ideas but censorship and the police -- ulti-
mately burst, it did so with disastrous
results for Europe and especially for the
Austrian Empire.

Clemens Wenzel Lothar von Metternich-
Winneburg was born at Coblenz on the
Rhine on May 15, 1773, The family, hold-
ing the rank of immediate counts of the
Empire, was an old one in the Rhineland,
closely associated with the Ecclesiastical
Electorates. Metternich's father was in the
diplomatic service of the Archbishop of
Trier until 1773 when he entered that of
the Emperor. It is not without significance
that the man who was to be Foreign Min-
ister and Chancellor of the Austrian Em-
pire for almost four decades was not a na-
tive Austrian. His outlook was of necessity
extended beyond the confines of his
adopted state, and it was easier for him to
see Austria objectively in its European set-
ting than it would have been had he looked
upon Vienna as his true home. Moreover
the Rhineland of Metternich youth was,
perhaps, the most cosmopolitan part of the
German area, with its aristocracy drawn
closely to French culture and imbued with
the principles of the Enlightenment.

It was in this cosmopolitan environment,
which had little feeling for national patri-
otism but a strong sense for inherited rights
and the traditional order, that Metternich's
formative years were spent. It was here
also that he saw the results of the French
Revolution, first as a student at Strassbourg
and then, from 1790 to 1792 as a student
in Mainz. In the latter year he joined his
father who was stationed in Brussels, but
soon the Revolutionary armies sweeping
into the Austrian Netherlands and bringing
with them their violence, their destruction
of orderly established forms of society and
government, and their unbridled enthusi-
asm for the Rights of Man, popular sover-
eignty and constitutionalism forced Metter-
nich to leave. Henceforth the proclaimed
principles of the Revolution were insepara-
bly associated in his mind with violence
and the subversion of law and order. As
an old man, when the Revolution against
which he had fought all his life had finally
overcome him, in March, 1850 he wrote to
Kübeck: "All revolutions are lies, or at least
so thoroughly larded with this wretched
quality, that it is not worth while to try to
separate the one from the other. Never has
a revolution truthfully declared its point of
departure, nor carried out its promises.
They destroy but do not create; they simply
provide the area in which ordering forces
are called upon to erect new structures out
of the ruins which they have created." ²

It is obviously impossible to do more than
sketch in the very broadest outlines a career
which extended over almost half a century,
and which, at least from the time of his
appointment as Austrian minister of for-
eign affairs in 1809 until his fall in 1848,
involved Metternich in every international
development of importance. To describe
the events in which he played a leading
role, to follow the intricacies of his diplo-
matic negotiations, and to evaluate his poli-
cies as they affected the international affairs
of Germany, Italy, and the Austrian Em-
pire, would, in effect, be to write the his-
tory of Europe in the first half of the nine-
teenth century. Through it all, in spite of
apparent contradictions, there is a remark-
able consistency in Metternich's course.
"God made me as I am," he wrote to
Countess Lieven, ³ "and I will remain the
same so long as it pleases Him to leave me
here. At the age of 15 I was what I am at
the age of 45. I shall be the same 20 years
from now. . . ." And to Wrede he wrote
in 1831: "My principles, my dear Prince,
have not changed, and they will never
change. . . . That which I wish in 1831,
I wished in 1813 and in all the period in
between." ⁴ Those principles were opposi-
tion to the French Revolution and its fruits.

Metternich himself declared that his life

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