1848

by Mike Rapport

  With word of Custozza, the King knew that the time to reassert his authority in full was fast approaching. His main concern was to bring Sicily under control. The liberal leadership of the rebellious island had been on the cusp of accepting a restoration of the constitution of 1812 early in March, when news of the February revolution in Paris arrived. The Sicilian parliament, which first met on 25 March, then raised the stakes by demanding a constitution whereby the island would be virtually independent, its only link with Naples being its shared royal dynasty, the Bourbons. When the Neapolitan government rebutted Sicilian pretensions, on 13 April the parliament at Palermo - mainly lawyers, intellectuals and liberal nobles - decreed the monarchy deposed: ‘Sicily does not demand new institutions,’ it haughtily declared, ‘but the restoration of rights which have been hers for centuries.’155 Sicily was, for a few months, truly an independent state: it did not even adopt the Italian tricolour as its flag, but the three-legged symbol of the island. Such separatism allowed the snubbed Neapolitans to accuse the Sicilians of waging a ‘civil war’ against a united Italy. Though there was a radical, republican minority, including Francesco Crispi, most Sicilian revolutionaries were constitutional monarchists, and the parliament voted for the respected liberal veteran Ruggiero Settimo to act as president until a new royal dynasty could be elected.

  Beyond the rarefied confines of the Sicilian legislature, the island was slipping into anarchy. What police remained were being murdered by the squadre, who now not only controlled large areas of the countryside but enjoyed influence within Palermo itself. With the collapse of Bourbon power, they had seized control of their own villages and marched ‘their’ people into the capital, enjoying the awe and fear that they inspired among the Palermitans. The government created a National Guard to defend the property and lives of Sicilian citizens, who were liable to be kidnapped or threatened until they parted with their money. In April this militia, drawn from the propertied elites, came to blows with the squadre, one of whose groups was led by the trouser-wearing, pistol-wielding Testa Di Lana, a formidable woman who had graduated from herding goats to killing policemen.

  In all the chaos the government could do little to raise an army strong enough to defend Sicily against any Neapolitan counter-attack. By September, the island could depend upon perhaps six thousand troops, including two regular battalions, with the rest made up of poorly trained National Guards, in addition to the hardened street-brawlers of the great cities and the unpredictable but undoubtedly violent squadre. They were no match for the Neapolitan regular army. In August Ferdinand mustered a ten-thousand-strong expeditionary force on the Calabrian coast, across the Straits of Messina. Seeking to free his hands of all political interference during his reconquest of Sicily, he also prorogued the Neapolitan parliament. The police set the lazzaroni on to the radical artisans who tried to defend the legislature on 5 September. The National Guard was severely reduced and liberal officials and judges were dismissed or harassed. By this time, the campaign to retake Sicily had already begun: the expeditionary force came to the rescue of the royal garrison in Messina’s citadel, the one bridgehead that the Neapolitans had clung on to since the start of the revolution. After a relentless bombardment from the guns of the fortress between 1 and 6 September, the troops advanced, confronted only with the city’s rough-and-ready civic guards and the urban crowd. The royal forces grimly set about retaking Messina street by burning street. When the fighting was over, some two-thirds of the city lay in smouldering ruins. Ferdinand was henceforth known to Sicilians by a new epithet: Bomba. A six-month armistice brokered by the appalled British and French on 11 September led to a lull in the fighting, but the Neapolitan reconquest of Sicily had begun with a royal vengeance.156

  In 1847 the German writer A. von Haxthausen graphically warned his readers of the possible calamity to come:

  Pauperism and proletariat are the suppurating ulcers which have sprung from the organism of the modern state. Can they be healed? The communist doctors propose the complete destruction and annihilation of the existing organism . . . One thing is certain, if these men gain the power to act, there will be not a political but a social revolution, a war against all property, a complete anarchy.157

  Though a conservative who was writing (with some sympathy) about Russia, Haxthausen expressed the deep-rooted fears of a much wider spectrum of European opinion about the dangers posed by the ‘social question’ of poverty and the painful economic transition of the nineteenth century. The liberals shared his fear that, after the political triumphs of the first months of 1848, radicals would seek to exploit the widespread distress and kill the new liberal order at the very moment of its birth, by pushing for a second, social revolution.

  The moderates were right to be worried. The poverty of the urban workers was one of the most important factors in the ultimate collapse of the liberal regimes of 1848. The workers’ demands were not always revolutionary, but they were social. In no country were they anywhere near a majority of the population, but because they were urban based, they could directly threaten the central institutions of the new order. Liberals, content with the constitutional liberties and governments in the making, were reluctant to concede to the workers much more than certain civil and political rights, along with some public works projects to ease the immediate economic misery. In the long run, they hoped, economic recovery and the new freedom to associate and to pursue any trade would take the sting out of labour militancy. But in 1848-9 there was little sign of economic recovery (undoubtedly the political uncertainties of those years contributed to this problem) and the measures promoted by liberal regimes to combat poverty were mere palliatives, sticking plasters barely covering the deep wounds of social despair. So even when workers’ own demands were moderate, or rooted in social distress rather than political militancy, radicals were frequently able to exploit their grievances and channel them towards political goals. At the same time, it was all too easy for conservatives to point to the fearsome power of working-class demonstrations, the June days in Paris, the August uprising in Vienna or the September insurrection in Frankfurt, to claim that the workers were intent on destroying social order, or even civilisation itself. Most liberals and middle-class people were now sufficiently shocked to agree and consequently were willing to sacrifice some of their hard-won political freedoms if that would ensure a return to social order. In these circumstances, with liberals falling in line with the forces of authority and the workers becoming increasingly associated with radicals, the politics of the 1848 revolutions were fatally polarised. Yet more dangerous still to the liberal order were those social divisions that more or less coincided with ethnic differences. This lethal cocktail was particularly potent among the peasantry of Central and Eastern Europe - and it was the rural population that in 1848 lent its considerable support to the counter-revolution.

