Rites of Peace: The Fall of Napoleon and the Congress of Vienna. Adam Zamoyski
(Żmigród) in mid-July, they came to the conclusion that they could defeat Napoleon without the help of Austria.3
Napoleon’s only hope of peace lay with Metternich, who still favoured a peaceful outcome, for a number of practical reasons. Having inherited a virtually bankrupt state in 1809, he had worked hard to rebuild its finances and was unwilling to see these frittered away on war, the most ruinous activity a state could pursue. War was also notoriously unpredictable, and even if successful could produce unexpected political tremors. Finally, the outbreak of war necessarily relegated diplomatists like himself to a secondary, and therefore unacceptable, role. As he took up residence in his roomy palace in Prague, which had been chosen as the venue for the congress due to open on 10 July, he faced with relish ‘the grand and immense task’ that faced him, and assured Wilhelmina that ‘I will do what I can to save this world.’4
He was certainly well placed to manage events, and his choice of Prague as the venue for the congress was no whim. The ancient Czech city lay within the Habsburg dominions, and was embraced by the formidable Austrian intelligence apparatus. As well as running the government of the empire, Metternich’s State Chancellery controlled a number of auxiliary services, such as the posts, the archives, and so on. It had a codes office to encrypt and decrypt secret correspondence, and a translation department, since the official language of government for Hungary was Latin, which was also employed in communications with the Vatican and in other state business; the administration of most of the monarchy’s German lands was carried on in German; and that of its Italian dominions in Italian, with French remaining the language of diplomacy and the court.
In the last decades of the eighteenth century the sheer quantity of information being processed through this immense machine inspired greater invigilation. With the outbreak of the French Revolution and the supposed threat of Jacobin conspiracy and contagion, the accent was shifted to surveillance. Francis and Metternich shared an almost obsessive fear of conspiracy and revolution, and both believed in being well-informed.
Metternich employed hundreds of spies and battalions of men who were expert at unsealing letters, copying them and resealing them with the speed necessary to avoid arousing suspicion – the letters might be lifted from a post bag while the horses were being changed, or simply removed from a desk in a private house for a few moments. Others would then translate and decrypt the copies. The head of the decryption office once boasted that he had broken eighty-five foreign codes, one of them, used by the Russian diplomatic service, taking him as long as four years to crack. In order to extend the range of his surveillance, Metternich managed, by offering faster communications and cheaper rates, to divert various international postal routes through Austrian dominions, where interesting-looking letters could be examined.5
No matter or item was too humble, or for that matter too grand, for the attention of Metternich’s spies. The archives of the State Chancellery are to this day full of copies of intercepted letters, some of them of the utmost banality, others of evident diplomatic or political interest, some of them between people of no social or political standing whatever, others quite the opposite. Not only was the public and private correspondence of all foreign diplomats and statesmen to and from Vienna intercepted and scrutinised; even intimate letters between members of the imperial family, including those sent and received by the Emperor Francis himself, were intercepted and copied just like anyone else’s.6
In the event, the Congress of Prague turned out to be little short of a farce. Napoleon’s nomination as his plenipotentiaries of Caulaincourt and Narbonne, both of them negotiators of the highest rank, suggested that his intent was serious. Narbonne, who reached Prague first, was surprised to discover that Frederick William had sent not Hardenberg, but Humboldt, a man of recognised talents but mediocre diplomatic standing, and a declared advocate of war besides. He was downright shocked when he heard that instead of Nesselrode Alexander had sent as his plenipotentiary Jean Anstett, a man of no experience and of poor reputation who, to make matters worse, was Alsatian by birth and therefore theoretically a renegade French subject. It was an astonishing demonstration of contempt for Napoleon and for the congress, and Narbonne informed Metternich that he could not sit down to talks with them, pending the arrival of Caulaincourt with instructions from Napoleon. On hearing the identity of the allied plenipotentiaries, Napoleon held back Caulaincourt, and when he did finally send him he did not furnish him with the requisite credentials.
This boded ill for the congress’s chances of success. The armistice had been prolonged, to 10 August, and if terms were not agreed by midnight on that date hostilities would resume, with Austria in the allied camp. This deadline, the nature of the allied plenipotentiaries and Napoleon’s sluggishness raise the question of whether anyone was serious about the congress.
‘At heart, nobody truly wanted peace,’ Nesselrode would later admit, adding that the congress was a ‘joke’ and that Alexander and Frederick William had been opposed to it from the start. Hardenberg was similarly sceptical, while in his letters from Prague Humboldt repeatedly assured his wife that nobody, least of all himself, was interested in making peace at this stage.
Metternich probably did favour a peaceful solution, though he was growing increasingly sceptical of its chances with each passing day. And while he reassured an anxious Humboldt that there would be war on 11 August whatever happened, he was determined to make it look as though he had been left with no option.7
Ironically, the one person who genuinely hoped to gain something from the congress was Napoleon, even though his motives were questionable. Caulaincourt and Narbonne were very much in earnest, though the latter thought peace a forlorn hope, and they set themselves up in a manner befitting a delegation to proper peace talks, much to Hardenberg’s amusement. Their brief was to keep negotiations going independently of the armistice. ‘After 10 August the armistice works against us,’ Napoleon explained: he believed that the Russians and the Prussians would be ready to take the field, while the Austrians would still be unprepared. This would allow him to defeat the Russians and Prussians while continuing to negotiate with Austria. ‘This is what we wish, but we must dissimulate and let them believe that we want the armistice to be prolonged indefinitely,’ he wrote. It seems that Napoleon still believed that he could make mischief between the allies, and that he would be able to split them at some stage and make a separate peace with Russia.8
His calculations were based on two false premises. The first was that the Austrians would not be ready to take the field on 10 August. The second was that a decisive victory over the Russians and the Prussians would tip the balance in his favour. Over dinner on 3 August Metternich explained to Caulaincourt, in whom he recognised a kindred soul, that times had changed in this respect. A battle lost by the allies now would make no material difference, as it could not change their attitude, which was one of exasperation with Napoleon based on the conviction that it was not possible to make a lasting peace with him. A battle lost by Napoleon on the other hand weakened him fundamentally, since it diminished his military prestige.9
The congress never did convene properly. Metternich had proposed that rather than sitting down to open verbal negotiations, the plenipotentiaries of the three powers should put their case in verbal notes addressed to him as mediator. Humboldt and Anstett agreed, while Narbonne and Caulaincourt insisted that there must at least be some verbal negotiation. This difference of opinion quickly degenerated into pointless argument, with both sides invoking various eighteenth-century congresses as precedent. ‘Nothing could be more amusing than the story of this supposed Congress, which has already lasted more than three weeks without a single question of form having been decided, and which will, it appears, be dissolved before it opens,’ Gentz wrote to a friend on 30 July.10
Gentz was certainly enjoying himself. There was little for him to do, since there were no conferences to minute and no memoranda to draft. The