1848 (37 page)

It is clear from all this that the congress could not possibly have been at the centre of a great conspiracy to dismember the Habsburg monarchy. When fighting broke out in Prague on 12 June, Austrian soldiers stormed the Czech National Museum, where the congress was meeting, fully expecting to find the Slavic hordes armed to the teeth. All they discovered was the museum's meek librarian. This did not stop Windischgrätz from arresting some of the leading delegates and expelling them from the city. Palacký and the other organisers were faced with little choice but to suspend the congress indefinitely. The historian himself, though plainly a moderate, was now kept under close watch by the police, while (with more reason) Havlíček was arrested on 3 July and the offices of his newspaper,
Národní Noviny
, were raided for evidence of the ‘conspiracy'. The incarceration of this popular Czech journalist merely ensured that he was elected to the Austrian parliament in five different constituencies. Although Windischgrätz's final report predictably accused the congress of treason, it prompted a strong protest from the Slav members of the parliament, including Palacký. The sham investigation became an embarrassment to the imperial government, and most of those arrested in the wake of the June days had been amnestied by mid-September.
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The uprising had sharpened ethnic divisions. It is true that there were plenty of Czechs who were alarmed at the prospect of a working-class rebellion in Prague: those National Guard units that suppressed the June insurrection were not all German-speaking companies, although they were predominantly so. For some Czechs, therefore, anxieties over social revolution were more pressing than any national claims they may have had. Yet it is also true that most of the German citizens of Prague, many of whom had no love of Windischgrätz, either stood aside from the uprising or took an active role in suppressing it. Consequently, the insurgents overwhelmingly comprised Czech students and workers, so that, for the German-speaking elites, the social strife coincided with ethnic friction. Beyond Bohemia, German nationalists had little doubt: the fighting in Prague was a conflict of nationalities. The radical
Volksfreund
spat venomously at ‘the insane or corrupt Slav party of the Czechs, which . . . has designs on turning . . . Austria into a Slav empire, at the expense of the Germans and Hungarians'. It short-sightedly saluted the marshal's victory as ‘a joyful event. A victory for German concerns in Bohemia and in the monarchy can never be a misfortune, for the Germans bring humanity and freedom to the conquered.'
¹¹⁰
In Frankfurt a parliamentary committee on 1 July agreed that the Prague uprising was part of a grand design to create a Slav empire and proposed that German forces be sent to Bohemia to support Windischgrätz. Only Engels was perceptive enough to realise that the Czechs were neither the instruments of Russia nor the tools of anti-German reaction.

In Hungary social tensions coincided powerfully with ethnic divisions, but Hungarian industrial workers were less numerous than their Czech counterparts, since the country was not so heavily industrialised as Bohemia and Moravia. Consequently, ethnic conflicts occurred most seriously in the Hungarian countryside, where there were tense relations between the predominantly Magyar landlords and the peasantry, who were frequently of a different ethnic group. Yet the workers of Hungary did offer a potential source of strength to the urban-based radical movement. In Budapest, in a population of 160,000 there were approximately 10,000 day labourers, 8,000 apprentices and a mere 1,000 factory workers. Moreover, they tended to be Germans and Czechs, which isolated them from the bulk of the Magyar population. Their demands, from mid-March to July, included those familiar to their counterparts elsewhere in Europe: better conditions, the reduction of working hours, higher rates for their goods and the legalisation of unions. Workers in Budapest and miners in northern Hungary agitated for these changes, and the liberal government made some concessions: it could do so with few misgivings primarily because, as Magyar nobles, its ministers had little in common with the usually German, middle-class employers. None the less, strikes, which arose in Budapest for higher wages and better conditions in April and May, were treated as a threat to public order and were broken with force.

