by Simon Winder
Of several congratulatory congresses held by the Allies, the meeting at Aachen in 1818 was the most genial. The Emperor Francis I of Austria, Tsar Alexander I, Frederick William III of Prussia and the non-royals Prince Metternich, Lord Castlereagh and the Duke of Wellington were in attendance, with other figures such as Goethe and some senior Rothschilds. There was a fun visit to see the sacred relics of Charlemagne, effectively, in the wake of Napoleon’s visit there, decontaminating the place with a strong spray of hysterical reactionary mysticism. There were discussions about having a permanent Allied army in Brussels which could swoop on the French – but this came to nothing as the most enthusiastic supporters were the Russians, who everyone else really wanted to go home. They had a cheery visit to Spa and one to Waterloo, where the Duke of Wellington gave one of his – what must have already been somewhat dreaded – battlefield tours. In a measure of how shaky everyone’s confidence was, Tsar Alexander insisted that for his journey from Aachen to Waterloo all Dutch troops (who were viewed as a security risk, having in some cases fought for Napoleon) had to leave the region and be replaced by a bodyguard of Swiss mercenaries. This followed one of the many hundreds of rumours about Napoleonic secret agents planning to kidnap him.
Perhaps the strangest discussions were for a gigantic European-wide army to be ferried by the British navy to South America to crush the colonial rebellion there against Spanish rule. This is one of the most daft what-ifs of all – but consistent with the new atmosphere of anti-republican hatred and the cult of obedience which swept European ruling circles. Fortunately the British had recent experience of this being a poor idea, having been humiliated some years earlier in an attack on Buenos Aires and having had a thankless time in their own recent war with the United States. We know that events would unfold in ways that ruined the visions of the men at Aachen, but it would have been an even more curiously different direction for history to have taken if this Latin American expedition had been launched – with unfortunate peasant lads from the Urals or Worcestershire battling electric eels, piranha and boa constrictors in the name of monarchical solidarity.
‘What is there to fear if you are a slave?’
With their business wrapped up, the monarchs and aristocrats at Aachen prepared to leave but were held there much against their will by a peculiar technological problem. To commemorate the end of the war and Britain’s central place in the Battle of Waterloo, the Prince Regent (ruling in place of his incapacitated father George III) commissioned Sir Thomas Lawrence to paint portraits of all the key figures gathered at Aachen. Like an amazingly slower version of some railway station photo-booth – to which the subject had to return once a month to see if the picture had fallen yet into the little tray – this process just took too long. The vast, sumptuous Waterloo Chamber at Windsor Castle is still there, preserved and unmessed-about-with by the odd accident of none of the Prince Regent’s successors having any aesthetic interests. The Chamber enshrines perhaps the last moments of glamorous male fashion as ‘The Great Renunciation’ began to bite and wealthy men shifted to simple black, grey and white clothing. All kinds of gorgeousness are here – unbelievable waistcoats, military dress uniforms of astounding chic. I remember once seeing an early nineteenth-century Parisian advertisement for imported English fashion: chapeau de Robinson?: Incroyable!4 Even the most zany reactionaries like the Emperor Francis I would not have dreamed of wearing a wig any more and the spirit of ‘new Roman’ austerity would soon make everyone look as boring as the British Prime Minister Lord Liverpool in his Lawrence portrait (white shirt, white cravat, black coat, hardly even any side-whiskers). Also preserved, perhaps, is the irritation and boredom of the world’s most powerful men forced to hang around while Sir Thomas worked up his scumbling.
The portraits are more revealing than the subjects would wish. The principals – Alexander I, Francis I, Frederick William III, William I of the Netherlands – are, despite the best efforts of Lawrence and others, visibly not up to their jobs. Despite declarations of monarchical solidarity, the handing out of tons of medals and reviews of immaculately turned-out troops, none of these figures inspire confidence – it is as though despite their protestations Napoleon had sucked the life from them. Their triumph in 1815 does not in the end feel like a triumph – in different ways each of their societies had been severely smashed up and the basis for their families’ rule over their countries had become shaky. Their ministers in their portraits look much tougher, and Metternich is even more sensationally dressed than his master Francis I. It is hard not to imagine that in private conversations the ministers might all have rolled their eyes at the mystical, querulous royal oddballs they had to put up with. In a sure sign of failure, many at Aachen were prey to mad fantasies about Freemasons, cosmic plots and the idea that lurking in a room, somewhere in Paris, there was some Arch Fiend sitting like a spider at the centre of a vast web of global revolution. For some years, anywhere in Europe, all it would take would be for a gang of desperate peasants to torch some feudal symbol or other and the Congress partners would go into paroxysms. They wished to collaborate in a pan-European police force, stamping out even the tiniest flame of dissent, but they did this in such a jittery way and with almost no positive vision (beyond obedience, and the building of endless canals) that further revolutions were inevitable.
