Christopher Clark
SEX & SUMMITRY
Rites of Peace: The Fall of Napoleon and the Congress of Vienna
By Adam Zamoyski (Harper Press 616pp £25)

A new Europe was born at the Congress of Vienna. A Dutch–Belgian composite state, the United Kingdom of the Netherlands, appeared in the north-west. Norway was transferred from Denmark to Sweden. Austria relinquished forever its foothold in the Netherlands and struck deep inroads into Italy with the acquisition of Lombardy-Venetia and the installation of Habsburg dynasts on the thrones of Tuscany, Modena and Parma. The kingdom of Prussia became a colossus that stretched across the north of Germany, broken only by one gap, forty kilometres wide at its narrowest point. Of the 300-odd principalities and statelets that had inhabited the old Holy Roman Empire, only thirty-nine German territories remained. The borders of the Russian Empire, redrawn to encompass the bulk of eastern and central Poland, extended further westwards than at any time in European history.

The implications of this comprehensive restructuring were momentous. Prussia replaced Austria as the foremost German power. Piedmont-Sardinia emerged as the pre-eminent territory in the Italian peninsula. The Poles seethed for a century under a triple regime of occupation. The fear of the threat posed by a resurgent France sufficed, more or less, to hold the allies of 1815 together, until it was overshadowed by the fear of Russia. It would be going too far to say that the Vienna settlement 'caused' the wars of 1848, 1854, 1864, 1866, 1870–71 and 1914–18, but it certainly accounts to a great extent for the conflicts and coalitions that shaped their course and outcome.

In this sophisticated, panoramic account of Europe's transition from war to peace in 1815, Adam Zamoyski revisits the elaborate sequence of summit negotiations that culminated in the Congress of Vienna. This has never been an easy story to tell. The list of dramatis personae extends into the hundreds, and the scenery constantly changes as the centre of political gravity moves from the mobile military headquarters of the 1813 campaigns to Paris, London and Vienna. Yet Zamoyski succeeds brilliantly, balancing the many strands of his narrative with intelligence and grace. Lucid overviews of high politics – sketched out against the background of some of the largest battles in human history – are interspersed with vivid set-pieces, telling anecdotes and poignant individual portraits.

Zamoyski weaves his high-political narrative into an account of the world of travel, consumption, sociability and sex that surrounded the summiteers. He is especially good on the infrastructure of the conferences – the variable cost and quality of apartments and carriages, the inconveniences of travel, and the dangers faced by diplomats making their way across areas that had only recently been battlefields, where they were tempting prey for gangs of Cossacks, or bands of wandering deserters. The protagonists of Zamoyski's account are forever arriving and departing in mud-spattered carriages, recovering from sea-sickness, searching for furniture to fill empty apartments, and coping with the insolence of unfamiliar servants. Like today's diplomats, the summiteers spent much of their time shopping on behalf of loved ones at home. There were the usual culture clashes: the British delegation were heard to complain that nobody served proper tea in Vienna, the Russians tended to trash their apartments, the British ambassador Sir Charles Stewart was forced to sell his hounds because he could find no one in Austria who would hunt foxes with him.

Women loom large in this book, mainly in their familiar Congress roles as mistresses and prostitutes, but also as wives (though not necessarily faithful ones). King Frederick of Denmark took up with the twenty-year-old Caroline Petronelle Seufert, a ‘young woman of the working class, blonde and pink, a pretty grisette’. The two were so attached to each other during the King's stay that she became known on the streets of Vienna as the ‘Queen of Denmark’. Frederick William III of Prussia, still slightly numb from the death of his wife Queen Luise in 1810, fell hopelessly in love with Countess Julie Zichy and ‘followed her about like a spaniel’. While Emperor Alexander pursued young women with reckless abandon, his wife renewed an earlier passionate affair with the Polish statesman Czartoryski. The German diplomat Gentz confided to his diary one evening that he had ‘passed an hour with Suzette, a very beautiful woman bequeathed to me by [Wilhelm von] Humboldt’. It seems to have been easy for even quite junior members of the delegations to pick up female Congress groupies from the streets of Vienna. There were also liaisons of a more serious kind. Wilhelmina de Biron, Princess of Sagan, became one of the great loves of Metternich's life, though he later ruefully admitted that she ‘sinned seven times a day and loved as often as others dine’. These liaisons helped to compensate for the ritualised tedium of the official occasions, but they could be functional in a political sense: Sir Charles Stewart and his junior colleague Frederick Lamb both secretly shared Wilhelmina with Metternich for a time, using her to acquire information about the Austrian, all of which was dutifully passed to London.

