Vienna, 1814: How the Conquerors of Napoleon Made Love, War, and Peace at the Congress of Vienna (57 page)

Metternich, who stayed on to complete the signing, was also feeling melancholy about this so-called triumphant return to Paris, a city he had known and loved years before as a young man serving as a diplomat. So much had changed since then. He stepped out of his room, onto the balcony, and stared at the Paris skyline. “This city and this sun,” Metternich observed in a letter to his daughter, “will still greet one another when there are no longer any traditions of Napoleon and Blücher, and least of all of myself.” So important it had all once seemed. All they were really doing, he concluded, was “dabbling in the mud, or in the shifting sand.”

E
PILOGUE

O
n October 17, after a seventy-one-day voyage, the frigate HMS
Northumberland
reached the small harbor of Jamestown, St. Helena. Unlike at Elba seventeen months before, there were no cheering crowds or celebrations waiting Napoleon’s arrival. He was no longer emperor, even of this island, “a black wart rising out of the ocean.” This time, Napoleon was a prisoner, and there would be no escape.

Just as she had never come to Elba, Marie Louise would not go to St. Helena—actually, she could not have come even if she had wanted to do so, as all Napoleon’s family members had been prohibited from accompanying him in his exile. Marie Louise moved instead to the Duchy of Parma, which she had secured with the help of the Russian tsar. She was joined by her lover, Count Neipperg, and later they secretly married. At the time of Napoleon’s death, in May 1821, Marie Louise revealed her marriage to her family, and it was quickly legalized. The couple eventually had three children, and when Neipperg died, she married a third time. Her son by Napoleon, on the other hand, never left Vienna, remaining a virtual prisoner of the palace, where he died of tuberculosis in 1832, only twenty-one years old.

Both the Duchess of Sagan and Princess Bagration would also later marry again. After breaking up with Prince Alfred and, not long afterward, with Lord Stewart, the Duchess of Sagan married a major in the Austrian army named Count Karl Schulenburg. She tried for a long time to regain her daughter, Adelaide-Gustava, though without success, and her spirits rapidly declined. “She was so sad, so disheartened, so troubled by everything,” one of her foster daughters claimed of her later years. “She seemed to have attacks of sheer despair.” The duchess moved back to Vienna, where she died in 1839. She never saw her daughter again.

Her rival, Princess Bagration, was fortunate to have escaped the clutches of her creditors. One member of the Sicilian embassy, the Duke of Serra Capriola, came to her aid, guaranteeing that her bills would be paid. The princess would later marry a rich Englishman, John Hobard Caradoc, and continue her now legendary extravagance. She moved into a lavish residence, Hôtel de Brunoy, in central Paris, where she would again host a fashionable salon. Metternich’s granddaughter saw her in her sixties. “Who has not seen her has seen nothing remarkable,” she said.

She has forgotten to grow old and thinks that she still lives in that magical time when Isabey painted her crowned with roses, enveloped in veils and surrounded with clouds. Only the veils and roses remain. The mass of curly blond ringlets has been reduced to four or five thin yellow hairs. Her skin is the color of a lemon; her body, yes—her body, one could see it—is a crackling skeleton.

She died in 1857, on a trip to Venice.

Both Princess Bagration and the Duchess of Sagan would always cling to their memories of their salons at the Vienna Congress, when, as each claimed, two great empires had fought over them. Both women, in fact, also ended up in literature: Princess Bagration in Balzac’s
La Peau de Chagrin,
the Duchess of Sagan in Nemcová’s story “Babicka” (“Granny”), about a princess who befriends a peasant. As for the Palm Palace, site of intrigue at the congress, it was torn down in the 1880s to make room for the Burgtheater.

The president of the Congress, Metternich, would remain Austria’s foreign minister for another thirty years, enjoying many diplomatic successes and weathering many controversies in an unusually long career. Older histories called the period the “Age of Metternich.” He was rewarded for his work at the Vienna Congress with a castle, Johannisberg, on the Rhine. Metternich’s power only ended with the revolution of 1848, when the seventy-five-year-old dignitary was forced to escape a riotous mob. After a year in exile, Metternich returned to Vienna, though he felt increasingly like a “phantasm” or an “imaginary being.” This was indeed different from the days when, as he vainly put it, he had “ruled Europe.” Fortunately for him, he would not live to see the many Austrian defeats and losses of territory that occurred in the 1860s and afterward.

