1848 (21 page)

Poles and Germans were clearly on a collision course. At first the now thoroughly alarmed Frederick William sought to negotiate with the Poles, sending General Wilhelm von Willisen to Poznań early in April in an attempt to defuse the tension. Yet conservatives close to the King had persuaded him to reinforce General von Colomb, the Prussian military commander in the region, whose men soon outnumbered Mierosławski's by two to one, although ten thousand of the Prussians were civilians armed only with hunting rifles and scythes. Willisen concluded an agreement with the Poles on 11 April, but by then it was too late. On 14 April the King made it clear that autonomy would be granted only to the ‘purely Polish' eastern districts of Poznania. Some cool Polish heads accepted that abandoning their claim to some predominantly German, western areas, albeit with large Polish minorities, was a compromise worth making, but the National Committee itself was adamantly opposed to any such partition. On 19 April Colomb unleashed his army. Mierosławski's volunteers fought a skilful defensive action, holding off Colomb's troops in one action on 29 April before two greater battles, the first the following day, in which the Poles managed to rout the Prussians, and the next on 2 May, when each side mauled the other to a standstill. Mierosławski was defeated only when his troops were caught in the open by Prussian artillery and pulverised. The last detachments surrendered on 9 May and the National Committee disbanded. Mierosławski himself was captured and, having tasting freedom for a mere fifty-one days, was locked up in Poznań's fortress.

In Frankfurt the early German cosmopolitan idealism had evaporated: in a new resolution, the Committee of Fifty still spoke piously of restoring Poland, but only if this did not harm German interests in any way.
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When the German National Assembly discussed Poznania on 24-7 July 1848, it voted to offer the Poles the ‘Duchy of Gnesen', a mere third of the original grand duchy, with only a quarter of its population. In a speech described by Lewis Namier as the ‘reveille of German nationalism', Wilhelm Jordan asked whether ‘half a million Germans' were to live under the rule of ‘a nation of lesser cultural content than themselves'? Darker still, he added that ‘the preponderance of the German race over most Slav races . . . is a fact'. The mere existence of a people was not enough to guarantee its independence: it had to have ‘the force to assert itself as a State among the others'. One of the few voices to object belonged to a Silesian Pole, Jan Janiszewski, who spat back that ‘culture which withholds freedom . . . is more hateful and despicable than barbarism'.
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Robert Blum, one of the wisest and most eloquent of the German radicals, shook his shaggy mane and remarked sadly on ‘the inordinate taste for conquest shown by our young and uncertain freedom'.
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The other spiky thistle that German nationalists had to grasp was how far Austria should be included in the new Reich. The issue was hotly debated throughout 1848-9 and was not finally resolved until Otto von Bismarck drove Austria out of Germany with Prussian blood and iron in 1866. In 1848, however, the Viennese revolutionaries fully expected to be part of the united Germany. In the night of 1-2 April, a group of students clambered up the tower of Saint Stephen's Cathedral and unfurled a huge red-black-gold German banner. The American diplomat in Vienna, William Stiles, saw that

 

Even the beloved Emperor Ferdinand was spotted gleefully waving a German tricolour on a balcony of the Hofburg. Still, the Hungarian nobleman (of German origin) Count Charles Leiningen-Westerburg noticed that some Viennese hedged their bets, flying the German, Austrian and imperial banners at the same time, so that, ‘as required, they can then easily remove the superfluous ones and join in the triumph of the victorious idea'.
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In fact, the inclusion of Austria in the united Germany would present several intractable problems. Not all - Protestant, economically liberal - northern Germans wanted a Germany to include conservative, Catholic, protectionist Austria. Those who sought to exclude Austria, like Heinrich von Gagern, therefore proposed a ‘smaller German' (
Kleindeutsch
) solution. Meanwhile, there were plenty of loyal Austrian monarchists and southern German Catholics who had no desire to see Austria reduced to the status of a mere southern province of a united Germany, or to see the new state dominated by Protestant Prussia. While they still wanted Austria to be included, they often envisaged a much looser confederation, in which the political structures of the existing states as well as the religious beliefs and economic interests of their subjects would be protected. In proposing to include Austria - the ‘greater German' (
Grossdeutsch
) solution - the conservatives were joined by radicals, although they envisaged a democratic, unitary republic of all Germans. Yet the
Grossdeutsch
idea had a major problem of its own: would it involve tearing the German-speaking parts of Austria out of the Habsburg Empire, which would lead to its break-up; or should it bring Austria into Germany along with the entire multi-ethnic empire, creating some sort of federal super-state in Central Europe? What, in other words, would become of the other nationalities of the polyglot monarchy?

