When Napoleon returned and tried to re-establish himself in 1815, Prussian forces under Field Marshal Blücher in cooperation with Wellington ensured the Anglo-German victory of 18 June; called Waterloo in Britain but, fittingly, La Belle Alliance in Germany. Returning to Paris in vengeful mood, Blücher was only narrowly dissuaded from destroying those prominent monuments to Napoleon’s military glory, the Pont de Iéna and the Vendôme column. Impoverished Prussia proved the most implacable and exacting of the Allies: her requisitions on the French population were extremely harsh. Only reluctantly did she yield to pressure from the other Allies to moderate her demands for war reparations, agreeing in 1817 to the reduction of the occupying forces, then to an early end to the agreed five-year occupation period. The last allied troops left France in November 1818.
The Peace Settlement of 1815
After a quarter-century of exhausting wars against France, the victorious Allies met at Vienna and redrew the map of Europe. Prussia, the strongest German state north of the River Main, but the least of the five Great Powers, was compensated for losing many of her Polish territories to Russia with lands that included the west bank of the Rhine, so giving her a frontier with France. The other Allies thus made her the bulwark against any renewed French aggression. France was stripped of all her gains since 1790, some strategic parcels of land on her north-eastern frontier, and Nice and Savoy to the south-east. Prussia now held the German-speaking Rhineland, which the French had regarded as within their ‘natural frontiers’. However, Prussian demands that France should also cede German-speaking Alsace and Lorraine on her eastern frontier were ruled out by Britain and Russia, who were unwilling to jeopardize the restored Bourbon monarchy in France by excessive demands.
Prussia’s newly acquired wealthy west German provinces were very different from the poor, flat, sandy acres of old Prussia east of the River Elbe, farmed by her Protestant squires and their peasants. Integration presented problems. Yet from Prussia’s beginnings her ruling Hohenzollern dynasty, styled kings only since 1701, had governed a varying agglomeration of territories with no natural frontiers. More awkward was the separation of her eastern and western provinces by the lands of other princes. Prussia had survived and grown, but had become a kingdom split in two.
‘Germany’ remained a geographical expression describing a patchwork of independent states ruled by kings, electors and dukes. A divided Germany suited the Great Powers, for each feared any other dominating central Europe. The French had reorganized Germany in their own interests, reducing some 360 petty states and free cities to three dozen. The Allies at Vienna redrew some boundaries but, for all their conservatism, did not attempt the impossible task of restoring the old order. To ensure stability in the German states they created a federal body, the German Confederation, presided over by the Habsburg Emperor of Austria, ruler of the most powerful central European state. All member states of the Confederation sent representatives to an assembly (called the Federal Diet) at Frankfurt-am-Main. In practice decisions in the Diet depended on the agreement of its two most powerful members, old rivals Austria and Prussia, while attempts to strengthen its powers always foundered on the reluctance of the smaller states to surrender any of their cherished sovereignty. Those who had hoped for some more effective form of German union were disappointed.
Nevertheless, the Vienna settlement and the determination of the victors to maintain it gave Europe nearly four decades of peace. Only when their cooperation broke down in the 1850s did it become possible for a new generation of rulers to bury the 1815 settlement and redraw the map of Europe in pursuit of their territorial ambitions. Those ambitions included unquenched French aspirations and Prussian hopes of consolidating her territories. They would feed upon the growth of nationalism among Italians and Germans.
The Ferment of Nationalism
In conquering Europe, French armies had seen themselves as carrying their revolutionary ideas of liberty and equality with them; but, to their indignation, the peoples they exploited as inferiors resented occupation, and began in varying degrees to assert their identities.
For most Germans, ‘patriotism’ meant loyalty to their state and prince. Yet a sense of German identity was rooted in Lutheran tradition and had been fostered by the writings of particular historians, journalists and philosophers. Fichte’s Addresses to the German Nation, delivered at the Berlin Academy during the occupation, had limited immediate impact, but demonstrated that French occupation was the major stimulus to German nationalism. If nationalism preached community of interest between people sharing the same language, culture and history, in practice it was virtually defined by hatred of the French and resentment of their domination.
From 1811 the nationalist writer Friedrich Jahn organized gymnastic societies which combined enthusiasm for strenuous drill in physical exercise with that for creation of a German national state. Ernst Moritz Arndt, poet and advocate of German nationalism, preached that the French were the ‘hereditary enemy’. After the end of what they styled the ‘War of Liberation’, student associations sought to perpetuate enthusiasm for a German nation. Yet the restored German rulers acted to suppress the radical ideas of the nationalists, which threatened to bring social upheaval and to topple their thrones. In the reactionary post-war years the student associations and gymnastic societies were banned. Police action, surveillance and censorship curbed nationalist agitation.
