FREDERICK ENGLES
REVOLUTION
AND
COUNTER-
REVOLUTION
IN GERMANY
FOREIGN LANGUAGES PRESS
First Edition 1977
PEKING 1977
.GIF)
FREDERICK ENGLESREVOLUTION
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The contents of this book are those of the Chinese edition under the same title, People's Publishing House, Peking, 1962. The series "Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany," originally written in English, is reprinted from photostats of issues of the New York Daily Tribune (1851-52), in which it first appeared, with misprints corrected and some changes in style made by us. The appended three articles[¥] are reprinted with a few corrections of the translation from the English edition of Marx and Engels, Selected Works, in two volumes, Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1951. The notes at the end of the book are compiled from various sources.
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I. |
Germany at the Outbreak of the Revolution |
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Written between August 1851
The original text is in page 2 [blank]
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GERMANY AT THE OUTBREAK
The first act of the revolutionary drama on the Continent of Europe has closed. The "powers that were" before the hurricane of 1848 are again the "powers that be," and the more or less popular rulers of a day, provisional governors, triumvirs, dictators, with their tail of representatives, civil commissioners, military commissioners, prefects, judges, generals, officers and soldiers, are thrown upon foreign shores, and "transported beyond the seas" to England or America, there to form new governments in partibus infidelium,[2] European committees, central committees, national committees, and to announce their advent with proclamations quite as solemn as those of any less imaginary potentates.
A more signal defeat than that undergone by the continental revolutionary party -- or rather parties -- upon all points of the line of battle, cannot be imagined. But what of that? Has not the struggle of the British middle classes for their social and political supremacy embraced forty-eight, that of
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the French middle classes forty years of unexampled struggles? And was their triumph ever nearer than at the very moment when restored monarchy thought itself more firmly settled than ever? The times of that superstition which attributed revolutions to the ill will of a few agitators have long passed away. Everyone knows nowadays that wherever there is a revolutionary convulsion, there must be some social want in the background, which is prevented by outworn institutions from satisfying itself. The want may not yet be felt as strongly, as generally, as might insure immediate success, but every attempt at forcible repression will only bring it forth stronger and stronger, until it bursts its fetters. If, then, we have been beaten, we have nothing else to do but to begin again from the beginning. And, fortunately, the probably very short interval of rest which is allowed us between the close of the first and the beginning of the second act of the movement, gives us time for a very necessary piece of work: the study of the causes that necessitated both the late outbreak and its defeat; causes that are not to be sought for in the accidental efforts, talents, faults, errors or treacheries of some of the leaders, but in the general social state and conditions of existence of each of the convulsed nations. That the sudden movements of February and March, 1848, were not the work of single individuals, but spontaneous, irresistible manifestations of national wants and necessities, more or less clearly understood, but very distinctly felt by numerous classes in every country, is a fact recognized everywhere; but when you inquire into the causes of the counter-revolutionary successes, there you are met on every hand with the ready reply that it was Mr. This or Citizen That who "betrayed" the people. Which reply may be very true, or not, according to circumstances, but under no circumstances does it explain anything -- not
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even show how it came to pass that the "people" allowed themselves to be thus betrayed. And what a poor chance stands a political party whose entire stock-in-trade consists in a knowledge of the solitary fact that Citizen So-and-so is not to be trusted.
The inquiry into, and the exposition of, the causes both of the revolutionary convulsion and its suppression are, besides, of paramount importance in a historical point of view. All these petty personal quarrels and recriminations -- all these contradictory assertions that it was Marrast, or Ledru-Rollin, or Louis Blanc, or any other member of the Provisional Government, or the whole of them, that steered the revolution amidst the rocks upon which it foundered -- of what interest can they be, what light can they afford, to the American or Englishman who observed all these various movements from a distance too great to allow of his distinguishing any of the details of operations? No man in his senses will ever believe that eleven men,* mostly of very indifferent capacity either for good or evil, were able in three months to ruin a nation of thirty-six millions, unless those thirty-six millions saw as little of their way before them as the eleven did. But how it came to pass that these thirty-six millions were at once called upon to decide for themselves which way to go, although partly groping in dim twilight, and how then they got lost and their old leaders were for a moment allowed to return to their leadership, that is just the question.
If, then, we try to lay before the readers of The Tribune [3] the causes which, while they necessitated the German Revolution of 1848, led quite as inevitably to its momentary repression in 1849 and 1850, we shall not be expected to give
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a complete history of the events as they passed in that country. Later events, and the judgment of coming generations, will decide what portion of that confused mass of seemingly accidental, incoherent and incongruous facts is to form a part of the world's history. The time for such a task has not yet arrived; we must confine ourselves to the limits of the possible, and be satisfied, if we can find rational causes, based upon undeniable facts, to explain the chief events, the principal vicissitudes of that movement, and to give us a clue as to the direction which the next, and perhaps not very distant, outbreak will impart to the German people.
And firstly, what was the state of Germany at the outbreak of the revolution?
The composition of the different classes of the people which form the groundwork of every political organization was, in Germany, more complicated than in any other country. While in England and France feudalism was entirely destroyed, or at least reduced, as in the former country, to a few insignificant forms, by a powerful and wealthy middle class, concen trated in large towns, and particularly in the capital, the feudal nobility in Germany had retained a great portion of their ancient privileges. The feudal system of tenure was prevalent almost everywhere. The lords of the land had even retained the jurisdiction over their tenants. Deprived of their political privileges, of the right to control the princes, they had preserved almost all their medieval supremacy over the peasantry of their demesnes, as well as their exemption from taxes. Feudalism was more flourishing in some localities than in others, but nowhere except on the left bank of the Rhine was it entirely destroyed. This feudal nobility, then extremely numerous and partly very wealthy, was considered, officially, the first "order" in the country. It furnished the
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higher government officials, it almost exclusively officered the army.
The bourgeoisie of Germany was by far not as wealthy and concentrated as that of France or England. The ancient manufactures of Germany had been destroyed by the introduction of steam, and by the rapidly extending supremacy of English manufactures; the more modern manufactures, started under the Napoleonic Continental System,[4] established in other parts of the country, did not compensate for the loss of the old ones, nor suffice to create a manufacturing interest strong enough to force its wants upon the notice of governments jealous of every extension of non-noble wealth and power. If France carried her silk manufactures victorious through fifty years of revolutions and wars, Germany, during the same time, all but lost her ancient linen trade. The manufacturing districts, besides, were few and far between; situated far inland, and using mostly foreign, Dutch or Belgian ports for their imports and exports, they had little or no interest in common with the large seaport-towns on the North Sea and the Baltic; they were, above all, unable to create large manufacturing and trading centres, such as Paris and Lyons, London and Manchester. The causes of this backwardness of German manufactures were manifold, but two will suffice to account for it: the unfavourable geographical situation of the country, at a distance from the Atlantic, which had become the great highway for the world's trade, and the continuous wars in which Germany was involved, and which were fought on her soil, from the sixteenth century to the present day. It was this want of numbers, and particularly of anything like concentrated numbers, which prevented the German middle classes from attaining that political supremacy which the English bourgeoisie has enjoyed ever since
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1688, and which the French conquered in 1789. And yet, ever since 1815, the wealth, and with the wealth, the political importance of the middle class in Germany, was continually growing. Governments were, although reluctantly, compelled to bow at least to its more immediate material interests. It may even be truly said that from 1815 to 1830, and from 1832 to 1840, every particle of political influence, which, having been allowed to the middle class in the constitutions of the smaller states, was again wrested from them during the above two periods of political reaction -- that every such particle was compensated for by some more practical advantage allowed to them. Every political defeat of the middle class drew after it a victory on the field of commercial legislation. And, certainly, the Prussian Protective Tariff of 1818, and the formation of the Zollverein,[5] were worth a good deal more to the traders and manufacturers of Germany than the equivocal right of expressing, in the chambers of some diminutive dukedom, their want of confidence in ministers who laughed at their votes. Thus, with growing wealth and extending trade, the bourgeoisie soon arrived at a stage where it found the development of its most important interests checked by the political constitution of the country -- by its random division among thirty-six princes with conflicting tendencies and caprices; by the feudal fetters upon agriculture and the trade connected with it; by the prying superintendence to which an ignorant and presumptuous bureaucracy subjected all its transactions. At the same time, the extension and consolidation of the Zollverein, the general introduction of steam communication, the growing competition in the home trade, brought the commercial classes of the different states and provinces closer together, equalized their interests, centralized their strength. The natural consequence was the passing of the
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whole mass of them into the camp of the liberal Opposition, and the gaining of the first serious struggle of the German middle class for political power. This change may be dated from 1840, from the moment when the bourgeoisie of Prussia assumed the lead of the middle-class movement of Germany. We shall hereafter revert to this liberal Opposition Movement of 1840-47.
The great mass of the nation, which neither belonged to the nobility nor to the bourgeoisie, consisted, in the towns, of the small trading and shopkeeping class and the working people, and in the country, of the peasantry.
The small trading and shopkeeping class is exceedingly numerous in Germany, in consequence of the stinted development which the large capitalists and manufacturers, as a class, have had in that country. In the larger towns it forms almost the majority of the inhabitants; in the smaller ones it entirely predominates, from the absence of wealthier competitors for influence. This class, a most important one in every modern body politic, and in all modern revolutions, is still more important in Germany, where, during the recent struggles, it generally played the decisive part. Its intermediate position between the class of larger capitalists, traders and manufacturers, the bourgeoisie, properly so-called, and the proletarian or industrial class, determines its character. Aspiring to the position of the first, the least adverse turn of fortune hurls the individuals of this class down into the ranks of the second. In monarchical and feudal countries the custom of the court and aristocracy becomes necessary to its existence; the loss of this custom might ruin a great part of it. In the smaller towns a military garrison, a county government, a court of law with its followers, form very often the base of its prosperity; withdraw these, and down go the shopkeepers, the
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tailors, the shoemakers, the joiners. Thus, eternally tossed about between the hope of entering the ranks of the wealthier class, and the fear of being reduced to the state of proletarians or even paupers; between the hope of promoting their interests by conquering a share in the direction of public affairs, and the dread of rousing, by ill-timed opposition, the ire of a government which disposes of their very existence, because it has the power of removing their best customers; possessed of small means, the insecurity of the possession of which is in the inverse ratio of the amount -- this class is extremely vacillating in its views. Humble and crouchingly submissive under a powerful feudal or monarchical government, it turns to the side of liberalism when the middle class is in the ascendant; it becomes seized with violent democratic fits as soon as the middle class has secured its own supremacy, but falls back into the abject despondency of fear as soon as the class below itself, the proletarians, attempt an independent movement. We shall, by and by, see this class, in Germany, pass alternately from one of these stages to the other.
