Somewhere Metternich is smiling. As German historian Wolfram Siemann points out, Metternich was working, and writing, for posterity, since he thought that only historians with access to his records in the far future would be able to judge him and his policies objectively. Certainly he expected more sympathy and understanding from them than from his ideologically partisan contemporaries, whether liberals or even a conservative like the North German Joseph Maria von Radowitz (who had been politely rebuffed when he offered his services to Metternich as biographer). Metternich could therefore only be pleased that he has finally received the kind of thorough and carefully weighed account of his life and political career for which he had hoped. That the present work portrays him in such a positive light must make him all the more content. Siemann's study is a major achievement, based on copious research, above all in the Austrian State Archives and the Metternich family papers and library stored in Prague and at the family seat of Königswart. This is “a biography” of Metternich, as the title suggests, rather than the biography; but if not providing final answers on all questions, it will remain the standard work for a long time. Because Metternich was such a central figure for the period, the book will need to be taken into account by all European historians of the age of revolutions. It offers as much for experts as for the broader audience at which it is aimed. If translated, it could even find a wide readership in the Anglophone world.Footnote ¹

Siemann's biography is comprehensive, covering all aspects of Metternich's life and paying considerable attention to both his early years and his later career. The author portrays Metternich's life across seven “epochs,” from the ancien régime of his birth in 1773 to the years of exile and retirement after the 1848 revolution. The weight of the narrative (about one third, or 340 pages) lies on the period of Metternich's diplomatic service and relations with Napoleon from 1801 to 1815 (though less so than in Metternich's own autobiographical writings). These years are recounted in more narrative detail, but this still leaves over five hundred pages to scrutinize the rest of Metternich's life.

Siemann emphasizes that Metternich's views and politics were not static and that they adapted with the times, but overall he puts more stress on constancy and continuity in Metternich's political worldview and policies. He is especially concerned to show how Metternich's early experiences and career influenced his later views. The foundation of his family life and upbringing, as well as his more noted university years in Strasbourg and Mainz spanning the early stages of the French Revolution, proved formative. Siemann documents for the first time, for instance, how much the young Metternich learned from his father's experiences as governor in the Austrian Netherlands in the early 1790s, as well as from his own small part in the coronations of Leopold II and Franz II as Holy Roman Emperors in 1790 and 1792. The young Metternich was not as polished a product at age twenty in 1793 as some have suggested (including Metternich himself); Siemann argues strongly that his visit to Britain and his exposure to British society and parliamentary government in 1794 put the finishing touches on his political education, not least through his exposure to Edmund Burke in the latter's counterrevolutionary phase. After that point Metternich's political judgments seem to have stayed stable. Similarly, Siemann accepts Metternich's own controversial account that he had been continuously striving for Napoleon's overthrow since his appointment as Austria's ambassador to the French court in 1806—i.e., before he ascended to the position of foreign minister in 1810, and long before Austria joined the coalition against France in the summer of 1813.

With respect to Metternich's politics, one of the book's primary contributions is to counter the traditional image of Metternich as a reactionary. As the reference to Burke indicates, Metternich was conservative, but of a reformist rather than reactionary bent. In Siemann's phrase, Metternich was a “British conservative Whig” (155), just like Burke: proaristocratic and monarchist, with a profound respect for historical tradition, but also open to reform and to new social and economic forces. Throughout his life, Metternich remained an admirer of the English political system as the best, if one not yet attainable under continental social conditions.

For Siemann, defending Metternich from allegations of being a reactionary turns above all on the accusation that Metternich used the threat of revolution only as a “pretext” (Vorwand; 653, 691) for repressive acts.Footnote ² Siemann also argues that the Austrian “police state” (778–79) was not as repressive as the modern term might suggest, even in comparison with other states at the time, from Napoleonic France to Britain itself in the 1790s or in 1819. For the most part, though, the author focuses on demonstrating the reality of Metternich's fears of revolution, as well as of acts of political violence and “terrorism” (672) of the sort perpetrated by the young university student and radical Carl Sand in 1819 against the renowned German author in Russian service August von Kotzebue. Rather than seeing conservative beliefs about Jacobin revolutionaries as an example of conspiracy theory, Siemann accepts the existence of a linked revolutionary network behind the revolutionary outbreaks from France to Spain, Italy, and Greece from 1814 to 1848.Footnote ³ On this basis he argues that monarchical governments at the time were really not so different from any other government in attempting to defend themselves from threats to their regime and preserve public stability. The monarchical governments did not, he makes clear, work according to a system of independent judicial oversight of security methods as modern liberal democracies do (or should), but neither were they especially repressive or sanguinary.Footnote ⁴ In all this Siemann comes close to the views of Alan Sked on Metternich's politics, even if he does not cite Sked's study in further support.Footnote ⁵ Historians inclined to approve of liberal or radical opposition figures from the Restoration and Vormärz periods, as in much of the previous literature, may not find this revised Metternich so much more sympathetic than the traditional version.

