1848 (52 page)

The decision shook the Frankfurt parliament to its core and sent shock waves through Germany. A member of the committee that had drafted the constitution, Karl Welcker, wrote fearfully: ‘We had hoped that we were at the end of our great work. We had hoped that we would succeed in concluding the revolution . . . now it seems that an even larger, more terrible and difficult revolution than that of 1848 is presenting itself to us.'
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During the long wait for Frederick William's decision, the political tensions had been stretched to the limit. Now, they snapped. On 4 May the deputies of the Frankfurt parliament issued a declaration demanding that all German governments accept the constitution and calling the elections for the lower house for 15 July. Should Frederick William continue to turn up his nose, then another ruler would be appointed Emperor in his place from one of the middle states. Prussia and the conservatives immediately latched on to this ultimatum, castigating it as a call for a further revolution. On 10 May, Heinrich von Gagern, who had desperately tried to find a compromise between the Frankfurt parliament and Frederick William, resigned as minister of the Reich when Archduke John refused to condemn the Prussian intervention in Saxony, where an insurrection in support of the constitution was crushed. Gagern was unwilling to countenance further revolutionary violence and, ten days later, he led sixty other deputies out of the parliament, claiming that to press the constitution on Germany would lead to civil war. This walkout was only one of several blows to the assembly. The Austrian delegates had been recalled by their government in April, the Prussians on 14 May, followed by two of the other states that had refused to recognise the constitution - Saxony and Hanover. As a national assembly, the German parliament was on the brink of collapse.

On 30 May the remaining deputies, now numbering only 104 and mostly of the left, withdrew to Stuttgart, in Württemberg, to distance themselves from the Austrian and Prussian troops who lurked menacingly in Mainz. The rump parliament was assured of a good reception in its new home, where a mass demonstration had taken place in support of the constitution on 16 April. The government was reluctant to crush the protests since it feared that its troops might go over to the side of the people, so King Wilhelm grudgingly accepted the constitution, although he then left Stuttgart and took up residence in Ludwigsburg. Two days later, in the King's absence, the Württemberg assembly formally agreed to the German constitution. When the remnants of the German parliament had assembled in his capital, Wilhelm refused in high dudgeon to return until they had left. Meanwhile, the Prussians noisily rattled their sabres, threatening to use force unless the parliamentarians were expelled. In these circumstances even the most determined German delegates recognised that their mission was now one of defiant symbolism, rather than one of constructive state-building. Johann Jacoby wrote to a friend: ‘we cannot conceal from ourselves the fact that, with the apathy into which a large part of Germany has fallen, the prospect of success . . . is only slight, but we believe we are obliged for the honour of the nation . . . to make this last effort'.
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The government in Stuttgart was enraged by the Prussian threats (the prime minister, Friedrich Römer, sarcastically described Berlin as Württemberg's new capital), but it also faced the real possibility of a Prussian invasion. It yielded to the pressure and this spelled the end for the German parliament. On 17 June royal troops sealed off all the roads out of Stuttgart, while the government ordered the parliament to have no more meetings. The following day, the city's streets echoed to the tramp of army boots. Soldiers smashed up the assembly's benches and tables and tore apart the German colours. A small group of deputies tried to gather at a hotel, but their dignified procession was blocked by cavalry. They were expelled from the state, but not before the deputy Adolf Schoder tried to console his colleagues: ‘the National Assembly will disappear today; perhaps for a time, the German cause will be trodden in the dust; but its spirit, gentlemen, you will not tread its spirit in the dust, and it will soon break away for itself again, in spite of all bayonets'.
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Across Germany a wide spectrum of liberal and radical opinion at last rallied to the defence of the 1848 revolution in the shape of the half-million-strong Central March Association. This organisation gathered support for what became known as the ‘campaign' or ‘civil war' for the constitution. One of the boiling cauldrons of this movement was the Rhineland. In Cologne five different provincial congresses were held in a matter of three to four days from 6 May, two of them liberal, three of them democratic. Some democratic and workers' organisations seem to have been preparing for a full-blown insurrection in the Rhineland and the spark came when the Prussian government called out the Landwehr, the citizens' militia, in readiness for the anticipated uprising. The plethora of Rhenish political clubs and congresses appealed to the troops not to use force. When delegates from over three hundred town and village councils in the Prussian Rhineland met at one of the liberal congresses in Cologne on 8 May, they demanded that Frederick William accept the constitution, rescind the call to arms and dismiss the conservative Prussian ministry - or face the break-up of the Kingdom of Prussia as it then existed. When asked whether they were ‘German' or ‘Prussian', the councillors had only one answer: ‘German! German! Secession from Prussia!'
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This seemed to be a real possibility, since the obedience of the local Landwehr to the government was doubtful. Carl Schurz witnessed a day-long protest of its members in Bonn, hearing calls to disobey the Prussian government and seeing its numbers swelling by the hour as militiamen from the surrounding countryside arrived.
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A mass meeting of the Landwehr at Elberfeld on 3 May proclaimed its support for the constitution. The democrats also hoped, however, that by rising up they would be able to enforce those aspects of their programme that had been rejected by the Frankfurt parliament. Marx's
Neue Rheinische Zeitung
, however, urged its readers to stand aloof from the campaign for the constitution altogether, arguing that its leaders were not committed to the workers' revolution. Within the democratic clubs, there ‘lurked betrayal and self-interest'.
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Marx was warning that a premature revolution would merely expose the left to further repression for very little gain. His congress in Cologne was held primarily to make preparations for a national workers' convention in Leipzig in June.

