Vienna, 1814: How the Conquerors of Napoleon Made Love, War, and Peace at the Congress of Vienna (15 page)

Among the many activities scheduled for the first week of the congress, there was a concert conducted by Vienna’s
Hofkapellmeister,
Antonio Salieri, the opera composer who taught Beethoven, and later Schubert and Liszt. The rumor that Salieri had poisoned Mozart was already circulating at the congress, despite the lack of evidence (one of the police agents, Giuseppe Carpani, would later write a defense of Salieri). Salieri would be active in the musical life of the Vienna Congress that autumn, even directing one “monster concert” of some hundred pianos—apparently an arrangement more experimental and innovative than pleasing to the ear.

In accordance with courtesies of the day, the monarchs were busy bestowing honors and awards upon each other. Britain inducted the leaders into its Order of the Bath and the Order of the Garter with the “Diamond George” pendant. The king of Denmark awarded his fellow sovereigns his state’s highest prize, the Order of the Elephant, and the king of Prussia the Black Eagle. The emperor of Austria conferred perhaps the most coveted of all, the Order of the Golden Fleece. All of these ribbons, stars, crosses, and collars, along with many others, were slipped around necks or pinned on breasts that first week.

The Festivals Committee was not the only one planning events. Every night there was entertainment at an embassy, salon, tavern, or somewhere else around town. On Tuesday evenings, for example, the Castlereaghs hosted their soiree at the Minoritenplatz, complete with supper, violin and guitar music, and dance. Despite being well attended and usually difficult to gain entrance to before 10 p.m., Agent ** complained of their tediousness. Guests were poorly greeted and often ignored. The room was dimly lit and poorly furnished, and many women who could not find a seat had to stand. Indeed, without the presiding hand of a talented hostess, this drawing room sometimes seemed more like a café than a salon.

When the British delegates ventured out into other salons in town, many seemed awkward and clumsy. “Either they try to impress us,” one police agent overheard, “or they skulk like beasts in a cave.” Others smiled at their odd selection of clothes, deemed eccentric at best. The effects of being an island power, so insulated from the Continent, seemed evident to more than a few observers that autumn.

One member of the British embassy, Ambassador Lord Stewart, had already gotten involved in a traffic dispute with the driver of another carriage—a common enough hazard in a town with many horse-drawn vehicles racing through the narrow streets. The event made the rounds in Vienna’s salons. According to one rumor, the British ambassador almost ended up tossing the coachman into the Danube. Police agents also followed the case, though they learned that it was actually the coachman who was close to pummeling the ambassador.

What had happened was that after the near accident, Lord Stewart, who had apparently “emptied some bottles of Bordeaux,” shouted obscenities, clenched his fists, boasted at his record as a boxer, and challenged the other man to a fistfight. The cabdriver, who evidently did not understand English, grabbed the whip and cracked him in the face. Bystanders broke up the scuffle, and police arrived on the scene before it turned worse, though the officers refused at first to believe that the loud drunk was really a high-ranking member of the British delegation.

Lord Stewart was already cropping up in police reports, too, for the vast amount of time he was spending in the company of what the spies called “ladies of easy virtue.” He was a regular customer at local brothels, many of them housed in the Leopoldstadt district, a mostly seventeenth-century development in what had once been the city’s thriving Jewish quarter. Stewart and his buddies had also discovered the merits of Hungarian wine, and, in the first week in Vienna, the British ambassador had several times been carried to his carriage.

Perhaps the liveliest topic buzzing in the salons the week of the scheduled opening was the reputed imminent arrival of Napoleon’s wife, Marie Louise. Since the fall of the empire, the twenty-three-year-old woman had been torn in her allegiance, vacillating between joining her husband on Elba or returning to her father, Emperor Francis, and the family in Vienna. She had spent a great deal of time pondering her choices and had, in the end, decided to return to Vienna. She was supposed to arrive at any moment, and speculation raged on how she would react to the sight of Vienna carried away in its celebration of her husband’s downfall.

W
HILE ALL THE
plenipotentiaries were preparing for the diplomatic duel at the next meeting of the Big Four, Talleyrand decided to take matters into his own hands. Fearing that his ostracization in the conference of the Great Powers would deprive him of any real influence, the French minister played to his strength. Talleyrand was rightly convinced that his conception of the congress as a parliament of states with equal power would resonate with the vast majority of the delegates, who were destined to be excluded from the proposed scheme.

On his own initiative, Talleyrand drafted, signed, and circulated an account of the secret meeting—a maverick breach of diplomatic etiquette. The Great Powers, he announced, had “formed a league to make themselves masters of everything.” This was very much against the spirit of the congress and the hopes of establishing a genuine peace. The Great Powers had no right to sabotage the congress, and had set themselves up instead as the “supreme arbiters of Europe.”

This note was, needless to say, very unpopular among the Big Four. Not only was the structure of the upcoming congress now out in the open, introduced in an unbecoming and an untimely fashion by an outside party, but Talleyrand’s version, in their eyes, blew everything out of proportion. Russia grumbled, Austria took offense, and the Prussians were absolutely furious.

In a meeting of the Big Four on October 2, Wilhelm von Humboldt denounced the French document as a “firebrand flung into our midst.” The Prussian embassy, it seems, quickly countered with its own campaign of propaganda, spreading rumors that the French were once again up to their old habits. Talleyrand was accused of sowing discontent among the Allies in order for his country to seize coveted regions of Belgium and the left bank of the Rhine.

