Revolutions - 6.08c- Metternich

Episode Date: May 15, 2017

After the fall of Napoleon, Austrian Foreign Minister Metternich attempted to orchestrate a new conservative order in Europe.  Sponsor: Bombfell.com/revolutions. 

Hello and welcome to Revolutions. Episode 6.8C. Metternish. So now that we've spent a lot of time minutely focused on event in and around 1830, I want to pull back and do a broader survey of European international relations in the years after Napoleon's fall to provide some much-needed context for what is to come in 1848. And I think the best way to conduct that survey is through the eyes of the global. great arch-enemy of revolution, Austrian foreign minister, Clemens von Metternich. His career is remarkable for its length. He was appointed Austrian foreign minister in 1809

and served in that capacity until his fall in the revolutionary year of 1848. Along the way, Metternich orchestrated the conservative reaction to the revolutionary forces of liberalism and nationalism that had been unleashed by the French Revolution and conquests of Napoleon. The international framework Metternich helped forge, and the political tactics he employed, both at home and abroad, were primarily designed to do two things. Stamp out revolution and reduce conflict between the great powers. In the end, all you can say is that Medernish failed to stamp out revolution and reduce conflict between the great powers, but it was certainly not for lack of trying.

Metternich was born in Koblenz in 1773, the son of a counten countess, who were among the minor German nobility that held estates in the Rhineland, territories that made up one of the bagillion components of the Holy Roman Empire. Though far removed from the inner circle Austrian nobility who ruled the empire from Vienna, Metternich's father had a satisfactory career in the Imperial Foreign Service, even if no one considered him particularly impressive, influential, or brimming over with talent. The second child, but eldest son of the family, young Metternich was groomed to follow in his father's footsteps. and he attended university first in Strasbourg, and then Mainz, from 1788 to 1792,

so just as the French Revolution is getting going. When school was not in session, he was attached to his father's staff as an apprentice clerk of sorts, and by the early 1790s, his father was plenipotentiary to, that's right, the Austrian-Netherlands. So Metternich cut his teeth drafting administrative memos in the future kingdom of Belgium. But his formal studies were cut short by the outbreak of war in April 6th,000. 1792. Though he was a teenager and thus possibly prone to idealistic flights of fancy, it's safe to say Metternich never had much use for the French Revolution. It seemed to him, even at this young age, an unnatural abomination that would do far more harm than good.

He spent the next few years dodging French armies, and then in late 1794 received what appeared to be an auspicious promotion to succeed his father as Plenipitentiary in the Austrian Netherlands, except this is the moment the French pushed across the Belgian border permanently, and the Austrian Netherlands ceased to exist, so there was no job for him to take up. To go along with his career setback, the Metternich family then suffered personal disaster, as further French expansion forcibly absorbed all the family estates in the Rhineland. Without office, property, or, frankly, even a home, the Metternich clan decamped for the safety of Vienna.

Now, the family managed to bounce back a bit in 17, as they arranged for Metternich to marry Elinor Countets, the granddaughter of the great Prince Countets, who had been state chancellor for 40 years and was about as inner circle Austrian nobility as it gets. The marriage into the Countets family brought Metternich money, but more importantly, access to the highest rungs of Viennese society. Still a young man, Metternich glided easily amongst these higher aristocrats, even if he always was something of a Rhineland outsider. He earned himself a bit of a reputation during these years.

He was never faithful to his wife. He enjoyed a good party, and he was almost comically vain about his appearance, all of which left many with an impression of fundamental superficiality about his whole character. But this growing social reputation never grew to outrageous proportions, and certainly did not derail his burgeoning diplomatic career. He attended the Congress of Rstadt that we talked about in episode 3.48, that was meant to settle a final piece between Austin, Austria and France. Then when war broke out again, Metternich found himself posted to Berlin,

which left him with the unenviable task of trying to convince the Prussians to join the war of the Third Coalition. Failing to crack, Prussian neutrality, the Austrians and Russians had to face now Emperor Napoleon alone, and we all know how that went. In December of 1805, Napoleon trouts the Austrians and Russians at Austerlitz, and the whole of Europe lay at Napoleon's feet. The subsequent Treaty of Presbyr was so punitive that it destroyed the Holy Roman Empire, hire forever, as Francis II relinquished his title as Holy Roman Emperor to become simply the Emperor of Austria. But by this point, Metternich himself had a reputation as a fairly competent diplomat to go along with his reputation as a womanizing, well-dressed rake,

