Siemann draws on previously unexamined archives to bring this multilayered and dazzling man to life. But short of compromising on his overarching goal Metternich aimed to accommodate liberalism and nationalism as much as possible. He was, as Henry Kissinger has observed, the father of realpolitik. That often required him, as the Austrian Empire’s foreign minister and chancellor, to back authority. He reveals Metternich as more modern and his career much more forward-looking than we have ever recognized.Ĭlemens von Metternich emerged from the horrors of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, Siemann shows, committed above all to the preservation of peace.

Historians treat him as the archenemy of progress, a ruthless aristocrat who used his power as the dominant European statesman of the first half of the nineteenth century to stifle liberalism, suppress national independence, and oppose the dreams of social change that inspired the revolutionaries of 1848. Wolfram Siemann paints a fundamentally new image of the man who shaped Europe for over four decades. Metternich has a reputation as the epitome of reactionary conservatism. Here’s the description from the Harvard website:Ī compelling new biography that recasts the most important European statesman of the first half of the nineteenth century, famous for his alleged archconservatism, as a friend of realpolitik and reform, pursuing international peace. A forthcoming biography from Harvard, Metternich: Strategist and Visionary, by Wolfram Siemann (Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich) argues, though, that in fact Metternich was a progressive visionary. Metternich opposed liberal nationalism and was an architect of the Holy Alliance, which attempted to defeat Revolutionary ideas in Europe through Christian values, including the divine right of kings.

Conventional wisdom portrays Metternich, the Austrian foreign minister who dominated Europe after the defeat of Napoleon, as an arch-reactionary.

Metternich siemann