1848
Page 8
While individual states were being reformed, liberals and radicals sensed the opportunity to recast all of Germany into a new, more unified shape. In Heidelberg on 5 March an assembly of fifty-one delegates from the freshly liberalised states brushed aside the weakly protesting Diet of the old German Confederation and cut its own path towards the future. Working with a feverish sense of urgency, the meeting convoked ‘a more complete assembly of trusted men from all German peoples’,38 a ‘pre-parliament’, which would gather in Frankfurt to arrange elections for a German national assembly, which in turn would draft an all-German constitution.
So far the German revolution had swept up only the ‘Third Germany’ - the smaller states lying between the two great power blocs of Prussia and Austria, which at first refused to buckle before the storm. In the west the Prussian Rhineland was swept along by the torrent - and it sent delegates to the Heidelberg Assembly. There was a demonstration of workers in Cologne on 3 March, led by the radical socialist Andreas Gottschalk, demanding, among other things, the right to work, free education and welfare measures to protect the poor. The army moved in and dispersed the three-thousand-strong protest, arresting its ringleaders. Prussia, therefore, had not as yet lost its footing. Nor had the other great German power, Austria, where the absolute monarchy, though its grip was weakening, still had a hold on its European empire. The uprising in the great Habsburg capital of Vienna of 13 March therefore gave fresh impetus to the revolution not only in Germany but throughout Europe. If the February revolution in Paris was the first great shock to the European conservative order in 1848, the second, equally fundamental blow for the old regime was the fall of Metternich.
The ageing Chancellor had been told of the revolution in France in a telegram from his friend, the banker Salamon Rothschild, whose tidings arrived at 5 p.m. on 29 February, just before the rest of the Viennese population learned the news from one of the few permitted foreign newspapers, the Augsburger Zeitung. The diplomat William Stiles observed that ‘the people, collected in groups throughout the streets, in the cafés, and reading-rooms, expressed themselves with a freedom and an earnestness altogether foreign to the habits of the calm and phlegmatic Germans’.39 The Chancellor himself remained sanguine: during the first ten days of March the chief of police, Count Josef von Sedlnitzky, never one to play down the risk of subversion, assured Metternich that there was nothing to fear in Vienna. Events in perennially troublesome Hungary, however, would dash this prediction. On 1 March word of the Parisian revolution reached the Hungarian Diet, which had been meeting at Pressburg since November. The parliament had been holding agonising debates about serfdom, but now even wider, root-and-branch reform seemed possible. On 3 March the fiery Lajos Kossuth rose in the lower house and gave the speech that would prove to be ‘the inaugural address of the revolution’.40 Habsburg absolutism, he declared, was ‘the pestilential air which . . . dulls our nerves and paralyses our spirit’. Hungary should be ‘independent, national and free from foreign interference’, tied to Austria only through the dynastic link of having the Emperor continue as King of Hungary. Kossuth went further and remarked that a political overhaul which benefited Hungary would not be safe for as long as the rest of the empire remained unreformed, so fundamental change was needed for all the subjects of the Emperor. ‘The dynasty’, he thundered, ‘must choose between its own welfare and the preservation of a rotten system.’41
This lion’s roar of a speech would have a profound impact, and it reached Vienna via a manuscript version translated into German and sent to the Legal-Political Reading Club. Very soon copies were clandestinely printed and circulating around the imperial capital. Initially, the meeting of the Lower Austrian Estates, due on 13 March, was the focus for liberal hopes and expectations. In excited anticipation a radical ‘party of progress’, led by Alexander Bach, gathered several thousand signatures on a petition (carried by Bach through the streets on horseback). This demanded parliamentary government and Austrian participation in the reform of the German Confederation.42 Yet the Staatskonferenz - the inner circle of family and ministers that acted as a regency council on behalf of Emperor Ferdinand - was divided between those who advocated some concessions and those, including Metternich, who urged no weakness. Initially, the latter held sway.
