In the meanwhile, the Frankfurt Parliament was struggling to resolve the matter of the relationship between the Habsburg monarchy and the rest of Germany. Towards the end of October 1848, the deputies voted to adopt a ‘greater-German’ (grossdeutsch) solution to the national question: the Habsburg German (and Czech) lands would be included in the new German Reich; the non-German Habsburg lands would have to be formed into a separate constitutional entity and ruled from Vienna under a personal union. The problem was that the Austrians had no intention of accepting such an arrangement. Austria was by now recovering from the trauma of the revolution. In a vengeful crusade that took 2,000 lives, Vienna was retaken by government troops at the end of October. On 27 November, Prince Felix zu Schwarzenberg, chief minister in Vienna’s new conservative government, exploded the greater-German option by announcing that he intended the Habsburg monarchy to remain a unitary political entity. The consensus at Frankfurt now shifted in the direction of the ‘lesser-German’ (kleindeutsch) solution favoured by a faction of moderate Protestant liberal nationalist deputies. Under the terms of a lesser-German option, Austria would be excluded from the new national polity, pre-eminence within which would pass (by default if not by design) to the Kingdom of Prussia.
Frederick William’s speculations on a Prussian-imperial Crown were drifting from dream into reality. Late in November 1848, Heinrich von Gagern, the new minister-president (prime minister) of the provisional Reich government in Frankfurt, travelled to Berlin to attempt to persuade Frederick William to accept – in principle – a German-imperial Crown. Frederick William initially refused, observing famously that the imperial title on offer was ‘an invented crown of dirt and clay’, but he also kept open the option of an acceptance, should the Austrians and the other German princes be in agreement. The signals broadcast by the government in Berlin were sufficiently encouraging to keep the small-German option afloat for the next few months. On 27 March 1849, the Frankfurt assembly voted (by a narrow margin) to approve a monarchical constitution for the new Germany and, on the following day, a majority voted for Frederick William IV as German Emperor. In one of the famous set-pieces of German history, a delegation from the assembly, led by the Prussian liberal Eduard von Simson, travelled to Berlin to make a formal offer. The king received them on 3 April, thanked them warmly for the trust that they, in the name of the German people, had placed in his person, but refused the crown, on the grounds that Prussia could accept such an honour only on terms agreed with the other legitimate princes of the German states. In a letter addressed to his sister Charlotte – officially known as Tsarina Alexandra Federovna – but intended for the eyes of her husband, he spoke a different language: ‘You have read my reply to the man-donkey-dog-pig-and-cat delegation from Frankfurt. It means in simple German: “Sirs! You have not any right at all to offer me anything whatsoever. Ask, yes, you may ask, but give – No – for in order to give, you would first of all have to be in possession of something that can be given, and this is not the case!” ’54
With Frederick William’s rejection of the crown, the fate of the great parliamentary experiment in Frankfurt was sealed. Yet the idea of a Prussian-led German union was not yet dead. During April, the Berlin government made it clear through a sequence of announcements that Frederick William IV was still willing to lead a German federal state of some kind. On 22 April, the king’s old friend Joseph Maria von Radowitz, who had been serving as a deputy to the Frankfurt Parliament, was recalled to Berlin to coordinate policy on a German union. Radowitz aimed to disarm the objections of Vienna by proposing a system of two concentric unions. Prussia would lead a relatively cohesive ‘narrower union’, which in turn would be loosely linked to Austria through a broader union. During May 1849, there were arduous negotiations with representatives of the lesser German kingdoms, Bavaria, Württemberg, Hanover and Saxony. At the same time, it was recognized that the new entity would not succeed unless it possessed some degree of legitimacy in public opinion. To this end, Radowitz rallied liberal and conservative advocates of the small-German idea at a widely publicized meeting in the city of Gotha. Amazingly, the Austrians seemed willing to consider the Radowitz plan; the Austrian envoy in Berlin, Count Prokesch von Osten, was much less hostile than might have been expected.