Later immortalized as the tsar of Tolstoy’s
War and Peace,
Alexander would have the most ambiguous fate. According to the official account, he died in 1825 while vacationing in the Crimea. The cause of death was never determined, though it was speculated to be everything from malaria and typhus to syphilis and poisoning. Rumors would long circulate that the tsar had actually faked his death and retreated to live as a monk in the mountains. According to this view, still championed by some historians, Alexander lived until 1864 as the rather extroverted Siberian hermit named Feodor Kusmitch. Another theory, emerging later in the nineteenth century, suggested that he died in the Holy Land on a pilgrimage. At any rate, despite the probability that Alexander died of typhus, the persistence of the rumors testifies to the enduring image of this most puzzling tsar. As Pushkin put it, Alexander was “a Sphinx who carried his riddle with him to the tomb.”

One of the last survivors of the Vienna Congress was Prince Talleyrand. After his retirement from the foreign ministry, he stayed in Paris, at his estate on rue Saint-Florentin, where he wrote, or rather dictated, his memoirs. Looking back, historians might well see Talleyrand as a representative of the peaceful and nonmilitaristic France, and his strategy of positioning his country as the leader of a coalition of smaller powers would be adopted repeatedly by later French leaders, from Napoleon III to Charles de Gaulle.

If Louis XVIII continued to shun Talleyrand for the rest of his reign, others appreciated his services at the congress. The king of Saxony had rewarded him liberally for his role in saving the kingdom, and the king of Naples gave Talleyrand another title, the Duke of Dino, for restoring the kingdom. Talleyrand, however, declined the latter, and asked that the title, with its properties, be given to his nephew and his niece Dorothée.

Dorothée—the new Duchess of Dino—returned to Paris in February 1816, after breaking up with Count Clam-Martinitz, and moved back in with Talleyrand. In December 1820, she gave birth to a daughter, Pauline, and many suspected that the seventy-four-year-old Talleyrand was the father. Very possibly having become lovers during the congress, Talleyrand and his niece-by-marriage certainly remained intimate over the years. They were still living together in 1830, when Talleyrand helped another king to the throne, Louis Philippe. He would spend his last working years as ambassador to England, the country with which he had worked hard to establish more friendly relations after some 150 years of hostility. Dorothée joined him in England as well. Talleyrand died in 1838, at age eighty-four, with Dorothée at his bedside.

“Vienna, Vienna,” Dorothée wrote. “The whole of my destiny is contained in the name of this city.” She looked back with fond memories of that period of her life, though she was always vague about the precise details. “If I ever did more than lick stamps,” she said of her time at the French embassy, “I never had the bad taste to brag about it.” She would host a fashionable salon for years until her death in September 1862 at age sixty-nine.

The most tragic fate, however, was Britain’s Castlereagh. Oddly, the most rational figure at the congress ended up consumed by paranoia and madness. His internationalism was soon out of step with Britain, which was gripped by an isolationist impulse and eager to shun long-term foreign commitments. Castlereagh refused to make policy based on public opinion, and he became very unpopular. Convinced that the world was in a conspiracy against him, Castlereagh would never leave his house without a couple of loaded pistols. He felt stalked, and he collapsed into a severe “mental delirium.” Friends feared for his safety, shocked by his increasingly strange and erratic behavior. Pistols, knives, and razors were carefully removed from his room. But the efforts to protect Castlereagh from himself were in vain. On the morning of August 12, 1822, Castlereagh slit his throat with a penknife he had smuggled into his study.

I
N THE EARLY
months of 1919, diplomats gathered in Paris to make peace after World War I. One of their main goals was to avoid the shocking decadence of the Congress of Vienna, or as Woodrow Wilson put it, “the odour of Vienna.”

