The 33 years after the end of the Napoleonic Wars are called in Austria—and to some extent in all of Europe—the Age of Metternich. The chief characteristics of this age are the onset of the Industrial Revolution, an intensification of social problems brought on by economic cycles of boom and bust, an increasingly mobile population, more demands for popular participation in government, and the rising tide of nationalism, all watched over by governments intent upon preserving the social, political, and international status quo.

Metternich was the symbol of those forces eager to preserve the status quo. In the debate about his policies, some have argued that Metternich was little more than an oppressive, reactionary but opportunistic statesman, eager to snuff out sparks of revolution and liberalism wherever he could detect them. Moreover, his much vaunted direction of the other powers in preserving the European order was really a mask for maintaining Habsburg influence in international affairs far out of proportion to the power that the monarchy actually possessed. Others contend that Metternich was one of the first philosophical conservatives, basing his social and political policies on coherent principles of orderly and cautious change in the context of good government and his diplomatic policies on maintaining stability by convincing the great powers of their mutual interests in preserving the European order as it then existed.

In international affairs, Metternich’s Concert of Europe did not last long. Within a few years after the Congress of Vienna, it had become clear that the five great powers simply did not have sufficiently similar interests or goals to cooperate on every issue that came before them. After European congresses at Troppau, Laibach, and Verona (1820–22) granted permission to Austria to deal with revolutions in Italy and to France to do the same in Spain, Britain announced its withdrawal from the Concert of Europe, proclaiming that it wanted no more to do with the conservative Continental powers. Likewise, a revolution in France in 1830 weakened that country’s link to Metternich’s system, and he even had trouble with Russia, which was greatly upset by Ottoman persecution of Orthodox Christians during the movement for Greek independence (1821–30). (See also Troppau, Congress of; Laibach, Congress of; Verona, Congress of; July Revolution; Greek Independence, War of.)

In domestic matters, Metternich may have desired good government, but his reputation as an oppressor gained considerable credence after 1815. Protests against conservative policies by a gathering of German students (at the Wartburg Festival) in 1817 and the assassination of a conservative playwright (August von Kotzebue) in 1819 led, under Metternich’s guidance, to the German Confederation’s adopting the Carlsbad Decrees, a set of laws placing German and Austrian universities under strict control. Harsh censorship was imposed, and a commission was established at Mainz to investigate all student societies for subversives. Teachers, writers, and students suspected of liberal views were blacklisted throughout Germany and Austria. In 1824 the German Federal Diet renewed these provisions for an indefinite period and in 1832 and 1833 expanded them at Metternich’s behest.

Metternich’s name was also equated with suppressing liberalism and radicalism in Italy. In 1821 Austrian troops put down risings in Naples and Piedmont; in 1831 rebellions in Parma, Modena, and the Papal States likewise ended in suppression by Austrian soldiers. The Austrian regime became the nemesis of the Carbonari and Young Italy, two movements associated with Italian nationalism and republicanism that were enormously popular among educated Italians.

Whereas Metternich’s name is often equated with oppression, he in fact was not eager to impose harsh and unrelenting rule in his own state or in others. Metternich believed that the best government was absolutism but that it was best because it guaranteed equal justice and fair administration for all. In the Habsburg monarchy and in the Italian governments he saved from revolution, he advocated reforms that would provide good government for the people. In many places his appeals went unheeded—in the Papal States, for example—and even in Austria his influence in domestic affairs weakened considerably as time went on. In 1826 Emperor Francis appointed Franz Anton, Graf (count) von Kolowrat, minister of state, and he steadily reduced Metternich’s influence in internal policy. In 1835 Francis died and was succeeded by his son Ferdinand, whose feeblemindedness necessitated the creation of a “state conference” to rule the monarchy. It consisted of two of Ferdinand’s uncles and his brother, along with Kolowrat and Metternich, as permanent members. High policy tended to drift, because the two archdukes were nonentities and Kolowrat and Metternich were usually at odds with one another.

While Metternich and his colleagues focused most of their attention on political activity, the monarchy was by no means standing still in economic and social matters. By the 1820s Austria was experiencing its first sustained industrial development. While many have regarded Austria’s exclusion from the Zollverein, the German customs union created by Prussia in the 1820s and ’30s, as permanently retarding Austria’s economic advancement, in fact, by the 1840s, Austrian production of pig iron, coal, cotton textiles, woolens, and foodstuffs was growing at a faster rate than that of the Zollverein. Advocates of political liberalism may have suffered at this time, but those of economic liberalism were gaining ground. After Francis’s death in 1835, practically all restrictions on new enterprises, especially those engaged in commerce, were lifted.

Most people still lived on the land, but even there changes were under way. As growing cities created markets for more and more agricultural goods, producers began to focus on agriculture for profit instead of for subsistence. Along with industrial crops such as sugar beets and flax, old crops such as wheat, vegetables, wine, and livestock were grown more and more for the commercial market. The social impact of these changes in agriculture became starkly apparent in 1848, when the final abolition of serfdom was encouraged by some of the landholding nobility, who were relying more and more on wage labour to work their estates and no longer wanted the obligations associated with having serfs.

Aiding these new economic efforts were the beginnings of an Austrian infrastructure of railroads and water transport. The first railroad on the European Continent appeared between Linz (Austria) and Budweis (now Ceské Budejovice, Czech Republic); it was a horse-drawn railway between the Danube and the Moldau (Vltava) rivers, which in fact was a connection between the Danube and the Elbe river systems. In 1836 work began on a steam railway heading north from Vienna, and by 1848 the monarchy contained more than 1,000 miles (1,600 km) of track. Canals were not a feature of Habsburg transportation because of poor terrain, but steam navigation began on the Danube in 1830 and expanded quickly.