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Metternich
As a man Metternich emerges as very different from the austere figure of popular imagination. Worldly, urbane and witty, he was a connoisseur of good living and enjoyed a sequence of scandalous love affairs and as much at home in Paris as Vienna.
Unknown Binding
First published January 1, 1972
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About the author
Alan Warwick Palmer
78 books24 followersAuthor also writes under Alan Palmer
Alan Palmer was Head of the History Department at Highgate School from 1953 to 1969, when he gave up his post to concentrate on historical writing and research.
Alan Palmer was Head of the History Department at Highgate School from 1953 to 1969, when he gave up his post to concentrate on historical writing and research.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
April 13, 2017
The stated goal of Alan Palmer is to defend the reputation of Clement von Metternich's whose name conjures up images of courageous partisans of liberty in some corner of the Austrian Empire suffering in dank dungeons awaiting execution. Indeed it is well known that Beethoven as he was composing Fidelio and Puccini as he was composing Tosca was thinking of Metternich who for fifty years fought with all his energy against democracy and freedom of expression. Metternich was no less hated by writers than by opera composers. Alexandre Dumas, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot, Stendhal, Lord Byron and William Wordsworth are among the many nineteenth century literary figures to have excoriated the nefarious Metternich. In the big picture, the artists and poets are right about Metternich who was indeed a terrible foe of what is now generally considered to be political progress.
What Palmer does is to show the tremendous intelligence, finesse, diplomat skill and tenacity that Metternich possessed in is lifelong struggle to preserve the domination of aristocracy in European politics. Thus instead of denouncing Metternich for opening the mail of diplomats, student leaders and liberal politicians, Palmer praises Metternich for how he used the information that he gathered in this manner. Skill is necessary after all to determine what can or cannot be believed. Even more skill is required in order to determine what measures should be taken.
By any standards, Palmer brushes rather lightly over the savage methods of repression used by Metternich. Palmer's justification would be that there is virtually no documentary evidence to link Metternich to the abuses. We know that Metternich scrupulously reviewed any letters that he had purloined mail due to the memoranda that he drafted about them. However, there is nothing in his correspondence or diaries about who was detained or what the conditions were like in any of the many prisons in the Austrian empire none of which he would have ever visited.
One example of Palmer's disingenuousness that struck me was his treatment of the 1846 Revolt in Galicia fomented by nationalist among the Polish nobility. One response taken by the Austrian authorities during this period was to pay a bounty to any Polish peasant who would deliver to them the severed head of a Polish head. According to the legend in Poland, it was Metternich who ordered the bounties. If indeed this was case, Metternich left no paper trace. Thus Palmer is able to write based on the available evidence, that Metternich regretted the abuses committed by Austrian officials in Galicia as they suppressed putting down the revolt.
Despite my reserves, about what Palmer chooses to omit or sweep under the carpet, there is no question that what Palmer does set out to do, he does well. For example his examination of Metternich's Congress system whereby the political leaders of England, France, Prussia, Russia and Austria met at regular intervals during the 1820s and 1830s to manage crises that threatened European peace or dynastic stability is masterful.
It was Metternich's firm belief that monarchs must rule as autocrats with absolutely no sharing of power with the middle classes. In Metternich's view, the middle classes were impossible to satisfy. The more power you would give them, the more they would demand until they would usurp the legitimate monarch. Once in power they would fall victims to their own incompetence in government and the unrealistic expectations that they would have stirred up in the masses in their struggles with the king. Thus the middle class or bourgeois government would fall to mob rule. A strong man like Napoleon would be needed to restore order and hopefully restore power to the rightful royal dynasty. Given this world outlook, Metternich wanted the ruling monarchs to meet in regular councils to resolve differences among themselves. They were act together to prevent any of their number from being other thrown by liberal democratic forces. Above all they were to abstain from supporting democratic movements in the territories of their fellow monarchs in hopes of seizing territories from their royal peers.
