![]() These events brought the family close to ruin. ![]() They reached the top of the pole just in time to witness the Empire's destruction by the forces unleashed by the French Revolution. ![]() Klemens's ancestors, including his father, adeptly climbed the greasy pole of imperial politics, loyally serving Habsburg interests in the Rhineland and the Austrian Netherlands. It is a strength of this book that it covers in some detail the rise of the Metternich family within the Rhineland, a territorially fragmented region closer to France than to Austria and Prussia, and one where the checks, balances and guarantees of the thousand-year old Holy Roman Empire remained peculiarly strong throughout the eighteenth century. Metternich is forever associated with reaction and Austria, but according to his own words it was the Rhine, not the Danube, that flowed through his veins. ![]() Klemens von Metternich's life spanned the final years of the Holy Roman Empire, the French Revolution, Napoleon, the so-called Restoration and Pre-March, and the 1848 Revolutions, a range that alone justifies the almost one thousand pages that Wolfram Siemann expends in rehabilitating the Austrian statesman. ![]()
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