1848 (58 page)

The persistence of the Hungarian revolution had serious consequences for the rest of the Habsburg Empire. It provided the perfect excuse for the Austrian government not to convene the parliament promised in the March 1849 constitution. The people running the empire were the bureaucrats, the army and the police, using German as their language. Moreover, once the revolution had been stamped out in Hungary and Italy, the government was strong enough to retract the promised constitution altogether. On 19 October 1850 Franz Joseph asked Baron Karl von Kübeck, a conservative, to define the role of the Reichsrat, or imperial council, which was meant to be the upper house of parliament nominated by the Emperor. Together, the Emperor and Kübeck outmanoeuvred the more reform-minded Schwarzenberg. It was announced that the Reichsrat was going to be the only part of the constitution to be implemented. The Emperor, in other words, had no intention of sharing any power with an elected lower house. The Reichsrat first met in April 1851, and in August it was ordered to investigate whether the constitution of March 1849 was viable. Unsurprisingly, it reported that it was unworkable, and the constitution was abolished on 31 December 1851 by the ‘Sylvester Patent', which restored absolutism in the Habsburg Empire.

By then, centralisation was more complete than it had been before 1848. The Hungarian constitution had been torn up and, as the Russian and Austrian troops had advanced, pro-Austrian officials had taken up the running of government in Hungary. Austrian law was introduced, and the Supreme Court in Budapest was abolished: henceforth, all appeals were to be heard in Vienna. The Hungarian police, the Pandurs, were replaced by the Austrian gendarmerie. Henceforth, the empire was not meant to be a multinational but an a-national state, in which everyone was bound together by their equal submission to the Emperor. In reality, of course, this meant that the political advantage now fell to the Germans, since their language would be the tongue of the state bureaucracy. In Hungary the German-speaking officials who had descended on the country wore a special uniform based on that of the famous Magyar cavalry, earning them the sobriquet ‘Bach's hussars', after the minister who drove through this policy of forcible assimilation. Romanian hopes of being rewarded for their loyalty were rapidly dashed: with the Hungarian revolution crushed, Austrian officials, supported by the army, descended on to Transylvania, Bukovina and the Banat as surely as they did on to Hungary itself, seeking the same, uniform obedience to the Emperor.
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Even the faithful Serbs and Croats received no reward for their dogged opposition to the Hungarians. Jelačić was removed from office in 1853, after which the Croatian governor was an Austrian general. Voivodina was given notional recognition as a separate province, but its governor was another Austrian army commander. As one Croat sighed to a Hungarian friend, ‘we received as a reward what you were given as a punishment'. He was right: Hungary may well have remained under martial law until 1854, but Croatia, frontier country that it was, continued to be controlled, in effect, by the imperial army.
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Writing half a century after the revolutions, Bolton King, who had known Mazzini and sympathised strongly with the Italian cause, crushingly remarked that the French intervention in Rome was ‘one of the meanest deeds that ever disgraced a great nation'. Indeed, witnesses noticed that, as Oudinot's men occupied the city, some of them seemed ashamed.
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And the act of crushing the life out of a sister republic provoked the French radicals, who rose up in Paris on 13 July 1849. The
démoc-socs
had been gaining in strength since the triumph of Louis-Napoleon in the presidential election the previous December. Many Parisian politicians still believed that Bonaparte was merely the creature of monarchists such as Thiers, who were using him to erode the gains of February 1848 and to decay the republic from within. This impression was reinforced when Louis-Napoleon asked the Orléanist Odilon Barrot to form a government. Barrot's cabinet included just one republican. The other ministers were monarchists who set about purging all levels of the administration of those appointed since the February revolution. The moderate republican majority in the National Assembly shared the government's obsession with ‘order', but it was clear that the ministry was going beyond a reaction against social revolution to a campaign against republicanism as a whole. The government pressure therefore had the remarkable effect of radicalising the Assembly, where the moderate republicans - who had supported Cavaignac in June - were suddenly bolstered by their erstwhile critics on the left.
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It was, in essence, a fragile coalition of republican defence against a monarchist and authoritarian resurgence.

