1848
Page 10
The battle for Berlin was one of the most ferocious anywhere in Europe in 1848. When the troops attacked the barricades, they used artillery and then marched head-on against the fortifications. Gerlach, who commanded troops during the fighting, said that the cannonballs ricocheted along the street. Everywhere the soldiers were confronted by one barricade after another. ‘One could discern three, maybe four barricades, one behind the other, on which construction had taken place continually in our presence,’ wrote Gerlach. ‘At the artillery fire everybody ran from the first . . . and also from the second barricade, but when the troops advanced towards the following barricade, they were met with violent rifle fire and with many stones from the houses, particularly from those at the corner.’ On the other side a witness wrote:
The thunder of cannons resounded in increasingly quick succession. Individual barricades already began to collapse into the street, and the more and more embittered and enraged advancing soldiers began a frightful hand-to-hand fighting . . . The whole street swam with blood. The houses were overcrowded with dead and wounded. At the corner of the Spandauerstrasse cannons were driven up whose shots were intended to clear the streets completely. The houses themselves were hit again and again and damaged by rifle shots. Throughout the city there began this time a frightful sounding of the alarm bells which was kept up through the whole night by armed artisans who had climbed the church towers.81
Even the most experienced of the officers were unaccustomed to the kind of battle being waged in the narrow confines of Berlin’s old streets. Faced with the ferocity of the insurgents, the frustrated, furious and often frightened soldiers fired indiscriminately into houses, through doors and windows. Gerlach’s men were equipped with tools that allowed them to break into the buildings; but once inside, the attackers were stabbed and shot at point-blank range.82 Houses burst into flames and burned through the night. In all some nine hundred people were killed in an afternoon and night of fighting - eight hundred of them on the insurgents’ side.
By the end of the day the army had control of the main thoroughfares and, unlike in Paris, there was little danger that the troops, with their rural origins and iron discipline, would be converted by the revolutionaries. None the less, Prittwitz was aware that the horrifying and exhausting experience of street-fighting had taken its toll on his men’s morale. That night he told the King that, unless the rising was put down within the first few days, there would be nothing else to do other than pull out his troops, besiege the city and bombard it into submission. The King was torn apart by conflicting emotions. The Berliners were rebels, but Frederick William’s own sense of Christian kingship found the idea of spilling his subjects’ blood utterly abhorrent. When Prittwitz had first asked for the order to advance, the King had cried, ‘Yes, all right! Only no shooting!’83 At the first crash of artillery, he had wept. So it was that Georg von Vincke, a moderate Westphalian aristocrat who had led the liberal opposition in the United Landtag and had ridden hard to reach Berlin, found a willing audience in Frederick William when he appeared at the palace still dressed in his travelling clothes. Vincke argued that the fighting would continue for as long as the people had no confidence in their King. A withdrawal of the troops and entrusting the King’s own safety to the citizens would reawaken their natural sense of loyalty. Gerlach, listening to this, joined in the mocking laughter at what he called the politician’s ‘miserable controversialist dialectic’, to which a furious Vincke snapped that they might well laugh now, but the following day they would not.84
At midnight, therefore, Frederick William told Prittwitz to cease operations, after which he sat down at his desk and drafted a further proclamation ‘To my dear Berliners’, which was hastily printed and distributed across the city in the early hours. The King promised that, once his subjects had returned ‘to their peaceful ways’ and dismantled the barricades, he would pull his troops back to defend only the Schloss, the armoury and several other government buildings: ‘Hear the paternal voice of your King, inhabitants of my loyal and beautiful Berlin.’85 The mauled and bloodied Berliners greeted the rather syrupy language with some scepticism. Yet an uneasy truce did hold across the city that Sunday morning. When Prittwitz went out himself to investigate, the first person he met was not an insurgent, but a servant girl who had been sent out to buy pastries. 86 The revolutionaries also allowed churchgoers to pass freely across the barricades on their way to worship. Encouraged, the King, meeting with Prittwitz and the Prince of Prussia in the palace’s red corner room, ordered all forces to pull back to barracks. 87 The Prince hurled his sword on the table in disgust.
With the Schloss all but denuded of troops, the insurgents picked their way across the debris-strewn streets and gathered outside the palace. This time they were in no mood for cheering the King. They were drawing biers upon which the broken bodies of those killed lay covered with flowers. They howled at the windows above: ‘Bring him out, or we will throw these dead right in front of his door!’88 The King emerged on to a balcony with the alarmed Queen clutching his arm. The carriages were drawn closer and, in a symbolic gesture of humility, the King removed his hat in respect. The Queen fainted. At this point the crowd serenaded the royal couple with a Lutheran hymn, ‘Jesus, my Refuge’, and the procession moved away. Meanwhile, the army was marching out of the city, drums beating. A Bürgerwehr, or civic guard, was hastily organised to ensure order, and the King, self-consciously wearing a German black-red-gold cockade in his hat, met its commanders on 21 March, whereupon he thanked them for restoring peace to his capital. He was saluted with cries of ‘Long live the German Emperor!’ That day, swept along by the popular tide, he issued a further proclamation, in which he declared: ‘I have today taken the old German colours and have put Myself and My people under the venerable banner of the German Reich. Prussia henceforth merges into Germany.’89 This was deliberately vague, but for now it seemed to satisfy the clamour for Prussian leadership of a united Germany.
On 22 March the dead from the street-fighting were buried. On that emotional day of mourning Frederick William finally announced that he would grant a constitution. Yet, playing the role of revolutionary monarch did not suit a king who had been forced to yield most of the concessions. Three days later he and his family abandoned the city for Potsdam and the royal palace of Sans-Souci, protected by elite guard regiments. Safe in his palace, the King began bitterly to feel the humiliation of the March revolution: ‘We crawled on our stomachs.’90 He was now surrounded by plenty of hardliners, among them the Prince of Prussia and Gerlach, all of whom were itching for a counter-revolution.91 Among them was Otto von Bismarck, who had travelled to Potsdam from his estate at Schönhausen to offer the services of his deferential, armed peasants to the King. When Prittwitz asked what could be done to restore royal authority, the tough nobleman, who was sitting by a piano, began to play the Prussian infantry charging-march.92
VI
Of all the constitutions wrung from Italian rulers in the first months of 1848, the Piedmontese constitution, or Statuto, of 4 March would prove to be, historically, the most significant for the future of Italy, since it became the constitution of the united Italy in 1860 and remained the fundamental law of the country until 1946. Power was to be shared between the King and the parliament, which comprised a senate and a chamber of deputies. The monarch retained control of the armed forces and foreign policy, and could call and dissolve parliament, but any financial act, including taxation, had to be approved by both chambers. Moreover, if the King prorogued parliament, it had to be summoned again within four months, so there could be no long-term rule without it. Civil rights were also guaranteed.93 The Statuto resonated across the frontier into Austrian-ruled Lombardy, where Milanese liberals now dared to dream of the possibility of a military invasion by the Piedmontese army, which would chase out the Austrians at the point of ‘100,000 bayonets’. Lombards took to wearing grey capes, in imitation of the uniforms of Charles Albert’s army. To turn the dream into reality,
Count Carlo d’Adda, a Lombard émigré taking refuge in Turin, and Count Enrico Martini acted as emissaries of Milan’s liberal nobility, pressing the King to strike the decisive blow against Austrian rule.94
Milan and Venice, the great cities of Austria’s two Italian provinces, had been simmering since the Tobacco Riots in early January. During his last weeks in power, Metternich became ever more preoccupied with Italy and was determined to resist the march of the revolution there. To do so he wanted to ensure that all the Austrian authorities - military and civil - coordinated their efforts not only with one another but with those Italian states yet to succumb to the torrent. For that he needed a trustworthy diplomat, who could keep in constant contact with the different Italian governments, to encourage them to resist revolution, to assure them of Austrian military support and to present the Austrian view through the press. The man he chose for the job was Count Joseph von Hübner, who received his brief in Vienna on 21 February. Remarking that Metternich’s confidence in his abilities ‘frightens more than it flatters me’, Hübner boarded the train from Vienna on 2 March, changed to post-horses and arrived in Milan seventy-two hours later. He did not know that the news of the Paris revolution had encouraged the liberals to organise a peaceful protest aimed at persuading the Austrians to grant Lombardy greater autonomy within the Habsburg monarchy, including press freedom and a civic guard. Martial law had been declared across Lombardy and Venetia on 25 February. Hübner found the city tense and the Austrian authorities in a state of defeatism, if not utter paralysis. At dinner on 5 March Count Ficquelmont, whom Metternich had sent to Milan the previous August to advise the local government, told Hübner, ‘I have been asked to do the impossible. All that I have done and all that you will do here are like sword blows on water.’95 Ficquelmont and his wife left Milan a few days later for Vienna, where he would become the foreign minister of the first post-Metternich government.
Matters only became worse for the Austrians when word of Metternich’s fall and the imperial promise of a constitution reached Milan on 17 March. That night the leaders of the liberal opposition met to discuss their response. They could wait and see what benefits the promised constitution would bring, or they could fully exploit the regime’s weakness and try to expel the Austrians altogether. The latter option carried great risks: the commander of the Austrian forces in Italy - the wily, redoubtable Marshal Joseph Radetzky - controlled a thirteen-thousand-strong garrison of imperial troops who were subject to iron-hard discipline but also had genuine respect and even devotion for their leader. The republican teacher and intellectual Carlo Cattaneo argued that there could be no insurrection against such forces: the people had neither the military leadership nor the weapons for such an undertaking. Later he frankly avowed that he suspected the moderates of seeking to provoke a premature uprising that would be powerful enough to tempt Charles Albert of Piedmont to intervene against the Austrians, thereby giving the revolution a monarchical stamp, and making it too weak to gather a republican momentum of its own. After much debate the Milanese agreed that the demonstration would be peaceful and led by Count Gabriel Casati, the podestà (mayor) of Milan. As the most highly placed Italian in the local municipal administration, Casati had worked closely with the Austrians, but he had some patriotic sympathies. This was an awkward division of loyalties that led him to allow one son to serve with the Piedmontese artillery and another to study at the University of Innsbruck. Cattaneo commented wryly that ‘Casati would have divided himself in two to serve both courts at the same time; unable to split himself, he wanted to split his family instead.’96 Yet, early the next morning, Casati did sterling work in persuading the vice-governor, Heinrich O’Donnell, not to call out the garrison, since that would merely inflame the situation. As a precaution, Radetzky primed his men for combat, fortifying the city gates with artillery and reinforcing the guards on the walls. On the night of 17 March Hübner was struck by the eerie silence in the streets: ‘There were here and there small groups of people, but they were whispering into each other’s ears and they dispersed at our approach.’97 The Austrian viceroy, Archduke Rainer, prudently left for the safety of Verona.
On 18 March the call was raised ‘Men to the street, women to the windows!’ Some fifteen thousand people marched, while countless others cheered and waved them on with red, white and green handkerchiefs. Casati himself, though dressed soberly in a black suit, wore a tricolour rosette while an Italian flag fluttered above his head. Women tossed tricolour ribbons from the windows. At the Palazzo del Governo a handful of sentries were swept aside by the popular torrent. Hundreds of people surged up the stairs and found O’Donnell in the council chamber. He had already made the last-minute concession of lifting censorship, but now, confronted by a respectable but potentially aggressive crowd, he had little choice but to sign the order for the establishment of a civic guard, to be made up of Milanese of independent means. As surety, the crowd took the unfortunate vice-governor hostage.
With this act, the frustrated Radetzky, who had been watching events furiously from the sidelines, struck back. His troops double-quicked through the streets to protect such buildings as the police headquarters, the law courts and the army engineering depot. Tyrolean marksmen were posted high among the marble needles of Milan’s great cathedral, from where they would snipe at all and sundry - be they insurgents or hapless citizens caught in the crossfire. The Milanese quickly threw up barricades in the narrow streets of the old city. Bells rang from the church towers to summon people to the defences. At first these fortifications were makeshift, comprised of overturned carriages, barrels and hastily chopped-down trees. Soon they were bolstered by paving stones, sofas, beds, pianos and church furniture. Among the first to stand on them were young democratic republicans like the twenty-seven-year-old Enrico Cernuschi, nicknamed ‘the little Robespierre’, who had studied law before giving it up to work in a sugar refinery.98 They were joined rapidly by artisans and workers, who formed the backbone of this spontaneous uprising. The republican Carlo Osio sped home from the demonstration and gathered a pistol, a stiletto and an iron bar - making him look more like a street thug than the doctor he was - before running back to help his brother Enrico and others build the barricades. Carlo careered headlong into a police patrol, narrowly escaped their gunshots, then beat a hasty retreat home again, this time to gather the rifle, bayonet and ammunition that he had stowed there. He was a veritable human arsenal.99
The more conservative patricians implored the insurgents to stand down and avoid the ‘inevitable massacre’.100 Yet few listened - not the comfortable merchants who opened their warehouses to allow the revolutionaries to search for weapons and matériel, not the chemists who helped to make gunpowder, nor the students, workers, women and children who helped to build the barricades and then took part in the fighting. Crossing the piazza in front of the cathedral, Hübner was caught up in a crowd armed with batons, ‘among them sinister faces recalling Paris during a day of rioting’. The sky, echoing to a confusion of noise, ‘was the colour of lead, and a fine rain, turning later into a downpour, never stopped falling’.101
While the Milanese held the narrow streets of the historic heart, the Habsburg forces - largely Croats and Hungarians - were firmly installed in some of the major buildings and enveloped the city by holding the walls. In the first few days the fate of the insurrection - which had no plan and no overall leadership - was desperately uncertain:
The parts of the city where the insurrection made most progress were not all in communication with each other . . . beyond there were very broad streets, thinly populated and very difficult to barricade and to defend, down which the enemy’s fire could fall . . . It was calculated that all the city that first night had only three to four hundred rifles of all kinds available.102
From the Casa Vidiserti - which served as the first, impromptu headquarters of the uprising because that was where Casati, its reluctant figurehead, had taken refuge - a civic guard was hastily organised. Osio - who
, like many of the insurgents, appeared at the house to receive instructions - was made a corporal in the new force. He would eventually be put under the command of the young, democratic nobleman Luciano Manara, whose platoon fought for the next four days almost without respite. For now, one of Osio’s first duties was to guard the captive vice-governor O’Donnell, who had been transferred to the safer Casa Taverna in the Contrada de’ Bigli.103 It was there that the republicans under Cattaneo tried to seize the political initiative on 19 March, creating a four-man council of war, including Cattaneo himself and Cernuschi. For now, its main purpose was to impose some firm leadership and military direction: Cattaneo had to deploy his great powers of persuasion to dissuade the younger, hotter heads from declaring a Milanese republic then and there. How, he asked, would Lombardy then gain the support of the other Italian states, which were still ranged under monarchist regimes and whose constitutions had barely begun to see the light of day? Instead of enjoying freedom, Italy would be engulfed in civil war. This analysis was perceptive, but the establishment of the Council of War still created a rival - and republican - seat of power against Casati’s liberal, monarchist municipality.104