On 10th March 1813, the King did what leaders do when they mean business, he created a spartan but stylish new military gong — the Order of the Iron Cross — and on 16th March he declared war on Napoleon with a heartfelt appeal in the name of ‘the people, your King, the Fatherland and our Honour’.(10) On 21st April, the general call-up came with Scharnhorst saying, ‘Every man who can piss against a wall to arms!’ The counter-attack to liberate Prussia and Continental Europe from the French occupation then began in earnest. Together with the Russians, the Prussians mobilised 280,000 men in a disciplined popular uprising at the Battle of Leipzig, and from 16th–19th October, they dealt the Grande Armée a crushing defeat from which it would never recover. By New Year’s Eve, Napoleon’s forces had crossed the Rhine and on 31st March 1814 the Prussians, Russians and Austrians entered Paris. Napoleon refused all compromise, escaped captivity and made a last stand at Waterloo, but the great ambitions for power that he and France shared were put to an end on 18th June 1815 by Wellington and Blücher.xciv Gneisenau and the British media campaigned for a war crimes tribunal, reparations, the division of France and a standing garrison to be put on French soil. But France was extremely lucky. Despite having committed crimes of war and crimes against humanity, she had done so in an era of kings and princes and royal courts, all of whom wished for nothing more than a speedy return to order and the old balance of power. Prussia was not so fortunate just over a hundred years later.
Once the war was over, the Austrian Emperor and King Friedrich Wilhelm III of Prussia began to rue their ‘call to arms of all Germans’. They found they had played sorcerer’s apprentices in igniting the spirit of pan-German nationalism by calling for all Germans to rise up against their oppressors. The volunteer movement and the militias had not taken oaths to their princes and kings, but to the German Fatherland. The black, red and gold colours of the volunteer regiments, the Lützow Corps, became the symbol around which nationalists and liberals commemorated the ‘national liberation of Germany’. At annual student commemorations of the war, students at the Wartburg Castle in Thuringia drew parallels between Germany’s liberation from Rome by Martin Luther and her liberation by popular uprisings against Napoleon.
Prussia and Austria had cause to try and restrain calls for greater German unity once the crisis was over, as the idea of a united Germany would sweep all but one dynasty away. The ultimate significance of the Napoleonic Wars, which has been obscured by the two World Wars of the twentieth century, was that German Europe had suffered over 200 years of virtually non-stop invasions by France. France was seen as the Erbfeind (inherited and habitual foe of Germany). The fear and enmity felt by Germans against France was once again on display during the 1830 and 1848 revolutions, when many German states in the newly reconstituted German Confederation were defenceless and fearful of renewed predatory French incursions.
RESTORATION EUROPE AFTER THE ERA OF NAPOLEON
The 1815 Vienna Congress effectively tried to recreate Europe as it was before Napoleon and the French Revolution. The Congress reconstituted the old Holy Roman Empire into a new German Confederation with its new Reichstag (parliament) in the city of Frankfurt at the Palais of Thurn and Taxis.xcv Frankfurt was a strategic choice as it was on the inner German fault line of the largely Catholic south and the Protestant north, areas historically well disposed to Austria and Prussia respectively.xcvi
The new German Confederation had thirty-nine states (thirty-five monarchies and four free cities), a much-reduced but still substantial number. It was the first time that Prussia held sway over more of German-speaking Europe than Austria in an era that was to mark the beginning of Austro-Prussian dualism in German affairs. The construction of the German Confederation left Austria in the driving seat, but greatly expanded the power of Prussia by giving her control over northern Germany as far west as the Rhineland and the Ruhr, whose immense natural resources had yet to be discovered. The German Confederation’s two strongest states were sanctioned to defend Europe from any renewed threats from France, with Prussia keeping watch in the west on the Rhine, and Austria in the south in northern Italy along the river Po (the Po river had been the ancient southern demarcation line of defence for the Holy Roman Empire). Prussia also put its alliance with Russia at the centre of its foreign policy. In 1817, the Prussian-Russian alliance became a family matter when Friedrich Wilhelm III’s daughter, Princess Charlotte, married Grand Duke Nicolas, the heir to the Romanov throne. As long as the wartime alliance between Russia, Prussia and Austria — the Three Eagle Alliance — endured, France had no real hope of breaking its pariah status, or of further territorial aggrandisement in Europe. Although Prussia had lost many of her Polish gains from the final division of 1795, it had been by mutual agreement, and the territories did not return to Poland but were ceded to Russia. Incredibly, the disappearance of Poland did not cause any of the victorious allies much concern. No one spoke up for an independent Poland, which would have been an ally of France and as such upset the balance of power in the region. Poland disappeared, and having been amicably divided up there was nothing left to fight over. Her non-existence was seen as a politically stabilising factor.
