1848
Page 1
Table of Contents
Title Page
Dedication
PREFACE
Chapter 1 - THE FOREST OF BAYONETS
I
II
Chapter 2 - THE COLLAPSE
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
Chapter 3 - THE SPRINGTIME OF PEOPLES
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
Chapter 4 - THE RED SUMMER
I
II
III
IV
V
Chapter 5 - THE COUNTER-REVOLUTIONARY AUTUMN
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
Chapter 6 - 1849: THE INDIAN SUMMER OF THE REVOLUTION
I
II
III
IV
CONCLUSION
Acknowledgements
NOTES
INDEX
Copyright Page
For Helen, of course,
and for Michael H. Rapport (1917-2007)
and John Bell (1964-2008):
de mémoire glorieuse et éternelle
PREFACE
In 1848 a violent storm of revolutions tore through Europe. With an astounding rapidity, crowds of working-class radicals and middle-class liberals in Paris, Milan, Venice, Naples, Palermo, Vienna, Prague, Budapest, Kraków and Berlin toppled the old regimes and began the task of forging a new, liberal order. Political events so dramatic had not been seen in Europe since the French Revolution of 1789 - and would not be witnessed again until the revolutions of Eastern and Central Europe in 1989, or perhaps the less far-reaching Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. The torrent severely battered the conservative order that had kept peace on the continent since the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, but which in many countries also suppressed dreams of national freedom and constitutional government. The brick-built authoritarian edifice that had imposed itself on Europeans for almost two generations folded under the weight of the insurrections.
The story of 1848 has been retold many times.1 It is a complicated one and telling it poses some interesting challenges. One historian has described it as a problem of ‘historical synchronisation’, 2 but Italians have a much more colourful phrase: ‘un vero quarantotto’ - ‘a real 48’ - which means ‘a right royal mess’.3 While the main purpose is therefore to tell the story and to do so in a way that will hopefully be enjoyed, the book is also driven by the belief that the revolutions of 1848-9 are worth revisiting because they have such contemporary resonance. In general I let the reader draw her or his own conclusions and connections from the evidence and narrative presented here, but every so often I give what I hope will be a helpful nudge. In 1848 the revolutionaries were faced with the problem of constructing liberal, constitutional regimes, while facing issues that are strikingly modern. For the Germans, Italians, Hungarians, Romanians, Poles, Czechs, Croats and Serbs, the year was to be the ‘Springtime of Peoples’, a chance to assert their own sense of national identity and to gain political recognition. In the cases of the Germans and the Italians, it was an opportunity for national unification under a liberal or even democratic order. Nationalism, therefore, was one issue that came frothing to the surface of European politics in 1848. While rooted in constitutionalism and civil rights, it was a nationalism that, ominously, made little allowance for the legitimacy of claims of other national groups. In many places such narrowness of vision led to bitter ethnic conflict, which in the end helped to destroy the revolutionary regimes of Central and Eastern Europe.
Another problem was the question of constitutions and democracy. The revolutions were scarred almost everywhere by a bitter, often violent, political polarisation. Moderates wanted parliamentary government - but not necessarily to enfranchise everyone - and they were challenged by radicals who wanted democracy - frequently combined with dramatic social reform - without delay. This split between liberals and democrats divided the revolutionary alliance that had so easily toppled the conservative order; and the resulting political polarisation had tragic consequences, not just in 1848, but for the future of liberal government and democracy in many parts of Europe deep into the twentieth century.
A third issue that came boiling to the surface in 1848 and never left the European political agenda was the ‘social question’. The abject misery of both urban and rural people had loomed menacingly in the thirty or so years since the Napoleonic Wars. The poverty was caused by a burgeoning population, which was not yet offset by a corresponding growth in the economy. Governments, however, did little to address the social distress, which was taken up as a cause by a relatively new political current - socialism - in 1848. The revolutions therefore thrust the ‘social question’ firmly and irrevocably into politics. Any subsequent regime, no matter how conservative or authoritarian, ignored it at its peril. In 1848, however, the question of what to do about poverty would prove to be one of the great nemeses of the liberal, revolutionary regimes.
