was not wholly, or mainly, his. Sir Robert
Gordon,[1] in a letter
to Castlereagh (dated Florence, July 11, 1819), gives the true
reason for this attitude: “How much is it to be desired that
the superior talents of Prince Metternich were more occupied
with the revision and improvement of the administration of
affairs in his own country. He is too enlightened not to perceive
its most palpable defect . . . He might have courage to sacrifice
himself for the institution of effective remedies, but he fears
that the confiding benignity of his Sovereign might afterwards
be dissuaded from the just and vigorous application of them.”
(F.O. Austria. Gordon. Jan.–Dec., 1819.) Metternich’s power,
after all, was limited by the goodwill of his master, the emperor
Francis, and Francis trusted him precisely because he seemed
to share his own fanatical hatred of all change. It is this fact
that seems to explain Metternich’s feverish anxiety to justify
his obscurantist attitude to himself and to the world. It suited
him to ascribe the general discontent, of which the causes were
not obscure, to the wanton agitation of the “sects,” and his
agents all over Europe earned their pay by supplying him with
plentiful proof of the correctness of his contention. The result
was well summed up in another letter of Gordon to Castlereagh
(ibid. No. 26, Florence, July 12, 1819). “Nothing,” he writes,
“can surpass Prince Metternich’s activity in collecting facts and
information upon the inward feelings of the people; with a habit
of making these researches he has acquired a taste for them. . . .
The secrecy with which this task is indulged leads him to attach
too great importance to his discoveries. Phantoms are conjured
up and magnified in the dark, which probably if exposed to
light would sink into insignificance; and his informers naturally
exaggerate their reports, aware that their profit is to be commensurate
with the display of their phantasmagoria.” The
judgment is instructive, coming as it does from a diplomatist
in intimate touch with Metternich and in general sympathy
with his views.
There was, none the less, method in this madness. Behind the agitations of the “sects” loomed the figures of the emperor Alexander and of his confidant Capo d’Istria, “the Coryphaeus of Liberalism,” whose agents, official or unofficial, were intriguing in every country in Europe, and not least in Italy. The factor, then, that determined Metternich’s attitude was not so much a dread of revolutions in themselves as of revolutions exploited by the “Jacobin” tsar to establish his own preponderance in Europe. Metternich’s object, then, in respect of the revolutionary agitations, was twofold: he wished to impress Alexander with the peril of this imperial coquetting with democratic forces; he wished to convince the “sects” that they could not rely on the tsar’s support. He succeeded in both these objects during the period from the congress of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1818 to that of Verona in 1822. (See Alexander I. of Russia; Europe: History.)
On his way to the congress of Aix, Metternich spent a few days at Frankfort, where his presence was sufficient to settle the difficult question of the constitution of the federal forces. It was a signal triumph. “You can have no idea of the effect produced by my appearance at the diet,” he wrote exultingly to his wife, “I have become a species of moral power in Germany and, perhaps, even in Europe” (Mem. iv. 64). This self-complacency was characteristic of the man; but, if we accept his view of “morality,” the boast scarce seems exaggerated. In the main questions debated at Aix, indeed, it was Castlereagh’s influence rather than that of Metternich which prevailed; the abolition of the supervision of French affairs by the committee of ambassadors was, for instance, carried against his opinion. But it was at Aix that Metternich was not only reconciled with Alexander, but laid the foundations of that personal influence over the tsar that was to bear notable fruit later; from Aix, too, where he arrived at a complete understanding with King Frederick William III. and the Prussian ministers, dates his preponderant influence in German affairs.
The outlook in Europe at the beginning of 1819 seemed to Metternich particularly gloomy. In France the ministry of Decazes was, in his opinion, under the inspiration of the Russian ambassador Pozzo di Borgo, heading straight for a new revolution; in Italy Russian agents were openly carrying on a Liberal propaganda; Germany, and notably the Prussian bureaucracy, was honeycombed with revolutionary ideas. Then came the news of the murder of Kotzebue (March 23). Metternich was in Italy at the time; but he determined at once to take advantage of this senseless crime to carry his views in the matter of muzzling the Liberal agitation in Germany. In the summer he met King Frederick William and Prince Hardenberg at Töplitz; a conference that resulted in the indefinite postponement of the Prussian constitution and in a secret agreement (Aug. 1) on the proposals to be laid before a conference of German ministers to be held at Carlsbad in the same month. The result of this were the famous Carlsbad Decrees (q.v.), by which liberty of speech and of the press was abolished throughout Germany. The Vienna conferences that followed in November and issued in the Final Act of the 15th of May 1820, was not so complete a triumph for Metternich; but his diplomacy, none the less, had succeeded in riveting on Germany the yoke of the Austrian system, which it was to bear with but partial and temporary relaxations for nearly thirty years (see Germany: History).
The year 1820 was marked by critical events which drew Metternich’s attention once more from the affairs of Germany to those of Europe at large. The revolution in Spain, with which Austria had no immediate concern, interested him little; but his attitude towards it is characteristic and illuminating. The emperor Alexander for whom the idea of the confederation of Europe was an article of faith, proposed a European intervention and offered to march a Russian army through northern Italy into Spain. Metternich, to whom the remedy seemed far worse than the disease, covered his dissent from this proposal with a great display of principle. The ills of Spain were “material,” those of Europe at large “moral”; and the European Alliance was there to deal with moral, not material, troubles. The revolution that followed in Naples, however, necessitated a different attitude. Strictly speaking, it concerned Austria alone; but Metternich was anxious to range Alexander openly against Italian Liberalism, and he therefore consented to the question being laid before a congress to be assembled at Troppau. The congresses of Troppau (1820) and Laibach (1821) are dealt with elsewhere (see Europe: History; Italy: History, and the articles s.v.). For Metternich they represented a signal triumph. Not only did he complete his ascendancy over the emperor Alexander; but he openly committed all the Powers to an approval of the Austrian system in Italy, a success that outweighed his failure to win over Great Britain to the general principle of intervention enunciated in the Troppau Protocol. His attempt, however, to crown his system in Italy by setting up a central committee on the model of the Mainz commission was defeated at the congress of Verona (1822) by the opposition of the Italian princes headed by the pope and the grand duke of Tuscany.
The sort of moral dictatorship which Metternich had acquired on the continent was shattered by the developments of the Eastern Question. At first, indeed, the peril of a Russian attack on Turkey had drawn Austria and Great Britain closer together, and in a meeting at Hanover in October 1821 Metternich and Castlereagh had come to an understanding as to using the Holy Alliance to prevent Alexander from acting independently of the concert. But Metternich’s hope that the Greek revolt would burn itself out “beyond the pale of civilization” was belied by events; and even before Castlereagh’s death it was clear that Great Britain would have sooner or later to adopt a policy of intervention opposed to all Metternich’s ideas. The breach was hastened by the accession to office of George Canning, who hated Metternich and all his ways. At Verona in 1822 the withdrawal of Great Britain from the system of the continental Allies was proclaimed to all the world; in March 1823 Canning recognized the Greek flag. This opened up the whole Eastern Question in the precise form that Metternich had sought to
- ↑ Sir Robert Gordon (1791–1847), brother of the 4th earl of Aberdeen, was between 1815 and 1821 associated with Wellington as minister plenipotentiary at Vienna.
