AS SOON AS NAPOLEON HAD BEEN SENT TO ST. HELENA THE RULERS WHO SO OFTEN
HAD BEEN DEFEATED BY THE HATED "CORSICAN" MET AT VIENNA AND TRIED
TO UNDO THE MANY CHANGES THAT HAD BEEN BROUGHT ABOUT BY THE FRENCH
REVOLUTION
THE Imperial Highnesses, the Royal Highnesses, their Graces the Dukes,
the Ministers Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary, together with the plain
Excellencies and their army of secretaries, servants and hangers-on,
whose labours had been so rudely interrupted by the sudden return of the
terrible Corsican (now sweltering under the hot sun of St. Helena) went
back to their jobs. The victory was duly celebrated with dinners, garden
parties and balls at which the new and very shocking "waltz" was danced
to the great scandal of the ladies and gentlemen who remembered the
minuet of the old Regime.
For almost a generation they had lived in retirement. At last the danger
was over. They were very eloquent upon the subject of the terrible
hardships which they had suffered. And they expected to be recompensed
for every penny they had lost at the hands of the unspeakable Jacobins
who had dared to kill their anointed king, who had abolished wigs and
who had discarded the short trousers of the court of Versailles for the
ragged pantaloons of the Parisian slums.
You may think it absurd that I should mention such a detail. But, if
you please, the Congress of Vienna was one long succession of such
absurdities and for many months the question of "short trousers vs. long
trousers" interested the delegates more than the future settlement of
the Saxon or Spanish problems. His Majesty the King of Prussia went so
far as to order a pair of short ones, that he might give public evidence
of his contempt for everything revolutionary.
Another German potentate, not to be outdone in this noble hatred for the
revolution, decreed that all taxes which his subjects had paid to the
French usurper should be paid a second time to the legitimate ruler
who had loved his people from afar while they were at the mercy of the
Corsican ogre. And so on. From one blunder to another, until one gasps
and exclaims "but why in the name of High Heaven did not the people
object?" Why not indeed? Because the people were utterly exhausted, were
desperate, did not care what happened or how or where or by whom they
were ruled, provided there was peace. They were sick and tired of war
and revolution and reform.
In the eighties of the previous century they had all danced around the
tree of liberty. Princes had embraced their cooks and Duchesses had
danced the Carmagnole with their lackeys in the honest belief that
the Millennium of Equality and Fraternity had at last dawned upon this
wicked world. Instead of the Millennium they had been visited by the
Revolutionary commissary who had lodged a dozen dirty soldiers in their
parlor and had stolen the family plate when he returned to Paris to
report to his government upon the enthusiasm with which the "liberated
country" had received the Constitution, which the French people had
presented to their good neighbours.
When they had heard how the last outbreak of revolutionary disorder
in Paris had been suppressed by a young officer, called Bonaparte, or
Buonaparte, who had turned his guns upon the mob, they gave a sigh of
relief. A little less liberty, fraternity and equality seemed a very
desirable thing. But ere long, the young officer called Buonaparte or
Bonaparte became one of the three consuls of the French Republic, then
sole consul and finally Emperor. As he was much more efficient than any
ruler that had ever been seen before, his hand pressed heavily upon his
poor subjects. He showed them no mercy. He impressed their sons into
his armies, he married their daughters to his generals and he took their
pictures and their statues to enrich his own museums. He turned
the whole of Europe into an armed camp and killed almost an entire
generation of men.
Now he was gone, and the people (except a few professional military men)
had but one wish. They wanted to be let alone. For awhile they had been
allowed to rule themselves, to vote for mayors and aldermen and
judges. The system had been a terrible failure. The new rulers had been
inexperienced and extravagant. From sheer despair the people turned to
the representative men of the old Regime. "You rule us," they said, "as
you used to do. Tell us what we owe you for taxes and leave us alone. We
are busy repairing the damage of the age of liberty."
The men who stage-managed the famous congress certainly did their best
to satisfy this longing for rest and quiet. The Holy Alliance, the main
result of the Congress, made the policeman the most important dignitary
of the State and held out the most terrible punishment to those who
dared criticise a single official act.
Europe had peace, but it was the peace of the cemetery.
The three most important men at Vienna were the Emperor Alexander of
Russia, Metternich, who represented the interests of the Austrian house
of Habsburg, and Talleyrand, the erstwhile bishop of Autun, who had
managed to live through the different changes in the French government
by the sheer force of his cunning and his intelligence and who now
travelled to the Austrian capital to save for his country whatever
could be saved from the Napoleonic ruin. Like the gay young man of the
limerick, who never knew when he was slighted, this unbidden guest came
to the party and ate just as heartily as if he had been really
invited. Indeed, before long, he was sitting at the head of the
table entertaining everybody with his amusing stories and gaining the
company's good will by the charm of his manner.
Before he had been in Vienna twenty-four hours he knew that the allies
were divided into two hostile camps. On the one side were Russia, who
wanted to take Poland, and Prussia, who wanted to annex Saxony; and on
the other side were Austria and England, who were trying to prevent this
grab because it was against their own interest that either Prussia or
Russia should be able to dominate Europe. Talleyrand played the two
sides against each other with great skill and it was due to his efforts
that the French people were not made to suffer for the ten years
of oppression which Europe had endured at the hands of the Imperial
officials. He argued that the French people had been given no choice in
the matter. Napoleon had forced them to act at his bidding. But Napoleon
was gone and Louis XVIII was on the throne. "Give him a chance,"
Talleyrand pleaded. And the Allies, glad to see a legitimate king
upon the throne of a revolutionary country, obligingly yielded and the
Bourbons were given their chance, of which they made such use that they
were driven out after fifteen years.
The second man of the triumvirate of Vienna was Metternich, the Austrian
prime minister, the leader of the foreign policy of the house of
Habsburg. Wenzel Lothar, Prince of Metternich-Winneburg, was exactly
what the name suggests. He was a Grand Seigneur, a very handsome
gentleman with very fine manners, immensely rich, and very able, but the
product of a society which lived a thousand miles away from the sweating
multitudes who worked and slaved in the cities and on the farms. As a
young man, Metternich had been studying at the University of Strassburg
when the French Revolution broke out. Strassburg, the city which gave
birth to the Marseillaise, had been a centre of Jacobin activities.
Metternich remembered that his pleasant social life had been sadly
interrupted, that a lot of incompetent citizens had suddenly been called
forth to perform tasks for which they were not fit, that the mob had
celebrated the dawn of the new liberty by the murder of perfectly
innocent persons. He had failed to see the honest enthusiasm of the
masses, the ray of hope in the eyes of women and children who carried
bread and water to the ragged troops of the Convention, marching through
the city on their way to the front and a glorious death for the French
Fatherland.
The whole thing had filled the young Austrian with disgust. It was
uncivilised. If there were any fighting to be done it must be done by
dashing young men in lovely uniforms, charging across the green
fields on well-groomed horses. But to turn an entire country into an
evil-smelling armed camp where tramps were overnight promoted to be
generals, that was both wicked and senseless. "See what came of all your
fine ideas," he would say to the French diplomats whom he met at a quiet
little dinner given by one of the innumerable Austrian grand-dukes. "You
wanted liberty, equality and fraternity and you got Napoleon. How much
better it would have been if you had been contented with the existing
order of things." And he would explain his system of "stability." He
would advocate a return to the normalcy of the good old days before
the war, when everybody was happy and nobody talked nonsense about
"everybody being as good as everybody else." In this attitude he was
entirely sincere and as he was an able man of great strength of will
and a tremendous power of persuasion, he was one of the most dangerous
enemies of the Revolutionary ideas. He did not die until the year 1859,
and he therefore lived long enough to see the complete failure of all
his policies when they were swept aside by the revolution of the year
1848. He then found himself the most hated man of Europe and more than
once ran the risk of being lynched by angry crowds of outraged citizens.
But until the very last, he remained steadfast in his belief that he had
done the right thing.
He had always been convinced that people preferred peace to liberty and
he had tried to give them what was best for them. And in all fairness,
it ought to be said that his efforts to establish universal peace were
fairly successful. The great powers did not fly at each other's throat
for almost forty years, indeed not until the Crimean war between Russia
and England, France and Italy and Turkey, in the year 1854. That means a
record for the European continent.
The third hero of this waltzing congress was the Emperor Alexander.
He had been brought up at the court of his grand-mother, the famous
Catherine the Great. Between the lessons of this shrewd old woman, who
taught him to regard the glory of Russia as the most important thing in
life, and those of his private tutor, a Swiss admirer of Voltaire and
Rousseau, who filled his mind with a general love of humanity, the boy
grew up to be a strange mixture of a selfish tyrant and a sentimental
revolutionist. He had suffered great indignities during the life of
his crazy father, Paul I. He had been obliged to wit-ness the wholesale
slaughter of the Napoleonic battle-fields. Then the tide had turned. His
armies had won the day for the Allies. Russia had become the saviour of
Europe and the Tsar of this mighty people was acclaimed as a half-god
who would cure the world of its many ills.
But Alexander was not very clever. He did not know men and women as
Talleyrand and Metternich knew them. He did not understand the
strange game of diplomacy. He was vain (who would not be under the
circumstances?) and loved to hear the applause of the multitude and soon
he had become the main "attraction" of the Congress while Metternich and
Talleyrand and Castlereagh (the very able British representative) sat
around a table and drank a bottle of Tokay and decided what was actually
going to be done. They needed Russia and therefore they were very polite
to Alexander, but the less he had personally to do with the actual work
of the Congress, the better they were pleased. They even encouraged his
plans for a Holy Alliance that he might be fully occupied while they
were engaged upon the work at hand.
Alexander was a sociable person who liked to go to parties and meet
people. Upon such occasions he was happy and gay but there was a very
different element in his character. He tried to forget something which
he could not forget. On the night of the 23rd of March of the year 1801
he had been sitting in a room of the St. Michael Palace in Petersburg,
waiting for the news of his father's abdication. But Paul had refused
to sign the document which the drunken officers had placed before him
on the table, and in their rage they had put a scarf around his neck
and had strangled him to death. Then they had gone downstairs to tell
Alexander that he was Emperor of all the Russian lands.
The memory of this terrible night stayed with the Tsar who was a very
sensitive person. He had been educated in the school of the great French
philosophers who did not believe in God but in Human Reason. But Reason
alone could not satisfy the Emperor in his predicament. He began to hear
voices and see things. He tried to find a way by which he could square
himself with his conscience. He became very pious and began to take
an interest in mysticism, that strange love of the mysterious and the
unknown which is as old as the temples of Thebes and Babylon.
The tremendous emotion of the great revolutionary era had influenced the
character of the people of that day in a strange way. Men and women who
had lived through twenty years of anxiety and fear were no longer quite
normal. They jumped whenever the door-bell rang. It might mean the news
of the "death on the field of honour" of an only son. The phrases about
"brotherly love" and "liberty" of the Revolution were hollow words in
the ears of sorely stricken peasants. They clung to anything that might
give them a new hold on the terrible problems of life. In their grief
and misery they were easily imposed upon by a large number of imposters
who posed as prophets and preached a strange new doctrine which they dug
out of the more obscure passages of the Book of Revelations.
In the year 1814, Alexander, who had already consulted a large number
of wonder-doctors, heard of a new seeress who was foretelling the coming
doom of the world and was exhorting people to repent ere it be too late.
The Baroness von Krudener, the lady in question, was a Russian woman of
uncertain age and similar reputation who had been the wife of a Russian
diplomat in the days of the Emperor Paul. She had squandered her
husband's money and had disgraced him by her strange love affairs. She
had lived a very dissolute life until her nerves had given way and for a
while she was not in her right mind. Then she had been converted by
the sight of the sudden death of a friend. Thereafter she despised all
gaiety. She confessed her former sins to her shoemaker, a pious Moravian
brother, a follower of the old reformer John Huss, who had been burned
for his heresies by the Council of Constance in the year 1415.
The next ten years the Baroness spent in Germany making a specialty
of the "conversion" of kings and princes. To convince Alexander, the
Saviour of Europe, of the error of his ways was the greatest ambition
of her life. And as Alexander, in his misery, was willing to listen
to anybody who brought him a ray of hope, the interview was easily
arranged. On the evening of the fourth of June of the year 1815, she was
admitted to the tent of the Emperor. She found him reading his Bible.
We do not know what she said to Alexander, but when she left him three
hours later, he was bathed in tears, and vowed that "at last his
soul had found peace." From that day on the Baroness was his faithful
companion and his spiritual adviser. She followed him to Paris and then
to Vienna and the time which Alexander did not spend dancing he spent at
the Krudener prayer-meetings.
You may ask why I tell you this story in such great detail? Are not the
social changes of the nineteenth century of greater importance than the
career of an ill-balanced woman who had better be forgotten? Of course
they are, but there exist any number of books which will tell you of
these other things with great accuracy and in great detail. I want you
to learn something more from this history than a mere succession of
facts. I want you to approach all historical events in a frame of mind
that will take nothing for granted. Don't be satisfied with the mere
statement that "such and such a thing happened then and there." Try
to discover the hidden motives behind every action and then you will
understand the world around you much better and you will have a greater
chance to help others, which (when all is said and done) is the only
truly satisfactory way of living.
I do not want you to think of the Holy Alliance as a piece of paper
which was signed in the year 1815 and lies dead and forgotten somewhere
in the archives of state. It may be forgotten but it is by no means
dead. The Holy Alliance was directly responsible for the promulgation
of the Monroe Doctrine, and the Monroe Doctrine of America for the
Americans has a very distinct bearing upon your own life. That is the
reason why I want you to know exactly how this document happened to come
into existence and what the real motives were underlying this outward
manifestation of piety and Christian devotion to duty.
The Holy Alliance was the joint labour of an unfortunate man who had
suffered a terrible mental shock and who was trying to pacify his
much-disturbed soul, and of an ambitious woman who after a wasted life
had lost her beauty and her attraction and who satisfied her vanity and
her desire for notoriety by assuming the role of self-appointed Messiah
of a new and strange creed. I am not giving away any secrets when I tell
you these details. Such sober minded people as Castlereagh, Metternich
and Talleyrand fully understood the limited abilities of the sentimental
Baroness. It would have been easy for Metternich to send her back to her
German estates. A few lines to the almighty commander of the imperial
police and the thing was done.
But France and England and Austria depended upon the good-will of
Russia. They could not afford to offend Alexander. And they tolerated
the silly old Baroness because they had to. And while they regarded the
Holy Alliance as utter rubbish and not worth the paper upon which it was
written, they listened patiently to the Tsar when he read them the first
rough draft of this attempt to create the Brotherhood of Men upon a
basis of the Holy Scriptures. For this is what the Holy Alliance tried
to do, and the signers of the document solemnly declared that they would
"in the administration of their respective states and in their political
relations with every other government take for their sole guide
the precepts of that Holy Religion, namely the precepts of Justice,
Christian Charity and Peace, which far from being applicable only to
private concerns must have an immediate influence on the councils of
princes, and must guide all their steps as being the only means of
consolidating human institutions and remedying their imperfections."
They then proceeded to promise each other that they would remain united
"by the bonds of a true and indissoluble fraternity, and considering
each other as fellow-countrymen, they would on all occasions and in all
places lend each other aid and assistance." And more words to the same
effect.
Eventually the Holy Alliance was signed by the Emperor of Austria,
who did not understand a word of it. It was signed by the Bourbons who
needed the friendship of Napoleon's old enemies. It was signed by
the King of Prussia, who hoped to gain Alexander for his plans for a
"greater Prussia," and by all the little nations of Europe who were at
the mercy of Russia. England never signed, because Castlereagh thought
the whole thing buncombe. The Pope did not sign because he resented this
interference in his business by a Greek-Orthodox and a Protestant. And
the Sultan did not sign because he never heard of it.
The general mass of the European people, however, soon were forced to
take notice. Behind the hollow phrases of the Holy Alliance stood the
armies of the Quintuple Alliance which Metternich had created among the
great powers. These armies meant business. They let it be known that the
peace of Europe must not be disturbed by the so-called liberals who were
in reality nothing but disguised Jacobins, and hoped for a return of the
revolutionary days. The enthusiasm for the great wars of liberation of
the years 1812, 1818, 1814 and 1815 had begun to wear off. It had
been followed by a sincere belief in the coming of a happier day. The
soldiers who had borne the brunt of the battle wanted peace and they
said so.
But they did not want the sort of peace which the Holy Alliance and the
Council of the European powers had now bestowed upon them. They cried
that they had been betrayed. But they were careful lest they be heard
by a secret-police spy. The reaction was victorious. It was a reaction
caused by men who sincerely believed that their methods were necessary
for the good of humanity. But it was just as hard to bear as if their
intentions had been less kind. And it caused a great deal of unnecessary
suffering and greatly retarded the orderly progress of political
development.