1848
Page 14
The defection to the revolution of the usually quiescent property-owners - middle class or otherwise - was often decisive. On 24 February Tocqueville came across a battalion of National Guards from his own, well-heeled neighbourhood who were abandoning the July Monarchy: ‘the fault lies with the government, so the danger is theirs; we do not want to get ourselves killed for people who have managed affairs so badly’.158 The July Monarchy fell because its bedrock - property-owners, entrepreneurs and small business-owners whose conservatism was tinged with a mild liberalism - had, at a moment of acute crisis, deserted it. These same people would then spend the next two years trying to reassert stability and order, which they saw as their safeguard, against the more radical elements that had been unleashed in February 1848. Yet, no matter how half-hearted the defection of the bulk of the middle class may have been, in many places it proved to be essential to the success of the revolutions because they provided the rank and file of the various citizens’ militias, which either pre-existed (as in Paris, Prague and Vienna) or were created (as in Budapest, Venice and Berlin). Since these citizens’ militias recruited primarily from among property-owners and burghers who had stakes in law and order, their lack of confidence in the old regime severely weakened its ability to keep control of the streets except by the terrible and (as it turned out) counter-productive use of regular troops. Liberal nobles, clerics, bourgeois, artisans, workers, students, peasants, women, men and even children all played, in different ways from one insurrection to the next, parts in supporting the revolutions.
This social unity, however, could not last. The revolutions of 1848 were to some extent built on what Georges Duveau has called a ‘lyrical illusion’.159 This ‘illusion’ rested, first, on the idea that the people had indeed triumphed over the old regime and even defeated its armed forces. There was some truth in this, but in most European states affected by the revolutions the structures of the old order were battered and severely damaged but not entirely levelled - except in France, the only country where the revolution destroyed the monarchy. Everywhere else, the monarchy remained - and with it ministers and advisers who were determined to resist further change or to undo the revolution altogether. They also kept control, vitally, of the armed forces, a factor that would prove to be decisive before the year was out. Second, the ‘lyrical illusion’ was also founded on the idea that the revolutions marked a new beginning, one in which the unity of all classes and people could nurture the delicate growth of a new freedom and a new, liberal order. That this hope was problematic, to say the least, became obvious almost immediately, for the nascent liberal regimes were beset, to varying degrees and in different ways, by two fundamental problems that would ultimately tear them apart. The first was the ‘national question’ - the problem of political unity and the place of ethnic minorities within the new liberal order. The second was the ‘social question’ - how to deal with the desperate poverty that afflicted so much of the population, both as part of the wider structural changes in the economy and in the acute distress of the 1840s. These two questions provide the themes for the next two chapters.
3
THE SPRINGTIME OF PEOPLES
‘A new era begins,’ mused Fanny Lewald in her diary on 28 February. ‘What will it bring the French? New battles? Murder and the guillotine? A short epoch of peace and then new tyranny? I cannot believe that . . . War between civilized peoples is the last vestige of brute animal behaviour and must vanish from the earth. I believe in mankind, in the future, in the survival of the Republic.’1 German liberals would dub 1848 the Völkerfrühling - the ‘Springtime of Peoples’ - a name pregnant with the liberating hopes of the early weeks of the revolutions, when national aspirations suddenly seemed possible. On 5 March the Heidelberg Assembly proclaimed that Germany must not intervene in the affairs of other states and that ‘Germany must not be caused to diminish or rob from other nations the freedom and independence which they themselves ask as their right.’2
Yet there was a dark side to the liberal nationalism of 1848. The revolutions provided European liberals with the unprecedented opportunity to realise ideals of national independence or unity, but their fulfilment often conflicted with those of neighbouring peoples, or there were national minorities within the presumptive boundaries of the emerging liberal states. Most patriots of 1848, in claiming national rights and freedoms for their own people, were in the process willing to trample on the liberties of others. All too soon the hard iron of national self-interest invariably won out over the more fragrant universal principles of 1848. Consequently, in many places where the ‘national question’ arose, Europeans would experience the brutalities of ethnic conflict, setting the revolutionaries against each other and providing the conservatives with the opening into which they could pour the hot lead of counter-revolution.