though even he was shocked when he found himself named to the critical position of Ambassador to France in 1806. Metternich would remain in Paris until 1809, enjoying all that Imperial Paris had to offer, including an affair with Napoleon's own sister. When Napoleon's Spanish ulcer started bleeding in 1808, though, the Austrians took a stab at escaping their unhappy subjugation and launched a surprise offensive in April of 1809, only to get trounced at Vagrum in July. Now, this was a disaster for the Austrians, but for Metternich personally, it proved to be the opportunity of a lifetime.

With the senior ministers of state resigning and discredited in the wake of Vagrum, Austrian Emperor Francis II needed a new foreign minister, and he tapped Metternich, even though he was still only 36 years old. Metternich would not relinquish this post for 40 years. With Austria once again a quote-unquote ally of France, new foreign minister Metternich did what he could to promote Austrian interests, and he scored an early victory when he helped negotiate the marriage of Napoleon to the Austrian princess Marie-Louis. Now, in general, Metternich would, was not actually opposed to Napoleon per se. He actually admired a lot about Napoleon, especially how he had tamed the French Revolution. But what Metternich couldn't abide

was Napoleon's constant push to expand his empire, to make himself master of the whole world. In Metternich's view, there was a natural order to things and a balance to great power relations that were disrupted when one power tried to rise above the rest. Metternich approved of a strong and healthy France, but one with Bortier's. that stopped at the Rhine. It was all this going over the Rhine business that he found so intolerable. So through the years of 1809 to 1813, as Austria played France's ally, Metternich did whatever little things he could to position Austria to join a new anti-French coalition should one form. Again, not with the object of crushing Napoleon and partitioning France, far from it,

just to get the emperor to accept that his dominion stopped at the Rhine. With Napoleon's disastrous invasion of Russia, seeming to provide Austria another opportunity to put the French back into France, in the summer of 1813, Metternich steered Austria into whatever it was, the 57th anti-French coalition. But upon joining the Allied coalition, Metternich's primary focus moved seamlessly from how do we defeat Napoleon to how do we not defeat him too badly. As soon as the Allies had the French on the run, Metternich officially became concerned about Prussian and especially Russian expansionism in a post-war world. With these new concerns in mind, Metternich engineered in November 1813 the famous Frankfurt proposal

that none of the other coalition partners really wanted to make. The proposal was that France would retain its natural borders, that is, those leading all the way to the Rhine. Napoleon would be left as Emperor of France, and the war would be over. but likely believing that accepting such a proposal would be the end of his regime at home, Napoleon rejected it, only to realize a few months later that the military situation was actually hopeless, and when he tried to accept the Frankfurt proposals in early 1814, the other allies were like, hell no, you had your chance and you blew it. With Napoleon finally put on a boat to Elba in the spring of 1814, the Allies got together in Vienna, and as host of this post-war Congress, Metternich finally had the

chance to guide Europe out of the horror that was a generation of revolutionary war. And Metternich was down to his very core, an anti-revolutionary. It would not be fair to say that he was some pig-headed reactionary trying to take Europe back to what it had been in 1788, but he certainly believed that there was a legitimate and an illegitimate way to wield power, and revolution was inherently illegitimate. Now, I don't know how much he read or even needed to read Burke. But the conservative Berkian philosophy that change and progress was possible only if it came in slow, careful, and orderly progressions, and even then, only if it was directed by legitimate social

and political institutions was deeply held by Metternich himself. The clean, swift breaks and radical changes promoted by revolutionaries of any stripe were dangerous affronts to nature. In Metternich's New World Order, the virus of revolution would be identified, quarantined, and then destroyed. Amongst the least legitimate of the new revolutionary forces unleashed by the French Revolution and then stoked by Napoleon's occupation of Europe was nationalism. Mennerniche looked at Germans and Italians and Poles talking about their national right to self-government and was like, no, that is insane. Some are born to rule, others to serve, and that is the way of things. So even though

many went to the Congress of Vienna thinking that something like a unified Germany and Italy, would emerge, Metternich did all he could to arrest those nationalist impulses. For him, it was a positive good that the legitimate masters of Europe, the Habsburgs, and the Bourbons, would once again be ruling international empires composed of people unfit to do the job for themselves. But while Metternich absolutely believed that the old ruling dynasty should reclaim their rightful place at the top of the European pyramid, the single greatest threat to international peace was one of the powers trying to do what not. Napoleon had just attempted to make themselves the sole master of the whole continent.