The victorious powers established what became known as the ‘Concert of Europe’,xcvii an alliance which sought to restore the balance of power in Europe in general and contain France’s expansionist tendencies in particular. Initially, it included Britain, Denmark, the United Netherlands,xcviii Austria, Prussia, the German Confederation and Russia. Beyond the narrow confines of merely restoring the former royal houses of Europe, the Concert also sought to establish a dynastic bulwark against the spread of liberalism and revolution.
Fear of a revanchist France remained uppermost in the minds of Europe’s monarchs and governments for half a century after her defeat at Waterloo. The spectre of the bloody Jacobin Revolution haunted the royal courts of Europe and appeared to be an infection that would not die. Revolutions erupted again in France in 1830 and 1848, sweeping across Europe, threatening monarchies, nobility and the great estates alike. Across much of the rest of Europe there followed a period of retrenchment and reaction on the part of monarchs who did not intend to go the same way. Reform and greater democracy were not uppermost in the minds of any of the courts of Europe after 1815; rather, restoration and repression were the bywords for Europeans after Napoleon. The nations of Europe were determined to put out the brush fires of revolution, lest they reignite and consume Europe in another disastrous conflagration.
In the case of Great Britain it would be wrong to use the term ‘Restoration’ as nothing needed to be restored, but the forces of conservative reaction were no less visible than in many other parts of Europe. Britain may have had a parliament, but it was far from a representative one. In 1831, out of 405 parliamentary seats, less than 500 voters elected 293 of them. The rotten borough system allowed seats to be bought or handed down through families, such as Old Sarum in Wiltshire, which had one Member of Parliament (MP) for three houses and seven constituents. Great metropolitan centres like Manchester had the same representation with just one MP to represent hundreds of thousands of voters. In 1819, a huge public meeting took place in Manchester estimated to have had somewhere between 30,000 and 150,000 people present. It was organised by the Manchester Patriotic Union Society, which campaigned for radical parliamentary reform. The military organised a cavalry charge against the crowd killing at least eleven and injuring a further 500 people, an incident that later became known as the Peterloo Massacre, with several eyewitnesses suggesting a much higher death toll than the one issued by the authorities.xcix (12) The rotten borough system was amended with the Reform Act of 1832, which abolished fifty-six of the boroughs, but still left the overwhelming majority of the population disenfranchised.
The Reform Act of 1867 widened the franchise from 1 to 2 million of the 5 million males in England and Wales and established the principal of a similar number of voters per constituency. A boundary commission was installed to examine
the matter in more detail in 1872. But as voting rights were only bestowed on householders, it still left the majority of male voters disenfranchised. The Third Reform Act of 1884 established the idea of one man one vote, considerably widening the franchise, allowing all males who paid an annual rent of ten pounds, or whose land holdings were valued at more than ten pounds, to vote, but this still left 40 per cent of the male population disenfranchised. There was no further electoral reform until after the First World War when the Representation of the People Act abolished the property qualification for men and enfranchised all women over the age of thirty. However, women still had to meet the minimum property qualification; they did not receive parity of voting rights until 1928.(13)
In France, Louis XVIII was obliged to accept his crown from the French legislature. However, once he was upon the throne, he acted as though there had never been a bloody revolution. Maurice de Talleyrand, who had been Napoleon’s Foreign Minister, continued in his role under the king and was at pains to explain to him that, ‘In civilised states at least, supreme power be exercised with the support of representative bodies.’ Louis was consequently compelled to maintain both a lower house and a constitution, even though the latter was merely labelled a ‘constitutional charter’.(14) His successor, Charles X, attempted to turn back the clock even further, which led to the outbreak of the 1830 revolution.
