In the event, the deliberations of the diet were to prove the hard-line conservatives right. For the first time, Prussian liberals of every stripe found themselves performing together on the same stage. They mounted a campaign to transform the diet into a proper legislature – by securing the right to reconvene at regular intervals, by demanding the power to approve all laws, by protecting it against arbitrary action on the part of the state authorities, by sweeping away what remained of corporate discrimination. Unless these demands were granted, they insisted, the diet could not approve the government’s spending plans. For liberal politicians from the regions, this was an exhilarating chance to socialize and exchange ideas with like-minded colleagues from across the kingdom. A liberal partisan culture began to emerge.
The Rhenish industrialist and railway entrepreneur David Hansemann had been a deputy in the Rhenish provincial diet since 1843 and was a leading figure in Rhenish liberal circles. He took care to procure a large apartment near the royal palace, where he hosted meetings with liberal delegations from other provinces. Parties of liberals also congregated at the hotel Russischer Hof for political discussions, debates and general conviviality. Liberal deputies were urged to arrive in the capital at least eight days in advance of the first session, so that there would be time for preliminary meetings. The importance of this experience in a state where the press and political networks were still fragmented along regional lines can scarcely be overstated. It fired liberals with a sense of confidence and purpose; it also taught them a first intense lesson in the virtues of political cooperation and compromise. As one conservative ruefully observed, the liberals regularly worked ‘late into the night’ coordinating their strategy for key political debates.65 By this means they succeeded in retaining the initiative in much chamber debate.
The conservatives, by contrast, were something of a shambles. Throughout much of the proceedings they seemed on the defensive, reduced to reacting to liberal proposals and provocations. As the champions of provincial diversity and local autonomy, they found it harder to work together on an all-Prussian plane. For many conservative noblemen, their politics were inextricably bound up with elite corporate status – this made it difficult to establish a common platform with potential allies of more humble station. Whereas the liberals could agree on certain broad principles (constitutionalism, representation, freedom of the press), the conservatives seemed worlds away from a clearly defined joint platform, beyond a vague intuition that gradual evolution on the basis of tradition was preferable to radical change.66 The conservatives lacked leadership and were slow to form partisan factions. ‘One defeat follows another,’ Leopold von Gerlach remarked on 7 May, after four weeks of sessions.67
In purely constitutional terms, the diet was a non-event. It was not permitted to transform itself into a parliamentary legislature. Before it was adjourned on 26 June 1847, it rejected the government’s request for a state loan to finance the eastern railway, declaring that it would cooperate only when the king granted it the right to meet at regular intervals. ‘In money matters,’ the liberal entrepreneur and deputy David Hansemann famously quipped, ‘geniality has its limits.’ Yet in terms of political culture the United Diet was of enormous importance. Unlike its provincial predecessors, it was a public body whose proceedings were recorded and published, so that the debates in the chamber resounded across the political landscape of the kingdom. The diet demonstrated in the most conclusive way the exhaustion of the monarch’s strategy of containment. It also signalled the imminence – the inevitability – of real constitutional change. How exactly that change would be brought about, however, remained unclear.
PRUSSIA ON THE EVE OF REVOLUTION
In his verse satire Germany – a Winter’s Tale, the poet, essayist, wit and radical satirist Heinrich Heine described his return to Prussia after thirteen years in Parisian exile. Heine hailed from a modest Jewish mercantile family in Düsseldorf, attended lectures by Hegel in Berlin, and converted to Christianity as a young adult in order to clear any obstacles to a career in the bureaucracy, a reminder of the assimilatory pressure exerted on Jewish subjects by Prussia’s ‘Christian state’. In 1831, having abandoned his ambition to enter state employment and acquired a considerable reputation as a poet and writer, he left Prussia to work as a journalist in Paris. In 1835, thanks to his outspoken critical commentaries on contemporary German politics, the Confederal Diet issued a nationwide ban on the publication and circulation of his books. A literary career inside the Confederation was now out of the question. Germany – A Winter’s Tale was published in 1844, following a brief and unhappy visit to his native Rhineland. The first Prussians to welcome him home were of course the customs officials, who made a thorough search of his luggage. In a sequence of sparkling quatrains, Heine evokes his experience at the Prussian border:
They snuffled and burrowed through trousers and shirts
And handkerchieves – nothing was missed;
They were looking for pen-nibs and trinkets and jewels
And for books on the contraband list.
You fools! If you think you’ll find anything here
You must have been sadly misled!
The contraband that travels with me
Is stored up here, in my head!
[…]
So many books are stacked in my head –
A number beyond estimation!
My head is a twittering bird’s nest of books
All liable to confiscation!