The National Assembly flexed its muscles by insisting that it would not separate until it had voted ten ‘organic laws' (concerned with harmonising existing institutions with the new constitution). Moreover, it thrust a stick into the government's spokes when, in the last days before the New Year, Barrot resorted to traditional fiscal policies to weather the continuing financial crisis: he reimposed the unpopular taxes on salt and wine that had been abolished earlier in the year. As indirect impositions, they fell with disproportionate weight on the poor. Bonaparte appears to have let his populist mask slip, revealing a president who was looking to support the interests of the old elites more than those of the peasant masses. As Karl Marx put it (in a terrible pun), ‘with the salt tax, Bonaparte lost his revolutionary salt'.
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The republicans mutilated the bill as it passed through parliament, slashing the two taxes - the salt tax to a third of its original value. On 26 January, it also rejected a government motion to ban all political clubs, with the deputies of the left going so far as to introduce a bill of impeachment against Léon Faucher, the minister of the interior responsible for the suggestion. Although the conservative government was clearly struggling to command a majority in what was still primarily a republican assembly, Bonaparte insisted that the cabinet retained his confidence. In other words he was suggesting that ministers were accountable to him, not to the legislature - an alarming claim for anyone who believed in parliamentary government.
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It was also becoming obvious that the president and his ministers supported the idea of dissolving the difficult Assembly as soon as was possible to allow for new elections.

The radical Parisian movement began to stir once again in response to the conservative challenge. Ledru-Rollin urged calm, but he also suggested in an article in
La Réforme
on 28 January that violations of the people's fundamental liberties ‘have always sounded the hour of revolution'.
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This thinly veiled threat of insurrection illustrated how polarised the government and the republican movement had now become. However, as Karl Marx perceptively saw, an uprising at that moment would have played directly into the hands of Barrot and Bonaparte, since it would have allowed them, ‘under the pretext of public safety . . . to violate the constitution in the interests of the constitution itself'.
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The day after Ledru-Rollin's article appeared, the government put forward its motion for an early dissolution of the Assembly. It was supported by the intimidating appearance of troops led by the royalist General Changarnier, who surrounded the Assembly under the pretext of defending it against a popular insurrection. To be fair, the prospect of an uprising was not merely the figment of overheated conservative imaginations: the radical left mobilised the armed sections of the old insurrectionary society, the Rights of Man, while the Sixth Legion of the National Guard offered the deputies an alternative meeting-place in the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers (which in itself was a revolutionary gesture, since it meant that the Assembly would continue to meet in defiance of the government and the military). None the less, the very threat of a new insurrection was enough to fracture the delicate unity of moderate and radical republicans, and the parliament agreed to a quick dissolution. Elections were to be held on 13 May. In one of its last significant acts, on 7 May the Assembly forbade the government from pursuing its campaign against the Roman republic.

The elections were held in the same atmosphere of political polarisation and social fear that had prevailed since the June days of 1848. The middle way charted by the moderate republicans would end in ‘shipwreck'.
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Conservative notables used their finances and their local influence to ensure that candidates whom they favoured led the electoral lists. Although few published openly monarchist views, it was clear that the republican experiment since February 1848 was being derided in these circles, and these attitudes were printed in election literature aimed at a wider, peasant readership. ‘Socialism is Famine', warned one leaflet intended for the rural electorate. The provisional government in particular was demonised, blamed especially for the ‘forty-five centimes' tax. Republicans associated with social reform - democratic humanitarians like Ledru-Rollin and reforming socialists like Blanc, along with firebrand revolutionary ‘communists' like Raspail and Blanqui - were indiscriminately lumped together as ‘reds'. The conservatives were helped by government officials, who obstructed the publication and distribution of left-wing literature and ‘advised' voters to choose candidates opposed to ‘doctrines destructive of society'. Some moderate republicans, while also emphasising the need for ‘order', condemned excessive government power and repression. Their voices were drowned out as the middle ground crumbled beneath their feet.