The working class in Germany is, in its social and political development, as far behind that of England and France as the German bourgeoisie is behind the bourgeoisie of those countries. Like master, like man. The evolution of the conditions of existence for a numerous, strong, concentrated and intelligent proletarian class goes hand in hand with the development of the conditions of existence for a numerous, wealthy, concentrated and powerful middle class. The working-class movement itself never is independent, never is of an exclusively proletarian character, until all the different factions of the middle class, and particularly its most progressive faction, the large manufacturers, have conquered political power and remodelled the state according to their wants. It
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is then that the inevitable conflict between the employer and the employed becomes imminent and cannot be adjourned any longer; that the working class can no longer be put off with delusive hopes and promises never to be realized; that the great problem of the nineteenth century, the abolition of the proletariat, is at last brought forward fairly and in its proper light. Now, in Germany, the mass of the working class were employed, not by those modern manufacturing lords of which Great Britain furnishes such splendid specimens, but by small tradesmen whose entire manufacturing system is a mere relic of the Middle Ages. And as there is an enormous difference between the great cotton lord and the petty cobbler or master tailor, so there is a corresponding distance from the wide awake factory operative of modern manufacturing Babylons to the bashful journeyman tailor or cabinet-maker of a small country town, who lives in circumstances and works after a plan very little different from those of the like sort of men some five hundred years ago. This general absence of modern conditions of life, of modern modes of industrial production, of course was accompanied by a pretty equally general absence of modern ideas, and it is therefore not to be wondered at if, at the outbreak of the revolution, a large part of the working classes should cry out for the immediate re-establishment of guilds and medieval privileged trades' corporations. Yet, from the manufacturing districts, where the modern system of production predominated, and in consequence of the facilities of intercommunication and mental development afforded by the migratory life of a large number of the working men, a strong nucleus formed itself, whose ideas about the emancipation of their class were far clearer and more in accordance with existing facts and historical necessities; but they were a mere minority. If the active movement of the
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middle classes may be dated from 1840, that of the working class commences its advent by the insurrections of the Silesian and Bohemian factory operatives in 1844,[6] and we shall soon have occasion to pass in review the different stages through which this movement passed.
Lastly, there was the great class of the small farmers, the peasantry, which, with its appendix of farm-labourers, constitutes a considerable majority of the entire nation. But this class again subdivided itself into different fractions. There were, firstly, the more wealthy farmers, what is called in Germany Gross- and Mittelbauern,[*] proprietors of more or less extensive farms, and each of them commanding the services of several agricultural labourers. This class, placed between the large untaxed feudal land-owners and the smaller peasantry and farm-labourers, for obvious reasons found in an alliance with the anti-feudal middle class of the towns its most natural political course. Then there were, secondly, the small freeholders, predominating in the Rhine country, where feudalism had succumbed before the mighty strokes of the great French Revolution. Similar independent small freeholders also existed here and there in other provinces, where they had succeeded in buying off the feudal charges formerly due upon their lands. This class, however, was a class of freeholders by name only, their property being generally mortgaged to such an extent, and under such onerous conditions, that not the peasant, but the usurer who had advanced the money, was the real land-owner. Thirdly, the feudal tenants, who could not be easily turned out of their holdings, but who had to pay a perpetual rent, or to perform in perpetuity a certain amount of labour in favour of the lord
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of the manor. Lastly, the agricultural labourers, whose condition, in many large farming concerns, was exactly that of the same class in England, and who, in all cases, lived and died poor, ill-fed, and the slaves of their employers. These three latter classes of the agricultural population, the small freeholders, the feudal tenants, and the agricultural labourers, never troubled their heads much about politics before the revolution, but it is evident that this event must have opened to them a new career, full of brilliant prospects. To every one of them the revolution offered advantages, and the movement once fairly engaged in, it was to be expected that each, in his turn, would join it. But at the same time it is quite as evident, and equally borne out by the history of all modern countries, that the agricultural population, in consequence of its dispersion over a great space, and of the difficulty of bringing about an agreement among any considerable portion of it, never can attempt a successful independent movement; they require the initiatory impulse of the more concentrated, more enlightened, more easily moved people of the towns.
The preceding short sketch of the most important of the classes, which in their aggregate formed the German nation at the outbreak of the recent movements, will already be sufficient to explain a great part of the incoherence, incongruence and apparent contradiction which prevailed in that movement. When interests so varied, so conflicting, so strangely crossing each other, are brought into violent collision; when these contending interests in every district, every province, are mixed in different proportions; when, above all, there is no great centre in the country, no London, no Paris, the decisions of which, by their weight, may supersede the necessity of fighting out the same quarrel over and over again in every single locality; what else is to be expected but that the contest
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will dissolve itself into a mass of unconnected struggles, in which an enormous quantity of blood, energy and capital is spent, but which for all that remain without any decisive results?
The political dismemberment of Germany into three dozen of more or less important principalities is equally explained by this confusion and multiplicity of the elements which compose the nation, and which again vary in every locality. Where there are no common interests there can be no unity of purpose, much less of action. The German Confederation, it is true, was declared everlastingly indissoluble; yet the Confederation and its organ, the Diet,[7] never represented German unity. The very highest pitch to which centralization was ever carried in Germany was the establishment of the Zollverein ; by this the states on the North Sea were also forced into a Customs Union of their own,[8] Austria remaining wrapped up in her separate prohibitive tariff. Germany had the satisfaction to be, for all practical purposes, divided between three independent powers only, instead of between thirty six. Of course, the paramount supremacy of the Russian Czar, as established in 1814, underwent no change on this account.
Having drawn these preliminary conclusions from our premises, we shall see, in our next, how the afore-said various classes of the German people were set into movement one after the other, and what character this movement assumed on the outbreak of the French Revolution of 1848.
London, September, 1851
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THE PRUSSIAN STATE
The political movement of the middle class, or bourgeoisie, in Germany may be dated from 1840. It had been preceded by symptoms showing that the moneyed and industrial class of that country was ripening into a state which would no longer allow it to continue apathetic and passive under the pressure of a half-feudal, half-bureaucratic monarchism. The smaller princes of Germany, partly to insure to themselves a greater independence against the supremacy of Austria and Prussia, or against the influence of the nobility in their own states, partly in order to consolidate into a whole the disconnected provinces united under their rule by the Congress of Vienna,[9] one after the other granted constitutions of a more or less liberal character. They could do so without any danger to themselves; for if the Diet of the Confederation, this mere puppet of Austria and Prussia, was to encroach upon their independence as sovereigns, they knew that in resisting its dictates they would be backed by public opinion and the Chambers; and if, on the contrary, these Chambers grew too strong, they could readily command the power of the Diet
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to break down all opposition. The Bavarian. Wurttemberg, Baden or Hanoverian constitutional institutions could not, under such circumstances, give rise to any serious struggle for political power, and therefore the great bulk of the German middle class kept very generally aloof from the petty squabbles raised in the legislatures of the small states, well knowing that without a fundamental change in the policy and constitution of the two great powers of Germany, no secondary efforts and victories would be of any avail. But, at the same time, a race of liberal lawyers, professional oppositionists, sprung up in these small assemblies; the Rottecks, the Welckers, the Roemers, the Jordans, the Stuves, the Eisenmanns, those great "popular men" (Volksmänner ) who, after a more or less noisy, but always unsuccessful, opposition of twenty years, were carried to the summit of power by the revolutionary springtide of 1848, and who, after having there shown their utter impotency and insignificance, were hurled down again in a moment. These first specimens, upon German soil, of the trader in politics and opposition, by their speeches and writings made familiar to the German ear the language of constitutionalism, and by their very existence, foreboded the approach of a time when the middle class would seize upon and restore to their proper meaning the political phrases which these talkative attorneys and professors were in the habit of using without knowing much about the sense originally attached to them.
German literature, too, laboured under the influence of the political excitement into which all Europe had been thrown by the events of 1830.[10] A crude constitutionalism, or a still cruder republicanism, were preached by almost all writers of the time. It became more and more the habit, particularly of the inferior sorts of literati, to make up for the want of
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cleverness in their productions by political allusions which were sure to attract attention. Poetry, novels, reviews, the drama, every literary production teemed with what was called "tendency," that is, with more or less timid exhibitions of an anti-governmental spirit. In order to complete the confusion of ideas reigning after 1830 in Germany, with these elements of political opposition there were mixed up ill-digested university recollections of German philosophy, and misunderstood gleanings from French socialism, particularly Saint-Simonism; and the clique of writers who expatiated upon this heterogeneous conglomerate of ideas, presumptuously called themselves "Young Germany,"[11] or "the Modern School." They have since repented their youthful sins, but not improved their style of writing.
Lastly, German philosophy, that most complicated, but at the same time most sure thermometer of the development of the German mind, had declared for the middle class, when Hegel pronounced, in his Philosophy of Law,[12] constitutional monarchy to be the final and most perfect form of government. In other words, he proclaimed the approaching advent of the middle classes of the country to political power. His school, after his death, did not stop here. While the more advanced section of his followers, on the one hand, subjected every religious belief to the ordeal of a rigorous criticism, and shook to its foundation the ancient fabric of Christianity, they at the same time brought forward bolder political principles than hitherto it had been the fate of German ears to hear expounded, and attempted to restore to glory the memory of the heroes of the first French Revolution. The abstruse philosophical language in which these ideas were clothed, if it obscured the mind of both the writer and the reader, equally blinded the eyes of the censor, and thus it was that the
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"Young Hegelian" writers enjoyed a liberty of the press unknown in every other branch of literature.
Thus it was evident that public opinion was undergoing a great change in Germany. By degrees, the vast majority of those classes whose education or position in life enabled them, under an absolute monarchy, to gain some political information, and to form anything like an independent political opinion, united into one mighty phalanx of opposition against the existing system. And in passing judgment upon the slowness of political development in Germany, no one ought to omit taking into account the difficulty of obtaining correct in formation upon any subject in a country where all sources of information were under the control of the government; where from the Ragged School and Sunday School to the newspaper and the university, nothing was said, taught, printed or published, but what had previously obtained its approbation. Look at Vienna, for instance. The people of Vienna, in industry and manufactures, second perhaps to none in Germany, and, in spirit, courage and revolutionary energy, proving themselves far superior to all, were yet more ignorant as to their real interests, and committed more blunders during the revolution than any others, and this was due, in a very great measure, to the almost absolute ignorance with regard to the very commonest political subjects in which Metternich's government had succeeded in keeping them.
It needs no further explanation why, under such a system, political information was an almost exclusive monopoly of such classes of society as could afford to pay for its being smuggled into the country, and more particularly of those whose interests were most seriously attacked by the existing state of things -- namely, the manufacturing and commercial classes. They, therefore, were the first to unite in a mass
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against the continuance of a more or less disguised absolutism and from their passing into the ranks of the opposition must be dated the beginning of the real revolutionary movement in Germany.
The oppositional pronunciamento of the German bourgeoisie may be dated from 1840, from the death of the late King of Prussia,[*] the last surviving founder of the Holy Alliance of 1815.[13] The new King was known to be no supporter of the predominantly bureaucratic and military monarchy of his father. What the French middle classes had expected from the advent of Louis XVI, the German bourgeoisie hoped, in some measure, from Frederick William IV of Prussia. It was agreed upon all hands that the old system was exploded, worn out, and must be given up; and what had been borne in silence under the old King now was loudly proclaimed to be intolerable.
