Klemens's ancestors, including his father, adeptly climbed the greasy pole of imperial politics, loyally serving Habsburg interests in the Rhineland and the Austrian Netherlands. It is a strength of this book that it covers in some detail the rise of the Metternich family within the Rhineland, a territorially fragmented region closer to France than to Austria and Prussia, and one where the checks, balances and guarantees of the thousand-year old Holy Roman Empire remained peculiarly strong throughout the eighteenth century. Metternich is forever associated with reaction and Austria, but according to his own words it was the Rhine, not the Danube, that flowed through his veins. Siemann draws on previously unexamined archives to bring this multilayered and dazzling man to life.Klemens von Metternich's life spanned the final years of the Holy Roman Empire, the French Revolution, Napoleon, the so-called Restoration and Pre-March, and the 1848 Revolutions, a range that alone justifies the almost one thousand pages that Wolfram Siemann expends in rehabilitating the Austrian statesman. But short of compromising on his overarching goal Metternich aimed to accommodate liberalism and nationalism as much as possible. He was, as Henry Kissinger has observed, the father of realpolitik. That often required him, as the Austrian Empire's foreign minister and chancellor, to back authority.
He reveals Metternich as more modern and his career much more forward-looking than we have ever recognized.Ĭlemens von Metternich emerged from the horrors of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, Siemann shows, committed above all to the preservation of peace.
Wolfram Siemann paints a fundamentally new image of the man who shaped Europe for over four decades. Historians treat him as the archenemy of progress, a ruthless aristocrat who used his power as the dominant European statesman of the first half of the nineteenth century to stifle liberalism, suppress national independence, and oppose the dreams of social change that inspired the revolutionaries of 1848.
Metternich has a reputation as the epitome of reactionary conservatism.
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