44. Frederick William IV receives a delegation from the Frankfurt Parliament. Addressing the king is the deputy Eduard von Simson. Standing beside the monarch is Count Brandenburg.
Despite these positive signs, the union project soon ran into serious trouble. It proved extraordinarily difficult to forge a compromise acceptable to all the key players. Twenty-six lesser territories expressed their willingness to join, but Bavaria and Württemberg, as ever, remained suspicious of Prussian intentions and stayed out. By the winter of 1849, Saxony and Hanover had also pulled back, followed by Baden. The Austrians, for their part, turned decisively against the idea, and began insisting first (from late February 1850) upon the inclusion in any proposed union of the entire Habsburg monarchy and later (from early May) upon the reinstatement of the old German Confederation. In this they were supported by the Russians, who heartily disapproved of Radowitz and his programme and intended to assist Austria against any serious challenge to its position in Germany.
The accumulating tension between Berlin and Vienna came to a head in September 1850. The flashpoint was a political conflict in the Electorate of Hesse-Kassel, a small territory that straddled the network of Prussian military roads linking Rhineland and Westphalia with the East-Elbian core provinces. The Elector of Hesse-Kassel – a notoriously reactionary figure – had attempted to force through counter-revolutionary measures against the will of the territorial diet, or Landtag . When influential elements within the army and the bureaucracy refused to comply, he called upon the aid of the revived German Confederation (the diet had been reinstated in Frankfurt, albeit without delegates from the union territories, on 2 September). Schwarzenberg immediately saw his opportunity: the deployment of Confederal troops in Hesse-Kassel would force the Prussians to back away from their unionist plans and to accept the resurrected Confederal Diet, with its Austrian presidency, as the legitimate political organization of the German states. Steered by the Austrians, the diet accordingly voted to restore the Elector’s authority in Hesse-Kassel through a ‘federal execution’. Enraged by this provocation, Frederick William IV appointed Radowitz foreign minister, with a view to signalling that Prussia had no intention of backing down.
A German civil war now seemed imminent. On 26 October, the diet in Frankfurt authorized Hanoverian and Bavarian forces to intervene in Hesse-Kassel. The Prussians deployed their own forces to the Hessian frontier, ready to resist a Confederal incursion. There followed a chain of stops and starts. On 1 November, news reached Berlin that the federal execution had begun – Bavarian troops had crossed the Hessian border. The Prussian cabinet was initially inclined to stop short of a full mobilization and seek a negotiated settlement, but this changed four days later when Schwarzenberg, pressing for an outright humiliation, demanded that Berlin remove the small troop contingents guarding the key Prussian military routes across Hesse-Kassel. Frederick William and his ministers now reluctantly resolved to order a full mobilization. On 24 November, Schwarzenberg, supported by Russia, served an ultimatum to Berlin demanding a complete Prussian withdrawal from Hesse-Kassel within the next forty-eight hours. Just as time was running out, Prussia agreed to further negotiations and everyone backed away from war. At a conference in Olmütz, Bohemia on 28–29 November, the Prussians stood down. Under the terms of the agreement known as the Punctation of Olmütz, Berlin undertook to participate in a joint federal intervention against Hesse-Kassel and to demobilize the Prussian army. Prussia and Austria also agreed to work together as equals in negotiating a reformed and restructured Confederation. These negotiations duly took place, but the promise of reform was not fulfilled; the old Confederation was restored, with some minor modifications, in 1851.
THE LESSONS OF FAILURE
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Through the shouting and gunfire of the March days, Frederick William IV had heard German music. Among the many German sovereigns who feared for their thrones in that tumultuous year, he was the only one to drape himself in the colours of the nation. While the Habsburg monarchy turned inward to confront its multiple domestic revolutions, Prussia began to play a leading role in German affairs, confronting the Danes over Schleswig and leading the effort to repress the second revolution of 1849 in the southern states. With some success, Berlin cultivated the pro-Prussian faction emerging within the German liberal movement, creating a degree of public legitimacy for its hegemonial designs. Prussia pursued the union project in a spirit of flexibility and compromise, hoping thereby to build a German entity that would be both popular (in the elitist, liberal sense) and monarchical without alienating Vienna. But the union project failed, and with it the king’s hopes of placing Prussia at the head of a united Germany. What light does this failure shed on the condition of Prussia and its place in the commonwealth of German states after the revolutions of 1848?
