Metternich: Strategist and Visionary

By Wolfram Siemann and Daniel Steuer

A compelling new biography that recasts the most important European statesman of the first half of the nineteenth century, famous for his alleged archconservatism, as a friend of realpolitik and reform, pursuing international peace.

Metternich has a reputation as the epitome of reactionary conservatism. Historians treat him as the archenemy of progress, a ruthless aristocrat who used his power as the dominant European statesman of the first half of the nineteenth century to stifle liberalism, suppress national independence, and oppose the dreams of social change that inspired the revolutionaries of 1848. Wolfram Siemann paints a fundamentally new image of the man who shaped Europe for over four decades. He reveals Metternich as more modern and his career much more forward-looking than we have ever recognized.

Clemens von Metternich emerged from the horrors of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, Siemann shows, committed above all to the preservation of peace. That often required him, as the Austrian Empire’s foreign minister and chancellor, to back authority. He was, as Henry Kissinger has observed, the father of realpolitik. But short of compromising on his overarching goal Metternich aimed to accommodate liberalism and nationalism as much as possible. Siemann draws on previously unexamined archives to bring this multilayered and dazzling man to life. We meet him as a tradition-conscious imperial count, an early industrial entrepreneur, an admirer of Britain’s liberal constitution, a failing reformer in a fragile multiethnic state, and a man prone to sometimes scandalous relations with glamorous women.

Hailed on its German publication as a masterpiece of historical writing, Metternich will endure as an essential guide to nineteenth-century Europe, indispensable for understanding the forces of revolution, reaction, and moderation that shaped the modern world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Release date: Nov 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9780674245914

Book preview

Metternich

STRATEGIST AND VISIONARY

Wolfram Siemann

Translated by Daniel Steuer

THE BELKNAP PRESS OF HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Cambridge, Massachusetts

London, England   2019

Copyright © 2019 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College

All rights reserved

Jacket art: François Gérard, Portrait of Metternich. Königswart Castle.

Jacket design: Annamarie McMahon Why

978-0-674-74392-2 (alk. paper)

978-0-674-24591-4 (EPUB)

978-0-674-24592-1 (MOBI)

978-0-674-24590-7 (PDF)

Originally published in German as Metternich: Stratege und Visionär, eine Biografie, by Wolfram Siemann, revised edition, 2017, © Verlag C. H. Beck oHG, München 2016

The translation of this work was funded by Geisteswissenschaften International—Translation Funding for Humanities and Social Sciences from Germany, a joint initiative of the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, the German Federal Foreign Office, the collecting society VG WORT, and the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels (German Publishers and Booksellers Association).

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Names: Siemann, Wolfram, author. | Steuer, Daniel, translator.

Title: Metternich : strategist and visionary / Wolfram Siemann ; translated by Daniel Steuer.

Other titles: Metternich. English

Description: Cambridge, Massachusetts : The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2019. | Originally published in German as Metternich: Stratege und Visionär, eine Biografie, by Wolfram Siemann, revised edition, 2017, (c) Verlag C. H. Beck oHG, München 2016.—Title page verso | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019005672

Subjects: LCSH: Metternich, Clemens Wenzel Lothar, Fürst von, 1773–1859. | Statesmen—Austria—Biography. | Diplomats—Austria—Biography. | Austria—History—1789–1900. | Europe—Politics and government—1789–1900.

Classification: LCC DB80.8.M57 S5313 2019 | DDC 940.27092 [B]—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019005672

Frontispiece: Portrait of Metternich by François Gérard (1810; copy)

CONTENTS

A Note on the Frontispiece

Translator’s Note

Preface to the English-Language Edition

Introduction

A Life in Seven Stages

Metternich’s Biographers across the Generations

The Risks and Limitations of Srbik’s Biography of Metternich

1 Origins: Family Ties and the Rise of the Metternichs

The Ministerial Metternichs

The Lords of Königswart

The Barons of Winneburg and Beilstein

The Counts as Members of the Imperial Diet

The Highest Floor: The Princes in the Bel Étage

2 Metternich’s Generation: Ancien Régime and Enlightenment, 1773–1792

Parental Home, Childhood, and Education

Studies in Strasbourg and Mainz: Formation of a Political and Historical View of the World

3 A Double Crisis: Empire and Revolution, 1789–1801

Fin de Siècle: The Imperial Elections of 1790 and 1792

1789: The Rupture of the French Revolution

Brussels and the Austrian Netherlands

The Journey to Great Britain: The Final Piece to the Young Metternich’s Political Universe

Collapse and Flight in 1794

A New Beginning: Vienna, Königswart, and Austerlitz

Time of Transition: The Diplomat in Waiting, 1796–1801

4 Between Peace and War: Life as an Ambassador, 1801–1806

Dresden, 1801–1803: The Minister at His Observation Post

Berlin, 1803–1806: The Ambassador on the Grand Diplomatic Stage

The Peace of Pressburg and the Beginning of the End for the Holy Roman Empire

5 World War: Outset and Intensification, 1806–1812

Ambassador in Paris, 1806–1809: In the Lion’s Den

Ambassador on Borrowed Time and Napoleon’s Captive under House Arrest

The Interim Minister: Sidelined by Napoleon

The Minister in Charge of the New Direction: A Defensive Strategy in Domestic Policy and Matchmaking Abroad, 1809–1810

The Foreign Minister on Tour: 181 Days with Napoleon

Domestic and International Consolidation, 1810–1812

6 World War: Climax and Crisis, 1813

Metternich Discreetly Assembles the Forces

The Tactical Path to an Armed Mediation

Austria Joins the War: The Quadruple Alliance

7 World War: Catastrophe and Resolution, 1814

The Final Battle against Napoleon and the Prefiguration of the Vienna Order

Metternich’s Second Voyage to England and Preparations for the Congress of Vienna

Metternich, the War, and Violence in Politics

8 The End of an Era and a New Beginning for Europe: The Congress of Vienna, 1814–1815

The Initial Situation: The Experience of War and a Legal Vacuum

The Cosmopolitans: Instigating a New Law Based on Imperial Legal Orders

A Master Plan? Metternich between Realpolitik, Strategy, and Vision

The Congress on the Brink: Crises Test the Principle of Balance

The End of the Holy Roman Empire: The Habsburg Empire and the German Question

Germany—United by Federal Ties: Metternich’s Part in the Foundation of the German Confederation

The Congress Dances—Especially in Metternich’s House

9 Connoisseur of Women and Head of the Entail

Iconography and Historical Specificity of Love

Love and Politics: At the Courts of Dresden, Berlin, and Paris

Wilhelmine von Sagan and the Confusion of Feelings

Dorothea von Lieven: The Nearness of the Beloved?

