The Camphausen government made valiant efforts to ensure that the new Prussia was run on liberal principles. There were bitter struggles with the king and his conservative advisers over the policy to be adopted vis-à-vis the Poles – Camphausen’s foreign minister, Baron Heinrich Alexander von Arnim-Suckow, a liberal who had served as the Prussian minister to Paris until March 1848, favoured making concessions to the Polish national movement, whereas the king and his advisers were reluctant to alienate Russia by appearing to encourage the Poles. Predictably, the foreign minister was forced to yield on this question and the Prussian army was sent into Posen to suppress the unrest there in May. There was also strife over the sensitive issue of ministerial co-responsibility for the conduct of military affairs. Frederick William, like his predecessors, regarded the Prussian monarch’s personal command over the army, the so-called Kommandogewalt, as an essential attribute of his sovereignty and was unwilling to make any concessions in this area; to do so, he informed the cabinet in characteristically extravagant terms, would be ‘incompatible with my honour as a human being, a Prussian, and a king, and would lead me directly to abdication’.28 Here again it was the ministry that backed down.
Unsurprisingly, there was also much contention over the new draft constitution, prepared in great haste by the Camphausen government in the hope that it would be ready for presentation to the National Assembly after its opening on 22 May. Frederick William was unhappy with many aspects of this document and later described his constitutional discussions with the ministers as ‘the most ghastly hours of my life’. The amended draft duly included revisions asserting that the monarch was king ‘by the grace of God’, that he exercised exclusive control over the army and that the constitution was to be understood as an ‘agreement’ (Vereinbarung) between himself and his people (as opposed to a basic law imposed upon the sovereign by the popular will).29
By the time this much-discussed document came before the National Assembly in June, the mood in the city and in the assembly itself had begun to sour. In Berlin, as in many parts of Prussia and Germany, the radical left was growing in numbers and confidence. Organizations and newspapers emerged to articulate the aspirations of those who rejected the elitism of the liberal programme. On the streets, too, there were signs that the liberal government was losing its grip on popular opinion. There were bitter disagreements over how to manage the legacy of the March uprising. Should the insurrection be retrospectively decriminalized? There was bitter debate over this question in the Berlin National Assembly. When the majority of deputies refused to accept the legality of the uprising, the radical deputy Julius Berends delivered a thundering oration in which he reminded the deputies that the assembly owed its very existence to the barricade fighters of 18–19 March. At around the same time, the democratic newspaper Die Lokomotive accused the National Assembly of denying its origins ‘like a badly brought up boy who does not respect his father’.30 A memorial procession in honour of the ‘March fallen’ attracted well over 100,000 people, but these were virtually all labourers, working women and journeymen, or to put it more pointedly, people from the same social stratum as the dead barricade fighters themselves. Middle-class burghers of the kind who predominated in the National Assembly were conspicuous by their rarity.
In this increasingly troubled climate, the chances of securing a majority in the National Assembly for the compromises enshrined in the first draft constitution were slim. When he failed to do so, Camphausen resigned on 20 June and Hansemann was asked to form a new government. Prime minister of the new cabinet was the liberal East Prussian nobleman Rudolf von Auerswald (Hansemann remained finance minister). Over the following month, the assembly’s constitutional committee, chaired by the distinguished democrat Benedikt Waldeck, presented a counter-proposal for the assembly’s consideration. The new draft constitution limited the monarch’s power to block legislation, provided for a genuinely popular national militia (a throw-back to the programme of the radical military reformers), proposed the introduction of civil marriage and removed the last traces of patrimonial privilege in rural areas.31 This draft was as contentious as the previous one. The resulting debates further polarized the assembly and no agreement was reached. The constitution remained in limbo.
It was the question of the relationship between the civilian and military authorities – a problem that would revisit Prussia in generations to come – that did most to undermine the fragile political compromise in Berlin. On 31 July, a violent clash over the arbitrary orders of a local army commander in the Silesian town of Schweidnitz resulted in the death of fourteen civilians. There was a wave of outrage, in the course of which the Breslau deputy Julius Stein presented a motion to the National Assembly proposing that measures be introduced to ensure that officers and soldiers acted in conformity with constitutional values. By this he meant that all army personnel should ‘distance themselves from reactionary tendencies’ and fraternize with civilians as proof of their commitment to the new political order.
Stein could be faulted in retrospect for his diffuse formulations, but he expressed the understandably deepening alarm of the new political elite over the unbroken power of the military. If the army remained the compliant tool of interests opposed to the new order, then it might be said that the liberals and their institutions were living on sufferance, that their debates and law-making amounted to little more than a farcical performance. The Stein motion tapped a deep vein of nervousness in the Assembly and was passed with a substantial majority. Sensing that the king would not yield to pressure on the military issue, the Auerswald Hansemann government did its best to avoid taking actions that would precipitate a confrontation. But the patience of the assembly soon ran out and on 7 September it passed a resolution demanding that the government implement Stein’s proposals. Frederick William was enraged and talked of restoring order in his ‘disloyal and good-for-nothing’ capital by force. In the meanwhile, the controversy over the Stein proposals forced the government to resign.
The new prime minister was General Ernst von Pfuel, the very man who had commanded the forces in and around Berlin on the eve of 18 March. Pfuel was a good choice – he was not a hard-line conservative, but a man formed by the enthusiasms and political ferment of the revolutionary era. His youth had been consumed by an intense homoerotic friendship with the romantic dramatist Heinrich von Kleist. Pfuel was among those who had emigrated in a spirit of injured patriotism during the French occupation. A popular figure at the Jewish salons and a friend of Wilhelm von Humboldt, he was widely admired by liberal contemporaries for his tolerance and erudition. But not even the mild-mannered Pfuel could mediate successfully between a recalcitrant king and an obstreperous assembly, and on 1 November, he too resigned.
The announcement that his successor would be Count Friedrich Wilhelm von Brandenburg was greeted with dismay in the liberal ranks. Brandenburg was the king’s uncle and the former commander of the VI Army Corps in Breslau. He was the favoured candidate of the conservative circle around the king and the purpose behind his appointment was straightforward. His task, according to Leopold von Gerlach, one of the king’s most influential advisers, would be to ‘show in every possible way that the king still rules in this country and not the assembly’.32 The assembly sent a delegation to Frederick William on 2 November to protest against the new appointment, but it was brusquely dismissed. One week later, on the foggy morning of 9 November, Brandenburg presented himself before the assembly in its temporary home on the Gendarmenmarkt and announced that it was adjourned until 27 November, when it would meet in the city of Brandenburg. A few hours later, the new military commander-in-chief, General Wrangel, entered the capital at the head of 13,000 troops and rode to the Gendarmenmarkt to inform the deputies in the assembly personally that they would have to disperse. The assembly responded by calling for ‘passive resistance’ and announcing a tax strike.33 On 11 November martial law was declared, the Civil Guards were disbanded (and disarmed), political clubs were closed d
own, and prominent radical newspapers were banned. Many of the deputies did attempt to congregate in Brandenburg on 27 November, but they were soon dispersed and the assembly was formally dissolved on 5 December. On the same day, in an astute political move, the Brandenburg government announced the promulgation of a new constitution.
The revolution was over in the capital, but it smouldered on in the Rhineland, where the exceptionally well-organized political networks of the radicals were successful in mobilizing mass opposition to the counter-revolutionary measures of the Berlin government. There was strong support throughout the Rhine province for the tax boycott pronounced by the National Assembly in its dying hours. Every day for a month, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, organ of the socialist left, ran the words ‘No more taxes!’ on its masthead. ‘People’s committees’ and ‘citizens’ committees’ sprang up to support the boycott in Cologne, Koblenz, Trier and other towns. Outrage over the dissolution of the assembly blended with provincial hostility to Prussia, confessional resentments (especially among Catholics) and the discontents associated with the patterns of economic stress and deprivation in the region. In Bonn, angry crowds insulted and beat tax officers and defaced or removed the Prussian eagles fixed to public buildings. In Düsseldorf on 20 November, there was a parade of the (now illegal) Civil Guard that culminated in a public oath to fight to the bitter end for the National Assembly and the rights of the people. The tax boycott campaign revealed the strength and social depth of the democratic movement in the Rhineland, and it certainly alarmed the Prussian authorities in the area. But the formal dissolution of the assembly in Brandenburg on 5 December deprived the democrats of a political focus. The arrival of troop reinforcements, coupled with the imposition of martial law in some hotspots and the disarmament of makeshift leftist militias sufficed to restore state authority.34
How had this happened? Why was the revolution that unfolded with such force in March so easily checked in November? It has often been noted that the overwhelmingly proletarian fighters who died on the barricades in Berlin and the wealthy liberal businessmen who occupied ministerial posts in the ‘March ministry’ represented utterly different social worlds and correspondingly opposed political expectations. The resulting divide ran right through the history of the revolution. The inability of liberals and radicals to agree on joint candidates for the May National Assembly elections, for example, meant that conservative and right-liberal candidates won instead.35 In the National Assembly in Berlin, the liberals consistently marginalized and stigmatized the social issues at the centre of the radical programme. As for the democratic left, it was successful in mobilizing mass support, especially in the Rhineland – a process facilitated by the politicization of popular culture in the 1840s. But the left, too, was divided. In May 1849, when a democratic uprising was organized in the Rhineland in support of the imperial constitution drawn up by the Frankfurt Parliament, the movement split between ‘constitutional’ and ‘Marxist’ or Communist democrats, who abstained on the grounds that the fate of a ‘bourgeois’ constitution ought to be a matter of indifference to the working class.36
What really tipped the scales in Prussia was the underlying strength of the traditional authority. In this connection, it is worth noting that Frederick William IV, the ‘romantic on the throne’, acted with more intelligence and flexibility during the crisis than he has often been given credit for. Indeed he performed his new role with surprising aplomb. Remaining in the capital after the troops had left and consenting in principle to the constitutionalization of the monarchy, he locked the liberals into an arduous process of negotiation while biding his time and looking for an opportunity to regain his freedom of manoeuvre. Behind the scenes, he gathered about him a cabal of conservatives determined to end the revolution at the earliest opportunity. By associating himself with the unionist objectives of the German national movement, he even secured a degree of popular legitimacy. In August 1848, when he visited the Rhineland, the popular enthusiasm was so intense that Karl Marx’s Neue Rheinische Zeitung had to cancel an issue after the workers in the press-room took the day off to cheer the king. Frederick William IV may have suffered from a ‘psychopathic’ fear of revolutionary upheaval, but his actions during the months of upheaval showed a sound tactical instinct.37
Then there was the fact that the revolution remained confined to particular areas of the kingdom. It was above all an urban event. There was certainly widespread rural protest, but with the exception of parts of the Rhineland, rural disorder tended to be very locally focused; urban politicians found it difficult to win the interest and support of people in the countryside, and protesters there rarely mounted a principled challenge to the authority of the king or of the state and its organs. For the most part, the countryside, especially in the East-Elbian provinces, continued to support the crown. It was here that conservative opposition to the revolution began to organize itself as a mass movement. During the summer of 1848, a range of conservative associations – veterans’ societies, patriotic leagues, Prussian leagues and peasants’ associations – proliferated across Brandenburg and Pomerania, the old core provinces where attachment to the Hohenzollern monarchy ran deepest. By May 1849, organizations of this kind encompassed a membership of over 60,000. It was a movement of artisans, peasants and shopkeepers – the people who had traditionally supported the evangelical voluntarism of the missionary societies.38
Another sign of the vitality of popular conservatism was the proliferation of ‘military clubs’ for patriotic veterans. Groups of this kind had existed since the 1820s, but they generally catered specifically to veterans of the Wars of Liberation and there were few of them. Their numbers rocketed from the summer of 1848; in Silesia, where there were eight military clubs before 1848, a further sixty-four were founded in the immediate aftermath of the revolution. In all, it is estimated that around 50,000 men in Brandenburg, Pomerania and Silesia joined such associations during the years 1848 and 1849.39 In this sense it could be said that the revolution of 1848 represented a coming of age for Prussian conservatism, which began to find its way towards a practical partisan articulation of conservative interests as well as ways of incorporating the voices and aspirations of ordinary people.
Most important of all was the continuing loyalty and effectiveness of the Prussian army. It hardly needs saying that the army played a crucial role in the suppression of the revolution. It marched into Posen in May 1848 to put an end to the Polish uprising there; it expelled the National Assembly from its Berlin premises in November and closed down its successor in Brandenburg a few weeks later; it was called in to deal with countless local tumults across the country. Yet the loyalty of the army was a less straightforward phenomenon than we might imagine. It was, after all, an army of Prussian citizens. The majority of soldiers were drawn from the very social strata that supported the revolution. Moreover, many of them were recalled at short notice from leave during the summer, which meant that they went directly from participating in the revolution to assisting in its suppression.40
It thus makes sense to ask why more men of the ranks did not defect or refuse to serve, or form revolutionary cells within the armed forces. Some did, of course. The radicals in particular made strenuous efforts to woo soldiers into crossing the picket line, and they were sometimes successful. Some local Landwehr units split into opposing democratic and loyalist factions – in Breslau, a radical Landwehr Club succeeded in attracting a membership of over 2,000.41 Despite the worst fears of the military leadership, however, the great majority of troops remained loyal to the king and their commanders. This was true not only of the East-Elbian troops (though it was especially true of them), but also of most of those who hailed from hotspots such as Westphalia and the Rhineland. The motivations for their compliance obviously varied according to local conditions and individual circumstances, but one factor stands out. This is the widespread belief among soldiers entrusted with the repression of local insurgencies that they were not closing down, but on the con
trary protecting the revolution, safeguarding the constitutional order against the anarchy and disorder of the radicals. Soldiers did not, on the whole, see themselves as the shock troops of counter-revolution, but as the preservers of the ‘March achievements’ against the threat posed by radical tumult. Indeed, so strong was the identification of some units with the struggle of the Prussian state to restore order that it could temporarily sweep aside the particularism of local and regional identities. So it was that the tax boycott campaign supported by radicals in Düsseldorf was brought to an end in November 1848 by two companies of the XVI Westphalian Infantry Regiment, who marched into the city singing the ‘Prussia Song’: ‘I am a Prussian, do you know my colours?’42
This perspective acquired a certain plausibility from the fact that the focus of initiative within the revolution did indeed pass swiftly to the radical left. From mid-April until July 1849, the German states were rocked once again by a wave of insurrections that extended from Saxony and the Prussian Rhineland to Baden, Württemberg and the Bavarian Palatinate. Although the insurgents involved in this second revolution claimed to be rising in support of the Frankfurt Parliament and its national constitution, they were essentially social revolutionaries whose programme recalled the politics of Jacobin radicalism. The position was especially critical in Baden, where the collapse of morale within the army opened the way to the establishment of a Committee of Public Safety and a revolutionary provisional government. Prussian troops, working beside contingents from Württemberg, Nassau and Hesse, played a crucial role in suppressing this last radical spasm of the revolution: they assisted the Saxon army in putting down the insurrection in the city of Dresden (in which Richard Wagner and the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin both participated) and then marched south to retake the Palatinate. On 21 June, Confederal forces defeated an insurgent army at Waghaäusel and ended the revolution in the Grand Duchy of Baden. These were bitter and deadly encounters: unlike in 1848, the revolutionaries of the second phase formed an armed force numbering over 45,000 men and fought pitched battles with the enemy, in which they defended themselves with courage and desperation.
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