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By Root 2638 0

a variety of means - including, not least, the letters of Marie-Louise to her father - Vienna was constantly reminded of the strength of France’s armies and the great length of her reach. Eventually, the family chit-chat was backed up by the dispatch of a special emissary to Vienna in the person of the Comte de Narbonne. Very much a figure of the ancien régime, Narbonne was a clever choice, and, indeed, even a conciliatory one, but his instructions made the reality clear enough:

British gold buys all those in whom hatred or fear are not enough to determine their course . . . Play upon the family connection. The emperor, my father-in-law, is intelligent, moderate and sensible: he has felt the full weight of a French invasion, and I have no doubt that today he wishes to continue faithfully to adhere to me. However, the intrigues of the court, the vanities of the salon, the bellicose fantasies of certain great ladies, are all working away in their usual base fashion . . . The clear-sighted know that such scenes must stop. It should not be difficult for you to show the emperor Francis the need to stay loyal to an alliance that is both more natural and safer for him than the alternative even if it is one that is at the same time superficially somewhat weaker. 60

As if hinting at violent retribution was not enough, there were also moments of sharp recrimination. Summoned to Paris to see Napoleon, for example, Schwarzenberg was upbraided by Maret who ‘provoked him beyond endurance in the course of a private conversation by representing Austria as faithless and even dishonoured’.61 But to see Austria as a power flirting with war, or, at the very least, one obsessed with curbing France’s power, that simply had to be cowed into submission, was a mistake. Francis I remained as pacific as ever; the army was badly equipped and understrength; even the limited intervention in the Russian campaign had exacerbated the effects of the massive devaluation that had been decreed in 1811 of the paper money on which Austria had relied since the 1780s; and relations with Hungary were very tense. As for Metternich, he wanted to check Russian expansion and isolate Britain, the obvious means of doing both being to engineer a peace settlement between France and her continental opponents. That Napoleon would have had to make concessions in Germany and other areas is true enough, but the Austrian chancellor was neither out to overthrow Napoleon, nor bent on getting back all of Austria’s lost territories. In his memoirs Metternich speaks of striking ‘a decisive blow’ against Napoleon when the time was ripe so as to establish ‘a real peace, not a mere truce in disguise like all former treaties of peace with the French Republic and with Napoleon’, this being something that could ‘only be done by restricting the power of France within such limits as . . . establish a balance of power among the chief states’.62 This sums up Metternich’s policy well enough, but there is nothing to suggest that he believed that such a goal could only be attained by military means, and that despite the fact that by the spring of 1813 the army was being readied for battle. Mobilization was essential to back up Austrian diplomacy but the aim was still mediation rather than war, still a compromise peace rather than total victory. Indeed, armed conflict remained both deeply undesirable and lacking in support:

The decided feeling of the different populations of the Austrian imperial states was for the preservation of peace. Austria had borne the burden of all the former wars except that of 1806, which had ended so unfortunately for Prussia; the inner strength of the empire seemed to be exhausted, and the people to have lost all hope of regaining by the force of arms what they had lost. In Austria . . . the expression ‘German feeling’ had no more meaning than a myth . . . A class not numerous but important from the position of the individuals composing it raised the banner of war in our country . . . [but] their voices died away in space, and their efforts would never