had already arrived before Alexandria, and there executed a convention with the Viceroy, by which the latter, abandoning all claim upon his other provinces, and undertaking to restore the Turkish fleet, was assured of the hereditary possession of Egypt. The convention was one which the English admiral had no authority to conclude, but it contained substantially the terms which the Allies intended to enforce; and after Mehemet had made a formal act of submission to the Sultan, the hereditary government of Egypt was conferred upon himself and his family by a decree published by the Sultan and sanctioned by the Powers. This compromise had been proposed by the French Government after the expiry of the twenty days named in the Treaty of July, and immediately before the fall of M. Thiers, but Palmerston would not then listen to any demand made under open or implied threats of war. Since that time a new and pacific Ministry had come into office; it was no part of Palmerston’s policy to keep alive the antagonism between England and France; and he readily accepted an arrangement which, while it saved France from witnessing the total destruction of an ally, left Egypt to a ruler who, whatever his faults, had certainly shown a greater capacity for government than any Oriental of that age. It remained for the Powers to place upon record some authoritative statement of the law recognised by Europe with regard to the Bosphorus and Dardanelles. Russia had already virtually consented to the abrogation of the Treaty of Unkiar Skelessi. It now joined with all the other Powers, including France, in a declaration that the ancient rule of the Ottoman Empire which forbade the passage of these straits to the war-ships of all nations, except when the Porte itself should be at war, was accepted by Europe at large. Russia thus surrendered its chance of gaining by any separate arrangement with Turkey the permanent right of sending its fleets from the Black Sea into the Mediterranean, and so becoming a Mediterranean Power. On the other hand, Sebastopol and the arsenals of the Euxine remained safe against the attack of any maritime Power, unless Turkey itself should take up arms against the Czar. Having regard to the great superiority of England over Russia at sea, and to the accessibility and importance of the Euxine coast towns, it is an open question whether the removal of all international restrictions upon the passage of the Bosphorus and Dardanelles would not be more to the advantage of England than of its rival. This opinion, however, had not been urged before the Crimean War, nor has it yet been accepted in our own country.
[Turkey after 1840.]
[Legislation of Reschid.]
The conclusion of the struggle of 1840 marked with great definiteness the real position which the Ottoman Empire was henceforth to occupy in its relations to the western world. Rescued by Europe at large from the alternatives of destruction at the hands of Ibrahim or complete vassalage under Russia, the Porte entered upon the condition nominally of an independent European State, really of a State existing under the protection of Europe, and responsible to Europe as well for its domestic government as for its alliances and for the conduct of its foreign policy. The necessity of conciliating the public opinion of the West was well understood by the Turkish statesman who had taken the leading part in the negotiations which freed the Porte from dependence upon Russia. Reschid Pasha, the younger, Foreign Minister at the accession of the new Sultan, had gained in an unusual degree the regard and the confidence of the European Ministers with whom, as a diplomatist, he had been brought into contact. As the author of a wide system of reforms, it was his ambition so to purify and renovate the internal administration of the Ottoman Empire that the contrasts which it presented to the civilised order of the West should gradually disappear, and that Turkey should become not only in name but in reality a member of the European world. Stimulated no doubt by the achievements of Mehemet Ali, and anxious to win over to the side of the Porte the interest which Mehemet’s partial adoption of European methods and ideas had excited on his behalf, Reschid in his scheme of reform paid an ostentatious homage to the principles of western administration and law, proclaiming the security of person and property, prohibiting the irregular infliction of punishment, recognising the civil rights of Christians and Jews, and transferring the collection of taxes from the provincial governors to the officers of the central authority. The friends of the Ottoman State, less experienced then than now in the value of laws made in a society where there exists no power that can enforce them, and where the agents of government are themselves the most lawless of all the public enemies, hailed in Reschid’s enlightened legislation the opening of a new epoch in the life of the Christian and Oriental races subject to the Sultan. But the fall of the Minister before a palace-intrigue soon proved on how slight a foundation these hopes were built. Like other Turkish reformers, Reschid had entered upon a hopeless task; and the name of the man who was once honoured as the regenerator of a great Empire is now almost forgotten.
CHAPTER XVIII.
