The historian Webster in his study of the Congress of Vienna concluded that
[it] cannot be said that [public opinion] affected the decisions of the statesmen to any material degree. The Polish-Saxon question [the most divisive issue among the coalition partners] was settled purely on grounds of expediency; and the populations of Germany were transferred from one monarch to another with scarcely the slightest reference to their wishes.14
This conclusion is overstated as it stands, and in any case it mistakes the role of public opinion in the state-nation for that within the society of state-nations. For the former, it is not the opinion of distant publics but the opinion of the nation which the state-nation represents that is crucial; for the latter, it is the way in which international opinion can be deployed by powers within the executive directorate that proves decisive, and this was even true, as we shall see, with the Polish-Saxon question. Osiander renders a better judgment when he observes instead that “what made [the Congress of Vienna] different… from earlier ones was the self-conscious way that public opinion was monitored by the peacemakers. The serene self-awareness of the Utrecht system was replaced at Vienna by anxious self-consciousness.”15 Obviously modern state-nations, whose governments hold power by virtue of some version of popular consent, are acutely attuned to public opinion. What is interesting, as Osiander notes, is that the society of such states should give a crucial role to public opinion in nondomestic affairs, not confining itself to the opinion of persons “back home” but carefully monitoring (and manipulating) the opinion in the various states with whom that society had to deal (as, for example, the opinion of French society regarding the provisions of the Treaty of Paris) and deploying arguments within the executive directorate based on international public opinion. Metternich, who carefully guided the public accounts of the Congress through Gentz, his protégé, wrote that “public opinion is the most powerful of all means; like religion, it penetrates the most hidden recesses, where administrative measures have no influence,” and Gentz himself wrote that
in the whole course of the latest events, the sovereigns of the coalition to destroy the ascendancy of Napoleon have regarded public opinion as one of their main supports, and… far from neglecting this opinion, they have rather laid themselves open to the accusation… to have listened to it too much… The Tsar… attaches the utmost importance to it; whatever his political or personal ambitions, I am sure that he would rather sacrifice them than to be seen in the eyes of the public as unjust, ungrateful, or a disturber of the general peace… 16
Talleyrand argued that this sensitivity was part of the new Age. In a letter to the French king, he wrote:
Formerly, the secular power could derive support from the authority of religion; it can no longer do this, because religious indifference has penetrated all classes and become universal. The sovereign power, therefore, can only rely upon public opinion for support, and to obtain that it must seek to be at one with that opinion.17
Talleyrand was speaking of domestic opinion; Castlereagh extended this reliance to international public opinion. He wrote the tsar, regarding the Polish issue, that “if Your Imperial Majesty should leave public opinion behind you… I should despair of witnessing any just and stable order of things in Europe.”
All these leaders had witnessed the destruction of the public stature of the French autocracy by journalists; each one knew that Napoleon's power, depending as it did on enormous public faith, derived at bottom from his place in the French imagination, a place he carefully nurtured in the bulletins he wrote. If religious tradition had underwritten the ancien régime, linking it with the dynastic past and imbuing it with the prestige of the mystical, then public opinion must underwrite the kind of state that depended on mass endorsement for its power and legitimacy. Perhaps Webster has in mind the form of the nation-state when, finding little sensitivity among the great powers to the national feelings of the publics whose states were being redrawn, he sees instead only expediency in the acts of state-nations.18 The role of public opinion in the nation-state is to assess whether the welfare of the people is being attended to by the State, and it is true that there was little of this at Vienna. But the role of public opinion in the state-nation was to assess the character, fitness, and morality of the State as the apotheosis of, not the servant of, the nation. Thus, for example, one historian of the Congress has concluded that even the allocations of territories were not as important19
in themselves as is often supposed. For Metternich, more than anything, the outcome of the redistribution talks mattered as an indicator of how successful Austria was at asserting herself. Austria was anxious to confirm its role as a principal international player…. [To] lose face in the German Confederation [would have been fatal to Austria's leadership of the new league]. This is not simply a matter of expediency, and it was important, vitally important, to Austria what German and European opinion thought of it.20
Much the same case can be made even with respect to the autocratic tsar. The relation between a parliamentary leader like Castlereagh and the public opinion of his domestic constituency in a state-nation provides elements out of which the relation of a state-nation's leader to other peer leaders is created, and ultimately the relation of that state to other states. That relation too is compounded of prestige, reputation, and the stature that is conferred by being at one with public opinion, and therefore domestic and international public opinion are linked. The tsar wished to gain the respect of the European public in order to play a decisive role in the directorate, a body made up of leaders who themselves, in their domestic constituencies, had to be attentive to public opinion. The Vienna system could only successfully function if it were made sensitive to public opinion: the congresses and the directorate ensured this.