When revolution broke out afresh in Europe in 1830 it was unrest in France, not Germany, that threatened international peace. In July Parisians overthrew the reactionary Bourbon Charles X and replaced him with the ‘Citizen King’, Louis-Philippe of the House of Orléans. The German Confederation took alarm as revolution began spreading across its frontiers. Simultaneously, the Belgians rose up to throw off the rule of the King of the Netherlands, declared their independence and called upon France for assistance. Demonstrators in Paris clamoured for the French troops to march to the Belgians’ aid, demanding the annexation of Belgium and the left bank of the Rhine into the bargain. The King of the Netherlands in his turn called on the allied powers for help. When Prussia promptly mobilized 80,000 men, Louis-Philippe warned that if they set foot in Belgium, ‘it’s war’. The confrontation was defused by a conference in London, at which the Great Powers agreed to recognize Belgian independence and guaranteed the neutrality of the new state. By restraint and compromise, a European war was avoided.
A new war scare flared up in 1840, not over European boundary disputes but about French ambitions in Egypt, which were thwarted by the other four powers. The French ministry, headed by Adolphe Thiers, reacted with ostentatious military preparations. A storm of bellicose indignation was unleashed in the Paris press. A revolutionary war to break the domination of the absolutist powers, to overthrow the 1815 settlement and retake the Rhine frontier was openly advocated to chants of the Marseillaise, with its bloodthirsty sentiments towards foreigners. French nationalism and nostalgia for la gloire increasingly expressed themselves through the cult of Napoleon among a generation of young men who felt stifled under the monarchy and had no recollection of the conscription, heavy taxes and endless bloodshed that had wearied France of Napoleon’s rule. Thiers, an eminent historian, exploited the legend for the benefit of the bourgeois monarchy, and was arranging to have the great man’s remains returned from St Helena for ceremonial entombment at Les Invalides.
Yet by threatening war to reassert French prestige, Thiers stirred a hornets’ nest across the Rhine, where reaction was resolute. The Federal Diet approved a Prussian proposal to arm German fortresses and muster troops. Prussia and Austria agreed to come to each other’s aid if attacked by France, and popular feeling reached fever pitch. The crisis popularized poems and songs expressing German sentiments: Becker’s ‘Rheinlied’ (‘They shall not have the free German Rhine’), Schneckenburger’s poem ‘Die Wacht am Rhein’ (later set to music by Carl Wilhelm) and Hoffmann von Fallersleben’s ‘Deutschland über alles’. Arndt called for the invasion of
France and the annexation of Alsace and Lorraine, and his theme was echoed in the German press.
Unlike in 1870, the powers drew back from the brink. Louis-Philippe removed Thiers, but the revelation of the depths of Franco-German antagonism had been startling. Another legacy of the crisis was the ring of fortifications that Thiers started constructing around Paris to defend the French capital in the event of a new invasion.
After the 1840 crisis German nationalism became more deeply rooted, even as new roads, canals, railways and the electric telegraph broke down barriers of time and space between German communities. The growth of the press diffused nationalism beyond its narrow academic and middle-class base and broadened political participation. Prussia lifted the ban on gymnastic societies in 1842. Like choral societies and shooting clubs, they flourished, promoting nationalism throughout the German states at festivals which provided a platform for Liberal politicians to urge the benefits of a united state that could throw off the political and economic constraints imposed by the fragmentation of the German-speaking lands. For, despite political repression, economic cooperation between German states was becoming a reality. Since 1818 Prussia had worked to abolish restrictive tariff barriers in her own interest. Her initiatives, and others in the south, resulted in the creation of a German Customs Union in 1834, forming a low-tariff trade area under Prussian domination which added more member states over the next two decades. Closer economic integration boosted Liberal and nationalist hopes that internal political barriers might also come down. In 1848 the advocates of greater German unity were presented with an arena for their ambitions.
Napoleon III Takes Power
That year revolutions ignited by economic distress swept Europe. Paris, that powder keg of revolutionary passions, erupted in February. King Louis-Philippe, despised for his cautious and inglorious foreign policy, abdicated and fled to England. The Second Republic was proclaimed by Paris radicals, but France became embroiled in internal troubles. Such was the need felt in the country for a man of order that the presidential election held on 10 December produced a result undreamt of by the revolutionaries of February when they introduced universal male suffrage: a Bonaparte was restored to power in France.
Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte was elected President of France by 5.5 million votes: far ahead of his nearest rival. Born in 1808, he was the nephew of the great Emperor, on whose knee he had been dandled as a child and whose legend he revered. After Waterloo Louis had lived in exile in Switzerland with his mother Hortense Beauharnais, and spoke French with a German accent. During disturbances in Italy in 1831 he had sided with the revolutionaries against the Austrian regime there. After both his elder brother and his cousin, ‘Napoleon II’, died in 1831–2, Louis assumed the role of Bonapartist pretender to the French throne. His pamphlets, notably Napoleonic Ideas (1839), promoted the myth Napoleon had woven around himself in exile on St Helena: of Napoleon the Liberal, Napoleon the friend of nationalities working for a united Europe, who had been thwarted by the reactionary monarchies. However, his first attempts to exploit his uncle’s legend against King Louis-Philippe ended in farce. An attempted military rising at Strasbourg in 1836 was a debacle and earned him a sentence of exile. A second attempt, a landing at Boulogne in 1840 with a boatload of volunteers and mercenaries who had joined him in London, was quickly overpowered by royal troops. This time Louis was imprisoned in the damp northern fortress of Ham. He escaped disguised as a workman in 1846 and fled to London where, supplied with money by his rich friends and English mistress, he was well placed to take advantage of events unfolding in 1848.
