"OMG-can you believe she wore that to the Congress of Vienna?"

As I promised Wednesday, today we return to the Congress of Vienna, with the ever-entertaining Adam Zamoyski as our guide!

Because so much of the activity surrounding the Congress was, let's say, extra-ministerial (the countless balls, dinners, hunting parties, and wild love affairs) it's no surprise that some of the most fun material in Zamoyski's Rites of Peace involve fashion--and, in particular, cattiness about fashion.

The British come in for the worst of it, which is understandable: because of Napoleon, they had been cut off from the continent--and thus from changes in fashion--for nearly twenty years. And the Europeans were cutting them no slack. Metternich, after writing to his wife that "It is raining Englishmen," told her that the ladies' dress appalled him. "You have to see it to believe it," he wrote, while Jean-Gabriel Reynard jotted in his diary that

Their separation from the Continent over twenty years has turned them into savages.

The ladies come in for the worst of it:

A somewhat unkempt if dashing, short-skirted look appeared to prevail, even amongst the older women. Schwarzenberg was astonished by Lady Castlereagh's dress sense. "She is very fat and dresses so young, so tight, so naked," he wrote.

Elsewhere, Lady Castlereagh is merely one victim in a broadside aimed at all the English ladies:

"Lady Castlreagh," Roksandra Sturdza wrote, "also amused the crowd by her colossal figure, which was rendered even more extraordinary and more gigantic by her dress; she wore ostrich feathers of every colour of the rainbow." According to Nostitz she "was always dressed up in ridiculously theatrical ways, colossal and graceless, plump and talkative, the joke of society." In this she was no different from the many other English women in Vienna. "The English women stand out by their ridiculous costumes," recorded Baroness du Montet, who complained of "the extreme indecency of their dress; their dresses, or rather sheaths, are so tight that their every shape is exactly drawn while they are open in front down to the stomach." Eynard was greatly amused by one English aristocrat who "came into the room in a dress tightly pulled in over her bottom which went down no more than a couple of fingers below the knee," adding that "this wealthy noblewoman looked like a tightrope walker, or even like one of the ladies of the Palais-Royal."

Lord Castlereagh himself seems to have been no more up on current fashion than his wife:

His appearance at Bale caused something of a sensation. He was kitted out in a curious blue tailcoat covered in braid of a kind not seen on the Continent since the 1780s, a pair of bright scarlet breeches, and "jockey boots." One of his attendants was decked out in what looked like a hussar uniform, and "appeared to have put his shirt on over his coat." . . . Humboldt wrote to his wife the following day, greatly amused by the contrast between the Austrian, Prussian and Russian diplomats, all uniformed, booted, and dripping with decorations, and Castlereagh, who in his gold-braided blue coat, red waistcoat and breeches and white silk stockings, "resembled nothing so much as a footman."

And all this at the same time as Beau Brummell was revolutionizing men's fashion back in England! There's really no excuse, your Lordship!

That's not, however, to say that all was well with the Europeans: even the English could enjoy looking down on Tsar Alexander, who

was far less socially experienced than most of those with whom he was mixing, as it was the first time he had spent much time in society. According to one lady he understood neither hyperbole nor irony, which resulted in misunderstandings and occasional offence. . . . He mostly dressed in the uniform of Colonel of one of the Russian Guard regiments, which no longer suited him, as he had grown a little plump over the past year, and the tight coat made his arms hang in front of his body like an ape's, while the skin-tight breeches stressed the outline of his fattening bottom. Yet he continued to affect the dash of a young buck His envy was aroused when Frederick William appeared at one ball in a hussar's uniform, and he decided that he must have one too. "I found him today trying on eight or nine pairs of hussar's breeches, and inconsolable to find them all too tight or too short," reported Anstett, adding that a courier was sent off to St Petersburg to fetch his aide-de-camp General Ozarowski's hussar uniform for the Tsar to try.

