1848 (35 page)

Ultimately though, the deputies had no chance of taking shelter in an ivory tower. While they tried to hammer out a constitution for a united Germany, they were confronted by an international crisis that would rebound severely on the emergent liberal order. In May, under diplomatic pressure from Britain, Russia and Sweden, the war in Schleswig-Holstein came to an uneasy truce. The Prussians were forced to sign an armistice at Malmö on 26 August. By this agreement, the German and Danish troops alike were to withdraw and the German provisional government in Schleswig was to be disbanded and replaced by a joint Danish-Prussian administration. There was an immediate storm of protest across Germany. It was also clear that the provisional central government appointed by the parliament, under the popular Habsburg Archduke John, was powerless to stop Prussia from signing the armistice, regardless of public opinion. Real power obviously still lay with the old order, not with the brave new world of a federal Germany. One of the right-wing liberals, the historian Friedrich Dahlmann, exploded in parliament, exclaiming that the effect of the armistice had been ‘to nip the new German authority in the bud'. In bowing to international pressure, he warned, ‘then, gentlemen, you will
never
again be able to hold up your proud heads! Consider these my words:
never
!'
⁸⁶
At the other end of the political spectrum, Robert Blum warned prophetically that to ratify the armistice would be to spark an insurrection. The delegates, quaking indignantly with wounded national pride and/or trembling from fear of a left-wing uprising, voted to reject the armistice. Archduke John's liberal ministers, who understood that this vote was tantamount to a decision to continue the war against Denmark - and possibly invite British and Russian intervention - resigned. These dangerous implications finally sunk in on 16 September, and the parliament reversed its vote (even Dahlmann had changed his mind). Prussian power was simply too strong, and the possibility of European war too great, for the parliament to wish to provoke either.

In Frankfurt, this volte-face produced a tragedy. The following day, a public meeting of twelve thousand people listened to calls from members of the extreme left of the parliament for a second revolution. It was agreed that there would be a mass protest, declaring that those who had voted for the armistice were traitors to Germany and proclaiming their mandates revoked. Archduke John's new first minister, the sharp Austrian Anton von Schmerling, moved quickly to confront this challenge. He called for troops from Hesse-Darmstadt, Austria and Prussia to protect the parliament. Two thousand soldiers were marched in early the following morning. On 18 September, the great crowd swarmed on the square around the Saint Paul's Church, and some of the demonstrators found an unguarded back entrance to the parliament. As fists and axes smashed through the door, Heinrich von Gagern stepped forward and thundered: ‘I declare every transgressor against this holy place a traitor to the Fatherland!'
⁸⁷
His courage stopped the assailants cold and they withdrew immediately. The rest of the session continued behind the barred doors of the church. The square outside was swept by the troops and barricades that had been thrown up in the city centre were stormed by Hessians. Gagern's children, being spirited out of the city in a carriage, could hear the rattle of musket fire in the distance. In all, sixty insurgents and soldiers were killed - as were two conservative delegates to the parliament, Hans von Auerswald and Felix Lichnowsky. They were out investigating the insurrection when they were trapped by a posse of rebels, who killed Auerswald on the spot. Lichnowsky, one of the more outspoken and therefore hated conservative deputies, was slaughtered in a more agonising and barbaric way: his bones were shattered with repeated blows, the word ‘Outlaw' was posted around his neck, then his broken body was tied to a tree and used for target practice.

The shockwaves were felt across Germany, but it was in long-suffering Baden that, on 22 September, the incorrigible Gustav Struve marched across the frontier from Switzerland with other republicans, including the young Wilhelm Liebknecht, later a leader of the German Social Democratic Party. They seized the town hall of Lörrach, proclaimed a German republic, promised social reforms and started to confiscate the property of known monarchists, alarming liberals and conservatives alike. They also succeeded in gathering an army - numbering ten thousand by Struve's probably overoptimistic estimate - but it was poorly equipped, with only two casks of gunpowder, one of which turned out to be useless. So when they were met by the Grand Duke's troops at Staufen four days later, they were crushed in just two hours of fighting. Struve narrowly escaped being torn apart by an angry, loyalist crowd before he and his wife (an active democrat in her own right) were arrested.

The September crisis set the German revolution on an almost irrevocably conservative course. Frankfurt was now under martial law. Carl Schurz passed through the city shortly after the bloody events:

 

It was clearer than ever that real power lay not with the Frankfurt parliament and the liberal administration but with the separate states - and the monarchs - who could still command the obedience of their armed forces.

Meanwhile, the revolution was tearing itself apart. As in France, German politics became increasingly polarised as liberals were more willing to look to authoritarian solutions for the defence of law and order. On the left, the reasonable, patient Blum despairingly wrote to his wife that, were it not for the disgrace of abandoning his fellow democrats, he would be inclined to withdraw from politics altogether and watch events unfold from a comfortable distance. Schurz commented that the right-wing deputies sat in parliament ‘with smiles of triumph on their lips'.
⁸⁹
Although some of the radicals had been willing to assume leadership of the Frankfurt uprising, the majority of their colleagues had tried to persuade the crowd to disperse and, once the fighting started, worked hard to find a peaceful settlement. It availed them little: like their French counterparts, they were blamed for the violence. Fanny Lewald, visiting Frankfurt and watching the proceedings of the parliament a month later, noted the strength of ‘party hatred', and she was saddened by how the politicians ‘are without faith, how they call the others bad and irresponsible and deny each other any political insight'. She also noted that conservatives coldly spoke of the ‘bullet solution'.
⁹⁰
Clotilde Koch-Gontard, a daughter of one of Frankfurt's leading industrialists, who hosted salons and dinners for the moderate liberal deputies, wrote on 23 September that she was disillusioned with the revolution. She condemned the liberals and conservatives for their ‘German stubbornness and pettiness', but was convinced that the left was looking for trouble: ‘The armistice was only a pretext. Even without it, civil war would have broken out, and we have it, so much must be clear to us. This Left cannot justify its sins against Germany.'
⁹¹

