1848 in Central Europe: An Essay in Historical Synchronisation

1848 in Central Europe: An Essay in Historical SynchronisationAuthor(s): John A. HawgoodSource: The Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 26, No. 67 (Apr., 1948), pp. 314-328Published by: the Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London, School ofSlavonic and East European StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4203949 .

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1848 IN CENTRAL EUROPE

AN ESSAY IN HISTORICAL SYNCHRONISATION

The modest task of this contribution will be not to discuss the

ideas of the 1848 revolutions in Central Europe or to analyse the

various manifestoes and constitutions they produced, not to draw

distinctions between the aims of the various liberal and national

movements or the programme of parties and leaders?that has been

or will be done elsewhere?but simply to relate the different revolu?

tionary movements and events in the states of Germany and the

Habsburg Empire to each other in time, and to attempt to assess

their degree of immediate interdependence and influence upon each

other.

To the student of history 1848 in Central Europe is a fascinating

kaleidoscope, presenting an infinite number of different patterns and

aspects and capable of almost as many interpretations, according to how he looks at the various shapes and colours of which it is

made up?and how often he rearranges and re-classifies his material.

At the same time it is as confusing as it is fascinating, for the series

of pictures he obtains, interesting as each is for itself, seem to

bear?like the patterns seen in a kaleidoscope?no very clear-cut

relationship to each other, though the resemblances are sometimes

as obvious as they are indefinable. There are so many centres of

action and resistance, so many triangles (and quadrilaterals) of

forces, so much seems to happen in a number of different places all at once, that it is all very difficult to follow. The consequence has been that the student of 1848 in Central Europe has tended to

fall into one of three quite excusable errors : he has concentrated

on one state or province or capital, and claiming it as the centre

of the revolution, and has brought events and personalities and ideas

only into sharp focus in, or closely related to, that centre, treating

everything else as blurred and subsidiary ; or secondly, he has tried

to give due regard to all the various centres and aspects of revolution, but has over-simplified issues and over-emphasised influences and

inter-relationships, so that everything happening in 1848 in Central

Europe is made to appear to have conformed to a single master-

pattern, as if following a common blueprint; or, finally, he has

been so appalled by the richness and variety of the tapestry of

events of that year of revolutions that he has carefully cut out the

various individual figures and places, in order to study them

314



1848 IN CENTRAL EUROPE. 315

separately and in isolation, and has thrown away or ignored all

the threads which linked them together, thus losing all sense of

direction and all realisation of 1848 in Central Europe as a com?

position of very different, but, historically and emotionally, highly

interdependent events.

It is indeed extremely hard to get a real grip, or to take a true

bearing, on the slippery and heaving surface of the Central Europe of 1848 and 1849, but a simple process of historical triangulation can take one a certain way. In the Germany nominally presided over by the Confederate Diet set up in 1815, the three great centres

of action and reaction in 1848-1849 were the cities of Frankfurt-am-

Main, Vienna and Berlin?the capitals respectively of the Germanic

Confederation, of Austria and of Prussia. The mutual antagonism of these three centres tended to dominate all discussion of

" the

German Question/' and prevented either a Frankfurt-Berlin axis

against Vienna or a Berlin-Vienna axis against Frankfurt from

developing very far, whereas a Vienna-Frankfurt axis against Berlin,

or indeed (despite the link of the regency of the Archduke John)

against anything, was never even remotely possible. In the Habs-

burg Empire, Vienna shared another triangle of forces with the

capitals of Bohemia and Hungary?Prague and, after the removal

in March, 1848, from Bratislava (Pressburg), where the Hungarian Diet had up to that time met, Budapest?while, within the kingdom of Hungary itself, Budapest formed a subsidiary triangle with the

respective centres of Croat-Slovene and Transylvanian nationalism.

