by Mike Rapport
The incident showed that there was an unbridgeable gap between the moderates and the radical left, which provided the conservatives with their opportunity. Pfuel resigned, his efforts at compromise in tatters. The King sensed that the divisions between the liberals and the democrats were so irreconcilable that he could at last strike, but even now he wavered: should he, he asked a friend, ‘continue with the constitutional comedy . . . or suddenly march in with Wrangel and then, as conqueror, fulfil the letter of my promises’?62 This last phrase was telling: it suggested that the King was not set on an outright reaction, but wanted to impose a ‘revolution from above’; that is, reform, but on the monarchy’s own terms. A constitution of ‘the most liberal sort’ was being considered, but it was one which, when the moment was right, would later be reformed to the monarch’s satisfaction. On 1 November, he heeded Bismarck’s advice and appointed the conservative Count von Brandenburg as prime minister. The situation then went from extremely bad to irretrievable. Frederick William snubbed a parliamentary delegation desperately trying to fend off a coup d’état (one of its members was an exasperated Jacoby, who exclaimed, ‘That’s the trouble with kings: they don’t want to hear the truth!’). This provoked fifteen hundred protesters to take to the streets in a show of radical defiance, which they called ‘a last fight for the fatherland and right and freedom’. On the other side of the political divide, the shrieks for an end to ‘anarchy’ and ‘lawlessness’ from the conservative press became shriller. Fanny Lewald returned to her city on 7 November to find the mood extremely depressing and the political bitterness harsher than before, learning that the ‘stable friends of order’ were waiting impatiently for the ‘verdict by shrapnel’.63
Two days later, Count Brandenburg appeared before the National Assembly and read a royal proclamation explaining that, for their own protection, the deputies were to be dismissed until the end of the month, when they would reconvene in Brandenburg. The majority in the Assembly rose in support of its president when he declared that such an act was illegal. It was only now that liberals and radicals rediscovered their common ground and talked about combining their forces - the democratic clubs and the civic guard - to defend the parliament, but it was too late. All that remained was passive resistance - the commander of the civic guard refused to use his men against the Assembly - but this merely provided the government with the pretext to send thirteen thousand of Wrangel’s troops, supported by sixty cannon, into Berlin on 10 November.
Now, though, came perhaps the National Assembly’s finest hour. Protected by the civic guard drawn up outside (with Wrangel’s men only two hundred paces away), and watched in respectful silence by supporters in the public galleries, the deputies went on with their business as the sky darkened and the lamps were lit. They discussed such matters as the abolition of the taxes on quill pens, dog biscuits and the feed for a peasant’s ‘house cow’. ‘They debated very calmly’, explained Lewald, ‘because they found themselves on the firm ground of true law.’ At one stage during the evening’s proceedings, the president sent a polite letter to Wrangel, asking how long his troops intended to stand outside, since their presence was not needed. Wrangel, his coarseness not attuned to such subtle humour, replied bluntly that he would not budge, since he recognised neither the National Assembly nor its president.64 Sitting casually on a chair in front of his troops, looking pointedly at his watch, the general gave the Assembly fifteen minutes to adjourn. In the end the parliamentarians meekly dispersed and the civic guard allowed itself to be disarmed. Even the backbone of the popular movement, the locomotive workers, who had gathered angrily in front of the royal palace, had no stomach for a fight against Wrangel’s well-drilled soldiers. They abandoned the square with only a formal protest.65
A sizeable proportion of the deputies hastily reassembled in the Berlin sharpshooters’ club (members of the same society had wreaked havoc on the army during the March revolution), where they voted in favour of a radical proposal to call on Prussian citizens to go on tax strike. Yet Brandenburg was not finished: on 12 November, he declared martial law and Wrangel’s artillery was wheeled ominously into positions around the city. The civic guard was disarmed, the democratic clubs were scattered and newspapers were closed down. Berlin was full of soldiers tramping the streets in their hob-nailed boots, or lounging in stairwells. The museum was turned into a barracks, where rifles were propped up against statues and helmets were piled on antiques. Streets were periodically sealed off as patrols searched houses for weapons.66 The tax strike had little impact, since the people who paid the most were precisely those who wanted a return to order. None the less, the conservatives avoided a complete reaction. On 5 December Prussia ‘received’ a constitution that had been ‘granted’ by Frederick William (over the protests of outright reactionaries like Brandenburg). There was to be a two-chamber parliament, with a lower house elected by universal male suffrage. Parliamentary controls over the machinery of the Prussian state were, though, swept aside: the King had full executive powers, including command of the armed forces. Soldiers and officials had to swear an oath to obey the King, not parliament; and on 30 May 1849, when he felt strong enough to do so, Frederick William handed down a revised electoral law, which divided each constituency into three classes of taxpayer, to ensure that the wealthiest voters elected one-third of all the delegates. He also confirmed the emancipation of the peasants from their remaining obligations, along with the abolition of noble tax privileges and of the local policing and judicial powers of the Junkers. Some artisans were satisfied with the restoration of the guilds in seventy trades, but the revolution in Prussia was well and truly over.67
