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

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Castlereagh’s instructions to these two dealt mainly with the extent of the subsidies which Britain was to contribute to the allied cause. But they also sketched out the basis of a final settlement towards which they were to work, and expressed the desire to bring about a closer union that would bind the allies to achieving those goals – he did not want this coalition disintegrating like the others, and he did not want the allies making a separate peace once they had achieved their own objectives, leaving Britain out in the cold. He already saw himself in the role of guiding spirit of this budding coalition, and had ambitious plans for it. But he did not as yet contemplate extending it to embrace Austria, and his mistrust of Metternich was so great that he would not even listen to what the Austrian envoy Wessenberg had to say.

4 A War for Peace (#ulink_195ad3a0-eb3e-5334-aa09-298879411f4f)

‘I desire peace; the world needs it,’ Napoleon declared at the opening session of the Legislative Assembly on 14 February 1813. He desired it probably as ardently as anyone. But he could only make it on terms that were, in his own words, ‘honourable and in keeping with the interests and the greatness of my Empire’. He could not contemplate the idea of negotiating from a position of weakness, and his instinctive reaction to his predicament was to win a war first.

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His policy of delivering a shattering blow and then dictating the terms of peace had worked well enough in the past, but each of his victories inevitably appeared less dramatic than the last, while repeated drubbings merely tempered the resistance of his enemies. His modus operandi was subject to the inexorable law of diminishing returns, but he appears to have been oblivious to this.

Following his failure to rally the remnants of the Grande Armée at Vilna and then at Königsberg in East Prussia, Murat had left his post and gone back to his kingdom of Naples. The man who took command in his stead was Napoleon’s stepson Prince Eugène de Beauharnais, Viceroy of Italy. He had managed to stabilise a front along the Vistula in January, and from his headquarters at Posen (Poznań) worked hard at replenishing the ranks of shattered units. On 27 January Napoleon wrote him a long letter reviewing the possibilities for a spring campaign that would take French forces back across the Niemen into Russia in August, and by the beginning of February he was making arrangements to despatch his household there.

The one lesson he had learnt from the Russian campaign was that too many attendants and accoutrements only got in the way. ‘I want to have much fewer people, not so many cooks, less plate, no great nécessaire,’ he wrote. ‘On campaign and on the march, tables, even mine, will be served with soup, a boiled dish, a roast and vegetables, with no dessert.’ He announced that he would be taking no pages, as ‘they are of no use to me’, apart from some of his more hardy hunting pages.

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By then the French front had been forced back to the line of the Oder, but Napoleon was not unduly worried. On 11 March he wrote again to Prince Eugène, now holding a front along the Elbe, sketching a grandiose plan of attack involving a sweep through Berlin and Danzig into Poland. From Kraków, Poniatowski, supported by the Austrians, was to strike northward and cut the Russian army’s lines of communication.

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These plans were disrupted, but his confidence was not particularly shaken, when on 27 March the Prussian ambassador in Paris handed in Prussia’s declaration of war on France. Napoleon’s reaction was to instruct Narbonne in Vienna to offer Austria the Prussian province of Silesia (which the Prussians had captured from Austria in 1745) as a prize if she supported France in the forthcoming war. Metternich did not want Silesia, and he certainly did not want to go to war again at the side of France. In a last-ditch attempt to bring Napoleon to the negotiating table, he sent Prince Schwarzenberg to Paris.

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Schwarzenberg’s instructions, dated 28 March 1813, stressed that the moment was ‘one of the highest importance for the future fate of Europe, of Austria, and of France in particular’, adding that it was ‘an urgent necessity’ that the two courts reach an understanding. He was to make it clear to Napoleon that while Austria would support France sincerely in pursuit of a fair peace, she did not feel herself bound to do so unconditionally. Metternich was particularly anxious to drive home the fact that Napoleon’s marriage to Marie-Louise counted for nothing in the present circumstances. ‘Policy made the marriage, and policy can unmake it,’ Schwarzenberg told Maret. But Napoleon was deaf to these hints.

