Portal:Austria/Selected biography/14

Prince Klemens Wenzel von Metternich (15 May 1773 – 11 June 1859) was a politician and statesman. He was one of the most important diplomats of his era.

He was a major figure in the negotiations before and during the Congress of Vienna and is considered both a paradigm of foreign-policy management and a major figure in the development of diplomatic praxis. He was the archetypal practitioner of 19th-century diplomatic realism, being deeply rooted in the postulates of the balance of power.

Probably no statesman was so praised, or so reviled, in his own day as Metternich. In one perspective he was revered as the infallible oracle of diplomatic inspiration; in another, he was loathed and despised as an incarnation of the spirit of obscurantism and oppression. The victories of democracy have made the latter view fashionable, and to the liberal historians of the latter part of the 19th century the very name Metternich was synonymous with a system in which nothing but senseless opposition to progress could be discerned.

Metternich was a master of the techniques of diplomacy: for instance, his dispatches were models of diplomatic style.