I am less convinced that the question of Metternich's motives or the accuracy of his threat perceptions ever lay at the core of the debate about Metternich's politics. Disagreement has centered more on the nature of the policies themselves. In this respect Siemann could have done even more to challenge the view of Metternich as reactionary by placing greater emphasis on the extent to which Metternich was ready to accept or even promote prophylactic political reforms as another way of avoiding revolution. Too strong a counterrevolutionary repression and too little conciliation, Metternich recognized, would simply provoke further revolution.Footnote ⁶ In Siemann's terms, Metternich pursued a “constructive” as well as a “defensive security policy” (607), the latter pointing to the policing of radicalism and the former to ameliorative efforts to meet popular demands partway. Metternich pushed for administrative reforms and for limited participation of new alongside old elites; this included support for limited constitutional settlements in the Habsburg realm as well as in Italy, France, and the German states. He strongly rejected popular sovereignty and parliamentary rule, but he was neither an absolutist nor a strict ständisch conservative of the old society of orders. In the schema of Italian historian Carlo Ghisalberti, Metternich promoted “consultative” rather than absolute, administrative, or constitutional monarchy (with consultative occupying the position between the administrative and constitutional types).Footnote ⁷

Concerning the related issue of Metternich and nationality, Siemann mirrors recent scholarship when he stresses that only a small minority in the early nineteenth century favored the creation of ethnic nation-states. In opposing them, therefore, Metternich and other leaders were not going against the wishes of most of what passed for the political public at the time, much less of the broad mass of the population. Most subjects, like most statesmen, still thought of themselves as living in a Europe of “zusammengesetzte Staatlichkeit” (492), or “composite monarchies” composed of provinces within dynastic states and multinational empires.Footnote ⁸ And as in the case of democratic radicals, Siemann considers nationalists dangerously misguided. They opened a “Pandora's box” (773) of ethnic violence, with nationalism the “original sin” (521) of the nineteenth century. Metternich showed great statesmanship and foresight, Siemann argues, in rejecting political nationalism. He did not oppose national identity as such, however, when it appeared as cultural rather than political nationalism; in fact, he promoted cultural initiatives for the various minority nationalities in the Habsburg monarchy. Siemann even accepts what Alan Sked does not: that Metternich aimed at a federalist reform of the Habsburg administration that would have taken into account the needs of the main subject nationalities.Footnote ⁹

In arguing that nationalists such as Giuseppe Mazzini were guilty of complete “cluelessness” [Ahnungslosigkeit; 772] in thinking that nationality-based nation-states could live peacefully with one another, Siemann overlooks some of the distinctions between the more cosmopolitan liberal nationalism of the first half of the nineteenth century and the more chauvinist type after 1848. This view also neglects the extent to which early nationalists and policy makers confronting the problem of nationality had indeed been thinking of ways to accommodate members of different national groups in the same polity, whether in a multinational empire like the Habsburg Empire or in a nation-state, as in the case of the constitutional draft for a union of German states in 1848. The 1848 revolutions certainly also underscore the potential for national conflict when it comes to drawing nation-state borders, as Siemann emphasizes, but the provisions on nationality rights explored in that year also laid the groundwork for the constitutional compromises and nationality parity in Austria-Hungary (particularly the Austrian half of the empire) from 1867 to 1918.Footnote ¹⁰ Siemann indicates that Metternich was right to see an automatic connection between early nineteenth-century liberal nationalism and a secessionist nationalism that would lead to the dissolution of the Habsburg Empire in the twentieth century. Most recent studies, however, reject such a teleological reading of Austrian history, highlighting instead the degree to which most nationalists in the empire stayed close to Austro-Slav or equivalent ideas of a federative reform of the monarchy and thus supported the continued existence of the Habsburg realm—all the more since “national indifference” and bilingualism continued to be such widespread phenomena there.Footnote ¹¹

With respect to his place in international history, Metternich's role in the diplomacy of 1813–14 that led to Napoleon's downfall is not “unknown” (376), as Siemann claims, but rather much debated. Disagreement centers above all around two sets of issues: the relative diplomatic roles of Metternich and figures such as British Foreign Secretary Lord Castlereagh and Tsar Alexander I of Russia; and the question of whether Metternich was really committed to war and the anti-Napoleonic coalition in 1813–14, or whether he was instead striving to achieve peace at any price and to leave Austria holding an uneasy European balance between the threatening expansionist powers of Romanov Russia and Napoleonic France, particularly given that Napoleon had been since 1810 the son-in-law of Austrian Emperor Franz I.