The revolutions were also genuinely European, in the sense that they arose across the continent. Even countries such as Britain and Russia that were not directly affected by insurrections were touched by the impact. This European dimension raises the interesting issue of how far Europe, in its historical development, is merely the sum of its different national parts, or how far those parts are linked by common experience, shared problems and similarities in ideals and aspirations. This question, too, has an important contemporary significance.
This book will explore these issues through a narrative of the events of 1848-9, which will draw on eyewitness accounts, memoirs and a wide range of secondary sources. This is a period of European history that is little explored outside academic texts, yet it is replete with its own drama: many of the images of European revolution - workers and students on barricades, red flags, tricolours - were present in 1848. The insurrections and their repression brought to centre-stage an impressive cast of characters, including: Metternich, the architect of the old conservative order; Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte (later Napoleon III), who became the French Second Republic’s nemesis by trading on his famous uncle’s name; Garibaldi, the red-shirted hero of the struggle for Italian unification; Mazzini, the near-religious inspiration behind Italian democratic republicanism; Bismarck, the Machiavellian dark horse of German history; and Radetzky, the wily, octogenarian Austrian field marshal who might legitimately have claimed to have been the main saviour of the Habsburg Empire. There are others who are perhaps not household names in the English-speaking world, but are no less the stuff of drama: the Croatian commander Jelačić; the fiery Hungarian revolutionary Kossuth; the bespectacled, inspiring Venetian republican Manin; the French historian and poet Lamartine, who had a flair for the dramatic. The 1848 revolutions present a complex and fascinating story, which combines the high politics of diplomacy, state-building and constitution-making with the human tragedy of revolution, war and social misery. Yet, at the same time, they had their truly uplifting and inspiring moments: 1848 was a revolution of hope as well as despair.
1
THE FOREST OF BAYONETS
Underneath a darkening January sky, a convoy of horse-drawn sledges cut trails across a glowing, snow-covered plain. The procession halted at a barrier, the passengers’ passports were inspected by a sergeant and a grizzled old soldier huddling under an oilskin, his rifle slung heavily over his shoulder, raised the barrier: it was the Russian frontier with Prussia. The sledges crunched once again through the snow. Turning his head, the lead passenger, a man named Alexander Herzen, heard a Cossack wish him a happy journey, the soldier holding the bridle of his
own hardy mount, its shaggy coat hanging with icicles.1 Herzen did not know it then, but he would not see Russia again. It was January 1847 and he was embarking on a European journey, accompanied by his wife Natalie, their three children, his mother, and two nannies. He was a member of the Russian gentry but also a socialist, escaping the stifling environment of life under Tsar Nicholas I and eager to learn more about ‘the West’, to make comparisons with Russia and, he hoped in vain, to return with the fruits of his learning.2
I
The Europe through which the Herzens were about to journey was a continent on the edge of an uncertain future. Politically, it was dominated by a conservative order. Of the five great powers - Austria, Prussia, Russia, France and Britain - only the last two had parliaments to temper royal power, but they were far from democratic. A parliamentary system had been evolving in Britain - albeit with bloodshed and political opposition - for generations. In 1832 had come the first great modern reform of the system, whereby urban property-owners were given the right to vote, while the cities - many of them hitherto absent or poorly represented at Westminster - were allowed to elect Members of Parliament. This was not democracy, for only one in five adult males (women were excluded as a matter of course) was enfranchised in England and Wales (and only one in eight in Scotland) and the composition of Parliament, which consisted of gentry and aristocratic landowners, remained virtually unchanged.