Russia swung between moderate attempts at liberalism and reform, and outright reaction. It was the last major nation in Europe to liberate its peasants from indentured servitudec and was also the last of the great European nations to establish a representative parliament; the defeat by Japan in the Russo-Japanese war of 1904–05 led to the first Russian Duma — or parliament — being called.
As for Austria, under the rule of Franz Ferdinand II she was ‘not only ridden with the fear of revolution, but with the fear of the Enlightenment in general.’ As one historian put it, Ferdinand was, ‘A stupid and unimaginative defender of the status quo… (and) the single most influential conservative in Germany throughout his long reign of forty three years!’(16) Austria, right up until the tumultuous revolutions of 1848, and beyond, acted as the anchor of the restoration period and was a major brake on reform, not only within her own dominions, but in the German Confederation and upon Prussia as well. Under the rule of Prussia’s Friedrich Wilhelm III, ‘continuity’ in the Austro-Prussian policy of ‘dualism’ (joint control over Germany) became institutionalised. The Prussian monarch would not act independently of Austria in the affairs of the German Confederation. With this, all hopes of German nationalists, liberals and radicals for reform, and greater unity were stifled.ci
The Reichstag in Frankfurt and the German Confederation as a whole remained little more than a meeting point for the diplomats and foreign ministers of the near forty German states. What was effectively beginning to emerge was three Germanies: Prussia, Austria and the German Confederation — the latter being the weakest and most fragmented of them all. It was not inevitable that Prussia would come to dominate the confederation, at least not in the first half of the nineteenth century, when Austria remained politically in the ascendancy, having in large measure dictated the post-Napoleonic restoration settlement in the form of Europe’s leading statesman Prince Klemens Wenzel von Metternich, the Austrian Foreign Minister and the chief architect of the 1815 Vienna settlement.
The reform movement within Prussia that in 1806 had seemed so urgent after the crushing military defeats at the hands of the Grande Armée did not survive long after the defeat of Napoleon, dissipating with the removal of the external threat that had created it. The great Prussian reformers Stein and Hardenberg nevertheless continued to work towards the refinement of the Enlightenment principals that had guided Prussia for almost a century. As one commentator observed, ‘In Prussia the continuity of rationalism in government… was as firm as the continuity of the counter enlightenment in Austria.’(18)
Karl August von Hardenberg, as Minister and then Chancellor (Prime Minister) of Prussia attempted to continue the impetus of the reform process, which had begun during the Napoleonic occupations. He gave greater self-governance to the cities and continued Church reform by allowing Prussian subjects to be citizens without being a member of any religious community for the first time; a thoroughly modern notion at the time. A raft of reforms also revolutionised Prussia’s economic development due to the wide-ranging liberalisation of the economy and trade. As the German historian Thomas Stamm Kuhlmann stated, ‘(Hardenberg) released trade and industry from the constraints of mercantilism and the relics of the guild system, (he)… created continuous growth to heal many of the deficiencies of a society and estates that no longer corresponded with the needs of a growing population.’(19) And while, for now, Prussia appeared content to allow Austria to rule the political roost in the German Confederation, she showed a marked appetite for coming to dominate it economically. Prussia engaged in a railway building war with Austria to attract German states into its newly created free trade zone called the Zollverein (Customs Union), established by Prussia in 1821. This quickly came to incorporate most of northern Germany and would continue to expand to cover nearly all of the German Confederation.
