In November Austria annexed the 'Free Republic of Cracow'. The absence of an Anglo-French entente enabled Metternich to do so without France objecting, even if there were loud protests in the English press. It was not a step he liked taking, since it meant a further departure from the Treaty of Vienna, but, as he stressed, the purpose of that treaty was to guarantee peace, not to create trouble centres; the little state had certainly been troublesome enough, a sanctuary for Polish revolutionaries intent on destabilising Austrian Galicia. Metternich emphasised that Cracow had not mended its ways despite many warnings, and that if Austria had not taken it over, Russia would have done so.
At the end of 1846 the chancellor realized that the reign of Pius IX was going to be very dangerous indeed. While he approved of the Pope's intention to reform the ramshackle administration of the Papal States, he was alarmed by the expectations of nationalists all over Italy. Pius had appointed the reputedly liberal Cardinal Gizzi secretary of state, while his amnesty was filling Rome with agitators. In Lombardy-Venetia, priests were already showing open hostility towards Austrian troops.
18
The Storm, 1846–48
A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of Communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police-spies.
KARL MARX,
Communist Manifesto, January 1848
To make a revolution is to subvert the ancient state of our country; and no common reasons are called for to justify so violent a proceeding.
EDMUND BURKE,
Reflections on the Revolution in France
In retrospect the abortive uprisings at Cracow and in Galicia would be seen as the start of the landslide which destroyed Restoration Europe and the Metternich system. The chancellor thought he was witnessing what he had watched at Strasbourg sixty years before, that the Revolution was coming again and the Terror would soon be in full swing—though convinced that this time it would break out in Italy, not in France. He and his wife revealed in their papers—he in his despatches and letters, she in her diary—their increasing bewilderment and horror.
No one really knows why the 1848 Revolution happened, least of all why at Vienna, and nobody can explain exactly why Metternich fell. If opposed to change, he was far from being out of touch with popular opinion; he read the extremely perceptive police reports, while the jibe that he saw everything from the windows of aristocratic drawing rooms is belied by his cultivation of scientists, artists and men of letters. All one can say is that his 'system' was bound to go in the end. Viktor Bibl, the harshest of his modern critics, is convincing when he credits the chancellor with believing that revolutions 'came not from economic misery or dissatisfaction with the political structure but were the work of secret societies, dreamers and unbalanced doctinaires'. For Metternich, liberalism and nationalism were no more than spectres, which should disappear of their own accord.
For once, Srbik agrees with Bibl. 'No one questions his [Metternich's] judgement in seeing destructive forces at work in all the heady currents from the Reformation to Liberalism, in "Prussian-ism" or "Teutonism", or in the politics of the industrial proletariat,' he writes. 'His great weakness was an inability to identify forces in the new climate which were genuinely creative and deserved encouragement.' Even the chancellor's admirers are forced to admit that, apart from promoting industrial development, he had no social policies whatever. As Srbik puts it, 'If Metternich understood the limits of the possible in foreign affairs, as an ultra-conservative he invariably hoped for the impossible where internal matters were concerned.' Nevertheless, his world ought to have lasted at least until his departure from the scene. When the revolution came, it ended so quickly, and in such abject failure, that one may be forgiven for wondering sometimes why it ever broke out at all.
Metternich knew that the world was changing but did not realize quite how much. Between 1819 and 1843 the Monarchy's population increased by a quarter to over 36 million; Vienna's inhabitants, who at the end of the previous century had numbered 235,000, were now nearly 400,000. One could travel to Prague, Budapest or Trieste by train and there were a thousand miles of track. (By tradition every Archduke was apprenticed to a trade and the young Francis Joseph chose that of engine driver.) Steamships plied the Danube, while Hungarian and Polish grain was exported from Trieste by the Österreichischer Lloyd Line, which owned 26 vessels in 1848. Steam looms had transformed textile production in lower Austria and Bohemia, and the output of Bohemian iron and steel trebled between 1820 and 1846. However, steam-driven machinery caused the layoff of thousands of old-style journeymen. During the 1840s a series of bad harvests and potato blights—especially in 1846-7—caused soaring food prices and a credit slump, which made unemployment still worse. (During 1847, 10,000 factory workers were laid off in Vienna alone.) The streets were full of beggars.
As Srbik shows, Metternich had recognised the threat to his world posed by capitalism—and the pauperism which frequently accompanies it—but had hoped to avoid any trouble by the increased profits accruing to both state and private business. An industrial recession was something altogether new in his experience.
At the same time, the enormous growth of a new middle class, who resented their exclusion from government, increased criticism of him. They joined noblemen and intellectuals in the 'Juridischer-Politischer Lesverein' (Juridical-Political Reading Circle) founded at Vienna in 1842, a similar Lesverein being founded at Prague. The Landtag of lower Austria, whose assemblies met in Vienna, voted to admit members of the bourgeoisie. Dissatisfaction with the regime grew. In 1842 Freiherr von Andrian-Werburg (in an anonymous pamphlet printed in Germany) had warned of disunity among the various peoples of the Empire; ironically, his solution was that of Metternich—more power for provincial Diets and a Reichstag at Vienna with deputies from all the Habsburg lands. In 1847 the Landtag of Lower Austria demanded the publication of the treasury's accounts.