Europe during the Thirty-years’ Peace–Italy and Austria–Mazzini–The House of Savoy–Gioberti–Election of Pius IX.–Reforms expected– Revolution at Palermo–Agitation in Northern Italy–Lombardy–State of the Austrian Empire–Growth of Hungarian National Spirit–The Magyars and Slavs–Transylvania–Parties among the Magyars–Kossuth–The Slavic National Movements in Austria–The Government enters on Reform in Hungary–Policy of the Opposition–The Rural System of Austria– Insurrection in Galicia: the Nobles and the Peasants–Agrarian Edict–Public Opinion in Vienna–Prussia–Accession and Character of King Frederick William IV.–Convocation of the United Diet–Its Debates and Dissolution–France–The Spanish Marriages–Reform Movement–Socialism– Revolution of February–End of the Orleanist Monarchy.
The characteristic of Continental history during the second quarter of this century is the sense of unrest. The long period of European peace which began in 1815 was not one of internal repose; the very absence of those engrossing and imperious interests which belong to a time of warfare gave freer play to the feelings of discontent and the vague longings for a better political order which remained behind after the convulsions of the revolutionary epoch and the military rule of Napoleon had passed away. During thirty years of peace the breach had been widening between those Governments which still represented the system of 1815, and the peoples over whom they ruled. Ideas of liberty, awakenings of national sense, were far more widely diffused in Europe than at the time of the revolutionary war. The seed then prematurely forced into an atmosphere of storm and reaction had borne its fruit: other growths, fertilised or accelerated by Western Liberalism, but not belonging to the same family, were springing up in unexpected strength, and in regions which had hitherto lain outside the movement of the modern world. New forces antagonistic to Government had come into being, penetrating an area unaffected by the constitutional struggles of the Mediterranean States, or by the weaker political efforts of Germany. In the homes of the Magyar and the Slavic subjects of Austria, so torpid throughout the agitation of an earlier time, the passion of nationality was every hour gaining new might. The older popular causes, vanquished for the moment by one reaction after another, had silently established a far stronger hold on men’s minds. Working, some in exile and conspiracy, others through such form of political literature as the jealousy of Governments permitted, the leaders of the democratic movement upon the Continent created a power before which the established order at length succumbed. They had not created, nor was it possible under the circumstances that they should create, an order which was capable of taking its place.
[Italy. 1831-1848.]
Italy, rather than France, forms the central figure in any retrospect of Europe immediately before 1848 in which the larger forces at work are not obscured by those for the moment more prominent. The failure of the insurrection of 1831 had left Austria more visibly than before master over the Italian people even in those provinces in which Austria was not nominally sovereign. It had become clear that no effort after reform could be successful either in the Papal States or in the kingdom of Naples so long as Austria held Lombardy and Venice. The expulsion of the foreigner was therefore not merely the task of those who sought to give the Italian race its separate and independent national existence, it was the task of all who would extinguish oppression and misgovernment in any part of the Italian peninsula. Until the power of Austria was broken, it was vain to take up arms against the tyranny of the Duke of Modena or any other contemptible oppressor. Austria itself had twice taught this lesson; and if the restoration of Neapolitan despotism in 1821 could be justified by the disorderly character of the Government then suppressed, the circumstances attending the restoration of the Pope’s authority in 1831 had extinguished Austria’s claim to any sort of moral respect; for Metternich himself had united with the other European Courts in declaring the necessity for reforms in the Papal Government, and of these reforms, though a single earnest word from Austria would have enforced their execution, not one had been carried into effect. Gradually, but with increasing force as each unhappy year passed by, the conviction gained weight among all men of serious thought that the problem to be faced was nothing less than the destruction of the Austrian yoke. Whether proclaimed as an article of faith or veiled in diplomatic reserve, this belief formed the common ground among men whose views on the immediate future of Italy differed in almost every other particular.
[Mazzini.]