Castlereagh, on the other hand, opted for a more constructive approach and went over to Kaunitz Palace, early that same morning, to discuss matters with Talleyrand personally. He had come to respect the French minister and his opinions, though the two men certainly did not agree on everything. Many thought Castlereagh was the friendliest to the French embassy, and among the Big Four, he no doubt was.

The British minister explained to Talleyrand in his calm, reassuring manner that the proceedings at the meeting at Metternich’s summer villa were intended to be “entirely confidential.” Talleyrand’s unexpected publication of his note had “rather excited apprehension” among the Austrian and Prussian ministers. Talleyrand listened, but he did not recant, apologize, or otherwise give any sign of remorse. He only reminded him that Castlereagh had asked his opinion, and “[he] was bound to give it.”

Talleyrand further explained that he could not participate in this ill-advised attempt to close off the congress. Napoleonic ideas of seizing power and acting unilaterally should be banished from international politics. Respecting principles of law and justice, on the other hand, was the best way forward. Castlereagh, unimpressed, returned to headquarters.

On October 3, Talleyrand wrote a second note, reiterating his main points, and this time he distributed it more widely. Sure enough, it had great impact. Many princes and delegates outside of the elite club of Great Powers shared Talleyrand’s concerns, and they applauded his defiance. He was speaking up for the minor states, and the only one, it seemed, doing so. Indeed, by maneuvering into position to be able to champion law and justice, the foreign minister of a country that had only recently devoured small nations was now, remarkably, being praised as their protector.

T
HE
G
REAT
P
OWERS
knew that they had to work quickly to rein in the Frenchman. The person that Metternich wanted to draft the official response to Talleyrand’s inflammatory paper was his assistant, Friedrich von Gentz, the secretary of the Congress, a short man with red hair and thick small-rimmed glasses. By a combination of talent and his own pushy efforts, he had managed to position himself right in the middle of everything.

In many ways, Gentz had a lot to prove. He was not a prince like Metternich, Talleyrand, or Hardenberg, all of whom had been raised to that title either during or immediately after the war. He was not even a count like his friend, the Russian adviser Karl Nesselrode, a man he had discovered and supported for years. Sure, Gentz had an aristocratic-sounding “von” in his name, but no one seemed to know where it had come from, and many suspected it was on his own initiative, as indeed it was.

A German by birth, the fifty-year-old Gentz had studied at the University of Königsberg under the philosopher Immanuel Kant, and this training showed. He was sharp in debate, adept at manipulating ideas and concepts, and so skillful in his questioning that he sometimes seemed like the Socrates of the Vienna Congress. Like the great philosopher, Gentz would also be unpopular with the people subjected to his painful tactics. He was a very hard worker, shunning many of the entertainments for a quiet evening in a salon discussing politics, which was his main passion. The Socratic comparison, of course, breaks down with Gentz’s unabashed worldly streak. He had a love of chocolate, perfume, and flashy rings. “If you want to make him deliriously happy,” Metternich said, “give him some bonbons.”

Gentz had previously worked as a civil servant in Prussia, where he had edited the conservative
Historisches Journal
and translated political thought, including Edmund Burke’s
Reflections on the Revolution in France.
In 1797, he went bankrupt; five years later, his marriage collapsed and he moved to Vienna. He joined the Austrian administration and eventually gained Metternich’s attention, becoming one of his most influential assistants. It was Metternich who had given him entrée into the congress and its high society.

Asked to answer the charges made by Talleyrand, Gentz went to work immediately with characteristic intensity. The next day, he was finished. Every decision of the committee was legal, Gentz argued in a frontal assault on Talleyrand’s accusations. Every decision, moreover, was shown to be completely in accord with the previous agreements, most importantly with the Treaty of Paris, the international document that legally gave rise to the Vienna Congress. As his colleagues had come to expect, Gentz was a wizard at finding just the right word for the occasion.

Gentz’s document was readily accepted and signed by the Great Powers. That night, Tuesday, October 4, at a soiree held by the Duchess of Sagan, it was officially presented to the French delegation. Metternich waited for the right moment, then pranced up to the French minister and, in front of a packed room, made a big show of handing him the protocol.

Talleyrand, of course, was not ruffled in the least. Less than twenty-four hours later, he also had a response, another letter that defiantly stood its ground. The Great Powers had no right, Talleyrand reaffirmed, to “take it upon themselves to decide everything in advance” and leave everyone else outside their cabal. Trying to impose their will as law was no better than Napoleon’s tactics and would only have the same result—more war and bloodshed.

When Talleyrand presented this paper at the next meeting of the Big Four at Metternich’s summer villa on October 5, the result was another “very tumultuous and very memorable conference,” as Gentz put it in his diary. Talleyrand’s protest was passed around the table. Both Metternich and Nesselrode frivolously “glanced at it with the air of men who require only to look at a paper to lay hold of all its contents.” Metternich turned to Talleyrand and asked him directly to withdraw the letter. He refused. Metternich tried again with more persuasion, but Talleyrand held firm. The French minister then added:

I shall take no more part in your conferences…I shall be nothing here but a member of the Congress, and I shall wait until it is opened.

But Talleyrand was making too many waves in salons and drawing rooms around town, and gaining too large a following to be ignored. Clearly, the French minister was not behaving in the way the Great Powers had hoped when they summoned him to their conference.

Exasperated, Metternich blurted out that he would cancel the peace conference immediately—a threat, at this point, so wildly unrealistic that it did not faze anyone. Russia’s Count Nesselrode came to Metternich’s assistance, stating unequivocally that the decisions in Vienna needed to be wrapped up quickly because the tsar was leaving town by the end of the month. Talleyrand, still unmoved, only replied, “I am sorry to hear it, for he will not be here to see the end of things.”