1848 (44 page)

Meanwhile, the Habsburg forces were still mustering around the city: on 16 October, Ferdinand confided the command to Windischgrätz, who was also given full powers to restore order. By 20 October, the field marshal's thirty thousand men in Bohemia were on the road to Vienna. In a proclamation written by Hübner, the Emperor warned that measures would be taken to curb the press, freedom of assembly and the militias, although these laws would be drafted with parliamentary collaboration. Alarmed, some of the Czech deputies at Olmütz persuaded him to offer reassurances that a constitution would still be drafted.
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For this purpose, on 22 October, Ferdinand ordered the parliament to leave Vienna and move to Kroměřiž (Kremsier) in Moravia (not far, but a safe enough distance, from the imperial court) by 15 November - an order that the left-wing deputies disobeyed.
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By 23 October, all of Windischgrätz's troops were in position, surrounding the city with 70,000 men; Jelačić's Croats held the eastern front. The Magyars were now twenty-eight miles away, on the Hungarian-Austrian border, waiting for the rump Austrian parliament to make a formal request for aid: ‘We are not entitled', declared Kossuth, ‘to force our aid upon people who do not express their willingness to accept it.'
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In Vienna, which was now entirely cut off from the outside world (even its water and gas supplies were severed), there were hopeful rumours that Magyar pickets had been spotted close to the city. Windischgrätz was all too aware that time was pressing, so he demanded the city's capitulation within forty-eight hours. The defiant response of the defenders was to make a sortie, in the small hours of the following day, against the imperial outposts. The field marshal's ultimatum expired on 26 October, when the attack began. The revolutionary outposts were driven back into the city, while an artillery battery dug into the Schmeltz cemetery just outside the first ring of the Viennese entrenchments was bombarded and then taken by storm. The main assault, however, was led by Jelačić, whose men, after twelve hours of fighting, managed to advance by midnight into the city's eastern suburbs. Even at this late stage, there were honest efforts to broker peace: Baron Pillersdorf, now a member of the Austrian parliament, asked Windischgrätz to offer some concessions in return for a Viennese surrender. The old soldier gruffly brushed off this suggestion. ‘Well then,' sighed Pillersdorf, ‘may the responsibility of all the blood shed fall on your head', to which the unfazed field marshal replied, ‘I accept the responsibility.'
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After a lull on 27 October, every battery around the city opened fire on the entrenchments outside. At 9 a.m., Windischgrätz himself led his troops from Schönbrunn and broke into the industrial suburbs, while Jelačić consolidated his grip on the eastern outskirts. Led by the fearsome Montenegrins - wrapped in their fiery red cloaks with their curved blades clamped in their mouths while they clambered on to the fortifications - the southern Slavs cleared some thirty barricades in hand-to-hand fighting. By evening, imperial troops stood in front of the walls of the inner city. The suburbs were bursting with flame, set alight by grenades, shells and Congreve rockets ‘tracing their brilliant curves across the night sky'.
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The bombardment continued all night, ending only in the morning when Windischgrätz decided to give the Viennese time to reconsider their defiance. Sure enough, a delegation from the city council made its way to the field marshal's headquarters at Schönbrunn to offer Vienna's unconditional surrender. But while the majority of Viennese were certainly desperate to see an end to the fighting, many of the revolutionaries were now far too compromised to throw down their arms without some guarantees: they were, as Stiles put it, ‘fighting with halters around their necks'.
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Nevertheless, being so short of food and munitions, even those Viennese who wanted to continue the battle could not hold out for much longer.

At this point, the commander of the National Guard, General Wenzel Messenhauser, who had spent two uninterrupted days in the cathedral tower watching the fighting and scanning the horizon hopefully, at last spotted the long-awaited approach of the Hungarians. Kossuth, who had joined the Magyar army with 12,000 volunteers on 28 October (bringing its total strength up to 25,000), had seen the flames of Vienna shooting into the night sky and decided that the time for legal niceties was over. ‘Vienna still stands,' he declared. ‘The courage of her inhabitants, our most faithful allies against the attacks of the reactionary generals, is still unshaken.'
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When the Hungarians crossed into Austria, the Viennese could hear their guns booming. The Viennese radicals, the National Guard, the students and the workers repudiated the city council's peace overtures and took up the fight once again. Windischgrätz detached Jelačić and Auersperg with 28,000 men to meet the Hungarians. On 30 October, the Magyars were a few tantalising miles from the city. At one of the most finely balanced moments in Austria's history, they marched straight towards the waiting mouths of sixty Austrian cannon, which were lurking behind the heights of Schwechat. When the Habsburg artillery opened fire, it was, according Colonel Arthur Görgey, ‘truly murderous at so short a distance'. The Hungarian regulars plodded doggedly onwards through the hail of shrapnel, but it was too much for the Honvéd, who broke and ran. By the next day, they had fallen back ‘like a scared flock' across the frontier.
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Despairing Viennese revolutionaries could hear and see this drama unfolding from the towers of the city: with the Hungarian defeat, the last hope of the Austrian revolution died.

Subjected to a further bombardment - in the light of which Saint Stephen's Cathedral was bathed in pink, scarlet and crimson
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- the city capitulated on 31 October. The city council sent a delegation to Windischgrätz, explaining that most Viennese wanted to surrender, but that they were being prevented from doing so because the desperate radical students, democratic clubs and workers were terrorising them.
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White flags now flapped from the city's towers and spires, but there were still pockets of stubborn resistance: when the field marshal's troops had to blast their way through the great Burg Gate, the adjacent imperial palace caught fire, destroying much of the Emperor's library. By the following day, though, the soldiers were in control, and Windischgrätz and Jelačić formally entered the city.

Two thousand people had died in the fighting. Since Vienna had broken the terms of its first surrender, the field marshal was in no mood for kindness: he declared a state of siege, with cordons of troops preventing people from entering or leaving without written permission. Some two thousand revolutionaries were arrested, the Academic Legion and National Guard were both disbanded, and censorship was imposed. Twenty-five revolutionaries were tried by court martial and executed. Among the victims were Messenhauser and Blum. By his public speeches, the latter was held to have encouraged the Viennese into rebellion. While it is true that, in his final days, Blum had succumbed to the radical temptation to be sanguinary in his rhetoric, his moderation in Frankfurt suggests that he did not deserve such a terrible fate. He was executed, ‘by powder and ball' (Austrian military jargon for death by firing squad), after a summary court martial on 9 November. His colleague Fröbel was also found guilty, but was pardoned and then expelled from Austria. His life was spared because (by his own testimony), he had published a pamphlet entitled ‘Vienna, Germany and Europe', in which he argued that the ‘German question' should not be resolved by partitioning the Austrian Empire. After the death sentence had been passed at his court martial and he was being led away, he shrewdly dropped the pamphlet on the table in the room. It was picked up and read by Windischgrätz, who was presiding over the tribunal. The commander was impressed enough to sign the pardon a couple of hours later.
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Messenhauser was shot in the city moat, having refused a blindfold and exerting his privilege, as a former officer, to give the order to fire himself.
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With the Habsburg black-gold now fluttering everywhere in the capital, the forty-eight-year-old Prince Felix zu Schwarzenberg was asked to form a new government on 19 November. He was Windischgrätz's brother-in-law: it was his sister who had been killed in Prague's June days. Earlier in 1848 he had been in Italy, first as ambassador to Naples and then with Radetzky's army. Unlike Radetzky and Windischgrätz, however, Schwarzenberg was no reactionary: when, in mid-October, it had looked like the Emperor was about to dissolve parliament altogether, it was his influence that had ensured that it was ordered to reconvene at Kremsier instead.
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Yet, in the end, he believed in the traditional Habsburg way of reform, from above: ‘Democracy must be fought and its excesses must be challenged but in the absence of other means of help that can only be done by the government itself.'
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He wanted to restore Habsburg authority, centralise the monarchy and, to some extent, Germanise it. The cabinet that he appointed therefore included some who had been associated with the liberal governments of 1848, namely Franz Stadion, who would soon set about drafting a new imperial constitution, and Alexander Bach, the one-time democrat. Before 1848, Bach had been one of the stalwarts of the liberal Legal-Political Reading Club and he was one of the more radical leaders of the March revolution; but during the summer, he grew more alarmed by the radical tide, declaring privately that he wanted ‘progress, but not upheaval'. Elected to the Austrian parliament and then appointed justice minister in the Doblhoff government in July, he saw, as Hübner (who got to know and respect him) put it, ‘the abyss which was opening beneath his feet'. Bach's definitive break with the left came in September, when he argued strenuously in favour of the imperial veto on parliamentary legislation. The murder of Latour in October merely confirmed Bach's entry into the conservative camp: ‘he had lost the faith in which he had been raised' and for this he was castigated by his former left-wing allies as an apostate.
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On 2 December, Schwarzenberg's government persuaded Ferdinand to abdicate, then replaced him with his nephew, the eighteen-year-old Franz Joseph. The new emperor had no associations with the liberal concessions made that year, so he could not be bound by them.
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The events of 1848 had taught Franz Joseph that the two great pillars of the Habsburg monarchy were the army and its subjects' loyalty to the dynasty. None the less, the Constituent Assembly was for now maintained, reconvening a little later than initially instructed, on 22 November, as a rump in Kremsier, primarily as a means of gathering support in the final reckoning with the Magyars. For now, the imperial parliament was allowed to produce its own version of a liberal constitution, but the government acted as if this document did not exist. On 4 March 1849, it foisted three acts on to the empire: its own bill of rights; a law on compensation for landlords for their losses from the abolition of serfdom; and a constitution ‘granted' by Franz Joseph. This last document was Stadion's work, and it was top-heavy in the sense that the Emperor held all the meaningful power, including legislative initiative and the appointment of ministers, who would be responsible to the sovereign, not to parliament. The Emperor was to make all decisions on matters affecting the empire, and since the whole monarchy was henceforth to be regarded as a unitary, centralised state, that meant virtually every area of policy. Some important traces of 1848 remained, including the abolition of serfdom and seigneurial obligations; the constitution recognised civil rights (including the equality of all subjects before the law); and, of course, it retained a parliament - of sorts. None the less, the government followed all this up by restricting freedom of the press and of association on 13 March. All nationalities were henceforth to be equal, but effectively that meant that no nationality was to have the right to its own separate political identity, since the empire was now divided into uniform provinces. The Kingdom of Hungary was thus to be erased. The nationality question in the Habsburg Empire was to be effaced by administrative uniformity and centralisation; this was no ‘federal' solution to the problem, but rather an ‘anational' one.

Events in Vienna gave Frederick William IV of Prussia the final shot of courage to take the revolutionary bull by the horns. In the autumn Prussian politics was still on the path towards constitutional government, but it was a rocky one. The Prussian parliamentary decree of 9 August requiring all soldiers to cooperate ‘respectfully and devotedly in the achievement of a constitutional legal situation'
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was taken at the court to be an outrageous assault on royal control of the army. The liberal ministry under Rudolf von Auerswald resigned on 8 September rather than force the military to swallow this order. By now, reassured of popular support - some of it expressed in petitions imploring the King to save the country from radicalism - the camarilla at Sans Souci was beginning to draft plans for a
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against the National Assembly, but these were not set in stone. Frederick William appointed Ernst von Pfuel as a stop-gap minister, and he worked hard to heal the rift between court and parliament. He tried in vain to enforce a softer version of the 9 August decree, arguing that if order were to be restored, it should be done within a legal framework. In early October he permitted parliament to debate Prussia's draft constitution, but his attempts to mollify the legislature failed to steer the King and the National Assembly off their collision course. Conservatives were revolted by the proposals to expunge from the royal title the words ‘by the Grace of God' and to abolish noble titles and the death penalty.