This was a red rag to the Russian bull. Vladimir Titov, the Russian ambassador in Constantinople, demanded that the Sultan cease negotiations with the revolutionaries and restore order in Wallachia, or Russia would intervene. This was enough to bring about a Turkish volte-face at the start of September. A new commissioner, Fuad Efendi, was sent to put an end to the revolt with the help of the Russian General Alexander Duhamel. Fuad crossed into Wallachia and camped outside Bucharest with 12,000 Turkish soldiers, while Duhamel brought up the 30,000 Russian troops who had been mobilized in Bessarabia. On 25 September they moved together into Bucharest and easily defeated the small groups of rebels who fought them in the streets. The revolution was over.
The Russians took control of the city and carried out a series of mass arrests, forcing thousands of Romanians to flee abroad. British citizens too were arrested. No public meetings were allowed by the pro-Russian government installed in power by the occupying troops. To write on political matters became a punishable offence; even personal letters were perused by the police. ‘A system of espionage has been established here,’ Colquhoun reported. ‘No person is allowed to converse on politics, German and French newspapers are prohibited … The Turkish commissioner feels compelled to enjoin all to cease speaking on political subjects in public places.’40
Having restored order in the principalities, the Tsar demanded for his services a new convention with the Ottomans to increase Russian control of the territories. This time his conditions were extortionate: the Russian military occupation was to last for seven years; the two powers would appoint the rulers of the principalities; and Russian troops would be allowed to pass through Wallachia to crush the ongoing Hungarian revolution in Transylvania. Suspecting that the Russians aimed at nothing less than the annexation of the principalities, Stratford Canning urged the Turks to stand firm against the Tsar. But he could not promise British intervention if it came to a war between Turkey and Russia. He called on Palmerston to deter Russia and demonstrate support for the Ottoman Empire by sending in a fleet – a measure he regarded as essential to prevent the outbreak of hostilities. If Palmerston had followed his advice, Britain might have gone to war with Russia six years before the Crimean War. But once again the Foreign Secretary was not prepared to act. Despite his hard line against Russia, Palmerston (for the moment) was prepared to trust the Tsar’s motives in the principalities, did not think that he would try to annexe them, and perhaps even welcomed the Russian restoration of order in the increasingly tumultuous and chaotic Ottoman and Habsburg lands.
Without support from Britain, the Turkish government had little option but to negotiate with the Russians. By the Act of Balta Liman, signed in April 1849, the Tsar got most of his demands: the rulers of the principalities would be chosen by the Russians and the Turks; the boyar assemblies would be replaced altogether by advisory councils nominated and overseen by the two powers; and the Russian occupation would last until 1851. The provisions of the Act amounted in effect to the restoration of Russian control and to a substantial reduction of the autonomy previously enjoyed by the principalities, even under the restrictions of the Règlement organique.41 The Tsar concluded that the principalities were henceforth areas of Russian influence, that the Turks retained them only at his discretion, and that even after 1851 he would still be able to enter them at will to force more concessions from the Porte.
The success of the Russian intervention in the Danubian principalities influenced the Tsar’s decision to intervene in Hungary in June 1849. The Hungarian revolution had begun in March 1848, when, inspired by the events in France and Germany, the Hungarian Diet, led by the brilliant orator Lajos Kossuth, proclaimed Hungary’s autonomy from the Habsburg Empire and passed a series of reforms, abolishing serfdom and establishing Hungarian control of the national budget and Hungarian regiments in the imperial army. Faced with a popular revolution in Vienna, the Austrian government at first accepted Hungarian autonomy, but once the revolution in the capital had been suppressed the imperial authorities ordered the dissolution of the Hungarian Diet and declared war on Hungary. Supported by the Slovak, German and Ruthenian minorities of Hungary, and by a large number of Polish and Italian volunteers who were equally opposed to Habsburg rule, the Hungarians were more than a match for the Austrian forces, and in April 1849, after a series of military stalemates, they in turn declared a war of independence against Austria. The newly installed 18-year-old Emperor Franz Joseph appealed to the Tsar to intervene.
