We meet him as a tradition-conscious imperial count, an early industrial entrepreneur, an admirer of Britain's liberal constitution, a failing reformer in a fragile multiethnic state, and a man prone to sometimes scandalous relations with glamorous women. Siemann draws on previously unexamined archives to bring this multilayered and dazzling man to life.
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. Clemens von Metternich emerged from the horrors of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, Siemann shows, committed above all to the preservation of peace. He reveals Metternich as more modern and his career much more forward-looking than we have ever recognized. 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. A compelling new biography that recasts the most important European statesman of the first half of the nineteenth century, famous for his alleged archconservatism, as a friend of realpolitik and reform, pursuing international peace.
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