1848

by Mike Rapport

  The resentment of the Magyars against what they saw as German dominance and overbearing Habsburg authority was potentially very dangerous to the empire. Unlike most of the other nationalities, the Magyars had a constitutional voice: the Hungarians had a diet, or parliament, which was dominated by the Magyar nobility, the clergy and the burghers of the free royal towns. Thus the ‘Hungarian nation’ - meaning in contemporary parlance those who were represented in the diet - made up a small proportion of the total population. The rest were legally defined, with graphic aptness, as the misera plebs contribuens - the poor tax-paying plebians (Latin was still, to the chagrin of patriotic Magyars, the official language of Hungarian politics and administration). The Magyar nobility none the less consisted of a fairly sizeable proportion of the Hungarian population - some 5 per cent compared to an estimated 1 per cent in pre-revolutionary France - and some of them were poor enough to be dubbed the ‘sandalled nobles’, since, it was said, they were so penniless that they could not afford boots. Yet, since these men only had their privileges and titles to distinguish them from the rest of the toiling masses, they were often the most resistant to any reform that endangered their status. Although the Habsburg Emperor, who also held the title of King of Hungary, could summon and dismiss the diet at will (and Emperor Francis sulkily refused to call the troublesome parliament between 1812 and 1825), it was difficult to raise taxation without consulting it, so it met in 1825, 1832-6, 1839-40, 1843-4 and, most dramatically, in 1847-8. Moreover, even when the parliament was not in session, the Hungarian gentry entrenched their opposition to the Habsburg monarchy in the fifty-five counties, where they elected and salaried the local officials, and where their assemblies (or ‘congregations’), which often met annually, were sometimes so bold as to claim the right to reject royal legislation.8

  In 1815 the Italians of Lombardy and Venetia fell under Habsburg rule. They, too, had an institutional outlet because they both had congregations, chosen from among local landowners and the towns, as well as the united ‘Congregations General’, which drew together delegates from the two provinces. These assemblies had the right to decide how to implement laws handed down by the government, represented by a viceroy living in Milan, but not to make legislation of their own. The Habsburgs had to tread carefully, for northern Italy was one of the jewels in their crown: Lombardy’s fertile, irrigated plains were a bright patchwork of wheat, of well-kept vines and of mulberry bushes, upon which silk worms produced their precious fibres. The duchy’s capital and, to the irritation of the proud Venetians, of the two provinces together, was Milan, which was culturally one of the most vibrant cities in Europe, thanks in part to the lighter touch of the censor, as compared with elsewhere in the Habsburg Empire. Lombardy-Venetia accounted for a sixth of the monarchy’s population, but contributed close to a third of its tax revenue - a fact that was not lost on Italian patriots. The Austrians worked hard to ensure that northern Italy was well and fairly governed, but the inevitable tensions arose. Educated Lombards and Venetians grumbled that Austrians occupied some 36,000 government posts, preventing Italians from enjoying their fair share of state patronage.9

  Outside Hungary and Lombardy-Venetia, there were no representative institutions worthy of the name in the Habsburg Empire. Since 1835 the Emperor had been the mentally disabled Ferdinand (in one famous outburst, he yelled at his courtiers, ‘I am the Emperor and I want dumplings!’). He was loved by his subjects, who affectionately referred to him as ‘Ferdy the Loony’, but of necessity the task of government was left to a council (or Staatskonferenz), dominated by Metternich. The rejection of constitutional government made repression almost unavoidable, since Metternich’s political vision would not admit the legitimacy of any opposition. There was a secret police, which operated out of offices on the Herrengasse in Vienna, but the number of officers was small - some twenty-five, including thirteen censors - so in the imperial capital they relied upon the regular police (which also handled a plethora of other tasks), while in the provinces local bureaux had to deal with both regular and secret policing. This was not a particularly intense system of surveillance, but it is also true that the activities of printers, publishers and writers were hemmed in with a range of petty, irritating regulations.10 Since only one of four categories of books was fully permitted, this fostered a climate that assumed a publication would be forbidden unless it was explicitly allowed.11