France had become a constitutional monarchy in 1814, when Napoleon was packed off to his genteel exile on Elba, and then again in 1815, after which the incorrigible Emperor was held under stricter conditions on the remote island of Saint Helena until his death in 1821. The Bourbon monarchy was restored, represented first by the portly Louis XVIII, younger brother of the guillotined King Louis XVI, and then, on his death in 1824, by their younger brother, the slender and ultra-conservative Charles X. The French constitution, the Charter of 1814, provided a parliament whose lower house, the Chamber of Deputies, was elected by the wealthiest 110,000 taxpayers. In 1830 Charles’s royal intransigence in the face of repeated liberal electoral victories provoked the final overthrow of the Bourbon dynasty. It is said that Charles had once declared that he would rather be a hewer of wood than rule like a British monarch. It was therefore a sublime irony that, as he made his way towards exile (he would live in Holyrood Palace in Edinburgh), at one staging-post Charles’s courtiers had to cut a table down to size so that everyone in the royal retinue could be accommodated in the small dining room. Back in Paris the Charter was retained by the new regime. This was the ‘July Monarchy’, named for the month when the Revolution occurred, under King Louis-Philippe, the scion of the rival Orléans dynasty. The Charter was slightly modified, so that the electorate swelled to include only 170,000 of France’s richest men: this was a mere 0.5 per cent of the French population, a sixth of those who enjoyed the vote in Britain after 1832.3
The other three great European powers were absolute monarchies and, of these, Austria was in many ways central to the conservative European system. ‘Austria’ was the Habsburg Empire, a polyglot assembly of territories enveloping no fewer than eleven different nationalities: Germans, Magyars, Romanians, Italians, and the Slav peoples - Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, Ukrainians (then known as Ruthenians), Slovenians, Serbs and Croats. This veritable Tower of Babel was held together by the Habsburg dynasty, ruling from its imperial capital, Vienna. From the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 right up to 1848, the dominant figure in Austrian politics was one of the giants of the nineteenth century, Klemens von Metternich. A long-serving Austrian diplomat, Metternich had been the Habsburg monarchy’s foreign minister since 1809 and Chancellor since 1821. He was intelligent, arrogant, aloof and, as a British diplomat once put it, ‘intolerably loose and giddy with women’.4 He was not Austrian, but was born in 1773 in Koblenz, a town then ruled by one of the many states of the Rhineland, the Archbishopric of Trier. Like the other small German principalities, Trier reposed within the protective shell of the Holy Roman Empire, at the pinnacle of which was the Emperor, who was chosen by the prince-electors and who was invariably a Habsburg, since this dynasty had for centuries been the most powerful and therefore the best placed to defend Germany. In the autumn of 1794 the French revolutionary armies overran the Rhineland and with the triumph of the blue-coated hordes came the republican retribution against the local nobility. The Metternich estates were confiscated and Klemens fled to Vienna, where he subsisted on an imperial pension and the income from his last remaining land in Bohemia. His inexorable climb up the ladder of Austrian diplomatic service began in 1801, when he took the post of Austrian minister to Saxony. With Napoleon rampaging across Central Europe - abolishing the thousand-year-old Holy Roman Empire in 1806 - Metternich began to develop the idea that the multi-national Habsburg monarchy, held together by a strong imperial government in Vienna, could become the new ‘foundations of a European political system’.5
By 1815 Metternich’s background and direct experience gave him a strong sense that the Habsburg monarchy was not only a German, but also a European, necessity. In a positive way, Metternich believed that a powerful state in Central Europe had a chance of protecting the smaller German states and of playing a leading role in preserving the social and political stability of the entire continental order. In a more negative sense, if the Habsburg monarchy failed, then the multi-national empire at the heart of Europe would fragment and, where once there was order, there would be civil strife, revolutionary conflict and terror, the effects of which no European state could hope to escape. Metternich was the main architect of the entire conservative order. Perhaps his greatest achievement was the diplomatic role that he played at the Congress of Vienna in 1815. After the protracted agony and slaughter of the Napoleonic Wars, this great international conference tried to reconstruct a European political system that aimed not only to maintain international peace, but to keep under the hammer the twin threats of liberalism and nationalism. This attitude was shared by Metternich’s fellow diplomats. The legacy of Napoleon Bonaparte and the carnage of the wars that now bear his name (and killed proportionately as many Europeans as the First World War) weighed heavily on the minds of policy-makers. So, too, did the grim, angular shadow of the guillotine. For conservatives across Europe, liberalism and nationalism meant revolution - and that could only be the bleak herald of destruction and death, whether it came in the shape of revolutionary armies streaming across the continent, respecting neither life, nor religion, nor property, or in the form of a bloodthirsty social war waged by scythe-wielding peasants, or by the desperate, dispossessed urban masses, against all those who had a stake in the established order. The post-Napoleonic political system therefore tried to be muscular in the face of subversive threats to its existence; this was precisely because it was all too aware of what failure might mean.
For the chief organiser of this order, the only monarchy worth the title was an absolute monarchy. In 1820, fearful that Alexander I of Russia was flirting with the hair-raising idea of introducing a constitution, Metternich addressed to the Tsar his ‘profession of political faith’. Monarchs, he argued, had to be ‘placed above the sphere of passions which agitate society’:
it is in times of crisis that they are principally called upon . . . to show themselves for what they are: fathers invested with all the authority which belongs to heads of families; to prove that, in dark times, they know how to be just, wise and, by that alone, strong, and that they do not abandon the peoples, whom they have the duty to govern, to the play of factions, to error and its consequences, which will fatally lead to the destruction of society.6
Among the ‘factions’ that threatened ‘society’ were liberals and nationalists who called for constitutions, national independence and political unity. Sovereigns should not yield to these demands, not even in an effort to make timely concessions to avoid revolution: ‘Respect for everything that exists; liberty for all Governments to watch over the well-being of their own peoples; a league between all
Governments against the factions in all States; mistrust for words devoid of sense [“the cry for Constitutions”], which have become the rallying cry of the factions.’ For Metternich, however, absolute rule did not mean despotism, which was government at the capricious whim of a single man. Rather, monarchs had to rule through a framework of law and regular administration: ‘The first and greatest of matters . . . is the fixity of laws, their uninterrupted working, and never changing them. So may Governments govern, may they maintain the fundamental bases of their institutions, old as well as new; for if it is always dangerous to interfere with them, it could not be useful to do so now, in today’s general turbulence.’7
The Habsburg regime, in fact, was not especially oppressive - at least not by the standards of modern dictatorships. Its bureaucracy was generally honest and efficient. Moreover (and despite his advice to the Tsar), Metternich used his considerable diplomatic influence to press mild reforms on the more benighted absolute rulers whose intransigence threatened to provoke violent opposition: in 1821 he promised military aid to King Ferdinand I of Naples against the monarch’s rebellious subjects, on the condition that Ferdinand made some minor concessions. Despite all the talk of the rule of law and of the benevolence of the monarchy, Metternich and other conservatives feared that, should constitutional or revolutionary movements have arisen among the diverse peoples of the Habsburg monarchy, then the very integrity of the empire would be endangered. In theory, it was held together by the subjects’ loyalty to the dynasty, the common institutions of the monarchy (including the administration and the imperial army) and, although there were religious minorities such as Jews and Protestants, the Catholicism of most Austrian subjects. In 1815 perhaps only the Germans, the Magyars, the Poles and the Italians had a deep sense of their own national identity. The first three, in particular, also dominated the other subject-nationalities of the empire, politically and socially. In Hungary the Magyar gentry lorded over the peasants who in the north were Slovaks, in the east were Transylvanian Romanians and in the south were Serbs or Croats. In Galicia the Poles tended to be the landlords holding the Ukrainian peasantry in such a state of servitude that they were practically beasts of burden. The Czechs, at least, with their high standards of education and (by 1848) the most advanced manufacturing base in the Habsburg monarchy, were beginning to challenge German hegemony in Bohemia, but one of the seething resentments among the non-Germans was that since the machinery of the state was centred in Vienna, it was dominated by German officials, whose language was usually the official medium in the law, education and administration. Even so, a developed sense of national identity was primarily shared by the aristocratic elites and the urban, middle classes, who were of course precisely the people most frustrated that opportunities in the bureaucracy, the law and in higher education were closed off unless one spoke German. This had not yet trickled down to the mass of peasants, many of whom saw the Emperor as their guardian against the depredations of their landlords, but the very fact that social difference coincided with ethnic divisions would aggravate the frequently bloody conflicts among the nationalities of Central Europe.