by Mike Rapport
The ‘Forty-Eighters’ were also confronted with the fact that their own national aspirations conflicted with those of other ethnic groups, whether they were neighbouring peoples or minorities within the presumptive state. When they responded, the revolutionaries found it very hard to look at the ‘national question’ from any perspective other than that of their own national interests. Even Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx’s intellectual partner, argued in 1852 that Bohemia ‘could only exist henceforth, as a portion of Germany’, dismissing the very idea of Czech nationality as ‘dying according to every fact known in history for the last four hundred years’.142 Engels was driven by the sense that the Slavs of the Austrian Empire were essentially counter-revolutionaries, since, when their national interests conflicted with those of the Germans and Hungarians, they turned to the Habsburgs for support. He was sympathetic to the Poles, and in the same article he denounced the travesty inflicted on them by the Prussians in 1848, but the apostle of communism had little sympathy for ‘those numerous small relics of peoples which, after having figured for a longer or shorter period on the stage of history, were finally absorbed as integral portions into one or the other of those more powerful nations’. Yet precisely those nationalities were giving political expression to their aspirations in 1848, sometimes for the first time. For Engels, some nationalities were doomed by history to be subject peoples, since they had neither the culture nor the strength to survive independently. This intellectual position - a version of the ‘threshold principle’ of nationality, which argues that a particular ethnic group becomes a ‘nation’ when it is large and powerful enough to sustain itself - allowed Engels to support German national interests against the Czechs and even to demand the restoration of Poland, but only if it was at the expense of the peoples further to the east - Lithuanians, Belarussians and Ukrainians - not the Germans.143
One of the tragedies of 1848 was therefore that it marked the moment when European liberalism explicitly surrendered itself to its darker, nationalist impulses. This was primarily because, when the conflicting strategic and territorial interests of competing national aspirations became clear, most liberals threw their weight behind the desires or needs of their own nationality. They rarely admitted the perspective of the other ethnic groups, since that would have meant implicitly recognising that there was some good reason behind these rival aspirations. So, instead, the liberals generally preferred to deny to other peoples the very rights and freedoms that they claimed for themselves. The conflicts that thus arose had long-term consequences for the development of nationalism in Europe. Experts frequently distinguish between ‘civic’ and ‘ethnic’ forms of national identity. The ‘civic’ type defines the nation politically, as a matter of explicit or implicit choice by its individual citizens to live together as a nation: as the French scholar Ernest Renan famously declared in 1882, the nation is a tacit ‘daily plebiscite’.144 The nation here is simply a political community: one’s nationality is defined by one’s desire to share equal political and civil rights with other citizens and to live under the same laws that govern that particular state. This form of nationalism has the capacity, of course, to absorb as fully fledged citizens different ethnic groups, whose new nationality is meant to transcend, if not efface altogether, their original identity. ‘Ethnic’ nationalism glories in the shared cultural roots and heritage of a people enjoying a common descent from a particular ancestry, real or mythical. One remained ‘organically’ part of a particular nation, whatever one did and wherever one went. Ties of ‘blood’ and ‘culture’ are often invoked to justify or explain this immutable sense of belonging. In this definition foreigners who lived within the boundaries of the state but could not claim to share the same ethnicity or ‘race’ as the indigenous people could never be full citizens. As authorities such as Anne-Marie Thiesse and Anthony D. Smith have suggested, all European national identities in practice have elements of both the civic and ethnic forms of nationalism, albeit in different combinations. As Smith puts it, the two forms represent ‘the profound dualism at the heart of every nationalism’.145
This point is well illustrated by the case of liberal Hungarian nationalism in 1848, which initially made its territorial claims through a form of civic nationalism, but ultimately assumed an ethnic, more exclusively Magyar form of identity. Liberals like Kossuth tried to argue that the non-Magyar nationalities should be satisfied with enjoying equal rights as citizens of the new order, rather than claim any special national status within it. This was, in other words, an attempt to resolve the problem of national minorities with an appeal to civic nationalism, a call for the non-Magyar groups to choose to be Hungarian citizens. But beneath this was an assumption that the Magyars would dominate the liberal state and that the non-Magyars would assimilate into it. In the long run it was even hoped that these nationalities might eventually adopt the Magyar language and identity. Consequently, assimilation into the liberal order in Hungary therefore assumed the superiority of Magyar identity and the eventual lapse of other forms of national identity within the historic ‘Crownlands of Saint Stephen’. Since the promise of equal rights as individuals was understandably wholly inadequate for most Romanian and Slav nationalists, who had little faith that their own national identities would be sufficiently protected, they reacted by emphasising their own, distinct ethnic identities, which in turn prompted a reaction among Magyars. This process led ethnic definitions of nationalism to be ever more firmly embedded. In effect it represented the failure of the emerging constitutional order to resolve the problem of the national minorities within it.
French nationalism is usually regarded as a model of the civic type, and it may be viewed as an exception in 1848, in that it was not pushed towards a more ethnic position. This may have been due largely to circumstances, since France - despite the pressure of radicals - remained within its existing boundaries and did not face any serious ethnic challenges within its territory. Republicans universally condemned attacks on the Jews, who by virtue of the revolution of 1789 were deemed to be citizens like everyone else. It is also true that French republicans - particularly those on the left - never lost their zeal in 1848-9 to liberate all the subjugated peoples of Europe. Even so, this messianic dream assumed the superiority of the French model of democracy and national self-determination. Moreover, lurking behind this cosmopolitanism were the old territorial pretensions to France’s ‘natural frontiers’, lost in 1815, which involved absorbing Belgium and the Rhineland. Such annexations would necessarily have posed the problem of assimilating the Flemish- and German-speaking inhabitants of those territories and may have created for the Second Republic difficulties of a similar type to those faced by liberal Hungary. Fortunately, in 1848 there was no new war of French revolutionary expansion, so French republican nationalism was able to hold fast to its civic impulses, offering equal rights to all its citizens regardless of confessional or (in the case of the Bretons and an ever-increasing immigrant population from the nineteenth century onwards) ethnic origins. The two cases of Hungarian and French nationalism in 1848 suggest that all expressions of nationalism, whether ‘ethnic’ or ‘civic’, were potentially aggressive and exclusive. This ‘civic’ ideal was rooted firmly in the assumption that nationality was a matter of choice - a decision by the individual citizen to live under a particular state and obey its laws, but in return to enjoy the civil and political rights of citizenship. The price of this assimilation into the civic order was that, in their relationship with the state (as voters, as soldiers, as officials, as pupils in state schools, for instance), individuals had to put their identity as citizens of the whole country first. Their sense of belonging in religious, class, provincial and even ethnic terms had to come second - and preferably a distant second - behind that. These other forms of identity, which threatened to fragment the civic order, had to be relegated to the citizens’ private lives.
It was different in Central and Eastern Europe, where nationalism became based on a more exclusive ‘e
thnic’ or ‘cultural’ sense of identity, rooted variously in a common language, religion and historic claims to ties of ‘blood’ or ‘race’. This - almost inevitably - involved denying the rights of citizenship to those people who lived within the boundaries of the putative state, but who were not held to be part of the same ethnic group - like Jews in Hungary until 1849. Otherwise - as with Hungarian nationalism in 1848 in relation to the Romanians and the Slavs - it insisted that in practice those people had to accept the privileged position of the language and culture of the politically and socially dominant nationality. This development, which can be seen at work in 1848, did not occur because Eastern and Central Europeans were more bigoted than their Western contemporaries. Rather, it happened because of the historical and political circumstances, which were also clearly exerting their influence during the revolutions of that year. While Western European states like France, Britain and Spain have had (more or less in the case of the first) stable territorial boundaries for the last two centuries, those countries in the East and Centre have not. In 1848 nationalists there were faced with the thorny task of carving new states out of multi-national empires. The boundaries of their presumptive countries were not set and where there were historical memories of long-lost borders, these could now be challenged by other national groups. With the fluidity of the frontiers and the overlapping claims of rival nationalities to the same territory, the inhabitants of these regions faced an uncertain political future. In 1848 a Transylvanian Romanian, for example, was politically a subject of the Habsburg Emperor, but was at the same time claimed as a Hungarian citizen by the Magyar liberals and hailed as a fellow citizen by the Romanian revolutionaries in Moldavia and Wallachia, who were in turn technically subjects of the Turkish sultan. The Romanians of 1848 were, in short, a stateless nation, like the Poles, the Ruthenians and the various other Slav peoples of the Habsburg monarchy. In the absence of a state of their own, which might have ruled over a clearly defined territory with settled political boundaries, the thread of continuity in the life of the nation - running through all the changes in foreign overlordship and conquest - became the culture of the people, its language, its religion, its shared history and its sense of common bloodlines. The germs of this idea, however, would bear its bitter fruit right up to the late twentieth century and, in the Balkans at least, it might continue to do so unless a ‘post-national’ solution is found to the problems posed by the emergence of new nation-states there. The brutality of the Second World War in Eastern Europe and the ethnic cleansing witnessed in the fragmenting Yugoslavia in the 1990s were distant but horribly resonant echoes of the darker side of the nationalism of 1848.
The Springtime of Peoples crystallised and sharpened national differences. The conflicts that constantly arose would dog attempts at European nation-building deep into the twentieth century. They also split the European liberal revolutions of 1848, eventually giving the counter-revolution the opportunity it needed to set them against one another. These ethnic conflicts were all the sharper where, as was often the case in Eastern Europe, the national tensions coincided with social divisions: the Ukrainians of Galicia could be turned by the Habsburgs against the Poles not only (or even primarily) because of ethic differences but because the latter were landlords while the former were frequently their serfs. The national conflicts alone presented the liberal revolutions with a gargantuan obstacle to overcome in the construction of a constitutional order. Yet, adding to the pressure, they were also beset by internal political and social challenges that threatened to polarise politics and poison social relations. Almost tangible fears of a renewed revolution, this time social rather than political in nature, grew more intense as spring gave way to summer. In those middle months of the year the liberal revolutions were contorted in an agony of social conflict from which they would never recover.
4
THE RED SUMMER
At 11 a.m. on 15 May, up to twenty thousand members of the radical clubs of Paris set off from the Place de la Bastille towards the National Assembly. They were led by Aloysius Huber, the president of the central coordinating body of the radical organisations, the Club des Clubs. The demonstration was on behalf of Poland, whose revolution had just been snuffed out in Poznania and on the streets of Kraków. Huber and most of the steering committee had insisted on a peaceful demonstration. The Executive Commission, the new government chosen by the recently elected National Assembly, was well aware of the plans. It chose not to provoke a confrontation by a strong demonstration of force, although the legislature itself would be defended by the militia. This restraint probably ensured that the day turned out to be bloodless. It could so easily have been different. When the marchers reached the Palais Bourbon, where the legislature met, some three thousand club members poured into the chamber. ‘I could never have imagined that such a mass of human voices could make such an immense noise,’ wrote an astounded Tocqueville, who was sitting in his deputy’s seat.1 Lamartine strode up and down as he made a futile effort to parley with the invaders. As the crowd’s discipline evaporated, Alexandre Raspail - whose fiery petition had been hastily adopted by the demonstration because Huber had absent-mindedly left the official one behind - strode into the chamber and read out his address. He could scarcely be heard above the din.
The situation went from bad to worse when the pallid revolutionary socialist Louis-Auguste Blanqui rose to the tribune. Blanqui had been one of the most dedicated of republican conspirators: along with Armand Barbès, he had been sentenced to death after the abortive uprising in 1839. This was commuted to life imprisonment after a public outcry, in which Lamartine and Victor Hugo had taken the lead. Blanqui (who at his death in 1881 had spent a grand total of thirty-three years in captivity, earning the nickname ‘l’Enfermé’, or ‘the Incarcerated’) was under house arrest in Blois when the revolution broke out. On his release, he returned to Paris, where he established the Central Republican Society, with the aim of pressing for an insurrection that would bring about a social revolution. Tocqueville, who was seeing him for his first and only time, wrote that Blanqui had ‘gaunt and withered cheeks, white lips . . . a dirty pallor, a mildewed appearance, no visible white linen, an old frock-coat stuck to his pockmarked and emaciated limbs; he seemed to have been living in a sewer and just come out of it’.2 Given Blanqui’s politics and character - uncompromising, austere, violent, sometimes sarcastic, socialist and revolutionary - it is scarcely surprising that moderates should have recoiled. Yet he had good cause to have a sinister appearance: his wife had died while he was in prison, and ever since he had worn black from head to toe, without even a white shirt to diminish his mourning; even his hands were sheathed in black gloves. Blanqui had political talents that gained him fervent admirers on the left: ‘his incisive, penetrating and reflective words . . . cut clinically like the blade of a knife’.3 The loyalty that he could inspire among his supporters had been tested in April, however, when the journalist Jules Taschereau (one of the moderates who in February had moved the banquet away from the 12th Arrondissement) published a document that purported to show that Blanqui had betrayed his comrades back in 1839. Barbès, who had fallen out with Blanqui during the uprising of that year and had thrown his weight behind the provisional government, readily accepted Blanqui’s guilt. The latter hit back with a fervent denial - ‘you are attacking me for my revolutionary inflexibility and my single-minded devotion to my ideals’4 - which sold a hundred thousand copies. His club rallied around him: some six hundred members gathered outside his home and carried him triumphantly back to their meeting-place with shouts of ‘Down with the National !’ How genuine the Taschereau document was has never been firmly established. And while it certainly damaged Blanqui’s reputation, it clearly did not shake the loyalty of his hard-core supporters. Armed with this, he continued to inspire fear among his opponents.