Vienna, 1814: How the Conquerors of Napoleon Made Love, War, and Peace at the Congress of Vienna (48 page)

But imposing the Bourbons over the wishes of Alexander, Metternich, and clearly many Frenchmen would not be easy. Many Englishmen back at home were also opposed to war for this purpose. English debt was already of substantial proportions, amassed in the recent war against the United States and the long, drawn-out struggle against Napoleon. In February, it had passed the £700 million mark, and payments on this debt alone consumed about one-third of the state’s annual budget.

In the last war, Britain had paid Russia, Prussia, Austria, Spain, Portugal, Sweden, Sicily, Bavaria, and many German states to fight Napoleon. Was Britain, again, to “subsidize all the world”? Was restoring the Bourbons again really worth risking so much loss in life, not to mention the wartime threats to English commerce and the continued hated income tax, the first in the world?

Members of the opposition Whig Party certainly did not think so. Sir Francis Burdett, for one, did not wish “to plunge this country into a sea of blood to reinstate the Bourbon line in France.” This dynasty did not have a good track record. One wit, Richard Sheridan, expressed the discontent rather well, summing up British foreign policy over the previous 150 years: half of it trying to remove the Bourbons, and the other half trying to restore them.

Besides, the Whigs argued, look how easily Napoleon had returned. “No man can doubt that this Napoleon stands as Emperor of France by the will of the French people.” Burdett spoke for many when he concluded, “Let then the French settle their own affairs.” It was not for Britain or Europe to intervene in their domestic disputes.

While these matters were debated in Parliament, newspapers, and clubs around the country, the Duke of Wellington made a fateful decision: He decided to pledge Britain’s full support to the war effort. It was a risky move even in a time of considerable ministerial discretion. Yet he pushed ahead and guaranteed British participation. By the time the Allied troops were marching, none of the opposition—or anyone else in the country, for that matter—had time to realize what had happened. Britain was going to war.

A
S MATTERS LOOKED
grim for the Bourbons in their exiled court at Ghent, Belgium, Talleyrand was praised as their best hope for the future. Arnail François, Comte de Jaucourt, his colleague in the Foreign Ministry, wrote, pleading with him to finish his affairs in Vienna, hurry back to the king, and accept a position of power.

At the same time, many of the other exiled ministers around the king also wanted Talleyrand recalled—but certainly not to offer him any more influence. For many, Talleyrand was to be lured out of Vienna and then sacked. Extreme royalists around the king had never forgiven him for his past; he was an aristocrat who joined the Revolution and then helped bring Bonaparte to power. There was no amount of evidence that would convince them that Talleyrand was not intriguing. The viper would soon again shed his skin.

By late April, King Louis XVIII would, in fact, summon Talleyrand back to his headquarters in Ghent. Talleyrand, however, stalled, and with good reason. He had to be cautious, as he suspected, quite rightly, the motives of many of the king’s closest advisers. What’s more, he knew that the business in Vienna was about to be wrapped up, and he did not want to leave as the congress approached its climax.

“My anxiety to find myself at Your Majesty’s side would make me start tomorrow,” Talleyrand answered, “if affairs were sufficiently advanced to render only my signature necessary, or if the termination of the Congress were still in the distance.” In another excuse, he argued that as others were preparing to depart, he could leave shortly, so as not to injure the king’s interests by being one of the first to leave town.

Two weeks later, Talleyrand was still making excuses for his delay. It was clear that those who wanted his recall, supporters and enemies alike, would have to think of something more powerful than a direct order from the king.

Chapter 29

F
AREWELLS

The demon is not far from us, and the Gates of Hell are always open.

—C
ARDINAL
C
ONSALVI

D
etermined to strike a deal, Napoleon kept on dispatching messengers to Vienna, and they kept on being stopped. Even his most recent courier, a former chamberlain to Emperor Francis, Monsieur de Stassart, had not succeeded. Arrested in Bavaria, his letters were seized and sent to the congress. Metternich promised to open these confiscated papers in front of his colleagues.

On May 3, Napoleon’s secret letters, seals seemingly unbroken, were brought into the conference room and set down on the familiar green table. Did Metternich know their contents already, with the help of the Austrian Cabinet Noir? It was hard to imagine that he did not.

Before he opened the letters, though, Metternich first wanted all nonessential diplomats “politely eased” out of the room. At that particular moment, this included only one person, Prussia’s minister of war, General Hermann von Boyen, who had arrived in town the previous month. Ambassador Humboldt was asked to escort his colleague out of the room, which he did, and then rushed back in for the show. The minister of war was left outside, upset and insulted.

With great flair, Metternich broke the seals, unfolded the letters, and began deciphering Napoleon’s monstrous scrawl. Sure enough, the emperor was emphasizing his pacific intentions and hoping to persuade Austria to accept peace with him. Metternich promptly affirmed his commitment to the Allies and announced that he would not even dignify Napoleon’s request with a response. This scene was exploited for all it was worth as a show of solidarity. He might as well have bowed and blown kisses after his performance.

Later that night, while dining in Chancellor Hardenberg’s rooms, Humboldt had the misfortune of running into Boyen again. The Prussian war minister was quite upset with Humboldt—enraged is more accurate. By the end of the tense conversation, on a second-floor balcony, the Prussian minister of war had challenged the ambassador to a duel.

Humboldt, to be sure, was no fighter. Count Carl Axel Löwenhielm, the Swedish delegate, earlier summed up this fact well, when he remarked ironically that if the issues of the Congress of Vienna ended up being decided by physical combat of the participants, then he hoped to draw the Prussian ambassador.

