Metternich

‘Game changer’ is a much-overused term for new academic books, but not in this case. Wolfram Siemann’s seminal biography of Metternich sheds a blinding array of new light on one of the most important figures of the age, and recasts forever our understanding of the politics and diplomacy of the Napoleonic period. At last, a great scholar has systematically exploited the private archives of the Metternich family, bringing new facts to bear on the key moments of the Napoleonic wars. It is simply indispensable, and HUP are to be saluted for making it available in English.

Admittedly this is not a book about Napoleon but about the architect of his defeat. Siemann spent decades in European archives producing a biography that would finally supersede that written by the Nazi von Srbik in the 1920s.

He accomplishes this task brilliantly by presenting a Metternich who is much more human, complex, uncertain, and more of a ‘dove’ in terms of geopolitics than anybody had imagined. It also does a fine job in rescuing the post-1815 Metternich from the condescension of posterity showing him not to have been the vicious reactionary of Cardonaro lore. It weighs in at seven… show more.