Siemann rightly depicts Metternich as a man of peace, deeply repulsed by war and the destruction and violence it brings. At the same time, he tries to emphasize the limits to Metternich's repugnance, and this does lead to some tension in the argument. Where previous historians have often accepted Metternich's apparent willingness to negotiate peace with Napoleon during the final campaign of 1812–14, Siemann insists that Metternich never wanted anything other than Napoleon's defeat and overthrow. Any peace overtures in those years, he argues, were simply tactical, designed either to cast Napoleon in a bad light in public opinion or to buy time for Austrian rearmament.

In this section of the book, Siemann's main target is the landmark work of Paul Schroeder.Footnote ¹² Siemann—unlike Sked—does not challenge Schroeder's broader thesis that European leaders in these years, above all Metternich and Lord Castlereagh, moved toward a cooperative rather than competitive balance of power—or what Schroeder terms a political “equilibrium.” He finds, however, that Schroeder gives too much credit to Castlereagh and too little to Metternich both as the source of such ideas and as the real linchpin of the anti-Napoleonic coalition (particularly in 1813, before Castlereagh arrived on the continent in January 1814 for face-to-face negotiations with the other principals, and at a point when Schroeder and other historians question Metternich's commitment to war à outrance against Napoleon).Footnote ¹³ Whereas Schroeder points to the “failure” of Metternich's mediation policy between Napoleon and the Allies in 1813 after the Grande Armée's retreat from Russia, Siemann deems it a masterstroke. From this perspective, Metternich never wanted peace; he only wanted a way to cement a successful coalition. Similarly, when Schroeder calls Metternich's peace policy “visionary,” he means to belittle its impracticality; when Siemann terms Metternich a “visionary,” as in the book's title, he points instead to Metternich's almost prophetic powers of historical and political analysis.Footnote ¹⁴ Siemann suggests that Schroeder was insufficiently versed in the Austrian archival sources, but he seems to forget that Schroeder began as a Habsburg and Metternich specialist.Footnote ¹⁵ In fact, Schroeder gives some of the most balanced coverage to the sources for the period, including Russian, French, and Prussian ones, that Siemann neglects.

With respect to the question of Metternich's policy vis-à-vis Napoleon, it would have been helpful for Siemann to have engaged more with the analyses of Sked and Enno Kraehe, both of whom also take a mainly Metternich-focused perspective on the subject and emphasize Metternich's centrality and wise judgment, but nevertheless come to different conclusions about his policies than Siemann's. For Sked, there is no indication that either Metternich or Emperor Franz I wanted anything other than peace in these years. They kept fighting because no peace plan mutually acceptable to Russia, Britain, and Napoleon could be found. Kraehe argues that Metternich was indeed supportive of the French alliance when he thought Russia could not defeat Napoleon, and that he still favored a peace based on a balance of power thereafter if possible, in order to avoid the dangers of an excessively powerful France or Russia. If France were fully vanquished, the threat of Russian hegemony would have been that much greater.Footnote ¹⁶ Siemann, by contrast, states that Metternich always knew that Napoleon would never make peace and could thus make overtures as he pleased for tactical reasons. But he gives little consideration to alternative interpretations. Siemann's analysis also tends to exclude the possibility of a two-track approach to Metternich's politics, whereby he might have been pursuing two potentially satisfactory outcomes: Napoleon's overthrow or an acceptable peace with him (which would still leave the question of which was Plan A, and which Plan B—but this explanation at least has the virtue of flexibility). In general, Siemann seems to overlook the extent to which Metternich's policies had to respond to the evolving negotiating positions of the other powers and to changing military and diplomatic fortunes, rather than simply representing his desired outcome all along.

On the diplomatic history and more generally, Siemann offers a very Metternich-centered view of his subject. This is understandable in a biography, as opposed to an international history, but there needs to be more recognition of the limitations of perspective in answering broader questions or arriving at broader judgments. Following Metternich's paper trail ceded too much influence to the Austrian statesman in setting the agenda and framing the narrative and leads at times to overemphasis on Metternich's role. Metternich was perhaps the best-informed statesman of his era, but this did not mean that he knew everything that was transpiring in Europe—not even, and perhaps especially, in the ministries of the competing powers. In discussing Metternich's political and character assessment of Napoleon, for example, Siemann tends to leave Metternich with the last word rather than bringing in more of the recent scholarship on Napoleon. He does rightly cite Jean Tulard's classic work, but he does not engage with, for instance, the recent biographies by Philip Dwyer and Alan Forrest or the studies of Napoleon's empire by Michael Broers, Stuart Woolf, and others. Depictions of Prussian or Russian policy are similarly shaped more by Metternich's opinions than by the scholarship on those powers.Footnote ¹⁷