When Humboldt tried to apologize, the proud minister of war refused to listen. The challenge had been issued, and the duel would take place as planned, he insisted. They would meet that Friday, May 5, at three in the afternoon, and drive out to a lonely spot, just outside Vienna.

At the appointed time, after Humboldt had spent the morning in conference and then dined, as he put it, like “Homeric heroes always did before battle,” he went to his duel. The location was actually moved to a more secluded place, “a pretty meadow near a wood” in the wine-growing region at Spitz. The minister of war, who had the first shot, aimed his pistol and, at the last second, deliberately shot wide. Humboldt’s pistol then also “misfired.” As Humboldt wrote home afterward, the two duelists realized the “pure foolishness” of the quarrel, had a good laugh, and walked back to town like old friends. Humboldt said that he had learned a lesson, namely, that it was much braver to reject a duel than it was to fight one.

Meanwhile, with most police resources concentrated on providing information and security in Vienna, the surrounding countryside was left more exposed and preyed upon, as one person complained, by many “plunderers, deserters and discharged soldiers averse to honest labor.” Among them was a young veteran, Captain Johann Georg Grasel, who had become so thoroughly disgusted with the prevailing “unequal distribution of wealth” in evidence that he had taken matters into his own hands. Young Grasel had become an outlaw: He would be the Robin Hood of the Vienna Congress.

Legends were quickly developing around this rogue and his gang of robbers, hiding out in a secret lair somewhere in the Vienna Woods. His followers were growing, and sometimes said to number in the fifties, sixties, or even the hundreds. Crimes were traced back to him all throughout the spring, and magnified into mythic proportions. They had a team of horses for quick strikes, always limited, as the story went, to “castles and public offices.” As the tradition developed, under the influence of Romanticism, Grasel was celebrated as a people’s bandit who would “rob the State and the rich in order to give to those he believed to be unjustly poor and oppressed.”

Grasel and his band of forest robbers did not penetrate any of the major delegations, or attack the main figures, but he aroused great interest. Critics of Napoleon saw Grasel as the outlaw emperor in miniature, while others compared the bandits to Prussians seizing territory at will from the Saxons and other Germans. Critics who accused the congress, as a whole, of “robbing the have-nots for the benefit of the haves” found the popular bandit alluring, turning the tables on the rich and powerful. It would not last for long, however. Captain Grasel was arrested later that year, and eventually executed.

N
APOLEON, MEANWHILE, WAS
hoping to show the true feelings of the tsar’s so-called allies, Britain and Austria, and sent him a copy of the secret treaty that they had signed, with Bourbon France, back in January. Alexander was furious. He threw a fit, stomping around his suites in the palace and glowering so much that, in the words of his adviser Kapodistrias, his face turned bright red and his ears purple. He called for Metternich at once. “Do you know this document?” the tsar demanded.

As Metternich stumbled through his excuses, Alexander interrupted him brusquely—he could be as forgiving as he could be petty. “While we live, there must be no mention of this between us again!” Alexander said, allegedly throwing the paper into the fire. “There are better things for us to do. We must think of nothing but our alliance against Napoleon.” The tsar was enjoying the chance to be magnanimous, and in all likelihood, he had suspected this agreement long before.

The Prussian generals also read the secret treaty, which Napoleon had published in newspapers. They were likewise disgusted, though ultimately this had little effect on their already low estimate of Prince Metternich. Besides, they had already discovered the treaty themselves, when searching a captured French official at Liège. What disturbed them most, however, was the participation of Great Britain. The secret treaty had confirmed their fears about this “Perfidious Albion,” as Napoleon had called them.

Back in London, Castlereagh was having difficulty defending his actions in Vienna. He was criticized for abandoning Poland, carving up Saxony, destroying Genoa, and generally making a mockery of diplomacy. His colleague, the Duke of Wellington, was likewise rebuked for his signature on the document that branded Napoleon an outlaw, and his adherence to this so-called doctrine of assassination. Worse still, the Duke of Wellington’s pledge that Great Britain would enter the war against Napoleon reached Parliament, and the opposition was outraged.

Britain had been tricked into accepting a war that, essentially, had already been decided upon, opposition party leaders fumed. Castlereagh, Wellington, and the war hawks of the Tory Party were senselessly trying to drown the continent in blood “in order to put down one man,” and, moreover, they had guaranteed British funds to pay for it all. “You have deceived us shamefully,” declared one member, who spoke for many that spring.

Castlereagh responded by going through a litany of reasons for the war: the impossibility of trusting Napoleon’s word—an ironic beginning perhaps, given the critiques against himself. He continued to warn about the dangers of having Bonaparte back in power, and the sheer uncertainty it meant for the future. In this speech, there were many reasons for the war, but, noticeably, no outright denial of any of the charges.

Britain was standing by its commitment to fight and subsidize the Allies in the war. And so the world’s first income tax, which had been imposed in Great Britain as “a temporary measure” in the war crisis of the 1790s and was supposed to be repealed in peacetime, would now not be abolished after all.

But even with this tax, the Duke of Wellington was frustrated with the military situation. The British army, gathering in Belgium, was not in the best of shape. Most of the hardened veterans of the Spanish campaign were not available, as many had been released from service at the end of the war and others were now making their way home after service in the American war. In fact, the army Wellington found was only about twelve thousand men, adequate enough perhaps for enforcing the handover of Belgium to Dutch control. But they were hardly in a position to face Napoleon.