In an era that has become inured to the authenticity-effect of documentary, it is hard to recapture the fascination of Grunholzer’s bald descriptions of life in the most desolate corners of the capital. He spent four weeks combing through a few selected tenements and interviewing their occupants. He recorded his impressions in a spare prose that was paced out in short, informal sentences, and integrated the brutal statistics that governed the lives of the poorest families in the city. Passages of dialogue were woven into the narrative and the frequent use of the present tense suggested notes scribbled in situ.
In basement room no. 3, I found a woodchopper with a diseased leg. When I entered, the wife grabbed the potato peelings from the table and a sixteen-year-old daughter withdrew embarrassed into a corner of the room while her father began to tell me his tale. He had been rendered unemployable while helping to construct the new School of Engineering. His request for assistance was long ignored. Only when he was economically completely ruined was he granted a monthly allowance of 15 silver groschen [half a thaler]. He had to move back into the family apartment, because he could no longer afford an apartment in the city. Now he receives two thalers monthly from the Poor Office. In times when the incurable disease of his leg permits, he can earn one thaler a month; his wife earns twice that amount, his daughter can bring in an additional one-and-a-half thalers. But their accommodation costs two thalers a month, a ‘meal of potatoes’ one silver groschen and nine pennies; at two such meals a day, this comes to three-and-a-half thalers per month for the staple nourishment. One thaler thus remains for the purchase of wood and for all that a family needs, aside from raw potatoes, in order to survive.45
Another work in the same vein was Friedrich Wilhelm Wolff’s widely read article on the ‘vaults of Breslau’, a shanty-town area of former barracks and military stores on the outskirts of the Silesian capital, which appeared in the Breslauer Zeitung in November 1843. Wolff, the son of a poor Silesian farmer who became a renowned radical journalist, claimed to describe a world that was both close and remote, a world that lay, as he put it, like an ‘open book’ before the walls of the city but was invisible to most of its better-off inhabitants. There was doubtless an element of voyeuristic pleasure in the consumption of such texts by bourgeois readers – an important influence on the burgeoning literature of social thick description was Eugène Sue’s remarkable blockbusting ten-volume novel of the Parisian underworld, Les Mystères de Paris, which appeared in instalments during 1842–3 and was widely imitated across Europe. If readers were prepared to lose themselves in Sue’s colourful demimonde, Wolff declared, then they should take all the more interest in the real ‘mystères de Breslau’ before their own doorstep.46 In almost identical language August Brass, author of Mysteries of Berlin (1844), insisted that anyone could observe the misery of the underworld in the capital if they merely ‘took the trouble to cast off the convenient veil of selfish comforts’ and cast their gaze outside their ‘usual circles’.47
By the early months of 1844, all eyes were fixed on the mountainous textile districts of Silesia, where years of falling prices and slackening demand had driven entire communities of weavers into grinding poverty. There were collections for the Silesians in the textile towns of the Rhineland. During March, the poet and radical literary scholar Karl Grün toured from town to town holding popular lectures on Shakespeare, the proceeds from which were sent via the provincial government to help the weavers of the Liegnitz district. In the same month, the Association for the Alleviation of Need among the Weavers and Spinners of Silesia was founded in Breslau. During May, on the eve of the uprising, Alexander Schneer, an official in the provincial administration and a member of the Breslau association, walked from house to house in some of the most affected areas, meticulously documenting the circumstances of weaver families in the manner pioneered by Grunholzer.48 In this sensitized environment, it is hardly surprising that contemporaries viewed the uprising of June 1844 not as an inadmissible tumult, but as the inevitable expression of an underlying social malaise.
The apparent correlation between rising population and mass poverty may lead us to suspect that the social crisis of this era was the result of a ‘Malthusian trap’, in which the needs of the population exceeded the available supply of food.49 This view is misleading, at least for Prussia. During the post-war decades, technical improvements (artificial fertilizers, modernized animal husbandry and the three-field rotation system) and an increase in land under cultivation doubled the productivity of agriculture. As a result, the food supply increased at about twice the rate of population growth. The problem was not, therefore, chronic underproduction. Large agricultural surpluses could also have a harmful effect on manufacturing, however, since they depressed the prices of agricultural produce. The resulting collapse in agrarian incomes entailed a corresponding decline in the demand for goods from the overcrowded manufacturing sector.
More importantly, food supplies remained vulnerable despite the impressive growth in total agricultural production, because natural catastrophes – poor harvests, cattle epidemics, crop diseases – could still turn the surplus into a drastic shortfall. The crisis that unfolded from the winter of 1846, when harvest failures sent food prices up to double and even triple the normal average, was a case in point. The crisis of 1846–7 was compounded by a downturn in the business cycle and a crop disease that wiped out the potato harvests upon which the poor in many areas had become dependent (Grunholzer, for example, had found in 1842 that potatoes were the main – and indeed virtually the only – food – stuff consumed by the poorest families he visited in the Vogtland in Berlin).