Initially, it was to France that European eyes anxiously looked. While European liberals were inspired by the February revolution, they were also uncomfortably aware that the First French Republic had been aggressively expansionist. The intensity of European anxieties was such that Piedmont initially deployed its forces not against Austria, but along the French frontier. The Belgian and Dutch governments put aside their mutual dislike to discuss measures for common defence against France. Prussian troops in the Rhineland were put on high alert, and other German states, great and small, followed suit.3 The frontier state of Baden was tormented by panic - the ‘French alarm’ - in which peasants took the distant beating of German military drums to be the sound of a marauding French army.4
French radicals certainly expected the provisional government to pursue an energetic foreign policy, to erase the humiliation of the defeat of 1815. For the republican left, this meant reconnecting with the revolutionary heritage of the 1790s, sending patriotic armies bursting forth, liberating Italy and Poland and spreading the gospel of democracy.5 The new socialist prefect of police, Marc Caussidière, wrote that the February revolution was like ‘a sacred promise of emancipation for all the peoples of Europe’, which explained why the Hôtel de Ville was being inundated with addresses from radicals from ‘all parts of the globe’.6 These foreign political refugees kept French revolutionary proselytism on the boil. In better times, cities like Paris and Lyon were hives of economic activity, attracting foreign workers (there were some 184,000 in the capital in 1848),7 many of whom now languished in unemployment. Their poverty made them fertile ground for the revolutionary seeds sown by their more politically minded compatriots. The largest of these expatriate groups were the Germans, of whom there were 55,000; the Poles, although numbering just 4,000, were probably the most energetic. In Paris the German expatriate poet Georg Herwegh organised a paramilitary force of some eight hundred German exiles and workers to spearhead a republican revolution in Germany. ‘In three magnificent days’, he told his French hosts, ‘you have broken with the past and raised the banner for all the people of the earth.’8 Over the course of the spring, making patriotic appeals for an aggressive foreign policy was a way for French radicals to recapture the political initiative that they had lost to the moderates on the creation of the provisional government. On 26 March, up to seven hundred Polish democrats led a march of Parisian radical club members - some twenty thousand strong - on the Hôtel de Ville, ignoring Lamartine’s urgent pleas the night before to cancel the demonstration. In the event, the protest, which demanded arms and weapons from the French government, finished peacefully after the foreign minister assured the Poles of France’s sympathies, but offered nothing beyond financial aid to help them return home.9
Lamartine was in an invidious situation, since it was his task to reassure France’s neighbours of the new Republic’s pacific intentions. The tricky balancing act that he had to perform was illustrated on 25 February, when he persuaded radical demonstrators to abandon their demand that the red flag be adopted as the banner of the Second Republic, but in order to do so he had to appeal to their nationalist impulses: ‘The red flag . . . has been dragged in bl
ood around the Champ de Mars10 . . . The tricolour flag has gone around the world carrying freedom in its folds.’11 Yet the British ambassador, Lord Constantine Normanby, saw Lamartine’s symbolic victory in a positive light and felt able to report to London that most French people appeared to support the new government and ‘trust to the efforts to moderate the popular feeling and reestablish order and confidence’.12 Lamartine’s colleagues also helped the next day when, seeking to break all associations with the Terror of the First Republic, they abolished the death penalty for political offences. More importantly, Lamartine’s ‘Manifesto to Europe’ (a declaration issued on 4 March) deftly balanced his sincere desire to ensure peace with the urgent domestic political need to absorb the radical pressure. The soothing words claimed that monarchies and republics could live together. While he denied the justice of the peace treaties of 1815, he declared that France accepted them as ‘facts to be modified by general agreement’. Nevertheless, there was some iron beneath the velvet glove. In an attempt to satisfy nationalist pressure, Lamartine declared that, if attacked, France would be a formidable enemy: ‘her martial genius, her impatience of action, and her force . . . would render her invincible at home, dreaded, perhaps, beyond her frontiers’. France would also not hesitate to protect her neighbours - specifically Switzerland and Italy - in their own attempts to democratise or to unite, if they were attacked by conservative powers. The Republic, however, hoped to lead by example, not by force:
It will make no secret propagation or incendiarism among its neighbours. It knows that no liberty is durable, save that which is born upon its own grounds. But it will exercise, by the light of its ideas, and by the spectacle of the order and peace which it hopes to display to the world, the sole and honest proselytism - the proselytism of esteem and sympathy.13
Yet the firebrands were not listening. Instead, they actively supported foreign revolutionaries in their efforts to topple their own governments - and the provisional government was still wary of taking rigorous measures to prevent them from exporting the republican revolution. A massive demonstration on 17 March, in which some hundred thousand members of the left-wing Parisian clubs participated, was an impressive show of force that put the ministers on the defensive. Consequently, the government reacted belatedly to the efforts of Lyon radicals who helped the attempt of expatriates from Savoy, then under Piedmontese rule, to prepare the duchy for its annexation by France. A fifteen-hundred-strong legion crossed into Savoy, taking Chambéry on 3 April, but the local peasantry did not take kindly to the ragged, poorly armed invaders. The next day they swept from the mountains and expelled the legion, killing five men and capturing eight hundred.14 Even more serious was an armed clash on the Belgian frontier, when some two thousand unemployed Belgian workers in Paris, organised into legions by republican exiles, travelled northwards to topple the monarchy in Brussels. Cautiously, the French authorities offered no more support than providing rail transport for the unarmed Belgians as far as the border. The first train, though, was accidentally allowed to roll over the frontier, delivering its consignment of would-be revolutionaries into the waiting arms of the Belgian authorities. A second, twelve-hundred-strong Belgian legion, however, was allowed to acquire weapons in Lille and, in the night of 28 March, it stole into Belgium. There it marched straight towards the gun-muzzles of the primed Belgian forces. In an hour-long skirmish at the aptly named village of Risquons-tout, the legion was torn apart by musket fire and grapeshot.15
Lamartine had to work hard to defuse these diplomatic bombshells. The exasperated foreign minister smoothed over one fiasco by (rather redundantly) offering French military assistance to Charles Albert in expelling the legion from Savoy.16 The assault on Belgium was potentially more damaging, since Britain was a guarantor of Belgian neutrality and took any French intrusion there as a serious threat to its own vital interests. Lamartine calmed tempers by frankly avowing that the provisional government was not yet secure enough to use force against radical troublemakers within France, but he accepted that other governments were perfectly entitled to receive them ‘with gunshot’.17
Adroitly managing these profound embarrassments, Lamartine made diplomatic headway. While only the American ambassador to Paris, Richard Rush, gave immediate and full recognition to the Second Republic, the Manifesto to Europe did soothe the inevitable fears about French intentions. Lamartine privately explained the finer points to various European ambassadors, and, one by one, each European state - even Russia - declared its intention not to intervene against the new republic.
I
Initially, the potential threat from France - and the grim possibility of being directly in the path of any Russian army intent on crushing revolution in Europe - had concentrated German minds on building up national strength through unity. The Mannheim Petition of 27 February neatly encapsulated the German sense of being trapped between the French hammer of revolution and the Russian anvil of reaction: ‘In a few days French armies might well be standing on our borders, while Russia assembles its own armies to the north . . . Germany can no longer stand by patiently and allow itself to be kicked.’18 Yet the drive for German unity was powered not only by fear: in the immediate aftermath of the March days it was also energised by hope and expectation. The German republican Carl Schurz would later recall the ‘People’s Springtime’ for its ‘enthusiastic spirit of self-sacrifice for a great cause which for a while pervaded almost every class of society with rare unanimity . . . I knew hosts of men who were ready at any moment to abandon and risk all for the liberty of the people and the greatness of the Fatherland.’19 The first problem was precisely what form that ‘liberty’ would take. Should the new, free Germany be a democratic republic or a parliamentary monarchy? The other question was: where should the boundaries of the ‘Fatherland’ lie? The latter problem revolved, first, around the national minorities who lived within the boundaries of the existing German states - particularly the Danes and the Poles - and second, around to what extent Austria - with its polyglot empire - should be included. The liberals and radicals clashed over the former question politically at the meeting of the ‘pre-parliament’ in Frankfurt, and then violently in the Grand Duchy of Baden.