Another subsidiary triangle within the kingdom of Bohemia was

formed by the internal stresses of Bohemian, Moravian and Silesian

regional and sectional interests, pulling against as well as with each

other. In addition, almost immediately after Frankfurt emerged as a significant centre of political activity in 1848, it too had to

suffer competition in western Germany, too diffused and intermittent

in nature to justify the simile of yet another triangle of forces, yet

forming clearly enough around two rival centres of activity to be

a very definite embarrassment to what was being attempted in

Frankfurt itself. These two rival centres of ideological crystallisa? tion were to be found in southern Baden and in the northern Rhine

Province respectively : the one being the radical-republican move?

ment associated in particular with the names of Hecker and Struve,

which produced the risings of April, 1848, and May-July, 1849 >

and the other being the barrage of socialist and communist criticism

and denigration directed against Frankfurt from Cologne by Karl

Marx and his associates, in the columns of the Neue Rheinische



316 THE SLAVONIC REVIEW.

Zeitung which, styling itself "

an organ of democracy," first appeared at the beginning of June, 1848, and continued (except between

20 September and 12 October, 1848, when it was temporarily

suppressed) until 19 May, 1849, a few days after both Austria and

Prussia had withdrawn their representatives from the Frankfurt

Parliament and reduced that body to a farcical rump, a shadow of its

former self. Of all the main centres of revolution Berlin alone was

not subjected to strong competition in the state of which it was

the capital, for no strong resistance or secession movement developed in the recently (1815) acquired Rhineland, while the movement of

the Poles in Posnania in the direction of autonomy and against the

incorporation of Prussian Poland within the Germanic Confederation

was very rapidly checked. Although Prussia was deeply involved

against Denmark quite early in 1848 in the Schleswig-Holstein

question, this was less on her own account than as the repre? sentative of outraged German national feeling, and she was soon

to make her peace with Denmark?on terms so disadvantageous to German interests that her action widened the already existing rift between Berlin and Frankfurt into a dangerous gulf.

The Central European revolutions of 1848 can be said to have

started neither very suddenly nor at all unexpectedly. There had

been many indications in 1847 and even earlier that the so-called "

era of Metternich "

was drawing to its close, and nobody was more

aware of this than Prince Metternich himself, whose mood of pessi? mism with regard to the immediate future was growing daily more

acute. In the States of Germany, in the Habsburg Empire and

in many other parts of Europe, unrest and dissatisfaction had already been rife and growing for several years, and many new and local

causes of irritation had recently been added to the general feeling of malaise which had suffused Europe for a whole generation, and

which had only been very partially relieved by the revolutions of

the early thirties in the western and southern countries of the

continent. These revolutions had hardly touched Central Europe, but they had nevertheless given Metternich an excuse for tightening

up his "

system," through the Schlussprotokolle of 1834 an(i other

new repressive measures. In the thirties and early forties the

protests against his regime and that of his coadjutors had grad?

ually become more vociferous, but only in the second half

of the forties did action follow words on any significant scale. Up to and including 1845 he felt that his sytem was holding together, but from 1845 onward he himself experienced a growing feeling of

helplessness in the face of events and movements which he could




no longer control. He had reached the age of seventy in 1843 and

had ceased to possess the overwhelming self-confidence of his

youth and middle years. Thus, nobody was less surprised than

Metternich himself at the deluge which engulfed and swept him

away in the spring of 1848. The only thing (apart from "

a liberal

Pope ") he had not foreseen was the base ingratitude of the Habsburg

dynasty and Court he had served so faithfully for forty years when

it dismissed him overnight without thanks or regret under the by no means overwhelming pressure of a few demonstrations and

petitions on the part of the Viennese students and workers. But

the news of his dismissal on 13 March, 1848 created a great sensation

throughout Europe, where it was not fully realised that he had for

several years wielded only the shadow of his former power and

influence, either at the Court of his Emperor, or in the "

Concert "

of the Powers, great and small, which he had once dominated.

Right up to 13 March Metternich remained a great scarecrow to

liberals and local patriots, but his policy had been suffering from

creeping .paralysis for a long time. It was nevertheless the condition

of Europe?especially of Central Europe?since 1845 rather than

his own failing powers that had paralysed him as a statesman.

