1848 (41 page)

Throughout Europe conservatives were steadily recovering their nerve - and with it the political initiative. There were several reasons for this. The first was that the events of the summer had shaken the liberals to the core. The threat of social revolution and working-class disorder allowed conservatives to feed on the widespread public fear of social disintegration. Anyone who had anything to lose from further chaos was drawn progressively away from the political centre to support the forces of law and order. The liberals generally fell increasingly - if often reluctantly - into line with their old enemies, the conservatives, in their desperate attempts to achieve social stability. In this way the persistence of the economic and social crisis and the attempts of both conservatives and radicals to assert themselves tore apart the revolutionaries, pushing the liberals closer to the reactionaries and drawing from them the same repressive measures that they had once opposed. This polarisation between left and right brought victory for the conservatives, because they still had the strength - and were clawing back the popular support - which the liberals lacked.

The 1848 revolutions also left many of the old state institutions intact. Since the revolutionary leadership in most parts of Europe were committed to constitutional monarchy and legality, the ruling monarch was left in control of ministerial appointments, even if those ministers were now responsible to a legislature. This was especially striking in Austria, where the essential structures of the empire were untouched: the Emperor, the court, the council of ministers, the state bureaucracy and the army all remained.
³
This meant that, unless the old regime had been totally overthrown, as it had in France and in Austria's northern Italian provinces, there was a good deal of continuity in personnel, many of whom were more willing to do the bidding of their monarch rather than the liberal upstarts, or else the monarch could appoint his own supporters. In the Habsburg Empire provincial governors, such as Stadion in Galicia and Thun in Bohemia, remained powerful figures who could use reforms such as the abolition of serfdom to gather popular support for the monarchy. In Croatia Ban Jelačić had ordered all his subordinates to obey the Emperor, rather than the Hungarian government, to which they were nominally subject. The liberal regimes, then, could never be entirely sure of the loyalty of local administrators and jurists. This was true even of France, where the provisional government sent commissioners into the provinces to replace monarchist prefects and sub-prefects with republicans and to dismiss the existing town councils. But this purge of local administration was not as thorough as one might expect. Certainly, in areas like the south-east, where there was already a deep-rooted tradition of rural radicalism, almost all the authorities were replaced, down to the mayor of the smallest village. However, in other regions, the existing officials simply declared a new loyalty to the republic and so retained their positions. These were the so-called ‘republicans of the day after' - the pragmatic converts who swathed themselves in republican colours while frequently hiding monarchist clothes underneath.
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A similar process took place in Hungary, Italy and Germany, where officials demonstrated their (questionable) loyalty to the new order by displaying the national rather than the dynastic colours.
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Control of the armed forces was, of course, crucial. In France the army adhered to the evolving tradition of service to the French ‘state', an entity held to be above the frequent political swings between democracy, monarchy and dictatorship, which provided national continuity through these vicissitudes of revolution and counter-revolution. None the less, under the Second Republic, the president turned out to be Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, so that even the French army became an instrument of authoritarianism. Elsewhere, the armed forces remained firmly in royal hands: Pope Pius IX and King Ferdinand of Naples could both order their troops to pull out of the conflict with Austria. The latter also used them to crush, successively, the Neapolitan revolution and Sicilian independence. In the Austrian Empire Radetzky, Windischgrätz and Jelačić were able to gather their forces and unleash them in the name of the Emperor, whose conservative ministers remained in command. In Germany the armed forces were still controlled by the governments of the separate states, which meant their princes. Consequently, while German liberals applauded the crushing of the republican movement in Baden, the destruction of Polish hopes in Poznania and the fight against Danish nationalism in Schleswig-Holstein, they were playing with fire. The fact that these troops were deployed not only under the command of the old regime rulers but at the request of the old German Confederation showed, first, that real power still rested with the separate states - and especially mighty Prussia - and, second, that the Bund, hated by the liberals as a relic of Metternich's conservative order, still had considerable vitality as an institution. When Bismarck told Frederick William that his position was far stronger than he realised, it was because the army was still his instrument. ‘That I was right', Bismarck later recalled, ‘was immediately proved by the fact that every military order . . . was carried out zealously and without scruple.'
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Hungary was the exception, because its liberal leadership was drawn from the landed, political elite of the country, so it controlled the apparatus of the state, right down to county level, as well as much (but by no means all) of the Magyar officer corps.