Nicholas agreed to act against the revolution without conditions. It was basically a question of solidarity with the Holy Alliance – the collapse of the Austrian Empire would have dramatic implications for the European balance of power – but there was also a connected issue of Russia’s self-interest. The Tsar could not afford to stand aside and watch the spread of revolutionary movements in central Europe that might lead to a new uprising in Poland. The Hungarian army had many Polish exiles in its ranks. Some of its best generals were Poles, including General Jozef Bem, one of the main military leaders of the 1830 Polish uprising and in 1848–9 the commander of the victorious Hungarian forces in Transylvania. Unless the Hungarian revolution was defeated, there was every danger of its spreading to Galicia (a largely Polish territory controlled by Austria), which would reopen the Polish Question in the Russian Empire.
On 17 June 1849, 190,000 Russian troops crossed the Hungarian frontier into Slovakia and Transylvania. They were under the command of General Paskevich, the leader of the punitive campaign against the Poles in 1831. The Russians carried out a series of ferocious repressions against the population, but themselves succumbed in enormous numbers to disease, especially cholera, in a campaign lasting just eight weeks. Vastly outnumbered by the Russians, most of the Hungarian army surrendered at Vilagos on 13 August. But about 5,000 soldiers (including 800 Poles) fled to the Ottoman Empire – mostly to Wallachia, where some Turkish forces were fighting against the Russian occupation in defiance of the Balta Liman convention.
The Tsar favoured clemency for the Hungarian leaders. He was opposed to the brutal reprisals carried out by the Austrians. But he was determined to pursue the Polish refugees, in particular the Polish generals in the Hungarian army who might become the leaders of another insurrection for the liberation of Poland from Russia. On 28 August the Russians demanded from the Turkish government the extradition of those Poles who were subjects of the Tsar. The Austrians demanded the extradition of the Hungarians, including Kossuth, who had been welcomed by the Turks. International law provided for the extradition of criminals, but the Turks did not regard these exiles in those terms. They were pleased to have these anti-Russian soldiers on their soil and granted them political asylum, as liberal Western states had done on certain conditions for the Polish refugees in 1831. Encouraged by the British and the French, the Turks refused to bow to the threats of the Russians and the Austrians, who broke off relations with the Porte. Responding to Turkish calls for military aid, in October the British sent their Malta squadron to Besika Bay, just outside the Dardanelles, where they were later joined by a French fleet. The Western powers were on the verge of war against Russia.
By this stage the British public was up in arms about the Hungarian refugees. Their heroic struggle against the mighty tsarist tyranny had captured the British imagination and once again fired up its passions against Russia. In the press, the Hungarian revolution was idealized as a mirror image of the Glorious Revolution of 1688, when the British Parliament had overthrown King James II and established a constitutional monarchy. Kossuth was seen as a very ‘British type’ of revolutionary – a liberal gentleman and supporter of enlightened aristocracy, a fighter for the principles of parliamentary rule and constitutional government (two years later he was welcomed as a hero by enormous crowds in Britain when he went there for a speaking tour). The Hungarian and Polish refugees were seen as romantic freedom-fighters. Karl Marx, who had come to London as a political exile in 1849, began a campaign against Russia as the
enemy of liberty. Reports of repression and atrocities by Russian troops in Hungary and the Danubian principalities were received with disgust, and the British public was delighted when Palmerston announced that he was sending warships to the Dardanelles to help the Turks stand up against the Tsar. This was the sort of robust foreign policy – a readiness to intervene in any place around the world in defence of British liberal values – that the middle class expected from its government, as the Don Pacifico affair would show.g
The mobilization of the British and French fleets persuaded Nicholas to reach a compromise with the Ottoman authorities on the refugee issue. The Turks undertook to keep the Polish refugees a long way from the Russian border – a concession broadly in line with the principles of political asylum recognized by Western states – and the Tsar dropped his demand for extradition.