Frederick William IVs amnesty on his accession in 1840 had

given liberal leaders new scope and confidence throughout Germany, and it set the final seal of failure on Metternich's Schlussprotokolle of 1834, even though Frederick William IV was himself to prove a sore disappointment to these liberals and was to accept a position of subservience to Austrian and Habsburg leadership in Germany that was most gratifying to Metternich. The Prussian people did

not share their king's sentiments in this direction, but one strong tie of self-interest which did bind Austria and Prussia together in

the 1840^ was the continued unrest in Poland which was to culminate

in the rising of 1846. In face of the strongly-expressed sentiments

of the Western European powers, the action against Cracow that

had been decided upon secretly by Austria in agreement with

Prussia and Russia as long ago as 1835, was postponed until Cracow

was re-occupied by Austrian troops in 1846 in the course of suppress?

ing the Galician insurgents, and its "

free "

status extinguished. The

rising in Posnania had been effectively put down by Prussia and its

leaders brought for public trial in Berlin, but the Austrians attempt?

ing to exploit Ruthenian and Ukrainian peasant resentment against the Polish landowners and bourgeoisie who had led the Galician

revolt, found themselves with a full-scale jacquerie on their hands

?and out of hand?which alarmed them exceedingly, even though




it also wrought great havoc in the ranks (and with the property) of the insurgent Poles. The year 1846 in Galicia and Posnania was

a preview of what could have happened on a much larger scale there

had the Poles but waited until 1848 ! As it was, the Austrian and

the Prussian authorities were more or less prepared in 1848 with a

policy of temporary political concessions to the Polish autonomists

(which were quickly withdrawn a few months later with the con?

nivance of the new German Central Authority at Frankfurt), and

of more permanent economic concession to the peasants in the shape of the removal of the remnants of serfdom and feudal dues. A

recurrence in 1848 of the two-tier rising of 1846 was thus successfully neutralised step by step, and the Tsar of All the Russias, whose

armies stood ready on the borders of "

Congress "

Poland, was not

called upon to intervene?as he was in Hungary in 1849. In

Poland's history 1848 is therefore not the "

great year "

that it

is in almost every other part of Europe except the Iberian Peninsula, Britain and Russia, but a year of inglorious frustration far less

significant than either 1831 or 1863, barren as both these were of

immediate practical results. For the Poles, 1848 had gone off

half-cock in 1846 !

Magyar nationalism, less explosively but more surely than that

of Poland had been feeling its way toward an open challenge to the

rule of Vienna and of Metternich throughout the forties. In 1843 came the apparently innocuous but actually epoch-making step of

making Magyar the sole official language of the proceedings of the

ancient Hungarian Diet (where up to that time Latin had held

equal status) as the first stage in a long-term policy of Magyarisa- tion of all the peoples living under the crown of St. Stephen. The

restiveness of the Diets of Croato-Slovenia and of Transylvania under this policy was to culminate in civil war among the people of

Hungary in 1848 and 1849 an(i to contribute much to the failure

of the Magyar revolution of those years. The Magyars, too, had

conjured up forces they could not control, and had mixed their

liberalism so completely with an extreme and chauvinistic type of

nationalism that, like the Poles in 1846, they found their subject-

peoples used against them by the dynasty whose authority they

sought to nullify. But the Magyars, unlike the Poles, had not been

weakened, nor had their national strength diffused, by partition or

by the extinction of their separate political institutions and the

Habsburgs had to submit to the humiliation of letting Tsar Nicholas I

help them liquidate the Hungarian independence movement in 1849 ?a proceeding which ultimately satisfied nobody, for in 1854 he




was, in the one unforgettable phrase of his long life, to compare himself to John Sobieski as

" l'autre imbecile qui a sauve Vienne."

When Pius IX was elected Pope in 1846 Lombardy and Venetia

immediately became potential centres of fresh political disturbance

within the Habsburg Empire, for all Italy took new hope from the

appearance of this so-called "

liberal" Pope. The amnesty he

immediately issued raised as many false expectations as had that

of Frederick William IV in Prussia six years before. Even Metter?

nich, usually a good judge of men, did not discern that the Pope's liberalism was but skin deep, and sought to warn him against the

giving of too many concessions in the Papal States?concessions

which might also be demanded in Lombardy and Venetia. The

Italian federalists saw Pius IX as the future president of a united

and federated Italy into which the Habsburg possessions would

ultimately be drawn?by peaceful means or, if needs be, by war??

