon’s forces. He lost the initiative, and on the third day his army, which was by then outnumbered by a ratio of two to one, began to lose its cohesion. That evening Napoleon ordered a retreat to the Rhine. Before leaving Leipzig he went to the royal palace and offered Frederick Augustus refuge in France, but the Saxon King declined the offer, stating that he could not abandon his subjects at such a time. Frederick Augustus sent officers to each of the allied monarchs with a request for negotiation, but there was no response.

When Alexander rode into Leipzig he found Bernadotte already in the square before the royal palace, conversing with General Reynier, the French commander of the Saxon army, whom he had just taken prisoner. The King of Saxony was standing at the foot of the stairs with his royal guard. Bernadotte greeted Alexander and offered to present him to Frederick Augustus, but the Tsar snubbed the hapless King and went in to pay his respects to the Queen. A moment later a Russian officer informed the King of Saxony that he was Alexander’s prisoner. After some argument as to where the unfortunate Saxon royal couple should be held and by whom, the Prussians took matters into their own hands, and at 4 a.m. on 23 October they were bundled into a carriage and sent under armed escort to captivity in Berlin.

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It was not just that the Saxon King had not declared for the allies right at the beginning, nor that he had gone back to Napoleon’s side after Lützen. ‘The despoliation of the goodly Frederick Augustus had become,’ as Hardenberg put it, ‘a necessity in the interests of making Prussia strong, and therefore in those of Europe.’ More precisely, Saxony was the most suitable compensation Alexander could offer Frederick William in return for Prussia’s former Polish provinces, which he was intending to hold on to himself.

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The allied victory at Leipzig was decisive. ‘I have just returned from the battlefield on which the cause of the world has been won,’ Metternich announced in a letter to his wife on 18 October. It was Napoleon’s first total defeat, and its scale no less than its psychological impact made it inconceivable that he should ever play a dominant role in Germany again. ‘The shame in which he covered us has been washed away by torrents of French blood,’ Stein wrote triumphantly to his wife. Humboldt was similarly delighted by his walk over the corpse-strewn battlefield.

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‘The deliverance of Europe appears to be at hand,’ Aberdeen wrote to Castlereagh. But the letter he wrote to his sister-in-law Maria was more muted in tone. ‘For three or four miles the ground is covered with bodies of men and horses, many not dead. Wretches wounded unable to crawl, crying for water amidst heaps of putrefying bodies. Their screams are heard at an immense distance, and still ring in my ears. The living as well as the dead are stripped by the barbarous peasantry, who have not sufficient charity to put the miserable wretches out of their pain. Our victory is most complete. It must be owned that a victory is a fine thing, but one should be at a distance.’

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Two days after the battle, on 20 October, Metternich was honoured by his sovereign with the title of Prince. For a man who believed in hierarchies as deeply as he did, this was gratifying. ‘What a range of sensations I have experienced over the past few days!’ he wrote to Wilhelmina that evening. ‘The world has been reborn under my very eyes; my most daring dreams have come true – my political standing has doubled; I am at the apogee of my career; it will have been accomplished. Yet everything, sensations, calculations, business – the whole world, are eclipsed by a single thought of mon amie; the world, its grandeurs and its miseries are like nothing to me; you, always you – nothing but you!’

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After waking him the next morning his valet, Giroux, asked: ‘Will Your Serene Highness put on the same suit Your Excellency wore yesterday?’ If this did not bring Metternich down to earth, the interview he had with Alexander later that day did.

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The Tsar was also in triumphant mood. The great battle, with its apocalyptic overtones, deepened his conviction that he was fulfilling his destiny as God’s instrument for the chastisement of Napoleonic godlessness. He too penned a note to his beloved in his moment of triumph. ‘I beg you to believe me when I say that I am, more than ever, yours for life in my heart and my soul, and I would add; Honi [sic] soit qui mal y pense,’ he wrote to Zinaida Volkonskaya, alluding to his recent decoration with the Garter.

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Metternich’s arrangement with Bavaria had not only shattered Stein’s plans; it had also profoundly irritated the Tsar, and it hung like a dark cloud over their meeting. Metternich expressed his disapproval at the activities of the Central Administrative Council, which was treating liberated areas like occupied enemy territory, and indeed at their long-term implications. He demanded that Stein be removed from his post. Alexander dismissed his arguments, declaring that he had made a promise to Stein, and that his authority would be compromised if he were obliged to break that promise.

Metternich could achieve little in the circumstances, and this is reflected in the new convention regarding liberated territories signed by the allied powers the following day. The Council was renamed a Central Executive, and although the rights of those princes who had become allies were to be respected, there was considerable ambiguity in the phrasing, which left Stein with virtually unlimited authority throughout the German lands.

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Metternich took the setback philosophically. The behaviour of Stein and of the Russian and Prussian soldiery ‘liberating’ Germany was beginning to produce a reaction at every level of society, and even many of those who had dreamt of this liberation were having second thoughts. ‘I often wonder where our nation is really going,’ Humboldt wrote to his wife, lamenting the lack of strong leadership. The poet Johann Wolfgang Goethe was so horrified at the depredations of the supposed liberators in his home city of Weimar that he declared ‘The medicine is worse than the illness,’ and continued to wear the Légion d’Honneur Napoleon had given him.

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Metternich played for time. He intensified secret negotiations with the rulers of the southern states, which gratefully accepted Austria’s protective embrace. He was confident that he could outmanoeuvre Stein through faits accomplis. Above all, he placed his faith in his ability to manipulate Alexander.

‘I argued for at least 3 hrs with your fine Emperor, I told him off as I do my son when he has done wrong,’ he wrote to Wilhelmina from Weimar on 25 October. ‘The result of my strictures will be that for the next week he will not do anything silly, but then he will start again and I shall have to tell him off again. That has been my role for the past 2 months.’ The sense of power this gave him was exhilarating. ‘I dashed over to Meiningen to arrange a few minor points in the destiny of the world with the Emp. Alexander and then dashed back here to do the same with my master,’ he reported to her six days later.

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The feeling that he was fulfilling some grand destiny led him to ponder that of Napoleon. ‘What kind of state must that man be in,’ Metternich mused in a letter to Wilhelmina, ‘he who once stood at the summit of power, and now sees the levers of such an immense construction shatter in his hands!’

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8 The First Waltzes (#ulink_7d89a6b8-c50d-54eb-ab96-d76af2e8409d)

Napoleon struggled back towards the Rhine after his defeat at Leipzig ‘in a state of despondency difficult to describe but easy to comprehend’, in the words of the Paris Préfet baron Étienne Pasquier. Of the more than 300,000 men under his command three months earlier, only 40 to 50,000 were still with him, and they were for the most part ‘no more than a crowd marching without order and incapable of carrying out any vigorous operation’. They nevertheless managed to defeat their erstwhile Bavarian allies under General Wrede, who tried to cut off their retreat at Hanau.

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The network of Napoleonic control over Germany that had been built up since 1806 unravelled. Napoleon’s brother Jérôme fled from his kingdom of Westphalia as the other rulers of the Rheinbund joined the allies. ‘I found him accompanied by his ministers of foreign affairs and war, and still surrounded by all the tattered trappings of royalty,’ wrote Beugnot, Napoleon’s minister in the grand duchy of Berg, who saw him pass through Düsseldorf. ‘The house he was occupying was full of lifeguards, whose theatrical uniforms heavy with gold were wonderfully inapposite to the situation; there were chamberlains on the stairs since there were no ante-chambers, and the whole thing resembled nothing so much as a troupe of players on tour rehearsing a tragedy.’

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