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

Metternich filled in his spare time pleasantly enough. The weather had turned fine and there was a festive atmosphere in the beautiful baroque city, which, in the words of Napoleon’s secretary Baron Fain, ‘presented the curiously mixed aspect of a capital and a military camp’. The armistice had cheered all those who longed for peace, and there were balls and parties for the French officers and members of Napoleon’s court.

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Metternich was feeling very pleased with himself. ‘I am beginning to believe a little in my star as Napoleon believes in his, when I see that I am now making the whole of Europe turn around a point that I and I alone have determined some months ago,’ he wrote to his wife after his second meeting with Napoleon. ‘There are crowds of people continually standing under my windows hoping to discover what I think,’ he noted with satisfaction, adding that he was frequently stopped in the street and asked whether there would be peace or war. He also took the opportunity to go shopping for presents for his wife and daughter, for which he received touching thanks. But his mind, when it was not occupied with affairs of state, was elsewhere. Metternich had fallen in love.

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The object of his affections was Wilhelmina, Princess of Sagan. She had, according to Countess Rozalia Rzewuska, who knew her well, ‘noble and regular features, a superb figure, and the bearing of a goddess’; but if she was a goddess, she was a fallen one. ‘She sins seven times a day and loves as often as others dine,’ Metternich would later write, with some justification. But it was not entirely her fault. ‘The consequences of a neglected upbringing and the frightening immorality of her paternal home had the most unfortunate influence on the destiny of the young and charming Wilhelmine,’ Rzewuska continues. ‘Abandoned to the vivacity of her senses, devoid of any religious principles, her imagination branded by pernicious example, Wilhelmine found herself defenceless against the great dangers which her beauty stored up for her.’

As a young girl she was seduced by her mother’s lover, the Swedish adventurer Gustav von Armfeldt, and became pregnant. A hasty marriage was arranged to the Prince de Rohan, who tolerated her continuing depravities as she tolerated his. But their ‘entente immorale’ was of short duration. They divorced, and Wilhelmina married the Russian Prince Trubetskoy, who was besotted by her and whom she dismissed ‘as they left the altar’. She was similarly curt with her third husband, Count Schulemburg. She was enormously rich and generous with it, and she made up in charm and natural wit what she lacked in upbringing and education.

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Metternich had originally regarded her as a friend and confidante, and the passionate feelings she kindled in him took him unawares. In lengthy and somewhat adolescent love letters he expressed his astonishment at the way they had crept up on him. He revelled in the first paroxysms of love, mixing up passionate outpourings with increasingly exalted views on the political situation. ‘I am going there like the real man of God, bearing the burden of mankind on my shoulders!’ he announced in a note penned hastily as he was leaving for Dresden.

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She returned his love, but she did not believe in exclusivity, and continued to receive visits from Windischgraetz whenever he could get leave from the army. She was enjoying life now that her country house had become the nexus of European politics. ‘Since the Emperor went to Gitschin at the beginning of June, I established myself here and experienced the most interesting, lively and extraordinary weeks of my life,’ Gentz wrote to Wessenberg from Ratiborzitz on 5 July. ‘You probably know, my dear friend, that at this strange point in time, when the four foremost sovereigns of the continent, along with their cabinets, ministers, foreign envoys, etc., and with 600,000 men under arms are concentrated in the narrow strip of land between Dresden and Reichenbach, the glamour of the residences and capitals of Europe – that is, as far as interest is concerned – are outshone by three or four Bohemian castles and today, a man of the world no longer speaks of Paris, Vienna, Petersburg, and so on, but of Gitschin, Optoschna and Ratiboržiz. In this last place – on top of everything, a little paradise which the Duchess of Sagan is making into a veritable heaven – one has seen in the last three weeks nothing but crowned heads, prime ministers, diplomatic conferences, couriers, etc.’