Wives and Children: Family Ties and Tribulations

10 The Construction of a New Beginning: Reform and Reconstruction, 1815–1818

Metternich’s Ideas and Policies on the Nationality Question: The Case of Italy

Journeys to Italy, a Happy, Ungovernable Country

Metternich’s Plan for a Reorganization of the Monarchy

Habsburg and the German Confederation: An Affirmation for Metternich and Prussia, 1817–1818

11 Defensive Security Policies: Averting Threats under the Vienna System, 1815–1829

Napoleon’s Hundred Days: Activating the European Security System

Fault Lines in the Societies of Europe after 1815

Metternich and British Security Policies, 1817–1820: Pretext or Defense against a Revolution?

The Radicalization of the German National Movement: The Wartburg Festival and Sand’s Assassination of Kotzebue

Metternich’s Hesitant Reactions: The Press, the Professors, and the Students

From Teplitz to Carlsbad: The Conferences on Domestic Security, 1819–1820

Metternich’s Suggestions for the Development and Extension of the German Federal Constitution: The Final Act of the German Confederation, May 15, 1820

Terrorism and Security Policies as a European Problem: England, France, and Metternich

The Double-Edged Sword of Intervention and the Concert of Europe

The Concert of Europe and the Defensive Security Policies of the 1820s

12 The Economist: Metternich as a Capitalist with a Social Conscience

Managing Financial Crises

Metternich as Agrarian Economist: Farmer, Vintner, Forester

Factory Owner and Industrial Entrepreneur

13 The Spring of Nations amid Poverty, 1830–1847

The July Revolution in 1830 and Metternich’s International Crisis Management

A Revolution in Communication, the Spring of Nations, State Security

Tolerated Revolutions after 1830

From the Orient to the Rhine: The Concert of the Major Powers as a Challenge

Metternich and Customs Policies

14 The Organization of Rule: Power Centers, Networks, Interests, Intrigues

The Master of the State Chancellery

Constrained by Emperor Franz’s Personal Regime

Emperor Franz’s Legacy: A System Headed by a Half-Wit Who Represents the Crown

Crisis Instead of Reform: Metternich versus Kolowrat

Lobbyism, the Power Politics of the Imperial Family, the Estates

15 Revolution, Escape, Exile, 1848–1851

Revolution 1848: Sheet Lightning, Outbreak, and Escape

Metternich’s English Self: In Exile, 1848–1849

Brussels 1849–1851: Metternich’s Look Back at a Liberal Economic Policy That Was Not to Be

16 At the Observatory: Twilight Years in Vienna, 1851–1859

Epilogue: Metternich as a Postmodern Character in Early Modernity

Abbreviations

Notes

Bibliography

Acknowledgments

Illustration Credits

Index

A NOTE ON THE FRONTISPIECE

It has not been possible to trace the history of the oil painting by the French painter François Gérard (1770–1837) in the usual catalogues of art history or by other means. This is not surprising, given that there is apparently only one privately owned original and one copy, which is kept at Königswart Castle. The painting is often dated in relation to reproductions, in particular an engraving in the portrait collection at the Austrian National Library that was made by the Viennese copperplate engraver David Weiß (1775–1846) on the basis of the oil painting. The original is sometimes dated between 1808 and 1809 (see, e.g., Husslein-Arco, Europa in Wien; illustration of the suspected original on p. 166, dated 1809 on pp. 165 and 167). This date, however, cannot be correct, because the painting shows Metternich with the collar of the Order of the Golden Fleece, which the emperor did not bestow on Metternich until March 10, 1810 (the document is dated March 15, 1810). Napoleon’s much sought-after court painter created portraits of the emperor and his family, of rulers, statesmen, and generals and their wives, but rarely of envoys in Paris, which is what Metternich was until 1809. In 1810, Metternich returned to the court in Paris on the occasion of Marie Louise and Napoleon’s wedding—this time as minister of foreign affairs and as a celebrated escort of the bride. He stayed from March 28 to September 24, 1810. According to the former curator, Miloš Řiha, the painting at Königswart Castle is marked Copy of 1810. It was therefore Gérard who produced the original portrait of the thirty-seven-year-old Metternich as well as the copy in the summer of 1810 in Paris.

TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

The story of the publication of Metternich’s posthumous papers, including their subsequent translation into English, is not an altogether happy one. The present biography is mostly based on archival sources (that is, the original texts), but the eight volumes edited by Metternich’s son Richard between 1880 and 1884 often differ from these. The five-volume English edition of the Memoirs of Prince Metternich, in turn, represents a selection from the German edition (only part of which, incidentally, is a memoir in the conventional sense, while the remainder consists of letters, memoranda, and various other documents). And this English translation is not completely free of error—even, at times, error that turns the proper meaning into its opposite.

In light of this, the translation of Metternich’s own words, in case of doubt, follows the authoritative quoted version, based on the archival sources, while citations in the notes are given to both the German and English published versions, as few readers will have the privilege of being able to consult the original sources. Where the existing English translation has had to be corrected, this is indicated by transl. modified in cases involving light editing, and transl. amended in cases in which the text has had to be changed substantially.

At the time of Metternich’s career as a diplomat and politician, French was the official language of diplomacy, and many of his communications were, accordingly, written in French. Occasionally, where the French original captures a particular nuance that might otherwise be lost, it was included in the German edition of this book, and in such cases the French has also been included in this translation.

German titles, names of institutions, and terms have been retained, or added in brackets, where no good English equivalent exists, or where a specific meaning is attached to a term. A case in point is the seemingly innocuous word Ruhe. Following the Prussian defeat at Jena / Auerstedt, the Prussian governor of Berlin published an appeal containing the phrase Ruhe ist die erste Bürgerpflicht, or the foremost duty of the citizen is to remain calm. This became proverbial, and the term Ruhe therefore acquired a very specific semantic penumbra. Because one of the central themes of this book is Metternich’s aim of creating and maintaining peace, Friede must be clearly distinguished from Ruhe, which implies the maintenance of social order.

Explanatory notes by the translator have been added where an English-speaking audience might be less familiar with a name or event than would a German-speaking audience. Some notes have also been added concerning information on the texts involved. All such notes have been kept to a minimum.

All emphases are in the original, unless otherwise indicated.

PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH-LANGUAGE EDITION

Clemens von Metternich, the state chancellor of the old Habsburg monarchy, has given his name to an entire era: the age of Metternich. The picture that history has so far formed of this man has been a highly ambivalent one. His opponents past and present have cast him as a villain and evil character, and historians of a nationalistic bent—with his best-known biographer, Heinrich von Srbik, setting the tone for that group—have judged him to be a cunning, womanizing, effeminate, and cosmopolitan enemy of the German nation, and even of the very notion of nationality. In the history of international relations, by contrast, where questions of war and peace are of paramount importance, the view of him has always been a different one, and this is especially the case in the Anglophone world. The former U.S. secretary of state Henry Kissinger was one of the most famous proponents of an alternative view, which, in 1954, he put forward in the still widely read book A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh, and the Problems of Peace. Kissinger highlighted one of Metternich’s most important insights, namely that lasting peace can only be secured through an international balance of power based on a shared legal order. This biography places this insight at the center of its narrative, arguing that Metternich’s long-term master plan was to secure a peace based on solidarity and consensus. Looking at the world today, it is obvious that for this reason Metternich is to be considered not only a major historical figure but also someone whose principles may still be of considerable importance. As this positive perspective on Metternich is associated in particular with the Anglophone world, I had always hoped that my biography might also become available to an English-speaking audience.

There is a second, hitherto unacknowledged, reason for Anglophone readers, in particular, to be interested in Metternich. On one occasion, in private conversation with Dorothea von Lieven, the wife of the Russian ambassador in London, Metternich, who was of course a German from the Rhineland, said, Austria is my moral fatherland. But he immediately added: If I were not what I am, I would like to be an Englishman. If I could be neither the one nor the other I would rather be nothing at all. This biography shows in detail, for the first time, that from an early age and throughout his life Metternich was an admirer of the English political system, which he considered to be the best in the world, albeit a system not yet realizable under the social and political conditions that prevailed in the continental Europe of his time. He was strongly influenced by Edmund Burke and also by his personal experiences of the British parliament, whose sittings he attended while staying in London. To him, this system represented what he called a historically evolved constitutionalism and embodied the ideal of a pragmatic, rather than doctrinal or ideological, conservatism. Metternich retained a life-long enthusiasm for all things English, including parliamentary government, Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, and English society in general. In his later years, he even discovered the writings of Alexis de Tocqueville and—to the great surprise of an American visitor of his—developed a solid understanding of the peculiarities of American democracy.

This book is the first biography of Metternich to be thoroughly based on archival material. For the first time, the family archives in Prague, which include Metternich’s extensive personal papers, his library at Königswart Castle, and the documents of the Rhenish Johannisberg archive were systematically consulted. Starting work on the documents in the family archive made me feel as though I was Howard Carter discovering the tomb of Tutankhamun. These previously unknown documents provided a view of another Metternich, of Metternich the strategist and visionary and, as I have mentioned, of Metternich the Anglophile—aspects of the man that had gone unnoticed.

Readers are likely to discover similarities between Metternich’s time and our own. That was not my intention at the outset. I did not want to push the issue of Metternich’s contemporary relevance in order to make him appear more important. In my eyes, he is not a hero, and in any case this is not how historians should approach their subjects. Historians should attempt to leave the moral prejudices of their own times behind and try to understand the mentality and intellectual attitudes of the past, in this case a past more than two hundred years away. My aim was to reconstruct Metternich’s intentions, achievements, and failures; I wanted to demonstrate the incongruence between what he wanted and what he was able to do. But, astonishingly, Metternich nevertheless ended up coming across as a surprisingly modern figure, and not only because of his views on war and peace. To us who live in an age in which terrorists massacre innocent bystanders in the name of a higher cause, the unprovoked killing of the writer August von Kotzebue by the student Carl Ludwig Sand—also in the name of some higher ideal—appears just as reprehensible as it did to most people at the time. The countermeasures taken in response to Kotzebue’s murder and other violent incidents may be compared to the activities of modern intelligence services and the other state institutions responsible for safeguarding constitutions. The Holy Roman Empire and the Habsburg monarchy were not kinds of nation-states, nor were they failed nation-states; they were historically evolved legal orders that are best understood as composite monarchies and multinational orders. Much like the European Union today, they tried to find a solution to the problem of how to guarantee harmony and unity between different nationalities in a way that advances the common interests of all. In the case of the Swiss confederation we may consider this experiment to be a successful one; in the case of the EU, the outcome is yet to be determined.

This book tells about a fictional journey into the past, and, as a kind of travel guide, the author often has occasion to stop and pause. He would be content if, in the end, those following him on this tour of Metternich’s life in seven stages came to know an important figure of world history a little better and formed their own judgment on that figure’s successes and failures. If he also succeeded in opening up a new and broader perspective on the major transitional period that took place in Europe and across the Atlantic between the time of the French Revolution and the dawn of nation-states after the revolutions of 1848, then the book’s subtitle—strategist and visionary—would be truly justified.

INTRODUCTION

A LIFE IN SEVEN STAGES

Before writing the major biography you hold in your hands, I published a rough sketch of Metternich’s life in the form of a slim monograph which appeared in 2010. It may therefore be appropriate to say a few words about the difference between the two texts. It would, of course, have been impermissible simply to retell the story of this important statesman in an expanded version that retained the same style. A short sketch tempts an author to present the results in advance and to give a picture of the protagonist’s personality and character in the beginning, when the reader should, in fact, gradually become familiar with them in the course of the narrative. The larger canvas of a full biography permits the biographer to take a different approach, and it affords greater freedom. It allows the author to adopt a different role—as it were, that of a knowledgeable companion and travel guide, one who takes a curious reader on a journey through the past. Thus, together we shall immerse ourselves in historical epochs and landscapes that have long since become alien to us. And the life we will be concerned with on our travels covers more historical epochs than most other statesmen have been able to experience—let alone to help shape, over the course of some fifty years, and then comment upon in retrospect.

If we leave aside the origins of the Metternich family, which go back to the Middle Ages, we shall be traversing seven past landscapes, separated by six historical transition points that mark alterations in the political system. Together, they led Metternich and his contemporaries from the age of the ancien régime right up to the beginnings of modernity in the nineteenth century. The remainder of this introduction is a short travel brochure, indicating what the reader who wants to go with us on this journey through these seven epochs can expect to see. We may define a historical experience as being of an epochal nature if it engraved the collective memory of its contemporaries with such force that, throughout their lifetimes, it did not let go of them and kept resurfacing in their conversations, recollections, and interpretations. For each of our seven epochal experiences, our brochure will also briefly indicate the perspectives from which they were perceived at the extreme ends of the political spectrum.