The French were now hemmed in by a tangled array of very unconvincing military arrangements. Dutch troops sat in flimsy border fortifications such as the clumsily repurposed castle at Bouillon and slow work began on various German fortresses. The different political German political entities created the ‘Confederation’, a loose cooperative organization, with an assembly in Frankfurt, which replaced the Holy Roman Empire. Some of its members were picturesquely tiny, as in the old Empire, but it was strikingly different from its predecessor in clearly being German. It may have had some minorities (particularly Czech and Polish) but unwittingly it set out the framework (including with the minorities) for arguments about Germany that were only resolved after 1945. The Confederation’s main practical aim was to provide an arena for Prussia and Austria to keep engaged in penning up the French Revolutionary monster. Confederal fortresses were created in a number of locations, including Mainz, Ehrenbreitstein (an ancient heap of rock opposite Koblenz), Luxembourg, Landau, Rastatt and Ulm. Engagingly, these were to be paid for by France. Chunks of these forts still litter the landscape – but they suffered from the increasingly hard-not-to-notice problem that France was no longer a threat. Decades went by with generations of Austrian, Prussian and Bavarian troops rotating through these extremely expensive and ever more pointless buildings. In the end their main contribution to European history was an accident at a confederal gunpowder store in Mainz which killed or injured hundreds of people and required yet more rebuilding work on the haggard cathedral.
The jittery and weird atmosphere of this period came to a head in 1830. My favourite French monarch, the self-immolatarily reactionary and dim Charles X, mocked the memory of Revolutionary and Napoleonic France with his demands for legislation which would punish those stealing sacred vessels from a church by having the offending hand cut off. These sorts of shenanigans resulted in a relatively minor burst of protest in Paris, at which Charles panicked and fled to England. A new regime was formed by a cousin whose family had some Revolutionary credentials, Louis Philippe. It was an indication of how little the Congress of Europe could do that no action was taken. The vast effort that had originated in the wish to ensure the safety of the Bourbon family had come to nothing. Indeed, France seemed to have little difficulty in continuing to act as a great power – it had successfully invaded Spain in 1823 to re-impose reactionary rule and, earlier in 1830, had begun its long military involvement in what became Algeria. Now its example in disposing of Charles X would have a huge impact on its northern neighbour.
The new United Kingdom of the Netherlands was a deeply unhappy place. It is hard to exaggerate just how much the Dutch had been traumatized by the tr
eatment of their country. Waves of barely resisted foreign intervention, humiliating switches of regime and eventual incorporation into France as merely a further small group of departments mocked a great past. It must have been unbearable to see the great tombs to the Republic’s naval, military, intellectual and artistic giants in the churches of Delft, now merely a minor town in Bouches-de-la-Meuse. They had been obliged to become helpless bystanders as their troops died in Russia and the British helped themselves to their overseas colonies. The new Dutch state had recovered sufficiently to have seventeen thousand troops at Waterloo and ended the war undoubtedly in the winning camp. It was in this context that the old Austrian Netherlands was handed over – to enlarge the kingdom from two million inhabitants to five million and to make it a plausible (or somewhat plausible) counterweight to France, and resolve the problem of what to do with these bedraggled southern territories.
