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Metternich - Strategist and Visionary (Hardcover)
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Metternich - Strategist and Visionary (Hardcover)
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A compelling new biography that recasts the most important European
statesman of the first half of the nineteenth century, famous for
his alleged archconservatism, as a friend of realpolitik and
reform, pursuing international peace. Metternich has a reputation
as the epitome of reactionary conservatism. Historians treat him as
the archenemy of progress, a ruthless aristocrat who used his power
as the dominant European statesman of the first half of the
nineteenth century to stifle liberalism, suppress national
independence, and oppose the dreams of social change that inspired
the revolutionaries of 1848. Wolfram Siemann paints a fundamentally
new image of the man who shaped Europe for over four decades. He
reveals Metternich as more modern and his career much more
forward-looking than we have ever recognized. Clemens von
Metternich emerged from the horrors of the Revolutionary and
Napoleonic wars, Siemann shows, committed above all to the
preservation of peace. That often required him, as the Austrian
Empire's foreign minister and chancellor, to back authority. He
was, as Henry Kissinger has observed, the father of realpolitik.
But short of compromising on his overarching goal Metternich aimed
to accommodate liberalism and nationalism as much as possible.
Siemann draws on previously unexamined archives to bring this
multilayered and dazzling man to life. We meet him as a
tradition-conscious imperial count, an early industrial
entrepreneur, an admirer of Britain's liberal constitution, a
failing reformer in a fragile multiethnic state, and a man prone to
sometimes scandalous relations with glamorous women. Hailed on its
German publication as a masterpiece of historical writing,
Metternich will endure as an essential guide to nineteenth-century
Europe, indispensable for understanding the forces of revolution,
reaction, and moderation that shaped the modern world.
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