by Mike Rapport
In the Habsburg monarchy, Jews had been subject to discriminatory legislation, including the obligation to pay a special tax in return for being ‘tolerated’ in the empire and a ban on holding landed property. In Vienna only resident Jews could engage in business: others were allowed to stay in the capital for only three days at a time. Perhaps unsurprisingly, therefore, many Jews took the lead in the revolution in the capital: the young doctor whose inspirational speech had fired up the Viennese crowd on 13 March, Adolf Fischhof, was Jewish, and he emerged as one of the leaders of the revolution, becoming president of the Committee of Safety established after the 15 May uprising. Yet the revolutionary efforts of his co-religionists were often mocked by the Viennese, many of whom still regarded the Jews as usurers and petty tradesmen. Pamphleteers offered anti-Semitic counter-blasts to Jewish petitions for emancipation. In the outburst of working-class violence that set the industrial suburbs ablaze in the March revolution, Jewish businesses were attacked. In other towns Jewish lives were physically threatened: only the timely arrival of the student militia prevented a full-blooded pogrom in Raab. In Prague the collapse of censorship brought anti-Semitic propaganda flooding on to the streets, which encouraged workers’ attacks on Jewish retailers through the spring, climaxing on 1-2 May, when rioting was unleashed against Jewish shopkeepers accused of overcharging for their wares.127 Understandably then, when Prague’s June insurrection came, the residents of the Jewish quarter barricaded their streets not to support the uprising but to protect Jewish neutrality in the struggle between the revolution and the counter-revolution.
Such were the openly visceral currents of anti-Semitism in the Austrian Empire that when Baron Franz Pillersdorf ’s original draft of the constitution of 25 April guaranteed freedom of religion to all people he was urged by the Lower Austrian Estates to limit this provision only to Christian denominations, ‘not on principle, but on account of popular feeling’.128 It was to be left to the parliament itself to decide on the rights of non-Christians, but that proved to be too short-lived to address the issue. When the constitution was torn up after the reaction, the provisions guaranteeing religious toleration were retained, but they still excluded the Jews, who had to wait until 1868 before they were liberated from all restrictions in Austria.
In Hungary the April Laws failed to enfranchise the Jewish population, reflecting elite anxieties over a dark wave of popular anti-Semitism that swept the country in the spring of 1848 - and much of the violence was committed by workers against Jewish premises, forcing the authorities to bring out the National Guard to protect their owners. The spark was the proposal in the Hungarian Diet on 21 March to give the franchise in municipal elections to anyone who was sufficiently wealthy, regardless of religion. Anti-Semitic violence was unleashed in Pressburg, where Jews were beaten up and their shops smashed. The rioting then spread to other towns, climaxing in early April. The consequence was that most liberals in the Diet reluctantly agreed - over Kossuth’s protests - that to pacify this popular rage the enfranchisement of the Jews should be delayed.129 There were, however, further outbreaks soon afterwards: in Budapest on 19 April (miraculously) no one was reported killed, though plenty were wounded when ‘the lower classes of the people armed with sticks, knives and axes’ fell on the city’s Jews, with the apparent aim of expelling them from the city. In Pressburg some ten Jews were lynched and a further forty wounded. Although both Batthyány and Kossuth were horrified, they also felt that further concessions to the mob would save lives: as Kossuth put it, any more pressure for emancipation would send Hungarian Jews to the slaughterhouse. On 25 April, therefore, Jews were ‘excused’ from military service - in other words, their services were not required for the National Guard. This was a reversal of the more radical Budapest Committee of Public Safety’s rejection on 18 March of an anti-Semitic petition demanding that Jews be expelled from the militia. Led by Petőfi, the radicals simply formed a special battalion for Jews. They accused the Germans (the ‘the blind tools of the overthrown regime’) and the dregs of the working class of being behind the anti-Semitic violence. These were judgements prompted by embarrassment and a strong sense that the pogroms were casting the revolution into disrepute; or, as Petőfi put it, throwing ‘mud at the virgin flag of 15 March’.130 While it is true that Germans did take the lead in some of the violence, there is no evidence that the anti-Semitism was motivated by counter-revolution or that it was merely carried out by an underclass of the urban poor. Rather, it was economically motivated and committed by otherwise respectable members of the artisanal guilds who resented the quiet immigration of Jews into the towns, setting up shop alongside and in competition with their Magyar and German-speaking rivals. Jews would in fact prove to be fiercely loyal to the liberal regime in Hungary - so much so that Slavs for years afterwards would equate Jews with rampant Magyar nationalism.
