The campaign in the south ended only with the capitulation of the hungry and demoralized remainder of the revolutionary army at the fortress of Rastatt on 23 July 1849. Under a Prussian occupation administration, three special courts were established in Freiburg, Mannheim and Rastatt to try the leading insurrectionists. Staffed by Badenese jurists and Prussian officers and operated in accordance with Baden law, these tribunals issued verdicts against sixty-four civilians and fifty-one military personnel. There were thirty-one death sentences, of which twenty-seven were actually carried out – executed by Prussian troops. According to one eyewitness, who saw the firing squads at work inside the walls of Rastatt fortress, the Prussians obeyed their orders to a man, though they returned from the execution grounds with faces ‘as white as chalk’.43
GERMANY CALLING
1848 was the year of the nationalists. Across Europe, the political and social upheavals of the revolution were intertwined with national aspirations. Nationalism was contagious. German and Italian nationalists were inspired by the example of the Swiss liberals, whose conquest of the conservative Sonderbund in 1847 paved the way to the creation of the first Swiss federal state. In the southern German states, republican nationalists even formed volunteer brigades to fight alongside the Protestant Swiss cantons. Italian revolutionary nationalism in turn stirred the ambitions of the Croats, whose chief nationalist organ, in the absence of an agreed Croatian literary idiom, was the Italian-language L’Avventura in Dubrovnik. German nationalism stimulated the Czech patriotic movement. So powerful was the spell cast by the national idea that Europeans could derive vicarious excitement from each other’s national causes. Liberals in Germany, France and Britain became enthusiasts of Polish, Greek and Italian liberty. Nationalism was a potentially radical force for two reasons. Firstly, nationalists, like liberals and radicals, claimed to speak for ‘the people’ rather than the crown. For liberals, ‘the people’ was a political community composed of educated, tax-paying citizens; for the nationalists it denoted an ethnicity defined by a common language and culture. In this sense, liberalism and nationalism were ideological cousins. Indeed nationalism was in some respects more inclusive than liberalism, whose horizons were confined to a wealthy, educated and largely urban elite. Nationalism by contrast, in theory at least, embraced every last member of the ethnic community. There was a close affinity here with the democratic orientation of mid-century radicalism; it is no coincidence that many German radicals became uncompromising nationalists. Secondly, nationalism was subversive because in many parts of Europe, the realization of the national vision implied fundamental transformations of the political map. Hungarian nationalists sought to separate themselves from the commonwealth of peoples under Habsburg rule; Lombard and Venetian patriots chafed under Habsburg rule; the Poles dreamed of a reconstituted Poland within the borders of 1772 – some Polish nationalists even called for the ‘return’ of Pomerania. Greek, Romanian and Bulgarian nationalists dreamed of throwing off the yoke of Ottoman imperial power.
If nationalism implied the political disintegration of the Habsburg monarchy, in Germany its thrust was integrative, it aimed to solder together the sundered parts of a putatively single German fatherland. How exactly the new Germany would look in practice was unclear. How would the unity of the new nation be reconciled with the rights and powers of the traditional monarchies? How much power would be concentrated in the central authority? Would the new German union be led by Austria or by Prussia? Where would its borders lie? These were questions that prompted endless contention and debate as the revolution unfolded. The national question was discussed in all the chancelleries and legislatures of the German states, but the pre-eminent theatre of public debate was the national parliament that opened on 18 April 1848 in St Paul’s Church in Frankfurt/Main. This assembly, comprising deputies from all over the German states elected under a national franchise, set itself the task of drawing up the constitution for a new united Germany. The interior of the parliamentary chamber, an elegant elliptical rotunda, was draped in the national colours and dominated by a huge painting of Germania by the artist Philip Veit. Veit’s monumental allegorical work, which was painted on to canvas and hung in front of the organ loft in the main chamber, showed a standing female figure crowned in oak leaves, a cast-off manacle at her feet; behind her the rising sun loosed darts of light through the tricolour fabric of the national flag.
The attitude of the Prussian authorities to the national project was of necessity ambivalent. Inasmuch as nationalists posed a principled challenge to the authority of the German territorial crowns, they were recognized as a subversive and dangerous force. This was the logic behind the campaign waged against the ‘demagogues’ in the post-war years. On the other hand, Prussian governments had no objection in principle to the creation of a tighter and more cohesive political organization of the German states, so long as this process served Berlin’s power-political interests. This was the logic at work in Prussia’s sponsorship of the Customs Union and its support for stronger Confederal security arrangements. By the 1840s, this consistent and self-interested pursuit of greater inter-territorial cohesion implied a more nuanced response to nationalism than had been possible in the immediate post-war years: if national sentiment could be managed, if it could be co-opted into some kind of partnership with the Prussian state, then national enthusiasm was a force that might be cultivated and exploited. This policy could bear fruit, of course, only if the nationalists in question could be persuaded that Prussia’s interest and that of Germany as a whole were one and the same.
During the 1840s, the idea of an alliance between Prussia and the liberal nationalist movement came to appear increasingly plausible. In the aftermath of the war scare of 1840–41 and the crisis in 1846 over the future of the ethnically mixed duchies of Schleswig and Holstein on the border with Denmark, moderate liberals throughout Germany looked increasingly to Prussia as a surrogate for the underdeveloped security arrangements of the Confederation. ‘Prussia must place itself at the head of Germany,’ the Heidelberg professor Georg Gottfried Gervinus told Friedrich Engels in 1843, though he added that Berlin would first have to enact constitutional reform. The Deutsche Zeitung, a liberal journal founded in May 1847, explicitly advocated the pursuit of German unity through an active foreign policy, to be achieved through an alliance between the Prussian state and the nationalist movement.44
The appeal to national aspirations featured prominently in the Prussian king’s early reactions to the revolutionary upheaval of March 1848. On the morning of 21 March, two days after the uprising and the departure of the army from the capital, a poster authorized by the king broadcast the following oracular announcement:
A new and glorious history is beginning for you today! You are henceforth once again a single great nation, strong free and powerful in the heart of Europe! Trusting in your heroic support and your spiritual rebirth, Prussia’s Frederick William IV has placed himself at the head of the movement for the redemption of Germany. You will see him on horseback today in your midst with the venerable colours of the German nation.45
Sure enough, the Prussian king appeared at midday, sporting a tricolour armband (some accounts speak of a sash in the national colours), with the national flag behind him, held aloft by a member of a Berlin shooting club. Throughout this curious royal perambulation through the capital the talk was of the nation. Students hailed the passing king as the new German Emperor, and Frederick William halted at intervals to address onlookers on the great importance of current developments for the future of the German nation. To drive the message home, the red, black and gold flag was flown that evening from the dome of the royal palace. A cabinet order despatched to the ministry of war announced that since the king would henceforth be devoting himself entirely to the ‘German question’ and expected Prussia to play a role in the resolution of the same, he wished the troops of his army to wear the ‘German cockade as well as the Prussian one’.46
Most astonishing of al
l was the declaration issued on the evening of 21 March under the title ‘To My People and to the German Nation’. The address began by recalling the dangerous days of 1813, when King Frederick William III had ‘rescued Prussia and Germany from shame and humiliation’ and went on to argue that in the current crisis, the collaboration of Germany’s princes under a unified leadership was essential:
Today I assume this leadership [… ]. My people, which does not fear danger, will not forsake me, and Germany will join me in a spirit of trust. I have today taken up the old German colours and have placed myself and my people under the venerable banner of the German Reich. Prussia is henceforth merged in Germany.47
It would be a mistake to see these extravagant gestures simply as an opportunist attempt to rally mass support around a beleaguered monarchy. Frederick William’s enthusiasm for ‘Germany’ was entirely authentic and long predated the outbreak of the 1848 revolutions. Indeed there is something to be said for the view that he was the first truly German-minded monarch to occupy the Hohenzollern throne. Frederick William was deeply involved in the project to resume the construction of Cologne Cathedral, an imposing Gothic structure begun in 1248 but unfinished since work had ground to a halt in 1560. There had been talk of completing the cathedral since the turn of the century and Frederick William became an enthusiastic advocate and supporter of the idea. In 1842, two years after his accession, the king travelled to the Rhineland to take part in celebrations inaugurating the building works. He attended Protestant and Catholic services and presided over a cornerstone ceremony at which, to the astonishment and delight of the onlookers, he delivered a sparkling impromptu speech praising the ‘spirit of German unity and strength’ embodied in the cathedral project.48 At around the same time, he wrote to Metternich that he had decided to devote himself to ‘ensuring the greatness, power and honour of Germany’.49
When Frederick William spoke of German ‘unity’, he was not referring to the political unity of a nation-state, but to the diffuse, cultural, sacral unity of the medieval German Reich. His speculations did not, therefore, necessarily imply a challenge to Austria’s traditional captaincy within the community of German states. Even during the war crisis of 1840–41, when Frederick William supported efforts to extend Prussia’s influence over the security arrangements of the south German states, he was reluctant to contemplate a direct confrontation with Vienna. In the spring months of 1848, the Prussian king’s vision of the German future was still in essence a vision of the past. On 24 April, Frederick William told the Hanoverian liberal and Frankfurt deputy Friedrich Christoph Dahlmann that his vision for Germany was a kind of reinvigorated Holy Roman Empire, in which a ‘King of the Germans’ (a Prussian, perhaps) would be chosen by a revived College of Electors and wield executive power under the honorary captaincy of a Habsburg ‘Roman Emperor’.50 As a romantic monarchical legitimist, he deplored the idea of a unilateral bid for power that would injure the historic rights of the other German crowns. He thus professed to be horrified when his new liberal foreign minister (Heinrich Alexander von Arnim-Suckow, appointed 21 March) proposed that he should accept the crown of a new ‘German Empire’. ‘Against my own declared and well-motivated will,’ he complained to a close conservative associate, ‘[Arnim-Suckow] wants to present me!!!!!! with the imperial title… I will not accept the crown.’51
Yet the king’s objection to a Prussian imperial title was by no means categorical. It would be another matter entirely if the other German princes voluntarily elected him to a position of pre-eminence and the Austrians were willing to renounce their ancient claim to leadership within the German Commonwealth. Under these circumstances, he told King Frederick August II of Saxony during the first week of May, he would be willing to consider accepting the crown of a new German Reich.52 These were highly speculative reflections at the time, but as events unfolded over the summer and autumn of 1848, they came to seem increasingly plausible.
Within a month of the outbreak of the revolution, Prussia had an opportunity to demonstrate its willingness to show leadership in the defence of the German national interest. A crisis was brewing over the future of the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein, predominantly agrarian principalities that straddled the frontier between German- and Danish-speaking northern Europe. The complex legal and constitutional status of the two duchies was defined by three awkward facts: firstly, a law dating back to the fifteenth century forbade the separation of the two principalities; secondly, Holstein was a member of the German Confederation but Schleswig to the north was not; thirdly, the duchies operated under a different law of succession from that of the Kingdom of Denmark – succession through the female line was possible in the kingdom but not in the duchies, where the Salic law prevailed. The inheritance issue began to cause consternation in the early 1840s, when it became clear that the Danish crown prince, Frederick VII, was likely to die without issue. For the government in Copenhagen, the prospect loomed that Schleswig, with its numerous Danish speakers, might be separated for ever from the Danish state. In order to guard against this eventuality, Frederick’s father, Christian VIII, issued the so-called ‘Open Letter’ of 1846, in which he announced the application of Danish inheritance law to Schleswig. This would permit the Danish Crown to retain its rights in the principality through the female line, should the future king die childless. The crisis triggered in the German states by the Open Letter brought about a dramatic intensification of nationalist sentiment; as we have seen, it also prompted many moderate liberals to look to Prussia for leadership in the face of the threat posed to the German interest (and specifically the German minority in Schleswig) by the Danish government.
Shortly after his accession to the Danish throne on 20 January 1848, Frederick VII brought the issue to a head by announcing the imminent publication of a national Danish constitution and stating that the king intended to integrate Schleswig into the Danish unitary state. A process of escalation was now under way on both sides of the border: in Copenhagen, Frederick VII’s hand was forced by the nationalist Eiderdane movement; in Berlin, Frederick William IV was pressured into responding by Arnim-Suckow, a beneficiary of the March uprising. On 21 March, the new Danish government annexed Schleswig. The Germans in the south of Schleswig responded by forming a revolutionary provisional government. Outraged by the Danish annexation, the Confederal authorities voted to make Schleswig a member of the German Confederation. Acting with the official endorsement of the German Confederation, the Prussians assembled a military contingent, reinforced by small units from several other northern German states, and marched into Schleswig on 23 April. The German troops quickly overran the Danish positions and pressed northward into Danish Jutland, though they found it impossible to break the superiority of the Danish forces at sea.
There was jubilation among the nationalists, especially in the Frankfurt Parliament, where several of the most prominent liberal deputies – including Georg Beseler, Friedrich Christoph Dahlmann and the historian Johann Gustav Droysen – had close personal connections with the duchies. What the nationalists failed adequately to appreciate was the fact that the Schleswig-Holstein question was swiftly becoming an international affair. In St Petersburg, Tsar Nicholas was furious to find his Prussian brother-in-law working, as he saw it, hand-in-hand with the revolutionary nationalists. He threatened to send in Russian troops if Prussia did not withdraw from the duchies. This energetic Russian démarche in turn aroused the disquiet of the English government, which feared that the Schleswig-Holstein question might serve as a pretext for the creation of a Russian protectorate over Denmark. Since the Danes controlled access to the Baltic Sea (the Danish straits of Sund and Kattegat were known as the ‘Bosporus of the North’), this was a matter of great strategic concern to London. The pressure for a Prussian withdrawal began to mount. Sweden soon joined the fray, along with France, and Prussia was forced to agree to a mutual evacuation of troops under the terms of the Armistice of Malmø, signed on 26 August 1848.53
The armist
ice came as a profound shock to the deputies in Frankfurt. The Prussians had signed it unilaterally, without the slightest reference to the Frankfurt Parliament. Nothing could better have demonstrated the impotence of this assembly, which was headed by a provisional ‘imperial government’, but had no armed force of its own and no means of obliging territorial governments to comply with its will. It was a serious blow to the legitimacy of the parliament, which had already begun to lose its grip on public opinion in the German states. In the initial mood of outrage that greeted the news of the armistice, a majority of the deputies voted on 5 September to block its implementation. But this was mere posturing, since the executive in Frankfurt had no means of controlling the situation in the north. On 16 September, the members voted again; this time they capitulated to power-political realities and accepted the armistice. During the riots that followed in the streets of Frankfurt, two conservative deputies were slain by an angry mob. Prussia thus demolished the hopes of the German nationalists. And yet this setback paradoxically helped to reinforce the Prussophilia of many moderate nationalist liberals, for it confirmed the centrality of Prussia to any future political resolution of the German question.
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