and Metternich sensed the danger from this direction. Nevertheless, he could not prevent the working out of a federal plan for Italy

by the Papal States in consultation with Tuscany and Piedmont-

Sardinia in October, 1847, nor was he able to check the unrest,

already stirring at both ends of Italy, which came to a head in

the rioting against the Austrian authorities in Milan at the beginning of January, 1848 (a main feature of which were demonstrations in

favour of the Pope), and in the revolution in Sicily which broke out

on 12 January and rapidly and successfully spread to the mainland

and Naples. When the pope?using the forbidden word in public for the first time, called down God's blessing upon

" Italy

" on

8 February, the writing was already upon the wall as far as Austrian

rule south of the Alps was concerned, although, owing to the back?

sliding of Pius IX, the military skill of General Radetzky and the

advent of a new Napoleon (with ideas very different from those of

his Carbonarist days) at the head of the French state, it was to take

another generation of striving before the "

barbaro dominio "

of the

foreigner was eliminated entirely from Italy. The revolutionary movement of 1848 thus broke out in Italy

quite independently of events in France and a clear two months

before it had Central Europe in its grip or the position of Metternich

had been openly assailed.

The rebuff to the ideas of Metternich in Italy was not at first

fully appreciated north of the Alps, but it had become obvious to

everybody by the end of January, 1848, that his fiat no longer held any force in, or with regard to, Switzerland. The restored Swiss confederation of 1815 had been guaranteed by the powers




at Vienna, and unlike Frederick William IV, who let Prussia's

dependency of Neuchatel remain neutral, Metternich threw all the

weight of his diplomacy against the liberal cantons and on the

side of the Sonderbund in the struggle which culminated in the

short and almost bloodless Swiss Civil War of 1847. The Catholic

cantons were unable to maintain the confederate status quo, and

were forced?like the Southern states of the U.S.A. a generation later?to enter into a closer confederation with the others. Britain,

through Palmerston, openly spurned the appeals of Metternich to

the Vienna powers to intervene in Switzerland and when Austria

did finally persuade France and Prussia to join somewhat half?

heartedly in a note of protest, this was ignored by the Swiss. A

second note, presented on 18 January, 1848, was likewise ignored, and when Russia associated herself with this action a month later, it still made no difference. Well before the end of February, 1848, it was obvious that the teeth Metternich had so carefully inserted

into the Vienna treaties were no longer capable of closing?even

upon a small country which stood right on Austria's frontiers and

which possessed virtually no armed power to resist intervention.

If events in Italy were the writing on the wall for Metternich, those

in Switzerland?much nearer to the seat of power of the Habsburg

Empire at Vienna and of the Germanic Confederation at Frankfurt

?were much more than that. They were a slap in the face which

resounded across Europe, and from which he was still reeling when

troubles much nearer home finally drove him from power. Trouble in the false paradise of the states of the Germanic Con?

federation was no new thing in 1848 and it is sometimes claimed that

the German revolution ought to be dated as commencing, not in

that year, but in 1847 at the latest. Certainly there is some support from the sequence of events for such an argument, for had not the

weavers of Prussian Silesia rioted in 1844, had not the people of

Leipzig risen against the unpopular Prince John of Saxony in 1845, had not floods and famine led to demonstrations in many parts of

Germany in 1846, and had not the Berlin potato riots of April,

1847?coinciding with Frederick William IVs belated summoning of the first Prussian United Diet (which had been promised to the

Prussian people as long ago as 1815, by Frederick William III)? all in their different ways been just as

" revolutionary

" as anything

that happened in 1848 ? The same cannot be said of the local

squabbles and riots in some of the other German states. The pro? tracted feud between the profligate Elector and his Estates in

Hessen-Kassel and the Lola Mbntez crisis in Bavaria, for instance,




have both rightly been characterised as opera bouffe, having little

real significance outside the states immediately concerned. More

significance attached to the activities of the liberal opposition in

such states as Baden, Wurttemberg and Nassau, but their strivings fall into the category of reform movements rather than of revolution, and it was only when Friedrich Hecker and his extreme radical

associates broke with the more moderate elements in South-West

Germany toward the end of 1847, and began to work for a German

radical-socialist republic, that a truly revolutionary trend may be

said to have taken shape there?and Hecker was to be no more

successful in Germany in 1848 than were the Chartists in England. Nevertheless, the more moderate liberals, and the monarchist-