Ultimately, in 1849, while Jews were among those fighting for Hungarian independence, the Diet would be true to its own ideals and fully emancipate them. Kossuth saw the Jews no differently from the other ethnic minorities of Hungary: they would be content with their status as free citizens in a state where they shared exactly the same rights as all the others. In such circumstances, they would have no need of special treatment as a separate national or religious group. As Kossuth put it, the Jews themselves must prepare for their own emancipation by agreeing that living under separate institutions governed by Mosaic law was not, after all, an essential part of their identity.131 This was much the same as the German liberal view, but Jewish emancipation and assimilation into the liberal state created something of a crisis within their own communities, where more traditionally minded Jews feared that their separate sense of identity would be gradually erased.132
The year 1848 in Central Europe therefore posited one of the great dilemmas of the modern, liberal state: should ethnic or religious minorities be obliged to assimilate fully into the political order, effacing in public life any sense of identity other than that of being a citizen, or should the state rest on pluralism (or multiculturalism), which allows all groups to express their own sense of separateness fully, but within a consensus that is supposed to guarantee mutual respect and the rule of law? There is no easy answer: the first option threatens to ride roughshod over religious and ethnic sensibilities; the second raises the spectre of a fragmented civic order. French republicans, however, had no doubts: since Jews had been fully emancipated in 1791, they were also citizens of the new republic. Nevertheless, one of the traditional flashpoints of anti-Semitism - Alsace - still flared up. This region was exceptional in France for this type of violence in 1848; it arose due to the peasants and workers identifying Jews with usury and economic competition. As a frontier province, it was also an area where people were on a particularly short fuse during the economic distress because they witnessed the ease with which food was still being exported133 - and Jews were unfairly blamed for that. In early March peasants in upper Alsace ransacked and burned Jewish homes and synagogues, forcing their occupants to take refuge in Switzerland. In Altkirch there was evidence that the local elites turned a blind eye and even actively encouraged the violence. According to one of the Jewish leaders, the root cause was
straightforward religious prejudice and resentment of usury, yet in the village of Oberdorf, peasants fell on the Jews, even though they were almost all indigent there . . . moreover, everywhere the attacks began with the synagogues, yet the synagogues have nothing to do with commerce or usury. For the greater part of the inhabitants here, all issues can be reduced to a matter of religion: people here are Catholic or Protestant rather than Republicans, Philippistes [i.e., Orléanists], or Legitimists.
A cluster of Jewish refugees in Porrentruy appealed, successfully, to the republican values of the new regime: ‘If there was ever a time for tolerance and legal protection for all religions, as well as respect for people and for property . . . it is certainly at the present time, now that the Nation has just constituted itself freely and s
pontaneously as a Republic.’ Adolphe Crémieux, now minister of justice and religions, promised material help to the Jewish refugees and to pursue the authors of ‘those savage assaults’. To the provisional government’s commissioner in Colmar, he wrote: ‘I am stupefied to learn that in France, in old Alsace, in a country so full of patriotism, that there should be enough miserable people who can attack citizens whose only crime is to be Jewish.’ To the Jews, he promised that they would find justice in the law courts, but the government also sent in the army, for ‘the government has no greater desire, no more pressing interest, than in protecting the property and lives of citizens’. The column that repressed the anti-Semitic violence in Altkirch was led by a certain Louis Eugène Cavaignac, a general who had impeccably republican credentials but who in the summer would gain some notoriety.134
While most of the revolutions, with varying degrees of success, sought to grant civil equality to the Jews, they also went some way to emancipation in the colonial empires. The most important measure was the definitive abolition of slavery in the French Empire. Slavery had been decreed illegal once before - by the First Republic in 1794 - but Napoleon Bonaparte had bowed to planter interests in the French Caribbean colonies and tried to reimpose it in 1802. He was successful in the islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique, but signally failed in Haiti, where the emancipated slaves fought victoriously for their independence. With the revolutionary example of Haiti (and that of the British islands, where slavery had been abolished in 1833), the persistence of the institution in the remaining French colonies was harder to justify to its opponents. Under the July Monarchy, which upheld slavery as a ‘property right’, republicans like Victor Schoelcher and Ledru-Rollin had made anti-slavery one of their causes. The former wrote eloquently against the institution, while the latter delivered a thunderous speech in favour of abolition in April 1847. Schoelcher became the Second Republic’s minister of the navy and, through that, had responsibility for the overseas colonies. On 27 April he carried the decree freeing the slaves in the French Empire: 87,000 on Guadeloupe, 74,000 in Martinique. These people joined the colonial elites, which included the whites and the free blacks (who, though educated and relatively prosperous, still faced racial discrimination), in formally becoming French citizens, with the right to vote. In the first elections Schoelcher would lead the list of candidates on both islands - and be elected in all six seats.135
The Danes and the Swedes also abolished slavery in their Caribbean islands (the Swedes still held Saint Barthélemy in 1848). Yet there was no serious talk of abandoning empire itself: the Dutch parliament certainly asserted some control over the Netherlands’ overseas colonies, but the commerce itself remained a monopoly of the crown. Algeria remained a French colony (it was first invaded in 1830 in a desperate attempt by the last Bourbon king, Charles X, to curry popularity with an overseas adventure), and while the European colonists were given the right to vote, the indigenous population was not.