The events of 1848–50 revealed, among other things, how very disjointed the Prussian executive still was. Because the monarch – rather than the cabinet or ministry of state – was still at the centre of the decision-making process, factionalism and rivalry within the antechamber of power remained a serious problem. Indeed, in some respects, this tendency was reinforced by the revolutions, which forced the king into the arms of the conservative circles at court. This was a source of endless problems for Radowitz, who was loathed by the court camarilla and lived in constant fear of conspiracies against him. It also meant that Berlin’s support for the unionist initiative at times appeared half-hearted, as powerful ministers and advisers close to the king let it be known to compatriots and foreign emissaries alike that they did not support the Radowitz policy. Even Frederick William IV himself, who liked to peer at questions from every possible angle, occasionally gave signs of wavering in his support for his beloved favourite. This systemic irresolution in Berlin in turn reinforced Schwarzenberg’s determination to press the Prussians hard over Hesse-Kassel. His ultimate aim was not to wage war against Prussia, but to ‘get rid of the radical leadership’ there, and ‘strike an agreement with the conservatives, with whom one could safely share power in Germany’.55 The Austrians could still, in other words, exploit the divisions within the Prussian executive, just as they had done in the 1830s and 1840s. Here was a problem that would be resolved only when a powerful prime minister succeeded in suppressing the antechamber and imposing his authority on the government.
The particularism of the lesser states was a further obstacle. Bavaria refused to join the Prussian union; Baden and Saxony refused to stay in it. This was a poor reward for the bloody work the Prussians had done in restoring monarchical authority in all three states. In Baden, the Grand Duke owed his very existence as sovereign to the intervention of the Prussians, who remained in occupation until 1852. It was as if the treasury of merits the Prussians had worked so hard to accumulate through the Customs Union, German security policy and the suppression of revolution counted for nothing. The irony did not escape the notice of those two percipient contemporary Prussians, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who wrote from London in October 1850:
Prussia had restored the rule of the forces of reaction everywhere and the more these forces re-established themselves, the more the petty princes deserted Prussia to throw themselves into the arms of Austria. Now that they could again rule as they had done before March [1848], absolutist Austria was closer to them than a power whose ability to be absolutist was no greater than its desire to be liberal.56
The débâcle of 1850 thus conformed to a time-honoured pattern. The Habsburgs would never be able to sound the bright trumpets of German unity, but they could still play masterfully upon the wheezing organ of the Confederation. In the ears of the lesser German dynasties, this was still the more congenial music.
Schwarzenberg’s success in facing down the Prussians over Hesse-Kassel would have been unthinkable without the advantages of an international setting that favoured Vienna against Berlin. Here was another lesson that Prussian sovereigns had had to learn at intervals throughout the history of the kingdom. The German question was ultimately a European question. It could not be addressed (let alone resolved) in isolation. Russia, France, Britain and Sweden all joined in pressing Berlin to back down in the war with Denmark in the summer of 1848, and Russian aid was essential in restoring Vienna to a position where it could respond forcefully to the challenge from Berlin. It was the Russians who tipped the balance in the struggle between Habsburg forces and the Hungarian revolution, the largest, best organized and most determined insurrection of 1848 anywhere in Europe. Behind Schwarzenberg at Olmütz stood the incalculable power of the Russian Tsar. ‘At the Tsar’s command,’ Marx and Engels predicted in October 1850, ‘rebellious Prussia will finally give way without a drop of blood being spilled.’57 From the perspective of November 1850, it was clear that a successful bid for German unity by Prussia would require a fundamental change in the power-political constellation of Europe. How this transformation might come about and what consequences it would entail were matters beyond the horizons of even the most imaginative contemporaries.
For the enthusiasts of the unionist project, the Punctation seemed a shocking defeat, a humiliation, a stain on the kingdom’s honour that called out for vengeance. The liberal nationalist historian Heinrich von Sybel, who had studied with Leopold Ranke in Berlin, later recalled the mood of disappointment. The Prussians, he wrote, had cheered their king as he took up the national cause against the Danes and defended the worthy people of Hesse-Kassel against their tyrannical Elector. ‘But now came a change: the dagger slipped from the trembling fist, and many a doughty warrior shed bitter tears into his beard. [… ] From a thousand throats rang a single cry of pain: for the second time the work of Frederick the Great had been annihilated.’58 Sybel was exaggerating. There were many who welcomed the news of Olmütz, including of course the conservative enemies of Radowitz. One of these was Otto von Manteuffel, who had long been pressing for a negotiated settlement with Austria and was appointed minister-president and foreign minister on 5 December 1850 – he was to remain in both posts for most of the following decade. Another was the conservative deputy Otto von Bismarck. In a famous speech to the Prussian parliament on 3 December 1850, Bismarck welcomed the Olmütz agreement, adding that he did not think it lay in Prussia’s interest ‘to play Don Quixote all over Germany on behalf of disgruntled parliamentary celebrities [gekraänkte Kammerzelebritaäten]’.59
And even those national-minded Protestant liberals who had supported the unionist project conceded that Olmütz was also a moment of sobriety and clarification after the rhetorical excesses of the revolution. ‘Realities,’ wrote the small-German nationalist and historian Johann Gustav Droysen in 1851, ‘began to triumph over ideals, interests over abstractions[…] Not through “freedom”, not through national resolutions would the unity of Germany be achieved. What was called for was one power against the other powers.’60 Far from undermining Droysen’s belief in Prussia’s German vocation, the setbacks of 1848–50 actually reinforced it. In an essay published in 1854 on the eve of the Crimean War, he expressed the hope that a determined Prussia would one day emerge to assert its leadership over the other German states and thereby found a unified, Protestant German nation. ‘After 1806 came 1813, after Ligny, Waterloo. In truth, we only need the cry “Forward”, and everything will spring into motion.’61
THE NEW SYNTHESIS
Historical narratives of the 1848 revolutions across Europe commonly end with an elegiacal reflection on the failure of revolution, the triumph of reaction, the execution, imprisonment, persecution or exile of radical activists and the concerted efforts of subsequent administrations to erase by force the memory of insurrection. It is a commonplace that the restoration of order in 1848–9 ushered in an era of reaction in Prussia. There was a con
certed effort to erase the memory of insurrection from public awareness. Ceremonies in honour of the ‘March fallen’ and processions to their graves in the Friedrichshain cemetery were strictly forbidden. The police force was consolidated, enlarged and its sphere of responsibility extended.
The democratic suffrage conceded by the Prussian authorities under the constitution of December 1848 was rescinded in April 1849. Under the new franchise, nearly all male inhabitants of the kingdom were entitled to a vote, but their votes differed in value, since they were divided into three ‘classes’ according to their taxable income. Each class voted for one third of the electors who in turn elected the deputies to the parliament. In 1849, the steep income differentials across the kingdom’s population meant that the first class, representing the wealthiest 5 per cent of the electorate, voted for as many electors as the second (12.6 per cent) and the third (82.7 per cent).62 The parliament was saddled in 1855 with a new upper house, the Herrenhaus, loosely modelled on the British House of Lords and containing not a single elected member. The revived German Confederation returned to its time-honoured role as an organ of domestic repression throughout the German states and issued the Confederal Act of 6 July 1854, which, coupled with supporting legislation in the individual states, introduced a range of instruments to inhibit the circulation of subversive publications. Even more significant was the Confederal Act on Associations, passed just over a week later, which subjected all political associations to police supervision and forbade them to maintain relations with each other.63
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