Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe

by Winder, Simon

  Defeat by Napoleon, part two

  The inexhaustible pleasures available in Vienna’s Military History Museum2 include some absolutely prime Napoleonic Wars material. Enormous plaster statues, flags and battle paintings loom through the murk and the walls are hung with implausibly chirpy engravings of crowds cheering the Emperor Franz who, even in the most oleaginous propaganda pieces, looks coldly unpleasant. One striking little survival is a French poster from the aftermath of the abortive Congress of Rastatt at the end of 1799. This classic of Revolutionary language announces the assassination of the French delegates Bonnier, Roberjot and Debry by the Austrian government: ‘THEIR BLOOD REEKS … IT DEMANDS … AND IT WILL OBTAIN … VENGEANCE!’ It all seems a long way from the tinkly pleasantries of the good old days. The delegates’ deaths were never properly explained as those concerns were swept away as the War of the Second Coalition broke out, a serious Austro-Russian attempt to crush the French. The discussions at Rastatt began a process over several years which made it ever clearer that the Holy Roman Empire was at an end and the Habsburg role was en route to dissolution. Instead of creating a united front against France, German rulers (including the Habsburgs) began chucking about ancient territories like confetti, with the rulers of Bavaria and Württemberg particularly behaving like children at a sugar-heavy picnic. No political boundary offered surety of any kind and duplicitous aggression was the only possible alternative to absolute extinction. All over Europe rulers were either hiding jewels in strange places and disguising their families as implausibly soft-palmed servants, or they were coming up with new designs for palaces and coronation robes, depending on the latest news.

  The French themselves had innumerable territorial options and over the coming years Napoleon would inherit the Revolutionary pleasure in fiddling with maps and constitutions, conjuring up such entities as the Parthenopean Republic and then – just as casually – dropping them. Like the Fat Boy in Pickwick Papers, the French were always careful to keep some food in their mouths, so that whenever they woke up they could immediately start chewing. One bitter horror for Franz II was the effortless French invasion of Switzerland in 1798. The country that had so humiliated Maximilian I was brought into the orbit of Paris with just a few menacing troop movements and some clever bribes. Even worse was the tightening French grip on the ‘Batavian Republic’, as the Netherlands had become – the country which had been the nemesis of the Spanish Habsburgs, the focus of a multi-generational conflict that had frittered all the wealth of the Americas, now fell to France with barely a squeak.

  The summer of 1799 was momentarily all excitement for the Habsburgs and Russians, who devastated northern Italy and southern Germany, and seemed to offer a serious threat to France. This was the beginning of the cult of Archduke Karl, Franz’s younger brother, the commander whose enormous statue stands with Prince Eugene’s as one of only two in the symbolically threadbare and incomplete Heroes Square in Vienna. Archduke Karl features in a thousand engravings and was the toast of the Empire, but it was in the context of everyone else being even worse rather than for any notable acumen. Compared to some of his rivals (such as the despairingly witless General Mack, humiliated by Napoleon at Ulm) he was a sort of Alexander the Great, but when lined up with figures such as Barclay de Tolly, Masséna, Wellington or – above all by a mile – Napoleon, he is barely a footnote. His achievement was very occasionally to win a battle but his victories only ever proved to be preludes to another fiasco. It could be that his enormous, hyper-charged statue in Heroes Square is there as a subtle, thoughtful meditation on human limits and as a bitter warning to his successors about the frailty of Habsburg power, but this seems unlikely.

  Despite its very temporary successes in the summer of 1799, a looming, headachy problem for Vienna also lay in the nature of her allies. It would be possible to write a whole book about the peculiar nature of Europe’s geography and its role in ruining every attempt by a single state to turn the continent into a China or an Ottoman Empire. But, keeping the issue under some kind of control, it is without doubt the case that the mixture of barriers scattered across Europe, whether mountains or seas, has had far more impact on the continent’s history than religion, ideology, specific national virtues and so on. In 1800 France presented, as usual, staggering problems for any invader. Most of its frontiers were sealed off by seas or mountains and it had the luxury of active fronts which faced onto a rubble of ineffective small states as well as being protected by Alpine passes and Rhine forts. Any Austrian or Russian invaders would somehow have to get past them even before they got to tangle with that year’s levée en masse of a further four hundred thousand highly motivated and well-led French soldiers.

  Two of France’s principal enemies, Britain and Russia, appeared in turn effectively impossible to invade, with Britain’s geography and money allowing it to pour resources into an infinitely expandable navy, while Russia enjoyed a colossal scale in which invaders simply disappeared. France would test both these defensive systems to their limits, but in both cases they held good. The Habsburg lands by contrast – like the occasional ally Prussia – were vulnerable from pretty much any angle. For years, part of the business of being French was to march across Austrian territory and ravage it as you went. Each of the coalition wars therefore tended to follow a pattern of Britain and/or Russia urging the Austrians on to aggressive military action at no fundamental risk to themselves. The sheer length of the wars and the increasingly Manichean atmosphere in which they were fought makes the reality of the coalitions from Austria’s point of view incredibly annoying. The British and the Russians always seemed to be enjoying themselves with issues irrelevant to Austria, while Austria got squashed. Britain kept refusing to commit its own troops to attacking Napoleon and yet always seemed to be able to scrape together the resources to do things like invade Buenos Aires, take over the Cape of Good Hope, or fight the United States, while the Russians would be merrily expanding into the Caucasus or Persia.

  The Austrians also had to deal with the profound implications of working out what to do with a Russian ally who, when engaged in western Europe, threatened to swamp Habsburg concerns. Was it a good thing, for example, that Russian soldiers were now marching into such un-Russian parts of Europe as Switzerland? From the British point of view the critical concern was the traditional one of globally crippling France, and these wars effectively ended a century-long global contest in Britain’s favour. If the price for Russian support was Russian domination of Central Europe this was (in an eerie preview of 1944–45) fine with Britain. But Vienna had to put up with the practical implications for itself, which were not good. So everybody involved in each new brothers-till-death coalition had reasons to hang back or do a deal.

  The very odd (and shortly strangled) Tsar Paul I focused much of his energy on the French treatment of the small island of Malta. Outraged by Napoleon’s expulsion of the Knights of St John, Paul himself became Grand Master, and once Britain in turn expelled the French and refused to hand the island to the Knights, Paul withdrew from his already strained alliance with the British. This loopy childishness drove Vienna mad. But it was also chilling to see Russia, under the guise of the Alliance, creeping up ever closer to Austria’s own basic interests. Any pleasure felt by the Austrians in despoiling and taking over Venice and its territories was balanced by the Russians taking over (in a leapfrog that would have even given Catherine the Great a happy surprise) the Ionian Islands and Kotor (Cattaro), threatening a future in which Russia had absolute control of the Adriatic. The issue of how on earth to deal with Russia now became an acute one, and indeed the motor for the final century of the Empire’s existence, long after Vienna had lost any interest in the future of France.

  In a bit over a year absolutely everything went wrong. The Second Battle of Zurich disposed of the Russians in Switzerland; a joint Anglo-Russian attack on Holland went completely wrong; the Brumaire coup brought Napoleon and the Consulate to power in France; the Battle of Marengo ruined
the Habsburgs in Italy and the Battle of Hohenlinden did the same for them in southern Germany. The Second Coalition caved in with beautifully uniformed French cavalry only forty miles from Vienna. The resulting Treaty of Lunéville at least gave Vienna full control over the southern Tyrolean territories of Brixen and Trento, a further geopolitical will-o’-the-wisp in the Habsburgs’ disastrous nineteenth-century non-destiny in Italy. But these small bits of Alpine picturesque could not hide the principal disaster: that all lands west of the Rhine were now fully incorporated into France, and that the treaty was a general admission of French primacy. From now on it would be Napoleon’s decision as to how Europe should be run, without even a residual sense that Franz II was the ‘senior ruler’.

  Franz II was undoubtedly a feeble figure, but it is unclear if even the toughest of his predecessors could have dealt intelligently with this maelstrom. A striking humiliation of the ‘senior ruler’ was Napoleon’s decision to make himself Emperor in May 1804. This fed into all kinds of Habsburg neuroses. Franz’s exact thinking is unrecoverable, but it is fair to say that Napoleon’s self-elevation threatened to make Franz the last of his line. The chaos in the Holy Roman Empire had wrecked the traditional structure and made it into a sauve-qui-peut mishmash, with Electors vanishing (farewell to Cologne and Trier) and re-emerging elsewhere (Mainz – but no longer actually in Mainz – Salzburg, Württemberg, Hesse-Kassel and Baden). The traditional Catholic Church structure lay in ruins and, of course, the Habsburgs themselves had fatally benefited. Not least they had got their hands on Salzburg, a piece of territory which now seems such a central part of the modern Austria state, but which was then a grab as illegitimate as, say, Poland had been. Salzburg also brought with it the burden that, as an ancient, major ecclesiastical state now gobbled up, it completely sullied and mocked (just as the French intended) any later bid by Vienna to protect the haggard remaining fragments of the Holy Roman Empire. Franz was so aware of this problem that he tried to make the absorption of Salzburg a ‘secret clause’ in the Treaty – but this just provoked booming laughter – how could the rest of Franz’s Catholic friends, or rather former friends, not know?

  The Salzburg issue – along with dozens of others – made clear that a frightening gap had now opened up between family interests and Imperial interests. If the Emperor was meant to protect his hundreds of dependent cities and knights then he was doing a terrible job, as these were incontinently gobbled up in a few weeks of delirium by Napoleon’s new German friends. The terrible question now arose as to what the next Imperial election might look like on Franz’s death. With a minority now of the Electors being Catholic and Napoleon himself creating a personal gravitational pull without precedent, there was no reason at all to imagine that a Habsburg would even be a serious candidate. Franz now had his one excellent idea: completely illegally and with no precedent he simply announced himself, later in the summer that Napoleon had made himself Emperor of the French, to be the Emperor of Austria. For two further, uneasy years he continued in parallel to be Holy Roman Emperor, but this latter title rapidly became merely the dead outer shell to be shed. After gasps and awkward silences, one by one the other rulers of Europe recognized the new title. As across Germany hundreds of old Habsburg clients had their lands sold and despoiled, as old Imperial symbols were knocked off town halls and city walls, Franz now became thanks to his new title Franz I as well as Franz II – confusingly and uniquely expressed as Franz I(II). All pretence of looking after the old Empire was cashed in and a great Habsburg retreat eastwards was now formalized. Franz was no mere vulnerable archduke in his personally held lands, but Emperor in his own right, and on a hereditary basis with no further nonsense about Electors. This political assertion gave the family another hundred and fourteen years of power.

  Things somehow get even worse

  When our children were old enough to take an interest, but still relatively biddable and portable, we went on several trips to Paris in the hope that this would inoculate them in favour of France and give them a graceful ease with both the city and the language in later life. This worked in only a limited way. Our second son bristled at the way Parisians could not speak English and were ‘sulky’ – both fair points – and I tended to fritter goodwill by coming up with spontaneous, delusive short cuts for our walks. These generally turned into route-marches down dusty, evil-smelling and featureless side streets, enlivened only by occasional umber-faced jack-in-a-box-like drunkards lurching out at us from doorways. A high point was reached when the children at last spotted a pizza restaurant from a British chain, which caused such delight that we spent the evening eating there rather than tucking into cassoulets. The children acted as a permanent absurdist pint-size John Bull chorus, applying our island common sense to everything from the Sainte-Chapelle to Picasso, with one of the latter’s works actually provoking a low whistle of respect at what he had ‘got away with’. All this thoroughly destroyed the – in any event frail – pretence my wife and I shared that we were somehow a sort of Belmondo–Seberg team crazily adrift in the city of alcohol and danger.

  We would light-heartedly bring up over breakfast some sort of cultural destination (the Louvre, the Musée Carnavalet) and the children’s ears would go flat to the sides of their heads, like threatened cats, clinging to their croissants but alert to danger. Various compromises would be made about types of food for the day, souvenirs which could be bought and promises not to leave the hotel until late morning: these kept some essentials of the original plan in place, but we shared the common parental problem of wanting some appeal to a higher authority – like the UN – which could find more fully in our favour.

  One of our trips was to Les Invalides, where both sons’ quiescence was bought by the idea of a museum full of guns, and the daughter’s by abusing the fact she was too young to know anything much. The relevance to the Habsburgs of all this is that Les Invalides is the home of their nemesis Napoleon. In a bold gesture designed to shore up his ebbing regime, King Louis-Philippe arranged in 1840 for «le retour des cendres» from Napoleon’s original burial place on the island of St Helena. In scenes of surely unparalleled nationalist hysteria most of Paris turned out to cheer on the dead man’s elaborate cortège. I have never myself been quite clear what I think about Napoleon, but as I ushered my sons into the presence of his quartzite whopper of a tomb, I felt I had underplayed the moment and should have at the very least designed special little cloaks and boots for them and possibly got them to spreadeagle themselves on the marble while I intoned something like, ‘I bring you a whole new generation, O Master,’ in a sort of Commendatore basso. As it happened, we on that occasion had to flee prematurely, as my daughter wandered up to a huge gold vase presented by Tsar Alexander I to his fellow Allies and set off its alarm. The tears of the daughter and exhortations of the guards – it is probably true that she was about to push it over, in an accidental death-to-all-autocrats gesture which would have shaped the rest of her life – made it sensible to leave. But this also meant abandoning any notions I might have had involving lighted torches, a muffled drumbeat and so on. The afternoon ended in an unhappy wrangle in the gift shop over whether a paper-knife in the shape of an antique dagger was a legitimate souvenir, or whether – it could be argued – this made it in all practical senses simply a dagger.

  Louis-Philippe’s gesture in bringing back Napoleon was an epic blunder as it simply served to heighten the gap between those heroic days and his own low-wattage regime – indeed paving the way for Napoleon’s nephew taking power later in the decade, a figure who did almost as much damage to the Habsburgs as his uncle.

  Napoleon’s career will always be in some sense a quite boring enigma. What was most obvious to contemporaries was his extraordinary improvisatory energy. But, as we know the outcome, it unavoidably becomes a story of over-reaching, hubris, futility, burned-out meteors and so on. It also becomes victors’ history – the almost implacable opposition to Napoleon by the Habsburgs and the British becomes dogged a
nd heroic rather than merely a brake on progress and a willingness to see hundreds of thousands of troops die in futile bids to hold off the forces of the future.

  Britain’s role is particularly problematic as, by various definitions, it was true that the ‘balance of power’ pursued by British leaders meant the ‘balance of power in Britain’s favour’, just as ‘free trade’ had a tendency to mean ‘free trade in British ships’. In the end the Anglo-Austrian alliance held, but with Napoleon’s destruction it became clear that – in a deeply significant geopolitical shift – the two countries’ concerns were now simply too remote from one another. The key European motor of the London–Vienna axis, which had endured spottily ever since the days of William III and Leopold I, now came to an end. The two countries’ interests simply no longer overlapped except, often bitterly, in relation to Russia, and they remained substantially at odds until the final and total estrangement of the First World War.