Another serious limitation to the ‘Springtime of Peoples’ was that it did little to emancipate women. Nowhere in Europe did they receive the right to vote, primarily because there was a persistent prejudice against it not only among most men but among many women, who had internalised the prevailing views of gender difference. Mid-nineteenth-century European society generally held that women were naturally predisposed to the domestic sphere: they were the nurturer of their children, the virtuous wife and the ‘angel of the hearth’. They were thought to be best protected by being under male authority, be it their father or their husband. Politics were best left to men, who were deemed to be more rational than women and so were naturally attuned to public life, an arena into which women were not meant to stray. Typical of even the left-wing revolutionaries in this respect was the Mainz democrat Ludwig Bamberger, who spoke out against women’s ‘perfumed slavery’ but asked, ‘Who wants to eradicate differences which are present in nature?’ Either sex, he argued, should get involved only ‘as is appropriate to its nature’.136 Even those rare voices that supported women’s emancipation could not always be said to be full-blown supporters of gender equality: a Hessian democrat declared that depriving women of the vote was akin to denying them the pleasures of ‘cooking, sewing, knitting, darning, dancing and playing’.137
Yet women did participate in the politics of the revolution in different ways; and, in the process, they challenged the limits to emancipation in 1848. Women almost everywhere (and of almost all social backgrounds) took part - usually in various supporting roles - in the street-fighting in the revolutions of February-March. Working-class women would also participate in later insurrections: in June in Paris and Prague, and in the radical uprisings in the Rhineland in 1849. In Paris women helped to build the barricades, and they carried food, messages and ammunition to the fighters - often by hiding these items in hollowed-out bread or in the bottom of milk canisters. The iconography of French women bearing flags on the barricades is no myth: two parisiennes were cut down by the National Guard as they did just that on 23 June 1848. The women of the barricades in Prague left a deep impression on posterity, as symbols of the heroism and sacrifice of Slav women.
Women were also important observers of the events, offering influential commentary on the revolutions: to cite but a few examples, under the pseudonym of Daniel Stern, Marie d’Agoult wrote a history of the 1848 revolution in France that remains an important source; in Germany, Fanny Lewald penned a series of influential letters on the revolution; in Italy, the American journalist Margaret Fuller became, in effect, the United States’ first war correspondent when she reported on the events in Rome for Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune.138 In Paris the socialist Eugénie Niboyet established a feminist newspaper called the Voice of Women. The Czech writer Božena Němcová sympathised with the plight of the poor, deplored anti-Semitism, opposed German nationalism and urged women’s emancipation through education: ‘We women have remained far behind the age, behind the banner of freedom and culture. Let us confess this, let us not be ashamed, for the fault is not with us, but with those who have completely neglected the education of people, and left the guidance of the female sex utterly to chance.’139 Such voices were those of the politically engaged writer, not the detached observer.