So as negotiations in Vienna unfolded, Mernish, along with British Foreign Secretary Castlereagh, who shared his basic worldview, worked to make sure that a true balance of power was put in place. They worked round the clock to counter first Russia's over ambitions in Poland and then Prussia's over ambitions in Saxony. And that was to say nothing of trying to make sure that the France that emerged from this Congress was still healthy and strong, because without France keeping a check on the Prussians, I mean, who knew what would happen? To this latter end, Metternich was among those who supported Talleyrand's bid to get a seat at the Big Boy table, because though Talleyrand and Metternish

did not much like each other personally, they shared the goal of establishing a balance of power in Europe, where each power saw their own individual interests as dependent on defending the Vienna settlement. That way no one would want to disrupt the general accord, because, said disruption would hurt their own interests, and draw the wrath of all the other powers. But of course, Metternich was not just there to advance his belief about conservative, legitimate empires existing in a natural and stable balance of power. He was also there to represent the Austrian hapsburgs. And though there was never any attempt to re-forge the old Holy Roman Empire, Austria did walk away from the Congress of Vienna with broad expanse of

territory and Hungary and Italy and Germany and wider dynastic connections to many of the smaller Italian kingdoms. They also secured the presidency of a new thing called the Confederation of Germany. Now, after the collapse of the Holy Roman Empire, many Germans were ready to abandon the myriad little principalities that pockmarked the map of Central Europe and joined them all together in a single unified German state. To head that off, Metternich built instead a confederation of 34 principalities and four free cities, who would then send representatives, not of the German people, but of the German courts. With Austria as president of this new confederation, Metternich believed he had deftly undermined the push for German unification,

while simultaneously reestablishing Austrian-Hapsburg hegemony in the region. In the midst of all these negotiations, of course, Austria magnanimously gave up their claim to the Austrian Netherlands, which, as we saw last week, was all. it into the kingdom of the Netherlands. But though this looked on the outside like a gesture of goodwill, it's not like the Austrians wanted to keep the Austrian Netherlands. Now, everything that had been hammered out, the Congress of Vienna was nearly derailed by the hundred days. But the Allies once again rallied and Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo before Metternich was even able to leave Vienna to join what he thought would be another

long war against France. He was delighted by how quickly things had been nipped in the bud, but frustrated that it necessarily led to harsher terms imposed on France in the Second Treaty of Paris. Like I say, he wanted France to be strong and healthy, just as long as they stayed in their place. So to defend this new map of Europe drawn up at the Congress of Vienna, the great powers of Europe entered into two somewhat overlapping alliances in the wake of Waterloo. The first was put forward by Tsar Alexander in September of 1815, and was dubbed the Holy Alliance. Having fallen hard for an evangelical brand of mystic Christianity,

Zarr Alexander wanted the royal families of Europe to agree to rule Europe on the basis of, quote, justice, love, and peace, and in accordance with good Christian morality. The other more cynical European diplomats, Metternich, chief among them, didn't quite know what to do with this proposed alliance of piety, nor how it would work in practice. But Tsar Alexander was critical to the good order of the new order, and he was not to be alienated lightly. So Metternich took a hand at redrafting some of the specific language in the Holy Alliance

to make sure that the opposite of justice, love, and peace were things like liberalism and secularism and nationalism, things that Metternich himself would be happy to have everybody joined forces to combat. And this was clever enough, as it might be. actually tend to restrain Alexander's own liberal impulses, and nearly every power in Europe, saved the British, eventually signed on to the Holy Alliance. Now, the British may have refused to sign on to that treaty, but they did sign on to the other treaty going around, one that reaffirmed all the previous treaties that have been signed by the British, Prussians, Russians,

and Austrians. In November of 1815, the Big Four all signed the Quadruple Alliance, which was primarily an agreement to come to each other's aid if France tried to break out of France again. But there were also some more general clauses in there about the peace and good order of Europe, though those were vague and open to interpretation. There was also a clause in there that was near and dear to Metternich's heart, where the powers would come together in regular summits to discuss and address matters of European concern. Matternich was convinced that the powers had to work together and get used to work together to avoid another repeat of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars.