It would be absurd to deny that these verses captured something real about the Prussian state. The oppressive, humourless and pettifogging engagement of the Prussian censorship authorities with political dissent was widely lamented by freethinkers across the kingdom. In the diary of the Berlin liberal Karl Varnhagen von Ense, the burdens of censorship are a constant theme. He writes of the ‘misery of small-minded, mischievous, obstructive surveillance’, the inventiveness of the censors in devising ‘ever new provocations’, the frustrations of running a critical literary journal under the arbitrary rule of the censorship office.68
On the other hand, as even Varnhagen was aware, Prussian censorship was laughably ineffective. Its real purpose, he observed in August 1837, was not to police popular reading habits, but to justify itself to the rest of the royal administration: ‘The people can read what it wishes, regardless of the content; but everything that might come before the king is carefully vetted.’69 It was virtually impossible, in any case, to control the traffic in contraband print. The political fragmentation of German Europe was a disadvantage from the censors’ point of view, for it meant that works banned in one state could easily be printed in another and smuggled across the lightly guarded borders. The radical Württemberg card seller Thomas Beck frequently crossed the border into the Prussian Rhineland with sheaves of his forbidden publications concealed within his hat.70‘I am now a large-scale importer of banned books into Prussia,’ Friedrich Engels, the radical son of a pious Barmen textile manufacturer, wrote to his friend Wilhelm Graeber from the city of Bremen in November 1839. ‘Börne’s Francophobe in four copies, the Letters from Paris by same, six volumes, Venedey’s Prussia and Prussianism, most strictly prohibited, in five copies, are lying ready for dispatch to Barmen.’71 Confederal bans on books such as Jakob Venedey’s Prussia and Prussianism, an angry tract against the Prussian administration by a Rhenish liberal, were ineffective because German booksellers routinely concealed their contraband stocks from the authorities.72 Songs were even harder to pin down, since they took up so little paper and could circulate without printed text. The politicization of popular culture confronted government with a mode of dissent that could never be effectively policed, because it was informal, protean, omnipresent.
The figure of the Prussian soldier, with his arrogant, affected, supercilious pose, symbolized for many, especially in the radical milieu, the worst features of the polity. It was in the city of Aachen, once the ancient capital of Charlemagne, now a sleepy Rhenish textile c
entre, that the returning Heinrich Heine caught his first glimpse of the Prussian military:
I wandered about in this dull little nest
For about an hour or more
Saw Prussian military once again
They looked much the same as before.
[…]
Still the same wooden, pedantic demeanour
The same rectangular paces
And the usual frozen mask of disdain
Imprinted on each of their faces.
They still strut so stiffly about the street
So groomed and so strictly moustached,
As if they had somehow swallowed the stick
With which they used to be thrashed.
Popular antipathy to the military varied in intensity across the kingdom. It was strongest in the Rhineland, where it fed on local patriotic resentment of Protestant Berlin. In many Rhenish towns, tension between solders and civilians – particularly young male civilians of the artisan and labouring classes – was a part of day-to-day life. Soldiers standing watch before public buildings made easy targets for young men on a night out; many chance violent encounters between soldiers and civilians occurred in or near taverns.73 Troops were also hated for their role in law enforcement. Prussian towns were very lightly policed by tiny contingents of ill-trained constables whose official duties included a wide range of tasks, such as attending to the orderly disposal of ‘raw materials and waste’, the cleaning of ‘streets and drains’, the clearing of obstacles, the removal of dung, the delivery of summonses, the ‘notification of official announcements by hand-bell’, and so on.74 The feebleness of civilian policing meant that the Prussian authorities were often forced to fall back on the military as a means of restoring order. In cases of serious tumult, the few local gendarmes generally made themselves scarce and waited for military assistance while the crowd, sensing its power, took the initiative – this is precisely what happened at Peterswaldau and Langenbielau in 1844. Lacking nuanced techniques of crowd management, military commanders tended to progress abruptly from verbal warnings to mounted charges with sabre blows or even gunfire. But this was not a specifically Prussian problem. In England and France too, the use of military units to restore order remained the norm. And the extreme violence meted out at Langenbielau in 1844 was no more typical of Prussian conditions than the Peterloo massacre of 1819 was of policing methods in Great Britain.
Britain was of course – as British travellers were forever pointing out – an incomparably more liberal polity, but it was not necessarily a more humane one. Britons tolerated levels of state violence that would have been unthinkable in Prussia. The number of condemnations to death in Prussia during the years from 1818 to 1847 fluctuated between twenty-one and thirty-three per annum. The number of actual executions was much lower – it varied between five and seven – thanks to the intensive use of the royal pardon, which became an important mark of sovereignty in this period. By contrast, 1,137 death sentences were handed down every year on average over the period 1816–35 in England and Wales, whose combined population (around 16 million) was comparable to Prussia’s. To be sure, relatively few (less than 10 per cent) of these sentences were actually carried out, but the number of persons executed still exceeded the Prussian figure by a factor of sixteen-to-one. Whereas the great majority of English and Welsh capital sentences were passed for property crimes (including quite minor ones), most Prussian executions were for crimes of homicide. The only ‘political’ execution of the pre-revolutionary era was that of the village mayor Tschech, who was found guilty of high treason for having attempted to murder the king.75 In short: there was no Prussian parallel to the routine slaughter perpetrated at the gallows under England’s ‘bloody code’.
Terrible as the extremes of poverty were in the ‘hungry forties’, they pale in comparison to the hunger catastrophe that ravaged British-administered Ireland. Today we blame this disaster on a combination of administrative error with the dynamics of the free market. Had such a mass famine been visited upon the Poles in Prussia, we would perhaps now be discerning in it the antecedents of post-1939 Nazi rule. It is also worth remembering that the Prussians faced constraints in Poland that had no counterpart in Ireland. Poland was the unquiet frontier between Prussia and the Russian Empire, and Prussian policy in the region had to take account of Russian interests. The Prussian Crown did not, of course, accept the legitimacy of Polish nationalist strivings. It did, however, accommodate the aspiration of its Polish subjects to cultivate their distinctive nationality. Indeed, the government’s promotion of Polish-language elementary and secondary schooling led to a dramatic rise in Polish literacy rates in the Prussian-occupied sector of the old Polish Commonwealth. There was, to be sure, a ten-year period when Provincial Governor Flottwell switched to a policy of assimilation through ‘Germanization’ – an ominous foretaste of later developments. But this was very inconsistently pursued, came to an end with the accession of the romantic Polonophile Frederick William IV and was in any case a response to the Polish revolution of 1830, which had raised serious doubts about the political loyalty of the province.
In the early 1840s, when Heine was living in literary exile in Paris, Prussian Poland remained an attractive refuge for Polish political exiles from east of the Poznanian border. Russian dissidents, too, found their way to Prussia. The radical literary critic Vissarion Grigorevich Belinskii was living in Salzbrunn, Silesia in 1847 when he wrote his famous Letter to Gogol denouncing the political and social backwardness of his homeland, a crime for which he was condemned to death in absentia by a Russian court. So resonant was this cry of protest within Russian dissident circles that Turgenev, who visited Belinskii in Silesia, chose to sign ‘Bailiff’, the savage pen-portrait of a tyrannical landlord in Sketches from a Hunter’s Album, with ‘Salzbrunn, 1847’, a coded indication of his support for Belinskii’s critique. In the same year, another exile, the Russian radical Alexander Herzen, crossed the Prussian border from the east. Arriving in Königsberg, he expressed a profound sense of relief: ‘The unpleasant feelings of fear [and] the oppressive sense of suspicion were all dispelled.’76
14
Splendour and Misery of the Prussian Revolution
BARRICADES IN BERLIN
By the end of February 1848, the population of Berlin was growing accustomed to the news of revolution. In the winter of 1847, Protestant liberals in Switzerland had fought – and won – a civil war against the conservative Catholic cantons. The result was a new Swiss federal state with a liberal constitution. Then, on 12 January 1848, after reports of unrest in the Italian peninsula, came the news that insurgents had seized power in Palermo. Two weeks later, the success of the Palermitan revolution was confirmed when the King of Naples became the first Italian monarch to offer his people a constitution.
It was above all the news from France that electrified the city. During February, a liberal protest campaign gained momentum in the French capital, culminating in bloody clashes between troops and demonstrators. On 28 February, an extra edition of Berlin’s Vossische Zeitung featured a ‘telegraphic despatch’ reporting that King Louis Philippe had abdicated. In view of the ‘current state of France and of Europe’, the editors declared, ‘this turn of events – so sudden, so violent and so utterly unexpected – appears more extraordinary, perhaps more momentous in its consequences than even the July Revolution [of 1830].’1 As the news from Paris broke in the Prussian capital, Berliners poured on to the streets in search of information and discussion. The weather helped – these were the mildest and brightest early spring days that anyone could remember. Reading clubs, coffee-houses and public establishments of all kinds were crammed to bursting. ‘Whoever managed to get his hands on a new paper had to climb on to a chair and read the contents aloud.’2 The excitement grew as word arrived of events closer to home – large demonstrations in Mannheim, Heidelberg, Cologne and other German cities, the concession of political reforms and civil liberties by King Ludwig I of Bavaria, the dismiss
al of conservative ministers in Saxony, Baden, Württemberg, Hanover and Hesse.
One important focal point for debate and protest was the Municipal Assembly, where elected members of the burgher elite regularly met to discuss the affairs of the city. After 9 March, when a crowd forced its way into the City Hall, the usually rather stolid assembly began to mutate into a protest rally. There were also daily political meetings at the ‘Tents’, an area of the Tiergarten just outside the Brandenburg Gate reserved for outdoor refreshments and entertainments. These had begun as informal gatherings, but they soon took on the contours of an improvised parliament, with voting procedures, resolutions and elected delegations, a classical example of the ‘public meeting democracy’ that unfolded across the German cities in 1848.3 It was not long before the Municipal Assembly and the Tents began to work together; on 11 March, the assembly discussed a draft petition from the Tents demanding a long list of political, legal and constitutional reforms. By 13 March, the gathering at the Tents, now numbering over 20,000, had begun to hear speeches from workers and artisans whose chief concern was not legal and constitutional reform, but the economic needs of the working populace. A gathering of workers at one corner formed a separate assembly and drew up a petition of its own pressing for new laws to protect labour against ‘capitalists and usurers’ and asking the king to establish a ministry of labour. Distinct political and social interests were already crystallizing within the mobilized crowd of the city.
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