1848
Page 27
In Frankfurt, this volte-face produced a tragedy. The following day, a public meeting of twelve thousand people listened to calls from members of the extreme left of the parliament for a second revolution. It was agreed that there would be a mass protest, declaring that those who had voted for the armistice were traitors to Germany and proclaiming their mandates revoked. Archduke John’s new first minister, the sharp Austrian Anton von Schmerling, moved quickly to confront this challenge. He called for troops from Hesse-Darmstadt, Austria and Prussia to protect the parliament. Two thousand soldiers were marched in early the following morning. On 18 September, the great crowd swarmed on the square around the Saint Paul’s Church, and some of the demonstrators found an unguarded back entrance to the parliament. As fists and axes smashed through the door, Heinrich von Gagern stepped forward and thundered: ‘I declare every transgressor against this holy place a traitor to the Fatherland!’87 His courage stopped the assailants cold and they withdrew immediately. The rest of the session continued behind the barred doors of the church. The square outside was swept by the troops and barricades that had been thrown up in the city centre were stormed by Hessians. Gagern’s children, being spirited out of the city in a carriage, could hear the rattle of musket fire in the distance. In all, sixty insurgents and soldiers were killed - as were two conservative delegates to the parliament, Hans von Auerswald and Felix Lichnowsky. They were out investigating the insurrection when they were trapped by a posse of rebels, who killed Auerswald on the spot. Lichnowsky, one of the more outspoken and therefore hated conservative deputies, was slaughtered in a more agonising and barbaric way: his bones were shattered with repeated blows, the word ‘Outlaw’ was posted around his neck, then his broken body was tied to a tree and used for target practice.
The shockwaves were felt across Germany, but it was in long-suffering Baden that, on 22 September, the incorrigible Gustav Struve marched across the frontier from Switzerland with other republicans, including the young Wilhelm Liebknecht, later a leader of the German Social Democratic Party. They seized the town hall of Lörrach, proclaimed a German republic, promised social reforms and started to confiscate the property of known monarchists, alarming liberals and conservatives alike. They also succeeded in gathering an army - numbering ten thousand by Struve’s probably overoptimistic estimate - but it was poorly equipped, with only two casks of gunpowder, one of which turned out to be useless. So when they were met by the Grand Duke’s troops at Staufen four days later, they were crushed in just two hours of fighting. Struve narrowly escaped being torn apart by an angry, loyalist crowd before he and his wife (an active democrat in her own right) were arrested.
The September crisis set the German revolution on an almost irrevocably conservative course. Frankfurt was now under martial law. Carl Schurz passed through the city shortly after the bloody events:
the victorious soldiery still bivouacked on the streets around their burning camp-fires, the barricades had not yet been removed, the pavement was still stained with blood, and everywhere the heavy tramp of military patrols was heard . . . The royal Prussian government had successfully defied the National Parliament, which represented the sovereignty of the German nation. Those who called themselves ‘the people’ had made a hostile attempt upon the embodiment of popular sovereignty resulting from the revolution, and this embodiment of popular sovereignty had been obliged to call upon the armed forces of the princes for protection against the hatred of ‘the people’. Thus the backbone of the revolution begun in March, 1848, was substantially broken.88
It was clearer than ever that real power lay not with the Frankfurt parliament and the liberal administration but with the separate states - and the monarchs - who could still command the obedience of their armed forces.