The pressure exerted by subsistence crises produced waves of unrest. In Prussia, 158 food riots – including marketplace disturbances, attacks on stores and shops, and transportation blockades – took place during April–May 1847 alone, when food prices were at their highest. On 21–22 April, the population of Berlin stormed and plundered market stalls and shops and attacked potato merchants.50 Interestingly enough, the geography of food riots did not coincide with that of the most acute shortage. Tumults were more likely to occur in areas that produced food for export, or in transit areas with high levels of food transportation. The Prussian territories bordering on the Kingdom of Saxony were thus particularly riot-prone, because the demand generated by the relatively industrialized Saxon economy ensured that grain exports passed through these areas.
Far from being politically subversive, such protests were generally pragmatic attempts to control the food supply, or to remind the authorities of their traditional obligation to provide for afflicted subjects, along the lines of the ‘moral economy’ famously theorized by E. P. Thompson in his study of the eighteenth-century English crowd.51 Rioters did not act as members of a class, but as representatives of a local community whose right to justice had been denied. The human targets of their wrath were likely to be outsiders: merchants who dealt with distant markets, customs officials, foreigners or Jews. There was thus no automatic or necessary link between subsistence rioting in 1846–7 and revolutionary activism in 1848. Many of the most riotous areas of 1846–7 remained quiescent during the revolutions and the most politically active group in Silesia during the revolutions of 1848 was not the Silesian weavers who had risen in 1844, but the better off among the peasants. Of the peasants, it was the most upwardly mobile who became active, forming associations and cooperating with the urban middle-class democratic intelligentsia.
Even if they were often spontaneous or apolitical in motivation, however, subsistence riots were certainly highly political in their effect. They accelerated processes of politicization that extended far beyond the milieu of the participants. Conservatives and protectionists blamed price rises and mass impoverishment upon government inaction or the deregu latory reforms introduced by liberal bureaucrats. Some conservatives blamed the ‘factory system’. On the other hand, liberals argued that industrialization and mechanization were the cure for, not the cause of, the social crisi
s, and called for the removal of government regulations that hindered investment and obstructed economic growth. Alarmed by the social emergency of 1844–7, conservatives experimented with prescriptions anticipating the German welfare state of the later nineteenth century.52 For radicals in particular, subsistence riots provided the opportunity to focus and sharpen their rhetoric and theory. Some left Hegelians argued, like the ‘social conservatives’, that the responsibility for arresting the polarization of society must lie with the state as the custodian of the general interest. The Silesian events of 1844 prompted the writer Friedrich Wilhelm Wolff to elaborate and refine his socialist analysis of the crisis. Whereas his report of 1843 on the Breslau slums was structured around loose binary oppositions such as ‘rich’ and ‘poor’, ‘these people’ and ‘the rich man’, or ‘a day-labourer’ and ‘the independent bourgeoisie’, his detailed article on the Silesian uprising, written seven months later, was far more theoretically ambitious. Here ‘the proletariat’ is opposed to ‘the monopoly of capital’, ‘those who produce’ to ‘those who consume’ and ‘the labouring classes of the people’ to the domain of ‘private ownership’.53
The debate between Arnold Ruge and Karl Marx over the meaning of the Silesian revolt provides a further illustration of the same process. In a rueful piece for Vorwärts! (Forwards), the journal of the German émigré radicals in Paris, Ruge argued that the weavers’ uprising had been a mere hunger riot that posed no serious threat to the political authorities in Prussia. Karl Marx responded to his former friend’s reflections with two long articles in which he put the contrary case, arguing, with what almost sounds like Prussian patriotic pride, that neither the English nor the French ‘worker uprisings’ had been as ‘theoretical and conscious in character’ as the Silesian revolt. Only ‘the Prussian’, Marx announced, had adopted ‘the correct point of view’. In burning the company books of the Zwanzigers and the Dierigs, he suggested, the weavers had directed their rage at the ‘titles of property’ and thereby struck a blow not only at the industrialist himself, but against the system of finance capital that underpinned him.54 This dispute, which ultimately turned on the issue of the conditions under which an oppressed population can be successfully revolutionized, marked an irrevocable parting of the ways for the two men. The bitter social conflict over resources gave off a negative energy that quickened the pace of political differentiation in Prussia.
HARDENBERG’S TIME-BOMB
By the 1840s, the Prussian political system was living on borrowed time. This was not just a matter of rising popular political expectations, but of financial necessity. Under the terms of the State Indebtedness Law of 17 January 1820, the Prussian government was prevented from raising loans unless these could be cleared through a ‘national Estates assembly’. By this means, the reformers (the drafter was Christian Rother, chief of the central directory of the ministry of finance and a close associate of Hardenberg) tied the hands of the government until such time as it should see its way to conceding further constitutional reform. This was the time-bomb that Hardenberg planted at the heart of the Prussian state. It ticked away quietly during the 1820s and 1830s, while successive finance ministers focused on raising loans indirectly through the nominally independent Seehandlung and keeping overall borrowing to a minimum. As a result, Prussia borrowed less in the 1820s and 1830s than any other German government.55
This could not continue for ever, as Frederick William IV well knew. The king was a passionate railway enthusiast at a time when the economic, military and strategic importance of the revolution in transport technology was becoming increasingly apparent.56‘Every new development in railways is a military advantage,’ the young Helmut von Moltke observed in 1843, ‘and for the national defence a few million on the completion of our railways is far more profitably employed than on our fortresses.’57 Since this was an area too important to be left to the private sector, it was clear that the Prussian state would soon face infrastructural expenditures it could not cover without raising substantial loans.
Yet the king was slow to accept the inevitability of a united national diet. There was a danger, as one of his closest associates observed, that a national assembly ‘would not stop at consultation over the state loan, but would act on anything it considered urgent’.58 In 1842, the king convened a United Committee composed of twelve delegates from each of the provincial diets, in the hope that this body would engage in consultations on matters such as the need for state railway finance without attempting to expand its own constitutional role. Petitions to the United Committee were forbidden, the issues for discussion were narrowly defined, and the rules of discussion ensured that genuine debate was out of the question – delegates were called upon to speak in alphabetical order and once only on each issue. This modest gathering could not achieve anything of substance; most importantly, as one Rhenish delegate had the temerity to point out during a discussion of railway finance, it lacked the authority to approve a state loan.59 By the end of 1844, Frederick William had resigned himself to convening a national meeting of the provincial diets within the next three years.
By the mid-1840s, the railway question was coming to a head. The Prussian railway network had grown impressively in recent years, from 185 kilometres in 1840 to 1,106 kilometres by 1845.60 But this growth had been concentrated in areas where private investors stood to make profits; entrepreneurs understandably had little interest in unprofitable major projects geared to macro-economic and military needs. In the autumn of 1845, however, news reached Berlin that the French government had embarked upon the construction of a strategic rail network whose eastern terminals posed a potential threat to the security of the German Confederation. Berlin’s calls for a coordinated all-German strategic railway policy were in vain: the Confederation failed to secure a consensus among the member states, even on the question of the appropriate gauge for an integrated network. It was clear that Prussia would have to see to its own needs.61 At the centre of the programme that crystallized during 1846 was the Ostbahn, a railway artery that would link the Rhineland and the French frontier with Brandenburg and East Prussia.
Hardenberg’s time-bomb was now primed to explode. The king’s Patent of 3 February 1847, which announced the convocation of a United Diet, stated clearly that this was the body envisaged in the State Indebtedness Law of 1820. It was not a new constitutional instrument, but merely the combination of all the provincial diets into a single body. It thus inherited the awkward hybrid identity of its predecessors: delegates were seated by province and estate, but voting was by head and the assembly operated as a single body, like a national parliament, for most of its business. There was an upper house, composed of princes, counts, mediatized nobles and members of the royal family. The rest of the delegates, representing the landed nobility, the towns and the peasants, sat in the Curia of the Three Estates. Complex voting arrangements ensured that the individual provinces retained the power to veto proposals damaging to their interests – in this respect the diet reflected the ‘federal’ structure of the Prussian state after 1815. The text of the Patent made it clear that the main business of the diet would be the introduction of new taxes and the approval of a state loan for railway construction.62
The United Diet was controversial even before it met. There was a small chorus of moderate conservative enthusiasts, but they were drowned out by the roar of liberal critique. Most liberals felt that the arrangements outlined in the Patent fell far short of their legitimate expectations. ‘We asked you for bread and you gave us a stone!’ thundered the Silesian liberal Heinrich Simon in a polemical essay published – to avoid the Prussian censors – in Saxon Leipzig. Theodor von Schön took the view that the delegates should use the opening session to declare themselves incompetent to act as a general diet and demand a new election. If the Patent was offensive to liberals, it also alarmed the hard-line conservatives, who saw it opening the door to a full-blown constitutional settlement. Many lesser landowning noblemen – even conservative o
nes – were put off by the special status accorded to the higher nobility; the preponderance of Silesian and Westphalian family names in the upper house also irritated the provincial deputies of the older provinces.63 And yet, at the same time, the announcement of the United Diet triggered a further expansion of political expectations.
On Sunday 11 April 1847 – a cold, grey, rainy Berlin day – a crowd of provincial delegates numbering over 600 was herded into the White Hall of the royal palace for the inaugural ceremony of the United Diet. The king’s opening speech, delivered without notes over more than half an hour, was a warning shot. Infuriated by the reception of his Patent, the king was in no mood for compromise. ‘There is no power on earth,’ he announced, ‘that can succeed in making me transform the natural relationship between prince and people [… ] into a conventional constitutional relationship, and I will never allow a written piece of paper to come between the Lord God in Heaven and this land.’ The speech closed with a reminder that the diet was no legislative parliament. It had been convened for a specific purpose, namely to approve new taxes and a state loan, but its future depended upon the will and judgement of the king. Its task was emphatically not to ‘represent opinions’. He would reconvene the diet, he told the deputies, only if he considered it ‘good and useful, and if this Diet offers me proof that I can do so without injuring the rights of the crown’.64
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