Metternich: Success or Failure?

by Nick Pelling. Charterhouse

new perspective. Volume 4. Number 2. December 1998

Summary: Metternich was skilled in the arts of contemporary diplomacy and image-making. For a while, he
preserved and strengthened the Habsburg Empire but only in appearance. Metternich was unable to prevent the
growth of the forces that weakened and ultimately destroyed the Habsburg Empire.

Prince Clement Wenceslas Lothair von Metternich, chancellor and foreign minister of the Austrian Habsburg
Empire, was the longest-serving first minister in the nineteenth century and, arguably, one of the most
successful. And yet in terms of the numbers of A-Level students writing essays about him he is a long way
down the historical hit parade, trailing after such apparently more exciting figures as Napoleon, Bismarck,
Cavour, Gladstone, Lenin, Stalin and of course Hitler. So why does Metternich lack pulling power? The answer
I feel lies in the fact that no one is quite sure how to interpret Metternich. He is often associated with
reconstructing the ancien régime after the revolutionary and Napoleonic eras but he is also seen as the man who
was destroyed by the revolutions of 1848. Thus creating a disconcerting confusion as to whether he should be
seen as a success or a failure. Given that A-Level examiners often ask students to decide whether Metternich
succeeded or failed, what can be said?

To begin with, it can be admitted that Metternich did not always care what people thought of him. For example,
he openly bragged about his ability to bore people into submission and described his conservative philosophy as
a set of ‘boring old principles’. Comments hardly designed to sell himself to posterity as a great success.

But Metternich as a personality was anything but dull. Born into the German high nobility in the Rhineland, he
had the arrogance of his class and more. In 1819 he said of himself:

There is a wide sweep about my mind. I am always above and beyond the preoccupations of most public men …
I cannot help myself from saying about twenty times a day: how right I am and how wrong they are.

In addition to this, he was extremely vain and convinced that women found him irresistible, which frequently
they did. His affair with Napoleon’s sister, Caroline Murat, is only the most well-known example of his ruthless
use of charm as a political weapon. Indeed, one might go on for a long time chronicling all the reasons why this
playboy politician can be described as anything but dull, but we ought perhaps to avoid the temptations of
tabloid history. To cut to the heart of the issue, what exactly did Metternich achieve?

In order to answer this question one must go back to the key event in Metternich’s youth: the French
Revolution. The revolutionary wars forced the Metternich family to flee from Germany into Austria. The young
Metternich never forgot this trauma. The rest of his career was, in a sense, one long reaction. After 1815, when
the revolutionary and Napoleonic era came to a close, Metternich had but one aim: to prevent any further
revolutions occurring in Europe. In practical terms, this meant the suppression of two closely-related
movements: Liberalism and Nationalism, ideologies which Metternich saw as the subversive roots of revolution.
(It is hardly surprising that a Habsburg minister would be against nationalism given that the Empire contained
about 11 different national groups.) To put this more positively and simply, his aim was to find ways of
restoring and preserving the ancien régime, by which he meant rule by an absolute monarchy and the social
dominance of the aristocracy. How successful was he in achieving this aim?

Rebuilding ‘The Old Order’ in Europe

When Metternich was first appointed foreign minister in 1809 the Habsburg Empire was at its lowest point in its
struggle against Napoleon. The French leader had forced the Empire out of its northern Italian territories, taken
over the Austrian Netherlands and subsumed the Habsburg parts of Poland into the Duchy of Warsaw. Habsburg
domination of Germany had also been smashed as a result of the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire. This
was a particularly powerful psychological blow to the dynasty’s sense of self worth: the Habsburgs had been
Holy Roman Emperors for almost all of the previous 400 years and suddenly it no longer existed. To add insult
to injury, this particular act of Napoleonic modernisation changed the title of the Habsburg Emperor from
Francis II, Holy Roman Emperor, to Francis I, Emperor of the remaining Habsburg dominions. One of the few
times in history that a monarch has been devalued.

For a short period around 1809 the complete collapse of the Habsburg Empire seemed a possibility. In that year
Metternich was appointed foreign minister and, within a few years, he had pulled the Empire back from the
brink of possible extinction. In short, Metternich used his diplomatic skills to outgeneral Napoleon. In 1810 he
persuaded the Habsburg Emperor, Francis I, to ally with Napoleon. When it became clear that the French leader
was not prepared to settle down and play the part of an old-fashioned absolute monarch he turned against him
and joined the Fourth Coalition, which eventually defeated France.

