Metternich was sanguine. He assumed that the defeat of Lützen would have sobered the allies and made them realise how much they needed the support of Austria. At the same time its limited nature would not have given Napoleon enough confidence to make him intransigent. This opened up room for manoeuvre.
Metternich hoped simultaneously to avoid the position of having to make a hasty choice between the two sides and to seize the moral high ground by adopting the role of mediator. This would leave Austria free, if Napoleon refused to cooperate, to join the allies against him – when she was ready, and only after securing favourable terms. It was not going to be easy, and Metternich realised that he might fall between two stools.
He had been in secret communication with the Russian court throughout the past year, with an eye to what might happen if Napoleon’s fortunes changed. Although obliged to send an Austrian auxiliary corps into Russia as part of Napoleon’s invasion force in 1812, he had instructed its commander, Schwarzenberg, to keep out of any fighting. This Schwarzenberg duly did, through a secret understanding with the Russian commanders facing him. When the Grande Armée began to disintegrate he pulled back into Poland, and on 6 January 1813 started to evacuate the grand duchy of Warsaw, which he was supposed to defend alongside Poniatowski’s Polish army. On 30 January he signed a secret convention similar to the one Yorck had concluded with the Russians and withdrew to Galicia, the Austrian province of Poland. This forced Poniatowski to fall back on Kraków, which opened the whole of Poland and the road west to the Russians.11
At this juncture Metternich would, circumstances permitting, have preferred to combine with Prussia in mediating a peace settlement between Russia and France, before the Russian army advanced any further west and before Napoleon reappeared on the scene with fresh forces. This would have laid the foundations for a peace that excluded both Russian and French influence from Germany and turned it into a neutral zone under Austrian and Prussian protection. Metternich mistrusted Prussia, which had let Austria down in the past and changed sides more than once out of opportunism. But he liked and respected her tall, distinguished-looking, grey-haired chancellor, Baron Karl August von Hardenberg. And, as it happened, Hardenberg had been thinking along the same lines as Metternich, and made the first tentative contact.
Hardenberg was not in fact a Prussian. Born in Hanover in 1750, he had travelled extensively before entering the service of his sovereign, King George III of England and Elector of Hanover. He had only left his service, reluctantly, after his wife had begun a scandalous and highly public affair with the Prince of Wales. It was then that he had found employment with the King of Prussia, for whom he negotiated the inglorious Treaty of Bâle in 1795, by which Prussia acquired large tranches of the Rhineland in return for ditching her allies and joining France. In 1804 he had become Prussia’s Foreign Minister and engineered the annexation of his native Hanover, once again in partnership with France against Austria and Russia, and in 1810 he was rewarded with the post of Prussian Chancellor.
Hardenberg’s attempt to negotiate an agreement with Metternich at the beginning of 1813 was overtaken by events; General Yorck’s mutiny ‘knocked the bottom out of my barrel’, to use his own words. With the Russians drawing near and the Prussian army joining them, he could not delay acceding to the alliance Alexander was offering long enough to combine with Metternich in an offer of mediation. Once he saw himself forced to accept the Russian alliance, he tried to persuade Metternich to do likewise, calculating that if Austria and Prussia were to accede together they might do so on better terms. But Metternich was not prepared to take such a chance, and had no desire to swap Austria’s subservient alliance with France for a similar one with Russia.12
He needed more time to reposition Austria, and for that it was essential to keep both Russia and France at arm’s length. Through his secretary Friedrich von Gentz he had secretly assured the Russian acting Foreign Minister, Count Charles Nesselrode, that Austria would break with Napoleon and join the allies, ‘for the eternal cause which will assuredly triumph in the end, for that cause which is neither Russian, nor Austrian, which is based on universal and immutable laws’, explaining why he could not do so quite yet.13
Gentz provided an invaluable conduit for communication with the allies. Born in Prussian Silesia, he had studied in Königsberg under Kant, then worked as a civil servant in Berlin, written for and edited a number of periodicals, and been an agent of the British Foreign Office before taking service in Austria. He was an old friend of Nesselrode, whom he knew from Berlin, and of Prussia’s ambassador in Vienna, Wilhelm von Humboldt. He was a colourful character, sentimental and naïve in his youth, when he had loved deeply and tragically before turning to a rackety life of drinking, gambling and whoring. Along with the poets Friedrich Schlegel and Jean Paul Richter, the two Humboldt brothers, Clemens Brentano, Friedrich Schleiermacher and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, he was at the centre of the intellectual circle dominated by the Jewish bluestocking Rahel Lewin, whose members switched lovers and entered into ‘intellectual marriages’ that did not constrain their freedom. Even after his marriage he carried on an exploitative relationship with Rahel Lewin, sired a child by a mistress, and had a string of affairs with notorious actresses and courtesans.
An extraordinarily hard worker, Gentz continued to study and write throughout. His political development took him from early enthusiasms for the French Revolution, through reactionary monarchism, to more pragmatic views. A clever man, widely travelled and wise in the ways of the world, he was quick to see through people and was an invaluable assistant to Metternich.
Metternich was also in contact with the Russian court through Count Stackelberg, the as yet unofficial Russian envoy in Vienna. And at the beginning of March he had sent his own envoy to allied headquarters at Kalisch. For this mission he had selected Count Louis-Joseph Lebzeltern, a bright young diplomat who had served under him in Paris and in 1810 been sent to St Petersburg to establish a personal link between Alexander and Metternich. Lebzeltern had made himself popular in Russia, which he left only at the outbreak of war in 1812.
When Lebzeltern appeared at Russian headquarters on 5 March he was warmly embraced by Alexander, who expressed the hope that Francis would save Europe by joining the cause. But Lebzeltern detected ‘a pronounced mistrust of our intentions’. Alexander’s apparent cordiality turned into impatience when he discovered that Metternich’s envoy had brought with him nothing beyond expressions of good will. He demanded immediate commitment, and dismissed the objection that the ground had to be prepared first, declaring that the details could be worked out at a congress to be held later.14
This conversation had taken place a full week before Prussia’s declaration of war against France, so it is hardly surprising that Metternich had not been ready to commit himself and his country. And there were deeper causes for concern. Russia and Prussia were weak. French might and Napoleon’s military talents could easily defeat them in the spring. Both had in the past made opportunistic peaces with France, and might do so again. If Austria were to betray her alliance with France now and expose herself to Napoleon’s anger, she would end up paying a heavy price. Metternich’s caution was strongly reinforced by his imperial master’s aversion to risk.
The Emperor Francis was not a heroic figure.