Kaunitz, WENZELIUS ANTHONY, PRINCE VON

Kaunitz, WENZELIUS ANTHONY, PRINCE VON, Count of Rietberg, Austrian statesman, was born at Vienna on 2d February 1711, and began his public career under Charles VI. Maria Theresa employed him on diplomatic missions to the courts of Rome, Florence, and Turin, and then appointed him minister to the governor of the Austrian Netherlands. He laid the foundations of his permanent fame as a diplomatist in 1748 at the congress of Aix-la-Chapelle. As Austrian ambassador at the French court in 1750–52 he succeeded in converting the century-long enmity of the two states into relations of amity and goodwill. In 1753 Kaunitz was appointed state chancellor, and in 1756 chancellor for the Netherlands and Italy, and for almost forty years continued to have the principal direction of Austrian politics. On account of the part he played in the affairs of Europe he was jocularly called the European coach-driver. As a man he was very vain and confident of his own abilities, narrow in his political views, regarding exclusively the supposed interests of Austria, yet sincere and upright according to his notions of duty. He took a very active part in the ecclesiastical reforms of Joseph II., and was always an earnest and liberal patron of the arts and sciences: he founded the art school of Vienna, and several academies in Lombardy and the Low Countries. He retired from public life when Francis II. ascended the throne, and died 27th June 1794. See Lives by Hormayr (in Der österreichische Plutarch, vol. vi.) and Beer (1872).