It's important to remember that this was a man who took himself and his role in the world so seriously that he soon took to leaving an empty place at the dinner table each night for Jesus.

Though kings and conquerors may come and go, the rule of the Fashion Police never falters, and as both men and women have come under their eternally withering fire in this post, I'll close with an account of a contest between the sexes, one of the many time-killing pastimes invented at the Congress that in themselves are enough to render the whole enterprise absurd to modern eyes:

On 15 February, at Countess Zichy's, Alexander and Countess Wrbna-Kagenek got into an argument about whether men or women took longer to dress, and decided to test the issue. Bets were laid as each retired to a nearby room with a witness and undressed, and when time was called they both dressed again and reappeared.

The Countess won. Ridiculous as it is, you did want to know, didn't you?

Metternich's alarm clock

One of the most arresting moments in Adam Zamoyski's Rites of Peace: The Fall of Napoleon and the Congress of Vienna (2007) comes in the early morning hours of March 7, 1815. Metternich, Austria's foreign minister, is woken "at the ungodly hour of 6 o'clock" by his valet, who has brought him a despatch marked "urgent." Metternich, tired equally by diplomacy and amours, chose to let it lie until 7:30, when he felt more like waking, at which point he opened it to find:

The English commissioner Campbell has just sailed into the harbour to enquire whether there has been any sighting of Napoleon, given that he has disappeared from the Island of Elba. The answer being negative, the English frigate put to sea without delay.

Though the note came from the Consulate General in Genoa, I can't help but hear a certain British faux-casualness in it, something like, "Say, old chap, have you seen that fellow Napoleon? No, no--no reason to worry: we've just lost track of him for a bit, that's all. I expect he's just popped round the corner for a spot of tea--I'm sure he'll turn up any minute now."* In one sense, such a momentous event seems to cry out for such downplaying, but I'm astonished nonetheless: this was the event that all Europe had feared, and the dread Napoleon soon proved those fears justified, parlaying his mere 1,000-man force into control of all of France.

Thoughts of Napoleon leading, as they inevitably do, to War and Peace, soon after finishing Zamoysky's book I turned to Tolstoy's letters, where I found this striking response to an inquiry about Napoleon from novelist Alexander Ivanovich Ertel, sent on January 15, 1890:

I can't tell you anything about Napoleon. No, I haven't changed my opinion, and I would even say I value it very much. You won't find any bright sides; it's impossible to find them until all the dark and terrible sides this person presents have been exhausted. The most valuable material is Memorial de Sainte-Helene. And his doctor's memoirs about him. However much they exaggerate his greatness, this pathetic fat figure with a paunch and a hat, loafing around an island and living only on the memories of his former quasi-greatness, is pathetic and nasty. I was always terribly agitated reading about this, and I very much regret that I didn't have to touch on this period of his life. The last years of his life when he plays at greatness and sees himself that it's no good--the period when he is shown to be a complete moral bankrupt, and his death--all this should be a very big and important part of his biography.

That letter offers an additional, unexpected pleasure: that defining phrase, "terribly agitated." It's how I always think of Tolstoy the man: fingers tightly gripping a book as he shakes it in anger and frustration, his lips atremble, his mind racing in counterattack. It could hardly have made him a comfortable spouse or father or even friend, but good god am I glad for it nonetheless.

"Most people know little about it, aside from the fact that a great deal of dancing took place."

{Photo by rocketlass.}

Just in time for a game of Risk with my nephew, his dad, and my brother*, over Christmas weekend I started reading Rites of Peace: The Fall of Napoleon and the Congress of Vienna (2007), by Adam Zamoyski. At the halfway mark, it’s nearly as fascinating as Zamoyki’s earlier book, Moscow 1812.