So everyone walked away at the end of 1815, committed to the basic principle of great power cooperations, and nobody wanted to go back to war, but everyone had their own version of what all of this meant. The British read everything as narrowly as possible, and we're only going to go back to war if a huge threat to the continental balance of power emerged, like literally Napoleon coming back for a third time. But other than that, they plan to retreat across the English Channel and not get involved any more in Continental Affairs. Meanwhile, Tsar Alexander was going through this phase of semi-liberal idealism, and he wanted everyone to take an active role everywhere. And at that moment, he was talking about providing a constitution for Poland, which is the opposite

of what a guy like Metternich wanted. All of this gave Metternich heartburn, as he was worried about overaggressive Russian ambitions and underaggressive British reticence. The big question, though, would be what happened when some major threat did emerge? Would the great powers be able to work together to quell a threat to the general peace? Now, luckily for Metternich, no such threats emerged prior to the first of the hopefully regular summits of the Great Powers. And we talked about this first summit in episode 6.1, held at Ex-Las Chappelle in the fall of 1818. This is when the other powers got together to agree on final payment terms for the French

indemnity, a timetable for withdrawing the occupation forces from France, and formally inviting France to retake its rightful place as one of the five great powers. This is when the Quadruple Alliance became the Quintuple Alliance. So far so good for Metternich, as this was all in keeping with his vision for a balanced and conservative Europe. But it also became clear at the that this balance was tenuous. Azar Alexander proposed what he called the Alliance Solitaire that would bind the powers to help each other even against threats that could only be described as purely domestic affairs. This proposal the British rejected outright, as they were not going to make themselves

one of the constables of conservative Europe. So the riffs that would wreck this Congress system of international diplomacy were already visible, though for the moment, Castlere and Metternich played good cop, bad cop, against Alexander and forced him to drop the scheme. Metternich's hope was that the question of foreign intervention into another power's domestic affairs would never come up, as each power would hopefully be able to deal with their own internal problems. And he certainly had theories of how to manage things in the reborn Austrian Empire. Metternich had a carrot and stick plan for the subjects of the new Austrian Empire,

but unfortunately the stick stuff was implemented and the carrot stuff, not so much. And Metternich may have been conservative, but he said that stability was not immobility, and he did have new things he wanted to try in the Austrian Empire, because the best way to stop the spread of revolution was to diffuse its causes. So for example, Metternich was a believer in Montesquieu's theories on political geography, that different climates created different peoples, and that, What worked in one place might not work in another. So he devised a system of chancellories that would each have power over the different ethnic segments of the Austrian Empire.

And this was not meant to just be an Austrian version of the representatives on mission, sent from Vienna to lord it over the natives. Metternich advised letting the Italians participate in Italian government, Hungarians and Hungarian government, Germans and German government. He also wanted to invite provincial subjects to the capital to participate. in the central imperial government, so that they would feel empowered and represented at all levels. To make them say, hey, we're members of this larger Austrian empire, but it's not so bad, you know. But all of this was too much for the Emperor Francis, who literally stuck Metternich's folder of recommendations in a drawer in 1817, and then spent the next 18 years apologizing for not having read them yet. So the carrots never really dangled. That left only the stick part of the plan,

which was Metternich being 100% cool with political repression. He was opposed to liberalism. He was opposed to nationalism. He was opposed to any form of revolutionary idea about anything. And he did not think there was some natural right to free speech, especially not when that speech threatened the natural order of things. Metternich thought the three most destabling discoveries in the history of Europe was America, gunpowder, and the printing press.

