Friedrich von Gentz
Friedrich von Gentz (2 May 1764 – 9 June 1832) was an Austrian diplomat and a writer. With Austrian chancellor Klemens von Metternich he was one of the main forces behind the organisation, management and protocol of the Congress of Vienna.
Friedrich von Gentz
May 2, 1764
June 9, 1832 (aged 68)
Publicist, statesman
Early life[edit]
Von Gentz was born in Breslau.
His father was an official, his mother was from the distinguished Berlin Huguenot family Ancillon and the aunt of Prussian minister Friedrich Ancillon. On his father′s transfer from Breslau to Berlin as director general of the royal mint, the gifted boy was sent to the Joachimsthalsches Gymnasium there. At the University of Königsberg he got acquainted with the teachings and thinking of Immanuel Kant, his intellect was sharpened and his zeal for learning quickened by the great thinker's influence. Nevertheless Kant′s categorical imperative and his ideas on the commandment of reason, from which all duties and obligations derive; did not prevent von Gentz from yielding to the taste for wine, women and gambling.[1]
When in 1785 he returned to Berlin, he received the appointment of secretary to the royal Generaldirectorium, his brilliant talents soon gaining him promotion to the rank of councillor for war (Kriegsrath). During an illness, which kept him virtuous by confining him to his room, he studied French and English, gaining a mastery of these languages, which opened up for him opportunities for a diplomatic career.[1]
Assisting von Metternich[edit]
In 1809, on the outbreak of war between Austria and France, von Gentz was for the first time actively employed by the Austrian government under Stadion. He drafted the proclamation announcing the declaration of war (15 April) and during the continuance of hostilities his pen was ceaselessly employed. The peace of 1810 and the fall of Stadion once more dashed his hopes and, disillusioned and hellishly blasé, he once more retired to comparative inactivity at Prague. Of von Metternich, Stadion's successor, he had at the outset no high opinion, and it was not until 1812 that the two men had close relations that were to ripen into lifelong friendship. However, when von Gentz returned to Vienna as von Metternich′s adviser, he was no longer the fiery patriot who had sympathized and corresponded with Stein in the darkest days of German depression and, in fiery periods, called upon all Europe to free itself from foreign rule. Disillusioned and cynical but clear-sighted as ever, he was henceforth before all things an Austrian, more Austrian, on occasion even than von Metternich.[3]
During the final stages of the campaign of 1814, he expressed the hope that von Metternich would substitute Austria for Europe in his diplomacy and, despite his opposition to Napoleon and of France, secure an Austro-French alliance by maintaining the husband of Marie Louise on the throne of France.[3]
Diplomatic work, Congress of Vienna[edit]
For ten years, from 1812 onward, von Gentz was in close touch with all the great affairs of European history as a writer and diplomat. He was the right hand, confidant and adviser of von Metternich. He accompanied the chancellor on his journeys and was present at all the conferences that preceded and followed the war. No political secrets were hidden from him, and his hand drafted all important diplomatic documents. He was secretary to the Congress of Vienna (1814–1815) a series of meetings to design a longterm peace plan for Europe, which meant he was state of affairs manager and head of protocol. His vast knowledge of men and affairs made him a power. He was under no illusion as to their achievements, and his memoir on the work of the Congress of Vienna is at once an incisive piece of criticism and a monument of his own disillusionment. He notes that at the Congress he received £22,000 through Talleyrand from Louis XVIII, while Castlereagh gave him £600, accompanied by ″les plus folles promesses″; his diary is full of such entries. Yet he never made any secret of these gifts. Von Gentz did attend all the congresses and conferences that followed until the Congress of Verona (1822).[3]
However, the liberalism of his early years was gone, and he had become reconciled to von Metternich's view that in an age of decay, the sole function of a statesman was to prop up mouldering institutions. It was the hand of the author of that offensive Memorandum to Frederick William III on the freedom of the press that drafted the Carlsbad Decrees. It was he who inspired the policy of repressing the freedom of the universities, and he noted in his diary as a day more important than that of Leipzig the session of the Vienna conference of 1819, which decided to make the convocation of representative assemblies in the German states impossible, by enforcing the letter of Article XIII of the Act of Confederation.[3]
Private life[edit]
In private life, von Gentz remained to the last a man of the world, but he was tormented with an exaggerated terror of death. He never saw his wife again since their parting at Berlin – she died in December 1802, a few months after his departure. His relations with other women, mostly of the highest rank, were too numerous to record. However, passion tormented him to the end, and his infatuation for Fanny Elssler, the celebrated danseuse, forms the subject of some remarkable letters to his friend Rahel, the wife of Varnhagen von Ense (1830–1831).[3]
Von Gentz remained a Protestant and never converted to Catholicism, although this step would have made his political and social life in the Austrian Empire easier.
Death and legacy[edit]
He died in Vienna in 1832.
Von Gentz has been described as a mercenary of the pen, and no other such mercenary has ever carved out for himself a more remarkable career. To have done so would have been impossible, in spite of his brilliant gifts, had he been no more than the ″wretched scribe″ sneered at by Napoleon. Though by birth he belonged to the middle class in a country of hide-bound aristocracy, he lived to move on equal terms in the society of princes and statesmen, which would never have been the case had he been notoriously bought and sold. Yet that he was in the habit of receiving gifts from all and sundry who hoped for his backing is beyond dispute. Von Metternich was aware of them, and he never suspected von Gentz of writing or acting in consequence against his convictions. As a matter of fact, no man was more free or outspoken in his criticism of the policy of his employers than this apparently venal writer. The gifts and pensions were rather in the nature of subsidies than bribes. They were the recognition by various powers of the value of an ally whose pen had proved itself so potent a weapon in their cause.[3]
It is, indeed, the very impartiality and objectivity of his attitude that make the writings of von Gentz such illuminating documents for the period of history which they cover. Allowance must of course be made for his point of view but less so perhaps than in the case of any other writer so intimately concerned with the policies which he criticizes. Apart from their value as historical documents, von Gentz′s writings are literary monuments, classic examples of nervous and luminous German language prose and of French as a model for diplomatic style.[3]