The Congress of Vienna and the political press

The Congress of Vienna is one of the historical key events of the 19th century. The attempt undertaken in the Austrian capital in 1814 and 1815 to create a European peace order that was supposed to guarantee security and stability holds new relevance particularly in our days of a Europe that is growing together. In view of this relevance and the approaching anniversary, an analysis of how the Congress was presented to the Viennese public will add a completely new aspect to existing research results in this field. The Congress is depicted most vividly by the political newspapers, which communicated its political decisions as well as the accompanying social programme. Whereas previous research assumed that the only two Viennese political newspapers, the `Österreichischer Beobachter` and the `Wiener Zeitung` only served to entertain and distract the public, this project will suggest that in fact these papers must be regarded as media of political communication: at a time when the importance of public opinion was long recognized, they offered a means of informing and influencing their readers - particularly through seemingly mundane descriptions of festivities. A detailed analysis of the Viennese newspapers` coverage of the Congress will show the extent to which these means were used, where they had their limits, and how the role of newspapers in the process of communication between the government and the political public must be understood in this context. As a third source, the Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung` will be examined, which was admitted and relatively widely spread in Austria despite its Bavarian origin. An analysis of this newspaper is therefore indispensable for obtaining a comprehensive picture of the information accessible to the Viennese reader. However, the project will not only examine the political newspapers as a mirror of events and reflect their subjects, its main focus will instead be on a comparative analysis of the content and mode of the reports in the three newspapers, using also formal and quantitative criteria. This analysis will be based on a detailed description of the Austrian government`s press policy: the goal is to elucidate the strategies adopted vis vis towards Austrian newspapers and the practice of censorship in general, also taking into account the theoretical reflections on the press of protagonists like Friedrich Gentz and Metternich in order to display their principles, motives and concepts in this area. Secondly, the project will study the range and number of readers and the reception of the newspapers. It is only on this basis that it can investigate how the government`s policy was implemented through the newspapers and determine the political significance of information and non-information. This approach offers a way to identify opportunities and shortfalls with regard to integrating the reading public into the proceedings of the Congress by using newspapers as a line of communication. The scientific investigation of this long-neglected aspect of the Congress of Vienna can thus fill an academic void.

With this project we gained important new insights into the history of the Congress of Vienna and into the field of history of media of the early 19th century. We were able to shed light on the so far hardly researched role of newspapers for the Austrian government and its citizens as well as on the relationship between government and public in the years 1809 to 1819.We pointed out the balancing act of the authorities between a change to a more libertine active press policy as a measure of relevance for domestic and foreign policy on the one hand and the missing willingness to accept the subjects as responsible citizens on the other hand. In addition to this the government had to face the problem that all permitted reading was interpreted as convenient to it or even as its own position. Against this background the years around the Congress of Vienna were a constant struggle for a successful press policy on the part of the Austrian government.During the Congress the necessity of political consideration was especially great. Only little news about the negotiations was given, but this had an especially strong effect. At the same time, political messages were continuously submitted via reports of festivities. They conveyed not facts but soft factors such as peace, harmony and unity of the allies and presented power structures. In contrast to the prevailing view that the two political Viennese newspapers served the sole purpose of entertaining and distracting the public, we can now prove the role of these dailies as media of political communication. These papers provided a forum to inform (to the extent the authorities wanted) as well as to influence their readers. By this means the foreign newspapers could not become obsolete for the public as the Austrian government had originally intended. But if the foreign press did not want to leave it at the officially available news, it was frequently dependent on rumors. The resumption of a classical topic like the Congress of Vienna in the sense of a modern political cultural history (Kulturgeschichte der Politik) contributed to establishing it as a research topic of high actual relevance within the historical sciences, but also within neighbouring disciplines. Together with two other FWF-projects we founded the Projektverbund Wiener Kongress, which is represented with its homepage www.wiener-kongress.at and which has been able to win numerous partners. At the end of the duration of the project there exists a strong international network, which can advance towards the jubilee years 2014 and 2015 and which will approach a broad public with the numerous events and the publications planned to mark this occasion. In this way, the project makes a substantial contribution to make the Congress of Vienna known as a topic of importance for the cultural European memory.