Looking back from June 1848, Palmerston was to accuse Metternich of being 'the ruin of an age . . . he succeeded for a time in damming up and arresting the stream of human progress.' Metternich has also been blamed for doing nothing to halt the regime's slide into crisis. Yet there was little he could do. In exile he admitted that its worst failings had been the pettyfogging interference in minor administrative matters, which crippled the machinery of government, and neglecting to provide central representation for the Monarchy's different regions:
Should I have made the government take a different direction? I did not have the power to do so. Should I have derailed it? But stopping it that way would have resulted in revolution.
He emphasised that his job was to represent Austria abroad and safeguard its political interests. What he did not say is that he had been blocked, first by Emperor Francis, then by Kolowrat and the Archdukes.
Afterwards the playwright Franz Grillparzer decided that the regime's essential decency, its reluctance to use harsh measures, had been the real cause of its fall. Certainly Francis I's death had been followed by a relaxation which was largely due to the chancellor. 'Were it not for the order and security everywhere prevailing, a stranger might hardly suppose, beyond the walls of the cities, that any police existed only at the frontiers,' wrote Mr Turnbull, a visitor from England in the 1830s. 'In no continental country have I ever travelled, in which, except in the provincial capitals, is so little of it either seen or felt.' This was an authoritarian regime too tolerant for its own good.
Another mistake was not to woo the middle classes—the financiers, lawyers, professors, writers. 'Separate by reasonable concessions the moderate from the exaggerated, content the former by fair concessions and get them to resist in resisting the insatiable demands of the latter' was Lord Palmerston's remedy. If Metternich did this, he 'would find his crop of revolutions . . . soon die away on the stalk'. Yet if the chancellor distrusted 'the monied interest' and intellectuals, the alienation of the bourg
eoisie was not due to any personal prejudice—many of his right-hand men and allies came from the middle classes.
Such people were increasingly frustrated by their exclusion from government, irritated by a censorship which would not leave them alone. Not only journalists and playwrights were affected, but theologians and scientists. Academics and professional men complained constantly. At first Grillparzer had been inclined to support Metternich, and in 1848 he would be a supporter of the counterrevolution. He respected the chancellor's love of literature and was deeply impressed by his reciting from memory a hundred verses from Childe Harold. Yet he rejected Metternich's 'system', damning him as the 'Don Quixote of Legitimism'. (Unknowingly he echoed Palmerston's comment that censorship in a land swarming with professors and newspaper men was a quixotic notion.) In 1845 ,Grillparzer and a delegation of writers asked the chancellor to ease the censorship. Metternich refused, explaining politely that to do so might hamper the government's 'good intentions'. What he did not say was that his colleagues would never allow it.
There was a flood of hostile literature, censorship evaded by printing in Germany. Andrian's was the most influential of such books; in the second volume, which appeared in 1847, he attacked the bureaucracy and the censors, demanding that Diets should have burgher and peasant members. Karl Beidtel's jeremiad about Austria's financial future came out the same year, warning that soaring inflation and state bankruptcy lay ahead, urging the calling of a national assembly to deal with the impending catastrophe. Karl Moering's Sybilline Books from Austria, published in January 1848, was a blistering attack on the regime's ineptitude. Similar opinions had been voiced since 1841 by the liberal periodical Die Grenzboten, produced in Brussels and read in every café in Vienna. All these publications demanded more power for provincial Diets, an Imperial Diet and an end to censorship. They would have been surprised to learn that privately the chancellor was not entirely opposed to these demands, perhaps because there was so far no movement within Austria for a liberal monarchy of the French or Spanish sort.
'He has no strength left for a fight as he used to,' Mélanie lamented in 1840. In reality her husband retained astonishing energy and was still able to achieve a great deal in defending his world until the end came. He would never lose the will to govern.
Even before Pio Nono's election, Metternich had been deeply suspicious of Charles Albert of Sardinia, fearing that the King hoped to use liberalism to acquire Lombardy. And, as he told Apponyi on 1 March 1847, 'Behind Liberalism marches radicalism.' A fortnight later, Cardinal Gizzi relaxed press laws and censorship. Political journals and clubs sprang up in Rome, all nationalist and liberal.
Palmerston's attitude was a constant irritation to the Ballhausplatz. During this crucial period the British foreign secretary's approach to Italian politics was based on the grossest misconceptions and wishful thinking, as was that of many British diplomats. In August 1847 Palmerston wrote to Lord Ponsonby at Vienna:
The accounts which Her Majesty's Government receives from Italy, and of which copies are sent to you, show that the apprehensions of Prince Metternich are extremely exaggerated; and that whatever may be passing in the minds of some few enthusiasts, nothing has yet happened which can justly be called a revolution, or which can indicate any, the most remote, probability of an attempt to unite Italy under one authority.