The liberal opposition received an injection of youthful energy from the students of the University of Vienna. Many of these young people were the archetypical, impoverished, garret-dwelling scholars who relished banned political literature, joined secret societies and were taught by stuffily conservative professors. Now, intoxicated by the political excitement, the students circulated a petition that demanded freedom of the press, speech, religion and teaching, improvements in education, popular representation in government and the participation of all German-speaking parts of the empire in the new Germany. They were galvanised further at early morning mass on Sunday 12 March by the passionate oratory of the liberal and popular theologian Anton Füster, who declared that Lent was a time of hope and that truth would triumph if the students acted courageously.43 They occupied the Aula, the university’s great hall, where, with tumultuous enthusiasm, the petition was soon covered with signatures. ‘The stormy air permeated everybody,’ recalled one student. ‘The students gave orders to the professors for the first time. A topsy-turvy world was beginning. Pedants tore their hair and thought that the world was going to pieces or that the whole youth must receive a “2” in the next examination . . . Had the light or reflection of dawn finally broken through the dismal sky?’44 The students agreed that the following day they would march en masse to the opening of the Landhaus to present their petition to the Lower Austrian Estates. That night, to garner muscle for their cause, posses of students stole through the city gates into the poorer suburbs, where they roused the Viennese workers. To counter this the authorities put the gates under close guard, while it began to dawn on the court that some concessions might be necessary. These would prove to be too little, too late.
Early in the morning of 13 March some four thousand students streamed out of their lectures, deaf to the warnings of their professors, and marched on the Landhaus, which happened to be just around the corner from Metternich’s Chancellery on the Ballhausplatz. A large, respectable gathering of mostly middle-class professionals - well-to-do lawyers, doctors, entrepreneurs and the odd bohemian writer and flamboyant artist - joined the throng in expectation as the Estates opened. Watching from the windows of the Chancellery, Metternich’s third wife Melanie scornfully remarked, ‘All they need is a stand selling sausages to make themselves happy.’45 Yet, as the protest was running out of steam, a pale, bearded young doctor named Adolf Fischhof silenced the directionless hubbub when, standing on the shoulders of four companions, his booming voice declared, ‘It is a great, significant day on which we find ourselves assembled here,’ and he urged the people to present the Estates with the demands of the liberal opposition. 46 Now speaker after speaker - ‘pale with terror at their own daring,’47 noted Stiles perceptively - climbed on to railings and balconies to harangue their audience, which cheered the orators and turned its anger towards Metternich.
No sooner had the president of the Estates, Count Albert Montecuccoli, tried to pacify the crowd by allowing a delegation to present the petition in the Landhaus than a Tyrolean journalist named Franz Putz arrived on the square. Holding aloft copies of Kossuth’s speech, he clambered on to the central fountain. Everyone knew of the great Magyar’s oration, but few had read or heard the precise content. Putz’s powerful lungs now bellowed the explosive words - including ‘liberty’, ‘rights’ and ‘constitution’ - across the sea of enthralled faces. When a window of the Landhaus squeaked open and copies of the Estates’ own petition fluttered down to the crowd, it was disappointingly meek by comparison and ‘each paragraph . . . was saluted with ringing laughter’.48 The constitutional cat was now out of the bag: students angrily tore up the Estates’ supplication. Cries of ‘No half measures!’, ‘No delay!’
and ‘Constitution! Constitution!’ rippled through the crowd. The mood was beginning to turn ugly, but a minor blunder now tipped it into violence. With commendable but, in the circumstances, tactless efficiency, the porter performed his noonday duty of locking the side door of the Landhaus. For the people unaware of the routine, this was a sign that their twelve delegates were being arrested. A crowd of students and, as Baron Carl von Hügel put it curiously, ‘intruders of the better class’49 battered down the doors and invaded the meeting chamber. To calm tempers, Montecuccoli agreed to adopt the liberal programme and to proceed to the royal residence in the Hofburg to present the demands to the Emperor.