1. The first of Metternich’s seven epochs lasted from his early childhood to the formative years of his youth (1773–1788). He was a sensitive observer, and during those years he witnessed the splendor and apocalyptic atmosphere of the ancien régime, as well as the intellectual fascination of the Enlightenment sweeping through aristocratic and bourgeois circles. The years between 1766 and 1777, in particular, saw the formation of a coherent generation, which would go on to provide Europe with its leading intellectual, political, and military figures. It was for this generation, which we shall later have occasion to characterize more precisely, that the historiographical labels Generation Metternich (for those born around 1773) and, seen from the opposite end of the political spectrum, so to speak, Generation Bonaparte (beginning in 1769) were coined.¹ All its members were embedded within the old cosmopolitan Europe of enlightened erudition as it could be found, in a more reserved style, in the busy metropolis of London, in fiery style in the seething intellectual hotbed that was Paris, and in a more measured and engaged style of laborious elaboration on the pulpits and in the offices of many German university and residential towns, where the attempt was made to combine the tradition of German public law, which reached back hundreds of years, with the challenges of enlightened rationality.

2. This old cosmopolitan Europe disintegrated under the onslaught of a dual crisis. When the Atlantic revolutions captured the old Continent in the form of the French Revolution in 1789, they drew in the young Metternich and his family as they steamrolled over the Rhineland, the Austrian Netherlands, and the United Provinces. In a first war (1792–1797), a coalition of German, Dutch, Spanish, British, Italian, and Russian troops tried to fend off the new age that was dawning. While some of his contemporaries still harbored timid hopes for a reform of the old German freedom, others believed that they would not be able to break the resistance of the old powers without terror.

3. In the almost twenty-five years from 1792 to 1815, which saw an almost uninterrupted world war raging (and, given what scholars have established about these years, it is no exaggeration to say this), Metternich experienced this new kind of clash between nations and empires, first as an envoy, then as the foreign minister of the Austrian monarchy. Napoleon, the alleged world soul on horseback, in Hegel’s words,² put his stamp on this conflict. For some he was the man of the century, for others an example of the worst kind of military despot. It was an epoch which confused those living through it, not least the peoples that were subjected to foreign rule: it produced bloody wars of unprecedented proportions at the same time as it promised freedom and moral progress for mankind. The Napoleonic myth seemed to embody this Janus-faced nature almost perfectly. What war actually meant, what it brought about, and how one might use it in new ways for the purpose of progress and in order to ruthlessly destroy one’s enemies—these were among the questions which occupied the Metternich generation.

4. The following epoch comprises the years 1815 to 1830. It saw what Paul Schroeder called the construction of the nineteenth-century system of European states, which remained in place between the Vienna Congress of 1814–1815 and the European revolutions of 1848–1849. This system functioned as a large and effective mechanism for the prevention of wars and revolutions, and within it Metternich acted as the coachman of Europe, to go by the not entirely accurate epithet he was given. He himself believed that the fragile European structure could only, at best, be patched up and given a series of makeshift repairs that might, perhaps, succeed in avoiding another great European war. Such a war, he believed, would be more devastating than any of the previous ones. To his enemies, this was the politics of Metternich’s restoration.

5. In 1830, this new war, so feared by Metternich, seemed to be in the cards. Starting out from Paris, the July Revolution spread to most of the European Continent, especially to its southern parts. From then on, people’s expectations oscillated between two poles. On the one hand, there were hopes for a spring of nations, which, however, could be brought about only by a large uprising, or perhaps by a massive war waged by an alliance of the enslaved peoples. This outcome was propagated by the Young Germany, the Young Poland, Italy, or Hungary. On the other hand, there was the constant fear of a renewed outbreak of an uncontrollable terror which might entail the collapse of all civilization.

6. The sixth epochal experience emerged out of the European revolutions of 1848–1849. For some, these signaled a move toward unified nation-states with free and democratic Constitutions. For others, Metternich among them, the revolutions meant the beginning of a time in exile and represented an unresolved crisis within the process of modernization. It was this crisis which fueled the growth of nationalism in the first place and thus destroyed the relations between the old states of Europe.

7. The seventh epoch, finally, comprised the mastery of the revolutions, the reaction, and—in the case of the Habsburg Monarchy—a long-overdue bureaucratic modernization in the form of neo-absolutism. Metternich, as his first major biographer, Heinrich von Srbik, wrote, observed all this from his box seat. Nevertheless, he continued to pull strings in the background (to an extent that has fully been appreciated only recently), and his advice continued to be in demand among political insiders. This period extended beyond the collapse of the Vienna system in the course of the Crimean War (1853–1856) and reached up to the first battles between the emerging nation-states. From 1859 onward, the Habsburg Monarchy was involuntarily drawn into these first wars between the emerging nation-states. Metternich, who died in 1859, saw his legacy, if there was a legacy, ultimately gambled away.

Thus, in Metternich’s life seven decisive experiences, each of which constitutes an epoch, follow on from one another: the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, the permanent existential threat of a war, the reconstruction of Europe (restoration), the spring of nations, the revolutionary crisis within the process of modernization, and the conflicts between nations that led to the formation of nation-states. In another historical age, each of these epochs would have sufficed to fill the life of a whole generation—in our case, all seven of them were experienced by one individual. How did this shape him? Metternich, at one and the same time a descendant of a storied family of counts and an enlightened free spirit, saw old orders perish, including—almost—that of his own aristocratic house, the Metternichs. Before his eyes, new orders emerged, and he helped in building them. This forced him to live through the times of changing discourses that marked the path from the old European (feudal) society of estates to a market-based capitalism. He was born as a member of the nobility of the Holy Roman Empire, a nobility that depended upon the peasantry, and from this, as the owner of an ironworks with a workforce of 400, he grew into the role of a manufacturer in the early industrial era.

Earlier biographies of Metternich, without exception, assume an almost static core to his personality. They do not consider the possibility that the decisive and system-toppling experiences he underwent might also have left their traces and transformations in his life. From the earliest days of his youth up until his old age, Metternich was a Homo scribens, an intellectual, whom many, including his main biographer, Heinrich von Srbik, erroneously pegged as a rigid doctrinal thinker. But as an intellectual, Metternich used his ongoing writing as a way of constantly assuring himself of his motivations and his goals. He was an avid reader, too, even on his weeks-long travels by coach through Europe. He read newspapers and books, and liked historical and fictional texts; and, if it could not be helped, he even read his opponents’ pamphlets. Most of all, he looked at documents and memoranda. Wherever he was, he wrote letters to members of his family, to friends, companions, and, of course, with particular frankness, to his great mistresses, Wilhemine von Sagan and Dorothea von Lieven. Aphorisms, memoranda, and correspondence line the path of his life. As he was incapable of throwing away anything he felt to be of importance, his posthumous papers (the Acta Clementina in Prague), which he himself arranged, and the archive of the Metternich family, which has survived completely intact, are inexhaustible sources of information for anyone seeking an understanding of this easily misunderstood character.