Women also formed, or joined, political clubs. In Paris the ‘Fraternal Association of Both Sexes’ admitted men and women as equals, while the Club of the Emancipation of Women and the Union of Women pressed for women’s rights - generally not to political enfranchisement, but to education, divorce, a control over their own property - and for a system of national workshops that provided work for unemployed women as well as for men. Meanwhile, radical clubs, such as the Montagnard Club and Adolphe Blanqui’s Central Republican Society, also admitted women, although most socialist clubs allowed women to attend but not to speak. In 1849-51 women played a role in distributing radical propaganda across the French countryside - by allowing their homes to be used as meeting places for the radicals and by reading left-wing newspapers aloud to the illiterate. Thousands of German women collected money for the popular cause of a German navy, while women’s clubs were established in cities such as Berlin, Mannheim and Mainz. In the Rhineland women were admitted to some democratic clubs from the summer of 1848, while mass meetings held in rural areas were well attended by them. In Mainz Kathinka Zitz-Halein created the Humania Association in May 1849 because Bamberger’s Democratic Association did not allow women to speak. Its purpose was to support ‘needy patriots’ with money, clothing, bandages and nursing during the radical insurrection that summer. Similar organisations appeared in Saxony, Nassau, Frankfurt and Heidelberg. The middle-class women of Prague founded the Club of Slavic Women to promote women’s education; it organised two public meetings in August 1848 to protest against the Austrian military occupation of the city. The second of these sent a delegation to Vienna which secured the release of some political prisoners who had been held since the insurrection in June. While, to modern eyes, such activities s
eem scarcely to have scratched the surface of inequality, to conservatives they were viewed as especially dangerous. On 17 March 1849 the Austrian government handed down a law on associations, banning women’s political activities of all kinds in the Habsburg Empire. It was even to be illegal for women to join political meetings as quiet observers.
Some women went so far as to try to stand in elections. In Paris in May 1849 Jeanne Déroin attempted to stand as a socialist candidate. The government declared her candidacy unconstitutional, warning that none of her votes would be counted. Her supporters among the left-wing republicans therefore backtracked, but it was an important symbolic moment in French politics. The great writer George Sand took a more Fabian approach to women’s political enfranchisement: she argued in April 1848 that women would some day participate in politics, but society had to change first. Until that happened, women would be too dependent upon marriage and too subjugated by laws that reinforced male authority within the family to act truly independently in politics. She therefore distanced herself from her admirers who proposed her candidacy for the upcoming elections. The task of the Second Republic was not to give women the right to vote, she argued, but to improve women’s status within the family first.140 This was a curious argument from someone who worked closely with Ledru-Rollin, the Republic’s minister of the interior.
VI
The events of 1848 appeared to provide an unprecedented opportunity for European liberals to realise their long-nurtured goals for national unity or independence. Moreover, the sudden collapse of the old governments offered some nationalities the chance to give political expression to their identities for the very first time. Yet the various nationalisms were riven by both internal divisions and conflicts with one another. The former problem was perhaps most glaring in Italy, where many patriots fought less for national unity than for the liberties of their own state: Venice, Lombardy, Tuscany, Sicily and so on. Loyalties could be even more localised than that: the inhabitants of the small towns and cities of the terra firma in Venetia regarded the preponderance of Venice itself with suspicion and even hostility. In Tuscany the port city of Livorno resented the capital, Florence, which provoked instability later. Civic pride - campanilismo (love of one’s own campanile, or bell-tower) - still had a deep and widespread appeal; by comparison a sense of a wider, ‘Italian’ identity seemed too abstract. Moreover, the existing rulers of the Italian states were reluctant to countenance any form of unification that undermined their own dynastic interests, and they held the trump cards: their armed forces, which allowed Charles Albert to dictate terms to the revolutionaries and which other rulers provided and withdrew according to their own interests. At times, Mazzini must have felt like tearing out his hair and beard. To cite another example, the Polish radicals, who in exile had formulated a vision of a unitary, democratic Polish state, came up against the more pragmatic but less ambitious provincialism of the patriotic movement on the ground in Poznania and Galicia. The Polish elites who provided the local leadership of the national movement had their own social interests to defend and felt that their cause would be best served by working first with their Prussian and Austrian rulers for reform, before trying to piece Poland together again. Even in Germany, where nationalism had spread more broadly among the population, the liberals had little or no experience of working within a national framework. Respect for the individual states was still deep-rooted throughout German society, and the revolutionaries carried with them a complex baggage of state and regional loyalties, religious denomination and economic interests, all of which coloured their opinions on the bigger national issues of 1848.141