The victory of conservatism in Austria and Prussia endangered the liberal regimes elsewhere in Germany. Some moderates who had been profoundly worried by the rising tide of radicalism welcomed Frederick William’s bloodless coup in Berlin: Gustav Mevissen hailed the ‘bold move’ and called on all men of courage ‘to place themselves on the basis of the new legal order and fight the impending anarchy’.68 After all, Prussia still had a constitution, which was an important fact. First, it showed that, while the revolution had been smashed by the instruments of the Prussian state, in the process the monarchy had accepted some of the opposition’s concepts of law and rights. Second, it meant that Prussia could remain the focus of German national aspirations, because it gave the kingdom some credentials for leadership of a united, constitutional Germany. However, other Frankfurt delegates made loud protests against the royal coup d’état. The entire German left at last rediscovered the unity that had been shattered in the spring. The moderate left-wing delegates established the Central March Association, aimed at uniting all shades of opinion in support of the revolutionary achievements against the gathering forces of reaction. It was an impressive network, boasting some half a million members in 950 affiliated clubs, which dwarfed the efforts of the more radical democrats who had been behind the troublesome Democratic Congress in Berlin in October (which counted 260 affiliated clubs). Meanwhile, the Frankfurt parliament soldiered on in its task of hammering out a German constitution.
One of the central issues exercising the deputies was the question of whether German-speaking Austria should be included in the united German Reich. As the moderate Friedrich Dahlmann put it succinctly, there were two choices: dissolving the Habsburg Empire and binding its German parts to the united German state; and keeping the empire intact, which meant excluding Austria from Germany. The parliament debated this issue in October, as news was filtering through of the fighting in Vienna. The deputies were split between two different German visions, which cut across the political divisions of left and right. In the early, heady days of the revolution those who supported the inclusion of Austria (the ‘Greater German’ or Grossdeutsch) solution were in the majority. They included Catholics who feared that, without Austria, the northern German Protestants would predominate, since they would make up two-thirds of the population. Democrats, who saw no sense in a German natio
n-state without the German-speaking Austrians, wanted a unitary, centralised and democratic Germany: to leave the Austrians out of it would mean that a substantial proportion of the German people would be left vulnerable to the other non-German peoples of the Habsburg Empire. As Tübingen radical Ludwig Uhland put it, the Austrian parliament already showed that the Slavs, with their mass of population, would dominate politically, so where would that leave the Austro-German minority? Austria’s mission was to be ‘a beating artery in the heart of Germany’.69
The Kleindeutsch (or ‘Smaller German’) solution opposed the inclusion of Austria. Its proponents included moderate liberals like Heinrich von Gagern, who could see no other practical way of creating a united German state. Alongside the parliament’s mandate to give the ‘whole German nation’ a constitution, Gagern argued, the deputies had to ‘take account of the circumstances, the facts . . . if we intend to create a viable constitution’. The Grossdeutsch idea would effectively dismember the Austrian Empire, which for Gagern was neither morally right (‘we have an obligation . . . when civil war has broken out in a federal state, when the fire is blazing, not to add more fuel to the conflagration’) nor in the interests of the new Germany, as it would leave the future stability and security of all Central Europe in doubt.70 Since they had no desire to assail the dynastic rights of the Habsburgs, such moderates believed that the simplest solution was to forge a smaller German state in the north, but loosely tied in a confederation with Austria and its non-German nationalities. As the Kleindeutsch solution excluded conservative, Catholic and protectionist Austria, its supporters tended to be northern, Protestant liberals who admired constitutional and free-trading Prussia. Wilhelm Wichmann spoke for many when he blasted:
Austria is the only state capable of placing real obstacles in the path of German unification and, in fact, has already done so. The other German states will have to merge into Germany or they will sink into it and into history. But Austria contains many anti-German elements, whose opposition and awakening could be a serious obstacle to the German movement which has been building up.71
By excluding Austria, the Kleindeutsch solution would also have preempted the problem over how far the non-German nationalities in the Habsburg Empire were to be included. For Wichmann, to include those peoples would be downright dangerous: Germany could stand as the equal of others ‘only if we keep our nationality as pure as possible, if we emerge from the great crystallization of nations about to take place in Europe as an unblemished crystal excluding as many foreign elements as at all possible’.72 By contrast, at its extremes, the Grossdeutsch solution envisaged an enormous state that included all of Germany and the entire Habsburg Empire. This was a view proposed strongly by those deputies who represented the more beleaguered German populations in non-German Habsburg territories. ‘Our aim’, declared Count Friedrich von Deym from Bohemia, ‘is to establish a giant state of 70, or even if possible of 80 or 100 millions.’ This idea, which would become known as the Mitteleuropäisch (Middle European) solution, would ensure that German influence would reach all the way into south-eastern Europe, while acting as a massive bulwark against other empires, particularly the Russian. This huge state would ‘stand in arms against east and west, against the Slav and Latin peoples, to wrest control of the sea from the English, to become the greatest most powerful nation on the globe - that is Germany’s future!’73 This vision of Mitteleuropa would lead - though by no means intentionally in 1848 - to Europe’s darkest years in the twentieth century. It should be said that the Kleindeutsch proponents were no shrinking violets when it came to the idea of ‘colonising’ south-eastern Europe, either. Together, according to Gagern, Germany and Austria had a mission to spread ‘German culture, language, and way of life along the Danube to the Black Sea’.74
The parliament was still debating this thorny issue and all its prickly ramifications when the counter-revolution struck in Austria. Days before Windischgrätz’s troops battered their way into Vienna, the parliament agreed on the first three articles of the German constitution, which declared that the German Empire would consist of the entire territory of the old confederation (though leaving the problems of Poznan and Schleswig-Holstein to future debate); that no part of the empire may form a state with non-German lands; and that any German country that shares a head of state with a non-German one should have a purely personal, dynastic union with the latter.75 In other words the Constitution proclaimed the Grossdeutsch solution just as it was becoming practically impossible. The Habsburg court and the imperial government had never been enthusiastic about German unification, since it would reduce Austria to being a mere ‘province’ in the Greater Germany. Symbolic of this reluctance was the fact that the ill-fated Latour had permitted the Austrian armed forces to fly the black-red-gold colours for only a single day, before ordering a return to the imperial black-yellow. While Vienna was still being hammered into submission, Baron Wessenberg, the Austrian minister-president, wrote to all Austrian diplomats in Germany that ‘the revolution has covered itself with a German mantle; the German colours have become the ensign of the party of overthrow’.76 When Robert Blum and Julius Fröbel were sentenced to death, some conservatives worried that, since they were members of the Frankfurt parliament, there would be repercussions in Germany. Schwarzenberg was unimpressed, bluntly telling Windischgrätz that their parliamentary privileges ‘have no legal force in Austria. The only privilege they can claim is that of martial law.’77 There cannot have been many more decisive ways of expressing the Austrian rejection of German unification than by shooting two of its representatives. On 27 November, Schwarzenberg declared that the Habsburg monarchy was a unitary state, a statement that was reinforced by the imperial constitution imposed by the Emperor in March 1849. The Greater German solution was therefore an impossibility, as it would mean tearing the German organs out of the body of the Habsburg monarchy. On 9 March, Schwarzenberg facetiously made a counter-proposal: a ‘Greater Austrian’ solution in which the entire Habsburg Empire would join Germany in a huge Central European confederation. As this would include a vast array of non-German peoples, it was clearly unacceptable to the majority in the Frankfurt parliament. Still, the advocates of neither the Kleindeutsch nor the Grossdeutsch solution had a majority in Frankfurt. Even with the unequivocal Austrian rejection of German unification, the Kleindeutsch idea would win the final vote only after some parliamentary horse-trading. The Austrian government’s uncompromising position was a statement of its new-found strength, now that it had destroyed the revolution in Prague in June 1848, crushed the Italians at Custozza in July and defeated the Viennese radicals in October. Yet, even in the spring of 1849, the empire still faced two major challenges: the first was finding a way to defeat the Hungarians; the second was to bring Italy well and truly to heel.