Three main currents of opinion are to be traced in the ferment of ideas which preceded the Italian revolution of 1848. At a time not rich in intellectual or in moral power, the most striking figure among those who are justly honoured as the founders of Italian independence is perhaps that of Mazzini. Exiled during nearly the whole of his mature life, a conspirator in the eyes of all Governments, a dreamer in the eyes of the world, Mazzini was a prophet or an evangelist among those whom his influence led to devote themselves to the one cause of their country’s regeneration. No firmer faith, no nobler disinterestedness, ever animated the saint or the patriot; and if in Mazzini there was also something of the visionary and the fanatic, the force with which he grasped the two vital conditions of Italian revival–the expulsion of the foreigner and the establishment of a single national Government–proves him to have been a thinker of genuine political insight. Laying the foundation of his creed deep in the moral nature of man, and constructing upon this basis a fabric not of rights but of duties, he invested the political union with the immediateness, the sanctity, and the beauty of family life. With him, to live, to think, to hope, was to live, to think, to hope for Italy; and the Italy of his ideal was a Republic embracing every member of the race, purged of the priestcraft and the superstition which had degraded the man to the slave, indebted to itself alone for its independence, and consolidated by the reign of equal law. The rigidity with which Mazzini adhered to his own great project in its completeness, and his impatience with any bargaining away of national rights, excluded him from the work of those practical politicians and men of expedients who in 1859 effected with foreign aid the first step towards Italian union; but the influence of his teaching and his organisation in preparing his countrymen for independence was immense; and the dynasty which has rendered to United Italy services which Mazzini thought impossible, owes to this great Republican scarcely less than to its ablest friends.
[Hopes of Piedmont.]
Widely separated from the school of Mazzini in temper and intention was the group of politicians and military men, belonging mostly to Piedmont, who looked to the sovereign and the army of this State as the one hope of Italy in its struggle against foreign rule. The House of Savoy, though foreign in its origin, was, and had been for centuries, a really national dynasty. It was, moreover, by interest and traditional policy, the rival rather than the friend of Austria in Northern Italy. If the fear of revolution had at times brought the Court of Turin into close alliance with Vienna, the connection had but thinly veiled the lasting antagonism of two States which, as neighbours, had habitually sought expansion each at the other’s cost. Lombardy, according to the expression of an older time, was the artichoke which the Kings of Piedmont were destined to devour leaf by leaf. Austria, on the other hand, sought extension towards the Alps: it had in 1799 clearly shown its intention of excluding the House of Savoy altogether from the Italian mainland; and the remembrance of this epoch had led the restored dynasty in 1815 to resist the plans of Metternich for establishing a league of all the princes of Italy under Austria’s protection. The sovereign, moreover, who after the failure of the constitutional movement of 1821 had mounted the throne surrounded by Austrian bayonets, was no longer alive. Charles Albert of Carignano, who had at that time played so ambiguous a part, and whom Metternich had subsequently endeavoured to exclude from the succession, was on the throne. He had made his peace with absolutism by fighting in Spain against the Cortes in 1823; and since his accession to the throne he had rigorously suppressed the agitation of Mazzini’s partizans within his own dominions. But in spite of strong clerical and reactionary influences around him, he had lately shown an independence of spirit in his dealings with Austria which raised him in the estimation of his subjects; and it was believed that his opinions had been deeply affected by the predominance which the idea of national independence was now gaining over that of merely democratic change. If the earlier career of Charles Albert himself cast some doubt upon his personal sincerity, and much more upon his constancy of purpose, there was at least in Piedmont an army thoroughly national in its sentiment, and capable of taking the lead whenever the opportunity should arise for uniting Italy against the foreigner. In no other Italian State was there an effective military force, or one so little adulterated with foreign elements.
[Hopes of the Papacy.]
A third current of opinion in these years of hope and of illusion was that represented in the writings of Gioberti, the depicter of a new and glorious Italy, regenerated not by philosophic republicanism or the sword of a temporal monarch, but by the moral force of a reformed and reforming Papacy. The conception of the Catholic Church as a great Liberal power, strange and fantastic as it now appears, was no dream of an isolated Italian enthusiast; it was an idea which, after the French Revolution of 1830, and the establishment of a government at once anti-clerical and anti-democratic, powerfully influenced some of the best minds in France, and found in Montalembert and Lamennais exponents who commanded the ear of Europe. If the corruption of the Papacy had been at once the spiritual and the political death of Italy, its renovation in purity and in strength would be also the resurrection of the Italian people. Other lands had sought, and sought in vain, to work out their problems under the guidance of leaders antagonistic to the Church, and of popular doctrines divorced from religious faith. To Italy belonged the prerogative of spiritual power. By this power, aroused from the torpor of ages, and speaking, as it had once spoken, to the very conscience of mankind, the gates of a glorious future would be thrown open. Conspirators might fret, and politicians scheme, but the day on which the new life of Italy would begin would be that day when the head of the Church, taking his place as chief of a federation of Italian States, should raise the banner of freedom and national right, and princes and people alike should follow the all-inspiring voice.