This issue was thrust firmly into the limelight in the political conflict between the Germans and the Czechs in the Austrian Empire. In Bohemia, the two ethnic groups initially basked in the glow of revolutionary fraternity. The first resistance to the Czech national movement came not from the Germans, but from the reformed Moravian Diet, which, though it contained both Czechs and Germans, voted against union with Bohemia out of provincial patriotism. This was a heavy blow to one of the cardinal aspirations of Czech nationalists: the unification of the ancient Czech crown lands of Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia. In Prague, meanwhile, Czechs and Germans initially joined together in supporting the Saint Václav Committee, which became Bohemia's informal government and the moral centre of the Czech revolution, since Austrian officialdom had been discredited. Rudolf Stadion tried to create an alternative, conservative seat of power by appointing his own commission early in April from among the worthies of Prague, both Czech and German, including the moderate liberal historian Frantíšek Palacký and some members of the Saint Václav Committee, but on 10 April it was subsumed by the latter. Three days later Stadion, conservative servant of the Habsburg monarchy that he was, was rather stunned to be chairing a body that now bore the title of ‘National Committee'. The new effective government - in which both Czechs and Germans served - prepared for the elections of the Bohemian Diet, called by virtue of the imperial concessions of 8 April. On the streets, the liberal Karel Havlíček's newspaper had put a fly in the soothing ointment of Czech-German cooperation by calling on all Czechs to remove German signs from their workplaces, but protests forced him to backtrack with a cringing apology.
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The Czech-German conflict stirred because of a surge of opposite currents: German nationalism and Austro-Slavism. The clash was elegantly summarised by a famous exchange between Frankfurt's Committee of Fifty and Palacký. On 6 April the former invited the great Czech historian to join them: German nationalists assumed that the Czech lands, since they had been under both the Holy Roman Empire and the Confederation, would also be part of the united Germany. The social and cultural elites spoke the language: even Palacký's great works were written in German. Yet, on 11 April, the historian stunned the committee by rejecting its invitation in a published letter.
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He began with a statement of Czech national identity: ‘I am a Czech of Slavonic blood . . . That nation is a small one, it is true, but from time immemorial it has been a nation of itself and based upon its own strength.' Palacký's statement did not come out of the blue - it was rather a feisty product of the accelerating Czech cultural renaissance of the nineteenth century
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- but it thrust the idea of Czech nationality on to the wider European table for the first time. Yet, while Palacký countered German nationalism with the Czech version, neither he nor any other Czech patriots sought full independence from Austria. The historian explained that the unity of the entire German people (which would include the Germans of Austria) would tear apart the Habsburg Empire. This would leave the smaller nations of Central and Eastern Europe vulnerable to the leviathan to the east - Russia - which ‘has become, and has for a long time been, a menace to its neighbours'. The Czechs and other peoples of Central Europe were sheltered from Russian expansionism by the protective shell of the Austrian Empire: ‘Assuredly, if the Austrian State had not existed for ages, it would have been . . . in the interests of Europe and indeed of humanity to endeavour to create it as soon as possible.' Palacký was therefore not only offering a rebuff to German nationalism in general but to the
Grossdeutsch
idea in particular.

His Austro-Slavism - the notion that the Slavonic peoples of Central Europe could find freedom and security within the Austrian Empire - so pleased the imperial government in Vienna that it offered him the position of education minister (which he declined). Yet Austro-Slavism assumed that the Habsburg monarchy would be reformed along lines that would give equal rights and status to all the peoples of the empire - turning it into a multinational federation. It remained to be seen whether this faith was well placed. Meanwhile, the Austro-Germans were downright hostile towards such an idea. They had long seen themselves as the
Staatsvolk
- the people who by virtue of their social position and their language, which they regarded as the
Staatssprache
, would always dominate the Austrian state.
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This dominance would be challenged by the demands of other nationalities for official recognition of their own languages, equal access to government posts and some degree of political autonomy.