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He spent his days reviewing newly-formed regiments on the Champ de Mars before they left for Germany. In the last week of March and the first two of April he made his final preparations. They included setting up a Regency Council which was to administer France while he was on campaign, and to assume control if anything were to happen to him. Schwarzenberg, who had a long interview with him at Saint-Cloud on 13 April, found him less belligerent than in the past, and genuinely eager to avoid war. ‘His language was less peremptory and, like his whole demeanour, less self-assured; he gave the impression of a man who fears losing the prestige which surrounded him, and his eyes seemed to be asking me whether I still saw in him the same man as before.’ Thirty-six hours later Napoleon left Saint-Cloud for the army, which he joined at Erfurt on 25 April.

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Alexander and Frederick William had already taken the offensive. With the Prussian army under General Gebhard Blücher in the van, they invaded Saxony, denouncing its King as a tool of Napoleon and a traitor to the cause. The King, Frederick Augustus, found himself in much the same position as Frederick William a couple of months earlier, but had even less time to make a decision as to which way to jump. The allies had their reasons for forcing the issue in this way, and they were not creditable ones.

In the secret articles of the Treaty of Kalisch, Russia had promised to restore Prussia to a position of power equal to that she had held before she lost her Polish lands to Napoleon, and to find ‘equivalents’ for her if necessary. Russia was in possession of those formerly Prussian Polish lands, but made no mention of giving them back, while the use of the word ‘equivalents’ suggested that Prussia would be rebuilt with German territory. The most desirable block of territory was Saxony. Both Alexander and Frederick William therefore hoped that Frederick Augustus would not declare for the allies and thereby place Saxony in the allied camp.

Frederick Augustus was genuinely attached to Napoleon, to whom he owed his royal crown, and, being endowed with a sense of honour, would have done anything to stand by his ally. But his small army had been annihilated in Russia, and he was now in the front line. He was being urged by Metternich to realign himself, but was both unwilling to do so and afraid of breaking his alliance with Napoleon. He attempted to sidestep the issue by taking refuge in Austria, and on 20 April concluding a treaty with her which guaranteed his continued possession of Saxony. Not long after he left it, his capital Dresden was occupied by Alexander and Frederick William, who marched in at the head of their troops, cheered by the population. But their triumph was to be short-lived.

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The allied army, consisting of some 100,000 Russians and Prussians commanded by the Russian General Ferdinand von Winzingerode and the Prussian Gebhard Blücher, marched out to face the French. But Napoleon advanced swiftly and defeated them at Lützen on 2 May. The Russians and Prussians had, according to a British officer attached to allied headquarters, shown bravery and dash, but ‘in crowds, without any method’. There had been a general want of direction in the command, and Alexander and Frederick William had only further muddled things by their presence on the battlefield. The retreat was chaotic and bad-tempered, and insults flew between the two allied armies.

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The victory demonstrated once again the superiority of French arms, but it was not decisive. Napoleon’s shortage of cavalry, a consequence of the previous year’s Russian campaign, prevented him from pursuing the enemy and turning their defeat into a rout. Although he trumpeted the news of a great victory for propaganda purposes, he was not satisfied. To Prince Eugène he wrote admitting that in view of the insignificant number of prisoners he had taken it was no victory at all.

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Alexander made light of the defeat. ‘This retreat was accomplished with admirable calm, tranquillity and order,’ he wrote to his sister Catherine, ‘and I admit that I would not have thought such a thing possible except on a parade-ground.’ The defeat nevertheless cast a pall over the allied army, and mutual recriminations followed, with Prussians blaming Russians for not holding firm, and vice-versa. The Prussians had suffered painful losses, including that of General Scharnhorst, and morale was correspondingly low. And although the allied retreat fell short of a rout, Alexander and Frederick William had to abandon Dresden and flee to Silesia. The King of Saxony hastily repudiated his alliance with Austria and hurried back to his capital to greet his ally Napoleon, who appeared to be back in control of events.

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Metternich was sanguine. He assumed that the defeat of Lützen would have sobered the allies and made them realise how much they needed the support of Austria. At the same time its limited nature would not have given Napoleon enough confidence to make him intransigent. This opened up room for manoeuvre.

Metternich hoped simultaneously to avoid the position of having to make a hasty choice between the two sides and to seize the moral high ground by adopting the role of mediator. This would leave Austria free, if Napoleon refused to cooperate, to join the allies against him – when she was ready, and only after securing favourable terms. It was not going to be easy, and Metternich realised that he might fall between two stools.

