The name is absent

JO Nineteenth Century Peace Congresses
of visions and of dreams. A new Joseph was required who
could state the principle and interpret the visions, and yet
make all serve France. And Talleyrand, who had been pon-
dering these things in his heart for six long years while he
served as an unwilling jailer, was not unequal to the task.
The principle was the idea of legitimacy and the dream was
a dream of peace and of eternal good will.

Next to Talleyrand, the most interesting figure at the con-
gress was the emperor Alexander I, who had been the Czar
of Russia since 1801. Napoleon, who was a keen judge of
men, said of Alexander: “With so many intellectual advan-
tages and dazzling qualities, . . . there is always some-
thing lacking in him, . . . and that which is lacking changes
perpetually.” He was a man of very great personal charm,
and considerable personal vanity. He seized upon ideas as
with a sudden inspiration, and with the greatest eagerness.
He passed from one idea which he regarded as a funda-
mental truth to its exact opposite by intermediate steps of
which he was not conscious. Alexander loved truly the two
ideas of liberty and order. Could they be reconciled? Met-
ternich was sure that they could not, and never wavered in
his preference for an order based on historic institutions and
historic obligations. Alexander thought that liberty might
be made to fall like the gentle showers from kingly heavens
upon the waiting people. He found instead that it welled
up in a mighty torrent, creative and destructive at the same
time. It would not obey the voice of single men, however
divinely sent to control its floods. And so the liberal mood
passed into one of reactionary gloom.

Alexander had been brought up at the court of his grand-
mother, the notorious and brilliant Catharine II. Between
his grandmother and his father, Paul, there existed the most
violent antipathy. Paul was a whimsical lunatic, like his son

<<   9   10   11   12   13   14   15   >>

More intriguing information