Meanwhile, the revolution was tearing itself apart. As in France, German politics became increasingly polarised as liberals were more willing to look to authoritarian solutions for the defence of law and order. On the left, the reasonable, patient Blum despairingly wrote to his wife that, were it not for the disgrace of abandoning his fellow democrats, he would be inclined to withdraw from politics altogether and watch events unfold from a comfortable distance. Schurz commented that the right-wing deputies sat in parliament ‘with smiles of triumph on their lips’.89 Although some of the radicals had been willing to assume leadership of the Frankfurt uprising, the majority of their colleagues had tried to persuade the crowd to disperse and, once the fighting started, worked hard to find a peaceful settlement. It availed them little: like their French counterparts, they were blamed for the violence. Fanny Lewald, visiting Frankfurt and watching the proceedings of the parliament a month later, noted the strength of ‘party hatred’, and she was saddened by how the politicians ‘are without faith, how they call the others bad and irresponsible and deny each other any political insight’. She also noted that conservatives coldly spoke of the ‘bullet solution’.90 Clotilde Koch-Gontard, a daughter of one of Frankfurt’s leading industrialists, who hosted salons and dinners for the moderate liberal deputies, wrote on 23 September that she was disillusioned with the revolution. She condemned the liberals and conservatives for their ‘German stubbornness and pettiness’, but was convinced that the left was looking for trouble: ‘The armistice was only a pretext. Even without it, civil war would have broken out, and we have it, so much must be clear to us. This Left cannot justify its sins against Germany.’91
III
Social fear also played into conservative hands in Austria. After the flight of the royal family on 17 May and the backlash of ordinary Austrians against the Viennese radicals, Baron Pillersdorf ’s government sensed that it was time to strike back. A new press law punished with imprisonment treasonable writings, insults against the Emperor and attempts to corrupt public morals. On 25 May the government went so far as to strike at the mainspring of Viennese radicalism, the student movement, by ordering the disbandment of the Academic Legion and the closure of the university. But the authorities had overplayed their hand, because they were still too weak to confront the inevitable resistance from the students and their working-class allies. The very next day students protested and workers armed with machine tools marched into the city centre. One hundred and sixty barricades were constructed, using weighty granite paving-stones heaved out of the roads. They rose ‘as high, in many places, as the second stories of the houses . . . over them waved either the red or black flag, those certain emblems of blood and death’.92 Yet there was no fighting: the government, well aware of its inability to assert its authority, yielded on 27 May, promising to entrust the security of the city to the Academic Legion and the National Guard, under the command of the ‘Security Committee’, which had been created after the Emperor’s flight.
The insurrection of 26 May, such as it was, was to be the high tide of the revolution in Vienna. Events had moved too far and too fast for most Austrians. As the American diplomat William Stiles put it, the moderate supporters of the constitution were fighting a ‘double conflict . . . first, that of the people against the old form of government; secondly, that of the new form of government against the Radicals, or enemies of all government’. He was left in little doubt that, when faced with a choice between the old system and more upheaval, they would choose the former as the lesser of two evils.93 Many Austrians were alarmed by radical militancy in support of German unity, which threatened to reduce the once-mighty Austrian monarchy to a mere appendage of a greater Germany, which, moreover, was potentially a republican state and, even worse, would be dominated by the hated Prussians.94 There were social anxieties as well, which were intensified by an acute consciousness of the poverty borne by the Austrian workers.
Over the summer of 1848 the economic hardship worsened in Vienna, aggravated by the political uncertainty and a downturn in demand caused by a steady flight of the well-to-do from the city. Viennese workers initially demonstrated little political consciousness, retaining faith in the students to whom they often looked for help in
their disputes with employers. Radical journalists, however, soon started making an impact with appeals for proletarian unity, verbal attacks on the rich and demands that the government do more for the poor. Workers had been excluded from the new liberal order in two important ways: first, they were denied membership of the National Guard, which therefore remained essentially a middle-class militia dedicated to protecting property; second, until the Stürmpetition of 15 May, the suffrage had been denied to those who earned a daily or weekly wage, servants and those who took charity.
Some effort had been made to tackle the distress of the city’s sixteen thousand workers. In the spring the government had lowered, or abolished altogether, taxes on certain types of food; and it had established public works, including, among other projects, shoring up the river banks along the Danube. This was not enough to help the growing army of unemployed who were still suffering in the economic crisis. Over the summer, calls for lower rents, or for no rents at all, were heard at public meetings, while for the first time Viennese workers paraded in the streets, forcing some employers to grant ten-hour days and pay increases. The tailors held an assembly to demand that women (who undercut men’s wages) be banned from making dresses and mantillas. The workshop of a French lady milliner was ransacked. To deal with this working-class militancy, the Security Committee set up a labour committee that was charged with providing food and further public works for the unemployed, while preventing non-Viennese from drifting into the city. Some workers were given the task of repairing the machines that had been wrecked and rebuilding the factories that had been torched during the March days. Yet, despite all efforts to stop them, impoverished outsiders desperate for help continued to trickle into the city, swelling those working on the public projects into a veritable army. The government began to fret over this potential threat to order and the cost to an already dangerously depleted city budget.