nationalists, of South-West Germany had their weapons ready and

polished, even if they had not yet used them. Their annual political assemblies, culminating in that at Heppenheim in October, 1847, their scientific conferences (which also concerned themselves with

politics) of the Germanisten in 1846 and 1847, *ne foundation of the

Deutsche Zeitung at Mannheim in 1847, and many things beside,

prepared them for what was to happen in the March days of 1848, and allowed them to divert the disturbances of those days into

peaceful channels. Their preparations had, unfortunately, not

armed them against things which were to happen subsequently? such as the Prussian attitude on the Schleswig-Holstein question, the Austrian and the Czech attitude toward the idea of a greater German unity, and, lastly, Frederick William IVs quixotic stubborn?

ness. In the rough-and-tumble of the debates in the state Diets

at Karlsruhe, at Stuttgart, at Wiesbaden, and elsewhere, they had

become politicians (which, as a class, Germany almost completely lacked before their generation?though she had been rich in soldiers

and administrators), but they had not become revolutionaries.

Finding themselves, in 1848, suddenly in the midst of a real revolu?

tion?for by mid-March everything was in such a state of flux in

Central Europe that, for a time, anything could have happened, and almost everything did?they never completely recognised it

as such, and they could not adjust their more leisurely reforming

tempo, which had sufficed for the preliminary skirmishes of 1846 and 1847, to the urgent need for action and decision once the battle

of interests and ideologies was joined. Giving first priority in their

debates in the Frankfurt Parliament to the formulation of "

The

Fundamental Rights of the German People," it may be said that, in admiring its plumage, they let the phoenix of an awakening German nation escape from their grasp. By the middle of 1849




they had only the ashes of this great opportunity, and their memories, left to them.

It has been said that, broadly speaking, the movement of 1848 was

not born of the strivings of liberalism in the states of the Germanic

Confederation, but of an upsurge of national feeling in the non-

German dependencies of the Habsburg Empire and of the Prussian

state. This is an over-simplification to some extent, but it remains,

fundamentally, a true assessment. Because the sentiment of nation?

ality is much fiercer and more elemental than mere liberal convictions

or a striving after democratic institutions can ever be, the revolution

of 1848 in the Habsburg dominions tended to be much more violent

than in the purely German states. There was no civil war in

Germany comparable to that in Hungary, and no bombardment

or reduction by force of any capital city of Central Europe outside

the Habsburg Empire, like that of Prague (in June, 1848), of Vienna

(in October, 1848) or of Budapest (in January, 1849). The two

revolutions in Baden were short and on a very small scale, and

the towns of Freiburg-im-Breisgau and Rastadt, which the insurgents

briefly held, were both small, and neither was a capital or a residence-

town. The riots in Berlin (in March, 1848) and the rising in Dresden

(in May, 1849) were strictly localised, and of bloodshed in the actual

fighting there was very little. Apart from Hecker, the leading German figures of the revolution of 1848 and 1849 tended to prefer the pen or the tongue to the sword, and were essentially men of

peace. Karl Marx, the most extreme of them all, though he

fearlessly travelled from Cologne right across Germany in the midst

of the revolution to visit Vienna in August and September, 1848, was never caught out of doors in a riot and is never recorded as

having mounted a barricade. Yet his observations on the course of that revolution?in France as well as in Central Europe?have had more influence upon the attitude of posterity toward it than those of any other man who lived through it. It is those who write

the history of revolutions rather than those who man their barricades

who have the last word !

It is true that German national and nationalistic feelings were

violently enough aroused and expressed later in the course of the

revolution?as in the Polish, the South Tirol and the Schleswig- Holstein debates in the Frankfurt Parliament (in July, August and

September, 1848, respectively), and that most good German liberals

applauded without reserve the successes of Radetzky in North Italy and of Windischgratz in Bohemia and Hungary. Nevertheless, the first moves of the revolutionaries in Germany proper?and in the