Zamoyski does a remarkable job of helping the reader keep the dizzying array of people and interests at the Congress straight. Though not representative of his general style, the following list is worth reproducing for the picture it gives of the complexity of Napoleonic-era European politics; it covers only the minor German interests--dispossessed nobles and the like--in attendance at the Congress:

Some Standesherren had got together and elected one of their number in a region; others preferred to go themselves. There were also representatives of the four Hanseatic cities (Hamburg, Lubeck, Bremen and Frankfurt); of the city of Mainz; of the Chamber of Commerce of the city of Mainz; of the Teutonic Order; of the firms of Bonte and Co., Kayser and Co. and Wittersheim and Bock, creditors of the government of Westphalia, which had been abolished; of the Bishop of Liege; of the subjects of Count Solms-Braunfels. One delegation of Catholic clergy demanded full restitution under Papal authority; another, consisting of four delegates led by the Bishop of Constance, called for the institution of a new German national Catholic Church. The Pope’s delegate, Cardinal Consalvi, was there to oppose this. There was also a delegation, consisting of Friedrich Justin Bertuch of Weimar and Johann George von Cotta of Stuttgart, publisher of the Allgemeine Zeitung, representing eighty-one German publishers and demanding a copyright law as well as freedom of the press. And there were J. J. Gumprecht and Jakob Baruch of Frankfurt and Carl August Buchholz of Lubeck, representing the interests of the Jews. They were one of the few groups eager to preserve changes made by Napoleon, who had granted them full equality, of which the authorities in many German states were now attempting to strip them once more.

Whew.

Yet out of this mess, Zamoyski constructs a narrative that is clear, coherent, and, even more remarkable, compelling. He freely indulges a taste for entertaining anecdotes--as in this story of one of the English plenipotentiary Sir Charles Stewart:

Accident-prone as ever, he came home one evening in his usual drunken state, tore off his uniform and threw himself onto the bed without bothering to close the french windows into the garden, and woke up to find that not only his richly gold-braided hussar jacket with its diamond-studded decorations, but every single item of clothing had been stolen. He was confined to quarters while a tailor ran up a new uniform.

The book spills over with such moments, which together paint a lively and unforgettable picture of the upper reaches of early nineteenth-century life.

Zamoyski is also blessed with the presence of three of the century’s most memorable figures: Tsar Alexander--of whom a friend once wrote,

He would willingly have made everyone free, as long as everyone willingly did what he wanted.

--the Austrian foreign minister, Metternich--who

was in every sense the center of his own universe. He would write endlessly about what he had thought, written and done, pointing out, sometimes only for his own benefit, how brilliantly these thoughts, writings, and doings reflected on him. This egotism was buttressed by a monumental complacency that was proof against all experience.

--and the French foreign minister, Talleyrand--whom Goethe called "the supreme diplomat of our century." and whom Roberto Calasso in The Ruin of Kasch credited with "the ability to sniff out the age." Together (or more accurately, perpetually at odds) they offer a tableau of drama, intrigue, and personal power that are breathtaking in their contrast to the limited political life of our more democratic age.

I’ll have plenty more to share from this book over the coming weeks, but with New Year’s Eve looming, it seems fitting to close with a brief description of one of the dozens of lavish balls held during the Congress. This account of the opening night fete--which filled two ballrooms and an indoor riding school--comes from the young German wife of the Danish ambassador:

In place of the windows there were enormous mirrors which reflected 100,000 sparkling lights. . . . The stairs swept down in two arcs to the floor of the riding school, which was covered with parquet and ringed on three sides with rows of seats like an amphitheatre. Blinded and almost dizzy, I paused for a few moments at the top of the stairs, and once I had gone down I could view the dazzling procession as the whole court of Vienna and those of other countries descended.

Those of you who, like me, tend to be skeptical about parties may find the response of Prussian chancellor Karl August von Hardenberg more in your line:

"Crush," Hardenberg jotted down in his diary. He disliked large gatherings and was in a bad mood besides, but even he could not resist adding "--many beautiful women."

Sounds like he might have been the sort to stay home on New Year’s.