Our travel guide will take care to lead his party step-by-step out of the depths of time and progressively forward. Along the way, he wants to make visible the important and formative moments—the primordial events—which would reappear as key triggers in the context of later conflicts, crises, and constellations. Only these events—the origins of later déjà-vu experiences, as it were—render his actions and judgments intelligible. From this perspective, perhaps, the fundamental concepts associated with what Reinhart Koselleck has called the saddle period between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—concepts such as right, revolution, reform, nation, civilization, representation, the people, and popular sovereignty—will appear in a new light. However, attempting to understand everything the way that Metternich did does not mean having to think that all of his views were justified. This biography is not an apologia. There is, today, no good reason for taking such a course. But it is the privilege of a historian writing today that he or she may try to derive what Metternich silently thought, what he implicitly meant but often did not make explicit, from the background of his earlier experiences. Maybe this is what it means to do justice to a historical figure.

A rich and methodologically fruitful debate in the wake of so-called postmodernism has given rise to doubts about the very possibility of historical narration, and it has raised the question of whether biography as a genre of historiography—that is, as the coherent description of a life according to the model of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister novels—is not simply an illusion, as Pierre Bourdieu suggested. Granted, the days of the old educational novel and the historical certainties associated with that genre are over. Indeed, they have been dead for a long time, at least since Johann Gustav Droysen’s Outline of the Principle of History, in which he wrote: The data for historical investigation are not past things, for these have disappeared, but things which are still present here and now, whether recollections of what was done, or remnants of things that have existed and of events that have occurred.³ Put differently: the past as such, or an entire past life, cannot be reconstructed; the gaps and contingencies of the surviving fragments do not permit this. But it is still possible, nevertheless, to confront the available evidence relating to a past life with justified questions about it. And if in the course of doing so new, meaningful contexts arise which not only let the picture of history and its characters move in black and white, producing at best varying shades of grey, but make this picture colorful,⁴ then the present book—and your travel guide—will have succeeded in one important point.

METTERNICH’S BIOGRAPHERS ACROSS THE GENERATIONS

Like many other important statesmen, Metternich began to think about his posthumous image early in his life. From 1820 onward, he made notes from memory that were to serve as building blocks for his autobiography. He was acutely aware of the role played by someone writing his memoirs, and included in his manuscripts only what concerned his own person and was useful in filling the gaps left by the official correspondence.⁵ The genuine scholarship of the historian, in his eyes, consisted in the fact that the researcher was admitted access to the imperial archives, and, drawing from this double source, they will more easily appreciate the great epoch during which destiny had laid upon me the difficult task of playing an active part on the world’s stage.⁶ Only historians, he believed, were able to judge the deeds and aims of statesmen impartially and justly. As he held such a high opinion of historians, he sharply distinguished between the judgments of his contemporaries and those of historians. For him, only the latter mattered. In 1829, in further autobiographical notes, he remarked that the historian is not yet born who will describe the numerous events of the first decades of the nineteenth century. Contemporaries cannot reasonably do more than collect materials for those who, in a subsequent period, will be called upon to write the true history of the past with that calmness and impartiality which are always wanting to those who have taken an active part in the events.⁷

Metternich was also keenly aware of the polarizing effect his personality had on his contemporaries. After all, they—as he himself wrote—had coined the misnomer the Metternich system in order to criticize him. In this context, too, he trusted in the historians’ methodically different way of proceeding: The archives of all countries contain ample proof of what I wanted and promoted, as well as of what I did not want and therefore fought against. The verdict, which will have to come from an impartial history, will decide on the worth of the former and the worthlessness of the latter element.⁸

One of his visitors at Schloss Johannisberg, the Prussian politician Joseph Maria von Radowitz, a supporter of the so-called lesser German solution [kleindeutsche Lösung]⁹ under Prussia’s leadership, even offered his services as Metternich’s impartial biographer. Metternich, Radowitz said, would not be able to find a spirit closer to his own.¹⁰ Radowitz thoroughly misjudged Metternich, who, as was his habit, politely kept his distance. In fact, he considered Radowitz to be an eccentric mind; he called him a diabolus rotae—that is, a prejudiced advocatus diaboli who proceeds from false premises and only wants to provoke. Radowitz, he wrote, is one of those spirits who do not stop halfway, and who numb themselves and strive to numb others, with the richness of their ideas and words. In short: Metternich considered him to be the prototype of a passionate, and certainly not impartial, contemporary.¹¹

Metternich’s opinion of the historians of coming generations was, however, overly optimistic. They argued and quarreled over him with an intensity that, in this epoch, is only matched by their arguments over the case of Napoleon. Between 1836 and 2015, around thirty biographies of Metternich have been published, covering all periods of his life. We may roughly distinguish five generations and changing perspectives.

First, there are his contemporaries, who are actually not well suited to writing the history of this time. During the same phase, the first editions of memoirs, collected writings, and documents pertaining to Metternich’s contemporaries appeared, and he was able to study them intensely. He delved into them, red pen in hand, marked up the texts, and then copied with his quill passages that seemed important to him. Thus he would study, for instance, the memoirs of Napoleon on St. Helena (the famous Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène, dictated to Emmanuel de Las Cases), the writings of Friedrich Gentz, or a biography of Freiherr vom Stein,¹² and even the comprehensive history of the time of the Revolution by Adolphe Thiers, who had taken the trouble to visit and question Metternich for a firsthand account of the events. The great extent to which Metternich’s judgment regarding the partiality of contemporaries applied to the early biographers was demonstrated very clearly by two individuals who had originally belonged to his inner circle. Wilhelm Binder, a professor of philology and history at the high school [Gymnasium] in Biel, Switzerland, was the first to produce a biography of Metternich. Published in 1836, it may safely be filed under the heading hero worship. The critical voice was provided by Josef von Hormayr, a court historian and a former director of the Haus-, Hof-, und Staatsarchiv in Vienna. As the leader of an alpine revolution that had been planned in 1813, Metternich had had him imprisoned (we shall return to this in more detail). As a result, Hormayr had become his unrelenting enemy. He left Austria, and ended up working for the state of Bavaria. In 1848, his desire for revenge inspired him to write a pamphlet under the title Kaiser Franz und Metternich, which portrays Metternich as a cold schemer, an absolutist, and a repressor of any kind of intellectual progress, as frivolous, superficial, and lacking character. Hormayr constructed the blueprint for the scathing picture of Metternich, which would go on to dominate historical interpretations of him, particularly those originating from the states of the lesser Germany.