German-speaking areas of Austria?were all those of liberals and

radicals against the conservatism and authoritarian rule of their

own princes. The interest shown by these liberals in the unification

of Germany as one nation took the definitely non-aggressive form of

the demand that a popularly-elected German parliament should meet

to discuss turning Germany (including as much of Austria as possible) into a constitutional federal state. Bassermann's famous motion to

that effect in the Baden Second Chamber on 12 February 1848, and

Heinrich von Gagern's resolution in the Diet of Hessen at Wiesbaden

on the 27th?and not the news of the fall of Louis Philippe in Paris

(of which Gagern was not yet aware when he spoke)?were the true

starting points of the revolution in western Germany. By the meet?

ing of the Heidelberg Assembly (5 March), and by the Vorparlament

(31 March), the Committee of Fifty (3 April) and the National

Assembly itself (18 May) at Frankfurt, the intentions of men like

Bassermann and the Gagern brothers were carried step by step nearer to realisation, all in a perfectly orderly and gentlemanly

manner?only disturbed by the secession of the extreme radicals

under Hecker and Struve from the Vorparlament, and the proclama? tion by them of a German republic in Baden (17 April), and by the

mordant and caustic criticisms being flung across the Rhine at their

efforts, by Marx and Engels and their Communist League?which formulated a

" Revolutionary Programme for Germany

" on 1 April

and began publication of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung on 1 June.

Only when a Frankfurt mob rioted against the National Assembly and murdered two of its members in September, 1848, upon hearing of its acceptance of the terms of Prussia's

" humiliating

" armistice

of Malmo with Denmark, was the orderly constitutional movement

brought face to face with the violence inherent in the revolution.

Such violence had come to the surface much earlier (though not

as early as the "March Days"), in Vienna and in Prague where

different nationalities had to live and to try to work side by side.

Palacky, in his famous letter of n April, 1848, announcing Czech

non-participation at Frankfurt, had sounded the keynote of the whole revolution?that national feelings were more fundamental than liberal convictions. But* Frankfurt did not heed his words, and proceeded to discuss

" fundamental rights

" at length before

bringing up much more pressing problems arising from the nature of the mosaic of states and nationalities living under the sovereignty of the various rulers of Germany and of the Austrian emperor. The

Austrian National Assembly?which first met in Vienna on 22 July, 1848?had not proceeded seriously to the consideration of a new




constitution for the Habsburg realm when it was removed by

Imperial rescript from the Austrian capital (after yet another out?

break of revolutionary violence there) to Kremsier (Kromeriz) in

Moravia, and though it began to reassemble at Kremsier on 15 Nov?

ember, its constitutional committee did not hold its first meeting until 13 January, 1849. It, too, began with

" fundamental rights/'

but, more rapidly than Frankfurt, proceeded to other things, and

succeeded in completing its draft constitution, embodying an

ingenious and by no means unworkable federal system of govern? ment for the Austrian Empire, by 4 March. It had finished in

two months a rather more complicated task than that for which

the Frankfurt constitutional committee (assisted by a whole sheaf

of preliminary drafts and plans) had needed more than half a year. But, alas, this haste came much too late, for on the day that the

Kremsier draft constitution was published, appeared the counter?

blast of the Stadion oktroiert constitution, whereby the Habsburg

Emperor made of his realm (including the Kingdom of Hungary) a strictly unitary state, and three days later the Austrian National

Assembly was finally dissolved by him, its work unfinished and its

constitution unadopted. It is one of the cardinal characteristics of the movement of 1848

and 1849 in Central Europe that events seemed always to run a

step ahead of, and to be a little too much for, the revolutionaries.

At first they seemed unaware of this, and when, breathlessly, they tried to catch up, it was too late. After the first three heady months

of almost unbroken success in March, April and May, 1848 were

over, the forces of reaction?with which a majority of the makers

of the revolution had always sought to compromise, instead of trying to crush them while they were still stunned by its early drive and

vigour?soon gathered enough courage and coherence to counter?

attack the revolution, before its leaders had even half done their

work. That the revolution, everywhere, was a race against time

only its sworn adversaries seemed to realise.

Thus, even before the German and Prussian National Assemblies

first met (on 18 and 22 May, 1848, respectively), the Polish revolt

in Posnania had been crushed by the Prussian government without

effective protest (leave alone intervention) from anywhere else in

Central Europe. Even before the great Slav Congress (which assembled on 2 June) had half-completed its deliberations in Prague, or the promised Austrian National Assembly had even met in

Vienna, the radical revolutionary movement in the Bohemian capital was crushed by Windischgratz, when he took the city on 17 June.




