“Vienna, 1814: How the Conquerors of Napoleon Made Love, War, and Peace at the Congress of Vienna”, by David King

 

448 pages, Harmony Books, ISBN-13: 978-0307337160

I thought I was in trouble when I began reading Vienna, 1814: How the Conquerors of Napoleon Made Love, War, and Peace at the Congress of Vienna as the clichés came fast and furiously at me: carriages “rumble”; dangers “lurked”; highwaymen are “cutthroat”; rococo is “ornate”; and so on and so forth…but there’s more, as we are treated to something that reads like an extended People Magazine puff-piece on the lifestyles of the rich and famous circa 1814, rather than a serious diplomatic history. There is far too much attention paid to the menus at various feasts and far too little focus on how important decisions were arrived at by the principals involved. Perhaps the clearest indication that this is a lightweight work, at best, is the utter absence of maps and the ample provision of plates of the various salon seductresses (is the contour of Princess Bagration’s cheek really of greater significance than the before-and-after boundaries of Prussia and Saxony?). I suppose, then, what we have here is a kind of sex lives of the (then) rich & famous, and if you’re okay with that than more power to ya, brother (but you’re still going to have to wade through all those clichés). I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised, as King makes clear that he wants to discuss how all of these puffed-up aristocrats “made love” in Vienna, but I was expecting more of the war-making followed by a touch of peace-making, too.