This raft of interpretation prefigures the second generation of biography, after 1866 and thus a few years after Metternich’s death, in which debates were fueled and kept alight by a division among commentators: on the one hand there was the view from the perspective of the lesser Germany and the Reich, and on the other from the perspective of the greater Germany and Habsburg. This fundamental divide meant that the understanding of Metternich was relentlessly and exclusively informed by the German question. What had been initiated by Hormayr was developed into a storm of propagandistic criticism by Heinrich von Treitschke, the Saxon who had turned into a Prussian. Although his History of Germany in the Nineteenth Century was no biography in the narrow sense, it did more than any other work to influence the image of Metternich, as it was a staple of any educated bourgeois household’s bookshelf. The professor of history—someone who, as a historian, should, according to Metternich, have written sine ira et studio [without harboring prejudices and without passion]—recognized in the chancellor a traitor of the German nation, a diplomatic plotter, an adroit man, someone devoid of ideas, someone endowed with calculating cunning and good-natured and smiling mendacity, a corrupt man, a dishonest man, or, to use Srbik’s later label: a non-German.¹³ The first volume of this raging book was published in Berlin in 1879. Only a year later, the son of the chancellor, Prince Richard von Metternich, published the first volume of the Posthumous Papers, containing material from the family archive and the Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv in Vienna. He wanted to stem the swelling tide of dismissive criticism.

From among the academic historians, it was Viktor Bibl—originally deutschnational,¹⁴ but later fully committed to National Socialism—who carried Treitschke’s picture of Metternich into the interwar years following 1918, in large part through a pamphlet whose subtitle referred to Metternich as the demon of Austria, and in which Bibl undertook to settle scores with that demon. Bibl laid the main blame for the decline of the Habsburg Empire at the feet of Prince Metternich, schemer and liar, and declared that—given the criticism leveled by other historians against his radical and anti-European interpretation of Metternich—it was to his, Bibl’s, satisfaction and honor to find himself in the dock together with Heinrich Treitschke.¹⁵

The focus of the third generation of the interwar years was determined by the experience of the Great War. Here we find Srbik, whose attitude to Metternich was ambivalent, and whom we shall have to look at separately later, and Constantin de Grunwald, who was much admired by Srbik and who defended Metternich against various criticisms in a biography first published in 1938. On the basis of fresh sources, he argued that the great diplomat Metternich recognized early on the threat faced by European civilization.¹⁶ And in 1933 the Englishman Algernon Cecil had already given the Anglo-Saxon audience the first serious biography of the chancellor in the English language. Cecil glorified Metternich as a great European and savior, in contrast to the totalitarian, revolutionary terrorism at the time and—in a contemporary reference—Hitler.¹⁷

The fourth generation suffered the shock of the Second World War and the catastrophe of the Holocaust. As a result, historians born during the interwar years were inclined to view Metternich even more as a European, as a peacemaker and master of international diplomacy. These historians, we may say, inherited the experience of the Great War from their parents’ generation and added to it their own experience of the Second World War. For instance, Alan Warwick Palmer (born 1926) saw Metternich as the Councillor of Europe; his fellow Englishman Desmond Seward (born 1935) subtitled his book on Metternich The First European. We may also think of the Frenchman Charles Zorgbibe (born 1935), who depicted Metternich as le séducteur diplomate, a seducer in the field of diplomacy.¹⁸ Then there is the American Paul W. Schroeder (born 1927), who made groundbreaking contributions to the reevaluation of Metternich’s diplomacy.¹⁹ Finally, and importantly, there is Henry Kissinger, the American politician and political scientist, originally born in Fürth in 1923, in whose masterful doctoral thesis one can detect the experience of both world wars and at the same time a sense of the new threat to humanity posed by the possibility of nuclear war. The programmatic subtitle of his thesis alone gave an entirely new meaning to the term restoration: A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problem of Peace.²⁰ Even though these historians (with the exception of Palmer and Zorgbibe) were not really biographers, they deserve our attention as examples of the international reorientation in the way Metternich was perceived. And so does the Austrian Helmut Rumpler (born 1935), who took the chancellor’s policies regarding different national identities more seriously than anyone had before, and regarded him, as a politician of the Habsburg Monarchy, as influencing European politics far beyond the issue of the lesser versus the greater Germany.²¹

Apart from the works of professional historians, there is a plethora of more or less popular descriptions of his life written by diplomats, members of the military, journalists, and other amateur historians, all of whom were fascinated by one aspect or another of Metternich. In part due to the sometimes large circulations of these works, they often contributed significantly to the spread and reinforcement of existing clichés. And that was the case from the very start. Beginning with the year of the chancellor’s death, we have the works of a member of the Prussian Parliament and liberal journalist;²² an Austrian secondary school teacher and member of the Ministry for Education;²³ an English colonel;²⁴ an Austrian major interested in cultural history;²⁵ a spirit merchant at Sandeman and captain in the British army;²⁶ a journalistic writer and president of the Austrian PEN-Club;²⁷ a French ambassador to Luxemburg;²⁸ a Swiss diplomat;²⁹ a French general and high commissioner in Austria;³⁰ a dramaturg, author, and actor;³¹ a main editor at Deutsche Welle;³² a journalist of the British yellow press and best-selling author;³³ an author and member of the Gruppe 47;³⁴ and a medical doctor, retrained as a historian and a founding member of Opus Dei.³⁵ Metternich, it seems, is a medium through which any author may reach a market and at the same attempt some education of the masses. As a concrete example, let us take a quick look at Bernd Schremmer, a teacher and freelance writer from Brandenburg, whose book Kavalier und Kanzler [Cavalier and chancellor] serves up almost every conceivable cliché regarding Metternich: It calls him an absolutist and a repressor, an obstinate man living a life of self-deception, and an anti-democrat whose lasting achievement was having inadvertently helped the progress of democracy through his resistance to it.³⁶

Almost all of the biographies mentioned here share one feature: they all draw on the same sources, especially on the posthumous papers of Metternich and other authors, which are not always reliably edited, and, in terms of secondary literature, in particular on Srbik as the one proper and undisputed source and canonical authority. From this material, they construct their individual pictures of Metternich, without ever examining their judgments and evaluations against the authentic sources that exist in the archives. We may therefore conclude that since Srbik’s work, which is based on archival research, no independent biography of Metternich has appeared.