Even before Heinrich von Gagern, as President of the German

National Assembly, had announced on 24 June, the "

bold stroke "

of setting up a Central German Government in Frankfurt the sister

revolution in France, which had provided so much encouragement to all Germans, had run into the reaction of

" the June days,"

with the announcement of the dissolution of the National Workshops, from which (as from the subsequent bloodshed in the streets of Paris) neither it nor the European revolutionary movement as a whole

was ever to recover. Even before the Austrian "

Emancipation Act" could be introduced (26 July) or passed (8 September) by the

Vienna Reichstag, Radetzky had been victorious in North Italy at

Custozza (25 July)?he reoccupied Milan on August 6?and Prussia

had called off the war with Denmark in the Armistice of Malmo

(2 July). It had been stated already that the revolution in Germany never recovered from the Frankfurt Parliament's loss of prestige when, after its acceptance of the unpalatable terms of this armistice, the people of Frankfurt rioted against it and lynched two of its

members (18 September). In a similar fashion, the revolution in

the Habsburg Empire suffered a mortal blow when the people of

Budapest and Vienna simultaneously took matters into their own

hands, and, disregarding' the more peaceful overtures and negotia? tions of their elected parliamentary representatives, respectively murdered Count Lamberg (the Imperial plenipotentiary) on

28 September, and Count Latour (the Austrian War Minister) on

6 October. From that time onward the princes and rulers of Central

Europe were no longer prepared to negotiate or compromise with

the revolution?even to gain time?and the mildest of reformers were

classed by them along with the most bloodthirsty mob leaders.

The appointment of Schwarzenberg as Austrian chief minister on

21 November was the symbol of this new stiffening, just as had

been that of Count Brandenburg to a similar position in Prussia

at the end of October. The Hungarian Parliament was dissolved

by the Emperor on 3 October and the Austrian banished to Kremsier

on the 22nd ; and although no disturbances comparable to those of

Vienna and Budapest occurred in Berlin in the autumn, Frederick

William IV and Count Brandenburg took the precaution of dissolving the Prussian National Assembly on 5 December, proclaiming on the

same day an oktroiert constitution of their own. On 13 December

Schwarzenberg, acting in the name of the young Emperor Francis

Joseph (who had ascended the Habsburg throne on 6 December),

finally rejected the proposal from Frankfurt that Austria should

accept a place in a Greater German federation, and thus snapped




the somewhat tenuous link between constitutional planning in Ger?

many and in Austria. Windischgratz had already offered a more

brutal affront to the Frankfurt Parliament by summarily executing

(on 9 November) one of its members, Robert Blum, who had come

to Vienna in October as a delegate of the left-wing parties at Frank?

furt, though not as an official representative of the Assembly as

such. Finally, on 20 December occurred a very spectacular demon?

stration of the fact that the whole movement of 1848 in Europe

had, as a revolution, now spent its force, for Louis Napoleon was

elected President of the Second French Republic?by universal

manhood suffrage !

The year 1849 witnessed an almost unbroken series of fresh

disasters for the revolution in Central Europe : Budapest fell to

Windischgratz on 5 January ; the Frankfurt Parliament adopted the principle of Prussian leadership for a United Germany on

13 January?only to have Frederick William IV reject the German

crown offered him on 28 March, although he took until 15 May to make his decision public and irrevocable ; meanwhile, in the

Habsburg lands the Kremsier Assembly had been dissolved (7 March) and the revolt in North Italy finally crushed by Radetzky at Novara

(23 March). Kossuth's "

deposition" of the Habsburg dynasty in

Hungary and his declaration of his country's independence, with

himself as Governor (on 14 April), was by that time little more than a

gesture, although the Magyars continued the forlorn fight from their

substitute capital of Debreczen until the Tsar Nicholas had inter? vened against them and they were forced to capitulate at Arad

(12 August) after their defeat at Vilagos. Kossuth thereupon fled to Turkey, and into lifelong exile.