  5

  THE COUNTER-REVOLUTIONARY AUTUMN

  In June 1848 a young Prussian nobleman had an audience with Frederick William IV in the King’s palatial refuge at Sans Souci. The thirty-three-year-old Junker advised the monarch that the struggle against the revolution was simply a ‘war . . . of self-defence’ for the conservative order, but ‘I could not induce the King to share my conviction that his doubts as to his power were without foundation’ and to resist the ‘usurpations’ of the Prussian parliament. 1 The nobleman was Otto von Bismarck, who as yet had little influence with the King, but who would famously rise to become one of Germany’s greatest, albeit one of its more Machiavellian, statesmen. In fact, Bismarck had also despaired over the collapse of absolutism: ‘The past is buried . . . no human power is able to bring it back to life, now that the Crown itself has cast earth on the coffin.’2 Yet the Junker soon rediscovered his mettle. He had already come to the notice of court conservatives before the revolution. In the United Diet in 1847 his speeches distinguished him as an earnest supporter of the King, and Leopold von Gerlach - one of the reactionaries who had Frederick William’s ear -
took note. The King was not inclined to listen to Bismarck in the summer of 1848, but by the autumn the situation had been transformed and Frederick William was ready to strike back against the revolutionaries.

  Throughout Europe conservatives were steadily recovering their nerve - and with it the political initiative. There were several reasons for this. The first was that the events of the summer had shaken the liberals to the core. The threat of social revolution and working-class disorder allowed conservatives to feed on the widespread public fear of social disintegration. Anyone who had anything to lose from further chaos was drawn progressively away from the political centre to support the forces of law and order. The liberals generally fell increasingly - if often reluctantly - into line with their old enemies, the conservatives, in their desperate attempts to achieve social stability. In this way the persistence of the economic and social crisis and the attempts of both conservatives and radicals to assert themselves tore apart the revolutionaries, pushing the liberals closer to the reactionaries and drawing from them the same repressive measures that they had once opposed. This polarisation between left and right brought victory for the conservatives, because they still had the strength - and were clawing back the popular support - which the liberals lacked.

  The 1848 revolutions also left many of the old state institutions intact. Since the revolutionary leadership in most parts of Europe were committed to constitutional monarchy and legality, the ruling monarch was left in control of ministerial appointments, even if those ministers were now responsible to a legislature. This was especially striking in Austria, where the essential structures of the empire were untouched: the Emperor, the court, the council of ministers, the state bureaucracy and the army all remained.3 This meant that, unless the old regime had been totally overthrown, as it had in France and in Austria’s northern Italian provinces, there was a good deal of continuity in personnel, many of whom were more willing to do the bidding of their monarch rather than the liberal upstarts, or else the monarch could appoint his own supporters. In the Habsburg Empire provincial governors, such as Stadion in Galicia and Thun in Bohemia, remained powerful figures who could use reforms such as the abolition of serfdom to gather popular support for the monarchy. In Croatia Ban Jelačić had ordered all his subordinates to obey the Emperor, rather than the Hungarian government, to which they were nominally subject. The liberal regimes, then, could never be entirely sure of the loyalty of local administrators and jurists. This was true even of France, where the provisional government sent commissioners into the provinces to replace monarchist prefects and sub-prefects with republicans and to dismiss the existing town councils. But this purge of local administration was not as thorough as one might expect. Certainly, in areas like the south-east, where there was already a deep-rooted tradition of rural radicalism, almost all the authorities were replaced, down to the mayor of the smallest village. However, in other regions, the existing officials simply declared a new loyalty to the republic and so retained their positions. These were the so-called ‘republicans of the day after’ - the pragmatic converts who swathed themselves in republican colours while frequently hiding monarchist clothes underneath.4 A similar process took place in Hungary, Italy and Germany, where officials demonstrated their (questionable) loyalty to the new order by displaying the national rather than the dynastic colours.5

  Control of the armed forces was, of course, crucial. In France the army adhered to the evolving tradition of service to the French ‘state’, an entity held to be above the frequent political swings between democracy, monarchy and dictatorship, which provided national continuity through these vicissitudes of revolution and counter-revolution. None the less, under the Second Republic, the president turned out to be Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, so that even the French army became an instrument of authoritarianism. Elsewhere, the armed forces remained firmly in royal hands: Pope Pius IX and King Ferdinand of Naples could both order their troops to pull out of the conflict with Austria. The latter also used them to crush, successively, the Neapolitan revolution and Sicilian independence. In the Austrian Empire Radetzky, Windischgrätz and Jelačić were able to gather their forces and unleash them in the name of the Emperor, whose conservative ministers remained in command. In Germany the armed forces were still controlled by the governments of the separate states, which meant their princes. Consequently, while German liberals applauded the crushing of the republican movement in Baden, the destruction of Polish hopes in Poznania and the fight against Danish nationalism in Schleswig-Holstein, they were playing with fire. The fact that these troops were deployed not only under the command of the old regime rulers but at the request of the old German Confederation showed, first, that real power still rested with the separate states - and especially mighty Prussia - and, second, that the Bund, hated by the liberals as a relic of Metternich’s conservative order, still had considerable vitality as an institution. When Bismarck told Frederick William that his position was far stronger than he realised, it was because the army was still his instrument. ‘That I was right’, Bismarck later recalled, ‘was immediately proved by the fact that every military order . . . was carried out zealously and without scruple.’6 Hungary was the exception, because its liberal leadership was drawn from the landed, political elite of the country, so it controlled the apparatus of the state, right down to county level, as well as much (but by no means all) of the Magyar officer corps.

  Elsewhere, the revolutions barely scratched the surface of conservative strength. Once they started to regain their confidence, conservatives adopted some of the methods of their liberal opponents, including the press and networks, to mobilise and organise opinion for the fightback. Conservative newspapers and political organisations burgeoned over the summer, buoyed by the first successes of the counter-revolution. In Austria new journals appeared, including the Wiener Kirchenzeitung, which stood up in defence of the Catholic Church, while the scurrilous Geissel (‘Scourge’) outdid even the most foaming-at-the-mouth revolutionary journals in abuse and vilification. In mid-September the latter’s acerbic editor, J. F. Böhringer, flew the imperial black-and-gold banner from the journal’s offices and had to be rescued from an angry Viennese mob by the National Guard - an irony that surely did not escape even him. By then, Austrian conservatives had finally organised their own political society, the Constitutional Club. As its name suggests, it did not seek to drag Austria back to the absolutist days of Metternich, but it attempted to defend the liberal, parliamentary order against ‘every bold encroachment in the direction of republicanism’, which it saw as ‘treason to the Fatherland and to constitutional freedom’.7 In practice this was the only social organisation (outside the Catholic Church) that could rally anyone who feared the radicals and their influence in Vienna. It therefore attracted a following whose main concerns were not for the constitution, but for law and order. Within days, it had somewhere between 22,000 and 30,000 members. Count Hübner remarked that the success of the club was ‘certainly a good symptom’.8

  In trying to mobilise the population, the conservatives had a great moral weapon at their disposal - religion - which in some areas of Europe was the decisive factor in keeping the population loyal to the old order. There were some notable radical or ‘red’ priests, to be sure, like Father Gavazzi in Italy and, in France, the towering intellect of Abbé Félicité Robert de Lamennais. The latter’s democratic-socialist convictions flowed directly from his religious faith: his bestselling Paroles d’un croyant depicted Jesus as a friend to the poor, while he believed that God spoke through ‘the people’ - vox popoli, vox dei. His newspaper, L’Avenir (The Future) had been banned by the Pope back in 1832. Elected to the National Assembly in 1848, he sat with the left and was one of the few voices to speak out in defence of the June days. Tocqueville, who worked with the Abbé on the draft of the Second Republic’s constitution, noted that he may well have worn a yellow waistcoat underneath a green frock-coat, but Lamennais still moved with modesty and some awkwardness, as if he h
ad just left the sacristy.9 Religion, however, usually lent its moral force to conservatism. In Protestant Prussia Lutheran pastors played a leading role in the conservative ‘King and Fatherland’ associations. In Catholic Europe regions like the Tyrol in Austria, the Abruzzi in the Kingdom of Naples and Brittany in France were both Catholic and conservative strong-holds. 10 In Rennes in Brittany the ‘Tree of Liberty’ planted with such solemnity in April was sawn down by anonymous hands two months later. A notice was pasted on the stump: ‘Thus perishes the infamous Republic!’ The authorities claimed that this sacrilege was encouraged by the fact that the royalist candidate in the by-election of early June had been openly supported by the clergy.11 In some countries religious conviction was channelled not only by the clergy from the pulpit but by new organisations. In Germany the first ‘Pius Associations’ sprang up as early as March 1848. Named after the Pope, they claimed to defend the Catholic Church against liberal secularism. By the end of October, there were four hundred such societies across Germany, with a staggering hundred thousand members. The pressure that these organisations exerted on the German parliament ensured that the Jesuits (who were then the bogeymen of all liberal-minded people) were not banned from Germany, while the Church retained its right to supervise religious education in state schools.12 Religion was one of the forces that seduced the peasantry back to their innate loyalty and deference to the traditional order (if they really ever abandoned it at all). And the quiescence of the rural masses was an ace in the conservative hand.