By now the imperial court had finally ordered its soldiers out of barracks under the command of Archduke Albert. His orders were to compel the crowds to disperse, but to avoid any loss of life if at all possible. The flood of humanity now stretched from the Landhaus, poured into the Ballhausplatz and spilled towards the Hofburg, where it confronted the gaping mouths of cannon and a line of fixed bayonets. The crowd showered the stone-faced soldiers with a barrage of insults and missiles. Vienna drew breath for a violent confrontation: retailers boarded up their shops and clusters of workers, who had marched in from the suburbs armed with tools, iron bars, pitchforks and wooden shafts, tramped through the streets. The authorities stemmed the proletarian flow by closing all the gates to traffic, but the workers tried to smash their way through. In the fighting the lamp-posts that lit the glacis - the open ground in front of the city walls - were torn up for use as battering rams. The hissing, escaping gas ignited and cast an eerie halo around the city. The troops won the first battle for the city gates and wheeled cannon on to the bastions. Barred from joining the political revolution taking place within, the frustrated workers now gave full vent to their economic grievances. They broke into factories and smashed up machinery, plundered bakeries and groceries and attacked landlords’ property.50
Outside the Hofburg, Archduke Albert was struck by a rock when he called on the citizens to return to their homes. The troops at last moved forward, but they were bombarded with stones and even furniture hurled from upper windows. His nerves at breaking point, a regimental commander barked out the fateful order: ‘Move forward with fixed bayonets and fire!’ The first shots of the Austrian revolution killed four people and a woman was trampled to death as the crowd stampeded away from the smoking muskets.51 Street-fighting now exploded across the city and only the timely intervention of his soldiers prevented Archduke Albert from being hauled off his horse.52 The suburban workers finally crashed through one of the city gates - the Schottentor - and tried unsuccessfully to storm the arsenal. The troops could control the main thoroughfares and squares, but the crowds of students, bourgeois and workers defended the side-streets with barricades. At 5 p.m. an uneasy truce was negotiated, in which the bourgeois militia, the Bürgergarde, promised to maintain order provided that the troops were withdrawn from Vienna, that the students were allowed to form their own militia (an ‘Academic Legion’) and that Metternich was dismissed by 9 p.m. The government conceded all but Metternich’s head. The Viennese willingly submitted to the Bürgergarde and the Academic Legion, for they had already been alarmed by the destructive power of the factory workers. It was for this reason, as much as enthusiasm for the revolution, that the ranks of the civic guard were suddenly swelled by new, middle-class recruits, who cleared some forty thousand arms from the arsenal.
The minutes ticked away as the Staatskonferenz argued about Metternich’s fate. The Chancellor, who had reached the Hofburg from the Ballhausplatz under guard, resplendent in his green coat and silk cravat and bearing his gold-handled cane, was agonisingly pressed into resigning. Metternich slipped out the Hofburg minutes before the deadline expired. He and Melanie left Vienna that night in a discreet fiacre, boarded another carriage outside the city and drove to a train, which spirited them across Europe. They spent almost a fortnight in The Hague, waiting until the apparently revolutionary threat from the Chartists had dissipated in London. The Times announced their arrival off a steamer from Rotterdam on 21 April.53
As daylight broke on 14 March the Viennese celebrated the fall of Metternich, but they suspected - rightly - that the government would yield not another inch and hoped to restore order by imposing martial law. Metternich’s last act as Chancellor had been to persuade the Staatskonferenz to give the fire-breathing Prince Alfred Windischgrätz full civil and military powers to restore imperial authority in Vienna. The army was still a brooding presence outside the city walls and, except for press freedom and the creation of a new National Guard, there were no further promises of civil liberties or a constitution. The balance was finally tipped when, on 15 March, Windischgrätz declared Vienna under a state of siege in all but name. The embers of revolution were fanned once more - although in the suburbs they had never died down, since working-class attacks on factories and shops had continued almost unchecked. At midday Ferdinand was persuaded to ride through the city to soothe passions, and he was cheered sincerely by the crowds. Yet this parade was merely a panacea, for people still hovered expectantly around the Hofburg that afternoon. It had at last dawned on the Staatskonferenz, including a thunder-faced Windischgrätz, that it was better to grant a constitution and then resist any further demands than risk the possibility of a mass insurrection. At 5 p.m. on 15 March a herald rode up to the palace gate and read the imperial proclamation. All Austria would be asked to send delegates to an assembly that would discuss ‘the Constitution which We have decided to grant’.54 The imperial capital, at last, rejoiced:
In Vienna, the whole aspect of things seemed changed, as it were, by a magician’s wand . . . The secret police had entirely disappeared from the streets; the windows of book-stores were now crowded with forbidden works, which, like condemned criminals, had long been withdrawn from the light of day; boys hawked throughout the city addresses, poems, and engravings, illustrative of the Revolution - the first issues of an unshackled press; while the newly-armed citizens formed into a National Guard, marched shoulder to shoulder with the regular military, and maintained in unison with them, the public tranquillity.55
One Viennese wrote excitedly that ‘The word “constitution” is giving a new movement to the waves of the time - a movement that will be felt over the whole globe and which will strike many a pillar of absolutism with thunder and lightning.’56 Those parts of Central Europe that so far had merely effervesced at the news from Paris now boiled over on the word from Vienna.