But if Louis XVI, "Louis-le-Desire,"** had been a plain, unpretending simpleton, half-conscious of his own nullity, without any fixed opinions, ruled principally by the habits contracted during his education, "Frederick William-le Désiré" was something quite different. While he certainly surpassed his French original in weakness of character, he was neither without pretensions nor without opinions. He had made himself acquainted, in an amateur sort of way, with the rudiments of most sciences, and thought himself, therefore, learned enough to consider final his judgment upon every subject. He made sure he was a first-rate orator, and there was certainly no commercial traveller in Berlin who could beat him either in prolixity of pretended wit or influency of
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elocution. And above all, he had his opinions. He hated and despised the bureaucratic element of the Prussian monarchy, but only because all his sympathies were with the feudal element. Himself one of the founders of and chief contributors to the Berlin Political Weekly Paper,[14] the so-called Historical School[15] (a school living upon the ideas of Bonald, De Maistre, and other writers of the first generation of French Legitimists [16]), he aimed at a restoration, as complete as possible, of the predominant social position of the nobility. The King, first nobleman of his realm, surrounded in the first instance by a splendid court of mighty vassals, princes, dukes and counts; in the second instance, by a numerous and wealthy lower nobility; ruling according to his discretion over his loyal burgesses and peasants, and thus being himself the chief of a complete hierarchy of social ranks or castes, each of which was to enjoy its particular privileges, and to be separated from the others by the almost insurmountable barrier of birth or of a fixed, inalterable social position; the whole of these castes or "estates of the realm" balancing each other, at the same time, so nicely in power and influence that a complete independence of action should remain to the King -- such was the beau idéal which Frederick William IV under took to realize, and which he is again trying to realize at the present moment.
It took some time before the Prussian bourgeoisie, not very well versed in theoretical questions, found out the real purport of their King's tendency. But what they very soon found out was the fact that he was bent upon things quite the reverse of what they wanted. Hardly did the new King find his "gift of the gab" unfettered by his father's death than he set about proclaiming his intentions in speeches without number; and every speech, every act of his went far to estrange from him
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the sympathies of the middle class. He would not have cared much for that, if it had not been for some stern and startling realities which interrupted his poetic dreams. Alas, that romanticism is not very quick at accounts, and that feudalism, ever since Don Quixote, reckons without its host! Frederick William IV partook too much of that contempt for ready cash which ever has been the noblest inheritance of the sons of the Crusaders. He found, at his accession, a costly, although par simoniously arranged system of government, and a moderately filled State Treasury. In two years every trace of a surplus was spent in court festivals, royal progresses, largesses, subventions to needy, seedy and greedy noblemen, etc., and the regular taxes were no longer sufficient for the exigencies of either court or government. And thus, His Majesty found himself very soon placed between a glaring deficit on the one side, and a law of 1820 on the other, by which any new loan, or any increase of the then existing taxation, was made illegal without the assent of "the future representation of the people." This representation did not exist; the new King was less inclined than even his father to create it; and if he had been, he knew that public opinion had wonderfully changed since his accession.
Indeed, the middle classes, who had partly expected that the new King would at once grant a constitution, proclaim the liberty of the press, trial by jury, etc., etc., in short, himself take the lead of that peaceful revolution which they wanted in order to obtain political supremacy -- the middle classes had found out their error and had turned ferociously against the King. In the Rhine Province, and more or less generally, all over Prussia, they were so exasperated that they, being short themselves of men able to represent them in the press, went to the length of an alliance with the extreme philo-
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sophical party, of which we have spoken above. The fruit of this alliance was the Rhenish Gazette of Cologne,[17] a paper which was suppressed after fifteen months' existence, but from which may be dated the existence of the newspaper press in Germany. This was in 1842.
The poor King, whose commercial difficulties were the keenest satire upon his medieval propensities, very soon found out that he could not continue to reign without making some slight concession to the popular outcry for that "representation of the people," which, as the last remnant of the long-forgotten promises of 1813 and 1815, had been embodied in the law of 1820. He found the least objectionable mode of satisfying this untoward law in calling together the Stand ing Committees of the Provincial Diets. The Provincial Diets had been instituted in 1823. They consisted, for every one of the eight provinces of the kingdom -- (1) Of the higher nobility, the formerly sovereign families of the German Empire, the heads of which were members of the Diet by birthright; (2) Of the representatives of the knights or lower nobility; (3) Of representatives of towns; and (4) Of deputies of the peasantry or small farming class. The whole was arranged in such a manner that in every province the two sections of the nobility always had a majority of the Diet. Every one of these eight Provincial Diets elected a committee, and these eight committees were now called to Berlin, in order to form a Representative Assembly for the purpose of voting the much-desired loan. It was stated that the Treasury was full, and that the loan was required, not for current wants, but for the construction of a state railway. But the united committees gave the King a flat refusal, declaring themselves in competent to act as the representatives of the people, and called upon His Majesty to fulfil the promise of a represent-
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ative constitution which his father had given when he wanted the aid of the people against Napoleon.
The sitting of the united committees proved that the spirit of opposition was no longer confined to the bourgeoisie. A part of the peasantry had joined them, and many nobles, being themselves large farmers on their own property, and dealers in corn, wool, spirits and flax, requiring the same guarantees against absolutism, bureaucracy and feudal restoration, had equally pronounced against the government and for a representative constitution. The King's plan had signally failed; he had got no money, and had increased the power of the Opposition. The subsequent sitting of the Provincial Diets themselves was still more unfortunate for the King. All of them asked for reforms, for the fulfilment of the promises of 1813 and 1815, for a constitution and a free press; the resolutions, to this effect, of some of them were rather disrespect fully worded, and the ill-humoured replies of the exasperated King made the evil still greater.
In the meantime, the financial difficulties of the government went on increasing. For a time, abatements made upon the moneys appropriated for the different public services, fraudulent transactions with the "Seehandlung,"[18] a commercial establishment speculating and trading for account and risk of the state, and long since acting as its money-broker, had sufficed to keep up appearances; increased issues of state paper money had furnished some resources; and the secret upon the whole, had been pretty well kept. But all these contrivances were soon exhausted. There was another plan tried: the establishment of a bank, the capital of which was to be furnished partly by the state and partly by private shareholders; the chief direction to belong to the state, in such a manner as to enable the government to draw upon the funds
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of this bank to a large amount, and thus to repeat the same fraudulent transactions that would no longer do with the "Seehandlung." But, as a matter of course, there were no capitalists to be found who would hand over their money upon such conditions; the statutes of the bank had to be altered, and the property of the shareholders guaranteed from the encroachments of the Treasury, before any shares were subscribed for. Thus, this plan having failed, there remained nothing but to try a loan -- if capitalists could be found who would lend their cash without requiring the permission and guarantee of that mysterious "future representation of the people." Rothschild was applied to, and he declared that if the loan was to be guaranteed by this "representation of the people," he would undertake the thing at a moment's notice -- if not, he could not have anything to do with the transaction.
Thus every hope of obtaining money had vanished, and there was no possibility of escaping the fatal "representation of the people." Rothschild's refusal was known in autumn, 1846, and in February of the next year the King called together all the eight Provincial Diets to Berlin, forming them into one "United Diet." This Diet was to do the work required, in case of need, by the law of 1820; it was to vote loans and increased taxes, but beyond that it was to have no rights. Its voice upon general legislation was to be merely consultative; it was to assemble, not at fixed periods, but whenever it pleased the King; it was to discuss nothing but what the government pleased to lay before it. Of course, the members were very little satisfied with the part they were expected to perform. They repeated the wishes they had enounced when they met in the provincial assemblies; the relations between them and the government soon became acrimonious, and when
page 25
the loan, which was again stated to be required for railway constructions, was demanded from them, they again refused to grant it.
This vote very soon brought their sitting to a close. The King, more and more exasperated, dismissed them with a reprimand, but still remained without money. And, indeed he had every reason to be alarmed at his position, seeing that the Liberal League, headed by the middle classes, comprising a large part of the lower nobility and all the manifold discontents that had been accumulated in the different sections of the lower orders -- that this Liberal League was determined to have what it wanted. In vain the King had declared, in the opening speech, that he would never, never grant a constitution in the modern sense of the word; the Liberal League insisted upon such a modern, anti-feudal, representative constitution, with all its sequels, liberty of the press, trial by jury, etc.; and before they got it, not a farthing of money would they grant. There was one thing evident: that things could not go on long in this manner, and that either one of the parties must give way, or that a rupture, a bloody struggle, must ensue. And the middle classes knew that they were on the eve of a revolution, and they prepared themselves for it. They sought to obtain, by every possible means, the support of the working class of the towns, and of the peasantry in the agricultural districts, and it is well known that there was, in the latter end of 1847, hardly a single prominent political character among the bourgeoisie who did not proclaim himself a "Socialist," in order to insure to himself the sympathy of the proletarian class. We shall see these "Socialists" at work by and by.
This eagerness of the leading bourgeoisie to adopt at least the outward show of socialism was caused by a great change
page 26
that had come over the working classes of Germany. There had been ever since 1840 a fraction of German workmen who, travelling in France and Switzerland, had more or less imbibed the crude socialist and communist notions then current among the French workmen. The increasing attention paid to similar ideas in France ever since 1840 made socialism and communism fashionable in Germany also, and as far back as 1843, all newspapers teemed with discussions of social questions. A school of Socialists very soon formed itself in Germany, distinguished more for the obscurity than for the novelty of its ideas; its principal efforts consisted in the translation of French Fourierist, Saint-Simonian and other doctrines into the abstruse language of German philosophy.[19] The German communist school, entirely different from this sect, was formed about the same time.
In 1844, there occurred the Silesian weavers' riots, followed by the insurrection of the calico printers of Prague. These riots, cruelly suppressed, riots of working men, not against the government but against their employers, created a deep sensation, and gave a new stimulus to socialist and communist propaganda amongst the working people. So did the bread riots during the year of famine, 1847. In short, in the same manner as Constitutional Opposition rallied around its banner the great bulk of the propertied classes (with the exception of the large feudal land-holders), so the working classes of the larger towns ]ooked for their emancipation to the socialist and communist doctrines, although, under the then existing press laws, they could be made to know only very little about them. They could not be expected to have any very definite ideas as to what they wanted -- they only knew that the programme of the constitutional bourgeoisie did not contain
page 27
all they wanted, and that their wants were nowise contained in the constitutional circle of ideas.
There was then no separate republican party in Germany. People were either constitutional monarchists, or more or less clearly defined Socialists or Communists.