The attempt to amalgamate two societies which had for well over two centuries defined each other by mutual hatred and contempt was not a success. The religious, social and linguistic problems were overwhelming. William I of the United Netherlands wanted everyone to read and speak ‘proper Dutch’ – a necessary action in creating a viable state, but awkwardly at odds with the different history of Flemish in the south and of the southern elite speaking French. Technocratic building of canals and redevelopment of Antwerp was not remotely enough. It was also awkward that the south not only had a larger population, but was also becoming, in much the same way as the Ruhr, curiously proto-industrial. Liège, even before the Prince-Bishop had been kicked out, was famous for manufacturing vigour and great seams of coal. In a curious piece of continuity though, the Cathedral of St Lambert, which Revolutionaries had begun to tear down in 1794, was still being taken down and its stone sold despite the notionally neo-Catholic environment – the last major bits finally going in 1827. Brussels too was formidable – it was already one of Europe’s largest cities, with a population over a hundred thousand, and not at all readily swallowable by the regime in The Hague. But, given that the south had in itself never had an independent identity, it was hard to imagine what it would look like without some form of external master – whether Burgundian, Habsburg, Spanish, Austrian or French.
The overthrow of Charles X’s reign had shown that the post-Waterloo structure was in as bad a shape as St Lambert’s Cathedral. The trigger in Brussels was a performance of Auber’s opera The Dumb Girl of Portici, with its rousing (or, to be honest, very mildly engaging) duet ‘Amour sacré de la patrie’ (‘Better to die than stay miserable! What is there to fear if you are a slave?’). After the performance at the Théatre de la Monnaie, crowds poured out and revolution began. With southern units refusing to fight, William I turned to the Congress powers for help. But, for their own reasons, none was enthusiastic. The most helpful were the French, who suggested that a large central block of the southern Netherlands could be incorporated into, say, France – with the western areas of Flanders as a British protectorate and Prussia taking Luxembourg and Maastricht. Once this had been studiedly ignored, the Congress system worked well for what was now described as ‘Belgium’. Continuing fear of France, but also the deep-seated and peculiar tensile strength of the south kept it intact. Horse-trading in the east built on earlier horse-trading when in 1815 William I had swapped with Prussia his family’s ancient ownership of the German Nassau territories for what now became the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. This made sense as part of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands, but was now isolated by the Belgian Revolution. Meeting in London, the Congress powers decided that Belgium should become independent but neutral within the borders of 1790. The Dutch refused to accept this and invaded. This led to the grim Siege of Antwerp, where French troops marched in to support Belgium and to winkle the Dutch out of the Antwerp citadel. This short and horrible campaign (immortalized in some shocking paintings in Les Invalides) devastated Antwerp and ended with over a thousand combat deaths. In 1839 the Dutch finally acknowledged Belgian independence and at a further London conference the borders were fixed: the Dutch kept Maastricht, but Luxembourg was split in two, with the majority becoming part of Belgium (including such places as Bouillon and Bastogne) and the east remaining in the possession of William I as Grand Duke of Luxembourg – the state that still exists today. This bizarre survival was one of the last surviving pieces of debris from East Francia, a still privately owned ducal enclave.
The future implications of a neutral Belgium were, of course, enormous. It became a powerful industrial and colonial state, and a blatant example (along with Baden) of why Max Weber’s ideas about Protestantism and Capitalism were completely wrong. Its neutrality matched Switzerland’s but on the basis of external guarantors – Britain, France, Prussia, Russia and the Netherlands – rather than its own strength. It used its neutral status to finagle its way into the Congo. The process that guaranteed its borders suggested a great future for reasonableness and novel forms of international law. The Dutch only recognized the boundaries with great reluctance, and some surreal little anomalies still remain today – most notably the Baarle-Hartog and Baarle-Nassau territories, a series of fragments of Belgium inside the Netherlands, sometimes just individual fields, that reflect (for reasons which I have puzzled over but ultimately given up in despair over) ancient land agreements between the Duchy of Brabant and the Lords of Breda. As readers may have noticed, I love territorial anomalies – but these seemed too silly to visit, even with the tantalizing knowledge that there is a pub partly on Dutch and partly on Belgian territory which, reflecting different licensing laws, allows you to keep drinking just by jumping over a line on the floor.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Strange happenings underground » The New Rhine » The Translation Bureau of Barbarian Books » Baden in turmoil » A Newfoundland dog in Luzern » Grand Duchies, Empires and Kingdoms
Strange happenings underground
I grew up, through sheer good luck, in the end house of a new development, a late 1960s mini-town built on the site of what had been vast Victorian gardens, which meant that while everything was new red brick and concrete, some garden features had survived, such as a charismatic monkey-puzzle tree. The luck came from being in the end house as, at the hyper-impressionable age of five, I was able to spend months, round-mouthed with wonder, staring out of the window at the monster earth-moving vehicles manoeuvring in the sticky red mud as they began work on the next section of houses. I would draw these hydraulic diggers obsessively, filling endless little notebooks. There was a superb caterpillar-tracked yellow Poclain which I fear became to me something like a modern God. This obsession with excavation equipment elided easily into an enthusiasm for dinosaurs and I went through a phase of sketching both diggers and dinosaurs together indiscriminately before, leaving behind childish things, I switched entirely to lovingly worked if wonky drawings of triceratops, stegosaurus and their friends. Visits to the Natural History Museum in London (where emotions were so high I practically had to be sedated to get me out) and ownership of a sensational book of colour illustrations of dinosaurs roaring at the sky or trying to eat each other completed my religious training.