[Election of Pius IX., June, 1846.]
[Reforms expected from Pius.]
[Ferrara, June, 1847.]
A monk, ignorant of everything but cloister lore, benighted, tyrannical, the companion in his private life of a few jolly priests and a gossiping barber, was not an alluring emblem of the Church of the future. But in 1846 Pope Gregory XVI., who for the last five years had been engaged in one incessant struggle against insurgents, conspirators, and reformers, and whose prisons were crowded with the best of his subjects, passed away. [405] His successor, Mastai Ferretti, Bishop of Imola, was elected under the title of Pius IX., after the candidate favoured by Austria had failed to secure the requisite number of votes (June 17). The choice of this kindly and popular prelate was to some extent a tribute to Italian feeling; and for the next eighteen months it appeared as it Gioberti had really divined the secret of the age. The first act of the new Pope was the publication of a universal amnesty for political offences. The prison doors throughout his dominions were thrown open, and men who had been sentenced to confinement for life returned in exultation to their homes. The act created a profound impression throughout Italy, and each good-humoured utterance of Pius confirmed the belief that great changes were at hand. A wild enthusiasm seized upon Rome. The population abandoned itself to festivals in honour of the Pontiff and of the approaching restoration of Roman liberty. Little was done; not much was actually promised; everything was believed. The principle of representative government was discerned in the new Council of State now placed by the side of the College of Cardinals; a more serious concession was made to popular feeling in the permission given to the citizens of Rome, and afterwards to those of the provinces, to enrol themselves in a civic guard. But the climax of excitement was reached when, in answer to a threatening movement of Austria, occasioned by the growing agitation throughout Central Italy, the Papal Court protested against the action of its late protector. By the Treaties of Vienna Austria had gained the right to garrison the citadel of Ferrara, though this town lay within the Ecclesiastical States. Placing a new interpretation on the expression used in the Treaties, the Austrian Government occupied the town of Ferrara itself (June 17th, 1847). The movement was universally understood to be the preliminary to a new occupation of the Papal States, like that of 1831; and the protests of the Pope against the violation of his territory gave to the controversy a European importance. The English and French fleets appeared at Naples; the King of Sardinia openly announced his intention to take the field against Austria if war should break out. By the efforts of neutral Powers a compromise on the occupation of Ferrara was at length arranged; but the passions which had been excited were not appeased, and the Pope remained in popular imagination the champion of Italian independence against Austria, as well as the apostle of constitutional Government and the rights of the people.
[Revolution at Palermo, Jan., 1848.]
In the meantime the agitation begun in Rome was spreading through the north and the south of the peninsula, and beyond the Sicilian Straits. The centenary of the expulsion of the Austrians from Genoa in December, 1746, was celebrated throughout central Italy with popular demonstrations which gave Austria warning of the storm about to burst upon it. In the south, however, impatience under domestic tyranny was a far more powerful force than the distant hope of national independence. Sicily had never forgotten the separate rights which it had once enjoyed, and the constitution given to it under the auspices of England in 1812. Communications passed between the Sicilian leaders and the opponents of the Bourbon Government on the mainland, and in the autumn of 1847 simultaneous risings took place in Calabria and at Messina. These were repressed without difficulty; but the fire smouldered far and wide, and on the 13th of January, 1848, the population of Palermo rose in revolt. For fourteen days the conflict between the people and the Neapolitan troops continued. The city was bombarded, but in the end the people were victorious, and a provisional government was formed by the leaders of the insurrection. One Sicilian town after another followed the example of the capital, and expelled its Neapolitan garrison. Threatened by revolution in Naples itself, King Ferdinand II., grandson of the despot of 1821, now imitated the policy of his predecessor, and proclaimed a constitution. A Liberal Ministry was formed, but no word was said as to the autonomy claimed by Sicily, and promised, as it would seem, by the leaders of the popular party on the mainland. After the first excitement of success was past, it became clear that the Sicilians were as widely at variance with the newly-formed Government at Naples as with that which they had overthrown.
[Agitation in Austrian Italy.]