With such elements, the slightest collision must have brought about a great revolution. While the higher nobility and the older civil and military officers were the only safe supports of the existing system; while the lower nobility, the trading middle classes, the universities, the schoolmasters of every degree, and even part of the lower ranks of the bureaucracy and military officers, were all leagued against the government; while, behind these, there stood the dissatisfied masses of the peasantry, and of the proletarians of the large towns, supporting, for the time being, the liberal Opposition, but already muttering strange words about taking things into their own hands; while the bourgeoisie was ready to hurl down the government, and the proletarians were preparing to hurl down the bourgeoisie in its turn -- this government went on obstinately in a course which must bring about a collision. Germany was, in the beginning of 1848, on the eve of a revolution, and this revolution was sure to come, even had the French Revolution of February not hastened it.
What the effects of this Parisian revolution were upon Germany, we shall see in our next.
London, September, 1851
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THE OTHER GERMAN STATES
In our last we confined ourselves almost exclusively to that state which, during the years 1840 to 1848, was by far the most important in the German movement, namely, to Prussia. It is, however, time to pass a rapid glance over the other states of Germany during the same period.
As to the petty states, they had, ever since the revolutionary movements of 1830, completely passed under the dictatorship of the Diet, that is, of Austria and Prussia. The several constitutions, established as much as a means of defence against the dictates of the larger states, as to insure popularity to their princely authors and unity to heterogeneous Assemblies of provinces, formed by the Congress of Vienna, without any leading principle whatever -- these constitutions, illusory as they were, had yet proved dangerous to the authority of the petty princes themselves during the exciting times of 1830 and 1831. They were all but destroyed; whatever of them was allowed to remain was less than a shadow, and it required the loquacious self-complacency of a Welcker, a Rotteck, a Dahlmann, to imagine that any results could
page 29
possibly flow from the humble opposition, mingled with degrading flattery which they were allowed to show off in the impotent chambers of these petty states.
The more energetic portion of the middle class in these smaller states, very soon after 1840, abandoned all the hopes they had formerly based upon the development of parliamentary government in these dependencies of Austria and Prussia. No sooner had the Prussian bourgeoisie and the classes allied to it shown a serious resolution to struggle for parliamentary government in Prussia, than they were allowed to take the lead of the constitutional movement over all non-Austrian Germany. It is a fact which now will not be any longer contested, that the nucleus of those constitutionalists of Central Germany, who afterwards seceded from the Frankfort National Assembly, and who, from the place of their separate meetings, were called the Gotha party, long before 1848 contemplated a plan which, with little modification, they in 1849 proposed to the representatives of all Germany. They intended a complete exclusion of Austria from the German Confederation, the establishment of a new confederation with a new fundamental law, and with a federal parliament, under the protection of Prussia, and, the incorporation of the more insignificant states into the larger ones. All this was to be carried out the moment Prussia entered into the ranks of constitutional monarchy, established the liberty of the press, assumed a policy independent from that of Russia and Austria, and thus enabled the constitutionalists of the lesser states to obtain a real control over their respective governments. The inventor of this scheme was Professor Gervinus, of Heidelberg (Baden). Thus the emancipation of the Prussian bourgeoisie was to be the signal for that of the middle classes of Germany generally, and for an alliance, offensive
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and defensive, of both against Russia and Austria; for Austria was, as we shall see presently, considered as an entirely barbarian country, of which very little was known, and that little not to the credit of its population; Austria, therefore, was not considered as an essential part of Germany.
As to the other classes of society, in the smaller states they followed, more or less rapidly, in the wake of their equals in Prussia. The shopkeeping class got more and more dissatisfied with their respective governments, with the increase of taxation, with the curtailments of those political sham-privileges of which they used to boast when comparing themselves to the "slaves of despotism" in Austria and Prussia; but as yet they had nothing definite in their opposition which might stamp them as an independent party, distinct from the constitutionalism of the higher bourgeoisie. The dissatisfaction among the peasantry was equally growing, but it is well known that this section of the people, in quiet and peaceful times, will never assert its interests and assume its position as an independent class, except in countries where universal suffrage is established. The working classes in the trades and manufactures of the towns commenced to be infected with the "poison" of socialism and communism, but there being few towns of any importance out of Prussia, and still fewer manufacturing districts, the movement of this class, owing to the want of centres of action and propaganda, was extremely slow in the smaller states.
Both in Prussia and in the smaller states, the difficulty of giving vent to political opposition created a sort of religious opposition in the parallel movements of German Catholicism and Free Congregationalism.[20] History affords us numerous examples where, in countries which enjoy the blessings of a state Church, and where political discussion is fettered, the
page 31
profane and dangerous opposition against the worldly power is hid under the more sanctified and apparently more disinterested struggle against spiritual despotism. Many a government that will not allow of any of its acts being discussed, will hesitate before it creates martyrs and excites the religious fanaticism of the masses. Thus in Germany, in 1845, in every state, either the Roman Catholic or the Protestant religion, or both, were considered part and parcel of the law of the land. In every state, too, the clergy of either of those denominations, or of both, formed an essential part of the bureaucratic establishment of the government. To attack Protestant or Catholic orthodoxy, to attack priestcraft, was, then, to make an underhand attack upon the government itself. As to the German Catholics, their very existence was an attack upon the Catholic governments of Germany, particularly Austria and Bavaria; and as such it was taken by those governments. The Free Congregationalists, Protestant Dissenters, somewhat resembling the English and American Unitarians,[21] openly professed their opposition to the clerical and rigidly orthodox tendcncy of the King of Prussia and his favourite Minister for the Educational and Clerical Department, Mr. Eichhorn. The two new sects, rapidly extending for a moment, the first in Catholic, the second in Protestant countries, had no other distinction but their different origin; as to their tenets, they perfectly agreed upon this most important point -- that all definite dogmas were nugatory. This want of any definition was their very essence; they pretended to build that great temple under the roof of which all Germans might unite; they thus represented, in a religious form, another political idea of the day -- that of German unity; and yet, they could never agree among themselves.
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The idea of German unity, which the above-mentioned sects sought to realize, at least upon religious ground, by inventing a common religion for all Germans, manufactured expressly for their use, habits and taste -- this idea was indeed very widely spread, particularly in the smaller states. Ever since the dissolution of the German Empire by Napoleon,[22] the cry for a union of all the disjecta membra [*] of the German body had been the most general expression of discontent with the established order of things, and most so in the smaller states, where costliness of a court, an administration, an army, in short, the dead weight of taxation, increased in a direct ratio with the smallness and impotency of the state. But what this German unity was to be when carried out was a question upon which parties disagreed. The bourgeoisie, which wanted no serious revolutionary convulsions, were satisfied with what we have seen they considered "practicable," namely, a union of all Germany, exclusive of Austria, under the supremacy of a constitutional government of Prussia; and surely, without conjuring dangerous storms, nothing more could, at that time, be done. The shopkeeping class and the peasantry, as far as these latter troubled themselves about such things, never arrived at any definition of that German unity they so loudly clamoured after; a few dreamers, mostly feudalist reactionists, hoped for the re-establishment of the German Empire; some few ignorant, soi-disant ** radicals, admiring Swiss in stitutions, of which they had not yet made that practical experience which afterwards most ludicrously undeceived them, pronounced for a federated republic; and it was only the most extreme party which, at that time, dared pronounce for a
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German Republic, one and indivisible.[23] Thus, German unity was in itself a question big with disunion, discord, and, in the case of certain eventualities, even civil war.
To resume, then, this was the state of Prussia and the smaller states of Germany, at the end of 1847. The middle class, feeling their power, and resolved not to endure much longer the fetters with which a feudal and bureaucratic despotism enchained their commercial transactions, their industrial productivity, their common action as a class; a portion of the landed nobility so far changed into producers of mere marketable commodities as to have the same interests and to make common cause with the middle class; the smaller trading class, dissatisfied, grumbling at the taxes, at the impediments thrown in the way of their business, but without any definite plan for such reforms as should secure their position in the social and political body; the peasantry, oppressed here by feudal exactions, there by money-lenders, usurers, and lawyers; the working people of the towns infected with the general discontent, equally hating the government and the large industrial capitalists, and catching the contagion of socialist and communist ideas; in short, a heterogeneous mass of opposition, springing from various interests, but more or less led on by the bourgeoisie, in the first ranks of which again marched the bourgeoisie of Prussia, and particularly of the Rhine Province. On the other hand, governments disagrecing upon many points, distrustful of each other, and particularly of that of Prussia, upon which yet they had to rely for protection; in Prussia, a government forsaken by public opinion, forsaken by even a portion of the nobility, leaning upon an army and a jurcaucracy which every day got more infected by the ideas, and subjected to the influence, of the oppositional bourgeoisie -- a government, besides all this, penniless in the most literal
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meaning of the word, and which could not procure a single cent to cover its increasing deficit, but by surrendering at discretion to the opposition of the bourgeoisie. Was there ever a more splendid position for the middle class of any country, while it struggled for power against the established government?
London, September, 1851
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AUSTRIA
We have now to consider Austria, that country which, up to March, 1848, was sealed up to the eyes of foreign nations almost as much as China before the late war with England.[24]
As a matter of course, we can here take into consideration nothing but German Austria. The affairs of the Polish, Hungarian or Italian Austrians do not belong to our subject, and as far as they, since 1848, have influenced the fate of the German Austrians, they will have to be taken into account hereafter.
The government of Prince Metternich turned upon two hinges: firstly, to keep every one of the different nations, subjected to the Austrian rule, in check by all other nations similarly conditioned; secondly, and this always has been the fundamental principle of absolute monarchies, to rely for support upon two classes, the feudal landlords and the large stock-jobbing capitalists; and to balance, at the same time, the influence and power of either of these classes by that of the other, so as to leave full independence of action to the government. The landed nobility, whose entire income con-
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sisted in feudal revenues of all sorts, could not but support a government which proved their only protection against that down-trodden class of serfs upon whose spoils they lived; and whenever the less wealthy portion of them, as in Galicia, in 1846, rose in opposition against the government, Metternich, in an instant, let loose upon them these very serfs, who at any rate profited by the occasion to wreak a terrible vengeance upon their more immediate oppressors.[25] On the other hand, the large capitalists of the Exchange were chained to Metternich's government by the vast share they had in the public funds of the country. Austria, restored to her full power in 1815, restoring and maintaining in Italy absolute monarchy ever since 1820, freed from part of her liabilities by the bankruptcy of 1810, had after the peace very soon re-established her credit in the great European money markets, and in proportion as her credit grew, she had drawn against it. Thus all the large European money-dealers had engaged considerable portions of their capital in the Austrian funds; they all of them were interested in upholding the credit of that country, and as Austrian public credit, in order to be upheld, ever required new loans, they were obliged from time to time to advance new capital in order to keep up the credit of the securities for that which they already had advanced. The long peace after 1815, and the apparent impossibility of a thousand years old empire, like Austria, being upset, increased the credit of Metternich's government in a wonderful ratio, and made it even independent of the goodwill of the Vienna bankers and stock-jobbers; for as long as Metternich could obtain plenty of money at Frankfort and Amsterdam, he had, of course, the satisfaction of seeing the Austrian capitalists at his feet. They were, besides, in every other respect at his mercy; the large profits which
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bankers, stock-jobbers and government contractors always contrive to draw out of an absolute monarchy were compensated for by the almost unlimited power which the government possessed over their persons and fortunes; and not the smallest shadow of an opposition was, therefore, to be expected from this quarter. Thus, Metternich was sure of the support of the two most powerful and influential classes of the Empire, and he possessed, besides, an army and a bureaucracy which, for all purposes of absolutism, could not be better constituted. The civil and military officers in the Austrian service form a race of their own; their fathers have been in the service of the Kaiser, and so will their sons be; they belong to none of the multifarious nationalities congregated under the wing of the double-headed eagle; they are, and ever have been, removed from one end of the Empire to the other, from Poland to Italy, from Germany to Transylvania; Hungarian, Pole, German, Rumanian, Italian, Croat, every individual not stamped with "imperial and royal" authority, etc., bearing a separate national character, is equally despised by them; they have no nationality, or rather, they alone make up the really Austrian nation. It is evident what a pliable and at the same time powerful instrument, in the hands of an intelligent and energetic chief, such a civil and military hierarchy must be.
