Nationalistic student societies, Burschenschaften, had grown in size and strength since the first group was founded in The actions of some Burschenschaften had grown increasingly violent. In an effigy of Metternich was burned in Wartburg. In March , a German writer working for the Russian Tsar was assassinated by a student. In response, the German Confederation met at Carlsbad.
Metternich persuaded the German states to agree to the suppression of liberal and nationalist expression. In Sptember , the Carlsbad Decrees were introduced. These allowed states to:. Austrian military power kept Prussia at bay in the mids.
Austria and Prussia had come close to conflict over how to respond to rebellion in Hesse-Cassel. The state had been a Prussian ally, but when its leader, Elector Frederick William appealed to the Confederation for help. Austrian and Bavarian troops marched into Hesse-Cassel to support its leadership. He came to view revolutionaries as tyrants who used the word freedom to justify violence. He wrote that: "The word freedom has for me never had the character of a point of a departure, but a goal….
Order alone can produce freedom. Without order, the appeal to freedom will always in practice lead to tyranny. Once Metternich was back in Vienna, his career as a statesman and politician advanced rapidly. His marriage in to Eleonore von Kaunitz, granddaughter of the Austrian state chancellor, gave him access to the highest social and political circles in the Austrian Empire.
His wife's contacts and knowledge were important for an ambitious man who had never before lived in Austria's capital city. After serving as Austrian ambassador to Berlin and Dresden, Metternich was appointed ambassador to France in In France when Metternich had the opportunity to study Napoleon, whom he termed "the conqueror of the world," he was not overawed; what he saw was a short, squat figure with a "negligent" appearance.
In April of , he appealed to the French emperor's vanity and cemented a temporary French-Austrian alliance by marrying Napoleon to Marie Louise, daughter of the Austrian emperor Francis I.
While in Paris, the tall, handsome, sociable, and poised Metternich began to acquire his lifelong reputation as a man who had "success with the ladies. He sent such optimistic reports back to Vienna—portraying a vulnerable Napoleon who was in danger of being overthrown by a resurgent revolutionary movement in France—that the Austrian government went to war against France and lost.
Yet when Metternich gained favorable peace terms from Napoleon, he was rewarded by being appointed the Austrian minister of foreign affairs in October In , he was given the hereditary title of prince. Metternich was biding his time, preserving "Austria's freedom of action" while accommodating "ourselves to the victo…. But by late , the French army was not only in retreat, pounded by a severe Russian winter, but was being pursued by the Russian army into Germany.
After Napoleon escaped from imprisonment on the island of Elbe in the Mediterranean Sea, he rallied the French army for a second time but was defeated in near Waterloo, Belgium. The year saw Metternich at the peak of his power and popularity in Austria. In , Napoleon had been master of much of Europe, and Austria had been a virtual puppet of French foreign policy; five years later, Metternich had become a key leader in the coalition of countries which defeated the French emperor twice.
Now the victors held the fate of Europe in their hands. When the victorious countries agreed to hold a diplomatic conference at Vienna the Congress of Vienna , Metternich saw it as a personal triumph. He believed that since Austria was at the center of the European Continent, it was the logical place to "lay the foundations for a new European order.
At the congress, Metternich's mastery of diplomatic maneuvering earned him the title of "the coachman of Europe. One observer described him as "not a genius but a great talent; cold, calm, imperturbable, and a supreme calculator. They might also be able to see that "the foundations of a lasting peace are secured as much as possible. Some rulers, such as Tsar Alexander, wanted the congress to create an international "police system" to prevent future revolutions and block the emergence of new Napoleons.
Metternich sympathized with this aim, but he also wanted to discourage any Russian interest in expanding into Europe. He also was determined to frustrate Austria's main rival in Germany, Prussia. Together with the British representative, Castlereagh, Metternich successfully worked to create a permanent alliance among the victors, envisioning grouped power that would "balance out" the ambitious or aggressive actions of any one country on the Continent.
Although the Quadruple Alliance halted only a few revolutions, and Metternich was disappointed when Britain left the alliance in , the "balance of power" system remained in place throughout the rest of the century.
So influential was Metternich's diplomacy that the era from to is often referred to as the "Age of Metternich.
After , Metternich devoted increasing amounts of his time to Austria's severe internal problems. The Austrian Empire was a conglomeration of 11 nationalities which had been forced under the rule of the Habsburg family by military conquests in the 17th century.
The French Revolution had proved to be a threat to the multinational Habsburg Empire, since it fanned the nationalism of some groups in the Empire, such as the Hungarians. Metternich saw nationalism and liberalism as serious threats to the survival of the Austrian Empire and tried to suppress both. At the Congress of Vienna, he also worked to create confederations in both Germany where he succeeded and Italy where he failed. In Metternich's time, Italy and Germany were what he called "geographic expressions"—divided into many individual governments with no national central government.
Italy had more than ten governments. Until Napoleon's invasion of Germany, there were more than political divisions in that country, each with its own petty monarch; the Congress of Vienna reduced this to 35, of which the two largest and most powerful were Austria and Prussia.
Metternich would have preferred a Germany united under Austrian leadership. With typical self-confidence, he worked to convince the Austrian emperor Francis II to allow himself to be made ruler over all of Germany.
Liberalism—a 19th-century middle-class movement to weaken monarchies and create parliaments or legislatures—also threatened the Austrian monarchy. Metternich saw liberalism as a child of the French Revolution of Innately suspicious of new political systems or ideas, Metternich proudly said that "everything changes but me.
Between and , Metternich watched suspiciously as liberal revolutions weakened monarchs in western Germany. When secret student fraternities at German universities the Burschenschaften staged patriotic demonstrations, he charged that the demonstrators were really promoting liberal goals. Secret societies were "the gangrene of society," he proclaimed; "as a device for disrupting the peace, fanaticism is one of the oldest things in the world.
After a politically conservative German playwright was assassinated by a student in , Metternich convinced Prussia that the two largest German states should intervene.
For many in Germany, Metternich became a hated symbol of reaction and repression. What Metternich feared most was that the liberal and national ideas would tear apart the multinational Habsburg Empire, causing each nationality under Habsburg rule to go its own way and establish its own separate government.
In the 18th century, the Austrian emperor Joseph II had decided that the way to unify the Empire was to centralize the administrative part of the government and standardize the law. Metternich disagreed, believing that the best way to discourage independence movements was to allow each section of the Empire to have its own distinctive rules and laws. Yet Metternich's ideas regarding Austria were rejected. Although he was appointed Austrian state chancellor in , his influence was restricted to foreign affairs by Count Kolowrat, the minister of state, who had the ear of the new emperor, the mentally retarded Ferdinand.
If it were not for Metternich's skills in diplomacy, his career would have been regarded as a virtual failure. At times, he himself thought that way.
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