The insurrection of Palermo gave a new stimulus and imparted more of revolutionary colour to the popular movement throughout Italy. Constitutions were granted in Piedmont and Tuscany. In the Austrian provinces national exasperation against the rule of the foreigner grew daily more menacing. Radetzky, the Austrian Commander-in-chief, had long foreseen the impending struggle, and had endeavoured, but not with complete success, to impress his own views upon the imperial Government. Verona had been made the centre of a great system of fortifications, and the strength of the army under Radetzky’s command had been considerably increased, but it was not until the eleventh hour that Metternich abandoned the hope of tiding over difficulties by his old system of police and spies, and permitted the establishment of undisguised military rule. In order to injure the finances of Austria, a general resolution had been made by the patriotic societies of Upper Italy to abstain from the use of tobacco, from which the Government drew a large part of its revenue. On the first Sunday in 1848 Austrian officers, smoking in the streets of Milan, were attacked by the people. The troops were called to arms: a conflict took place, and enough blood was shed to give to the tumult the importance of an actual revolt. In Padua and elsewhere similar outbreaks followed. Radetzky issued a general order to his troops, declaring that the Emperor was determined to defend his Italian dominion whether against an external or domestic foe. Martial law was proclaimed; and for a moment, although Piedmont gave signs of throwing itself into the Italian movement, the awe of Austria’s military power hushed the rising tempest. A few weeks more revealed to an astonished world the secret that the Austrian State, so great and so formidable in the eyes of friend and foe, was itself on the verge of dissolution.
[Austria.]
[Affairs in Hungary.]
It was to the absence of all stirring public life, not to any real assimilative power or any high intelligence in administration, that the House of Hapsburg owed, during the eighteenth century, the continued union of that motley of nations or races which successive conquests, marriages, and treaties had brought under its dominion. The violence of the attack made by the Emperor Joseph upon all provincial rights first re-awakened the slumbering spirit of Hungary; but the national movement of that time, which excited such strong hopes and alarms, had been succeeded by a long period of stagnation, and during the Napoleonic wars the repression of everything that appealed to any distinctively national spirit had become more avowedly than before the settled principle of the Austrian Court. In 1812 the Hungarian Diet had resisted the financial measures of the Government. The consequence was that, in spite of the law requiring its convocation every three years, the Diet was not again summoned till 1825. During the intermediate period, the Emperor raised taxes and levies by edict alone. Deprived of its constitutional representation, the Hungarian nobility pursued its opposition to the encroachments of the Crown in the Sessions of each county. At these assemblies, to which there existed no parallel in the western and more advanced States of the Continent, each resident land-owner who belonged to the very numerous caste of the noblesse was entitled to speak and to vote. Retaining, in addition to the right of free discussion and petition, the appointment of local officials, as well as a considerable share in the actual administration, the Hungarian county-assemblies, handing down a spirit of rough independence from an immemorial past, were probably the hardiest relic of self-government existing in any of the great monarchical States of Europe. Ignorant, often uncouth in their habits, oppressive to their peasantry, and dominated by the spirit of race and caste, the mass of the Magyar nobility had indeed proved as impervious to the humanising influences of the eighteenth century as they had to the solicitations of despotism. The Magnates, or highest order of noblesse, who formed a separate chamber in the Diet, had been to some extent denationalised; they were at once more European in their culture, and more submissive to the Austrian Court. In banishing political discussion from the Diet to the County Sessions, the Emperor’s Government had intensified the provincial spirit which it sought to extinguish. Too numerous to be won over by personal inducements, and remote from the imperial agencies which had worked so effectively through the Chamber of Magnates, the lesser nobility of Hungary during these years of absolutism carried the habit of political discussion to their homes, and learnt to baffle the imperial Government by withholding all help and all information from its subordinate agents. Each county-assembly became a little Parliament, and a centre of resistance to the usurpation of the Crown. The stimulus given to the national spirit by this struggle against unconstitutional rule was seen not less in the vigorous attacks made upon the Government on the re-assembling of the Diet in 1825, than in the demand that Magyar, and not Latin as heretofore, should be the language used in recording the proceedings of the Diet, and in which communications should pass between the Upper and the Lower House.
[Magyars and Slavs.]