As to the other classes of the population, Metternich, in the true spirit of a statesman of the ancien régime,* cared little for their support. He had, with regard to them, but one policy: to draw as much as possible out of them in the shape of taxation, and at the same time, to keep them quiet. The trading and manufacturing middle class was but of slow
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growth in Austria. The trade of the Danube was comparatively unimportant; the country possessed but one port, Trieste, and the trade of this port was very limited. As to the manufacturers, they enjoyed considerable protection, amounting even in most cases to the complete exclusion of all foreign competition; but this advantage had been granted to them principally with a view to increase their tax-paying capabilities, and was in a high degree counterpoised by internal restrictions on manufactures, privileges of guilds and other feudal corporations, which were scrupulously upheld as long as they did not impede the purposes and views of the government. The petty tradesmen were encased in the narrow bounds of these medieval guilds, which kept the different trades in a perpetual war of privilege against each other, and at the same time, by all but excluding individuals of the working class from the possibility of raising themselves in the social scale, gave a sort of hereditary stability to the members of those involuntary associations. Lastly, the peasant and the working man were treated as mere taxable matter, and the only care that was taken of them was to keep them as much as possible in the same conditions of life in which they then existed, and in which their fathers had existed before them. For this purpose, every old established hereditary authority was upheld in the same manner as that of the state; the authority of the landlord over the petty tenant-farmer, that of the manufacturer over the operative, of the small master over the journeyman and apprentice, of the father over the son, was everywhere rigidly maintained by the government, and every branch of disobedience punished, the same as a transgression of the law, by that universal instrument of Austrian justice -- the stick.
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Finally, to wind up into one comprehensive system all these attempts at creating an artificial stability, the intellectual food allowed to the nation was selected with the minutest caution, and dealt out as sparingly as possible. Education was everywhere in the hands of the Catholic priesthood, whose chiefs, in the same manner as the large feudal land-owners, were deeply interested in the conservation of the existing system. The universities were organized in a manner which allowed them to produce nothing but special men, that might or might not obtain great proficiency in sundry particular branches of knowledge, but which, at all events, excluded that universal liberal education which other universities are expected to impart. There was absolutely no newspaper press, except in Hungary, and the Hungarian papers were prohibited in all other parts of the monarchy. As to general literature, its range had not widened for a century; it had been narrowed again after the death of Joseph II. And all around the frontier, wherever the Austrian states touched upon a civilized country, a cordon of literary censors was established in connection with the cordon of custom-house officials, preventing any foreign book or newspaper from passing into Austria before its contents had been twice or three times thoroughly sifted, and found pure of even the slightest contamination of the malignant spirit of the age.
For about thirty years after 1815 this system worked with wonderful success. Austria remained almost unknown to Europe, and Europe was quite as little known in Austria. The social state of every class of the population, and of the population as a whole, appeared not to have undergone the slightest change. Whatever rancour there might exist from class to class -- and the existence of this rancour was, for Metternich, a principal condition of government, which he
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even fostered by making the higher classes the instruments of all government exactions, and thus throwing the odium upon them -- whatever hatred the people might bear to the inferior officials of the state, there existed, upon the whole, little or no dissatisfaction with the central government. The Emperor was adored, and old Francis I seemed to be borne out by facts when, doubting of the durability of this system, he complacently added: "And yet it will hold while I live, and Metternich."
But there was a slow underground movement going on which baffled all Metternich's efforts. The wealth and influence of the manufacturing and trading middle class increased. The introduction of machinery and steam-power in manufactures upset in Austria, as it had done everywhere else, the old relations and vital conditions of whole classes of society; it changed serfs into freemen, small farmers into manufacturing operatives; it undermined the old feudal trades-corporations and destroyed the means of existence of many of them. The new commercial and manufacturing population came everywhere into collision with the old feudal institutions. The middle classes, more and more induced by their business to travel abroad, introduced some mythical knowledge of the civilized countries situated beyond the imperial line of customs; the introduction of railways, finally, accelerated both the industrial and intellectual movement. There was, too, a dangerous part in the Austrian state establishment, viz., the Hungarian feudal constitution, with its parliamentary proceedings and its struggles of the impoverished and oppositional mass of the nobility against the government and its allies, the magnates. Pressburg,* the seat
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of the Diet, was at the very gates of Vienna. All the elements contributed to create among the middle classes of the towns a spirit, not exactly of opposition, for opposition was as yet impossible, but of discontent; a general wish for reforms, more of an administrative than of a constitutional nature. And in the same manner as in Prussia, a portion of the bureaucracy joined the bourgeoisie. Among this hereditary caste of officials the traditions of Joseph II were not forgotten; the more educated functionaries of the government, who themselves sometimes meddled with imaginary possible reforms, by far preferred the progressive and intellectual despotism of that Emperor to the "paternal" despotism of Metternich. A portion of the poorer nobility equally sided with the middle class, and as to the lower classes of the population, who always had found plenty of grounds to complain of their superiors, if not of the government, they in most cases could not but adhere to the reformatory wishes of the bourgeoisie.
It was about this time, say 1843 or 1844, that a particular branch of literature, agreeable to this change, was established in Germany. A few Austrian writers, novelists, literary critics, bad poets, the whole of them of very indifferent ability, but gifted with that peculiar industrialism proper to the Jewish race, established themselves in Leipzig and other German towns out of Austria, and there, out of the reach of Metternich, published a number of books and pamphlets on Austrian affairs. They and their publishers made "a roaring trade" of it. All Germany was eager to become initiated into the secrets of the policy of European China; and the Austrians themselves, who obtained these publications by the wholesale smuggling carried on upon the Bohemian frontier, were still more curious. Of course, the secrets let out in these publications were of no great importance, and the reform
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plans schemed out by their well-wishing authors bore the stamp of an innocuousness almost amounting to political virginity. A constitution and a free press for Austria were things considered unattainable; administrative reforms, extension of the rights of the provincial Diets, admission of foreign books and newspapers, and a less severe censorship -- the loyal and humble desires of these good Austrians did hardly go any further.
At all events, the growing impossibility of preventing the literary intercourse of Austria with the rest of Germany, and through Germany with the world, contributed much towards the formation of an anti-governmental public opinion, and brought at least some little political information within the reach of part of the Austrian population. Thus, by the end of 1847, Austria was seized, although in an inferior degree, by that political and politico-religious agitation which then prevailed in all Germany; and if its progress in Austria was more silent, it did nevertheless find revolutionary elements enough to work upon. There was the peasant, serf or feudal tenant, ground down into the dust by lordly or government exactions; then the factory operative, forced, by the stick of the policeman, to work upon any terms the manufacturer chose to grant; then the journeyman, debarred by the corporative laws from any chance of gaining an in dependence in his trade; then the merchant, stumbling, at every step in business, over absurd regulations, then the manufacturer, in uninterrupted conflict with trades-guilds, jealous of their privileges, or with greedy and meddling officials; then the schoolmaster, the savant, the better educated functionary, vainly struggling against an ignorant and presumptuous clergy, or a stupid and dictating superior. In short, there was not a single class satisfied, for the small
page 43
concessions government was obliged now and then to make were made not at its own expense, for the Treasury could not afford that, but at the expense of the high aristocracy and clergy; and, as to the great bankers and fundholders, the late events in Italy, the increasing opposition of the Hungarian Diet, and the unwonted spirit of discontent and cry for reform manifesting themselves all over the Empire, were not of a nature to strengthen their faith in the solidity and solvency of the Austrian Empire.
Thus Austria, too, was marching, slowly but surely, towards a mighty change, when of a sudden an event broke out in France, which at once brought down the impending storm, and gave the lie to old Francis's assertion that the building would hold out both during his and Metternich's lifetime.
London, September, 1851
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THE VIENNA INSURRECTION
On the 24th of February, 1848, Louis Philippe was driven out of Paris and the French Republic was proclaimed. On the 13th of March following, the people of Vienna broke the power of Prince Metternich, and made him flee shamefully out of the country. On the 18th of March the people of Berlin rose in arms, and. after an obstinate struggle of eighteen hours, had the satisfaction of seeing the King surrender himself over to their hands. Simultaneous outbreaks of a more or less violent nature, but all with the same success, occurred in the capitals of the smaller states of Germany. The German people, if they had not accomplished their first revolution, were at least fairly launched into the revolutionary career.
As to the incidents of these various insurrections, we cannot enter here into the details of them: what we have to explain is their character, and the position which the different classes of the population took up with regard to them.
The revolution of Vienna may be said to have been made by an almost unanimous population. The bourgeoisie (with
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the exception of the bankers and stock-jobbers), the petty trading class, the working people, one and all, arose at once against a government detested by all, a government so universally hated, that the small minority of nobles and money-lords which had supported it made itself invisible on the very first attack. The middle classes had been kept in such a degree of political ignorance by Metternich that to them the news from Paris about the reign of anarchy, socialism and terror, and about impending struggles between the class of capitalists and the class of labourers, proved quite unintelligible. They, in their political innocence, either could attach no meaning to these news, or they believed them to be fiendish inventions of Metternich, to frighten them into obedience. They, besides, had never seen working men act as a class, or stand up for their own distinct class interests. They had, from their past experience, no idea of the possibility of any differences springing up between classes that now were so heartily united in upsetting a government hated by all. They saw the working people agree with themselves upon all points: a constitution, trial by jury, liberty of the press, etc. Thus, they were, in March, 1848, at least, heart and soul with the movement, and the movement, on the other hand, at once constituted them (at least in theory) the predominant class of the state.
But it is the fate of all revolutions that this union of different classes, which in some degree is always the necessary condition of any revolution, cannot subsist long. No sooner is the victory gained against the common enemy than the victors become divided among themselves into different camps and turn their weapons against each other. It is this rapid and passionate development of class antagonism which, in old and complicated social organisms, makes a
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revolution such a powerful agent of social and political progress; it is this incessantly quick upshooting of new parties succeeding each other in power which, during those violent commotions, makes a nation pass in five years over more ground than it would have done in a century under ordinary circumstances.