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As he was getting nowhere in Dresden, Metternich decided to leave on 30 June. He was in his travelling clothes and his coach was waiting below when he received a note summoning him for an interview with Napoleon. He gave orders for the horses to be unharnessed and went to the Marcolini villa, dressed as he was. He found Napoleon in the same mood as before, and was resigning himself to listen to the habitual torrent of bluster and complaint, when the Emperor suddenly ushered him into a study and sat him down at a table at which Maret was poised to take notes. He then asked him to set out Austria’s proposals for the mediation. Metternich obliged, and to his surprise Napoleon gave his assent. A note was drawn up to the effect that the belligerent parties would send plenipotentiaries to a congress to be held under Austrian mediation at Vienna or Prague, to begin in the first days of July.

Napoleon suggested including plenipotentiaries from Britain, the United States of America and Spain, but Metternich demurred. He considered it so unlikely that Britain would agree to take part that he refused to agree to inviting her, as her probable failure to respond might provide Napoleon with an excuse for declaring the congress invalid. It was therefore agreed that only Spain and the United States be invited to send their representatives.

‘Never has an important piece of business been expedited so promptly,’ Metternich noted with satisfaction. An hour later his carriage was rolling out of Dresden, and on 1 July he was back with Francis at Gitschin. On 4 July he was at Ratiborzitz, conferring with Hardenberg, Humboldt, Nesselrode and Stadion on how to conduct the negotiations in the congress that was to assemble at Prague in a few days’ time.

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6 Farce in Prague (#ulink_c0b669f0-9328-53ba-b8b7-b5d66d3364e7)

A few days after Metternich’s departure from Dresden, Napoleon received unwelcome news from Spain. Wellington had taken the offensive at the end of May, obliging the French to fall back. Threatened with the possibility of being cut off, Napoleon’s brother King Joseph was forced to abandon Madrid. The British caught up with him and the retreating French army and routed it at Vittoria on 21 June. It was a shattering defeat, rendered all the more shameful by the loss of all the army’s and the King’s baggage.

Berthier and other marshals advised Napoleon to evacuate all his garrisons, pull back his forces from Germany and concentrate a powerful army on the Rhine. It would have been the sensible course. But if he were to pull back he would be abandoning his German allies, and such a sign of weakness would give heart to all his enemies; besides which he found the idea of giving ground hard to stomach. He was also haunted by the notion that his people would not tolerate his making peace on any but victorious terms, that if he failed to come up with something that could be dressed up as a victory, what he called his ‘magie’ would be dispelled. He therefore held firm, and demonstrated his determination to stand by his allies by signing, on 10 July, a fresh treaty of alliance with Denmark.

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Napoleon was still hoping that at some point he might be able to strike a deal with Alexander. ‘Russia has the right to an advantageous peace,’ he told his secretary Baron Fain. ‘She will have bought it with the devastation of her lands, with the loss of her capital and with two years of war. Austria, on the contrary, does not deserve anything. In the present state of affairs, I would not mind a peace that would be glorious for Russia; but I would feel a very real repugnance to see Austria reap the fruit and the honours of a pacification of Europe as the prize for the crime she is committing by betraying our alliance.’

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But Alexander was by now the one monarch least likely to make peace with Napoleon on any terms. And even if his own army was not in belligerent mood, he knew that he was strongly supported by the Prussian generals, who were so sanguine that in the course of a military confabulation at Trachenberg (Żmigród) in mid-July, they came to the conclusion that they could defeat Napoleon without the help of Austria.

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Napoleon’s only hope of peace lay with Metternich, who still favoured a peaceful outcome, for a number of practical reasons. Having inherited a virtually bankrupt state in 1809, he had worked hard to rebuild its finances and was unwilling to see these frittered away on war, the most ruinous activity a state could pursue. War was also notoriously unpredictable, and even if successful could produce unexpected political tremors. Finally, the outbreak of war necessarily relegated diplomatists like himself to a secondary, and therefore unacceptable, role. As he took up residence in his roomy palace in Prague, which had been chosen as the venue for the congress due to open on 10 July, he faced with relish ‘the grand and immense task’ that faced him, and assured Wilhelmina that ‘I will do what I can to save this world.’

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He was certainly well placed to manage events, and his choice of Prague as the venue for the congress was no whim. The ancient Czech city lay within the Habsburg dominions, and was embraced by the formidable Austrian intelligence apparatus. As well as running the government of the empire, Metternich’s State Chancellery controlled a number of auxiliary services, such as the posts, the archives, and so on. It had a codes office to encrypt and decrypt secret correspondence, and a translation department, since the official language of government for Hungary was Latin, which was also employed in communications with the Vatican and in other state business; the administration of most of the monarchy’s German lands was carried on in German; and that of its Italian dominions in Italian, with French remaining the language of diplomacy and the court.

In the last decades of the eighteenth century the sheer quantity of information being processed through this immense machine inspired greater invigilation. With the outbreak of the French Revolution and the supposed threat of Jacobin conspiracy and contagion, the accent was shifted to surveillance. Francis and Metternich shared an almost obsessive fear of conspiracy and revolution, and both believed in being well-informed.

Metternich employed hundreds of spies and battalions of men who were expert at unsealing letters, copying them and resealing them with the speed necessary to avoid arousing suspicion – the letters might be lifted from a post bag while the horses were being changed, or simply removed from a desk in a private house for a few moments. Others would then translate and decrypt the copies. The head of the decryption office once boasted that he had broken eighty-five foreign codes, one of them, used by the Russian diplomatic service, taking him as long as four years to crack. In order to extend the range of his surveillance, Metternich managed, by offering faster communications and cheaper rates, to divert various international postal routes through Austrian dominions, where interesting-looking letters could be examined.

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No matter or item was too humble, or for that matter too grand, for the attention of Metternich’s spies. The archives of the State Chancellery are to this day full of copies of intercepted letters, some of them of the utmost banality, others of evident diplomatic or political interest, some of them between people of no social or political standing whatever, others quite the opposite. Not only was the public and private correspondence of all foreign diplomats and statesmen to and from Vienna intercepted and scrutinised; even intimate letters between members of the imperial family, including those sent and received by the Emperor Francis himself, were intercepted and copied just like anyone else’s.

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In the event, the Congress of Prague turned out to be little short of a farce. Napoleon’s nomination as his plenipotentiaries of Caulaincourt and Narbonne, both of them negotiators of the highest rank, suggested that his intent was serious. Narbonne, who reached Prague first, was surprised to discover that Frederick William had sent not Hardenberg, but Humboldt, a man of recognised talents but mediocre diplomatic standing, and a declared advocate of war besides. He was downright shocked when he heard that instead of Nesselrode Alexander had sent as his plenipotentiary Jean Anstett, a man of no experience and of poor reputation who, to make matters worse, was Alsatian by birth and therefore theoretically a renegade French subject. It was an astonishing demonstration of contempt for Napoleon and for the congress, and Narbonne informed Metternich that he could not sit down to talks with them, pending the arrival of Caulaincourt with instructions from Napoleon. On hearing the identity of the allied plenipotentiaries, Napoleon held back Caulaincourt, and when he did finally send him he did not furnish him with the requisite credentials.

This boded ill for the congress’s chances of success. The armistice had been prolonged, to 10 August, and if terms were not agreed by midnight on that date hostilities would resume, with Austria in the allied camp. This deadline, the nature of the allied plenipotentiaries and Napoleon’s sluggishness raise the question of whether anyone was serious about the congress.

‘At heart, nobody truly wanted peace,’ Nesselrode would later admit, adding that the congress was a ‘joke’ and that Alexander and Frederick William had been opposed to it from the start. Hardenberg was similarly sceptical, while in his letters from Prague Humboldt repeatedly assured his wife that nobody, least of all himself, was interested in making peace at this stage.

Metternich probably did favour a peaceful solution, though he was growing increasingly sceptical of its chances with each passing day. And while he reassured an anxious Humboldt that there would be war on 11 August whatever happened, he was determined to make it look as though he had been left with no option.

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Ironically, the one person who genuinely hoped to gain something from the congress was Napoleon, even though his motives were questionable. Caulaincourt and Narbonne were very much in earnest, though the latter thought peace a forlorn hope, and they set themselves up in a manner befitting a delegation to proper peace talks, much to Hardenberg’s amusement. Their brief was to keep negotiations going independently of the armistice. ‘After 10 August the armistice works against us,’ Napoleon explained: he believed that the Russians and the Prussians would be ready to take the field, while the Austrians would still be unprepared. This would allow him to defeat the Russians and Prussians while continuing to negotiate with Austria. ‘This is what we wish, but we must dissimulate and let them believe that we want the armistice to be prolonged indefinitely,’ he wrote. It seems that Napoleon still believed that he could make mischief between the allies, and that he would be able to split them at some stage and make a separate peace with Russia.

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His calculations were based on two false premises. The first was that the Austrians would not be ready to take the field on 10 August. The second was that a decisive victory over the Russians and the Prussians would tip the balance in his favour. Over dinner on 3 August Metternich explained to Caulaincourt, in whom he recognised a kindred soul, that times had changed in this respect. A battle lost by the allies now would make no material difference, as it could not change their attitude, which was one of exasperation with Napoleon based on the conviction that it was not possible to make a lasting peace with him. A battle lost by Napoleon on the other hand weakened him fundamentally, since it diminished his military prestige.

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The congress never did convene properly. Metternich had proposed that rather than sitting down to open verbal negotiations, the plenipotentiaries of the three powers should put their case in verbal notes addressed to him as mediator. Humboldt and Anstett agreed, while Narbonne and Caulaincourt insisted that there must at least be some verbal negotiation. This difference of opinion quickly degenerated into pointless argument, with both sides invoking various eighteenth-century congresses as precedent. ‘Nothing could be more amusing than the story of this supposed Congress, which has already lasted more than three weeks without a single question of form having been decided, and which will, it appears, be dissolved before it opens,’ Gentz wrote to a friend on 30 July.

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Gentz was certainly enjoying himself. There was little for him to do, since there were no conferences to minute and no memoranda to draft. The weather was fine, and he would spend the long summer evenings and balmy nights strolling through the beautiful city with Humboldt and Metternich, discussing everything from love to philosophy. Metternich was less happy. Wilhelmina had promised to come to Prague so they could continue their intimacy, but he waited and waited, sending her letter after letter brimming with despair and jealousy. He complained to Humboldt that he had ‘lost his joie de vivre’.

Humboldt, who was beginning to alter his view of Metternich, assuring his wife that he was intelligent and ‘never unreasonable’, was in contrastingly high spirits. He was comfortably lodged in a princely palace and filled his spare time with work on his translation of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon. His superior Hardenberg had recently been distracted by an affair with a woman of whom Humboldt apparently disapproved, and this show of ‘depravity’ encouraged his speculations that he might be able to take over his post himself.

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As the deadline of 10 August approached, Caulaincourt made one last attempt to establish a line of negotiation with Metternich. He explained that Napoleon’s suspicions of him were largely based on the fact that the four conditions for negotiation put forward until now were not credible, and invited conjecture as to what others might lurk behind them. If Metternich were to state the allies’ full demands at the outset, Napoleon would know what he was up against and respond accordingly.

On 5 August, just five days before the armistice was to expire, Napoleon sent a note to Caulaincourt instructing him to sound out Metternich on his price for abandoning the allies and returning to the French alliance. Metternich’s response was contained in a note dated 8 August which confirmed the same four conditions, with the only difference that he now dropped the one that Illyria be returned to Austria and demanded that instead of dissolving the Rheinbund, Napoleon renounce his protectorate over it. He also added the stipulation that the conclusion of a general peace was to be accompanied by an agreement to be enforced by all sides aimed at protecting weaker powers. Caulaincourt said that if it were up to him, he would accept, but expressed doubt as to whether Napoleon would.

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‘The great moment has arrived at last, my dearest friend,’ Metternich wrote to his wife on 10 August. That evening Humboldt, Anstett and all those in favour of war gathered in Metternich’s palace. Watches were consulted with impatience, and when the chimes of midnight rang out over the sleeping city Metternich announced that the armistice was over and Austria was now a member of the alliance. He ordered a beacon to be lit which, by a chain reaction, carried the news all the way to the Silesian border and on to allied headquarters at Reichenbach. By the morning Russian and Prussian troops were on the march to join the Austrian army outside Prague. ‘Everything is decided, dearest Li,’ a delighted Humboldt wrote to his wife.

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