I mention this because in my teens I used to feel a twinge of sadness that I might one day unthinkingly cast aside the Cretaceous and Jurassic playmates of my childhood. One of the pleasures of being in my fifties is realizing that I still love dinosaurs just as much and have seriously overshot growing out of them. This is the key background to my walking through the streets of Maastricht for what I thought would be a routine but fun visit to the town’s natural history museum. Such places always include something surprising – particularly if they have a ‘brown room’, where glazed, desiccated and insect-riddled old stuffed creatures sit wistfully in glass cases. But when I entered the museum the whole world spun round: this visit was more than just a quick glance at a dust-coated pufferfish. Over all these years I had never put two and two together. In the unlikely-to-happen event (albeit one I have prepared for
most of my life) of someone challenging me to name my favourite dinosaur I would without hesitation have said: the mosasaur. This horrifying marine reptile had provoked in my prized big dinosaur book a masterpiece of speculative illustration – a deep-green big-flippered torpedo of toothed malice. But I had never thought about the meaning of its name, which turned out to be ‘lizard from the Meuse’, and it was first discovered just outside the town called ‘crossing of the Meuse’: Maastricht.
The discovery of a jumbled block of fossilized teeth, bones and jaws by some nearby miners in 1770 was the starting pistol for a new understanding of the Earth. A superb engraving from the time shows five brawny miners pushing the dreadful object on rollers watched by two Sturm-und-Drang savants in cloaks who gesture their astonishment. The celebrated object, ‘The Great Animal of Maastricht’, was trundled off as booty to Paris by the French Revolutionary army in 1795. There were countless arguments: was it a whale or crocodile? Why was it crushed and compacted? How old was it? The great Cuvier studied it and confirmed the creature was a lizard, albeit one of staggering size. In 1822 the heroic early palaeontologist William Conybeare named it ‘mosasaur’.
The Maastricht museum turns out not just to have a very good ‘brown room’, but to also be a mosasaur shrine. It has one in a specially built ‘mosaleum’ and another, christened Lars, in a laboratory being gradually extracted from its rock. They even have an admittedly somewhat speculative painting of a dead mosasaur being eaten by proto-sharks. The impact of the mosasaur’s discovery was enormous. It was followed up by my hero Mary Anning’s discovery of plesiosaur fossils in Dorset, but also by two further bombshells: the unearthing in 1856 of Neanderthal (‘Neander Valley’) man about fifteen miles east of Düsseldorf and in 1861 of archaeopteryx in Franconia. To a curious extent it can be argued that the very idea of this newly revealed ancient past is intimately linked with industrialization. Each of these finds were made by miners in quarries where they were simply digging deeper than before. The impact they had on ideas about the nature of the world (allied with books such as Lyell’s Principles of Geology) raised catastrophic problems for Christianity, discarding the last vestiges of belief in Bishop Ussher’s timeframe. The mosasaur shook to pieces man-oriented timescales. If the Creation happened in six days then what was this object? There were some ingenious attempts to square the circle, such as that God placed the bones there to test our faith by giving the Earth the false disguise of great age, but these fooled few. The ultimate conclusion, that it was part of a creature that splashed about happily eating everything else in a shallow Dutch tropical sea bordered by gigantic ferns some hundred million years ago, certainly required something of an intellectual wash-and-brush-up.
