[Author’s Note: This is the second in a three-part series-within-a-series having to do with the participants in the First Congress of Vienna. Part I; which has been published; dealt with the most important monarchs and foreign ministers at the Congress. This part concerns some of the secondary participants and Part III will look at some of the lesser-known buy still interesting people who made the First Congress of Vienna so fascinating.] Teaser: Can you identify these participants from these simple clues? Diplomats born in one country and serving another (France to Germany, Germany to France, France to Italy, Germany to Russia, etc.)? The English diplomat who had four sons: three became generals and one became a navy captain? The Austrian diplomat who devoted his career to “wine, women and song;” but when he was locked up in a room and free of temptation “he was a brilliant diplomat.”? The diplomat who couldn’t make up which side he was on, so he worked for both sides, depending on which was in power at the moment? The diplomat who married off his niece, gave her husband a duchy, and then brought her to Vienna to be his hostess and lover? The king’s bastard who became a delegate? The opera singer who had Napoleon and Wellington for lovers, although not at the same time? The only two participants who dared to challenge Napoleon to his face? He thought he was standing in Metternich’s shadow, but he actually stood quite tall on his own? Introduction: This article (OK, call it a chapter in a forthcoming book if you like) can be summed up easily. Who: The Participants - Five key ones and eighty-one in all. Here I am focusing on the secundae donne (e.g. secondary or supporting participants) that were part of the First Congress of Vienna. What: The Congress of Vienna. Where: The Hofburg and surrounding areas in Vienna, Austria. When: September 1814 – June 1815. Why: 1) To reestablish the balance of power in Europe; 2) To prevent future wars; 3) To reward the victors and punish the losers in the Napoleonic Wars. How: Through a series of one-on-one tete-a-tete or small group meetings frequently interrupted by a wide variety of informal soirees and social events culminating in the one and only general assembly of all the participants, except for Spain, to sign the final agreement. But above all else, this is a story about people: famous, infamous and not so famous; from emperors and kings to fancy call girls and common street prostitutes; from geniuses, to intelligent, to crafty, to down-right stupid; from all over Europe they gathered together in Vienna for a few months. This is their story, or at least part of it. Here I’ve gathered the great and not-so-great, the famous and the infamous, those who stood tall in the eyes of history and those who stood in their shadows, and those who were happy to stand in the shadows of those who stood in the shadows. The Simple Lesson The simple lesson, but one with potentially profound consequences, of this article can also be applied to Dippers as well as diplomats. It is: “Sometimes the least known men and women have the most interesting lives.” It may have been two hundred years since these men and women strode the European diplomatic stage in Vienna, but they can still teach us a thing or two about how to play “The Beautiful Game of Diplomacy.” For instance, oftentimes it’s not how big or how small a player you are that makes the difference: it’s how you play the game. Sometimes, the smallest players gain the most because they’ve worked the hardest. Here you will find names you know well, names you vaguely remember and names you’ve never heard of. Sounds just like Dip, huh? Look at the portraits of these Congress of Vienna participants. All but one of them have a portrait or two on wiki. Then go online and look at some of the “selfies” from a recent DipCon event you can find on Facebook or Meet-up. In most cases the subjects of the portraits were made to look better than they actually did, at least if the artist knew what was good for him. Hair was darkened and thickened. Chins were lifted. Wrinkles vanished. Waists shrunk. Bosoms enlarged and lifted. Today’s “selfies,” unless they’ve been photo-shopped, show us as we are, warts and all, at that moment. Over the years, decades and generations the hair grays and thins, chins sag, wrinkles become crevices, waists expand and bosoms and pecs sag or droop. Who: The Participants The first group of 24 names comes from Wikipedia and includes the most important participants in the Congress of which the five most important were the: Duke of Wellington (or Castlereagh or Clancarty, who took turns succeeding him) of England; Prince von Metternich of Austria; Charles Talleyrand of France; Emperor Alexander I of Russia; and King William of Prussia; The second group consists of the representatives of the eight minor states at the Congress, although their rulers may have been important for other reasons (e.g. George III, King of England and also of Hanover): Bavaria, Denmark, Hanover, Netherlands, Papacy, Sardinia, Savoy and Switzerland. The third group is drawn from the “Geocities Congress of Vienna Role Playing Game” roster and includes some lesser figures, etc. The Geocities list also includes some cases of “gender-benders.” See if you can spot them. I suspect the organizers of the game did this to increase the number of female participant in their game. In all there are 80 or so names on my combined master list. The various sources suggest there were around 70 real participants in the Congress and another 330 or so hanger-ons. Note that the combined master list includes some names (Byron, The Turk, etc.) who were not actually at the Congress but who would have contributed something to it if they had been. I resisted the urge to combine all the entries from the various sources into one mega- alphabetical list out of respect for the sources. Doing your own Google search will take you to many other sources and sites for most of these individuals. In a few cases you can actually find the participant’s memoirs online. However, some of them run into multi-volume sets. Some of the entries were quite short (I think two lines is the shortest), but only one failed to include a picture of the subject. As you’ll soon see they’re all here: prima donnas, secundae donne, chorus members and spear-chuckers; each waiting to take their place on the stage of history, whether it’s diplomatic or Diplomatic. So here’s the final composite list of participants in the First Congress of Vienna. See how many of them you can identify. Congress of Vienna, Combined Participants List (Alphabetical by last name, first initial and/or country initial in some cases). The More-or-Less Complete Cast:
The Secundae Donne Joaquim Lobo Silveira, 7th Count of Oriola António de Saldanha da Gama, Count of Porto Santo Jean-Louis-Paul-François, 5th Duke of Noailles André Dupin "I have always", he said, "belonged to France and never to parties." André Marie Jean Jacques Dupin, detto André Aîné (1783 – 1865), giurista, avvocato e politico francese.
Non parce que, mais quoique.
J’ai le plus profond respect pour la libertè du prêtre, tant qu’il se renferme dans ses fonctions: si cette liberté était attaquée, je serais le premier à la défendre; mais que le prêtre se contente du maniement des choses saintes, et qu’il ne sorte pas du seuil de son éclise: hors de la, il rentre pour moins dans la foule des citoyens, il n’a plus de droits que ceux du droit comun Pedro de Sousa Holstein, 1st Count of Palmela He earned notoriety at an early age by telling Napoleon to his face at the conference in Bayonne in 1808 that the Portuguese would not ‘consent to become Spaniards’ as the French Emperor wanted. Baron Johann von Wessenberg (Congress Participant) In 1814 he was appointed second Austrian delegate (after Prince Metternich) at the Congress of Vienna. Wessenberg efforts made a major contribution to the establishment of the German Confederation. Prince Andrey Kirillovich Razumovsky (Congress Participant) The elder Rasumovsky's late Baroque palace on the Nevsky Prospekt is a minor landmark in Saint Petersburg. In 1792 Andres Kyrillovitch was appointed the Tsar's diplomatic representative to the Habsburg court in Vienna, one of the crucial diplomatic posts during the Napoleonic era. He was a chief negotiator during the Congress of Vienna that resettled Europe in 1814, and asserted Russian rights in Poland. In 1808 he established a house string quartet consisting of Ignaz Schuppanzigh, Louis Sina, Franz Weiss, and Joseph Linke. Razumovsky was an accomplished amateur violinist, and also known as a competent torban (Ukrainian theorbo) player. Of four torbans known to have been in his possession one is preserved in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. His commissioning three string quartets from Beethoven in 1806 was the act that has made his name familiar. He asked Beethoven to include a "Russian" theme in each quartet: Beethoven included Ukrainian themes in the first two. Razumovsky was the brother-in-law of another of Beethoven's patrons, Prince Joseph Franz von Lobkowitz. His first wife, Countess Elisabeth von Thun was a sister in law of Count Carl von Lichnowsky. He built a magnificent neoclassic palace worthy of the representative of Alexander I, at his own expense and to the designs of Louis Montoyer, on the Landstraße, quite close to the city, and filled it with antiquities and modern works of art. In the morning of 31 December 1814, during the preparation of a ball with the Tsar Alexander I as guest of honor, a fire broke out in a temporary ballroom extension, setting the ballroom ablaze and burning out roomfuls of art in the back wing of the palace. Even though he was raised to prince the following year, Razumovsky was never the same. He lived in seclusion in Vienna until his death in 1836. In 1862 the street on which Razumovsky's palace is located was named Rasumofskygasse.[2] Pedro Gómez Labrador, Marquis of Labrador Richard Le Poer Trench, 2nd Earl of Clancarty Wacken (Recorder) Nikolaus von Wacken (Recorder) (Österreichischer Staatskanzleirat, Freiherr 1823) an experienced and versatile konzipist (legal drafter) Friedrich von Gentz (Congress Secretary) For ten years, from 1812 onward, Gentz was in closest touch with all the great affairs of European history, the assistant, confidant, and adviser of Metternich. He accompanied the chancellor on all his journeys; was present at all the conferences that preceded and followed the war; no political secrets were hidden from him; and his hand drafted all important diplomatic documents. He was secretary to the Congress of Vienna (1814–1815) and to all the congresses and conferences that followed, up to that of Verona (1822), and in all his vast knowledge of men and affairs made him a power. He was under no illusion as to their achievements; his memoir on the work of the congress of Vienna is at once an incisive piece of criticism and a monument of his own disillusionment. But the Liberalism of his early years was gone forever, and he had become reconciled to Metternich's view that, in an age of decay, the sole function of a statesman was to prop up mouldering institutions. It was the hand of the author of that offensive Memorandum to Frederick William III, on the freedom of the press, that drafted the Carlsbad Decrees; it was he who inspired the policy of repressing the freedom of the universities; and he noted in his diary as a day more important than that of Leipzig the session of the Vienna conference of 1819, in which it was decided to make the convocation of representative assemblies in the German states impossible, by enforcing the letter of Article XIII of the Act of Confederation. In private life, Gentz remained to the last a man of the world, though tormented with an exaggerated terror of death. His wife he had never seen again since their parting at Berlin, and his relations with other women, mostly of the highest rank, were too numerous to record. But passion tormented him to the end, and his infatuation for Fanny Elssler, the celebrated danseuse, forms the subject of some remarkable letters to his friend Rahel, the wife of Varnhagen von Ense (1830–1831). He died in Vienna on 9 June 1832. Gentz has been described as a mercenary of the pen, and assuredly no other such mercenary has ever carved out for himself a more remarkable career. To have done so would have been impossible, in spite of his brilliant gifts, had he been no more than the "wretched scribe" sneered at by Napoleon. Though by birth belonging to the middle class in a country of hide-bound aristocracy, he lived to move on equal terms in the society of princes and statesmen; which would never have been the case had he been notoriously bought and sold. Yet that he was in the habit of receiving gifts from all and sundry who hoped for his backing is beyond dispute. He notes that at the congress of Vienna he received £22,000 through Talleyrand from Louis XVIII, while Castlereagh gave him £600, accompanied by "les plus folles promesses"; his diary is full of such entries. Yet he never made any secret of these gifts; Metternich was aware of them, and he never suspected Gentz of writing or acting in consequence against his convictions. As a matter of fact, no man was more free or outspoken in his criticism of the policy of his employers than this apparently venal writer. These gifts and pensions were rather in the nature of subsidies than bribes; they were the recognition by various powers of the value of an ally whose pen had proved itself so potent a weapon in their cause. It is, indeed, the very impartiality and objectivity of his attitude that make the writings of Gentz such illuminating documents for the period of history which they cover. Allowance must of course be made for his point of view, but less so perhaps than in the case of any other writer so intimately concerned with the policies which he criticizes. And, apart from their value as historical documents, Gentz's writings are literary monuments, classic examples of nervous and luminous German prose, and of French as a model for diplomatic style. “Wiesel, ebenfalls ein Berliner, zeichnete sich durch die Gabe eines außerordentlichen Scharfsinnes und unerschrockenster Dialektik aus, war im hohen Grade beredt, ein Freidenker derbster Art, unaufhörlicher Raisonneur, ganz cynisch und fast Lachen erregend in seinen Manieren. [...] Wunderbarer Weise war er mit Adam Müller, der ganz entgegengesetzten Grundsätzen und Manieren huldigte, auf's innigste befreundet, ja sogar unentbehrlich für diesen. [...] Nach dem Tode desselben schrieb Müller einen äußerst merkwürdigen Brief über seinen Freund. „Ich verliere viel an ihm, sagte er; er ersetzte und repräsentirte mir nicht nur die ganze liberale und demokratische Welt, und überhob mich nicht nur der Mühe, die Iournale und Bücher meines Gegenpart zu lesen, sondern er trieb das alles auf die rechte deutsche Höhe, bis zur Läugnung des persönlichen Gottes, zur Behauptung, daß alles Unglück in der ganzen Weltgeschichte aus dem Glauben an eine persönliche Offenbarung herrühre. Drei Stunden hindurch habe ich ihn einmal über letztern Punkt auf meinem Zimmer mit wirklich teuflischer Grazie und Sachkenntniß William Cathcart, 1st Earl Cathcart The new king of Bavaria was the most important of the princes belonging to the Confederation of the Rhine, and remained Napoleon's ally until the eve of the Battle of Leipzig, when by the Treaty of Ried (8 October 1813) he made the guarantee of the integrity of his kingdom the price of his joining the Allies. On 14 October, Bavaria made a formal declaration of war against Napoleonic France. The treaty was passionately backed by Crown Prince Ludwig and by Marshal von Wrede. By the first Treaty of Paris (3 June 1814), however, he ceded Tyrol to Austria in exchange for the former Grand Duchy of Würzburg. At the Congress of Vienna, which he attended in person, Maximilian had to make further concessions to Austria, ceding Salzburg and the quarters of the Inn and Hausruckviertel in return for the western part of the old Palatinate. The king fought hard to maintain the contiguity of the Bavarian territories as guaranteed at Ried but the most he could obtain was an assurance from Metternich in the matter of the Baden succession, in which he was also doomed to be disappointed. At Vienna and afterwards Maximilian sturdily opposed any reconstitution of Germany which should endanger the independence of Bavaria, and it was his insistence on the principle of full sovereignty being left to the German reigning princes that largely contributed to the loose and weak organization of the new German Confederation. The Federal Act of the Vienna Congress was proclaimed in Bavaria, not as a law but as an international treaty For his motto he chose: God and the just cause (Danish: Gud og den retfærdige sag) and since the time of his reign, Danish monarchs have only used mottos in the Danish language instead of the usual Latin. Frederick became King of Denmark on 13 March 1808. When the throne of Sweden seemed likely to become vacant in 1809, Frederick was interested in being elected there, too. Frederick actually was the first monarch of Denmark and Norway to descend from Gustav I of Sweden, who had secured Sweden's independence in 1520s after a period of union with other Scandinavian countries. However, Frederick's brother-in-law, Prince Christian Augustus of Augustenborg, was first elected to the throne of Sweden, then the French Marshal Bernadotte. He made Denmark the most loyal ally of Napoleon. After the French defeat in Russia in 1812, the Allies again and again asked him to change sides. He refused. Many Danish historians portray the king as stubborn, incompetent, and motivated by a misconceived loyalty towards Napoleon. However some historians in recent years have provided a different interpretation that sheds a better light on the king. He stayed with Napoleon in order to protect the exposed situation of Norway, which was dependent on grain imports and had become the target of Swedish territorial ambitions. He expected the wars would end with a great international conference in which Napoleon would have a major voice, and would help protect Denmark's interests, especially in Norway. After his defeat in the Napoleonic Wars in 1814 and the loss of Norway, Frederick VI carried through an authoritarian and reactionary course, giving up the liberal ideas of his years as a prince regent. Astro-Databank chart of King of Denmark Frederik VI born on 28 January 1768. Victor Emmanuel I of Savoy (and Sardinia) He ruled Sardinia from Cagliari for the next twelve years, during which time he constituted the Carabinieri, a Gendarmerie corps, still existing as one of the main branches of the military of Italy. Most of his mainland possessions were occupied by the French for much of his reign. William I of The Netherlands The propensity for Danish kings to be painted and sculpted in Roman togas and such, even into the late 1800s. To understand why you have to look at the work of a famous Danish artist named Thorvaldson (Karl Albert) Bertel Thorvaldsen (Danish pronunciation: [?b???dl? 't???væl?sn?]; ca. 1770 – 24 March 1844) was a Danish sculptor of international fame, who spent most of his life (1789–1838) in Italy. Thorvaldsen was born in Copenhagen into a Danish/Icelandic family of humble means, and was accepted to the Royal Danish Academy of Art when he was eleven years old. Working part-time with his father, who was a wood carver, Thorvaldsen won many honors and medals at the academy. He was awarded a stipend to travel to Rome and continue his education. In Rome, Thorvaldsen quickly made a name for himself as a sculptor. Maintaining a large workshop in the city, he worked in a heroic neo-classicist style. His patrons resided all over Europe.[1] Upon his return to Denmark in 1838, Thorvaldsen was received as a national hero. The Thorvaldsen Museum was erected to house his works next to Christiansborg Palace. Thorvaldsen is buried within the courtyard of the museum. In his time, he was seen as the successor of master sculptor Antonio Canova. His strict adherence to classical norms has tended to estrange modern audiences. Among his more famous works are the statues of Nicolaus Copernicus and Józef Poniatowski in Warsaw; the statue of Maximilian I in Munich; and the tomb monument of Pope Pius VII, the only work by a non-Italian in St. Peter's Basilica. Imagine if he’d studied in Athens. We’d have all those Danish kings standing around in their fig leafs. Early suspenders (with buttons) go back 300 years and became popular in the 1820s and somebody named Thurston is actually credited with inventing them. Clip-on braces came about in the 1940s (according to Sears). Interestingly, just about every one of these individuals has a painting or sculpture in their wiki article. Some have dozens of them. Remember, there were no photographs in those days (or selfies) so each of these “important” people would, as soon as they could afford, it have their portrait painted for an important occasion for themselves or perhaps, for one of their fans. Those who couldn’t afford a personal portrait by a well-known portrait painter (or a statue or bust by Thorvaldsen) would commission a hack painter to paint their face and decorations (hopefully the right and real ones) onto a stock portrait (horse optional at extra cost). Generally the number of paintings of an individual rose as their status rose. There are hundreds of paintings of various emperors and kings, down to a handful for a marquis or count. One exception was Cardinal Consalvi, perhaps because he was so easy to paint. A fat man in a gold chair, seated beneath a crucifix or portrait of the Christ, dressed in red with a nice pectoral cross was an instant winner; and a nice commission or perhaps an indulgence. Of course nobody can match Napoleon, who was the center of attention at the Congress of Vienna, even though he wasn’t there. The Conclusion The big difference between the first group of monarchs and foreign ministers I wrote about last time and the secundae donne I’ve discussed here is quite simple: The first group were powerful enough that they could meddle in the affairs of the secondary states at the Congress without worrying about the consequences. The second group lacked the power to prevent such interference unless, of course, they had the backing of one or more of the first group members. Next time I’ll discuss the third group, the walk-ons and spear chuckers, of the Congress that made it so interesting and so entertaining. .
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