by Mike Rapport
None the less, the Czech workers did emerge as a political force in June 1848. As in so many other European cities, this played into conservative hands by arousing the fears of almost everyone else. The evidence is sketchy, but it appears that the imperial war minister, Count Theodor Latour, had thought of Radetzky’s forces in Italy as a ‘southern army’ that was to be complemented by the efforts of a ‘northern’ force.103 This implied that some ministers, at least, had a strategic vision for the defeat of the revolutions in the Habsburg Empire. While Radetzky pressed forward in Italy, the fiery Alfred Windischgrätz would be sent to Prague to take command of the imperial forces in Bohemia. There could have been no better choice for the leadership of the counter-revolution in the north: the marshal had been bitterly opposed to the concessions made in March and he drew no distinction between moderates and radicals, who were all rebels to him, equally worthy of a dose of hot lead. It was he who had crushed the Prague workers’ insurrection of 1844, so his return to the city seemed to presage a new ruthlessness in the way in which Vienna proposed to deal with the Czechs.
People immediately noticed a new vigour in the military presence: patrols were doubled, the size of Prague’s garrison was increased and artillery was placed on the heights of Vyšehrad and Petřin, which dominated the city centre. The radical press appealed to the soldiers not to become the instruments of reaction and demanded that arms, artillery and ammunition be given to the National Guard and the Academic Legion, a request that, of course, Windischgrätz had no intention of granting. Strangely, a Slavonicthemed ball was held on 10 June, to which the Czech liberals, Windischgrätz and the governor of Bohemia, Leo Thun, had all been invited. Although the revellers hissed when the marshal entered the ballroom, there was no other aggravation.
Windischgrätz had read the situation on the streets well: the students and their allies in the more militant companies of the National Guard could command at most three thousand rifles, while in time the marshal could muster close to ten thousand troops. He could also rely on the National Guards from more conservative and German-speaking districts. The odds were therefore stacked enormously against the liberals, but with both sides refusing to concede, a clash was almost inevitable. The spark in this tinder-box came on 12 June when, after hearing Mass beneath the statue of Saint Wenceslas, a large crowd of students, National Guards, members of Svornost (the exclusively Czech militia) and unemployed workers (some 2,500 of them, largely at the urging of radical students) marched in protest against Windischgrätz. This demonstration blundered into a delegation from the German Association, which had just met the marshal and promised him their support. The ensuing scuffles degenerated into full-scale running battles between workers, National Guards and soldiers. There were also stand-offs between Czech and German militia companies. With violence erupting spontaneously across the city, barricades were erected and six days of violence followed. Any hopes of an end to the fighting evaporated when, first, the insurgents took Governor Thun hostage and, second, when Windischgrätz’s wife was killed by a stray bullet.
The revolutionaries had placed most of their four hundred barricades poorly: the marshal reckoned that he had to take only fifteen of them to keep communications open between the old and the new town. The flimsy fortifications were built hastily, and by end of the first day, the Austrian forces, led by grenadiers who acted as shock troops but backed by loyal units of the National Guard, had secured the city’s main arteries. When the insurgents, led by Karel Havlíček, issued their demands, they were in the circumstances rather tame: the dismissal of Windischgrätz, the withdrawal of the troops and the establishment of a new provisional government. During a lull in the combat in the small hours of 15 June, Windischgrätz pulled his troops back from the barricades. It was an ominous sign. Shells then rained down on the city centre from the heights above: ten people were killed, three others later died of their wounds and some thirty mangled corpses were found among the rubble only after the fighting. By 17 June it was all over and martial law was declared. This was the first major victory of the counter-revolution in the Habsburg Empire since Kraków at the end of April.104
Windischgrätz established a dubious commission of inquiry to investigate those responsible for the insurrection. He more or less told it to ‘discover’ that it was the fruit of a vast Slavic conspiracy to undermine and destroy the Habsburg monarchy. The evidence for this was found in the coincidental fact that the Slav Congress was meeting in Prague at the time. This had been convened by the Czechs to keep up the momentum from Palacký’s rebuke to Frankfurt and rally all Slavs against German pretensions. For this reason it was originally planned to coincide with the opening of the German parliament in May. In the event, the 385 delegates gathered in Prague under Palacký’s presidency on 2 June. Similar ideas for a congress had come from other Slavs with their own agendas, namely Slovaks like L’udovít Štúr, the Polish National Committee in Poznania (which had good reason to fear German nationalism) and southern Slav adherents of the ‘Illyrian ideal’.105 The congress therefore had a broad agenda. It was to discuss possibilities for the unification of all the Slav peoples of the Habsburg Empire, the relations between those Slavs and the other nationalities of the monarchy, links between the Austrian Slavs and the other Slav peoples and the relationship between all Slavs and the rest of Europe. Problems immediately arose with even the loosest notion of Slav unity: the Poles and the Ukrainians quarrelled over the question of Galicia. The Russians were conspicuous by their near absence: the congress was determined that neither the Germans nor the Magyars could accuse them of being tools of tsarist reaction. Of the seven Russian delegates, one was Mikhail Bakunin, an anarchist thinker who was scarcely representative of Russian opinion. The Czechs feared the Germans; but, for the Slovaks, the Magyars were the real worry. The Poles, who sympathised with the Magyars (for they were both anti-German and anti-Russian), wanted to mediate between the southern Slavs and the Magyars, rather than fully support the former.106 Bakunin criticised the congress for focusing primarily on the Austrian Slavs, and so ignoring the plight of those who lived under the Ottoman and Russian empires.107 Precisely because of these contradictory pressures the Slav Congress was, as Lewis Namier puts it, ‘a seed-plot of history’,108 since it revealed the conflicts of aspirations, hopes and interests among the peoples who would emerge as the ‘successor states’ to the East European empires after 1918.