The radicals expected to do well in these elections. They had woken up to the fact that they could not expect to win anything more than a small rump in the new National Assembly unless they won the peasant vote. ‘Thanks to universal suffrage,' wrote the socialist journalist Pierre Joigneaux (who edited
La Réforme
for a year while a deputy in the old Assembly), ‘we must, whether we like it or not, take into account the populations of our countryside. That is where the big battalions now lie.'
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He wrote those words in January 1850, but he was merely re-emphasising a strategy that the radicals had already begun to apply in 1849: the elections of April 1848 and their aftermath had shown that it was not enough to rely on the support of the urban workers and artisans.
La Réforme
admitted: ‘No one had given a thought to the countryside since the First Republic. From now on we shall have to.'
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They were helped in this by the ongoing economic crisis, which bit deep in the countryside, since those agricultural regions that depended heavily on selling their produce to the market were suffering from a collapse of prices in wine, silk, grain and hemp. Economic distress was almost certainly not enough, in itself, to radicalise the peasantry and to make them support the
démoc-socs
(who by this stage were coming to be known simply as ‘socialists'). The countryside had been ravaged with poverty and famine in the past, yet this had not turned the peasants into revolutionaries. Indeed, some historians have argued that the evidence of peasant politicisation under the Second Republic has been misread: the peasantry, argues Eugen Weber, were merely reacting to their own local economic concerns, or to village feuds, and followed the lead of the rural notables, some of whom were certainly ‘reds'. The point Weber makes is that the sincerity and depth of peasant radicalisation were rather superficial, merely dressing up traditional loyalties, conflicts and concerns in modern political clothing.
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But in a sense, as Weber himself argues in a later article, this does not matter: the politics of universal male suffrage empowered the peasants at least to choose sides between rival local politicians, and this was expressed in political terms, marking a start in bringing the rural community into national politics.
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This was achieved in no small part by radical propagandists who not only followed the obvious tactic of exploiting peasant economic distress and disillusionment with President Bonaparte but did so in ways that slotted easily into rural life. Rural almanacs interspersed advice on farming, climate and remedies with political articles, sometimes taking the form of a dialogue between a knowledgeable (for which read
démoc-soc
) peasant successfully convincing one of his less enlightened associates of the wisdom of the radical, republican way. Though subscribers to the radical press tended to be those literate villagers who had some cultural ties with the wider world - teachers, café-owners, the village mayor, postal workers, doctors and veterinarians - they acted as ‘culture brokers' who disseminated the ideas to a wider audience. Café-owners, in particular, had a strong sense of grievance because business was hit by the wine tax, so they had good reason to marshal their customers against the government.
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In the electoral campaign of 1849 the
démoc-socs
did not merely harp on about some golden, utopian future, but rather offered practical solutions to the immediate rural crisis. They promised reductions in taxation and cheap credit, both of which would appeal to despairing peasant smallholders. In some areas ‘red' candidates lent their weight to peasant resistance against the ‘forty-five centimes' tax. In Paris a
démoc-soc
committee was elected from workers, shopkeepers and intellectuals from the surviving political clubs and workers' associations, representing a broad spectrum of left-wing opinion. In April this committee tried, for the first time, to forge what had been lacking in the previous year: a truly nationwide electoral organisation, corresponding with other provincial committees and coordinating policies with the left-wing members of the outgoing National Assembly. It also issued a single electoral programme for all
démoc-soc
candidates standing in Paris and its environs, declaring that deputies would resist all violations of the constitution and that ‘the right to work is the most important of all human rights; it is the right to life'.
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Perhaps the notoriously fractious French left managed to keep its unity until the elections because much of the extremist leadership had been in prison since the previous summer, so there was less pressure from them.