Yet the radicals failed to mobilise the workers because they offered little in the way of a social programme. Hungarian radicalism rested on the Twelve Points proclaimed in the March days, so, except for peasant emancipation, its goals were primarily political. Petőfi wrote a few lines of sympathy for the plight of the patriotic poor, but poetry (no matter how well written) did nothing to address their material needs. However, the workers themselves had not yet drunk from the well of new, socialist ideas. When four thousand apprentices marched on the Café Pilvax, the beating heart of Budapest radicalism, to ask Pál Vasvári, Petőfi and others to be their spokesmen, the young artisans did not demand, in unison with their French and Czech counterparts, the ‘organisation of work'; rather, they wanted to ‘burn the tyrannical guild laws'. Dramatic as this rhetoric sounds, it was merely a demand to make entry into the guilds easier - and without paying high fees. Vasvári recognised the insurrectionary potential of the artisans, but even he suggested that they should take their requests to the government. The social gulf was simply far too great between the workers and the radicals, most of whose leadership had sprung from the Magyar gentry. Strikes went unreported in the main radical organ,
March Fifteenth
, and when, on 22 April, posters appeared demanding fixed food prices, the distribution of church land among the peasants and the abolition of the guilds, the radicals took fright and dismissed these dangerous notions at a public meeting.
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The core support for Hungarian radicalism therefore remained the students, intellectuals, professionals, government officials and clerks concerned about the continuing dominance of the landed elites in Hungarian politics. This was far too narrow a base for the radicals to score any resounding successes in the elections held between late June and mid-July. Most enfranchised Hungarians voted for the familiar political elites of the country: some 72 per cent of the new parliament were landed nobles, leaving
March Fifteenth
to declare sulkily that ‘the people' wanted ‘to serve the noble gentlemen'. The vast majority of the rest were drawn from the urban middle classes, mostly lawyers and government officials. The results are partially explained by the stubborn persistence of deference, but the system was also stacked in favour of the aristocracy, since the rural electoral committees were almost universally filled with estate owners, while in the towns they consisted primarily of the established burghers. Moreover, the radical programme itself had little appeal beyond the confines of its urban middle-class supporters. While Hungarian radicalism showed far more concern for the peasantry than it did for the workers, most of the poorer country dwellers could not vote. Meanwhile, the avowed anti-monarchism of many radicals, including Petőfi, ensured that they were rejected at the polls by most Hungarians, for whom the King was still sacrosanct. The poet, in a clumsy volte-face, wrote articles trying to dilute his earlier republicanism, but it availed him nothing: he failed to gain election and, to add injury to insult, he was nearly lynched by a drunken mob. In the end, of 414 members of the lower house, perhaps 50 adhered to the Twelve Points.
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The radicals therefore had to rely on extra-parliamentary pressure. They developed sophisticated organisations to coordinate policy and to bind the left-wing rump of deputies to the broader movement. In mid-July a ‘Society for Equality' was created, with a journal entitled the
Radical Democrat
. Taking the French Jacobin clubs of the 1790s as its model, the society sought to forge a nationwide network, to rally patriotic, democratic opinion into a great pressure group - perhaps in readiness for a second revolution. The radicals may not have had much in the way of a social programme, but they potentially possessed a great weapon in Magyar nationalism, which was stewing in the capital. Suspicion of the Viennese court and Batthyány's willingness to compromise with it for the sake of stability stirred patriotic Magyar angst. One of the central issues here was the question of who controlled the armed forces. In May it emerged that the commander of the garrison at Budapest, Baron Ignaz Lederer, had refused to hand out arms to the National Guard, despite ominous signs that the country was about to be attacked by the Croats. When a government commission found that some fourteen thousand rifles were available, a crowd of two thousand, organised by the radical March Club, marched to beating drums on to Lederer's residence. Imperial soldiers reacted by charging with bayonets fixed, killing one protester and seriously wounding twenty. Petőfi seized on this incident to demand a change of ministry, the punishment of the troops involved and the withdrawal of all Hungarian forces from the imperial army in Italy. Batthyány, however, was working hard to put the April Laws on solid foundations and had no intention of provoking the Viennese court.

