74 DYNASTIC EMPIRE, c. 1763-18t>7
straddled its borders. Metternich's Chancellery had a section on :| domestic matters with direct access to the Ministry of Police, and he ^ himself took on the task of monitoring intellectual trends and managing the Monarchy's ideological stance (including, in modern pair M lance, its "image') at home and abroad. He approached this wortgjjjj with the mental equipment of an eighteenth-century rationalist 1;| grand seigneur untouched by either the liberal democracy or romantic^!] reaction of the French revolutionary period, concerned to preserve the balance of the body politic against the gusts of enthusiasm froinlil whatever quarter. In international politics this led him to advocate|| the so-called Congress system of periodic meetings of the Powers:;! f1815 22) to coordinate the fight against revolutionary tendencies!!] In central Europe he secured the confederal Diet's acceptance of thlpf Karlsbad decrees (1819), which limited free speech and the aulon-: omy of universities, where liberal and German nationalist ideas;|i were strongest. In the Monarchy itself balance for MetlemicihiJ meant ending the disproportion between its Austrian and Hungarian;:]]! parts by lessening centralism in the former lands and reining iji | Magyar separatist tendencies in Hungary. To this end he advocatei&i building up north Italian, 'lllyrian' and Galician entities (based iOftif regional not national loyalties, however) which could then,, bythiNj most ambitious of his several reform drafts of this period {l8L7kJ become sub-units of a new Ministry of the Interior, with the hint of | Hungary and Transylvania's potential reduction to similar status- ]| Mettermch was thus aware of the problems which had long,pla-'| gucd Habsburg administration: its lack of coordination and the'.con*"! fusion between policy-making and its implementation. By proposing | a system of ministries he was repudiating the time-consumingitradi- f tion of collegiate bodies through which the Monarchy had hitherto* 1 been governed. Ministries could efficiently discharge the day-tQ-d^"*i running of government business, while a small elite body advisedlttera monarch on general policy for the state as a whole. The sccondigoalijj had been the principle behind Kaunitz's Staatsrat of 1761 butlfiiA&l interval this highest organ had continually allowed itself to be: drawn..;] into the detailed application of government policy. Francis's habiB®§j|j settling matters directly with individual departments and his concent-] with minutiae had prevented the development of any kind of govifriU ] mental esprit decorps. By the year 1802.2000 files are said to havi§i§lq*l ! up for the Emperor's attention. Metternich's proposals for adntpisH trativc reorganisation were thus not new. The Staats- undiKoufer*""; enzministerium (1801) and revamped Staatsrat (1808, :181;4j|jjf*<fe$
METTERNICH'S AUSTRIA 7a
all failed attempts to embody the idea of a central consultative forum
unburdened by the trivia of the daily round.
Exalted notions of Metternich's statesmanship have been almost as :PiCom'mon in some twentieth-century quarters as was his denigra-
lion äs the evil genius of reaction in the nineteenth. The man who
told the Duke of Wellington in 1824 that he felt all Europe to be his iilatherland has been portrayed by his chief biographer Heinrich von : Srbik as the guardian of Austria's European role in a system which
recognised state and national individualities but subordinated their ligpurate egoisms to the wider good. This fairly reflects Metternich's jpgl.f-image but is somewhat uncritical. The Chancellor's generalised IIBstrums bespoke static assumptions. Human nature did not change, iSwpined; the mass of the people were always conservative and the ;;iiSeillätion of the forces of change and stability permitted only a cycli-view of history; hence, revolutionary Utopias were a dangerous iifrally', attractive only to naive idealists (professors, religious radi-... e;ils   Metternich played a role in the Papal condemnation of üiÜirnennais in 1834) or self-interested egoists 'who enter the house illhl^have set on fire not to save the valuables but to make off with sÄBrn'^ Equality was a chimera, tor what equality could there be ü|!fi§#eeh a wise man and a foolish one? Monarchy and sound religion ssfljinented the bonds of loyalty necessary in a hierarchical society; : dernocracv dissolved them. Metternich's apergus were not without iijfeiplogical force. He recognised the aristocratic base to the unique iSiimstitutionalism of pre-1832 England. He had, too, some awareness IfäjJ.the limits of the possible; when Adam Müller blamed all Europe's äjdjseontents on the Reformation, he remarked that he was not going Itolake on Martin Luther. Conscious of the need to rely on more than ffffisorship in the battle for ideas, he overrode the police chief Sedl-i|||i|kyi:ahd allowed the leading German newspaper of the day, the mildly liberal Augsburger Allgemeine Reitling, into Austria in the 1820s, ipitiigt its cautious editor Collin to accept Austrian government l|l||etiai for fear of losing his concession. But does this justify the IjlIiimSiöf a higher political wisdom?
lIlMever^'as he was, Metternich's imagination was limited by a :"™|pked complacency, both intellectual and social. 'Such is mycharac-Ilfowrote to one of several mistresses in 1813, assuring her of illsr>ni,agnitucte of his passion; 'if it is unlike others', so much the iiliifpfor them ... time will prove to you ... what I am and what I llllPfeför the friend of my heart'.3 The conviction of his supe-pHlllöönality, which made him reluctant to abandon doctrines