The revolution in Vienna made the middle class the theoretically predominant class; that is to say, the concessions wrung from the government were such as, once carried out practically and adhered to for a time, would inevitably have secured the supremacy of the middle class. But, practically, the supremacy of that class was far from being established. It is true that by the establishment of a National Guard, which gave arms to the bourgeoisie and petty tradesmen, that class obtained both force and importance; it is true that by the installation of a "Committee of Safety," a sort of revolutionary, irresponsible government in which the bourgeoisie predominated, it was placed at the head of power. But at the same time, the working classes were partially armed too; they and the students had borne the brunt of the fight, as far as fight there had been; and the students, about four thousand strong, well-armed and far better disciplined than the National Guard, formed the nucleus, the real strength of the revolutionary force, and were noways willing to act as a mere instrument in the hands of the Committee of Safety. Though they recognized it and were even its most enthusiastic supporters, they yet formed a sort of independent and rather turbulent body, deliberating for themselves in the "Aula," keeping an intermediate position between the bourgeoisie and the working classes, preventing, by constant agitation, things from settling down to the old everyday tranquillity, and very often forcing their resolutions upon the Committee of Safety.
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The working men, on the other hand, almost entirely thrown out of employment, had to be employed in public works at the expense of the state, and the money for this purpose had of course to be taken out of the purse of the tax-payers or out of the chest of the city of Vienna. All this could not but become very unpleasant to the tradesmen of Vienna. The manufactures of the city, calculated for the consumption of the rich and aristocratic courts of a large country, were as a matter of course entirely stopped by the revolution, by the flight of the aristocracy and court; trade was at a standstill, and the continuous agitation and excitement kept up by the students and working people was certainly not the means to "restore confidence," as the phrase went. Thus, a certain coolness very soon sprang up between the middle classes on the one side, and the turbulent students and working people on the other; and if, for a long time, this coolness was not ripened into open hostility, it was because the ministry, and particularly the court, in their impatience to restore the old order of things, constantly justified the suspicions and the turbulent activity of the more revolutionary parties, and con stantly made arise, even before the eyes of the middle classes, the spectre of old Metternichian despotism. Thus on the 15th of May, and again on the 26th, there were fresh risings of all classes in Vienna, on account of the government having tried to attack or to undermine some of the newly conquered liberties, and on each occasion, the alliance between the National Guard or armed middle class, the students and the working men was again cemented for a time.
As to the other classes of the population, the aristocracy and the money-lords had disappeared, and the peasantry were busily engaged everywhere in removing, down to the very last vestiges, feudalism. Thanks to the war in Italy,[26]
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and the occupation which Vienna and Hungary gave to the court, they were left at full liberty, and succeeded in their work of liberation, in Austria, better than in any other part of Germany. The Austrian Diet very shortly after had only to confirm the steps already practically taken by the peasantry, and whatever else the government of Prince Schwarzenberg may be enabled to restore, it will never have the power of re-establishing the feudal servitude of the peasantry. And if Austria at the present moment is again comparatively tranquil, and even strong, it is principally because the great majority of the people, the peasants, have been real gainers by the revolution, and because whatever else has been attacked by the restored government, these palpable, substantial advantages, conquered by the peasantry, are as yet untouched.
London, October, 1851
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THE BERLIN INSURRECTION
The second centre of revolutionary action was Berlin. And from what has been stated in the foregoing papers, it may be guessed that there this action was far from having that unanimous support of almost all classes by which it was accompanied in Vienna. In Prussia the bourgeoisie had been already involved in actual struggles with the government; a rupture had been the result of the "United Diet"; a bourgeois revolution was impending, and that revolution might have been, in its first outbreak, quite as unanimous as that of Vienna, had it not been for the Paris revolution of February. That event precipitated everything, while, at the same time, it was carried out under a banner totally different from that under which the Prussian bourgeoisie was preparing to defy its government. The revolution of February upset, in France, the very same sort of government which the Prussian bourgeoisie were going to set up in their own country. The revolution of February announced itself as a revolution of the working classes against the midd!e classes; it proclaimed the downfall of middle-class government and the emancipation of
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the working man. Now the Prussian bourgeoisie had of late had quite enough of working-class agitation in their own country. After the first terror of the Silesian riots had passed away, they had even tried to give this agitation a turn in their own favour; but they always had retained a salutary horror of revolutionary socialism and communism; and, therefore, when they saw men at the head of the government in Paris whom they considered as the most dangerous enemies of property, order, religion, family, and of the other penates of the modern bourgeois, they at once experienced a considerable cooling down of their own revolutionary ardour. They knew that the moment must be seized, and that without the aid of the working masses they would be defeated; and yet their courage failed them. Thus they sided with the government in the first partial and provincial outbreaks, tried to keep the people quiet in Berlin, who during five days met in crowds before the royal palace to discuss the news and ask for changes in the government; and when at last, after the news of the downfall of Metternich, the King made some slight concessions, the bourgeoisie considered the revolution as completed, and went to thank His Majesty for having fulfilled all the wishes of his people. But then followed the attack of the military on the crowd, the barricades, the struggle, and the defeat of royalty. Then everything was changed; the very working classes, which it had been the tendency of the bourgeoisie to keep in the background, had been pushed forward, had fought and conquered, and all at once were conscious of their strength. Restrictions of suffrage, of the liberty of the press, of the right to sit on juries, of the right of meeting -- restrictions that would have been very agreeable to the bourgeoisie because they would have touched upon such classes only as were beneath it -- now were no longer possible. The
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danger of a repetition of the Parisian scenes of "anarchy" was imminent. Before this danger all former differences disappeared. Against the victorious working man, although he had not yet uttered any specific demands for himself, the friends and the foes of many years united, and the alliance between the bourgeoisie and the supporters of the overturned system was concluded upon the very barricades of Berlin. The necessary concessions, but no more than was unavoidable, were to be made; a ministry of the opposition leaders of the United Diet was to be formed, and in return for its services in saving the crown, it was to have the support of all the props of the old government, the feudal aristocracy, the bureaucracy, the army. These were the conditions upon which Messrs. Camphausen and Hansemann undertook the formation of a cabinet.
Such was the dread evinced, by the new ministers, of the aroused masses, that in their eyes every means was good if it only tended to strengthen the shaken foundations of authority. They, poor deluded wretches, thought every danger of a restoration of the old system had passed away; and thus they made use of the whole of the old state machinery for the purpose of restoring "order." Not a single bureaucrat or military officer was dismissed; not the slightest change was made in the old bureaucratic system of administration. These precious constitutional and responsible ministers even restored to their posts those functionaries whom the people, in the first heat of revolutionary ardour, had driven away on account of their former acts of bureaucratic overbearing. There was nothing altered in Prussia but the persons of the ministers; even the ministerial staffs in the different departments were not touched upon, and all the constitutional place hunters, who had formed the chorus of the newly-elevated
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rulers, and who had expected their share of power and office, were told to wait until restored stability allowed changes to be operated in the bureaucratic personnel which now were not without danger.
The King, chap-fallen in the highest degree after the insurrection of the 18th of March, very soon found out that he was quite as necessary to these "liberal" ministers as they were to him. The throne had been spared by the insurrection; the throne was the last existing obstacle to "anarchy"; the liberal middle class and its leaders, now in the ministry, had therefore every interest to keep on excellent terms with the crown. The King, and the reactionary camarilla that surrounded him, were not slow in discovering this, and profited by the circumstance in order to fetter the march of the ministry even in those petty reforms that were from time to time intended.
The first care of the ministry was to give a sort of legal appearance to the recent violent changes. The United Diet was convoked, in spite of all popular opposition, in order to vote as the legal and constitutional organ of the people a new electoral law for the election of an assembly, which was to agree with the crown upon a new constitution. The elections were to be indirect, the mass of voters electing a number of electors, who then were to choose the representative. In spite of all opposition, this system of double elections passed. The United Diet was then asked for a loan of twenty-five millions of dollars, opposed by the popular party, but equally agreed to.
These acts of the ministry gave a most rapid development to the popular, or as it now called itself, the democratic party. This party, headed by the petty trading and shopkeeping class, and uniting under its banner, in the beginning of the
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revolution, the large majority of the working people, demanded direct and universal suffrage, the same as established in France, a single legislative assembly, and full and open recognition of the revolution of the 18th of March, as the base of the new governmental system. The more moderate faction would be satisfied with a thus "democratized" monarchy, the more advanced demanded the ultimate establishment of the republic. Both factions agreed in recognizing the German National Assembly at Frankfort as the supreme authority of the country, while the constitutionalists and reactionists affected a great horror of the sovereignty of this body, which they professed to consider as utterly revolutionary.
The independent movement of the working classes had, by the revolution, been broken up for a time. The immediate wants and circumstances of the movement were such as not to allow any of the specific demands of the proletarian party to be put in the foreground. In fact, as long as the ground was not cleared for the independent action of the working men, as long as direct and universal suffrage was not yet established, as long as the thirty-six larger and smaller states continued to cut up Germany into numberless morsels, what else could the proletarian party do but watch the -- for them all-important -- movement of Paris, and struggle in common with the petty shopkeepers for the attainment of those rights which would allow them to fight, afterwards, their own battle?
There were only three points, then, by which the proletarian party in its political action essentially distinguished itself from the petty trading class, or properly so-called democratic party: firstly, in judging differently the French movement, with regard to which the democrats attacked, and the proletarian revolutionists defended, the extreme party in Paris;
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secondly, in proclaiming the necessity of establishing a German republic, one and indivisible, while the very extremest ultras among the democrats only dared to sigh for a federative republic; and thirdly, in showing upon every occasion that revolutionary boldness and readiness for action, in which any party, headed by and composed principally of petty tradesmen, will always be deficient.
The proletarian, or really revolutionary party succeeded only very gradually in withdrawing the mass of the working people from the influence of the democrats, whose tail they formed in the beginning of the revolution. But in due time the indecision, weakness and cowardice of the democratic leaders did the rest, and it may now be said to be one of the principal results of the last years' convulsions that wherever the working class is concentrated in anything like considerable masses, they are entirely freed from that democratic influence which led them into an endless series of blunders and misfortunes during 1848 and 1849. But we had better not anticipate; the events of these two years will give us plenty of opportunities to show the democratic gentlemen at work.
The peasantry in Prussia, the same as in Austria, but with less energy, feudalism pressing, upon the whole, not quite so hard upon them here, had profited by the revolution to free themselves at once from all feudal shackles. But here, from the reasons stated before, the middle classes at once turned against them, their oldest, their most indispensable allies; the democrats, equally frightened with the bourgeoisie by what was called attacks upon private property, failed equally to support them; and thus, after three months' emancipation, after bloody struggles and military executions, particularly in Silesia, feudalism was restored by the hands of the, until yesterday, anti-feudal bourgeoisie. There is not a more damning
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fact to be brought against them than this. Similar treason against its best allies, against itself, never was committed by any party in history, and whatever humiliation and chastisement may be in store for this middle-class party, it has deserved by this one act every morsel of it.
London, October, 1851
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THE FRANKFORT NATIONAL ASSEMBLY
It will perhaps be in the recollection of our readers that in the six preceding papers we followed up the revolutionary movement of Germany to the two great popular victories of March 13th in Vienna, and March 18th in Berlin. We saw, both in Austria and Prussia, the establishment of constitution al governments and the proclamation, as leading rules for all future policy, of liberal or middle-class principles; and the only difference observable between the two great centres of action was this, that in Prussia the liberal bourgeoisie, in the persons of two wealthy merchants, Messrs. Camphausen and Hansemann, directly seized upon the reins of power; while in Austria, where the bourgeoisie was, politically, far less educated, the liberal bureaucracy walked into office and professed to hold power in trust for them. We have further seen, how the parties and classes of society, that were heretofore all united in their opposition to the old government, got divided among themselves after the victory or even during the struggle; and how that same liberal bourgeoisie that alone profited from the victory turned round immediately upon its
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allies of yesterday, assumed a hostile attitude against every class or party of a more advanced character, and concluded an alliance with the conquered feudal and bureaucratic interests. It was in fact evident, even from the beginning of the revolutionary drama, that the liberal bourgeoisie could not hold its ground against the vanquished, but not destroyed, feudal and bureaucratic parties except by relying upon the assistance of the popular and more advanced parties; and that it equally required, against the torrent of these more advanced masses, the assistance of the feudal nobility and of the bureaucracy. Thus, it was clear enough that the bourgeoisie in Austria and Prussia did not possess sufficient strength to maintain their power and to adapt the institutions of the country to their own wants and ideas. The liberal bourgeois ministry was only a halting place from which, according to the turn circumstances might take, the country would either have to go on to the more advanced stage of unitarian republicanism, or to relapse into the old clerico-feudal and bureaucratic regime. At all events, the real, decisive struggle was yet to come; the events of March had only engaged the combat.
Austria and Prussia being the two ruling states of Germany, every decisive revolutionary victory in Vienna or Berlin would have been decisive for all Germany. And as far as they went, the events of March, 1848, in these two cities, decided the turn of German affairs. It would, then, be superfluous to recur to the movements that occurred in the minor states; and we might, indeed, confine ourselves to the consideration of Austrian and Prussian affairs exclusively, if the existence of these minor states had not given rise to a body which was, by its very existence, a most striking proof of the abnormal situation of Germany and of the incomplete-
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ness of the late revolution; a body so abnormal, so ludicrous by its very position, and yet so full of its own importance, that history will, most likely, never afford a pendant to it. This body was the so-called German National Assembly at Frankfort on the Main.
After the popular victories of Vienna and Berlin, it was a matter of course that there should be a Representative Assembly for all-Germany. This body was consequently elected, and met at Frankfort, by the side of the old Federative Diet. The German National Assembly was expected, by the people, to settle every matter in dispute, and to act as the highest legislative authority for the whole of the German Confederation. But, at the same time, the Diet which had convoked it had in no way fixed its attributions. No one knew whether its decrees were to have force of law, or whether they were to be subject to the sanction of the Diet or of the individual governments. In this perplexity, if the Assembly had been possessed of the least energy, it would have immediately dissolved and sent home the Diet -- than which no corporate body was more unpopular in Germany -- and replaced it by a federal government chosen from among its own members. It would have declared itself the only legal expression of the sovereign will of the German people, and thus have attached legal validity to every one of its decrees. It would, above all, have secured to itself an organized and armed force in the country sufficient to put down any opposition on the part of the governments. And all this was easy, very easy, at that early period of the revolution. But that would have been expecting a great deal too much from an assembly composed in its majority of liberal attorneys and doctrinaire professors, an assembly which, while it pretended to embody the very essence of German intellect and science,
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was in reality nothing but a stage where old and worn-out political characters exhibited their involuntary ludicrousness and their impotence of thought, as well as action, before the eyes of all Germany. This Assembly of old women was, from the first day of its existence, more frightened of the least popular movement than of all the reactionary plots of all the German governments put together. It deliberated under the eyes of the Diet, nay, it almost craved the Diet's sanction to its decrees, for its first resolutions had to be promulgated by that odious body. Instead of asserting its own sovereignty, it studiously avoided the discussion of any such dangerous questions. Instead of surrounding itself by a popular force, it passed to the order of the day over all the violent encroachments of the governments; Mayence, under its very eyes, was placed in a state of siege and the people there disarmed, and the National Assembly did not stir. Later on it elected Archduke John of Austria Regent of Germany, and declared that all its resolutions were to have the force of law; but then, Archduke John was only instituted in his new dignity after the consent of all the governments had been obtained, and he was instituted not by the Assembly, but by the Diet; and as to the legal force of the decrees of the Assembly, that point was never recognized by the larger governments, nor enforced by the Assembly itself; it therefore remained in suspense. Thus we had the strange spectacle of an assembly pretending to be the only legal representative of a great and sovereign nation, and yet never possessing either the will or the force to make its claims recognized. The debates of this body, without any practical result, were not even of any theoretical value, reproducing, as they did, nothing but the most hackneyed commonplace themes of superannuated philosophical and juridical schools; every sentence that was said, or
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rather stammered forth, in that Assembly having been printed a thousand times over and a thousand times better long before.
Thus, the pretended new central authority of Germany left everything as it had found it. So far from realizing the long-demanded unity of Germany, it did not dispossess the most insignificant of the princes who ruled her; it did not draw closer the bonds of union between her separated provinces; it never moved a single step to break down the custom-house barriers that separated Hanover from Prussia, and Prussia from Austria, it did not even make the slightest attempt to remove the obnoxious dues that everywhere obstruct river navigation in Prussia. But the less this Assembly did, the more it blustered. It created a German fleet -- upon paper; it annexed Poland and Schleswig; it allowed German Austria to carry on war against Italy, and yet prohibited the Italians from following up the Austrians into their safe retreat in Germany; it gave three cheers and one cheer more for the French Republic and it received Hungarian embassies, which certainly went home with far more confused ideas about Germany than what they had come with.
This Assembly had been, in the beginning of the revolution, the bugbear of all German governments. They had counted upon a very dictatorial and revolutionary action on its part -- on account of the very want of definiteness in which it had been found necessary to leave its competency. These governments, therefore, got up a most comprehensive system of intrigues in order to weaken the influence of this dreaded body; but they proved to have more luck than wits, for this Assembly did the work of the governments better than they themselves could have done. The chief feature among these intrigues was the convocation of local legislative
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assemblies, and in consequence, not only the lesser states convoked their legislatures, but Prussia and Austria also called constituent assemblies. In these, as in the Frankfort House of Representatives, the liberal middle class, or its allies, liberal lawyers and bureaucrats, had the majority, and the turn affairs took in each of them was nearly the same. The only difference is this, that the German National Assembly was the parliament of an imaginary country, as it had declined the task of forming what nevertheless was its own first condition of existence, viz., a united Germany; that it discussed the imaginary and never-to-be-carried-out measures of an imaginary government of its own creation, and that it passed imaginary resolutions for which nobody cared; while in Austria and Prussia the constituent bodies were at least real parliaments, upsetting and creating real ministries, and forcing, for a time at least, their resolutions upon the princes with whom they had to contend. They, too, were cowardly, and lacked enlarged views of revolutionary resolution; they, too, betrayed the people, and restored power to the hands of feudal, bureaucratic and military despotism. But then, they were at least obliged to discuss practical questions of immediate interest, and to live upon earth with other people, while the Frankfort humbugs were never happier than when they could roam in "the airy realms of dream," im Luftreich des Traums.[27] Thus the proceedings of the Berlin and Vienna constituents form an important part of German revolutionary history, while the lucubrations of the Frankfort collective tomfoolery merely interest the collector of literary and antiquarian curiosities.
The people of Germany, deeply feeling the necessity of doing away with the obnoxious territorial division that scattered and annihilated the collective force of the nation.
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for some time expected to find, in the Frankfort National Assembly at least, the beginning of a new era. But the childish conduct of that set of wiseacres soon disenchanted the national enthusiasm. The disgraceful proceedings occasioned by the armistice of Malmoe (September, 1848)[28] made the popular indignation burst out against a body which, it had been hoped, would give the nation a fair field for action, and which, instead, carried away by unequalled cowardice, only restored to their former solidity the foundations upon which the present counter-revolutionary system is built.
London, January, 1852
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POLES, CZECHS AND GERMANS
From what has been stated in the foregoing articles, it is already evident that unless a fresh revolution was to follow that of March, 1848, things would inevitably return, in Germany, to what they were before this event. But such is the complicated nature of the historical theme upon which we are trying to throw some light, that subsequent events cannot be clearly understood without taking into account what may be called the foreign relations of the German revolution. And these foreign relations were of the same intricate nature as the home affairs.
The whole of the eastern half of Germany, as far as the Elbe, Saale and Bohemian Forest, has, it is well known, been reconquered during the last thousand years, from invaders of Slavonic origin. The greater part of these territories has been Germanized, to the perfect extinction of all Slavonic nationality and language, for several centuries past; and if we except a few totally isolated remnants, amounting in the aggregate to less than a hundred thousand souls (Kassubians in Pomerania, Wends or Sorbians in Lusatia), their inhabitants
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are, to all intents and purposes, Germans. But the case is different along the whole of the frontier of ancient Poland, and in the countries of the Czechish tongue, in Bohemia and Moravia. Here the two nationalities are mixed up in every district, the towns being generally more or less German, while the Slavonic element prevails in the rural villages, where, however, it is also gradually disintegrated and forced back by the steady advance of German influence.
The reason of this state of things is this: ever since the time of Charlemagne the Germans have directed their most constant and persevering efforts to the conquest, colonization, or, at least, civilization of the east of Europe. The conquests of the feudal nobility between the Elbe and the Oder, and the feudal colonies of the military orders of knights in Prussia and Livonia only laid the ground for a far more extensive and effective system of Germanization by the trading and manufacturing middle classes, which in Germany, as in the rest of Western Europe, rose into social and political importance since the fifteenth century. The Slavonians, and particularly the Western Slavonians (Poles and Czechs), are essentially an agricultural race; trade and manufactures never were in great favour with them. The consequence was that, with the increase of population and the origin of cities in these regions, the production of all articles of manufacture fell into the hands of German immigrants, and the exchange of these commodities against agricultural produce became the exclusive monopoly of the Jews, who, if they belong to any nationality, are in these countries certainly rather Germans than Slavonians. This has been, though in a less degree, the case in all the east of Europe. The handicraftsman, the small shopkeeper, the petty manufacturer, is a German up to this day in Petersburg, Pest, Jassy, and even Constantinople;
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while the money-lender, the publican, the hawker -- a very important man in these thinly populated countries -- is very generally a Jew, whose native tongue is a horribly corrupted German. The importance of the German element in the Slavonic frontier localities, thus rising with the growth of towns, trade and manufactures, was still increased when it was found necessary to import almost every element of mental culture from Germany; after the German merchant and handicraftsman, the German clergyman, the German school-master, the German savant came to establish himself upon Slavonic soil. And lastly, the iron thread of conquering armies, or the cautious, well-premeditated grasp of diplomacy, not only followed, but many times went ahead of the slow but sure advance of denationalization by social developments. Thus, great parts of western Prussia and Posen have been Germanized since the first partition of Poland, by sales and grants of public domains to German colonists, by encouragements given to German capitalists for the establishment of manufactories, etc., in those neighbourhoods, and very often too, by excessively despotic measures against the Polish inhabitants of the country.
