Age of Metternich
The Age of Metternich refers to the period in European history from 1815 to 1848, characterized by the dominance of conservative political forces and the influence of Austrian statesman Klemens von Metternich. It was a time of restoration and reaction following the Napoleonic Wars, marked by efforts to maintain the status quo and suppress liberal and nationalist movements across Europe.
6 Key excerpts on "Age of Metternich"
eBook - ePub- Jean Berenger, C.A. Simpson(Authors)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...CHAPTER TEN The Age of Metternich (1815–48) The period from 1815 to 1848 was dominated by the character of the chancellor of Austria, and in Austrian historiography is referred to as the Age of Metternich. Klemens Wenzel Nepomuk Lothar, count, later prince, Metternich was the true successor to Kaunitz, whose granddaughter he took as his first wife. In 1809, after his recall from the embassy in Paris, he was in charge of foreign affairs and from 1817 was the emperor Francis I’s chief minister. After Francis I’s death in 1835 and until the revolution of 1848, he was the true ruler of Austria since, with count Kollowrath, he controlled the Regency Council which until 1848 assisted Ferdinand I ‘the Benign’ (1793–1875) who had succeeded Francis I as emperor but was incapable of managing affairs on his own, even with the assistance of a prime minister. Metternich belonged to a family of aristocrats which had always served the House of Austria, as canons in the cathedral chapters of the Rhineland or in the diplomatic service and army; since 1648 there had been a Metternich heavy cavalry regiment. The chancellor loved society, especially that of beautiful women. He was intelligent and lively, not especially inclined to hard work, and found administration boring in the extreme. He left a copious private correspondence which reveals his intellectual qualities as well as his limitations and obsessions. METTERNICH AND EUROPE: THE HOLY ALLIANCE Metternich devoted all his effort to maintaining the system put in place in 1815 and to countering the ideas of the French Revolution. He remained unshaken in his resolve and did not cease to parade his self-confidence before the emperor, despite the fleeting differences of opinion between them over the modernization of institutions. In 1832 he wrote to count Apponyi, ‘in Europe, there is only one matter of import and that is revolution’. He had a mission to join Prussia and Russia in guaranteeing the order restored by the treaties of 1815...
eBook - ePub- Stephen J. Lee(Author)
- 2008(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...6 Metternich and the Austrian Empire 1815–48 Clement von Metternich, Minister of Foreign Affairs (1809–48) and Austrian State Chancellor (1821–48), was the most significant conservative statesman in Europe during the period 1815–48. As well as dominating affairs within the Austrian Empire, he often dictated policies within the German Confederation and the Italian peninsula, and directly influenced the pattern of international relations through the medium of the Concert of Europe. He was regarded, by admirers and opponents alike, as the major spokesman of the first half of the nineteenth century against all forms of revolution. An important theorist of the continental variety of conservatism, Metternich insisted that full monarchical powers should be retained. He returned frequently to his cardinal fear: that the proper restraints imposed on humanity by ‘pure and eternal law’ were being threatened by the growing presumptions of a dangerous minority who deliberately encouraged violent change rather than a well-ordered evolutionary social and political development. He also seems to have had reservations about man’s ability to deal sensibly with technical progress. In his Political Testament, written in 1820, he affirmed that the range of human knowledge had widened considerably in recent centuries, but without a corresponding development in human wisdom. Innovations had, therefore, produced unsettling side-effects. Printing, for example, furthered the spread of false and seditious doctrines and ideologies, while the discovery of America had destroyed the traditional notion of landed property as the true source of value, and substituted a more volatile attitude to commercial wealth based on bullion...
- Alan Sked(Author)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...1 Metternich and his System, 1815–48 T HE MOST prominent figure in nineteenth-century Habsburg history was, of course, Prince Metternich, Foreign Minister between 1809 and 1848 and House, Court and State Chancellor from 1821. Historians occasionally refer to the period 1815–48 as the ‘Age of Metternich’ and often it is said to have been dominated by ‘the Metternich System’. The implication is that Metternich not only formulated the foreign policy of the Habsburg Monarchy, but through that controlled the destiny of Europe. For this reason he is considered a major historical figure and like all such figures is surrounded by controversy. Judgements of him, however, have on the whole been negative. Most textbook writers see him as a reactionary figure whose obsession with suppressing revolution — the Revolution, with a capital R from his point of view — frustrated the establishment of moderate, constructive, reforming regimes in Central Europe. Had it not been for the Metternich System, these writers imply, Europe as a whole might have developed along general liberal lines and perhaps have been spared all sorts of wars and catastrophies. In particular, the Deutscher Sonderweg, that is to say, Germany’s peculiar path of historical development, might never have occurred, Bismarck might never have been necessary, and European history might have taken on an altogether different character. Likewise, if it had not been for Metternich, the Habsburg Empire might have reformed itself constructively, the nationalities might have been appeased, and 1914 might never have happened...