  The repression was particularly tough in Russia, the second of Europe’s pre-eminent absolutist regimes. If Metternich cast Austria in the role of Central Europe’s policeman, then Tsar Nicholas I saw himself as gendarme for the entire continent. The Russian empire had been in his iron, autocratic grip since the death of Alexander I in 1825. He had founded the notorious Third Section, the secret police, an organisation which had a tiny number of officials, but which worked through the gendarmerie and a larger number of informants, who made as many as five thousand denunciations a year. The very existence of police spies created an atmosphere in which it took a brave soul to express dissent openly. One widely believed myth held that in one office of the Third Section headquarters in Saint Petersburg there was a trap door: during a seemingly innocuous conversation, a perfectly innocent individual summoned before the police officials could be lured into saying a minor indiscretion, whereupon a lever would be pulled and the victim would fall into a dungeon below to be subjected to all sorts of unspeakable horrors.

  The real oppression was bad enough for those who dared to voice their thoughts too loudly. In 1836, when the liberal intellectual Petr Chaadaev lambasted Russia for its backwardness, he met the fate that would be shared by some twentieth-century Soviet dissidents: the government declared him insane and confined him to an asylum.12 Even (or perhaps, given his quick temper, especially) the great poet Pushkin had to tread carefully: he was tolerated because the Tsar liked his work, but even he was subjected to the occasional rap on the knuckles. Intellectuals and writers cautiously circulated their writings in manuscript among friends first, and only later approached publishers - if they approached them at all. The Tsarist regime did not only fear dissent from among Russia’s intellectuals, it was anxious - perhaps more justifiably - of the possibility of a mass uprising by the peasantry, twenty million of whom were serfs and who had risen up with startling vengeance in the past, most recently under the renegade Cossack Emilian Pugachev in the early 1770s. It also worried about opposition from the downtrodden subject nationalities of the Empire, especially the Poles, who bore their subjugation only between fits of rebelliousness.

  The third great absolute monarchy in Europe, Prussia, had been governed since 1840 by King Frederick William IV, who moved rapidly after his accession to dash liberal hopes that he would introduce a constitution. His father, Frederick William III, had promised his eager subjects to abandon absolute rule several times, but that had been during the Napoleonic Wars, when he wanted to arouse the patriotism of his loyal Prussians against the hated French. A generation later, Frederick William IV explained to a disappointed liberal official that ‘I feel I am king solely by the grace of God.’ A constitution would, he said, make the whole idea of monarchy ‘an abstract concept, by dint of a piece of paper. A paternal governance is the way of true German princes.’13 Prussia did have provincial estates, but these representative bodies were stacked heavily in favour of the nobles and great landowners and they were not permitted to correspond with one another, to avoid any notion that they could merge into a national parliament. This was especially galling to liberals, many of whom were Prussians of recent vintage. The Rhineland, with its advanced economy and relatively positive experience of Napoleonic rule, had been given to Prussia in 1815, to strengthen Germany against France. This made Prussia a kingdom of two halves - the east dominated by the landed nobility, with their great estates and their peasants, who until 1807 had been enserfed, and the west, with its strong manufacturing base and burgeoning middle class. One of the latter, on learning of the imminent Prussian annexation of the R
hineland in 1815, sniffed that they had married into poor relations - meaning the agrarian, noble-dominated east. It was perhaps no surprise that much of the liberal leadership of the Prussian revolution in 1848 sprang from the Rhineland. As well as its formidable army, it was however the combined wealth of its manufacturing and agricultural bases that made Prussia one of the greatest powers not just of Germany but of Europe.

  Thanks, then, to the peace settlement at Vienna in 1815, Central and Eastern Europe had been thrust under the domination of these three absolute monarchies. Since 1795 the old Polish kingdom (except for the Napoleonic interlude of the Grand Duchy of Warsaw, established in 1807), had been wiped off the map, partitioned between Russia, Prussia and Austria - and this was confirmed at the peace congress. The three ‘eastern monarchies’ therefore tried (in vain) to asphyxiate Polish nationalism under their combined weight.

  They were equally determined to keep German nationalism locked inside its Pandora’s box. Austria shared with Prussia a dominant position in Germany, which, after the destruction of the Holy Roman Empire and a dramatic reordering of territory under Napoleon, was now divided into thirty-nine states (including Austria and Prussia), bound together in a confederation (Bund), with a diet that met at Frankfurt. This assembly was not a parliament of elected representatives, but rather a meeting of diplomats sent by the governments of the separate states, a sort of German ‘United Nations’. Its purpose was not to encourage Germany into closer union - quite the opposite. The Bund was intended to preserve the conservative order and to ensure that disputes between the states were resolved peacefully, which of course reassured the smaller ‘middle states’ that they would be protected against the domineering tendencies of Prussia and Austria. It could call on the various German governments to provide soldiers to defend Germany from foreign invasion, but also against domestic revolutionary threats. In 1819 it issued the repressive Karlsbad Decrees against the German radical and liberal movements, and especially against the student nationalist organisations, the Burschenschaften. These edicts were reiterated in 1832 in response to a wave of revolution and protest that swept across Europe. Behind the decrees stood Metternich, who had also looked askance at the constitutionalism beginning to take root in Germany in the years immediately following the Napoleonic Wars. The southern German states of Baden, Württemberg, Bavaria, Nassau and Hesse-Darmstadt had all emerged with constitutions. This process was actually in keeping with the act that created the German Confederation, and which declared that all German states should have ‘constitutions of the territorial estates’. This, however, was a deliberately ambiguous phrase, since it could mean either (as the southern German states interpreted it) a modern, parliamentary monarchy or a more conservative style of traditional ‘estates’ in which the nobles, the clergy and the good burghers of the towns were separately represented, ensuring that the estates were always weighted towards conservative interests. Metternich had exerted his influence on King Frederick William III of Prussia and then on the German Confederation to ensure, first, that Prussia did not join the constitutional dance and, second, that the Bund’s ‘Final Act’ of 1820 interpreted the term ‘constitution’ in Metternich’s sense, to mean estates rather than parliaments. Even then, they were to be stacked in favour of the ‘monarchic principle’, meaning that the prince would always enjoy most of the power.14

  It was in Italy, however, that Metternich pursued the most active counter-revolutionary and anti-liberal policies. He famously derided the claims of Italian nationalists for unification by calling Italy ‘a geographical expression’,15 split as it was among ten kingdoms, duchies and statelets. He saw Austria’s role to keep it that way. Besides ensuring that Austria had a strong direct Italian presence, by virtue of its annexation of Lombardy and Venetia in the north, the Congress of Vienna had arranged Italian affairs so that Austria would be the predominant power in the entire peninsula. After the long experience of Napoleonic occupation, the purpose was initially to ward off French influence, but the role soon developed into one of repressing Italian liberalism and nationalism. Tuscany was ruled by a Habsburg grand duke, while the Duchies of Parma and Modena were also governed by relatives of the Emperor. Beyond these dynastic ties, the Austrians were given the right to garrison the fortress of Ferrara in the Papal States. The Bourbon King of the Two Sicilies (meaning southern Italy and the eponymous island, since 1816 deprived of its separate parliament and ruled directly from Naples) signed an alliance and a military convention with Austria, which bound the kingdom tightly to Habsburg policy. Only the north-western Kingdom of Sardinia (which included the island of the same name and, on the mainland, Piedmont and Genoa) remained completely independent: it was militarily the most powerful of all Italian states and provided a strong buffer between France and the Austrians in Lombardy. Yet Austrian power in Italy was such that it was able to intervene militarily against liberal revolutions in both Naples and even in Piedmont itself in 1820-1. In the aftermath the Austrians tried over ninety leading Lombard liberals (although they had little to do with the uprisings) and condemned forty of them to rot in the dark Spielberg fortress in Bohemia. Among them was Silvio Pellico, who on his release in 1830 wrote My Prisons, a testimony to both Austrian oppression and to the power of religious faith in the face of adversity. The book became a bestseller and contributed to a ‘black legend’ of Austrian misrule in Italy. Metternich merely reinforced the grim image of Germanic oppression when he again sent troops southwards in 1831-2 to crush insurrections in Modena, Parma and the Papal States (where the Austrians had the brass neck to hold on to Bologna until 1838).

  Austrian power and influence therefore spread from Germany down to the toe of Italy and into Eastern Europe. It was, Count Anton Kolowrat-Liebsteinsky disparagingly said, a ‘forest of bayonets’. Kolowrat was no liberal, but he was Metternich’s great rival in the Staatskonferenz. He agreed with the Chancellor ‘that people must strive for conservatism and do everything to achieve it. Yet we differ about means. Your means consist of a forest of bayonets and fixed adherence to things as they are. To my mind, by following these lines we are playing into the hands of the revolutionaries.’16 Metternich’s more rigid form of conservatism, he fretted, would merely create such pressure that ‘your ways will lead us . . . to our ruin’. The outspoken British statesman Lord Palmerston bluntly criticised Austria’s ‘repressive and suffocating policy’ because it ‘will lead to an explosion just as certainly as would a boiler that was hermetically sealed and deprived of an outlet for steam’.17 Kolowrat was also deeply concerned about the financial cost of maintaining Austrian power in Europe at such intensity: between 1815 and 1848, the army swallowed some 40 per cent of the government budget, and paying interest alone on the state debt digested a further 30 per cent. One of the great weaknesses of Metternich’s ‘system’ that was exposed in 1848 was that it had scant money left in its coffers to cope with the worst economic downturn of the nineteenth century and so could do little to soothe the people’s distress.

  II

  The political restrictions imposed on Europe could not help but provoke opposition. Just as Metternich and his ilk felt the heavy weight of recent history in their political calculations, so that same history proved to be an inspiration to their opponents. The French Revolution of 1789 and its Napoleonic progeny had provoked dread among conservatives, but - in the true Romantic fashion of the age - their memory could stir the blood of liberals, radicals and patriots who felt constricted in the stifling atmosphere of Metternich’s Europe. The first post-war generation of European liberals had personally engaged in the struggles of the revolutionary era. With the final allied victory in 1815, they had lost either because they had supported Napoleonic rule - and its often empty promises of freedom - or because, having opposed the French, they had hoped in vain that from the ruins of the old European order would rise a new, constitutional system.

  There were unsuccessful revolutionary outbreaks in Italy in 1820-1, led in Naples by liberal army officers (inc
luding Guglielmo Pepe, a former Napoleonic officer with a central role to play in 1848), who were members of a secret revolutionary society called the Carbonari, dedicated to the overthrow of Austrian domination and to the establishment of a liberal order in Italy. The French equivalent, the Charbonnerie, drew much of its strength from the seething resentment felt by former servants of the Napoleonic state who had been purged in the royalist reaction, the violent ‘White Terror’ of 1815 - so-called to distinguish it from the ‘Red’ Jacobin Terror of 1793-4. Among those who joined the underground opposition was a teenage Louis-Auguste Blanqui. His family had fallen on hard times after his father, the Napoleonic prefect of the Alpes-Maritimes, lost his post when the territory (better known as Nice) was returned to Piedmont in the peace settlement of 1815. Blanqui thus began a lifetime of revolutionary activism that would last until his death in 1881. In Spain the liberals yearned for the Constitution of 1812, which had been forged in Cadiz by a parliament that had met not far from the hostile muzzles of cannon belonging to the besieging French army. Yet when King Ferdinand VII returned triumphantly in 1814, he brushed aside the constitution and sent many of the liberals scurrying into exile. They had their revenge in 1820, when they seized power and compelled Ferdinand to rule as a constitutional monarch for three years - until they in turn were overwhelmed by French troops (the ‘100,000 sons of Saint Louis’) sent over the Pyrenees by Louis XVIII, who was intent on restoring the royal absolutism of his fellow Bourbon.