M. de Talleyrand had seen enough before he went to Vienna, and probably heard enough since he had been there, to make him doubtful of the success of his first experiment: but his position was such that in any combination in France that had not the late Emperor Napoleon at its head, he would still be the person to whom a large party in and out of his own country would look for the solution of the difficulty which the downfall of Louis XVIII. would provoke.
The basis of the congress of Vienna was necessarily that furnished by the engagements which had already taken place between the allies at Breslau, Töplitz, Chaumont, and Paris; engagements which concerned the reconstruction of Prussia according to its proportions in 1806, the dissolution of the Confederation of the Rhine; the re-establishment of the House of Brunswick in Hanover; and arrangements, to which I shall presently allude, concerning the future position of the Grand Duchy of Warsaw.
As all that was to be distributed was a common spoil in the hands of the allies, they suggested that a committee of four, representing England, Austria, Prussia, and Russia, should first agree amongst themselves as to the partition; and that an understanding having been established between these—the principal parties—this understanding should be communicated to the others; to France and Spain in particular;—whose objections would be heard.
Such an arrangement excluded France from any active part in the first decisions, which would evidently be sustained when the four allies had agreed upon them.
The tact and talent of M. de Talleyrand were displayed in getting this sentence reversed.
Taking advantage of the treaty of peace which France had already signed, he contended that there were no longer allies, but simply powers who were called upon, after a war which had created a new order of things in Europe, to consider and decide in what manner this new order of things could best be established for the common good, and with the best regard to the old rights existing before 1792, and the new rights which certain states had legitimately acquired in the long struggle which, with more or less continuity, had existed since that epoch.
With some difficulty he at last made these ideas prevail, and the committee of four was changed into a committee of eight, comprising all the signatories to the treaty of Paris: Austria, England, Russia, Prussia, France, Spain, Portugal, and Sweden.
This first point gained, the second,—viz., a division amongst the allies, was to be brought about. Any precipitate effort to do this would have prevented its success. M. de Talleyrand waited to work for it himself until rival interests began to work with him.
Now Austria’s great pre-occupation was to regain her old position in Italy, without diminishing the importance of that to which she pretended in Germany.
The views of Russia, or rather of the Emperor Alexander, were more complicated, and formed with a certain greatness of mind and generosity of sentiment, though always with that craft which mingled with the imperial chivalry.