Word: metternich
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
There was no simple touchstone, no all-embracing word to sum up the world organization that emerged this week from San Francisco. Augustus had sought the security of his world through Roman "justice"; Gregory through Christian "brotherhood"; Napoleon through "law" and the Grand Army; Metternich through "legitimacy"; Wilson through "democracy." The San Francisco conference had no comparable key; it just said "security." By stressing the goal rather than the path, it opened the door to all opportunities-and to all contradictions...
...they were mostly preoccupied with the delights and hazards of freedom. Several hundred Russian, Polish and Czech farm laborers shut Count & Countess Wolff von Metternich in their Westphalian castle, organized an impromptu commune. Said one of the Russians: "For five years we watched them eat eggs. Now we eat eggs...
When Jacques Offenbach's operetta La Belle Hélène was first performed in Paris in the days of Empress Eugenie. Prince Metternich took one horrified gander at its neo-Homeric ribaldry, primly led his wife to the nearest exit. But La Belle Hélène outlived Metternich. Last week, in a new version called Helen Goes to Troy, a lavish $140,000 Manhattan production that seemed likely to become Broadway's latest smash-hit musical, it was still going strong...
...part of the Great Design of Henry IV of France and his minister Sully. Rousseau included it in his Project for Perpetual Peace. Mild William Penn was for it. So was Abbe de Saint-Pierre. But not until 1815, when the reactionary genius of Prince Metternich bore splotchy fruit in what has accurately been called the Unholy Alliance, was international policing really put to the test of action...
Came 1848, and both Italy and France kicked over the traces; revolt spread to Austria and Germany and Prince Metternich, for 33 years the mastermind of the Alliance, fled his country; the Unholy Alliance was dead. Yet its influence on the minds of men lived on. For this despotic use of international force by a club of contented war-winners gave the whole ideal of international police an unsavory aura which lasted well into the 20th Century...