There lay in this demand for the recognition of the national language the germ of a conflict of race against race which was least of all suspected by those by whom the demand was made. Hungary, as a political unity, comprised, besides the Slavic kingdom of Croatia, wide regions in which the inhabitants were of Slavic or Roumanian race, and where the Magyar was known only as a feudal lord. The district in which the population at large belonged to the Magyar stock did not exceed one-half of the kingdom. For the other races of Hungary, who were probably twice as numerous as themselves, the Magyars entertained the utmost contempt, attributing to them the moral qualities of the savage, and denying to them the possession of any nationality whatever. In a country combining so many elements ill-blended with one another, and all alike subject to a German Court at Vienna, Latin, as the language of the Church and formerly the language of international communication, had served well as a neutral means of expression in public affairs. There might be Croatian deputies in the Diet who could not speak Magyar; the Magyars could not understand Croatian; both could understand and could without much effort express themselves in the species of Latin which passed muster at Presburg and at Vienna. Yet no freedom of handling could convert a dead language into a living one; and when the love of country and of ancient right became once more among the Magyars an inspiring passion, it naturally sought a nobler and more spontaneous utterance than dog-latin. Though no law was passed upon the subject in the Parliament in which it was first mooted, speakers in the Diet of 1832 used their mother-tongue; and when the Viennese Government forbade the publication of the debates, reports were circulated in manuscript through the country by Kossuth, a young deputy, who after the dissolution of the Diet in 1836 paid for his defiance of the Emperor by three years’ imprisonment.
[Hungary after 1830.]
[The Diet of 1832-36.]
[Széchenyi.]
Hungary now seemed to be entering upon an epoch of varied and rapid national development. The barriers which separated it from the Western world were disappearing. The literature, the ideas, the inventions of Western Europe were penetrating its archaic society, and transforming a movement which in its origin had been conservative and aristocratic into one of far-reaching progress and reform. Alone among the opponents of absolute power on the Continent, the Magyars had based their resistance on positive constitutional right, on prescription, and the settled usage of the past; and throughout the conflict with the Crown between 1812 and 1825 legal right was on the side not of the Emperor but of those whom he attempted to coerce. With excellent judgment the Hungarian leaders had during these years abstained from raising any demand for reforms, appreciating the advantage of a purely defensive position in a combat with a Court pledged in the eyes of all Europe, as Austria was, to the defence of legitimate rights. This policy had gained its end; the Emperor, after thirteen years of conflict, had been forced to re-convoke the Diet, and to abandon the hope of effecting a work in which his uncle, Joseph II., had failed. But, the constitution once saved, that narrow and exclusive body of rights for which the nobility had contended no longer satisfied the needs or the conscience of the time. [406] Opinion was moving fast; the claims of the towns and of the rural population were making themselves felt; the agitation that followed the overthrow of the Bourbons in 1830 reached Hungary too, not so much through French influence as through the Polish war of independence, in which the Magyars saw a struggle not unlike their own, enlisting their warmest sympathies for the Polish armies so long as they kept the field, and for the exiles who came among them when the conflict was over. By the side of the old defenders of class-privilege there arose men imbued with the spirit of modern Liberalism. The laws governing the relation of the peasant to his lord, which remained nearly as they had been left by Maria Theresa, were dealt with by the Diet of 1832 in so liberal a spirit that the Austrian Government, formerly far in advance of Hungarian opinion on this subject, refused its assent to many of the measures passed. Great schemes of social and material improvement also aroused the public hopes in these years. The better minds became conscious of the real aspect of Hungarian life in comparison with that of civilised Europe–of its poverty, its inertia, its boorishness. Extraordinary energy was thrown into the work of advance by Count Széchenyi, a nobleman whose imagination had been fired by the contrast which the busy industry of Great Britain and the practical interests of its higher classes presented to the torpor of his own country. It is to him that Hungary owes the bridge uniting its double capital at Pesth, and that Europe owes the unimpeded navigation of the Danube, which he first rendered possible by the destruction of the rocks known as the Iron Gates at Orsova. Sanguine, lavishly generous, an ardent patriot, Széchenyi endeavoured to arouse men of his own rank, the great and the powerful in Hungary, to the sense of what was due from them to their country as leaders in its industrial development. He was no revolutionist, nor was he an enemy to Austria. A peaceful political future would best have accorded with his own designs for raising Hungary to its due place among nations.
[Transylvania.]