Elsewhere, the revolutions barely scratched the surface of conservative strength. Once they started to regain their confidence, conservatives adopted some of the methods of their liberal opponents, including the press and networks, to mobilise and organise opinion for the fightback. Conservative newspapers and political organisations burgeoned over the summer, buoyed by the first successes of the counter-revolution. In Austria new journals appeared, including the
Wiener Kirchenzeitung
, which stood up in defence of the Catholic Church, while the scurrilous
Geissel
(‘Scourge') outdid even the most foaming-at-the-mouth revolutionary journals in abuse and vilification. In mid-September the latter's acerbic editor, J. F. Böhringer, flew the imperial black-and-gold banner from the journal's offices and had to be rescued from an angry Viennese mob by the National Guard - an irony that surely did not escape even him. By then, Austrian conservatives had finally organised their own political society, the Constitutional Club. As its name suggests, it did not seek to drag Austria back to the absolutist days of Metternich, but it attempted to defend the liberal, parliamentary order against ‘every bold encroachment in the direction of republicanism', which it saw as ‘treason to the Fatherland and to constitutional freedom'.
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In practice this was the only social organisation (outside the Catholic Church) that could rally anyone who feared the radicals and their influence in Vienna. It therefore attracted a following whose main concerns were not for the constitution, but for law and order. Within days, it had somewhere between 22,000 and 30,000 members. Count Hübner remarked that the success of the club was ‘certainly a good symptom'.
⁸

In trying to mobilise the population, the conservatives had a great moral weapon at their disposal - religion - which in some areas of Europe was
the
decisive factor in keeping the population loyal to the old order. There were some notable radical or ‘red' priests, to be sure, like Father Gavazzi in Italy and, in France, the towering intellect of Abbé Félicité Robert de Lamennais. The latter's democratic-socialist convictions flowed directly from his religious faith: his bestselling
Paroles d'un croyant
depicted Jesus as a friend to the poor, while he believed that God spoke through ‘the people' -
vox popoli, vox dei
. His newspaper,
L'Avenir
(
The Future
) had been banned by the Pope back in 1832. Elected to the National Assembly in 1848, he sat with the left and was one of the few voices to speak out in defence of the June days. Tocqueville, who worked with the Abbé on the draft of the Second Republic's constitution, noted that he may well have worn a yellow waistcoat underneath a green frock-coat, but Lamennais still moved with modesty and some awkwardness, as if he had just left the sacristy.
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Religion, however, usually lent its moral force to conservatism. In Protestant Prussia Lutheran pastors played a leading role in the conservative ‘King and Fatherland' associations. In Catholic Europe regions like the Tyrol in Austria, the Abruzzi in the Kingdom of Naples and Brittany in France were both Catholic and conservative strong-holds.
¹⁰
In Rennes in Brittany the ‘Tree of Liberty' planted with such solemnity in April was sawn down by anonymous hands two months later. A notice was pasted on the stump: ‘Thus perishes the infamous Republic!' The authorities claimed that this sacrilege was encouraged by the fact that the royalist candidate in the by-election of early June had been openly supported by the clergy.
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In some countries religious conviction was channelled not only by the clergy from the pulpit but by new organisations. In Germany the first ‘Pius Associations' sprang up as early as March 1848. Named after the Pope, they claimed to defend the Catholic Church against liberal secularism. By the end of October, there were four hundred such societies across Germany, with a staggering hundred thousand members. The pressure that these organisations exerted on the German parliament ensured that the Jesuits (who were then the bogeymen of all liberal-minded people) were not banned from Germany, while the Church retained its right to supervise religious education in state schools.
¹²
Religion was one of the forces that seduced the peasantry back to their innate loyalty and deference to the traditional order (if they really ever abandoned it at all). And the quiescence of the rural masses was an ace in the conservative hand.

The European peasantry had played an important part in the revolutions in the first three months of 1848. They had hastened the collapse of the old order by rising up: in the East against serfdom; in the West against taxation, low wages, indebtedness and the surviving manorial rights of the landlords and over rights of access to forests and pasture. Politicians of all political hues produced newspapers aimed at a peasant readership - in many places for the very first time. In Hungary the radical Mihály Táncsics - who had been a peasant before becoming a tailor and then a schoolteacher - began to publish the
Workers' Newspaper
at the end of March. Its title referred not to urban journeymen but to rural labourers: it backed universal male suffrage and demanded the abolition of all the remnants of ‘feudalism' that the Hungarian liberals had left intact. The newspaper was distributed free to peasants on market days, which ensured that Táncsics was one of the few radicals to be elected to the new Hungarian parliament.
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Elsewhere, the revolutions brought the ballot box to the peasantry for the first time. It is not clear that they understood the nuances of modern political concepts: for example, Czech peasants understood the word ‘constitution' merely as freedom from compulsory labour service. The liberal press complained that Czech peasants also did not understand such terms as ‘democrat', ‘reactionary', ‘despotism' and ‘hierarchy', though one can surely forgive them for finding the slippery notion of ‘sovereignty' hard to grasp. The claim that they did not know what ‘aristocrat' meant seems somehow less credible.
¹⁴
Still, peasants across Central Europe voted for the first time and some of them were elected as deputies. The Austrian parliament, which first convened on 22 July, had 383 delegates, of whom 92 were peasants. The Moravian assembly, which met on 31 May, boasted 97 peasant deputies out of 247 - enough to have it dubbed the ‘Peasant Diet'.

The revolutions of 1848 were therefore not restricted to the urban crucibles, but politicised the peasantry on an unprecedented scale. Yet, understandably, this development only went so far as the dictates of the peasants' own interests. Once those were met the rural population could fall back into detached neutrality. If (as in France) peasant proprietors felt threatened by the further radicalisation of the revolution, or if (as in Hungary and much of Italy) the liberal regimes did not entirely live up to the peasants' hopes, the peasantry were open to the blandishments of opponents of the new order. Sometimes these were radical, but more often they were conservative. The liberals were either landowners themselves or believed strongly in the rights of property, which did not incline them to radical measures that would satisfy the peasantry entirely. For example, where serfdom was abolished, the landlords received compensation, some of the costs of which were borne by the peasantry themselves, which saddled them with debts for a generation or so. Rural ire therefore focused on the liberal regimes that had apparently failed to deliver on their early promise. Moreover, after the initial disorders of the spring, traditional habits of deference could also creep back, when the peasants, still faced with the overwhelming economic crisis and the uncertainties of the revolution, sought security in obedience to their landlords and above all in submission to their sovereign. Where elections were held on the basis of universal or a broad male suffrage, this conservatism of the countryside counted heavily against the liberals. And almost everywhere, it was one of the pillars - or perhaps the very keystone - of the counter-revolution.

The impact of the revolutions on the countryside was most dramatic in Central and Eastern Europe, because there the peasants suffered under many heavy obligations to the state and to their landlords, including serfdom. Their counterparts in the West aimed primarily at wiping out the last relics of the old seigneurial (sometimes called ‘feudal') system, which had already been eroded or all but levelled since the eighteenth century. In 1848 the fear of a
jacquerie -
an uncontrollable, unfathomable peasant uprising against landlords, government officials and other figures of hate - hastened the abolition of servile status in Central and Eastern Europe. Mindful of the slaughter of the Polish nobles of Galicia by Ukrainian peasants in 1846, European landlords were naturally jumpy over the prospect of an uprising of their serfs and tenants. In the spring of 1848 peasants almost everywhere in Eastern and Central Europe refused to perform their services or to pay dues, while the government's weakness meant that landlords also could not depend upon the state to enforce them or to protect their own lives and property from peasant violence. Consequently, the only way to restore order was to give the rural insurgents what they wanted and abolish all seigneurial obligations and, where it existed, to end serfdom. Yet the latter policy also meant that landlords would have to make material sacrifices, since they would lose their free supply of labour. Moreover, since the serfs did not own the estates on which they toiled, freeing them without giving them land would create an impoverished, restless and potentially rebellious social group. On the other hand, to give the freed peasants land meant taking property from the landlords, who could claim (on the basis of the liberals' own principles) that this was a violation of property rights. Consequently, it was argued, the owners would have to be compensated both for the loss of peasant labour services and for any grants of land that went along with emancipation. It was virtually impossible to find a solution that would satisfy everybody.