The elections to the Austrian parliament were held in this atmosphere of political tension and social fear. Consequently, voters returned a majority of conservatives or moderate liberals, although there was also a significant minority of left-wingers who would become important later. For now, however, the centrist ‘law and order’ group, which backed the ministry and the constitution of 25 April, dominated. The parliament opened on 22 July and, by then, a new cabinet had been appointed under Baron Johann Philipp von Wessenberg, a former servant of the old regime who could - when the time came - orientate policy on to a more monarchist tack. Among his ministers was the repentant liberal lawyer Alexander Bach, whose abhorrence of the instability and violence of the revolution was fast pushing him towards a conversion to conservatism. As the summer blazed on, the government’s grip on the situation grew tighter, with the crushing of the Czech revolution in June, the overpowering of the Piedmontese in northern Italy in July and the slow but sure gathering of Croatian forces against the Hungarians. By August, the ministry was looking to reassert imperial power closer to home.
For now, however, Vienna was feverish. Count Alexander von Hübner had been released from his imprisonment in Milan and had made his way back to Austria, taking in a leisurely holiday in Switzerland en route. When he finally arrived home, he was stunned by the tableau presented by the imperial capital:
I no longer recognised my good old town of Vienna . . . In the streets one meets only slovenly students, national guards struggling with their sabres, proletarians and low-class whores. The good people, those with self-respect, the Black-Yellows, the Kaiserlics, who formed the immense majority and who shut themselves up at home or took refuge outside the city wished for the Emperor and trembled together with their families.95
Stiles noted that the city was transformed from a garden of hedonistic delights to an arena of dreary political activities: ‘constant spectacles, processions, consecrations of flags, festivities of fraternity’. He also noted that the flight of the court and the nobility had severely reduced spending in the capital, crippling the city’s artisans who produced luxury items - an assessment with which Engels agreed. It was therefore more than just the middle class that joined in the ‘shout for a return to a regular system of government, and for a return of the Court’.96 When, on 12 August, Emperor Ferdinand finally returned after being persuaded of his safety by a deputation from the parliament, he was greeted joyfully, with girls scattering flowers in the imperial family’s path as they stepped off the Danube steamer. Watching the procession, Hübner was impressed by one of the royals, the eighteen-year-old Franz Joseph, nephew of the Emperor, who was wearing a military uniform: ‘his cold demeanour, the severity of his look, betrayed the emotions which were agitating him. It was sadness, but not discouragement: I would almost say that it was anger being contained with difficulty. For me, it was a revelation and a hope.’97
The radicals responded to Ferdinand’s return by holding a stormy mass meeting of ten thousand members of the democratic clubs at the Odeon Hall, where they declared their adherence to the extreme left of the Frankfurt parliament. This provoked an outcry among the more moderate Viennese, who accused the Academic Legion and the radicals of nurturing republicanism. There remained, meanwhile, the economic crisis, and the issue of the public works. The government, mindful of the example of the June days in Paris, was reluctant to shut down the projects altogether. Instead, it announced a reduction in pay, which provoked the crisis. On 21 August, there were street demonstrations, with women in the lead, in the suburbs. The following day, the workers built an effigy of the public works minister and gave him a mock-funeral, saying that he had choked to death on the money he had extracted from the unemployed. When the National Guard tried to disperse the protesters, there were clashes, which escalated on 23 August. The Academic Legion, though refusing to join in the repression, was reluctant to side with the insurgents and stood back, a mere spectator to what followed. Lacking the support of the very people whom they regarded as their leaders, the workers stood no chance. Demonstrators were beaten with the flats of sabres, bayoneted and shot. Between 6 and 18 workers were killed, and between 36 and 152 seriously wounded (depending upon whether one believes government or radical counts). When the fighting was over, women from the more prosperous quarters of the city garlanded the National Guards’ bayonets with flowers.