Nevertheless, there were outbreaks of revolutionary violence in the Rhineland: militia around Elberfeld, Düsseldorf and Solingen all mutinied. A thousand of them gathered in an armed camp overlooking Elberfeld on 8 May before barricading the centre of the city itself, successfully resisting an attack by regular troops the following day. In Solingen the revolutionaries included red-scarved women wielding revolvers and daggers. Democrats built barricades in Düsseldorf, but these were blown to smithereens by mobile artillery. The uprising spread to the countryside, where village democrats had agreed to ring the church bells as a prearranged signal for an uprising. On 10 May, several thousand armed peasants marched on Düsseldorf to help the beleaguered democrats, only to find that they had already been repressed. While the insurgents melted away and returned home, the uprising had stretched the capabilities of the local authorities to keep order to breaking point. First Elberfeld, then Solingen fell into the hands of the democrats, who established ‘committees of safety' to direct the insurrection. These committees tried to maintain as wide a consensus as possible, cooperating with the liberal, constitutional monarchists. When Marx's close collaborator Friedrich Engels joined the insurgents at Elberfeld, he was soon expelled because he was accused of trying to convert the revolution from a movement of the ‘black-red-gold' (the constitution) into a purely ‘red' (social, republican) uprising.

But the insurrection in the Prussian Rhineland soon fizzled out: delegates sent to Berlin were too eager to believe government promises that Frederick William wanted unity, and the insurgents dismantled the barricades, so that when the Prussian troops arrived, they met no opposition. Some ten to fifteen thousand people, however, had taken up arms to defend the constitution in one of Frederick William's most prosperous provinces,
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and there were also uprisings in Saxony, the Bavarian Palatinate and Baden. Women played an important role in these insurrections: they fought in Dresden (Saxony) in May, but more usually they formed organisations supporting the insurgents and offering help to those who were imprisoned or exiled after their defeat.

In Saxony the parliament (or Landtag) tried to force King Frederick Augustus II to accept the Frankfurt constitution. Assured of Prussian support, the King refused, and on 30 April he prorogued the parliament and appointed an ultra-conservative government. Alarmed by the news that the Prussians were massing their forces on the border in support of the King, workers and craftsmen took to the streets of Dresden. These protests turned violent on 3 May after troops fired on the crowds. The King fled and a provisional government, including radicals such as Stephan Born, the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin and the composer Richard Wagner (who perhaps was biting the hand that fed him since he was Royal Kapellmeister), was established. Bakunin hoped that Dresden would inspire a Europe-wide revolutionary movement - and a conspiracy inspired by events in Dresden was certainly discovered in Prague, where the authorities swooped on students and intellectuals in a series of pre-emptive, night-time arrests to prevent an insurrection planned for 12 May.
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In Dresden the revolution came to a more violent end. Prussian troops marched into the city on 5 May. Then, in four days of street and house-to-house fighting, they used new hand-guns that operated with modern firing-pins and inflicted terrible casualties. The opera house burst into flames. Wagner clambered up church towers, ringing their bells to rally the revolutionaries and reconnoitring Prussian troop movements. He was accompanied by a schoolmaster, with whom he passed the time discussing religion and philosophy, while bullets chipped the masonry around them.
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Born applied his considerable talents for organisation to mobilise the workers, whom he used to keep communications open by smashing through the internal walls of houses, so that the insurgents could pass through the buildings without having to run the murderous gauntlet of enemy fire in the streets. When the end was near, Bakunin, who had been rather contemptuous of the ‘amateurish' Saxon revolutionaries, calmly puffed on his cigar and coldly proposed that the town hall, the seat of the provisional government, should be packed with all the remaining munitions and detonated. His colleagues, however, were in no mood to immolate themselves. In all some 250 insurgents were killed and 400 wounded, and a further 869 people were arrested and interrogated, mostly workers. Six thousand others were prosecuted for their actions since the revolution of March 1848, with 727 of them given heavy prison sentences.
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Born had managed to stage an orderly withdrawal from the battered city with two thousand of his supporters before striking out on his own, finally reaching the safety of Switzerland. Wagner, hidden in a friend's carriage, made his escape to Zürich.

In Bavaria King Maximilian II rejected the constitution after encouragement from Frederick William. In the Rhenish part of his kingdom a massive meeting of clubs and organisations of all shades of liberal and radical opinion held at Kaiserslautern on 2 May established a ten-member ‘provisional defence committee' to act as a provisional government until the King came to his senses. The meeting also declared (in a rather neat if facetious inversion of conservative attitudes) that the Bavarian government was guilty of high treason against the constitution and that the King was therefore a rebel. This provisional government then appealed to all other parts of the kingdom to obey its decrees. With the forces of order weak in the Bavarian Palatinate, the revolution easily spread, with people arming themselves to defend the constitution. In each of the local demonstrations the well-organised radicals took the lead through the ‘people's associations', in oath-taking, unfurling red flags and giving the uprising a strongly republican tone. Among those who joined the revolution here was Carl Schurz, who, with all his possessions in a knapsack, had made his way on foot to Kaiserslautern to join his friend and teacher, Gottfried Kinkel, who had found an outlet for his revolutionary energies as a secretary to the provisional defence committee. Schurz was made a lieutenant and was employed as a commissioner; his task was to mobilise the countryside in preparation for the royal counter-attack. By 17 May almost all of Bavaria west of the Rhine was in revolutionary hands. This success inspired the democrats of the neighbouring Rhine-Hessen to try to expel the Prussian garrison from Mainz and to march to the support of the republicans in Kaiserslautern. The revolutionaries also reached out to long-suffering Baden, which was undergoing its third revolution.

The strength of the Baden republicans lay in the support that they enjoyed among the rank and file of the forces, politicised by the democratic clubs which had proliferated across the grand duchy. The latest revolution began as an army mutiny in which the fortress of Rastatt was seized on 12 May. Grand Duke Leopold fled the capital, Karlsruhe, in the night of 13-14 May and found safety across the French frontier. Baden was now a republic with a provisional government led by moderate democrats, including Franz Raveaux, a member of the German parliament who acted as a conduit between the Baden republic and the remnants of that assembly. He also worked hard to get the Badensian, Rhenish and Palatine republicans to coordinate their actions. They agreed on an attack along the Rhine towards Frankfurt, to protect the German parliament from Prussian troops, while a smaller Palatine effort would act as a diversion by invading Rhine-Hessen. The main Badensian attack - led by Franz Sigel, Friedrich Hecker's military adviser - was a disaster, but the Palatines captured Worms, holding it for four days (25-9 May) before the Hessian army bombarded the city, forcing the insurgents to withdraw.