He had been in secret communication with the Russian court throughout the past year, with an eye to what might happen if Napoleon’s fortunes changed. Although obliged to send an Austrian auxiliary corps into Russia as part of Napoleon’s invasion force in 1812, he had instructed its commander, Schwarzenberg, to keep out of any fighting. This Schwarzenberg duly did, through a secret understanding with the Russian commanders facing him. When the Grande Armée began to disintegrate he pulled back into Poland, and on 6 January 1813 started to evacuate the grand duchy of Warsaw, which he was supposed to defend alongside Poniatowski’s Polish army. On 30 January he signed a secret convention similar to the one Yorck had concluded with the Russians and withdrew to Galicia, the Austrian province of Poland. This forced Poniatowski to fall back on Kraków, which opened the whole of Poland and the road west to the Russians.

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At this juncture Metternich would, circumstances permitting, have preferred to combine with Prussia in mediating a peace settlement between Russia and France, before the Russian army advanced any further west and before Napoleon reappeared on the scene with fresh forces. This would have laid the foundations for a peace that excluded both Russian and French influence from Germany and turned it into a neutral zone under Austrian and Prussian protection. Metternich mistrusted Prussia, which had let Austria down in the past and changed sides more than once out of opportunism. But he liked and respected her tall, distinguished-looking, grey-haired chancellor, Baron Karl August von Hardenberg. And, as it happened, Hardenberg had been thinking along the same lines as Metternich, and made the first tentative contact.

Hardenberg was not in fact a Prussian. Born in Hanover in 1750, he had travelled extensively before entering the service of his sovereign, King George III of England and Elector of Hanover. He had only left his service, reluctantly, after his wife had begun a scandalous and highly public affair with the Prince of Wales. It was then that he had found employment with the King of Prussia, for whom he negotiated the inglorious Treaty of Bâle in 1795, by which Prussia acquired large tranches of the Rhineland in return for ditching her allies and joining France. In 1804 he had become Prussia’s Foreign Minister and engineered the annexation of his native Hanover, once again in partnership with France against Austria and Russia, and in 1810 he was rewarded with the post of Prussian Chancellor.

Hardenberg’s attempt to negotiate an agreement with Metternich at the beginning of 1813 was overtaken by events; General Yorck’s mutiny ‘knocked the bottom out of my barrel’, to use his own words. With the Russians drawing near and the Prussian army joining them, he could not delay acceding to the alliance Alexander was offering long enough to combine with Metternich in an offer of mediation. Once he saw himself forced to accept the Russian alliance, he tried to persuade Metternich to do likewise, calculating that if Austria and Prussia were to accede together they might do so on better terms. But Metternich was not prepared to take such a chance, and had no desire to swap Austria’s subservient alliance with France for a similar one with Russia.

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He needed more time to reposition Austria, and for that it was essential to keep both Russia and France at arm’s length. Through his secretary Friedrich von Gentz he had secretly assured the Russian acting Foreign Minister, Count Charles Nesselrode, that Austria would break with Napoleon and join the allies, ‘for the eternal cause which will assuredly triumph in the end, for that cause which is neither Russian, nor Austrian, which is based on universal and immutable laws’, explaining why he could not do so quite yet.

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Gentz provided an invaluable conduit for communication with the allies. Born in Prussian Silesia, he had studied in Königsberg under Kant, then worked as a civil servant in Berlin, written for and edited a number of periodicals, and been an agent of the British Foreign Office before taking service in Austria. He was an old friend of Nesselrode, whom he knew from Berlin, and of Prussia’s ambassador in Vienna, Wilhelm von Humboldt. He was a colourful character, sentimental and naïve in his youth, when he had loved deeply and tragically before turning to a rackety life of drinking, gambling and whoring. Along with the poets Friedrich Schlegel and Jean Paul Richter, the two Humboldt brothers, Clemens Brentano, Friedrich Schleiermacher and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, he was at the centre of the intellectual circle dominated by the Jewish bluestocking Rahel Lewin, whose members switched lovers and entered into ‘intellectual marriages’ that did not constrain their freedom. Even after his marriage he carried on an exploitative relationship with Rahel Lewin, sired a child by a mistress, and had a string of affairs with notorious actresses and courtesans.

An extraordinarily hard worker, Gentz continued to study and write throughout. His political development took him from early enthusiasms for the French Revolution, through reactionary monarchism, to more pragmatic views. A clever man, widely travelled and wise in the ways of the world, he was quick to see through people and was an invaluable assistant to Metternich.