Now, he couldn't undiscover America, and he couldn't wave a wand and make people forget about gunpowder, but he could, as much as possible, control the spread of printed ideas and punish those who tried to spread the wrong ideas. So inside the Austrian Empire, Metternich established intricate networks of secret police, and he established an imperial postal system so that mail could be easily read. It did not take much money to buy off servants and coachmen, inkeepers, copyboys, whoever, to report. support anything they heard that might be considered seditious. And more than anything, Matternich planned to keep an eye on the middle-class bourgeoisie, who he had identified long ago as the principal authors of revolutionary mania. Most people in the world wanted peace and good order and to just go about their lives. But this rising middle class, newly educated and newly prosperous, they were fired with revolutionary ambition. So Metternich made it his mission

to disrupt their attempts to organize politically and punish them if they got out of line. Shortly after the Congress said at Ex-Las Chappelle, a wave of liberal challenges to the conservative European order broke out. Across greater Germany, student groups became hotbeds of liberal nationalism, and in early 1819, one of these radical students murdered a conservative writer, who was rightly suspected of being in the employ of Russia. This assassination sent a wave of panic amongst the various courts of the German Confederation as they feared the growing networks of student revolutionaries. They turned to Austria and Metternich for guidance. And Metternich was happy to provide that guidance, and he steered the members of the German Confederation to the Karlsbad decrees of

September 1819. Mutually agreed to by all the constituent parts of the Confederation, The Carlsbad decrees, first, required pre-approval for any printed work less than 20 pages. Publications over that size were already subject to local censorship laws. Second, they placed universities under strict political supervision. Teaching or propagating prescribed ideas were grounds for expulsion or termination, and then further it was decreed that any student expelled from school or professor fired from his post was forbidden to be enrolled or hired in any other university in the German Confederation. Third, a central tribunal was established to identify and punish activist and revolutionary leaders

and lead to fines, exile, or getting tossed into a political prison. Finally, the principal danger was identified as movements favoring people's participation in government and popular sovereignty. Executed far less ineptly than the four ordinances, that we'd be dropped on France a decade later, the Carlsbad decrees crushed freedom of speech and the press and severely curtailed academic freedom in Germany, as political agents now monitored and reported and punished everything. The push for national German unification and liberal revolution was effectively forestalled for now. But Germany was not the only place facing liberal activists in 1819 and 1820. As we discussed in episode 5.17, the mutiny in Cadiz broke out in January

of 1820 and quickly blew into a full-blown liberal revolution in Spain that saw the formally desired one, King Ferdinand, forced to accept the liberal constitution of 1812. The problem of Spain was a big test for Metternich's system, but matters were complicated considerably for him. A similar revolt broke out in neighboring Portugal, and then a few months later, another revolution broke out against the Morban ruler of the Kingdom of two Siciles in July of 1820. This last was of direct concern to Metternich and the Austrians, as it was literally right next door to their empire, and, by secret treaty, the king of the two Sicilies was a client king of Austria.

Now, we'll talk more about this aborted Italian revolution next week, as it was fomented and executed by the Carbonari, that secret Italian revolutionary society that I've mentioned a few times now. The revolt in southern Italy, though, inspired action in northern Italy, and suddenly, despite all his repressive measures, Metternich was facing his worst nightmare, liberal revolution inside Austrian domains. All of these threats would ultimately be quelled, but they exposed the fatal division inside what was now the quintuple alliance. The Great Powers met at Trapaw in October of 1820 and approved Austrian military intervention into Italy, except not really. The British were now so opposed to Great Power intervention into the internal affairs of other states that they did not even send an official representative to Trapaw. Instead, they sent merely an observer.

France, too, looked like it planned to consider the matter outside the scope of its foreign policy and sent merely an observer, not a full ambassador. So it was really down to Austria, Prussia, and Russia supporting action against the liberals in Italy. This little three-way Eastern coalition invited the king of the two Sicilies to submit a request for intervention, which he did at the follow-up meeting at Leibok in January of 1821. This request made, the Austrians prepared for war, and the Tsar pledged to put 100,000 troops along the Austrian border, just in case the Austrians needed help. In the spring of 1821, the Austrians marched south and successfully suppressed the liberal Italian revolutionaries. But this still left the matter of Spain out there, which further exposed divides

