![]() He spent his young adulthood in the borderlands – Strasbourg, Mainz and Brussels – where the European impact of the revolution was initially and most intensely felt. The young Metternich had watched some of his teachers, amiable figures steeped in the rationalism of the late Enlightenment, align themselves with the violence of the French Revolution. But this order had to be of a special kind, capable of connecting the arrangements regulating the interaction between states with factors that ensured a stable social and political order within them. The vortex of violence that swept across Europe between 17 showed that peace was vulnerable unless it was founded on robust structures and principles, in short on a European order. Peace did not mean for him the mere absence of war. Wolfram Siemann’s evocative and deeply researched biography places the quest for peace at the centre of Metternich’s life and thought. War, he told Sagan, ‘contaminates everything, even the imagination … That is why I work for peace.’ Passing the scene of recent fighting near Troyes in March, Metternich noted that the armies had concerned themselves only with killing no one had taken the trouble to gather or bury the dead. The consequence of a campaign which was only being carried on due to the intransigence of one man, whose ultimate defeat appeared inevitable, these losses must have seemed cruelly pointless. At the Battle of Vauchamps on 14 February, seven thousand Prussians were killed or wounded. Further French victories followed at Montmirail and Chateau-Thierry, with more than five thousand allied casualties. He struck at the Russians again on 10 February, exacting a further three thousand casualties (and conceding only five hundred). At the Battle of Brienne on 29 January, he mounted a surprise attack on the Prussians, inflicting nearly four thousand casualties three days later, in heavy drifts of snow, he attacked combined Prussian, Austrian, Russian, Bavarian and Württemberg forces, leaving between six and seven thousand dead and wounded (and absorbing more than five thousand casualties of his own). He no longer possessed the resources to reverse the allied advance, but could still do grave damage to his pursuers. For months they traversed an immense crime scene.īy the middle of February 1814, when Metternich was writing to Sagan, Napoleon had been pushed out of Germany and was retreating westwards across France, pursued by the allied armies of Austria, Russia and Prussia. And this meant, among other things, that the key decision-makers were confronted in the most visceral way with the scale and human impact of the war. The congress that drew up the postwar peace settlement at Vienna in 1814-15 began peripatetically, with European envoys and ministers trailing along through the debris of the vying armies as they fought their way towards Paris. War’s only positive feature, he observed, was its ability to numb the senses to the immense misery it caused. This is that story.‘I hate the war and all that it brings: the killing, the pain, the piggishness, the pillaging, the corpses, the amputations, the dead horses – not to forget the rape,’ the Austrian foreign minister Klemens von Metternich told his friend Wilhelmine von Sagan. Thus, the early 19th century can be seen as the beginning of a more egalitarian Europe than had existed before. In some cases, governments responded violently, while in others, governments proved more receptive to change. ![]() In 1848, especially, oppressed people rose up against existing governmental systems and called for increased equality and rights. Most notably, Europe was rocked by a series of popular revolutions. And Romanticism, shunning the cold rationality of the Enlightenment, emphasized emotional reactions to events, which affected politics, art, literature, and music. Socialism, responding to the pressures of industrialization promised a world of communal cooperation and the elimination of class differences. ![]() Nationalism, which had been heightened by the Napoleonic Wars, emphasized self-identity and the consolidation of nationalities under a common government, often at the expense of existing empires. Classical liberalism, modeled on the United States and practiced with some success in France, promised more personal freedom and governments more responsive to the wishes of the people. ![]() Conservatism favored a return to hereditary monarchies with strong, and sometimes, absolute control over their people. The period from 1815 to 1850 was a time of competing ideologies, all of which promised a new Europe. Hereditary monarchies had fallen, new ideas had taken hold in France and spread throughout the continent, and the Industrial Revolution was beginning to change the lives of everyone. After the defeat of Napoleon, Europe was left in a real mess.
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