It is clear from all this that the congress could not possibly have been at the centre of a great conspiracy to dismember the Habsburg monarchy. When fighting broke out in Prague on 12 June, Austrian soldiers stormed the Czech National Museum, where the congress was meeting, fully expecting to find the Slavic hordes armed to the teeth. All they discovered was the museum’s meek librarian. This did not stop Windischgrätz from arresting some of the leading delegates and expelling them from the city. Palacký and the other organisers were faced with little choice but to suspend the congress indefinitely. The historian himself, though plainly a moderate, was now kept under close watch by the police, while (with more reason) Havlíček was arrested on 3 July and the offices of his newspaper, Národní Noviny, were raided for evidence of the ‘conspiracy’. The incarceration of this popular Czech journalist merely ensured that he was elected to the Austrian parliament in five different constituencies. Although Windischgrätz’s final report predictably accused the congress of treason, it prompted a strong protest from the Slav members of the parliament, including Palacký. The sham investigation became an embarrassment to the imperial government, and most of those arrested in the wake of the June days had been amnestied by mid-September.109
The uprising had sharpened ethnic divisions. It is true that there were plenty of Czechs who were alarmed at the prospect of a working-class rebellion in Prague: those National Guard units that suppressed the June insurrection were not all German-speaking companies, although they were predominantly so. For some Czechs, therefore, anxieties over social revolution were more pressing than any n
ational claims they may have had. Yet it is also true that most of the German citizens of Prague, many of whom had no love of Windischgrätz, either stood aside from the uprising or took an active role in suppressing it. Consequently, the insurgents overwhelmingly comprised Czech students and workers, so that, for the German-speaking elites, the social strife coincided with ethnic friction. Beyond Bohemia, German nationalists had little doubt: the fighting in Prague was a conflict of nationalities. The radical Volksfreund spat venomously at ‘the insane or corrupt Slav party of the Czechs, which . . . has designs on turning . . . Austria into a Slav empire, at the expense of the Germans and Hungarians’. It short-sightedly saluted the marshal’s victory as ‘a joyful event. A victory for German concerns in Bohemia and in the monarchy can never be a misfortune, for the Germans bring humanity and freedom to the conquered.’110 In Frankfurt a parliamentary committee on 1 July agreed that the Prague uprising was part of a grand design to create a Slav empire and proposed that German forces be sent to Bohemia to support Windischgrätz. Only Engels was perceptive enough to realise that the Czechs were neither the instruments of Russia nor the tools of anti-German reaction.
IV
In Hungary social tensions coincided powerfully with ethnic divisions, but Hungarian industrial workers were less numerous than their Czech counterparts, since the country was not so heavily industrialised as Bohemia and Moravia. Consequently, ethnic conflicts occurred most seriously in the Hungarian countryside, where there were tense relations between the predominantly Magyar landlords and the peasantry, who were frequently of a different ethnic group. Yet the workers of Hungary did offer a potential source of strength to the urban-based radical movement. In Budapest, in a population of 160,000 there were approximately 10,000 day labourers, 8,000 apprentices and a mere 1,000 factory workers. Moreover, they tended to be Germans and Czechs, which isolated them from the bulk of the Magyar population. Their demands, from mid-March to July, included those familiar to their counterparts elsewhere in Europe: better conditions, the reduction of working hours, higher rates for their goods and the legalisation of unions. Workers in Budapest and miners in northern Hungary agitated for these changes, and the liberal government made some concessions: it could do so with few misgivings primarily because, as Magyar nobles, its ministers had little in common with the usually German, middle-class employers. None the less, strikes, which arose in Budapest for higher wages and better conditions in April and May, were treated as a threat to public order and were broken with force.
Yet the radicals failed to mobilise the workers because they offered little in the way of a social programme. Hungarian radicalism rested on the Twelve Points proclaimed in the March days, so, except for peasant emancipation, its goals were primarily political. Petőfi wrote a few lines of sympathy for the plight of the patriotic poor, but poetry (no matter how well written) did nothing to address their material needs. However, the workers themselves had not yet drunk from the well of new, socialist ideas. When four thousand apprentices marched on the Café Pilvax, the beating heart of Budapest radicalism, to ask Pál Vasvári, Petőfi and others to be their spokesmen, the young artisans did not demand, in unison with their French and Czech counterparts, the ‘organisation of work’; rather, they wanted to ‘burn the tyrannical guild laws’. Dramatic as this rhetoric sounds, it was merely a demand to make entry into the guilds easier - and without paying high fees. Vasvári recognised the insurrectionary potential of the artisans, but even he suggested that they should take their requests to the government. The social gulf was simply far too great between the workers and the radicals, most of whose leadership had sprung from the Magyar gentry. Strikes went unreported in the main radical organ, March Fifteenth, and when, on 22 April, posters appeared demanding fixed food prices, the distribution of church land among the peasants and the abolition of the guilds, the radicals took fright and dismissed these dangerous notions at a public meeting.111
The core support for Hungarian radicalism therefore remained the students, intellectuals, professionals, government officials and clerks concerned about the continuing dominance of the landed elites in Hungarian politics. This was far too narrow a base for the radicals to score any resounding successes in the elections held between late June and mid-July. Most enfranchised Hungarians voted for the familiar political elites of the country: some 72 per cent of the new parliament were landed nobles, leaving March Fifteenth to declare sulkily that ‘the people’ wanted ‘to serve the noble gentlemen’. The vast majority of the rest were drawn from the urban middle classes, mostly lawyers and government officials. The results are partially explained by the stubborn persistence of deference, but the system was also stacked in favour of the aristocracy, since the rural electoral committees were almost universally filled with estate owners, while in the towns they consisted primarily of the established burghers. Moreover, the radical programme itself had little appeal beyond the confines of its urban middle-class supporters. While Hungarian radicalism showed far more concern for the peasantry than it did for the workers, most of the poorer country dwellers could not vote. Meanwhile, the avowed anti-monarchism of many radicals, including Petőfi, ensured that they were rejected at the polls by most Hungarians, for whom the King was still sacrosanct. The poet, in a clumsy volte-face, wrote articles trying to dilute his earlier republicanism, but it availed him nothing: he failed to gain election and, to add injury to insult, he was nearly lynched by a drunken mob. In the end, of 414 members of the lower house, perhaps 50 adhered to the Twelve Points.112
The radicals therefore had to rely on extra-parliamentary pressure. They developed sophisticated organisations to coordinate policy and to bind the left-wing rump of deputies to the broader movement. In mid-July a ‘Society for Equality’ was created, with a journal entitled the Radical Democrat. Taking the French Jacobin clubs of the 1790s as its model, the society sought to forge a nationwide network, to rally patriotic, democratic opinion into a great pressure group - perhaps in readiness for a second revolution. The radicals may not have had much in the way of a social programme, but they potentially possessed a great weapon in Magyar nationalism, which was stewing in the capital. Suspicion of the Viennese court and Batthyány’s willingness to compromise with it for the sake of stability stirred patriotic Magyar angst. One of the central issues here was the question of who controlled the armed forces. In May it emerged that the commander of the garrison at Budapest, Baron Ignaz Lederer, had refused to hand out arms to the National Guard, despite ominous signs that the country was about to be attacked by the Croats. When a government commission found that some fourteen thousand rifles were available, a crowd of two thousand, organised by the radical March Club, marched to beating drums on to Lederer’s residence. Imperial soldiers reacted by charging with bayonets fixed, killing one protester and seriously wounding twenty. Petőfi seized on this incident to demand a change of ministry, the punishment of the troops involved and the withdrawal of all Hungarian forces from the imperial army in Italy. Batthyány, however, was working hard to put the April Laws on solid foundations and had no intention of provoking the Viennese court.
The issue of Hungarian troops in imperial service was now a hot topic. Moderates like Batthyány and Széchenyi were determined to serve the country’s best interests (as they saw them) by soothing Hungary’s relations with Austria. So when, on 11 July, the Austrian government sent a request for Hungarian troops to bolster Radetzky’s Italian campaign, Batthyány told his fellow ministers that they should voluntarily offer 40,000 out of the 200,000 troops proposed for the entire Hungarian army. This would give the Magyars political leverage with Vienna and compel the Croatian Ban Jelačić to tread carefully. Even Kossuth agreed to this plan, although this meant reversing the earlier position whereby the Hungarians had steadfastly refused to support the suppression of another European people.113 The about-turn infuriated the radical left. One of their most eloquent spokesmen, Count László Teleki, went straight for the jugular by pointing out (correctly, as it w
ould prove) that the government had put its faith in a court that would never force the Croatian ban to back down. While the Italians were fighting for freedom, Teleki baldly declared, Jelačić most certainly was not.114 Nevertheless, the government won the final vote overwhelmingly on 22 July. Although in practice fresh Hungarian troops were never sent to Italy, the government’s victory illustrated once again that the European liberals of 1848 put their own national interests above the cosmopolitan ideals of universal liberty and self-determination.