But Metternich’s greatest triumph was still to come. If Napoleon had threatened the virtual end of the Habsburg
Empire it was Metternich’s achievement at the Congress of Vienna to redraw the structure of Europe in such a
way that the Habsburgs emerged in an even stronger position than before the Napoleonic era. Control of north
Italy was regained, as was control of Germany through the creation of a German Confederation under the
permanent presidency of the Habsburgs. More spectacularly Metternich used his diplomatic sleight of hand to
slice up the contentious areas such as Saxony and Poland without alienating his two key future allies: Russia and
Prussia. Arguably, by the end of the Congress the Habsburg Empire was not only a great power but the great
power; the geographic and political centre of Europe’s restored ancien régime. More cynically one might say
that Metternich’s real achievement was to establish the illusion that the vast Habsburg Empire had become in
Metternich’s phrase ‘a geographical necessity’ - a linchpin holding the restored order of Europe together.

After 1815 Metternich’s aim was uncomplicated, if impossible: to suspend time, or at least, to preserve the
Vienna settlement for as long as possible. Despite the confusing nonsense of the Tsar Alexander’s so-called
Holy Alliance, it was Metternich’s Quadruple Alliance and the resultant Congress System that established some
sort of mechanism to allow Europe’s resurgent superpowers to co-ordinate their efforts to fight the revolutionary
fires wherever they should start. Inevitably, the alliance was a fragile construction and by 1822 after the bizarre
suicide of Castlereagh (he slit his own throat with a penknife in a fit of melancholy) the Congress System was
also effectively dead.

Though Metternich was particularly disappointed to see Britain become less supportive, he wasted no time in
building a smaller, more hard-line alliance of absolute monarchies known simply as the alliance of ‘Northern
Courts’: St Petersburg, Berlin and Vienna. Although this too was prone to internal squabbling, in particular over
the Eastern Question, Metternich was able to maintain a good relationship with Russia, which stands in stark
contrast to Austrian foreign ministers that came after him.

Thus, for much of his period at the foreign office Metternich was able to mask Austria’s relative military
weakness by working in tandem with other great powers. This was perhaps always the essence of what has
become known, rather too grandly, as the Metternich System.

Undoubtedly, Metternich lost some of his mastery of European affairs in the last decade at the foreign ministry
and he was unable to prevent revolutions occurring right across Europe in 1848, but we should not lose sight of
the fact that he had given ‘The Old Order’ a new start.

Policing the Habsburg Empire

In many ways the Habsburg Empire was an inherently unstable structure: over 250,000 square miles in area,
populated by 11 different national groups all of whom, with the exception of the Austrian ruling aristocracy,
were largely without access to political power and therefore increasingly excited by the ideas of nationalists and
liberal reformers. As these twin creeds grew more popular in the nineteenth century the plight of the ancient
Habsburg Empire appeared more and more precarious. Napoleon had threatened destruction and yet Metternich
again found ways to breathe new life into the old body politic.

It is often argued that, in addition to the territorial triumph at the Congress of Vienna, Metternich achieved
stability in the Habsburg Empire by creating a ‘police state’. How true is this? It is certainly true that he worked
very closely with Director of Police, Count Sedlnitzky, and that in addition to the regular police he created a
vast network of spies and informers, all paid to pass information to him. Occasionally, prominent nationalists,
such as the Hungarian Kossuth or the Italian Confalonieri, were thrown into jail. Books, newspapers, journals,
plays and even paintings could be banned if the content was deemed likely to foment national or liberal feeling.
Perhaps most notoriously he issued the Carlsbad decrees in 1819 which sought to suppress almost all dissident
thought within the German confederation. There can be little doubt that this was a particularly extreme package
of repressive legislation and in the way it targeted intellectuals such as professors, writers or students. It has led
some historians, such as A.J.P. Taylor, to compare the Austrian chancellor with the infamous American, Senator
McCarthy.

All of this is true and in some ways it is not surprising that some books cast Metternich as a rather sinister spider
at the centre of a very unpleasant web (an image that Metternich actually enjoyed) but revisionist historians have
shown that it was a web with absurdly large holes in it. The censorship, letter opening and bureaucratic
interference did not prevent the flow of liberal and nationalist ideas into the Empire. The midnight arrests and
occasional disappearances were more irritating than terrifying. The State was maddening but not fatal.

Having said that, Metternich’s conservatism was built upon the assumption that the people were too stupid to
know what was in their own interest. From this point of philosophical departure it is a short route to tyranny and
therefore Metternich must receive some of the blame for creating what we might see as a rather inefficient
prototype of the police state, though the police in question were surely somewhat closer to the Keystone variety
than those of the KGB or Gestapo. More to the point, up until 1848 the system worked very well.

Success or failure?