In the presidential campaign his supporters adeptly promoted the power of the Bonaparte name, using images that appealed to classes who had never before had the vote. Not for the last time, bourgeois professional politicians underestimated the powers of this unimpressive figure, whose tendency to stoutness, drooping eyelids, and hesitant, heavily accented delivery belied his political skills and determination. As Prince-President, he swore to defend the Republic and toured the country, promoting himself as the only man who could defend both liberty and order and reconcile internal divisions that lately had made France seem ungovernable. Continuing radical disturbances rallied conservatives to him as a man of order. Catholics approved of a new education law favouring religious schools, and of the despatch of an expeditionary force to protect the Pope from revolutionaries at Rome. Louis-Napoleon’s championship of universal male suffrage against the bourgeois politicians of the National Assembly who tried to restrict it made him appear a defender of democracy.
His appeal to many groups, combined with shrewd appointments of supporters to key posts, put him in a strong position to extend his presidency, which was due to end in 1852. The National Assembly, however, blocked his attempt to achieve this legally. Louis, with careful planning by his inner circle and the support of reliable generals and his police chief, staged a coup d’état on the night of 2 December 1851, the anniversary of his uncle’s victory at Austerlitz. The Assembly was locked out; its leading politicians were arrested and imprisoned.
‘Operation Rubicon’ did not go as smoothly as planned, however. On 3 December a Deputy of the National Assembly, Dr Baudin, was killed on a Paris barricade. Next day over a thousand protestors manned barricades in the city. Troops opened fire and killed dozens of them and bystanders too. In the provinces over 26,000 people were arrested, half of whom were deported, banished or imprisoned. Throughout the nineteen years of his rule, the ‘crime of 2 December’ blighted Louis-Napoleon’s attempts to win over a hard core of opponents to accept the legitimacy of his regime. Nevertheless, the great majority of French voters supported him when he sought popular endorsement of his coup. He had brought something new to European politics; a dictatorship resting on popular approval, but supported by strict censorship, police surveillance and electoral manipulation. Pressing his advantage, in November 1852 he sought approval for restoration of the Empire and got it by 8 million votes to 250,000, with 2 million abstentions. With effect from 2 December 1852 he declared himself Napoleon III, Emperor of the French, and shortly promulgated a constitution that preserved the forms but not the substance of parliamentary government.
To calm fears at home and abroad that the return of the Empire meant war, he declared at Bordeaux in October 1852 that ‘The Empire means peace’, and that his focus would be on internal improvements like building roads, railways, dockyards and canals. He was careful to cultivate his uncle’s old nemesis, Great Britain. Despite his peaceful professions, he cultivated the army, recreated an elite Imperial Guard, and frequently appeared in military uniform, in deliberate contrast to the black-coated dullness of Louis-Philippe’s court. Like all French governments since Waterloo, he nurtured hopes of burying the 1815 treaties. Unlike the Bourbon monarchs, but like the republicans of 1848, he sympathized with the cause of nationalities in Europe. He might be expected to act in their favour where opportunities arose.
Broken Dreams of German Unity
Meanwhile, the Liberal and nationalist politicians who had ridden the wave of revolution across the German states in 1848 had seemed tantalizingly close to creating a new German nation. After bloody riots in Berlin in March, King Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia sought to conciliate the crowds by wearing the black, red and gold German nationalist colours and declaring, ‘Henceforth, Prussia is merged into Germany.’ A German Parliament met at Frankfurt in May and drew up a federal constitution for the German states based on universal manhood suffrage.
Hopes that this impressive constitution might be peacefully accepted by the existing states were disappointed. By late 1848 the Prussian government had recovered its nerve: the Liberal ministry was dismissed and the army reentered Berlin. When the Frankfurt Parliament respectfully offered Friedrich Wilhelm the title of German Emperor in April 1849, he refused it. To him, the acceptance of a crown ‘from the gutter’ with a Liberal constitution was anathema. Within weeks a further wave of popular uprisings across Germany demanding th
e Frankfurt constitution was brutally suppressed by Prussian troops commanded by the king’s brother, Prince Wilhelm. By July, Prussian firing squads in Berlin, Saxony and Baden had extinguished revolution throughout Germany.
The defunct Frankfurt Parliament had been frustrated partly because it had no armed forces of its own to enforce its will. Yet its deliberations had shown that German nationalism was no more peaceable than any other variety. The Frankfurt Parliament declared war on Denmark in 1848 when it attempted to incorporate the mixed-race Duchy of Schleswig, which was not even part of the Confederation. Prussia was initially willing to mount an invasion on the German Parliament’s behalf, but had to call an armistice when Russia, Britain and France brought diplomatic pressure to bear. Impotent in the face of Great Power solidarity, the furious Frankfurt Parliament had to accept that Prussia was no longer prepared to fight its German nationalist war.
Sedan 1870- The Eclipse of France Page 2