Metternich's approach to suppressing liberal democratic reform worked quite well up until the catastrophic events of World War I which saw the fall of the Habsburg, Hohenzollern and Romanov empires in Central Europe. One can only wonder in retrospect if these regimes might have made a peaceful transition to democracy if they had not so ruthlessly suppressed all opposition for the roughly one hundred years that followed the Napoleonic wars.
Palmer's book is well worth the read. Readers looking for a more critical review of Metternich should consult: Phantom Terror: The Threat of Revolution and the Repression of Liberty 1789-1848 by Adam Zamoyski.
What Palmer does is to show the tremendous intelligence, finesse, diplomat skill and tenacity that Metternich possessed in is lifelong struggle to preserve the domination of aristocracy in European politics. Thus instead of denouncing Metternich for opening the mail of diplomats, student leaders and liberal politicians, Palmer praises Metternich for how he used the information that he gathered in this manner. Skill is necessary after all to determine what can or cannot be believed. Even more skill is required in order to determine what measures should be taken.
By any standards, Palmer brushes rather lightly over the savage methods of repression used by Metternich. Palmer's justification would be that there is virtually no documentary evidence to link Metternich to the abuses. We know that Metternich scrupulously reviewed any letters that he had purloined mail due to the memoranda that he drafted about them. However, there is nothing in his correspondence or diaries about who was detained or what the conditions were like in any of the many prisons in the Austrian empire none of which he would have ever visited.
One example of Palmer's disingenuousness that struck me was his treatment of the 1846 Revolt in Galicia fomented by nationalist among the Polish nobility. One response taken by the Austrian authorities during this period was to pay a bounty to any Polish peasant who would deliver to them the severed head of a Polish head. According to the legend in Poland, it was Metternich who ordered the bounties. If indeed this was case, Metternich left no paper trace. Thus Palmer is able to write based on the available evidence, that Metternich regretted the abuses committed by Austrian officials in Galicia as they suppressed putting down the revolt.
Despite my reserves, about what Palmer chooses to omit or sweep under the carpet, there is no question that what Palmer does set out to do, he does well. For example his examination of Metternich's Congress system whereby the political leaders of England, France, Prussia, Russia and Austria met at regular intervals during the 1820s and 1830s to manage crises that threatened European peace or dynastic stability is masterful.
It was Metternich's firm belief that monarchs must rule as autocrats with absolutely no sharing of power with the middle classes. In Metternich's view, the middle classes were impossible to satisfy. The more power you would give them, the more they would demand until they would usurp the legitimate monarch. Once in power they would fall victims to their own incompetence in government and the unrealistic expectations that they would have stirred up in the masses in their struggles with the king. Thus the middle class or bourgeois government would fall to mob rule. A strong man like Napoleon would be needed to restore order and hopefully restore power to the rightful royal dynasty. Given this world outlook, Metternich wanted the ruling monarchs to meet in regular councils to resolve differences among themselves. They were act together to prevent any of their number from being other thrown by liberal democratic forces. Above all they were to abstain from supporting democratic movements in the territories of their fellow monarchs in hopes of seizing territories from their royal peers.
Metternich's approach to suppressing liberal democratic reform worked quite well up until the catastrophic events of World War I which saw the fall of the Habsburg, Hohenzollern and Romanov empires in Central Europe. One can only wonder in retrospect if these regimes might have made a peaceful transition to democracy if they had not so ruthlessly suppressed all opposition for the roughly one hundred years that followed the Napoleonic wars.
Palmer's book is well worth the read. Readers looking for a more critical review of Metternich should consult: Phantom Terror: The Threat of Revolution and the Repression of Liberty 1789-1848 by Adam Zamoyski.
January 9, 2016
A long-reaching biography of one of the great statesmen of Europe, spanning the age of Napoleon and the coming of Italian independence. A great "tell-all" account of a man who lived long enough to know pretty much everyone on the Who's Who list in Europe for the better part of a century. A bit turgid and haughty in tone at times - not unlike the Chancellor himself - it was well worth the read.
June 11, 2021
The book was well written but I found its endless commentary on political events rather laborsome. I had originally purchased this book because I wanted to know more about Metternich's mindset. I was especially enthralled by my initial reading of him, his system, and the vast intelligence apparatus that he had personally set up. I felt this book did not cover much of those elements with the author choosing to focus on a much broader view of the man's life.
August 13, 2022
This fabulous biography of Metternich comprises twenty chapters:
1) Rococo
2) World in Ferment
3) Dresden and Berlin
4) Ambassador to Napoleon
5) Collaboration
6) Peace and War
7) Negotiating Valiantly
8) The Business of Victory
9) Vienna
10) Dabbling in the Shifting Sand
11) Aix and Carlsbad
12) ‘My Friends the Spiders’
13) Power’s Foremost Parasite
14) The Shadow of Eclipse
15) Challenge Resisted
16) Monarchy Without a Monarch
17) A Sense of Conflict
18) Challenge Triumphant
19) Exile
20) Eldest Statesman
It was Austria’s destiny that in its years of crisis it was guided a man who epitomised its very essence: it was its destiny and not its good fortune, for as in Greek tragedy, the accomplishment of Clemens Von Metternich made foreseeable the ultimate collapse of the State fought so long to preserve.
Like the State he represented, Metternich was a product of an age in the process of being transcended. He was born in the 18th century, of which Talleyrand was to say that nobody who lived after the French Revolution would ever know how sweet and gentle life could be. And the certitude of the time of his youth never left Metternich.
Contemporaries might scoff at his incantation of the maxims of sound reason, at his facile philosophizing and polished epigrams. They did not understand that it was an accident of history which projected Metternich into a revolutionary struggle so foreign to his temperament.
For like the century that formed him, his style adapted better to the manipulation of factors treated as given than to a contest of will better to achievement through proportion than through scale. He was a Rococo figure, complex, finely carved, all surface like an intricately cut prism.
His face was delicate but without depth, his conversation brilliant, but without ultimate seriousness. Equally at home in the saloon and in the Cabinet, graceful and facile, he was the beau ideal of the eighteenth century aristocracy which justified itself not by its truth, but by existence. And if he never came to terms with the new age it was not because he failed to understand its seriousness but because he disdained it.
Therein too his fate was the fate of Austria.
The author of this volume says, “Metternich was by no means indifferent to what future generations would think of him, though he had every confidence in their verdict. ‘My name is linked with so many great events that it will accompany them to posterity’, he declared in a private letter written when his life still had forty years to run; and he added, ‘A century hence, authors will judge me very differently’.
There is no doubt he had every intention of assisting them to think rightly about him. He drafted three autobiographical fragments and gave instructions to his son, Richard, that these reminiscences should be published twenty years after his death, together with selections from his archives.
The Collected Papers duly appeared in the early 1880s and the documents they included have proved a rich mine of information, even though they were pruned and edited. Unfortunately the autobiographical sections were less successful. They showed traits hardly endearing to his readers: a gift of invention; a tact of omission; and a claim of infallibility.
‘He dazzles himself with his brightness in the mirror which he holds perpetually before his eyes’, wrote Albert Sorel, master-craftsman among the French historians of diplomacy. The Memoirs did not improve Metternich’s reputation as much as he had assumed or his son anticipated…”
And we can conclude this discussion with the following observation:
Yet Metternich was not primarily a theorist nor even a constructive statesman. Though he prided himself on a logical scientific approach to political problems, his gifts were those of an artist. He practised the skills of diplomacy with greater fluency than any contemporary except Talleyrand, from whom he had learnt many of the refinements of the game.
