Free Vienna, 1814: How the Conquerors of Napoleon Made Love, War, and Peace at the Congress of Vienna by David King

viceroy of Italy still in his Napoleonic uniform, had come to safeguard his interests—he had been promised a state by the Treaty of Paris, though it had not yet been specified where it would be. Among the countless German princes, there was Karl August, the Duke of Weimar, the generous patron of Goethe, Schiller, Herder, Wieland, and many other poets and writers who made his small duchy a literary Arcadia.
    There were also several members of the Reuss family, whose ancestors had ruled the tiny principality of Reuss since the eleventh century. Every male had been named Henry (at first Henry the Tall, Henry the Short, Henry the Brave, and so on, though by the seventeenth century they had started using numerals, planning to continue until one hundred and then start over again). The family had also split into an elder branch, represented at the congress by Prince Henry Reuss XIX, and a younger branch, by Prince Henry Reuss XXII. Other members of the family who came to Vienna for the congress included Henry LII and Henry LXIV.
    Far less conspicuous, of course, was a young erudite twenty-nine-year-old representing the small delegation of Hesse-Cassel named Jacob Grimm. He and his brother Wilhelm had just published, two years before, the Kinder-und Hausmärchen, better known as Grimm’s Fairy Tales, and Jacob Grimm would use his free time in Vienna to work on another collection of folktales that would be published after the congress.
    Excitement was indeed in the air, and there was a scramble to participate in the lavish peace conference in any way possible. Vienna’s most distinguished families angled to secure a place, as Schönholz noted with surprise, even offering “to don servants’ garb only to be close to the wondrous events to come.” Prince de Ligne had said that he would not have missed the Vienna Congress for 100,000 florins.
     
     
     
    M INGLING, TOO, AMONG these throngs were some spectators with a special mission. Vienna’s chief of police, the fifty-four-year-old Baron Franz von Hager, was running an extensive, intrusive, if sometimes highly inept espionage service. He had many agents already watching, following, and befriending the visitors streaming into Vienna. Hager answered directly to the Austrian emperor, Francis, who, like many enlightened despots before him, was particularly keen to stay enlightened about what his people were doing, saying, and thinking.
    Austria had considerable experience in the art of surveillance, letter snatching, cipher breaking, and snooping in general. Habsburg agents had honed their skills under the watchful eyes of Joseph II. Emperor Francis would take up where his uncle had left off, increasing the cloak-and-dagger budget by a staggering 500 percent and vastly expanding its activities. An energetic class of agents was recruited, showing the emperor’s talent for selecting officers who were, in the words of one well-placed archduke, “repulsive to all decent-minded people.”
    Stationed in the Hofburg Palace, in a suite of offices in the Imperial Court Chancellery wing of the palace, placed, conveniently, next to the emperor, the Vienna spies would need much more than repulsive qualities to meet the expectations placed upon them. There was indeed a great sense of urgency as the police system finalized its preparations for a large peace conference.
    Spies had in fact just uncovered a ring of disaffected Italian patriots who had plotted to open the Vienna Congress by assassinating the Austrian emperor. The suspects were not happy that their homeland would once again fall under foreign rule—passing, as one put it, from the purgatory of Napoleon to the hell of Austria. By the middle of August, however, the police had quietly foiled this conspiracy and expelled the suspects.
    Regardless of how dangerous the threat of an assassination actually was, the police acted with quick diligence, and seized upon this occasion to bargain for additional resources to prevent tragedy at