inside the concert of Europe. The British considered Spain to be something of their personal protectorate after years of blood and sweat in the peninsular war, and they rejected anyone's right to intervene in internal Spanish affairs. Now, the eastern powers may have wanted to get involved, but with Italy flaring up, it's not like the Austrians could send troops to the Iberian Peninsula, and Prussia, for her part, was unwilling to shoulder the burden alone. Now, Zar Alexander, now returning to a conservative line after his years of flirting with liberalism, offered to march 150,000 troops right across Europe and deal with these upstart Spaniards. But Metternich, now Chancellor of Austria, in addition to being foreign minister,

thought that Russians, being loose in Western Europe was an even greater threat to the good order of things then liberal Spaniards ruling Spain. So that left only France, who the other powers, cautiously agreed to support if France decided to intervene. Now, as we saw on episode 6.1, the French did indeed intervene in 1823 and restored Ferdinand to the throne. And then to everyone's great relief,

King Louis XIII did not make any grand proclamations about, like, annexing Spain. But the whole incident made it clear that there was a limit to how far the great powers could actually work together. On the one side, you had the British refusing to intervene in anything, and on the other, you have the Russians volunteering to intervene in everything, and the other powers bulking at giving the Russians a thin end of the wedge to ram through greater territorial claims. So no matter how hard Metternich tried, it was impossible to turn these two

rigid squares of self-interest and general interest into a harmonious circle, even as he kept insisting that that harmonious circle was the natural order of things. But though it was clear the great powers were retreating to their own self-interest, the flare-ups of liberal revolution around 1820 were successfully beaten back, with only one major exception, and that was the Greeks. Now, I have managed to somehow successfully avoid talking about the Greek War of Independence, and that's because the run of events from 1821 to 1832 are on their own worth an entire oh, I don't know, 15 to 20 episode series, but since I'm not going to cover it, I have been trying

to keep the can of worms from erupting in my face. The bottom line, though, is that the Greeks revolted against Ottoman rule in 1821. The cause of Greece became a political and social flashpoint across Europe that threatened to undo all that Metternich had worked for, because here you had a bunch of nationalists declaring independence from their legitimate imperial masters. It was the opposite of what he believed in, and he worked very hard to prevent intervention on behalf of the upstart Greeks. But in the matter of Greece, Metternich found himself isolated, as the other powers viewed the Greek revolt through the lens of their own self-interest, not the larger conservative balance of power. When it came to Greece, Metternich was no longer guiding events, but helplessly watching as everyone

ignored him. So the other powers of Europe intervening not to defend the conservative order, but to help a nationalistic fragment gained independence, was depressing as hell for a guy like Metternich. And then his morale drooped further in 1830 and 1831, as he was forced to acquiesce first to the July revolution in France, and then the Belgian Revolution in what was supposed to be the Kingdom of the Netherlands. As I mentioned at the end of episode 6.7, Metternich accepted the July revolution only because it was the lesser of two evils, the greater evil being the return of the hated French Republic. And then he accepted Belgian independence as also the lesser of two evils, the greater

being annexation back into France. So for all his beliefs about a natural order of things, Metternich was frustrated that everyone kept acting in what was allegedly an unnatural way. It might actually make one wonder what in all of this was natural and what was not, because Medernish's system demanded the other powers of Europe and the other people of Europe do very unnatural things, like not prioritize their own perceived interests. By 1830, it was clear that the system wasn't working, and in the end it wasn't going to work, and Metternich himself would eventually be consumed by the revolutionary virus he had spent his life trying to eradicate, because it's only going to get worse from here.

So we will leave Metternich there in the early 1830s, because I don't want to get too far ahead of myself. And next week, I actually want to go back and dig a little deeper into the liberal revolts of 1820, because the Carbonari movement is a great chance to explore how a revolutionary secret society functions in practice. Because if you remember all the way back to the French Revolution, in those early days, events were improvised, and it wasn't until Dantan in the insurrection of August the 10th that something like professional revolutionaries came into being. Well, now one full generation later, professional revolutionaries and professional revolutionary societies now exist, and the Carbonari are a great early example of the phenomenon. So next week, we will go through the secret initiation rights and gain access to the inner circle of a secret society dedicated to the liberation of Italy.