But just as a settlement was being reached, news arrived from Constantinople that Stratford Canning had improvised a reading of the 1841 Convention so as to allow the British fleet to move into the shelter of the Dardanelles if heavy winds in Besika Bay demanded this – exactly what transpired in fact when its ships arrived at the end of October. Nicholas was furious. Titov was ordered to inform the Porte that Russia had the same rights in the Bosporus as Britain had just claimed in the Dardanelles – a brilliant rejoinder because from the Bosporus Russian ships would be able to attack Constantinople long before the British fleet could reach them from the remote Dardanelles. Palmerston backed down, apologized to Russia, and reaffirmed his government’s commitment to the convention. The allied fleets were sent away, and the threat of war was averted – once again.
Before Palmerston’s apology arrived, however, the Tsar gave a lecture to the British envoy in St Petersburg. What he said reveals a lot about the Tsar’s state of mind just four years before he went to war against the Western powers:
I do not understand the conduct of Lord Palmerston. If he chooses to wage war against me, let him declare it freely and loyally. It will be a great misfortune for the two countries, but I am resigned to it and ready to accept it. But he should stop playing tricks on me right and left. Such a policy is unworthy of a great power. If the Ottoman Empire still exists, this is due to me. If I pull back the hand that protects and sustains it, it will collapse in an instant.
On 17 December, the Tsar instructed Admiral Putiatin to prepare a plan for a surprise attack on the Dardanelles in the event of another crisis over Russia’s presence in the principalities. He wanted to be sure that the Black Sea Fleet could prevent the British entering the Dardanelles again. As a sign of his determination, he gave approval to the construction of four expensive new war steamers required by the plan.42
Palmerston’s decision to back down from conflict was a severe blow to Stratford Canning, who had wanted decisive military action to deter the Tsar from undermining Turkish sovereignty in the principalities. After 1849, Canning became even more determined to strengthen Ottoman authority in Moldavia and Wallachia by speeding up the process of liberal reform in these regions – despite his growing doubts about the Tanzimat in general – and bolstering the Turkish armed forces to counteract the growing menace of Russia. The importance he attached to the principalities was shared increasingly by Palmerston, who was moved by the crisis of 1848–9 to support a more aggressive defence of Turkey’s interests against Russia.
The next time the Tsar invaded the principalities, to force Turkey to submit to his will in the Holy Lands dispute, it would lead to war.
4
The End of Peace in Europe
The Great Exhibition opened in Hyde Park on 1 May 1851. Six million people, a third of the entire population of Britain at that time, would pass through the mammoth exhibition halls in the specially contructed Crystal Palace, the largest glasshouse yet built, and marvel at the 13,000 exhibits – manufactures, handicrafts and various other objects from around the world. Coming as it did after two decades of social and political upheaval, the Great Exhibition seemed to hold the promise of a more prosperous and peaceful age based upon the British principles of industrialism and free trade. The architectural wonder of the Crystal Palace was itself proof of British manufacturing ingenuity, a fitting place to house an exhibition whose aim was to show that Britain held the lead in almost every field of industry. It symbolized the Pax Britannica which the British expected to dispense to Europe and the world.
The only possible threat to peace appeared to come from France. Through a coup d’état on 2 December 1851, the anniversary of Napoleon’s coronation as Emperor in 1804, Louis-Napoleon, the President of the Second Republic, overthrew the constitution and established himself as dictator. By a national referendum the following November, the Second Republic became the Second Empire, and on 2 December 1852 Louis-Napoleon became the Emperor of the French, Napoleon III.