The 574-strong pre-parliament consisted of members invited from existing German state assemblies, others summoned individually for their progressive reputations, and a handful who had been spontaneously elected by popular meetings. The radicals managed to send a respectable number of delegates because their networks were already primed to seize any opportunities offered by the political crisis. Most notable among the radical leadership was the Prussian Johann Jacoby, the Saxon Robert Blum and the Badensians Gustav Struve and Friedrich Hecker.20 The rupture between liberals and radicals occurred at the very first meeting on 31 March. Struve rose and pressed his republican programme for a single, unitary and democratic German state, watched in awe by the two thousand spectators crammed into the public galleries. The following day, Heinrich von Gagern, a moderate, liberal-minded nobleman from Hesse (who had fought at Waterloo at the age of sixteen), stemmed the radical assault. Fanny Lewald - no great political admirer - described him as ‘tall and strongly built . . . his posture, his voice, his manner of expression all bear the imprint of his masculinity’.21 Gagern believed in law, order and monarchy, but he accepted that it was necessary to wrest the initiative from the radicals - ‘to become revolutionary in order to avoid a revolution’, as one observer put it.22 He and other moderates respected the individual German states, but believed that some overarching political unity was required if Germany were to be strong and succeed in realising its mission as a great, civilising influence. For the liberals, Germany would be a federation of constitutional monarchies, with an emperor chosen by its parliament. On 1 April Gagern rose to the tribune and silenced the noisy assembly with a sweep of his steely gaze, but his victory was almost a foregone conclusion, for some 425 deputies were liberal monarchists by conviction. The moderates pressed their advantage when the pr
e-parliament separated on 3 April, electing a ‘Committee of Fifty’, which would act as a caretaker until the actual German parliament was due to meet in May. Neither Hecker nor Struve was elected on to this committee. Hecker stormed out, taking a rump of deputies with him, while the more compromising Blum and the other democrats stayed, hoping to work for a federal Germany that would allow for the coexistence of both monarchies and republics. Blum stood apart from many of his fellow democrats not only because of his eloquence (which spoke directly to the impoverished masses since he drew on his childhood experience of privation) or because of his shaggy beard and the worker’s blouse that he sometimes wore, but because he saw the wisdom of political compromise.23 Yet the radical left was not only defeated but irretrievably fractured.
These early defeats convinced some radicals that ‘the reaction’ was already gathering pace and that, as Carl Schurz recalled, ‘there was no safety for popular liberty except in a republic’.24 But there was no chance of a republic being established by legal means. Hecker fumed: ‘Nothing can be done in Frankfurt. We have to strike in Baden’ - where grassroots republicanism had found rich soil. The grand duchy had been politically one of the most liberal since 1815, but its territory included large landed estates that belonged to princes or knights of the former Holy Roman Empire who had lost their political power during the territorial reshuffles of the Napoleonic era but still burdened their peasantry with the relics of seigneurialism. During the March revolution, peasants in the Black Forest seized their landlords’ property and demanded weapons to defend their claims. Such rebels offered a willing ear to republican propaganda,25 but the Baden republicans had more than just peasant anger to sustain them. Over the Swiss border, a German ‘national committee’ recruited a paramilitary force from among the twenty thousand expatriates, while the former soldier Franz Sigel organised his own republican legion at Mannheim and, in Paris, Georg Herwegh, leader of the eight-hundred-member German Democratic Society, was boasting that he could raise a force of some five thousand Germans. The Prussian ambassador to Baden warned that ‘with a word - that may already have been spoken - an army of more than twenty thousand desperate and fanatic proletarians could unite under [Hecker’s] command’.26