- Alan Cassels(Author)
- 2002(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Those princes who had been restored in 1815 therefore deserved protection, for ‘monarchy is the only government that suits my way of thinking’. The diplomatic settlement of 1815 was similarly inviolable because international engagements must be honoured ‘so long as they are not abolished or modified by common agreement between the contracting parties’. If popular nationalist feelings, aroused in the French revolutionary era, had been ignored at the Congress of Vienna, that was of no account; they engaged Metternich’s attention only as a facet of democracy, ‘a principle of dissolution, of decomposition’. 14 Nor should it be overlooked that nationalism was a deadly virus for the state in whose service Metternich, a Rhinelander, had risen to prominence; the Habsburg empire was a melange of differing national groups. When German Burschenschaften (student groups) agitated in 1819 against the betrayal of the liberal and nationalist hopes of the war of liberation, Metternich persuaded the diet of the Germanic Confederation to accept the Carlsbad Decrees which imposed political tutelage and censorship on German universities. The next question was whether the Burschenschaften were a local phenomenon or part of a wider discontent. The latter view gained ground in 1820 with the assassination of the king’s nephew in Paris, anti-government conspiracy in London and open revolts in Italy and the Iberian peninsula. ‘We have come to one of those fatal epochs’, wrote Gentz, ‘when one cannot count on anything.’ 15 Legitimacy required upholding on the international stage. The essence of Castlereagh’s 1815 proposal for a European concert was periodic meetings of the great powers, and in the next seven years four international congresses were held. The first, at Aix-la-Chapelle in 1818, dealt with the problems of containing France and reintegrating it into the family of nations, which was, in Castlereagh’s view, the proper and principal object of the concert...
eBook - ePubGermany 1789-1919
A Political History
- Agatha Ramm(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Metternich had obtained for Austria the diplomatic ascendancy of Europe by manœuvring her into a position where for France, Russia and Prussia, as well as for Britain and the German princes, the most important consideration had become Austria’s next move. Metternich was later to hope to beat the revolution ‘tout comme j’ai vaincu le conquérant du monde’ in June 1813. 1 After 1815, he considered the climax of his career was passed. It did not threaten Austria’s ascendancy that the congress failed and dispersed on 11 August and that on the same day she declared war on France. 1 1766–1852. A former imperial knight, prominent in the movement of 1809, and father of Friedrich, Heinrich and Max von Gagern, leaders in the Liberal movement of 1848–49. Metternich consolidated Austria’s ascendancy by achieving the defeat of Stein’s plans for the administration of German territory (see above, p. 97). Metternich had offered Napoleon conditions of peace which were a reasonable basis for Austria’s claim to act in the interest of Europe: the restoration to Austria of Illyria and the Tyrol (from Bavaria), the dissolution of the Confederation of the Rhine and of the Grand Duchy of Warsaw and the restoration of Prussia, Hanover and the Hansa Towns. Conspicuously absent was any constructive proposal for the creation of a new, non-federal Germany. On the contrary, Austria in the Treaty of Ried, 8 October 1813, guaranteed Bavaria, in the allies’ name as well as her own, full sovereign rights...
eBook - ePubWestern Civilization: A Global and Comparative Approach
Volume II: Since 1600
- Kenneth L. Campbell(Author)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...He also exploited differences between Prince Klemens von Metternich (1773–1859), the foreign minister of the Austrian Empire, and Britain’s foreign minister, Lord Castlereagh (1769–1822). France was admitted into an alliance that became known as the Concert of Europe. But not long after the Congress of Vienna, the diverse interests of different nations began to manifest themselves. Furthermore, the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars had left a diverse legacy that was, in some ways, at odds with the settlement negotiated at Vienna by Metternich and his colleagues. The Legacy of the French Revolution and Napoleon Many of the men and women who lived through the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars were left with psychological scars that forever altered their view of the world. To many people, the French Revolution had been an evil with only one cause: presumption. The revolutionaries in France and, before them, the philosophers of the Enlightenment had dared to think that they could change the world on their own initiative and abandon such time-honored concepts as faith, tradition, and experience. Napoleon’s military dictatorship had lacked any justification beyond its own power and its ability to restore order to a country threatened by anarchy. The destruction of tradition had opened the door to competing ideas about how a nation might be governed or society organized without any absolute standards of right and wrong. Conservatives became deathly afraid of change, which Metternich referred to as a “moral gangrene” that would slowly erode the fabric of society and destroy the foundations of European civilization. The clergy, the nobility, and the monarchs of Europe especially tended to share Metternich’s views. Unprepared psychologically to grasp the future implications of the French Revolution, they clung desperately to the ideals of the past and, frequently, an idealized vision of the past...