Metternich was also in contact with the Russian court through Count Stackelberg, the as yet unofficial Russian envoy in Vienna. And at the beginning of March he had sent his own envoy to allied headquarters at Kalisch. For this mission he had selected Count Louis-Joseph Lebzeltern, a bright young diplomat who had served under him in Paris and in 1810 been sent to St Petersburg to establish a personal link between Alexander and Metternich. Lebzeltern had made himself popular in Russia, which he left only at the outbreak of war in 1812.

When Lebzeltern appeared at Russian headquarters on 5 March he was warmly embraced by Alexander, who expressed the hope that Francis would save Europe by joining the cause. But Lebzeltern detected ‘a pronounced mistrust of our intentions’. Alexander’s apparent cordiality turned into impatience when he discovered that Metternich’s envoy had brought with him nothing beyond expressions of good will. He demanded immediate commitment, and dismissed the objection that the ground had to be prepared first, declaring that the details could be worked out at a congress to be held later.

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This conversation had taken place a full week before Prussia’s declaration of war against France, so it is hardly surprising that Metternich had not been ready to commit himself and his country. And there were deeper causes for concern. Russia and Prussia were weak. French might and Napoleon’s military talents could easily defeat them in the spring. Both had in the past made opportunistic peaces with France, and might do so again. If Austria were to betray her alliance with France now and expose herself to Napoleon’s anger, she would end up paying a heavy price. Metternich’s caution was strongly reinforced by his imperial master’s aversion to risk.

The Emperor Francis was not a heroic figure. Born in Florence in 1768, he was meant to succeed his father as Grand Duke of Tuscany, but his uncle Joseph II’s failure to produce an heir placed his father, Leopold, on the imperial throne, which he himself ascended in 1792. According to his uncle Joseph, Francis was ‘of a dull and sullen disposition’ and ‘intellectually lazy’. Although fairly energetic in his performance of the actions of everyday life, he slowed down markedly whenever thought was required, sometimes literally coming to a standstill. Like his uncle Joseph, he was distrustful of new ideas and almost allergic to enthusiasm and passion in others. Humourless by nature, he was indifferent to most forms of entertainment, and unlike his uncle he was very devout.

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He had learnt his lesson painfully in 1809, when, carried away by a wave of patriotic fervour sweeping the country and the optimism of his then chancellor, Count Johann Philipp Stadion, he had embarked on a war to liberate Germany from French domination while Napoleon’s back was turned. The ease with which Napoleon, despite being heavily engaged in Spain at the time, had managed to turn about and defeat Austria had left an indelible impression on Francis and Metternich. The only thing that had saved the Austrian state from annihilation had been the politic marriage of Francis’s daughter Marie-Louise to the French conqueror. She had been sacrificed to ensure the survival of the Habsburg monarchy. There was no knowing what sacrifices Napoleon might demand if he were provoked again.

Metternich’s apparent subservience to Napoleon was unpopular in Austria. He had come to power as a result of the fall of Stadion, and was even accused of having engineered it. While Stadion continued to enjoy public esteem, Metternich was regarded as representing a ‘peace party’ dedicated to a policy of abasement; there had recently even been plots to assassinate him, hatched by bellicose officers.

While he continued to play for time, his opponents did everything to try to force the issue, obliging him to act in ways that only increased his unpopularity. The Emperor’s brother Archduke John was at the head of a conspiracy, fed by British money, to raise a revolt against French rule in Carynthia, Tyrol and Illyria, hoping to launch a guerrilla similar to that in Spain throughout French-ruled Italy. This was just the kind of thing that Metternich had no time for – it could achieve little, yet if Napoleon were to hear of Austria’s complicity, the retaliation could be draconian. On 25 February he arrested the British courier delivering funds to the conspirators, and a few weeks later a number of other conspirators, including the Archduke himself. The courier was given safe-conduct back to London, and furnished with letters for Castlereagh suggesting the resumption of relations and the despatch of a diplomatic envoy.

At the beginning of April, Hardenberg had sent Metternich a message suggesting a secret meeting between them, in the presence of Nesselrode. Metternich had no desire to discuss German affairs in front of a Russian, nor did he wish to arouse Napoleon’s suspicions. Narbonne had alerted Napoleon to the fact that there was ‘an underground connection’ between Vienna and his enemies, and Metternich knew he was being observed.

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