In the Germany of the former confederation there was also by that time little left of the revolution to crush. The Frankfurt Parlia?

ment, a rump of which (after the withdrawal of the Austrian and

the Prussian delegates by their governments on 5 and 14 May

respectively, and the secession of the "

Gagernites "

on (28 May), had adjourned to Stuttgart on 7 June, was chased out of its assembly hall?and out of existence?by the King of Wurttemberg's soldiers on the 18th?just thirteen months after it had first met amid such

high hopes in the Paulskirche at Frankfurt-am-Main. By the end of the same month the German princes had firmly taken the question of a future constitution for Germany back out of the hands of the

people and their elected representatives, and, in the League of the Three Kings and the Gotha Assembly (25 and 26 June) were trying to propound fresh solutions of their own to the German problem.




In July, 1849 (when Rome fell to the French and the short-lived

Roman Republic of Mazzini and Garibaldi was extinguished), came

the fiasco of the Erfurt "

Union "

Parliament?a pale afterglow of

the constitutional ideas of the majority at Frankfurt?and the last

capitulation of the Baden republicans at Rastadt. In August, not

only did the Hungarian revolutionary army surrender at Arad, but

so also did Venice, the last remaining pocket of resistance to

Radetzky in North Italy. In the Papal States at the same time

the Pope's temporal power was restored, backed by French and

Austrian guns. The elderly Archduke John of Austria, a persistent and still

substantial ghost of the great Central European revolution of 1848,

lingered on in office as Imperial Regent and head of the already

disintegrated Frankfurt Central Government until 20 December,

1849, when even he resigned. In June, 1848, he had accepted, amid high hopes on all sides, the Regency both over the Habsburg realm (while the Emperor Ferdinand skulked at Innsbruck) and

over the new Germany being created?it was hoped?at Frankfurt.

In his person he seemed to form a firm bridge between the two

Germanies and between these and the non-German nationalities of

Central Europe. The events of the eighteen months that followed

saw all the hopes of this ambitious prince (and of many better

democrats and liberals than he ever was) dashed to the ground, and

trampled upon by the forces of reaction.

The restoration of the old Confederation of 1815 at the end

of 1850, at the Convention of Olmutz (Olomouc) came as a not

unexpected climax to all this. Prussia, humiliated, had to turn

to find a different way of securing for herself the recognised leader?

ship of Germany?a way which would unify Germany, and exclude

the Habsburg Empire from it, not by the method of speechifying and majorities, but by blood and iron. Yet, though Prussia emerged from the years of revolution with less prestige than her rival, she

nevertheless now possessed one great advantage over Austria. She

remained a constitutional state (even if it was with the oktroiert

constitution of 1849, watered down again in 1850, with its illiberal

three-class franchise), whereas Austria, after 1 January, 1851, did

not, even in name?for on that date Francis Joseph cancelled the

unitary and makeshift constitution of Stadion (proclaimed on

4 March, 1849, to smother the Kremsier draft constitution at birth, but never put into force) and his empire returned to its old autocratic

pattern that was by now so completely out of tune with the times.

The liberal Deutsche Zeitung, of Mannheim, had written of Austria




on 30 March, 1848 : "

Die Staat, die dennoch immer am weitesten zuriick

ist, hann nicht unser Fuhrer w er den," and this was even more true

in 1851 than in 1848. Prussia and Frankfurt took the lead in the

revolutionary movement away from Austria during the March days ; she only took it over again in the period of reaction which followed

the revolution, just as she had done in the era of Metternich which

had preceded it. This was a sinister reputation for any state to

acquire ! Not only did Austria show herself by her history in 1848 and 1849 incapable of leadership in Germany, but incapable also of

putting her own house in order or of solving her nationalities problem, under the Habsburg dynasty, as what has been called a

" supra?

national state." From that time onward she was marked out for

destruction as a great power, and the dynasty which had ruled over

her for so long was doomed. Eighteen-forty-eight had been a last

chance for Austria to develop into a federation of free peoples and

of Germany to unify herself as a liberal and democratic state. That

this chance was lost or thrown away accounts largely for the disasters

both of 1914-1919 and of 1933-1945.

John A. Hawgood.

University of Birmingham.

February, 1948.



Documents

1848 in Central Europe: An Essay in Historical Synchronisation