The issue of Hungarian troops in imperial service was now a hot topic. Moderates like Batthyány and Széchenyi were determined to serve the country's best interests (as they saw them) by soothing Hungary's relations with Austria. So when, on 11 July, the Austrian government sent a request for Hungarian troops to bolster Radetzky's Italian campaign, Batthyány told his fellow ministers that they should voluntarily offer 40,000 out of the 200,000 troops proposed for the entire Hungarian army. This would give the Magyars political leverage with Vienna and compel the Croatian Ban Jelačić to tread carefully. Even Kossuth agreed to this plan, although this meant reversing the earlier position whereby the Hungarians had steadfastly refused to support the suppression of another European people.
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The about-turn infuriated the radical left. One of their most eloquent spokesmen, Count László Teleki, went straight for the jugular by pointing out (correctly, as it would prove) that the government had put its faith in a court that would never force the Croatian ban to back down. While the Italians were fighting for freedom, Teleki baldly declared, Jelačić most certainly was not.
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Nevertheless, the government won the final vote overwhelmingly on 22 July. Although in practice fresh Hungarian troops were never sent to Italy, the government's victory illustrated once again that the European liberals of 1848 put their own national interests above the cosmopolitan ideals of universal liberty and self-determination.

The storm that would break over Hungary in September was now gathering, both in Transylvania and along the Military Frontier. Tensions in the former became increasingly strained when the Magyars brushed off the Blaj programme and when Transylvania was declared part of the Kingdom of Hungary. The Transylvanians were left with a tough choice: they could push for union with Moldavia and Wallachia, but this would spark a conflict with the Sultan, the principalities' ultimate sovereign, or with the Tsar, who was their ‘protector'; alternatively, they could declare their loyalty to the Habsburgs and in return secure a separate Romanian crown within the Austrian Empire. This latter choice had been mooted by the three Hurmuzaki brothers in Bukovina, a territory that bordered on Hungary but was ruled directly from Vienna. Yet, for now, this idea had no mass support and it fell on deaf ears.
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In the summer of 1848 the more attractive option was union with the two Danubian principalities. Moreover, it seemed viable - briefly - because in June a revolution in Bucharest had toppled the ruling Wallachian prince, Gheorgiu Bibescu, and established a liberal provisional government. On 7 August, one of the leaders of the Romanian movement in Transylvania, Dimitrie Golescu ‘the Black', mused over a map of all the Romanian lands, from the Black Sea to the fringes of Transylvania: ‘You know, they might make a handsome little kingdom, of nice round shape, which nature itself seems to have designed . . . I do not know why I believe that this idea, which last year would have seemed utopian, to-day looks within our reach.'
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Weeks earlier, the reason had been the revolution in Bucharest. There, Romanian liberals, all of them from noble (
boier
) families, and many of them Paris-educated, aspired to national freedom and unity and seethed at Russian dominance. The more radical among them had also launched a critique of the society in which they lived. Many felt that the
boiers
exploited the peasantry (who were mostly enserfed) in order to live a life of ‘sensualism, vice, and egoism' (as Golescu's cousin, Alexandru, put it).
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In 1843 such critics, like Constantin Rosetti and Ion Brătianu, had established an organisation named
Frăţa
(Brotherhood) in Bucharest to coordinate the activities of liberal intellectuals and revolutionary conspirators in the army. Its ultimate aim was to be ready for the revolution, whenever it came. Its very secrecy - and the close surveillance of the authorities - prevented it from flourishing, but its members would emerge as the liberal leadership in 1848. Meanwhile, the
boiers
themselves had grievances, particularly in Moldavia, where they resented the dictatorial ways of the ruling prince, Mihail Sturdza, while merchants and manufacturers groaned under his onerous taxation. In Wallachia the
boiers
sought to persuade Prince Bibescu of the need for political and social reform, including the abolition of serfdom, driven as they were by an acute awareness that the countryside was becoming restless. During the ‘Hungry Forties', peasants dragged their feet over their obligations to their landlords. By 1848 they were refusing outright to perform their labour services. Rural riots erupted more frequently and increasing numbers of serfs fled to freedom across the frontiers.
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