Klemens von Metternich

Klemens von Metternich was the foreign minister of the Austrian Empire from 1809 and its chancellor from 1821 until the revolution of March 1848 drove him from office. He helped organise the coalition that defeated Napoleon, dominated the Congress of Vienna that redrew the map of Europe in 1814–1815, and for three decades used diplomacy, censorship and police surveillance to hold back liberalism and nationalism. The period is often called the Age of Metternich, and his reputation has swung between that of a far-sighted peacemaker and that of a symbol of reaction.

Metternich was born on 15 May 1773 in Koblenz, in the Rhineland, into an old noble family of the Holy Roman Empire. His father, Count Franz Georg, was an imperial diplomat, and the boy was raised speaking French more fluently than German. He studied law at Strasbourg from 1788 and then at Mainz, so that he witnessed the early years of the French Revolution at close range. The revolutionary armies that overran the Rhineland in 1794 seized the family's estates there, and the experience left him with a lifelong hatred of revolution.

The family moved to Vienna, and in 1795 he married Countess Eleonore von Kaunitz, granddaughter of the great Austrian chancellor Wenzel Anton Kaunitz. The match gave him entry to the highest circles of Viennese society. After serving at the Congress of Rastatt, he became ambassador to Saxony in 1801, to Prussia in 1803 and, in 1806, to Napoleon's court in Paris, where he studied the emperor closely.

Austria's defeat by France in 1809 ended with the harsh Treaty of Schönbrunn, and in October that year Emperor Francis I appointed Metternich foreign minister. Judging that Austria was too weak to resist, he chose accommodation. He arranged the marriage in 1810 of Napoleon to the emperor's daughter, Archduchess Marie Louise, and in 1812 Austria sent a small army to support the French invasion of Russia.

After the destruction of Napoleon's army in Russia, Metternich moved cautiously from alliance to armed neutrality and then to mediation. When Napoleon rejected his terms at a famous meeting in Dresden in June 1813, Austria joined Russia, Prussia, Britain and Sweden in the final coalition of the Napoleonic Wars. The allied victory at Leipzig in October 1813 was followed by Metternich's elevation to the rank of prince. He wanted a France strong enough to balance Russia, and favoured keeping Napoleon or his son on the throne, but the allies restored the Bourbons in 1814.

Metternich hosted the great peace conference that met in Vienna from the autumn of 1814, amid a celebrated round of balls and entertainments. With Britain's Lord Castlereagh, France's Talleyrand and the Prussian and Russian delegations, he worked out a settlement intended to prevent any single power from dominating the continent. Russia received most of Poland as a kingdom under the tsar, Prussia gained part of Saxony and much of the Rhineland, and Austria gave up its old Belgian lands in exchange for Lombardy and Venetia in northern Italy. In place of the defunct Holy Roman Empire, a loose German Confederation was created under Austrian presidency. The final act was signed in June 1815, days before Napoleon's last defeat at Waterloo.

For a decade after 1815 the great powers met regularly in congresses, at Aachen in 1818, Troppau in 1820, Laibach in 1821 and Verona in 1822, a practice that came to be called the Concert of Europe. Metternich used these meetings to defend the principle that legitimate monarchs could intervene against revolution. Austrian troops crushed liberal revolts in Naples and Piedmont in 1821, and he backed French intervention in Spain in 1823. Britain gradually withdrew from this policy, and Austria's closest partners became the Russian Empire and the Kingdom of Prussia.

Inside Germany, the murder of the conservative writer August von Kotzebue by a student in 1819 gave him the pretext for the Carlsbad Decrees, which imposed press censorship, put universities under supervision and banned nationalist student societies across the Confederation. In the Habsburg lands he relied on censorship and an extensive network of police informers. In 1821 he was named Chancellor of State.

His personal life was marked by loss. Eleonore died in 1825, his second wife, Antoinette von Leykam, died in 1829 after less than two years of marriage, and several of his children died young. In 1831 he married the Hungarian countess Melanie Zichy-Ferraris.

From the late 1820s Metternich's influence waned. He could not prevent Greek independence or the revolution of 1830 in France, and at home he lost ground to his rival, Count Kolowrat. After Francis I died in 1835 and was succeeded by his mentally incapable son Ferdinand I, government was run by a council in which the two men obstructed each other, and Metternich's own proposals for administrative reform went nowhere. He was increasingly seen as the embodiment of a regime that refused to change.

When revolution broke out in Paris in February 1848, it spread quickly. On 3 March Lajos Kossuth demanded a constitution in the Hungarian Diet, and on 13 March crowds of students and workers filled the streets of Vienna. Troops fired on demonstrators, and that evening the court forced Metternich to resign. He fled in secret, eventually reaching London and then Brighton, where he received visitors such as the Duke of Wellington and Benjamin Disraeli, before moving to Brussels.

Metternich returned to Vienna in 1851 and offered advice to the young emperor Franz Joseph I, who listened politely but rarely followed it. He opposed Austria's involvement in the Crimean War and, in 1859, the ultimatum that started the war with France and Piedmont-Sardinia, an early step in the unification of Italy. He died in Vienna on 11 June 1859, aged 86.

For much of the nineteenth century liberals and nationalists portrayed Metternich as the jailer of Europe, the man who kept central Europe from developing constitutional government. Later historians, notably his biographer Heinrich von Srbik and, after the Second World War, writers on diplomacy such as Henry Kissinger, praised the Vienna settlement for preventing a general European war for decades. Others, including A. J. P. Taylor, have questioned how much power he really had, arguing that his diplomacy concealed the weakness of a multinational empire rather than curing it. Few dispute his skill as a negotiator, or that the forces he fought, nationalism above all, eventually reshaped Austria and the whole of Europe.