As with the Parisian June days, the workers’ protests had been spontaneous, owing little to radical political leadership. Yet one conclusion seemed inescapable: the conservative Wiener Zeitung declared that ‘the workers have seen the contrast between their defenceless poverty and armed property. And at this moment there came into being a proletariat that formerly did not exist.’98 Middle-class radicals tried to deny the existence of a social schism. The Democratic Club shouted down Marx, who was then visiting Vienna, when he tried to argue that the violence was a class struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. For Engels, 23 August was the moment when the middle class abandoned the cause of the people: ‘thus the unity and strength of the revolutionary force was broken; the class-struggle had come in Vienna, too, to a bloody outbreak, and the counter-revolutionary camarilla saw the day approaching on which it might strike its grand blow’.99 But Marx found that it was not only the middle class who were deserting the revolution; there was little sympathy for his ideas even when he addressed workers’ meetings. On 7 September, he left Vienna, grumbling at the stubborn refusal of the workers to see that they should be waging a class war against the bourgeoisie. However, the social fear was very real, even if it was not always expressed in the class-conscious terms that Marx would have liked, and these social tensions would help tear apart the liberal order.
The reaction began slowly at first: the public works were suspended, but they were replaced by a ‘Committee for the Assistance of Destitute Tradesmen’, which attempted to find work for the unemployed. In other words there was no more direct state intervention, but the committee at least set about its task enthusiastically, consulting with the guilds as to how the government could improve economic conditions. The
National Guard was placed under the direct command of the Interior Ministry, which also assumed responsibility for law and order. This signalled the end for the Security Committee, whose moderate members carried a motion for its own dissolution on 25 August.100
In Vienna, the tide was beginning to turn back towards the conservatives. In Prague the counter-revolution was by then already complete. Social tensions in the Czech cities were complicated by the additional layer of ethnic strife between Czechs and Germans. The precise relationship between the social and national conflicts was complex. Workers formed a tiny segment of the population of the Czech lands, but memories of their destructive capacities in 1844 ensured that, four years later, there were palpable fears of a ‘communist uprising’.101 Yet little was done to address the root cause of their distress (although, in Prague, the prices of certain foods were reduced, relief funds were collected and the unemployed were set to work on public projects). Meanwhile, the best advice that a liberal newspaper, Bohemia, could offer was to await the drafting of a constitution, which would surely bring a brighter future for all. Yet the workers were effectively excluded from the new political order: they were denied the vote, first by the Moravian Diet in Brno in April and then by the National Committee when it drafted the electoral law for Bohemia on 28 May. The National Guard had, like elsewhere, been established to safeguard property and to keep the workers in check. The failure to enfranchise the latter came as supplies of raw materials (such as cotton from the United States) were choked off for lack of credit, so mills closed and unemployment continued to increase unabated. This was accompanied by a sharp rise in prices. It was small wonder that the workers remained restless, while the collapse of Austrian authority gave them the confidence to express their distress in acts of violence. They took to the streets of Prague in early May. There were strikes in Ostrava and Brno. Yet, while in Vienna the workers found spokesmen among the students and the democratic press, in Prague they were left with little voice. The call for the ‘organisation of work and wages’ in the earlier March petitions had been quietly shelved by the National Committee. Czech students’ focus on political and national issues did not begin to address the workers’ bread-and-butter anxieties. There was, moreover, no evidence of any socialist-style class consciousness: Czech workers took out their anger and despair on more traditional scapegoats, not least the Jews. When the textile workers marched in a demonstration demanding better working conditions on 3 June, they were easily dispersed by the army, and the city authorities castigated the protesters for their ‘blind stubbornness’.102