In December he informed Ponsonby, 'With regard to the events which are now passing in Italy, Her Majesty's Government do not apprehend therefrom danger to the internal tranquility of the Peninsula.'
In October Mr Henry Howard of the British Embassy in Berlin had commented in a despatch to the foreign secretary:
Prince Metternich, as your Lordship is aware, lives in the past and in illusions which he sedulously keeps up, not listening to others of a different opinion from himself, or rather listening only to his own voice and only attending to such of his agents as report in his own sense. He compares the present movement in Italy to that which took place in the years 1820 and 1821, and represents it in the light of a revolution, the work of secret societies and Radicals, with Republican and Communist objects.
Most British observers considered the Austrian chancellor to be a fossilised reactionary who was hopelessly out of touch with reality.
Metternich was on more sympathetic terms with Guizot, if in 1839 he had suggested that the French prime minister 'confused doctrines with principles'. (By contrast, Guizot wrote of Metternich in his memoirs, 'One saw in him a rich, complex, deep intelligence unfold itself, zealous to seize and utter general ideas and abstract theories and at the same time a supremely sharp, practical sense.') The reason for growing closer was concern about Prussia. The chancellor's German policy had always been based on cooperation with the Prussians, but both he and Guizot were uncomfortably aware that, unlike the Habsburg monarchy, the Prussian state had not yet reached the point of 'territorial saturation'. Yet even Guizot did not share Metternich's fears over Italy. However, events were going to show only too soon that Metternich's predictions had been astonishingly accurate.
By the spring of 1847 the palace on the Rennweg was almost ready. Underneath the balcony of the huge house were the words 'parvus domus, magna quies' ('small house, great rest'), usually cited as an example of the chancellor's vanity but more likely to have been a wry joke. It seemed that he would know little rest there. Princess Mélanie had written in January, 'The King [of Prussia] has promulgated a constitution, without teeth or merit, which means nothing today but which could burst into flames tomorrow and destroy the kingdom.' In March she confided to her diary her worries about their prospects in the new palace:
Clemens is very taken by it, but I only tremble when I think of it. The future is so dark and the present so sad for me that I scarcely dare think further ahead than tomorrow . . .
Clearly she was desperately alarmed by the political situation:
Attempts at reconciliation between France and England are a source of great embarrassment for Louis Philippe and his cabinet. Furthermore, there is the condition of Spain and Portugal, countries which are a prey to the greatest confusion. Italy is boiling over, while Prussia with its clever constitution is a cause of grave concern to the French cabinet. Kings and ministers are crying out to be rescued since they can no longer control movements which never cease to challenge them . . .
In April she was writing 'our hearts are profoundly troubled and full of apprehension for the future', that 'in Italy matters are taking a troublesome turn, and in particular at Rome'.
'The general situation in Europe is very dangerous, my dear count!' Metternich himself wrote to Apponyi in June 1847. 'I await M Guizot's reply about affairs in Switzerland, which have taken the most detestable road possible.' Swiss liberals, who dominated the federal Diet, were trying to replace the constitution of 1815 by a more centralised state. The situation was complicated by religious disagreements. In 1845 the Sonderbund, a league of seven staunchly conservative and Catholic cantons formed two years earlier, had become an armed confederation ready to defend itself against a federal decree expelling the Jesuits. Austria demanded that religious rights should be respected, fearing that should the federal government at Berne triumph, Switzerland would become the first victim of the coming revolution. (The federal president, Ulrich Ochsenbein, was said to be a foaming radical.) Guizot proposed that the powers should intervene, a proposal which Palmerston thwarted by playing for time—he hoped for a civil war which the liberals would win.
In July 1847 Mélanie recorded in her diary how Rome seemed from the perspective of the Ballhausplatz:
My poor husband is very much absorbed by Italian affairs. Rome is in total revolution. They have set up a citizens' guard and chased out the city governor; at all the street corners there are stuck up the names of those whom the population want to see outlawed, and among their number, naturally enough of course, are those of the better-class-people and right-thinking persons . . . Daggers are sold publicly in the streets with their hilts made in th
e shape of the Papal arms and bearing the motto 'Viva Pio Nono'! So now the people are going to commit murder under his patronage. The garrison at Ferrara has been reinforced but it looks very much to me as though the Pope is quite openly opposing any steps which are being taken to stop the evil spreading. There is talk of his abdication.
On 17 July, Metternich had ordered not only the reinforcement of the Austrian garrison at Ferrara but the occupation of all key points in the city after anti-Austrian demonstrations—as Austria was entitled to do under the Treaty of Vienna. The Pope protested, as did King Charles Albert and also Lord Palmerston, who at once put the entire British fleet in the Mediterranean on the alert. Garibaldi wrote from South America offering the services of his 'Italian Legion' to the Church. (A former member of Giovine Italia, he was precisely the type of revolutionary adventurer whom the chancellor expected to take over the Papal States.) The reports of disaffection in Lombardy-Venetia were by now so alarming that Metternich contemplated visiting Milan and Venice to inspect the situation on the spot.
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