THE RISKS AND LIMITATIONS OF SRBIK’S BIOGRAPHY OF METTERNICH

Srbik’s work, published in 1925, stands out from all other existing biographies in terms of its scholarship, erudition, and use of archival documents. It is rightly seen as the achievement of a lifetime. Srbik’s name seems—not only in professional circles—to be intimately linked to that of Metternich, and consequently information taken from his work is simply treated as authoritative, even if more recent research has clearly falsified it.

Let me illustrate this with an example. A luxuriously edited volume that was recently published on the occasion of the 200th anniversary of the Vienna Congress³⁷ contains a brief biographical sketch of Metternich’s life with the very apt title Das Leben eines Geradlinigen [The life of an upstanding character]. In it, the author touches upon Metternich’s time as an ambassador in Paris and in this context avers that Metternich is guilty of fundamental misinterpretations of the political situation in 1809. With his reports from Paris and his support for a people’s war, he is said to have, to a large extent, brought about Austria’s decision to go to war. This thesis has long since been refuted (namely, since 1968) by painstaking research drawing on documents in the Prague and Vienna archives.³⁸ The author adopts this discredited judgment from Srbik, whose evaluations are not based on a consultation of the relevant sources because these are, as he put it, practically endless. Srbik turned Metternich into one of the main initiators of the glorious, unhappy war of 1809.³⁹ The more recent author, however, is unaware that this view has been undermined by later research and follows Srbik’s opinion because he considers it to be still … unsurpassed.⁴⁰

However, not all details are in need of correction. What renders Srbik’s work highly problematic from the perspective of what we know today is its overall design, its basic ideological texture, which is directly transposed onto the interpretation of its subject matter.

Anyone who approaches Srbik’s take on the life and politics of Metternich faces a two-volume mountain of 1,431 pages, and hardly anyone has read every single line of it. As I intend to visit sources that Srbik consciously avoided or did not have access to, it seems appropriate at this point to mention the risks encountered when consulting Srbik’s oeuvre of 1925. And just to avoid any misunderstanding: the distance between now and then is far too great, in every respect, to indulge in any pleasure in murdering the grandfathers, as Thomas Nipperdey put it in his plea for a denationalization of the writing of history. This plea, however, is as relevant now as it ever was.⁴¹

Biological Racism

Given Srbik’s reputation, it may seem shocking to suggest that biological racism is the ground on which his biography rests, but it cannot be pushed to one side, because it is the factor that fundamentally determines his evaluation of Metternich. Here and in what follows, I shall quote at length from the author in order to forestall any accusation that I illegitimately, or even maliciously, charge him with these false assumptions.

Srbik’s key thesis in his search for the ideas in the system of Metternich is this: The primary concept for Metternich is that of race (vol. 1, p. 389). This thesis is altogether unfounded.⁴² If one is looking for Metternich’s key concepts, then they are the law, as he understands it, then nationality, and, most importantly, society. The latter he understood in the modern sense of a collective singular.⁴³ This alone is enough to place Metternich in a different system of coordinates than those assumed by Srbik. Srbik’s key thesis is not an isolated slip. Expanding on it, he writes: He saw the urge of the German tribes, states, and landscapes toward segregation as an immutable racial property and thus deeply rooted in German nature and history (vol. 1, p. 406). The concern with spiritual specificity and the character of large peoples that Srbik recognizes in Metternich, he unites with the generic concept of race into which, he alleges, Europe disintegrated in the nineteenth century (vol. 1, p. 355). As Srbik’s judgment on the Treaties of Tilsit of 1807 shows, there is a systematic aspect to this nomenclature: The Roman and Slavonic cultures agreed in order to dominate and divide the earth, and in order to oppress Germany and England (vol. 1, p. 114).

Pursuing his peoples-based critique of civilization, Srbik juxtaposes the old state—a rule-governed, rational union that works to achieve common purposes—with a new state that he sees as a blood-filled natural body (vol. 1, p. 374). In this, he anticipates the national socialist idea of the body of a people. His definition of the real political task, which Metternich in his eyes failed to achieve, is to guarantee the leadership of the German political body (vol. 2, p. 391). In the European character of the Austrian state (vol. 1, p. 198) he saw precisely the opposite of this. Just like Oswald Spengler—one of his sources—he turns peoples and cultures into organisms with an individual soul.⁴⁴

Srbik raises the question of the division between race, people, and nation (vol. 1, p. 406). The German people, he writes, is a structure of Germanic tribes who live in a community of blood (vol. 2, p. 391). Passages that sometimes sound like quotations from historical sources actually express Srbik’s very own convictions, convictions he explicitly confirmed once again in 1951 when he argued for an evaluation of racial ideology that is as impartial as possible,⁴⁵ still pleading, even at that point, for a properly understood German racial theory.⁴⁶

Nationalism as a Weapon

The consequences of Srbik’s racial approach for his picture of Metternich are obvious. They consist of a series of negative judgments in places where a historian would rather expect explanations and historical contextualization. Thus, he says about Metternich: The moral and spiritual energies of the people which, if awakened, are truly the greatest means of rescue, remained internally alien to him (vol. 1, p. 124). Srbik constructs an integrated and unhistorical concept of a people and uses it as a basis for making deductions, where Metternich uses the term nationality, which must be understood differently. Against this standard of a people, Srbik concludes that Metternich’s nature lacked the gift of heroism which provides the capacity for the highest achievement because he did not realize the political value of national cultural treasures, of an autonomous national state, and the transformation of a monarchical army into an army of the people. Srbik thinks Metternich lacks insight into the unity of state and people, state and culture (vol. 1, p. 127).

Because nation and state were alien concepts to his way of thinking, Metternich is said originally to have had only minor and vague ideas about a community of the German people as a state and culture (vol. 1, p. 85). During the years 1813–1815, the feeling for a national German state as a point of reference was alien to him (vol. 1, p. 180), and he harbored a coldness toward the national will (vol. 1, p. 197). Srbik denies that Metternich possessed any patriotic feeling (vol. 1, p. 125), and even where Metternich declares, to Napoleon, that he takes himself to be a German, Srbik objects: His Germanness was altogether of the unrealistic and universal kind that we find at the end of the previous century (vol. 1, p. 407). He ultimately labels Metternich un-German: he detects in him a "European frame of mind [Gesinnung] which is, viewed from today’s perspective, non-national, and which internally bound him to the character of Austria as a non-national state (vol. 1, p. 193). And he concludes: There was no place in Metternich’s mind or heart open to the high values of a national German Reich or federal state (vol. 1, p. 378). Srbik makes this claim despite the fact that Metternich spoke of the German Confederation as Germany and as the fatherland. Thus, he condemns the core idea of a federalism that Metternich pursued because the chancellor was a representative of the federalist idea, which is, indeed, appropriate for Austria. This federalism he wanted to build on the basis, not of national entities, but of the historical-legal bodies of countries, and he did not want to let it go further than the legal-administrative sphere" (vol. 2, p. 189).