IV
Prodded by some of the Habsburg court, Jelačić had crossed the Drava with his forces and invaded Hungary on 11 September 1848: his declaration promised to deliver Hungary ‘from the yoke of an incapable, odious, and rebel Government’.78 Against his enormous army of some fifty thousand men, the Hungarians had a skeletal force of five thousand, mostly raw recruits and National Guards commanded by Count Ádám Teleki, an aristocratic career soldier who was squeamish about fighting a fellow commander who had sworn an oath to the Emperor. He pulled his forces back towards Budapest, declaring on 15 September that he felt morally bound not to fight the Croats. In response the Hungarian government (still clinging to its desire for legality) asked - more in hope than expectation - the palatine, Archduke Stephen, to command Hungary’s forces, but he refused, since Emperor Ferdinand had ordered him not to resist Jelačić. So the Croats advanced on to Budapest virtually unopposed, visiting the horrors of war on the countryside. One of Jelačić’s officers wrote:
In four days’ time we will be before Pesth, and God help the town, for the Frontiersmen [Jelačić’s troops] are so embittered and angry that they will be awful to manage. Already, they can’t be kept fr
om excesses, and rob and steal frightfully. We order a thousand floggings to be administered every day; but it is no sort of use: not even a god, much less an officer, can hold them back. We are received by the peasants quite kindly, but every evening come the complaints, sometimes dreadful ones. I am driven desperate by this robber train and feel no better than a brigand myself.79
The invasion provoked a political crisis in Budapest, but its outcome was quite remarkable. Radical unease with Batthyány’s government and the ‘treachery’ of Palatine Stephen had been rumbling since the summer. By early September, the newspaper March Fifteenth and the Society for Equality were talking openly about a second revolution. Following the French example, the club organised a massive banquet, scheduled for 8 September, to put pressure on the government and force the resignation of the ministers, excluding Kossuth and Minister of the Interior Szemere. Yet Kossuth himself rose in parliament on 2 September and persuaded the radicals to postpone the gathering. The great and popular orator explained that the government was currently engaged in delicate negotiations in Vienna, trying hard to avert open war. There was also the fear that a second revolution in Budapest would provide the pretext for Palatine Stephen to bring in imperial forces and crush the entire liberal order. This, as it turned out, was not idle speculation, for on 29 August Stephen had written to the Austrian garrison commander in the fortress of Komárom upstream from Budapest and told him to be ready to move on the capital against ‘the planned machinations of the unruly party’. Yet such troops could also have been used in a counter-revolutionary coup against the government itself.80 Fortunately, the radicals - albeit after some heated debate - agreed to Kossuth’s request. Their press even accepted that the last-ditch negotiations with the Emperor were a valid attempt at ‘saving our country’. The government itself, explained the Radical Democrat, was raising ‘the holy standard of the principles of the revolution’, so it called on everyone to support its efforts to ward off the crisis.81 The Society of Equality had also organised a thousand-strong ‘national defence’ force, aimed ostensibly at defending the country when diplomacy failed, but in reality forming a revolutionary militia that could seize power should Batthyány’s government fall on the outbreak of war. But even this paramilitary organisation voluntarily disbanded on 12 September.