Epilogue

Abstract

There were to be occasional echoes of the exchange in later days. Early in 1787 Joseph, receiving in audience a delegation from the Netherlands told them, not precisely very tactfully, that it was a great pity that the exchange had not taken place after all.¹ Later in the year Noailles, still the French ambassador, reported that Joseph again was thinking in terms of acquiring Bavaria. ² Two years later there was a newspaper report to the effect that an exchange of Bavaria for the Netherlands was imminent. ³ But by this time the Emperor’s health had broken down, he had suffered a disaster in the Balkans, and it is most unlikely that he would have courted new complications. The ghost of the exchange was not exorcised even when Joseph went to his grave. In 1792, at a meeting of the Council of State in Vienna, the minister Spielmann proposed that if Prussia were to acquire further territory in Poland, as it was on the point of doing, Austria would compensate itself by putting through the exchange. Lehrbach was consulted about the possibility of renewing the project and answered that Karl Theodor was still to be had in return for a crown, but Kaunitz did not think that anything could be done at this time. ⁴ There would, however, be no other times. The Netherlands, which had revolted against Joseph in 1789, had been subdued by Austrian troops, but were on the point of being once and for all severed from Austria by the victorious armies of the French Revolution. There would now be nothing to exchange.