Indeed, the Vienna Congress has been subjected to many critiques, not least for the many quarrels and celebrations that distracted the peacemakers and dragged out the negotiations endlessly. At the same time, however, there was one unintended consequence: All the saber rattling at the congress meant that no Great Power felt secure enough to demobilize its army after the war ended; hence, each Great Power could field a large army quickly when Napoleon decided to leave Elba. The slow pace of the negotiations, moreover, meant that all the powers would be in one place at the same time to plan Napoleon’s final defeat. Had the congress wrapped up its affairs earlier, the leaders would have dispersed across the Continent and the challenges of coordinating a campaign, let alone a war, would have been much more difficult.

Of course, this does not lessen the sting or the validity of the criticism that could be hurled at the leaders. Their secret diplomacy did sow much distrust and suspicion, and their sheer exclusiveness alienated many smaller states left outside as mere spectators. The principles for reconstructing Europe were applied selectively and inconsistently. Despite the talk of legitimacy, for example, old republics such as Genoa and Venice would not be re-created, and disappeared forever. Likewise, the Holy Roman Empire was not restored, nor were the Knights of Malta to their properties.

The congress delegates certainly looked after their own interests. As frequently pointed out, the interests of the people were often sacrificed to the interests of the dynasties. “The Big fish devour the small,” Spain’s Labrador had protested. Russia was one of the main winners, walking away with Finland and Bessarabia, both of which it had seized in the Napoleonic Wars. With the addition of the nominally independent Kingdom of Poland, Russia would now be in a position to influence not only central Asia and the Middle East, but also a large part of northern, southeastern, and central Europe. Russia had become more of a European power than at any time in its history.

The Austrians took advantage of their position as hosts of the congress to regain the Tyrol, as well as Dalmatia and Istria, which brought them deeper into the Balkans, where they would be embroiled until World War I and the end of the Habsburg monarchy. Austria also extended its rule over northern Italy, gaining Lombardy and Venetia, while Tuscany, Parma, and Modena were given to members of the Habsburg family. Even the restored Bourbon dynasty in Naples was dependent on policy making in Vienna. Austria’s dominance would survive until Italy’s unification later that century.

The Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia, for that matter, left the peace conference with Genoa, French Savoy, Nice on the Riviera, the suzerainty of Monaco, and other territorial gains that would significantly increase the kingdom’s power, wealth, and status. The additions at Vienna would play no small role in helping Piedmont-Sardinia, only fifty years later, to drive the Austrians out and complete the unification of Italy.

Certainly, the congress left many disgruntled peoples around the continent. Just as its leaders ignored Spanish America and most of the non-European world, they also largely ignored national passions and oppressed nations. But this latter criticism, at least, is partly anachronistic, stemming from later nineteenth-century historians writing at a time when nationalism was a much more powerful force than in 1815. Nationalism at the congress was still primarily regarded as a potentially dangerous force, and the peacemakers in Vienna subordinated it, when drawing maps, to other concerns—whether they were legitimacy, balance of power, or simply, as Gentz said, “dividing the spoils.”

The Great Powers are also often accused of arbitrarily intervening in the domestic politics of smaller sovereign states. There is considerable substance to this claim. In four major meetings of the “concert of Europe” (Aix-la-Chapelle 1818, Troppau 1820, Laibach 1821, Verona 1822), the Great Powers redefined the basis of their alliance from resisting any attempt to upset the peace settlement to asserting a more general right to intervene in the affairs of states to preserve law and order. In the process, the Great Powers became what Castlereagh called “a general European police.”

In 1820, for example, when the leaders met at Troppau in what is now Opava, the peace seemed threatened in a number of ways. The year had witnessed a conspiracy to blow up London’s House of Parliament, the assassination of the heir to the French throne, and revolutions in Spain, Portugal, Piedmont, and Naples. In response, the Great Powers declared that they would not recognize revolutionary or illegal changes to the peace settlement and pledged to use force, if necessary, to defeat any such challenge. In practice, this would mean propping up many unpopular, autocratic rulers. The Congress of Vienna did not, of course, cause or carry out these policies, but it had set the machinery in place that the Great Powers exploited.