Europe had a party during the Congress of Vienna in the last months of 1814. Monarchs, ministers, ambassadors and their wives and mistresses had learnt what Lord Castlereagh called ‘habits of confidential intercourse’ while engaged in defeating Napoleon. Between balls and banquets in the city’s many palaces, they seduced, betrayed and negotiated with each other. Letters copied for the Austrian police tell us who slipped up which staircase, or quarrelled between which polonaises. ‘You, always you, nothing but you,’ wrote Metternich to the Duchess of Sagan, while ‘all Europe’ waited in his antechamber. Their love affair seemed to concern him more than ‘the affairs of the world,’ complained his secretary Friedrich von Gentz.
Adam Zamoyski has written a vigorous, colourful sequel to his much praised account of Napoleon’s march on Moscow in 1812. Darting from city to city and battlefield to battlefield like one of the couriers in his book, he describes not only the Congress of Vienna but almost all campaigns and negotiations in Europe between December 1812 and December 1815.
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