share the implacable resentment with which Great Britain
pursued Napoleon; she watched with alarm the development
of the ambitions of Alexander I., which threatened to substitute
a Russian for a French supremacy in Europe; she was far from
sympathizing with the noisy enthusiasm of the patriots of the War
of Liberation for a united Germany, in which the traditional
influence of the Habsburgs would be balanced or overshadowed
by that of Prussia. Metternich had no wish to see the husband
of Marie Louise ousted in favour of the Bourbons, who had
little reason to be grateful to Austria; still less did he desire
to see on the throne of France Alexander’s protégé Bernadotte,
whose name was being whispered in the Paris salons as the
destined saviour of his native country. But if Napoleon was
to remain sovereign of France, it must be not by his own force,
but by grace of his father-in-law, and hedged round with limitations
which would have made him little more than the lieutenant
of the Habsburg monarchy. This was the secret of the moderate
terms of accommodation ostentatiously offered by Metternich
to Napoleon at various stages of the campaign. From Frankfort
he sent, through General de Saint-Aignan, a diplomatist on
whose indiscretion he could rely, an informal offer of peace on
the basis of France’s “natural frontier,” the Rhine, the Alps
and the Pyrenees. The famous manifesto of Frankfort, issued
on behalf of the Allies (Dec. 4, 1813), contained no such offer of
acceptable terms; but Metternich’s object was attained; for
Napoleon refused to be drawn into the trap, and the French
people cursed the emperor’s infatuation in refusing a settlement
which, from what had leaked out of Saint-Aignan’s mission,
they believed would have satisfied the legitimate ambitions of
France. On the other hand, Metternich did his best to oppose a
too rapid advance of the allied forces on Paris, which would have
played into the hands of Russia and Prussia; and it was to his
initiative that the conferences of Châtillon were due. Only when
the breakdown of the negotiations made it clear that Napoleon
had seen through his plans, and preferred the chances of war to
the certainty of ruin or of surviving only as the puppet of Austria,
did Metternich join with Castlereagh in pressing upon the tsar
the necessity for restoring the Bourbons. On the 1st of March
1814, he set his hand to the treaty of Chaumont, of which the
immediate object was the restoration and preservation of the
old dynasty in a France reduced to her “legitimate frontier.”
In other respects, however, the treaty was a triumph for Metternich;
for it laid down that at the final settlement Germany was
to be reconstituted as a confederation of sovereign states, and it
also did much to temper the fear of a Russian dictatorship by
consecrating the principle of that concerted action of the Great
Powers, in affairs of international interest, which after Napoleon’s
fall was to govern the European system. On the 10th of April
Metternich arrived at Paris, ten days after its occupation by
the Allies. He was now at the height of his reputation; on the
20th of October 1813, two days after Leipzig, he had been
created an hereditary prince of the Austrian Empire; he now
received from the emperor Francis a unique honour: the
right to quarter the arms of the house of Austria-Lorraine
with those of Metternich. At the same time (April 21) the
countship of Daruvar was bestowed upon him. On the
30th of May Metternich set his signature to the treaty of
Paris, and immediately afterwards accompanied the emperor
Alexander and King Frederick William on a visit to England.
On the 18th of July he was back in Vienna, where the great
congress was to meet in the autumn. The dignity of
a Hungarian magnate was bestowed upon him before it
assembled.
At the congress Metternich’s charm of manner and great social gifts gave him much personal influence; the ease and versatility with which he handled intricate diplomatic questions, too, excited admiration; at the same time he was blamed for his leaning to intrigue and finesse and for a certain calculated disingenuousness which led to an open breach with the emperor Alexander, who roundly called him a liar. In the difficult questions of Poland and Saxony the honest and conciliatory attitude of Castlereagh was of more avail in reaching an acceptable settlement than all Metternich’s cleverness. If in the Italian and German questions, however, Austria’s views triumphed, this was due to the foresight displayed in Metternich’s diplomacy during the campaigns and to the address with which he handled the questions at issue at the congress. The complacency of Hardenberg had allowed Austria alone to negotiate with the states of the Confederation of the Rhine with a view to detaching them from Napoleon; and he had used this opportunity to render impossible the idea of a united Germany. On the 8th of October 1813 he had signed with Bavaria the treaty of Ried, which in the event of the liberation of Germany guaranteed to Bavaria a sovereign and independent status. This instrument, which was reinforced by a secret treaty signed at Paris on the 3rd of June 1814, served as a model for similar agreements with other courts; and the principle involved was, as mentioned above, included in the treaty of Chaumont. Thus all the unionist ideals, represented at the congress by Stein, were sterilized from the outset; and the Act of Confederation embodied in the Final Act of Vienna gave to Germany exactly the form desired by Metternich as best calculated to perpetuate Austrian preponderance (see Germany: History). The same was true of the settlement of Italy. The question here was complicated by the treaty of alliance signed by Metternich with Murat as the price of his treason to Napoleon. But Metternich from the first had known that the treaty was but a temporary expedient; that Great Britain would never recognize “the person at the head of the government of Naples”; and that sooner or later Murat himself would afford excuse enough for tearing the treaty up. Not Murat’s dream of an Italy united under his own rule, but the traditional Austrian policy of possession in the north and preponderance throughout the Peninsula was Metternich’s goal, and this he secured at the congress. Murat, in view of Austria’s engagements, was suffered to survive for the time being; he himself shattered the alliance during the Hundred Days; and the Bourbons returned to Naples, pledged by a secret agreement to attune their policy to that of Vienna (see Naples: History).
Metternich, then, emerged from the congress of Vienna confirmed in the confidence of his sovereign, and therefore supreme in Germany and in Italy. To him had been due the marvellous recovery of the Habsburg monarchy; in spite of Gentz’s lament that in the latter stages of the campaign of 1814 “Europe” had been substituted for “Austria” in his diplomacy, Metternich had acted throughout first and foremost in the interests of Austria, as he was bound to do. This, too, gives the key to his policy after 1815, the policy of using the European concert, established by the treaty of Chaumont and the Paris treaty of the 20th of November 1815, as an instrument for ensuring the “stability” of Europe by suppressing any “revolutionary” manifestations by which the settlement made at Vienna might be endangered.
After the campaign of Waterloo and Napoleon’s second downfall Metternich was again in Paris, where he co-operated with the emperor Alexander and Castlereagh in securing tolerable terms of peace for France. A few days after the signing of the two treaties of the 20th of November 1815, he left Paris for Milan, where he met the crown prince Louis of Bavaria and Baron von Rechberg, with whom he came to terms on certain outstanding questions between Austria and Bavaria, terms embodied in the treaty of Munich of the 14th of April 1816. During his visit to Italy, which he repeated in 1816 and 1817, Metternich could not but be impressed with the general signs of discontent with Austrian rule. Neither was he blind to the true causes of this discontent: the atrophy of the administration owing to its rigid centralization at Vienna, and the policy of enforcing Germanism on the Italians by a ruthless police system. He made half-hearted proposals for removing something of both these grievances; but his terror of revolution from below made him fearful of reforms from above. While therefore in Prussia king and ministers were labouring hard to remodel and consolidate the monarchy, Metternich did next to nothing to reform the most obvious abuses of the Austrian Empire. Yet the fault
