Rites of Peace: The Fall of Napoleon and the Congress of Vienna. Adam Zamoyski
whole of southern Germany would be wide open to their interference. He therefore agreed to almost all of Bavaria’s demands. By the Treaty of Ried, signed on 8 October, Bavaria undertook to leave the Rheinbund and ally herself with Austria, contributing 36,000 men who would operate under Austrian command. In return, Austria pledged her protection and that of her allies, which she had no right to do.
It is the secret articles of the treaty which are significant. One, which was to cause Metternich and indeed all the other statesmen of Europe many sleepless nights in the following year, guaranteed to Bavaria her current territorial extent and, recognising that certain areas would need to be returned to Austria, full compensation to be negotiated later. But by far the most important article was the one stating that ‘The two High Contracting Parties regard one of the principal objects of their efforts in the present war to be the dissolution of the Confederation of the Rhine and the total and absolute independence of Bavaria, so that, unfettered and placed beyond all foreign influence, she may enjoy the fullness of sovereignty.’23
The Treaty of Ried was a triumph for Metternich, who had managed to enlist an invaluable ally as well as deny one to Alexander. It also overturned Stein’s plans for a unified German state. But the struggle for control of Germany was by no means over, and one of its first and greatest victims was King Frederick Augustus of Saxony.
When Napoleon abandoned Dresden the King had been obliged to take refuge in his second city, Leipzig, where Napoleon concentrated his forces, and on which all the allied armies were now converging – even Bernadotte had been browbeaten, by Pozzo di Borgo and Stewart, into joining in the action. The attack opened on 16 October.
The battle for the city, which came to be known as the Battle of the Nations because of the number of nationalities involved, was the largest engagement of the Napoleonic Wars, involving well over half a million men, who were pounded by more than 2,000 pieces of artillery, and lasting three days.
Although heavily outnumbered, Napoleon held his own throughout the first day, delivering some heavy blows at the allies. On the second, the French were gradually obliged to give ground as Blücher appeared in their rear and the full weight of the allied forces was brought to bear. On that day the Saxon contingent in the French army defected and joined the allies, further depleting Napoleon’s forces. He lost the initiative, and on the third day his army, which was by then outnumbered by a ratio of two to one, began to lose its cohesion. That evening Napoleon ordered a retreat to the Rhine. Before leaving Leipzig he went to the royal palace and offered Frederick Augustus refuge in France, but the Saxon King declined the offer, stating that he could not abandon his subjects at such a time. Frederick Augustus sent officers to each of the allied monarchs with a request for negotiation, but there was no response.
When Alexander rode into Leipzig he found Bernadotte already in the square before the royal palace, conversing with General Reynier, the French commander of the Saxon army, whom he had just taken prisoner. The King of Saxony was standing at the foot of the stairs with his royal guard. Bernadotte greeted Alexander and offered to present him to Frederick Augustus, but the Tsar snubbed the hapless King and went in to pay his respects to the Queen. A moment later a Russian officer informed the King of Saxony that he was Alexander’s prisoner. After some argument as to where the unfortunate Saxon royal couple should be held and by whom, the Prussians took matters into their own hands, and at 4 a.m. on 23 October they were bundled into a carriage and sent under armed escort to captivity in Berlin.24
It was not just that the Saxon King had not declared for the allies right at the beginning, nor that he had gone back to Napoleon’s side after Lützen. ‘The despoliation of the goodly Frederick Augustus had become,’ as Hardenberg put it, ‘a necessity in the interests of making Prussia strong, and therefore in those of Europe.’ More precisely, Saxony was the most suitable compensation Alexander could offer Frederick William in return for Prussia’s former Polish provinces, which he was intending to hold on to himself.25
The allied victory at Leipzig was decisive. ‘I have just returned from the battlefield on which the cause of the world has been won,’ Metternich announced in a letter to his wife on 18 October. It was Napoleon’s first total defeat, and its scale no less than its psychological impact made it inconceivable that he should ever play a dominant role in Germany again. ‘The shame in which he covered us has been washed away by torrents of French blood,’ Stein wrote triumphantly to his wife. Humboldt was similarly delighted by his walk over the corpse-strewn battlefield.26
‘The deliverance of Europe appears to be at hand,’ Aberdeen wrote to Castlereagh. But the letter he wrote to his sister-in-law Maria was more muted in tone. ‘For three or four miles the ground is covered with bodies of men and horses, many not dead. Wretches wounded unable to crawl, crying for water amidst heaps of putrefying bodies. Their screams are heard at an immense distance, and still ring in my ears. The living as well as the dead are stripped by the barbarous peasantry, who have not sufficient charity to put the miserable wretches out of their pain. Our victory is most complete. It must be owned that a victory is a fine thing, but one should be at a distance.’27
Two days after the battle, on 20 October, Metternich was honoured by his sovereign with the title of Prince. For a man who believed in hierarchies as deeply as he did, this was gratifying. ‘What a range of sensations I have experienced over the past few days!’ he wrote to Wilhelmina that evening. ‘The world has been reborn under my very eyes; my most daring dreams have come true – my political standing has doubled; I am at the apogee of my career; it will have been accomplished. Yet everything, sensations, calculations, business – the whole world, are eclipsed by a single thought of mon amie; the world, its grandeurs and its miseries are like nothing to me; you, always you – nothing but you!’28
After waking him the next morning his valet, Giroux, asked: ‘Will Your Serene Highness put on the same suit Your Excellency wore yesterday?’ If this did not bring Metternich down to earth, the interview he had with Alexander later that day did.29
The Tsar was also in triumphant mood. The great battle, with its apocalyptic overtones, deepened his conviction that he was fulfilling his destiny as God’s instrument for the chastisement of Napoleonic godlessness. He too penned a note to his beloved in his moment of triumph. ‘I beg you to believe me when I say that I am, more than ever, yours for life in my heart and my soul, and I would add; Honi [sic] soit qui mal y pense,’ he wrote to Zinaida Volkonskaya, alluding to his recent decoration with the Garter.30
Metternich’s arrangement with Bavaria had not only shattered Stein’s plans; it had also profoundly irritated the Tsar, and it hung like a dark cloud over their meeting. Metternich expressed his disapproval at the activities of the Central Administrative Council, which was treating liberated areas like occupied enemy territory, and indeed at their long-term implications. He demanded that Stein be removed from his post. Alexander dismissed his arguments, declaring that he had made a promise to Stein, and that his authority would be compromised if he were obliged to break that promise.
Metternich could achieve little in the circumstances, and this is reflected in the new convention regarding liberated territories signed by the allied powers the following day. The Council was renamed a Central Executive, and although the rights of those princes who had become allies were to be respected, there was considerable ambiguity in the phrasing, which left Stein with virtually unlimited authority throughout the German lands.31
Metternich took the setback philosophically. The behaviour of Stein and of the Russian and Prussian soldiery ‘liberating’ Germany was beginning to produce a reaction at every level of society, and even many of those who had dreamt of this liberation were having second thoughts. ‘I often wonder where our nation is really going,’ Humboldt