In terms of the ongoing battle with the king to introduce greater political reform, Hardenberg’s most important contribution, whilst framing the terms of the state indebtedness law in 1820, was to preclude the Prussian government from raising large scale loans for the military or infrastructure projects unless the National Estates Assemblies had first cleared them at a new and specially convened National Assembly. He had ensured that when the time came the Assemblies would in turn demand their quid pro quo for these loans in the form of greater representation. Along with his substantive economic reforms, which allowed for Prussia’s rapid economic expansion, this was to be Hardenberg’s most enduring legacy in the long march towards giving Prussia a more modern set of representative institutions.
The Prussian king had initially regarded reform as a necessary evil to revitalise Prussia after her humiliating defeat, but he soon began to believe that the reform process had gone far enough and served its purpose. Hardenberg’s attempts at creating a Prussian constitution, and representative institutions, effectively died with him in 1822. Prussia had received only modernised provincial estates (Provinzialstaende), at which the three major representatives of the social order (the noble landowners, farmer landowners and the cities) were represented. The most that was achieved was the creation of an assembly of the provincial diets (Provinzallandtage).(20)
The king continued to surround himself with a conservative camarilla (a de facto Cabinet of advisers), and the conservative nobility encircled the throne, attempting to distract the king from all reforming influences. Their view of stabilising the state meant keeping the king from giving in to further reformist tendencies. As Stamm Kuhlmann succinctly put it, ‘Consequently, a victory of the Restoration party in Prussia presupposes a victory over the heart and mind of the king… who had a tendency to follow the advice of the last person who had (his) ear. The lurching, unstable course that the monarch thus took contributed to the image of a state that wavered between Restoration and Reform.’(21)
Prussia’s restoration conservatives were strengthened at every turn by Austria. The Austrian state Chancellor, Prince Klemens von Metternich, had no qualms about interfering in the affairs of other states. At the Congress of Aachen in 1818, he lectured the Prussian king on the dangers of German nationalism in the form of the freedom of the press and the expansion of German nationalistic and militaristic movements. Metternich particularly had in mind the Turnbewegung (Gymnastics Movement), organised by nationalist teachers, students and former members of the Landwehr (the civilian militia created during the Napoleonic War). The Teplitz Agreements, reached between Austria and Prussia in 1819, were followed in their stead by the Karlsbad Decrees, which sought to prevent Prussia from ‘introducing general forms of representative government, to repress liberal and democratic
thought and demands for political participation.’(22) They led to the ‘prosecution of the demagogues’, and brought about radical press censorship, causing many German nationalists and radicals to either be imprisoned or flee Germany.cii The flame of German nationalism and liberal reform, which both monarchies had encouraged in order to help them rally their populations in the fight against Napoleon, was something they now tried to trample under foot.
In 1848, yet another French revolution engendered fear within the hearts of the European establishment and estates, as well as within the populations who had suffered French occupation. But it took this fear to begin the evolution towards national, liberal and democratic institutions in the German Confederation and Prussia. A.J.P. Taylor famously wrote that 1848 was the key year in which the German train wreck of the twentieth century began, because it was ‘The revolution that failed to turn,’(23) — a judgment that, though widely quoted, is not entirely justified. In the aftermath of the 1848 revolutions, right through to the 1860s, most German states evolved greater democracy in the form of equality before the law, trial by jury, right of self-assembly, varying degrees of freedom of the press and free enterprise.(24) Germany and Prussia may not have gained a parliamentary democracy along the lines of that which evolved in Britain and France in the last part of the nineteenth century, but there were certainly significant turning points that liberated Prussia from the shackles of enlightened absolutism. As the American historian on Prussia, David E. Barclay, stated, ‘As a result of the dramatic events of 1848–1850, Prussia did make a permanent transition to constitutionalism and parliamentarianism… (leading to) a constitution and an elected parliament.’(25) While Austria increasingly came to be seen as a reactionary and ailing regime, holding back all attempts at reform, Prussia’s strength and vitality seemed boundless by comparison. Gradual political reform along with dynamic economic and population growth would see Prussia eclipse Austria as the leading power within ‘German Europe’ in the second half of the nineteenth century.ciii
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