Far from being a failure, he would appear to have a most dazzling series of achievements to his name. The
outwitting of Napoleon, the negotiated triumph of Vienna, the establishment of a diplomatic method or system
which, to a certain extent, allowed the ruling classes of Europe to co-operate and communicate rather than make
war. (A principle the Habsburgs would have done well to remember after 1848 when they lost territories in the
wars of 1859 and 1866 and lost the entire Empire in the Great War of 1914-18.) In addition to this, in the field
of domestic policy though he was undoubtedly repressive and intolerant, he nevertheless provided strong central
government, indeed it might well be argued that a policy of even-handed repression of the nationalities was far
superior to the sharing of power with the Hungarians that occurred in 1867 and which was, arguably, a very
damaging constitutional change, creating not so much the Dualist constitution of the textbooks but a
schizophrenic one - by 1914 the western half of the Empire had universal manhood suffrage whilst the
Hungarian east remained defiantly undemocratic. One might also argue that the suppression of nationalism was
not necessarily a bad thing given what nationalism in the former Habsburg Empire has led to in the twentieth
century, not just Fascism of the Hitlerian variety but the barbarism of ‘ethnic cleansing’ in the recent Balkan
civil war. Indeed, we surely need to rethink the lurking assumption in many textbooks that the nineteenth-
century nationalists were somehow on the side of ‘progress’. So, in many ways Metternich provided the
Habsburg Empire and, to a lesser extent, Europe generally, with over 30 years of relative stability: an
extraordinary achievement after the convulsions of the Napoleonic era.

And yet, oddly, there is still the aura of failure around his name. The reason is very simple, his system
ultimately destroyed itself and him with it. To explain a little: it is frequently argued that his systematic
implementation of inflexible and repressive policies actually created the very revolutions that he was trying to
prevent. Thus the 1848 revolutions can be read as a kind of historical judgement upon the entire Metternich
system, damning him forever. Although this is a debatable point there is, surely, much truth in it. And this is part
of the problem for students of Metternich: he was both a success and a failure. So how, finally, should we
interpret him?

The master of illusion

Almost everything about Metternich feels false. In many ways even his failure has been exaggerated and
distorted by a curious process of guilt by association - association with a double decline: that of his class, the
aristocracy, and, of course, that of the Habsburg Empire, both of which spent the rest of the nineteenth century
digging their own graves and then falling into them in the Great War of 1914-18. Thus, most unfairly, it is the
history of Europe after 1848 that has done much to portray Metternich as a man sowing the seeds of future
failure.

In writing history we are all too often casting our historical actors into the rather clichéd roles of successful hero
or failed villain. Metternich can all too easily be cast as either. Even Metternich often seemed unsure of which
script he was following: he described himself on one occasion as ‘a kind of lantern’ which people used ‘to see
the way through’ and on another, as a hopeless man wasting his time ‘propping up buildings mouldering in
decay’. The uncertainty illuminates the most important aspect of Metternich’s career: his power was always a
kind of theatrical illusion. He created the illusion of the ‘necessity’ of Austria at the Congress of Vienna, the
illusion of a ‘system’ which could control European events, the illusion of himself as the sinister policeman at
the centre of a grand ‘police state’ and, of course, the illusion of himself as the only man who could hold back
the tides of revolution. We should not be surprised by the fact that the illusion was eventually shattered and
exposed for what it was in 1848. The real measure of Metternich’s success is the fact that for over 30 years he
was able to create the illusion of Austrian strength and obscure the reality of her relative weakness. Compared to
the other great powers the army was in poor shape but state finances were being crippled by the cost of trying to
maintain it. Exclusion from the Prussian dominated Zollverein left Austria shut out from Europe’s most
important trading markets. Emergent nationalism was eating away at the stability of such a multi-ethnic empire.
The police state was failing dismally to prevent subversive ideas corroding further the political system. Indeed,
the Habsburg Empire was, by 1848, a Great Power in name only. Metternich’s most impressive achievement
was to hide all of this decaying reality behind the thin façade of his own personal grandeur. Arguably and
ironically, this makes him only a success in obscuring the much deeper failure of his system.

Words and concepts to note

Ancien régime: a general term for ‘The Old Order’ in Europe before the French Revolution of 1789, when most
countries were ruled by absolute monarchs and the aristocracy were the dominant class.

Liberalism: a political system of ideas stressing freedom of the individual and usually demanding some sort of
representative government with a limited monarchy but not necessarily full democracy. A democrat might well
be described as a ‘radical’.

Nationalism: a movement stressing loyalty to one’s nation or race rather than loyalty to a dynasty or Empire.

Metternich System: a descriptive label for Metternich’s methods, implying that his use of congresses, alliances
and informal consultation in conjunction with all the apparatus of the police state can be seen as one system,
particularly given that all his methods seem to have one clear, ideological aim: the prevention of political
change.

Questions to consider

 What image, both of himself and of the Habsburg Empire, did Metternich create?

 Was Metternich’s major achievement the preservation of the Habsburg Empire, its lands, powers and strength
in Europe?

 What is a fair assessment of Metternich's diplomatic skills in alliance making for the benefit of Austrian
interests?

 Why was it impossible for Metternich to resist the forces of liberalism and nationalism?

Metternich: Success or Failure? by Nick Pelling © new perspective 1998

Nick Pelling, Head of History at Charterhouse School, is the author of The Habsburg Empire 1815-1918,
Hodder and Stoughton, 1996.