In the Czech lands in early April, some of the Germans, who felt especially threatened because there they were a minority, had already reacted by founding a German League ‘for the Preservation of Their Nationality', which opposed many of the demands of the Czech revolution and called for the absorption of the Czech lands into ‘Greater Germany'. Palacký's letter now decisively broke open a chasm between the two nationalities and by the end of the month the League boasted a membership of eight hundred, which distributed propaganda in support of the Frankfurt parliament. Germans began to desert the National Committee, leaving it to become a voice of Czech nationalism. Mutual animosity became ever shriller: ‘Forward against the German, forward against the murderer, against Frankfurt,' screamed the chorus of one popular Czech song, while newspapers derided the Germans as stupid and murderous and their language as babbling.
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The Germans responded in kind. In Frankfurt the Committee of Fifty listened to Arnold Schilling declare on 3 May, ‘I believe that since Bohemia cannot be held in the German Confederation by conviction, she must be bound to Germany by the sword's edge'.
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When the Habsburgs were finally able to restore their authority in Prague in June, they would be applauded by German nationalists of almost every political persuasion.

Palacký's protests of Slav loyalty and his rebuff to German nationalism would ultimately illuminate the path by which the Habsburg monarchy would crush the revolution and reassert its authority. For every German, Italian and Magyar nationalist threatening the integrity of the empire there was a Slav or Romanian who felt their ethnic identity was endangered by the triumphant nationalism among the Germans or Hungarians. This allowed the Habsburgs to play off the national minorities against one another. Yet this was much more than a cynical policy of ‘divide and rule': it rested on the genuine loyalty of Habsburg subjects who felt that their security and interests were best defended by the empire.
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If this was true of the Czechs, it was equally true of other national groups who felt the sting of Magyar or German nationalism. In the process, however, the Springtime of Peoples in the Habsburg Empire rapidly fell into the abyss of civil war.

The recovery of imperial power in 1848 was all the more striking because in the spring the Emperor's new ministers had been powerless against the surging revolutionary tumult in Vienna. The backbone of the radical movement was provided by the students of the Academic Legion, middle-class intellectuals, the urban lower middle classes (such as master-craftsmen, retailers and clerks) and suburban workers who tended to follow the students' political lead. Its leadership was assumed by the Central Committee, originally established to liaise between the Academic Legion and the more moderate National Guard. The radicals split definitively with the liberals when the Emperor issued his promised constitution on 25 April. Liberals were keen to crystallise what they had gained, so were happy with the constitution as it empowered them through a system of indirect elections for a parliament due to meet on 26 June. The Emperor kept important powers, offsetting what were regarded as the pitfalls of democracy. The constitution was greeted joyfully by most Viennese, but it was a bitter disappointment for the radicals. It had been ‘granted' by the Emperor, who retained an absolute veto, control over war and peace and the right to make all official appointments. Moreover, there was no promise of universal male suffrage, for the manner of elections to the new parliament was yet to be decided by the government. The students' response was to take to the streets in a traditional form of protest. Over two successive nights on 2-3 May, the Emperor's new first minister, Count Ficquelmont, was ‘serenaded' by a powerful crowd of Academic Legionnaires, National Guards and workers, who made an unholy racket outside his home, singing songs at the top of their lungs, hurling abuse up at his windows and demanding his resignation before invading the Foreign Ministry, where a deputation threatened, cajoled and browbeat the startled Ficquelmont into promising to resign within twenty-four hours. On 4 May the minister-president was as good as his forcibly extracted word and he handed over the poisoned chalice to Baron Franz Pillersdorf. It was a resounding victory for the students, and illustrated ‘the remarkable fact that a government, which a few weeks before had been . . . one of the most powerful in Europe . . . had become so weak as to be unable to protect the highest officer of state from the insults and indignities of the rabble'.
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