Social fear also played into conservative hands in Austria. After the flight of the royal family on 17 May and the backlash of ordinary Austrians against the Viennese radicals, Baron Pillersdorf 's government sensed that it was time to strike back. A new press law punished with imprisonment treasonable writings, insults against the Emperor and attempts to corrupt public morals. On 25 May the government went so far as to strike at the mainspring of Viennese radicalism, the student movement, by ordering the disbandment of the Academic Legion and the closure of the university. But the authorities had overplayed their hand, because they were still too weak to confront the inevitable resistance from the students and their working-class allies. The very next day students protested and workers armed with machine tools marched into the city centre. One hundred and sixty barricades were constructed, using weighty granite paving-stones heaved out of the roads. They rose ‘as high, in many places, as the second stories of the houses . . . over them waved either the red or black flag, those certain emblems of blood and death'.
⁹²
Yet there was no fighting: the government, well aware of its inability to assert its authority, yielded on 27 May, promising to entrust the security of the city to the Academic Legion and the National Guard, under the command of the ‘Security Committee', which had been created after the Emperor's flight.

The insurrection of 26 May, such as it was, was to be the high tide of the revolution in Vienna. Events had moved too far and too fast for most Austrians. As the American diplomat William Stiles put it, the moderate supporters of the constitution were fighting a ‘double conflict . . . first, that of the people against the old form of government; secondly, that of the new form of government against the Radicals, or enemies of all government'. He was left in little doubt that, when faced with a choice between the old system and more upheaval, they would choose the former as the lesser of two evils.
⁹³
Many Austrians were alarmed by radical militancy in support of German unity, which threatened to reduce the once-mighty Austrian monarchy to a mere appendage of a greater Germany, which, moreover, was potentially a republican state and, even worse, would be dominated by the hated Prussians.
⁹⁴
There were social anxieties as well, which were intensified by an acute consciousness of the poverty borne by the Austrian workers.

Over the summer of 1848 the economic hardship worsened in Vienna, aggravated by the political uncertainty and a downturn in demand caused by a steady flight of the well-to-do from the city. Viennese workers initially demonstrated little political consciousness, retaining faith in the students to whom they often looked for help in their disputes with employers. Radical journalists, however, soon started making an impact with appeals for proletarian unity, verbal attacks on the rich and demands that the government do more for the poor. Workers had been excluded from the new liberal order in two important ways: first, they were denied membership of the National Guard, which therefore remained essentially a middle-class militia dedicated to protecting property; second, until the
Stürmpetition
of 15 May, the suffrage had been denied to those who earned a daily or weekly wage, servants and those who took charity.

Some effort had been made to tackle the distress of the city's sixteen thousand workers. In the spring the government had lowered, or abolished altogether, taxes on certain types of food; and it had established public works, including, among other projects, shoring up the river banks along the Danube. This was not enough to help the growing army of unemployed who were still suffering in the economic crisis. Over the summer, calls for lower rents, or for no rents at all, were heard at public meetings, while for the first time Viennese workers paraded in the streets, forcing some employers to grant ten-hour days and pay increases. The tailors held an assembly to demand that women (who undercut men's wages) be banned from making dresses and mantillas. The workshop of a French lady milliner was ransacked. To deal with this working-class militancy, the Security Committee set up a labour committee that was charged with providing food and further public works for the unemployed, while preventing non-Viennese from drifting into the city. Some workers were given the task of repairing the machines that had been wrecked and rebuilding the factories that had been torched during the March days. Yet, despite all efforts to stop them, impoverished outsiders desperate for help continued to trickle into the city, swelling those working on the public projects into a veritable army. The government began to fret over this potential threat to order and the cost to an already dangerously depleted city budget.

The elections to the Austrian parliament were held in this atmosphere of political tension and social fear. Consequently, voters returned a majority of conservatives or moderate liberals, although there was also a significant minority of left-wingers who would become important later. For now, however, the centrist ‘law and order' group, which backed the ministry and the constitution of 25 April, dominated. The parliament opened on 22 July and, by then, a new cabinet had been appointed under Baron Johann Philipp von Wessenberg, a former servant of the old regime who could - when the time came - orientate policy on to a more monarchist tack. Among his ministers was the repentant liberal lawyer Alexander Bach, whose abhorrence of the instability and violence of the revolution was fast pushing him towards a conversion to conservatism. As the summer blazed on, the government's grip on the situation grew tighter, with the crushing of the Czech revolution in June, the overpowering of the Piedmontese in northern Italy in July and the slow but sure gathering of Croatian forces against the Hungarians. By August, the ministry was looking to reassert imperial power closer to home.

For now, however, Vienna was feverish. Count Alexander von Hübner had been released from his imprisonment in Milan and had made his way back to Austria, taking in a leisurely holiday in Switzerland
en route
. When he finally arrived home, he was stunned by the tableau presented by the imperial capital: