64 Nineteenth Century Peace Congresses
Talleyrand managed to set the committee by the ears over
the partition of Saxony and the fate of Poland, and at the
same moment gained for his own discredited country such a
place that it practically became the arbiter of the delibera-
tions, and the foreign minister of Louis XVIII gave his mas-
ter an influence such as no French king had had since the
days of the one who could say with truth: “L’état, c’est
moi I
It must be confessed that after the French representative
gained for himself so prominent a place in the committee of
the great powers, he showed little further zeal in the matter
of assembling the actual congress, and the strangest thing
about the Congress of Vienna is that in the strictest sense
there never was any congress at all. Although more than a
hundred kings, princes, and diplomats were present in the
city, they never were asked to assemble in one room to de-
liberate. The leaders of the congress simply met together
in more or less self-appointed committees, very often delib-
erated informally before dinner in the evening, or else
intrigued secretly behind one another’s backs. The nearest
approach to an actual congress was a committee of eight
powers, including the five great powers of the day and, in
addition, Spain, Portugal, and Sweden, which met occasion-
ally at Metternich’s house and appointed other subcommit-
tees to deal with special problems.1 This committee had
Metternich as chairman and Gentz as secretary. I sup-
pose it is inevitable that in any great assembly which is to
make arrangements of an intricate kind, the real work must
be done by committees. But at Vienna there was no one to
insist that the work of these small bodies should be finally
reported to the main assembly. The arrangements which
1 One important subcommittee organized the German Confederation. An-
other did the same for Switzerland.