avoid; for the action of Great Britain involved a move on the
part of Russia, jealous of her prestige in the Levant, and thus
led ultimately to a rearrangement of the relations of the Powers
which, so far as the affairs of the Ottoman empire were concerned,
left Austria isolated. It is impossible here even to outline
Metternich’s diplomacy during the eleven years between the
outbreak of the Greek revolt and the signature of the treaty
of London (1832) by which the kingdom of Greece was established.
The principles that guided it are, however, sufficiently
simple. In common with Great Britain he desired to maintain
the integrity of the Ottoman Empire as a barrier against Russian
domination in the Balkan peninsula; he wished also to avert a
Russo-Turkish war, not only for the above reason, but also
because this would involve the breakdown of the system by
which he hoped to curb the revolutionary forces in the West.
He therefore attempted, and for a while successfully, to persuade
the tsar that the Greeks were only “ordinary rebels against
legitimate authority.” But, when this expedient failed, he was
the first to suggest the complete independence of Greece, which
seemed to him less dangerous to Austrian interests than a
tributary principality on the model of Moldavia and Wallachia.
In the end his attitude was one of abstention and protest, since he
rightly considered that the action of the Powers which culminated
in the treaty of London was fatal to the doctrine of legitimacy,
on which his system was based.
The Greek question was not finally settled when the outbreak of the revolutions of 1830 threatened the overthrow of the whole structure of 1815 in the West. Events which seemed to involve the complete ruin of Metternich’s system gave it in effect, however, a new lease of life. Austria, isolated by the events in the East, was once more brought into touch with Russia by a crisis that concerned both Powers equally. On the receipt of the news of the July revolution in Paris Metternich hastened to meet Count Nesselrode at Carlsbad; and, though the Russian statesman refused to commit himself to the idea of an immediate reconstitution of a league of the three autocratic Powers, a common basis of action was agreed upon, and the foundations were laid for that cordial understanding that ripened in the meeting of Münchengrätz three years later. Meanwhile, though his language was still “European,” Metternich’s attitude towards the revolutions was wholly Austrian. He preached the sacred duty of intervention, but he refused to intervene, save where the interests of the Habsburg monarchy were directly concerned. He was even the first to recognize the revolutionary government of Louis Philippe (Sept. 8); he answered the appeal of the king of Holland for help with an ironical reference to the geographical situation of Austria; he did not even interfere with the revolutions in Germany and Poland. But when in Italy revolts broke out that threatened the Austrian hegemony, he acted with promptitude and decision, in spite of the threatening attitude of France; in the spring of 1831 Austrian bayonets restored order in Parma, Modena and the Papal States. Yet even here Metternich showed an unwonted moderation: not only did he soon withdraw the Austrian troops from Ancona, but he took the initiative in impressing on the papal government the urgent necessity for drastic reform. This attitude was, indeed, mainly determined by the uncertainty as to the relations of the three autocratic courts on whose co-operation the effectiveness of a policy of repression ultimately depended; and Metternich’s next work was to attempt to re-cement the broken alliance. With Prussia he had little difficulty; the timidity of King Frederick William III. had increased with years and the events of 1830, and the Prussian and Austrian governments came to complete understanding on a common policy in Germany. Its first fruits were the additional articles appended by the Federal Diet (June 28, 1832) to the Vienna Final Act, by which the control of the diet over the state legislatures was increased. As for Russia, Count Nesselrode at first maintained the reticent attitude he had adopted at Carlsbad; but finally, in 1833, Metternich met the emperor Nicholas I. himself at Münchengrätz and by adroit flattery won him over to his views. The Berlin convention of the 15th of October 1833, which reaffirmed the divine right of intervention, was a fresh triumph for Metternich’s diplomacy. This had been rendered possible by the change in Russia’s attitude towards the Turkish question after 1829, which made a co-operation of Austria and Russia possible in the East (see Mehemet Ali); and in its turn it made possible the maintenance for a while longer of the Austrian system in Germany.
The convention of Berlin marked the last conspicuous intervention of Metternich in the general affairs of Europe. “The Holy Alliance of the East,” as Palmerston called it, served the immediate purpose of securing “stability” in the countries immediately subject to the Powers composing it; it made no attempt at more than “moral” intervention in questions, e.g. that of Spain, that lay beyond its own sphere of influence; and the development of the Eastern Question, leading to the rapprochement between Russia and Great Britain, though Austria joined the Quadruple Alliance of 1840, tended to loosen the cordial ties between the courts of Vienna and St Petersburg. The Straits Convention of 1841, by which France was formally readmitted to the concert, was due largely to Metternich’s initiative; so, too, was the ill-judged effort of the continental Powers in 1847 to interfere in favour of the Sonderbund in Switzerland. But, on the whole, the growing crisis within the Habsburg monarchy itself was sufficient to deter Metternich from foreign adventures. So long as the emperor Francis lived all question of reform was impossible, and when he died, in 1835, the rusty machinery of the Austrian administration was too completely out of gear to be set right by anything short of a complete reconstruction, to which Metternich was too old to set his hand, even had he had the inclination to do so. He was too experienced not to realize the sickness of the state, but he was content to veil it from himself and to attempt to veil it from others. The world was not deceived; but it was not until the Vienna mob, in 1848, was thundering at the door of his cabinet that Metternich himself realized the truth to which he had tried to blind himself. With his fall his system also fell; and his flight from Vienna was the signal for the revolutions by which in 1848 all the countries under Habsburg influence were convulsed.
The resignation of Prince Metternich, handed in on the 13th of March 1848, was accepted by the emperor on the 18th, and the prince and his family at once left for England. Here he lived in great retirement, at Brighton and London, until October 1849, when he went to Brussels. In May 1851 he went to his estate of Johannesberg, where he was visited by King Frederick William IV. and Bismarck; in September he returned to Vienna. The events of 1848 had not shaken his self-complacency; they seemed to him rather to confirm the soundness of his own political principles, which would have scotched the evil betimes had not the weakness of others allowed the forces of disorder to gather strength. But though, in his own opinion, triumphantly vindicated, he did not again take office; he maintained, none the less, as a critic and adviser no mean influence on the counsels of the Austrian court, though it was contrary to his advice that Austria signed the treaty of the 2nd of December 1854 with France and Great Britain. He lived to see the beginning of the struggle of France and Italy against Austria, dying on the 11th of June 1859.
Probably no statesman of all time has, in his own day, been more beslavered with praise and bespattered with abuse than Metternich. By one side he was reverenced as the infallible oracle of diplomatic inspiration, by the other he was loathed and despised as the very incarnation of the spirit of obscurantism and oppression. The victories of democracy brought the latter view into fashion, and to the Liberal historians of the latter part of the 19th century the name of Metternich was synonymous with that of a system in which they could recognize nothing but a senseless opposition to the forces of enlightenment. A juster estimate of the man and his work has, however, become possible as the age has moved farther away from the smoke of controversy. On the whole, history has tended to endorse the sane judgment on Metternich pronounced by Castlereagh when