In the book as a whole, Siemann's main target is the venerable Austrian biography of Metternich by Heinrich Ritter von Srbik.Footnote ¹⁸ At the outset, Siemann demonstrates how völkisch nationalism and great-man views of history had skewed Srbik's views, and how haphazard his recourse to archival sources was in comparison to his regular reliance on the (negative) views of contemporaries. Having in that early section demolished the reliability of Srbik's volume as a standard work on Metternich, it is disappointing that Siemann keeps refuting Srbik point by point as the narrative continues rather than engaging more fully with more recent scholarship. Given Siemann's effort to revise Metternich's image as a reactionary, for example, it would have been helpful, as previously noted, to have engaged more with Sked's analysis—particularly since Sked too places such stress on the solid grounds for Metternich's fears of pan-European revolutionary conspiracies that one can label “terrorist,” with awareness of the present-day connotations of that term.Footnote ¹⁹

Two things in particular to which this book could have given more attention stand out (if one may dare to suggest additions to a volume of nearly a thousand pages). First, there is the question of Metternich's interactions and maneuverings in the context of court society and the imperial-royal bureaucracy. In this regard Siemann mainly brings in the figure of Metternich's chief rival from his later career, Count Kolowrat, but other actors merit inclusion as well. More to the point, his treatment of this theme, though insightful, could not be handled to full effect in a separate chapter but instead needed to be integrated throughout the book where it became important at various stages along the way—not least in the politics surrounding questions of war, peace, and reform in the Habsburg monarchy during the Napoleonic years. Apart from the problems encountered by Metternich's father while serving as governor in the Austrian Netherlands in the early 1790s, which resulted from the influence of Prince Ferdinand von und zu Trauttmansdorff back in Vienna, and the attention to the case of Kolowrat and the Bohemian noble lobby in the chapter devoted to this theme near the end of the work, the dimension of internal struggles over policy and influence at court almost never features. In this respect, too, as in his diplomacy, Metternich seems to operate in splendid near-isolation, frustrated in his reform efforts mainly by Kaiser Franz himself. Count Josef von Wallis appears briefly as court treasurer in the context of Napoleonic diplomacy, but he is hardly mentioned as one of Franz's chief advisors in his position as Minister of State and Council, a capacity in which Metternich often had to wrestle with him. Baron Anton von Baldacci and General Peter von Duka, two of Franz's other favorite advisors, do not appear in these roles at all. Similarly, Siemann does not point to the politically fraught nature of Metternich's relations with Count Johann Philipp von Stadion, or to his still more fraught relations with Stadion's supporters in Viennese court and high society. Or, for that matter, do figures such as the Hungarian magnate Count Carl Zichy and the Zichy family generally feature on the other side of these battles for influence, although they served as one of the bastions of Metternich's social and political position against his many detractors.

Second, similar problems apply to the chapter on Metternich's relations with women. This chapter offers a helpful overview of Metternich's various amorous and political relationships with women, and above all his relations with the women of his family, but Siemann rarely integrates these figures into the narrative of Metternich's career and politics. He mines Metternich's letters to the Baltic German Princess Dorothea von Lieven (wife of the Russian ambassador in London), for instance, and to the cosmopolitan salonnière and hub of Viennese society Wilhelmine Duchess of Sagan as sources that reveal Metternich's thinking during the years from 1812 to the 1820s, but he does not really consider these women as potential influences on Metternich. They are seen more as mirrors than as sounding boards for Metternich, as he sought to think through problems or to clear his mind before diving back into the masculine world of politics. The responses, or political insights, in the women's letters receive relatively little attention. This analytical discrepancy may have more to do with Siemann's vision of Metternich as statesman than with a neglect of gender history, for in his account, after a certain point in the 1790s, there is in general very little sense of Metternich as having been influenced by anyone's political views, even those of Friedrich Gentz, Metternich's long-time collaborator and the translator of Metternich's much-admired Burke.Footnote ²⁰

Rather than presenting these as deficits in the present work, it is perhaps fairer to suggest attention to the realm of political infighting and to the role of women as desiderata for future research. With his grand biography, Siemann has already provided an insightful new portrait of Metternich and his times, based on deep immersion in both published and unpublished sources. He offers an ultimately captivating portrait of Metternich as a tragic “hero” (867) in an almost classical sense: as a man and statesman of much wisdom who identified and grappled with some of the most important problems of the age in the Habsburg Empire and in Europe, but who was fated to fail in his efforts to address them. Readers may not always come to the same conclusions as Siemann about such a historiographic lightning rod as Metternich, but the author is surely right that sustained and thorough engagement with Metternich's life and career can help us rethink our views of Metternich's time, and even of our own.