In this manner the last seventy years had entirely changed the line of demarcation between the German and Polish nationalities. The Revolution of 1848 calling forth at once the claim of all oppressed nations to an independent existence, and to the right of settling their own affairs for themselves, it was quite natural that the Poles should at once demand the restoration of their country within the frontiers of the old Polish Republic before 1772. It is true, this frontier, even at that time, had become obsolete, if taken as the delimitation of German and Polish nationality; it had become more so every year since by the progress of Germanization; but then,
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the Germans had proclaimed such an enthusiasm for the restoration of Poland that they must expect to be asked, as a first proof of the reality of their sympathies, to give up their share of the plunder. On the other hand, should whole tracts of land, inhabited chiefly by Germans, should large towns, entirely German, be given up to a people that as yet had never given any proofs of its capability of progressing beyond a state of feudalism based upon agricultural serfdom? The question was intricate enough. The only possible solution was in a war with Russia. The question of delimitation between the different revolutionized nations would have been made a secondary one to that of first establishing a safe frontier against the common enemy. The Poles, by receiving extended territories in the east, would have become more tractable and reasonable in the west; and Riga and Mitau[*] would have been deemed, after all, quite as important to them as Danzig and Elbing.** Thus the advanced party in Germany, deeming a war with Russia necessary to keep up the Continental movement, and considering that the national re-establishment even of a part of Poland would inevitably lead to such a war, supported the Poles; while the reigning liberal middle-class party clearly foresaw its downfall from any national war against Russia, which would have called more active and energetic men to the helm, and, therefore, with a feigned enthusiasm for the extension of German nationality, they declared Prussian Poland, the chief seat of Polish revolutionary agitation, to be part and parcel of the German Empire that was to be. The promises given to the Poles in the first days of excitement were shamefully broken. Polish armaments,
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got up with the sanction of the government, were dispersed and massacred by Prussian artillery; and as soon as the month of April, 1848, within six weeks of the Berlin revolution, the Polish movement was crushed, and the old national hostility revived between Poles and Germans. This immense and incalculable service to the Russian autocrat was performed by the liberal merchant-ministers, Camphausen and Hansemann. It must be added that this Polish campaign was the first means of reorganizing and reassuring that same Prussian army, which afterwards turned out the liberal party and crushed the movement which Messrs. Camphausen and Hansemann had taken such pains to bring about. "Whereby they sinned, thereby are they punished." Such has been the fate of all the upstarts of 1848 and 1849, from Ledru-Rollin to Changarnier, and from Camphausen down to Haynau.
The question of nationality gave rise to another struggle in Bohemia. This country, inhabited by two millions of Germans, and three millions of Slavonians of the Czechish tongue, had great historical recollections, almost all connected with the former supremacy of the Czechs. But then the force of this branch of the Slavonic family had been broken ever since the wars of the Hussites in the fifteenth century;[29] the provinces speaking the Czechish language were divided, one part forming the kingdom of Bohemia, another the principality of Moravia, a third the Carpathian hill-country of the Slovaks, being part of Hungary. The Moravians and Slovaks had long since lost every vestige of national feeling and vitality, although mostly preserving their languages. Bohemia was surrounded by thoroughly German countries on three sides out of four. The German element had made great progress on her own territory; even in the capital, in Prague, the two nationalities were pretty equally matched; and everywhere
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capital, trade, industry and mental culture were in the hands of the Germans. The chief champion of the Czechish nationality, Professor Palacky, is himself nothing but a learned German run mad, who even now cannot speak the Czechish language correctly and without foreign accent. But as it often happens, dying Czechish nationality -- dying according to every fact known in history for the last four hundred years -- made in 1848 a last effort to regain its former vitality, an effort whose failure, independently of all revolutionary considerations, was to prove that Bohemia could only exist, henceforth, as a portion of Germany, although part of her inhabitants might yet, for some centuries, continue to speak a non-German language.
London, February, 1852
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PAN-SLAVISM -- THE SCHLESWIG-
Bohemia and Croatia (another disjected member of the Slavonic family, acted upon by the Hungarian, as Bohemia by the German) were the homes of what is called on the European Continent "Pan-Slavism." Neither Bohemia nor Croatia was strong enough to exist as a nation by herself. Their respective nationalities, gradually undermined by the action of historical causes that inevitably absorbs them into a more energetic stock, could only hope to be restored to anything like independence by an alliance with other Slavonic nations. There were twenty-two millions of Poles, forty-five millions of Russians, eight millions of Serbians and Bulgarians -- why not form a mighty confederation of the whole eighty millions of Slavonians, and drive back or exterminate the intruder upon the holy Slavonic soil, the Turk, the Hungarian, and above all, the hated, but indispensable Niemetz, the German? Thus, in the studies of a few Slavonian dilettanti of historical science was this ludicrous, this anti-historical movement got
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up, a movement which intended nothing less than to subjugate the civilized West under the barbarian East, the town under the country, trade, manufactures, intelligence, under the primitive agriculture of Slavonian serfs. But behind this ludicrous theory stood the terrible reality of the Russian Empire, that empire which by every movement proclaims the pretension of considering all Europe as the domain of the Slavonic race, and especially of the only energetic part of this race, of the Russians; that empire which, with two capitals such as St. Petersburg and Moscow, has not yet found its centre of gravity, as long as the "City of the Czar" (Constantinople, called in Russian Tzarigrad, the Czar's city), considered by every Russian peasant as the true metropolis of his religion and his nation, is not actually the residence of its Emperor; that empire which, for the last one hundred and fifty years, has never lost, but always gained territory by every war it has commenced. And well known in Central Europe are the intrigues by which Russian policy supported the new-fangled system of Pan-Slavism, a system than which none better could be invented to suit its purposes. Thus, the Bohemian and Croatian Pan-Slavists, some intentionally, some without knowing it, worked in the direct interest of Russia; they betrayed the revolutionary cause for the shadow of a nationality which, in the best of cases, would have shared the fate of the Polish nationality under Russian sway. It must, however, be said for the honour of the Poles, that they never got to be seriously entangled in these Pan-Slavist traps; and if a few of the aristocracy turned furious Pan-Slavists, they knew that by Russian subjugation they had less to lose than by a revolt of their own peasant serfs.
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The Bohemians and Croatians called, then, a general Slavonic Congress at Prague,[30] for the preparation of the universal Slavonian alliance. This Congress would have proved a decided failure even without the interference of the Austrian military. The several Slavonic languages differ quite as much as the English, the German and the Swedish, and when the proceedings opened, there was no common Slavonic tongue by which the speakers could make themselves understood. French was tried, but was equally unintelligible to the majority, and the poor Slavonic enthusiasts, whose only common feeling was a common hatred against the Germans, were at last obliged to express themselves in the hated German language, as the only one that was generally understood! But just then, another Slavonic Congress was assembling in Prague, in the shape of Galician lancers, Croatian and Slovak grenadiers, and Bohemian gunners and cuirassiers; and this real, armed Slavonic Congress, under the command of Windischgratz, in less than twenty-four hours drove the founders of an imaginary Slavonian supremacy out of the town and dispersed them to the winds.
The Bohemian, Moravian, Dalmatian, and part of the Polish deputies (the aristocracy) to the Austrian Constituent Diet, made in that Assembly a systematic war upon the German element. The Germans and part of the Poles (the impoverished nobility) were in this Assembly the chief supporters of revolutionary progress; the mass of the Slavonic deputies, in opposing them, were not satished with thus showing clearly the reactionary tendencies of their entire movement, but they were degraded enough to tamper and conspire with the very same Austrian Government which had dispersed their meeting at Prague. They, too, were paid for this infamous conduct; after supporting the government during the insurrec-
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tion of October, 1848, an event which finally secured to them the majority in the Diet, this now almost exclusively Slavonic Diet was dispersed by Austrian soldiers, the same as the Prague Congress, and the Pan-Slavists threatened with imprisonment if they should stir again. And they have only obtained this, that Slavonic nationality is now being everywhere undermined by Austrian centralization, a result for which they may thank their own fanaticism and blindness.
If the frontiers of Hungary and Germany had admitted of any doubt, there would certainly have been another quarrel there. But, fortunately, there was no pretext, and the interests of both nations being intimately related, they struggled against the same enemies, viz., the Austrian Government and the Pan-Slavistic fanaticism. The good understanding was not for a moment disturbed. But the Italian Revolution entangled a part at least of Germany in an internecine war; and it must be stated here, as a proof how far the Metternichian system had succeeded in keeping back the development of the public mind, that during the first six months of 1848 the same men that had in Vienna mounted the barricades went, full of enthusiasm, to join the army that fought against the Italian patriots. This deplorable confusion of ideas did not, however, last long.
Lastly, there was the war with Denmark about Schleswig and Holstein. These countries, unquestionably German by nationality, language and predilection, are also, from military, naval and commercial grounds, necessary to Germany. Their inhabitants have, for the last three years, struggled hard against Danish intrusion. The right of treaties, besides, was for them. The revolution of March brought them into open collision with the Danes, and Germany supported them. But while in Poland, in Italy, in Bohemia, and later on, in
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Hungary, military operations were pushed with the utmost vigour, in this, the only popular, the only, at least partially, revolutionary war, a system of resultless marches and counter-marches was adopted, and an interference of foreign diplomacy was submitted to, which led, after many an heroic engagement, to a most miserable end. The Ge
AND COUNTER-REVOLUTION
IN GERMANY[1]
and September 1852
Published in the New York
Daily Tribune on October 25
and 28, November 6, 7, 12 and
28, 1851; February 27, March 5,
15, 18 and 19, April 9, 17 and
24, July 27, August 19, Sep-
tember 18, and October 2 and
23, 1852
English
Printed according to
the newspaper text
OF THE REVOLUTION
* Members of the French Provisional Government. --Ed.
* Big and middle peasants. --Ed.
* Frederick William III. --Ed.
** "Louis the Longed-for." --Ed.
* Scattered members. --Ed.
** So-called. --Ed.
* Old regime --Ed.
* Slovak name: Bratislava. --Ed.
* Lettish name: Jelgava. --Ed.
** Polish name: Gdansk and Elblag. --Ed.
HOLSTEIN WAR