But he possessed the opportunity, denied to Talleyrand, of shaping the very character of statecraft in an era of external peace. Metternich’s achievements are essentially transitory, victories of intrigue rather than of creative conviction, triumphs of expediency more than of principle; but the distinctive features of diplomacy during the Hundred Years Peace were perfected by the Austrian Chancellor and passed into general usage at a time when Europe’s fate was determined by its chancelleries to a greater extent than ever before or since…..
1) Rococo
2) World in Ferment
3) Dresden and Berlin
4) Ambassador to Napoleon
5) Collaboration
6) Peace and War
7) Negotiating Valiantly
8) The Business of Victory
9) Vienna
10) Dabbling in the Shifting Sand
11) Aix and Carlsbad
12) ‘My Friends the Spiders’
13) Power’s Foremost Parasite
14) The Shadow of Eclipse
15) Challenge Resisted
16) Monarchy Without a Monarch
17) A Sense of Conflict
18) Challenge Triumphant
19) Exile
20) Eldest Statesman
It was Austria’s destiny that in its years of crisis it was guided a man who epitomised its very essence: it was its destiny and not its good fortune, for as in Greek tragedy, the accomplishment of Clemens Von Metternich made foreseeable the ultimate collapse of the State fought so long to preserve.
Like the State he represented, Metternich was a product of an age in the process of being transcended. He was born in the 18th century, of which Talleyrand was to say that nobody who lived after the French Revolution would ever know how sweet and gentle life could be. And the certitude of the time of his youth never left Metternich.
Contemporaries might scoff at his incantation of the maxims of sound reason, at his facile philosophizing and polished epigrams. They did not understand that it was an accident of history which projected Metternich into a revolutionary struggle so foreign to his temperament.
For like the century that formed him, his style adapted better to the manipulation of factors treated as given than to a contest of will better to achievement through proportion than through scale. He was a Rococo figure, complex, finely carved, all surface like an intricately cut prism.
His face was delicate but without depth, his conversation brilliant, but without ultimate seriousness. Equally at home in the saloon and in the Cabinet, graceful and facile, he was the beau ideal of the eighteenth century aristocracy which justified itself not by its truth, but by existence. And if he never came to terms with the new age it was not because he failed to understand its seriousness but because he disdained it.
Therein too his fate was the fate of Austria.
The author of this volume says, “Metternich was by no means indifferent to what future generations would think of him, though he had every confidence in their verdict. ‘My name is linked with so many great events that it will accompany them to posterity’, he declared in a private letter written when his life still had forty years to run; and he added, ‘A century hence, authors will judge me very differently’.
There is no doubt he had every intention of assisting them to think rightly about him. He drafted three autobiographical fragments and gave instructions to his son, Richard, that these reminiscences should be published twenty years after his death, together with selections from his archives.
The Collected Papers duly appeared in the early 1880s and the documents they included have proved a rich mine of information, even though they were pruned and edited. Unfortunately the autobiographical sections were less successful. They showed traits hardly endearing to his readers: a gift of invention; a tact of omission; and a claim of infallibility.
‘He dazzles himself with his brightness in the mirror which he holds perpetually before his eyes’, wrote Albert Sorel, master-craftsman among the French historians of diplomacy. The Memoirs did not improve Metternich’s reputation as much as he had assumed or his son anticipated…”
And we can conclude this discussion with the following observation:
Yet Metternich was not primarily a theorist nor even a constructive statesman. Though he prided himself on a logical scientific approach to political problems, his gifts were those of an artist. He practised the skills of diplomacy with greater fluency than any contemporary except Talleyrand, from whom he had learnt many of the refinements of the game.
But he possessed the opportunity, denied to Talleyrand, of shaping the very character of statecraft in an era of external peace. Metternich’s achievements are essentially transitory, victories of intrigue rather than of creative conviction, triumphs of expediency more than of principle; but the distinctive features of diplomacy during the Hundred Years Peace were perfected by the Austrian Chancellor and passed into general usage at a time when Europe’s fate was determined by its chancelleries to a greater extent than ever before or since…..
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews