Excitement is building in Vienna ahead of the 60th annual Eurovision Song Contest later this week. Last year’s winner, Conchita Wurst, can be seen on billboards around the city, a bearded doppelganger of Gustav Klimt’s “Golden Adele”.
Other posters remind residents that, for three nights from May 19th, “all of Europe will be our guest in Vienna”.
No doubt similar posters covered the city two centuries ago when the Vienna Congress came to town in September 1814. Its aim: to redraw Europe’s borders and establish a peaceful order for the post-Napoleonic continent.
Some 30,000 attended: crowned heads of Europe, diplomats, wives and mistresses descended on Vienna and stayed for nine months. Contemporary accounts make it sound like a cross between a Eurovision, an EU summit and the Davos world economic forum: high-stakes diplomacy and decadent parties. Shortly after the congress ended in June 1815 Napoleon saw – as Abba reminded us in 1974 – his Waterloo.
The Vienna Congress – with its shuttle diplomacy and high-profile concluding signing ceremony – set the framework for such meetings to this day.
Mother of all summits
Anyone curious about the mother of all summits can visit an exhibition at Vienna’s lower Belvedere. Visitors first see landscape depictions of the city the delegates saw on their arrival in 1814 and the meeting of the three crucial monarchs: Friedrich Wilhelm III of Prussia, Tsar Alexander of Russia and Franz of Austria. We learn about the endless parties and salons set up to amuse the 30,000 visitors in a city that, at the time, had a population of just 10 times that.
Yet the exhibition rarely touches on the meaty issues of the gathering, reflecting a complaint made by participants two centuries ago.
“The congress is dancing,” sniffed Austrian diplomat Charles de Ligne, “but doesn’t move forward.”
The master of ceremonies was the brilliantly scheming Austrian foreign minister, Klemens von Metternich. The British delegation was led by foreign secretary Lord Castlereagh, until he was succeeded by the Duke of Wellington. French foreign minister Talleyrand wheedled his way to the top table by offering to support western European powers against Russia.
The Four Great Powers all got something from the meeting: Russia kept Finland, taken from Sweden in 1809, and added the Duchy of Warsaw. Prussia got a chunk of Saxony and much of the rest of Poland. A German confederation emerged that consolidated 360 states into 39, while British control was confirmed over colonies in Africa and Asia. The Netherlands and Southern Netherlands – roughly today’s Belgium – emerged as a monarchy with a Nassau king.
Historians debate the achievements of the congress today, in particular the “Concert of Europe”. These rules of engagement for the continent’s powers, that held for decades, is a praiseworthy legacy after decades of Napoleonic instability, suggests German historian Heinrich August Winkler.
Embracing France
“The diplomats of the Vienna Congress wanted to create a balance of the political forces in Europe and allow the vanquished France a return to the concert of power,” he said at a discussion on April 26th in Vienna’s Burgtheater. However, like many historians, he is critical of efforts of conservatives to turn back the clock on the French Revolution.
Polish intellectual Adam Krzeminski suggests the stability that emerged from Vienna is deceptive. Austria, Prussia and Russia were trying to have it both ways: acting as both referees and congress players as they pushed through their own strategic interests.
“The idea that the great powers could decide about the interests of European states proved false,” he said. “The present, one hundred years later, was the first World War.”
No look at the Vienna Congress could leave out the large cast of beautiful women who gathered there, as smart and scheming as the men.
Historian Hazel Rosenstrauch has compiled a book of the congress’s erotic mistresses. Like Catherine Bagration, the widow of a Russian general known as the “wandering princess”. An emancipated figure, she had already given Prince Metternich a daughter before she bedded Tsar Alexander at the congress.
Her main rival was Grand Duchess Catherine Pavlovna, Tsar Alexander’s sister, whose “insatiable licentiousness” saw her bed an Austrian duke and the crown prince of Württemberg. The Prussian king, meanwhile, was obsessed with Duchess Julie Zichy, in whom he believed he had found the spirit of his dead wife, Luise.
As the Eurovision comes to town, attendees will have their work cut out topping the Vienna Congress, a congress in every sense of the word.