The appearance of a new French emperor put the great powers on alert. In Britain, there were fears of a Napoleonic revival. MPs demanded the recall of the Lisbon Squadron to guard the English Channel against the French. Lord Raglan, the future leader of the British forces in the Crimean War, spent the summer of 1852 planning the defences of London against a potential attack by the French navy, and that remained the top priority of British naval planning throughout 1853. Count Buol, the Austrian Foreign Minister, demanded confirmation of Napoleon’s peaceful intentions. The Tsar wanted him to make a humiliating disclaimer of any aggressive plans, and promised Austria 60,000 troops if it was attacked by France. In an attempt to reassure them all, Napoleon made a declaration in Bordeaux in October 1852: ‘Mistrustful people say, the empire means war, but I say, the empire means peace.’1
Louis-Napoleon, 1854
In truth, there were reasons to be mistrustful. It was hardly likely that Napoleon III would remain content with the existing settlement of Europe, which had been set up to contain France after the Napoleonic Wars. His genuine and extensive popularity among the French rested on his stirring of their Bonapartist memories, even though in almost every way he was inferior to his uncle. Indeed, with his large and awkward body, short legs, moustache and goatee beard, he looked more like a banker than a Bonaparte (‘extremely short, but with a head and bust which ought to belong to a much taller man’, is how Queen Victoria described him in her diary after she had met him for the first time in 18552).
Napoleon’s foreign policy was largely driven by his need to play to this Bonapartist tradition. He aimed to restore France to a position of respect and influence abroad, if not to the glory of his uncle’s reign, by revising the 1815 settlement and reshaping Europe as a family of liberal nation states along the lines supposedly envisaged by Napoleon I. This was an aim he thought he could achieve by forging an alliance with Britain, the traditional enemy of France. His close political ally and Minister of the Interior, the Duc de Persigny, who had spent some time in London in 1852, persuaded him that Britain was no longer dominated by the aristocracy but a new ‘bourgeois power’ that was set to dominate the Continent. By allying with Britain, France would be able to ‘develop a great and glorious foreign policy and avenge our past defeats more effectively than through any gain that we might make by refighting the battle of Waterloo’.3
Russia was the one country the French could fight to restore their national pride. The memory of Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow, which had done so much to hasten the collapse of the First Empire, the subsequent military defeats and the Russian occupation of Paris were constant sources of pain and humiliation to the French. Russia was the major force behind the 1815 settlement and the restoration of the Bourbon dynasty in France. The Tsar was the enemy of liberty and a major obstacle to the development of free nation states on the European continent. He was also the only sovereign not to recognize the new Napoleon as emperor. Britain, Austria and Prussia were all prepared to grant him that status, albeit reluctantly in the case of the last two, but Nicholas refused, on the grounds that emperors were made by God, not elected by referendums. The Tsar showed his contempt for Napoleon by ad
dressing him as ‘mon ami’ rather than ‘mon frère’, the customary greeting to another member of the European family of ruling sovereigns.h Some of Napoleon’s advisers, Persigny in particular, wanted him to seize on the insult and force a break with Russia. But the French Emperor would not begin his reign with a personal quarrel, and he passed it off with the remark: ‘God gives us brothers, but we choose our friends.’4
For Napoleon, the conflict with Russia in the Holy Lands served as a means of reuniting France after the divisions of 1848–9. The revolutionary Left could be reconciled to the coup d’état and the Second Empire if it was engaged in a patriotic fight for liberty against the ‘gendarme of Europe’. As for the Catholic Right, it had long been pushing for a crusade against the Orthodox heresy that was threatening Christendom and French civilization.
It was in this context that Napoleon appointed the extreme Catholic La Valette as French ambassador to Constantinople. La Valette was part of a powerful clerical lobby at the Quai d’Orsay, the French Foreign Ministry, which used its influence to raise the stakes in the Holy Lands dispute, according to Persigny.
Our foreign policy was often troubled by a clerical lobby (coterie cléricale ) which wormed its way into the secret recesses of the Foreign Ministry. The 2 December had not succeeded in dislodging it. On the contrary, it became even more audacious, profiting from our preoccupation with domestic matters to entangle our diplomacy in the complications of the Holy Places, where it hailed its infantile successes as national triumphs.
The Crimean War Page 13