Vienna, 1814: How the Conquerors of Napoleon Made Love, War, and Peace at the Congress of Vienna (26 page)

Warnings of the tsar’s tendency to act unilaterally seemed to have hit their mark with an alarming accuracy. But there was something else unsettling about this announcement. When the Prussian army marched into the region, it made the startling claim that it acted with “the consent of Austria and of England.”

Metternich was furious; he had done nothing of the sort. As he put it in his official letter, Austria had promised to accept the seizure of Saxony if—and only if—the Prussians succeeded in preventing Russian gains in Poland. Failure in this question rendered the offer void. Metternich’s conditional acceptance was printed as if it had been absolute. It was a complete misrepresentation, he claimed.

Castlereagh also protested against this distortion of the facts, and showed concern about the implications for his diplomatic mission. He had gambled on Prussia and lost. The king of Prussia was now closer to the tsar than ever before; moreover, when the Russian army moved out of Saxony, it marched straight into Poland, fortifying its hold on the disputed territory. Russia was simply acting like the dictator of Europe, imposing its views on the other states. Castlereagh’s policy was in shambles.

Chapter 16

T
HE
L
AST
J
OUST

The Congress seemed like a theatrical performance while the house was burning.

—C
OUNTESS
E
LISE VON
B
ERNSTORFF

W
hile the congress worked and danced, there was a peculiar forty-seven-year-old in a small flat on the fourth floor of a narrow building on the Mölker Bastei, hunched over a black Auster pianoforte. He was a stocky man of average height, with a mass of dark curly hair, thick eyebrows, and an intense gaze. His nose was “square like a lion,” and he had the most “marvelous dimples, formed by two jawbones capable of cracking the hardest nuts.” This was Ludwig van Beethoven, and he was composing music for the Congress of Vienna.

During the autumn of 1814, Beethoven was at the height of his popularity. He had moved to Habsburg capital twenty-two years before, from Bonn, where he had been born in 1770. Beethoven had never liked Vienna or its people: “From the Emperor to the bootblack, all the Viennese are worthless,” he had generalized. He did, however, enjoy the strolls, particularly out on the slopes of the Kahlenberg at the edge of the Vienna Woods.

Here he walked daily, sometimes “muttering and howling” as thoughts passed through his head. He made sure to bring along paper and pencil for any impromptu jottings—after all, he believed, it is the “woods, trees and rocks [that] produce the echo which man desires to hear.” When Beethoven arrived back at his flat, he was known, on a good day, to rush excitedly to his black stool and proceed to lose himself at the keyboard. Walking companions, if there had been any, were quickly forgotten.

His rooms overlooking the old city wall were just as cluttered and untidy as his clothes were shoddy and sloppy. One musician who paid a visit, just after the congress, described them as “dreary almost sordid…in the greatest disorder: music, money, clothes lay on the floor, linen in a heap on the unclean bed, the open grand piano was covered in thick dust, and broken coffee cups lay on the table.”

Beethoven was one of the first of a new generation of artists, regarded less as a craftsman for hire than as a genius, who, it was believed, could make his own rules and live on his own terms. The concept of genius, influenced by the Romantic movement, was changing, from a particular talent that someone possessed to a description that applied to the whole person, and Beethoven personified this shift. His odd behavior and eccentricities were tolerated as a hallmark of his genius.

Indeed, when he went out to dine at inns or restaurants, Beethoven preferred a table in the far corner, and would often sit there brooding. Gloomy and sullen at times, the musician liked to complain about the endless problems caused by his lazy or scheming servants or friends. He might also, suddenly and unexpectedly, lash out at anyone nearby. He had only recently hurled a plate of food at a waiter.

For the last two years, Beethoven’s hearing had been steadily growing worse, and his guests already had to shout. Along with the deterioration, caused, it seems, by a growth in his inner ear by the bone, Beethoven’s idiosyncrasies became more marked. He was in pain, and losing contact with the world of sound was only increasing his own sense of isolation. With his rough edges and abruptness, he had already been called an “unlicked bear.” He was paying even less attention now to social conventions.

At the moment, the grumpy genius was preparing for the upcoming concert at the Redoutensaal of the Hofburg. His compositions, he knew, should celebrate the Allied victory over Napoleon, and commemorate the Congress of Vienna, convened to reconstruct Europe.

W
HEN THE MONARCHS
were not acting like “spoiled children” or “playing soldiers,” as Baronne du Montet put it, they spent many mornings hunting—often stag, boar, hare, or pheasant. The English physician Richard Bright witnessed one of the hunting parties at the Congress of Vienna and thought it had all the “barbarity of a bullfight.” The carnage, however, was often on a much larger scale.

On November 10, the court traveled to the Lainzer Tiergarten outside Vienna for one such hunt. Some twenty stands had been constructed for the occasion, like an amphitheater. No fewer than six hundred wild boar, and a number of other animals, had been rounded up from nearby forests and were then released, a few at a time, into the small makeshift arena. The monarchs, ready with gun at hand and assistants at their side to help load, shot according to rank. First the emperors fired and then the kings, followed by the princes, dukes, field marshals, and so on. The Swiss banker Jean-Gabriel Eynard was appalled; there was no skill, stamina, or even risk. It was pure slaughter.