Where Is the Will to Create a German Cultural Imperialism?

Metternich distanced himself repeatedly and very explicitly from any Germanizing [Germanisieren] in the vein of Joseph II, and he pleaded for equality between the nationalities throughout the Austrian monarchy. Srbik blames him for this because he finds lacking in Metternich the sort of domestic German cultural imperialism that he considers appropriate: It is right that the German nationality enjoys priority over the many others who fill the space of the state, because the ruling dynasty originally belonged to it, and because it is the true element of civilization in this enormous union of peoples. By virtue of its cultural superiority it is therefore called to take the leadership within the state (vol. 1, p. 431).

Srbik’s fundamental position leads him to regard Metternich’s policies, which are basically defensive—that is, aimed at preserving peace with the outside—from the very outset as wrong. This is also the reason for Srbik’s judgment that the chancellor fails to achieve his alleged task in eastern and southeastern Europe during the revolution of 1848–1849—when the German soul was most deeply wounded (vol. 2, p. 372). Regarding the time of the Revolution, Srbik speaks of the danger that Austria’s "German people of the leader [deutsches Führervolk] will be pushed back, weighed down, by the alien nations within the multilingual state until they become a minority, no longer capable of fulfilling the task of permeating a natural space with predominantly German culture. He sees the German-Austrian peculiarity as a people facing the danger of Slavonification and pleads for the expansion of German material and spiritual influence, and German influence in terms of power politics further east in Europe (vol. 2, p. 373). In these matters Srbik is driven by the conviction that from the very beginning, the pan-Slavic idea, with the fundamental ingratitude of the national instinct, turned against Germanness [Deutschtum] as the bringer of culture" (vol. 2, p. 188). All this shows clearly how Srbik imposes an interpretive framework on Metternich’s ideas of the state, law, federalism, and nationality that can only result in condemnation but not in historical explanation. In Srbik’s eyes, Metternich’s fault was that he did not want to conquer eastern Europe for the Germans.

The Theory of the Master Race and the Political Myth of the Führer

Of crucial importance to a biography is the question of whether the biographer makes a particular view of human nature his norm. A historian committed to academic standards, in particular, must be as self-critical and cautious as possible regarding this question. But the opposite applies in the case of Srbik, who puts forward his ideal dogmatically and insists that Metternich conform to it. There are characters who, for Srbik, are models to be followed: Mazarin, Richelieu, Stein, Napoleon, and, in particular, Prince Felix zu Schwarzenberg, who emerged as the Austrian prime minister out of the revolutionary era in 1848. Srbik’s canonical values lead him to make judgments such as the following: Metternich always lacked the highest virtues: political passion, untiring energy, original creative powers (vol. 1, p. 316); he was not a strong personality, not a Richelieu and not a Mazarin (vol. 1, p. 319). Napoleon, by contrast, possesses the power of the personality that conquers the world and a titan’s will to rule (vol. 1, p. 347). Regarding 1848, Srbik remarks that the time lacked a great individual who could have created a new world order; Metternich lacked the Promethean spark of truly creative power in his politics (vol. 1, p. 229). He was never a man of the great, decisive, creative deed (vol. 1, p. 113).

In Schwarzenberg, Srbik saw embodied the opposite of all that: He was a man of deeds, "a creative spirit, absolutist in all of his nature, but capable also of entering into a pact with constitutionalism, the bourgeoisie, and the masses if it was in the interest of his great idea of the state; a bold and cold-blooded calculator when it came to power relations and fleeting constellations, one who played a virtuoso game of chess with other states without consideration given to legitimacy or tradition …; a political master type [Herrennatur] and a warrior (vol. 2, p. 391). Srbik glorifies in Schwarzenberg a man of an iron will with a talent for political leadership [Führergabe] (vol. 2, p. 450). Unlike Metternich, Schwarzenberg pushed the German question toward a solution" (vol. 2, p. 392).

It is important to highlight Srbik’s ideology of a master race because it is anchored in a framework that declares the western European type of legal thought, with its emphasis on international law and constitutionalism, to be outdated. The consequence for Srbik’s biography of Metternich is that the protagonist appears to be a statesman from a bygone era, someone who wanted to lead Austria to greater unity, but on the basis of international law and the founding documents of the German Confederation (vol. 2, p. 391). Srbik ranks the irrationality of the deed above the rationality of political actions: The nature of a leading statesman … can never be exhausted by a political theory.… The selfish moment, the will to power, and the ambition to act effectively can never be subtracted from his actions (vol. 1, pp. 414–15). Metternich lacked the vigorous drive of life in his own chest, something that would have enabled him, as it once did Frederick the Great, to act heroically and boldly, and to practice Machiavellian politics, rather than to apply, as he did, the petty and petty-minded means of statecraft (vol. 1, p. 415).

Srbik’s view of Metternich’s mediating policies in mid-1813, which were decisive for achieving victory in the Napoleonic Wars, is of a piece with these judgments: This policy does not shine under any heroic light, but shows a cold heart and a deviousness that exceeds even that of Hardenberg; hate and greatness of the soul were unknown to it (vol. 1, p. 149). It is of little help that, following this unequivocal condemnation, Srbik contradicts himself by presenting this policy as without alternative: In its masterful deliberateness, it was probably the only one suitable to set the half-wrecked boat of Austria afloat again, and at the same time to serve the narrower interests of the state as well as the old community of states, while yet not putting all the eggs in one basket. For all that, his judgment remains unchanged: His policies were meant to remain informed by soberness and a passionless lack of imagination (vol. 1, p. 164). Metternich’s reservations regarding Blücher’s risky individual initiatives, which led to many a lost battle, should not be rated too highly in ethical terms, Srbik thinks (vol. 1, p. 167).

If we are to put Srbik’s picture of Metternich’s character in its proper place, it would help to have a quotation that sums up this picture in full. He writes:

Metternich, however, was not one of the truly great who imposed their personal peculiarities and the individuality of their life on an age, thereby giving that age a new form … He was no deep and forceful thinker, and he was not endowed with a concentrated energy that acts with an iron and ruthless will. Metternich did not possess a great instinct for power; according to his whole nature he was not a man of deeds; he shied away from decisive opposition and from battle on a grand scale … because the graceful and softly passive [Weichempfängliche] outweighed manly daring from the very beginning.