There are many memorable portraits in this book, but Talleyrand emerges with particular clarity. We encounter him first in the hands of his valets in Paris, entertaining morning callers, his face scarcely visible for ‘an enormous assemblage of flannel, felt, fustian, percale [in] a mass of white’. ‘Amongst the more remarkable elements of his toilette’, the Russian minister Nesselrode reported, ‘was one so curious as to overcome one's disgust in observing it. It involved the consumption of one or two large glasses of tepid water, which he sucked in through the nostrils and then ejected, more or less like an elephant, through his nose.’ To embrace Talleyrand, Nesselrode recalled, was to be covered in powder. Later we meet the wily French statesman at the height of his powers, skilfully exploiting tensions among the allies over the fate of Saxony and Poland to open up opportunities for France and exasperating his power-obsessed interlocutors with the buzzwords 'public law', 'international order' and 'legitimacy'.

Zamoyski's narrative moves briskly and he writes with a light touch. But his account is not without reflective depth. Inlaid into the narrative are many insights into the braggadocio and mutual paranoia that underpinned much of the politicking, and astute accounts of how the various summiteers conceptualised their role in the negotiation process. The book also has much to say about the performative aspects of diplomacy – the importance of clothing, dancing and flattery, the feigning of indignation or anger in the conference chamber. It was essential, the Earl of Abercorn told Lord Castlereagh, as the latter prepared to leave England, that an ambassador adopt an air of ‘undisguised personal and national haughtiness (with a sweet sauce of studied, unremitting, ceremonious, condescending politeness and attention)’. Zamoyski shows us how a statesman can be led astray by the deceptive simplicity of maps: when Castlereagh drew up the projected frontiers for the new Dutch state, he seized upon the River Meuse as a convenient boundary and thus drew a neat line right through the middle of a cultural and economic community that had thrived on both sides of the water since the sixteenth century.

Only once does Zamoyski, it seems to me, strike a slightly off note: his handling of Wilhelm von Humboldt, the Prussian ambassador in Vienna, is unaccountably hostile. We are told that Humboldt liberally indulged ‘a seedy taste for preferably fat lower-class girls, whom he could treat like objects, while writing curiously high-minded letters to his wife Caroline’. Later Zamoyski touches again on Humboldt's ‘taste for raddled whores and fat lower-class women’. But there is surely more than this to be said for Humboldt, the classical scholar, inventor of the modern humanist university, champion of Jewish emancipation and the most consistently liberal minister of the Prussian reform era. Humboldt's sexual adventures and his porous ethical standards were hardly unusual, as Zamoyski's own highly coloured account of these matters demonstrates.

Rites of Peace is a fine example of narrative history, elegant, sketched on a broad canvas, and sound on factual detail. Zamoyski has a sharp eye for the vanity of prominent men and for the discrepancies between intention and outcome. His deft use of contemporary diaries, diplomatic reports and memoirs ensures authenticity of tone and atmosphere. Vienna, he concludes, may have given birth to a new kind of politics, centred on summitry, consultation and a consensual acceptance – in principle – of the inviolability of sovereign states. But it also set the parameters for a chain of wars and national struggles that would shake Europe for more than a century.