Meanwhile, as the Committee of Eight started working its way through the affairs of Italy, proceeding in a geographical fashion, as planned, the first item on the agenda was resolving the fate of Genoa, a port on the northeastern coast that had been a commercial power since the Middle Ages. The ancient republic had been seized by Napoleon, incorporated into his empire in 1805, and transformed, as lamented famously in the first sentence of Tolstoy’s
War and Peace,
into the “private estates of the Bonaparte family.” Now, with the war over, Genoa was eager to be restored to its independence and regain its former status as a free republic. This was, after all, what the city had been promised.

In the spring of 1814, at the end of the war, Great Britain had assured Genoa that its republic would be revived “as it had been before the Revolution.” All the city had to do was officially support the Allied army. The Genoese accepted these terms, and now sent a delegation to Vienna to oversee its promised restoration.

But there was a rude shock awaiting the city’s chief delegate, the twenty-eight-year-old scion of a prominent banking family, the Marquis de Brignole-Sale. Britain was now claiming that the man who made the offer of restoring the republic, Lord William Bentinck, the commander of the Mediterranean and minister to Sicily, was not authorized to make such a claim, as indeed he was not. Worse still, rumors circulated that Britain had promised that Genoa itself would be handed over to the king of Sardinia. The rumors were true. Castlereagh had signed his name to that agreement, a secret article attached to the Treaty of Paris.

Castlereagh and the Allies had reasoned that Genoa, a small and relatively weak republic, would be a temptation to future French aggression; moreover, situated as the city was near strategic Alpine mountain passages, the loss of Genoa could threaten all of north Italy as well. The king of Sardinia (Piedmont-Sardinia) could defend the territory much more effectively. Genoa was then just another part of Castlereagh’s strategy of building an “iron ring” around France: the greater Netherlands in the north, the stronger Prussia in the east, and now this enlarged Sardinia in the south.

So despite the protests of Genoa’s delegate, not to mention the millions he was said to be dispensing to lobby support, the Committee of Eight remained unmoved. Previous promises to the city were now denied and shrugged aside. Arguments for restoring the republic, the legitimate form of government before the war, were made in vain. The delegates simply pointed to the words inked in a secret article of the treaty, “The King of Sardinia will receive an addition to his territory in the state of Genoa,” and proceeded to do just that.

As the Great Powers planned to proceed down the peninsula on to the next Italian questions, they were also busy appointing a number of standing committees, not too different from what Talleyrand had proposed. The first of the special committees, the German Committee, had been established in the middle of October to create a federation and write a constitution, though the trouble of Saxony had embittered all its discussions. On the sixteenth of November, the German Committee had actually stopped meeting. It would be some five months before this committee would convene again.

The Great Powers would eventually appoint ten such specialized committees. There would be one, for example, to ensure the free navigation of rivers, and another to sort out the tangled questions that governed diplomatic etiquette. Others would be created as the need arose.

One new committee, appointed on the twelfth of November, was the Swiss Committee, which, like its counterparts, clearly faced some major challenges. Switzerland, at the time of the Vienna Congress, was a federal union of some twenty-two cantons that varied greatly in culture and history. Some spoke French as their official language, others German, and one Italian, not to mention a few places like Engadine and Graubünden, which had a large minority population speaking a fourth language, the Latin-based Romansh. More divisive still, some cantons were predominantly Catholic, others Protestant. Some were bastions of aristocracy, and others fiercely democratic.

The cantons could not agree on their vision for Switzerland. Some wanted closer cooperation between the cantons, and others wanted less; some wanted in the federation, others out. Two different diets—or directing bodies—had been created the past year, one around the aristocratic Bern, the other around the more democratic Zürich. Many feared that their country was headed toward civil war. The Swiss Committee, it was hoped, would find a satisfying solution. It would be difficult to secure peace in Europe as long as war raged in its center.

B
Y THE MIDDLE
of November, as new committees met behind closed doors, two main topics appeared to dominate discussions in Vienna salons. The first was the fate of the king of Saxony, whose kingdom had been seized by the Prussians. The second, more pleasantly, was the upcoming Carousel at the Spanish Riding School, a full-scale attempt to re-create a medieval tournament. Of all the grand spectacles at the Congress of Vienna, many thought that this was the greatest.

Vienna had been eagerly looking forward to the pageant, scheduled for Wednesday evening, November 23. The Festivals Committee had pored over accounts of other elaborate carousels from history, hoping to understand their conventions and then “surpass them in splendor.”

The Spanish Riding School, designed by Josef Emanuel Fischer von Erlach and completed in 1735, was a magical setting for the Carousel. Underneath the crystal chandeliers blazing with candles, the arena was shaped in a long rectangle well suited for equestrian maneuvers. At one end was the imperial grandstand, with rows of gilded armchairs waiting for the sovereigns. The balcony at the other end of the hall was reserved for the twenty-four ladies selected to be the tournament’s
belles d’amour,
the “Queens of Love,” for whom their champions would battle. Galleries ran along the sides connecting the two grandstands. The columns around the hall were hung with the armor, weapons, and mottoes of the knights scheduled to compete.

Crowds started to arrive in the early evening, and by about seven, when La Garde-Chambonas arrived with Prince de Ligne, the arena was nearly full. Counterfeiters had once again produced a number of bogus tickets for the occasion, and the baron’s police were put on the case. They wanted to prevent too many uninvited guests from gate-crashing their imagined medieval tournament.