IV
In the small hours of 14 March Archduke Stephen, the Palatine (Viceroy) of Hungary, was woken by a messenger from Vienna who had come thundering down the road on horseback, bearing the news of Metternich’s fall. Stephen had Hungarian sympathies and he summoned an emergency meeting of the upper house of the Hungarian Diet in Pressburg. There, everyone agreed that the Diet would demand a separate Hungarian government, with reform of the counties, wider representation of the people and (here the theme of nationalism rose to the surface) the full union of Transylvania with Hungary. It was also decreed that delegates from both houses would travel to Vienna and present this petition to the Emperor in person. That night Kossuth was hailed as a hero by students in a torchlit procession. In return, Kossuth was emboldened to present the liberal Count Lajos Batthyány as the next Hungarian prime minister. The following day, underneath a blustery, cloudy sky, a 150-strong Hungarian deputation - including the firebrand Kossuth and the moderate Count Istvan Széchenyi - boarded two steamers on the Danube for Vienna. Their arrival in the imperial capital at 2 p.m., just hours before the Emperor promised his Austrian subjects a constitution, was triumphant. Dubbed the ‘Argonauts’ because they had arrived by boat, the Magyars were resplendent in plumed fur caps, gold-braided frock-coats, red trousers, richly ornamented scabbards and knee boots clinking with spurs.
On the morning of 16 March Kossuth was carried to the Hofburg on the shoulders of cheering Austrians. At the palace the Hungarians found that the Empero
r - drained, pale, and his head lolling - had already been persuaded by the Staatskonferenz to concede all that the Magyars asked. Overnight, in fact, Széchenyi and Batthyány had quietly persuaded Archduke Stephen to stand up to the arch-conservatives at court by arguing that it was better to yield than to provoke a rebellion for full Hungarian independence. Now the Hungarians pushed even further, also demanding that Batthyány be called to form a government and that all legislation passed by the Hungarian Diet be automatically ratified. This was going too far for the Emperor’s inner circle, which rejected these new demands outright. What now followed would later ensure that Batthyány would end his life facing a firing squad and Stephen would finish his political career in exile. Stephen rushed straight to the Emperor himself - bypassing the Staatskonferenz altogether - and extracted the feeble-minded Ferdinand’s personal agreement that Batthyány be made Hungarian Prime Minister. The Imperial Rescript that emerged on 17 March therefore gave Hungary its own government, responsible to the Diet, and appointed Stephen as the Emperor’s plenipotentiary, with full powers to implement the reforms. Stephen immediately officially appointed Batthyány as his premier. The new cabinet included a kaleidoscope of views from the gradual reformist Széchenyi to the radical Kossuth. The former bristled at the thought of serving alongside the latter: ‘I have just signed my death sentence!’ he wrote, adding later that ‘I shall be hanged with Kossuth.’57