Metternich and the Anglo-Neapolitan Sulphur Crisis of 1840

Abstract

Historians generally depict the Italian peninsula after the Congress of Vienna as primarily under the influence of the Habsburg Empire. It is surprising, therefore, that some 150 years after the death of one of the most influential figures of the period, the Austrian Chancellor Clemens Wenzel Lothar Nepomuk Prince von Metternich (d. 1859), there is still no comprehensive study of his Italian policies, even though such a study would throw important new light on the final stage of Metternich's career at the Viennese Chancellery from 1830 to 1848. This paper addresses only a few months in this period, but it draws on the archives in Vienna, London, Moscow, Berlin, Munich, Brussels, Prague and Děčín to show that, although Metternich's Austria played a critically important role in the Italian politics, its influence in the southern part of the peninsula was considerably lower than is generally assumed. In fact, as will be shown, in this region the conservative central European monarchy had to share its influence with Great Britain and France. Nor did the two liberal powers automatically regard this area as an exclusive sphere of Habsburg influence, as became evident a quarter a century after the Congress during the so-called Sulphur Crisis in 1840, when a dispute between Great Britain and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies about the control over the production of the Sicilian sulphur led to a serious crisis that was finally solved by the mediation of France. As we shall see, Austria was excluded from the management of this crisis both because the British foreign Secretary, Henry John Temple Lord Palmerston, did not want to allow Metternich to play the role of arbitrator and because the Austrian influence over the court of Naples was in reality very weak.