That the Hungarian movement of this time was converted from one of fruitful progress into an embittered political conflict ending in civil war was due, among other causes, to the action of the Austrian Cabinet itself. Wherever constitutional right existed, there Austria saw a natural enemy. The province of Transylvania, containing a mixed population of Magyars, Germans, and Roumanians, had, like Hungary, a Diet of its own, which Diet ought to have been summoned every year. It was, however, not once assembled between 1811 and 1834. In the agitation at length provoked in Transylvania by this disregard of constitutional right, the Magyar element naturally took the lead, and so gained complete ascendancy in the province. When the Diet met in 1834, its language and conduct were defiant in the highest degree. It was speedily dissolved, and the scandal occasioned by its proceedings disturbed the last days of the Emperor Francis, who died in 1835, leaving the throne to his son Ferdinand, an invalid incapable of any serious exertion. It soon appeared that nothing was changed in the principles of the Imperial Government, and that whatever hopes had been formed of the establishment of a freer system under the new reign were delusive. The leader of the Transylvanian Opposition was Count Wesselényi, himself a Magnate in Hungary, who, after the dissolution of the Diet, betook himself to the Sessions of the Hungarian counties, and there delivered speeches against the Court which led to his being arrested and brought to trial for high treason. His cause was taken up by the Hungarian Diet, as one in which the rights of the local assemblies were involved. The plea of privilege was, however, urged in vain, and the sentence of exile which was passed upon Count Wesselényi became a new source of contention between the Crown and the Magyar Estates. [407]
[Parties among the Magyars.]
[The Diet of 1843.]
The enmity of Government was now a sufficient passport to popular favour. On emerging from his prison under a general amnesty in 1840, Kossuth undertook the direction of a Magyar journal at Pesth, which at once gained an immense influence throughout the country. The spokesman of a new generation, Kossuth represented an entirely different order of ideas from those of the orthodox defenders of the Hungarian Constitution. They had been conservative and aristocratic; he was revolutionary: their weapons had been drawn from the storehouse of Hungarian positive law; his inspiration was from the Liberalism of western Europe. Thus within the national party itself there grew up sections in more or less pronounced antagonism to one another, though all were united by a passionate devotion to Hungary and by an unbounded faith in its future. Széchenyi, and those who with him subordinated political to material ends, regarded Kossuth as a dangerous theorist. Between the more impetuous and the more cautious reformers stood the recognised Parliamentary leaders of the Liberals, among whom Deák had already given proof of political capacity of no common order. In Kossuth’s journal the national problems of the time were discussed both by his opponents and by his friends. Publicity gave greater range as well as greater animation to the conflict of ideas; and the rapid development of opinion during these years was seen in the large and ambitious measures which occupied the Diet of 1843. Electoral and municipal reform, the creation of a code of criminal law, the introduction of trial by jury, the abolition of the immunity of the nobles from taxation; all these, and similar legislative projects, displayed at once the energy of the time and the influence of western Europe in transforming the political conceptions of the Hungarian nation. Hitherto the forty-three Free Cities had possessed but a single vote in the Diet, as against the sixty-three votes possessed by the Counties. It was now generally admitted that this anomaly could not continue; but inasmuch as civic rights were themselves monopolised by small privileged orders among the townsmen, the problem of constitutional reform carried with it that of a reform of the municipalities. Hungary in short was now face to face with the task of converting its ancient system of the representation of the privileged orders into the modern system of a representation of the nation at large. Arduous at every epoch and in every country, this work was one of almost insuperable difficulty in Hungary, through the close connection with the absolute monarchy of Austria; through the existence of a body of poor noblesse, numbered at two hundred thousand, who, though strong in patriotic sentiment, bitterly resented any attack upon their own freedom from taxation; and above all through the variety of races in Hungary, and the attitude assumed by the Magyars, as the dominant nationality, towards the Slavs around them. In proportion as the energy of the Magyars and their confidence in the victory of the national cause mounted high, so rose their disdain of all claims beside their own within the Hungarian kingdom. It was resolved by the Lower Chamber of the Diet of 1843 that no language but Magyar should be permitted in debate, and that at the end of ten years every person not capable of speaking the Magyar language should be excluded from all public employment. The Magnates softened the latter provision by excepting from it the holders of merely local offices in Slavic districts; against the prohibition of Latin in the Diet the Croatians appealed to the Emperor. A rescript arrived from Vienna placing a veto upon the resolution. So violent was the storm excited in the Diet itself by this rescript, and so threatening the language of the national leaders outside, that the Cabinet, after a short interval, revoked its decision, and accepted a compromise which, while establishing Magyar as the official language of the kingdom, and requiring that it should be taught even in Croatian schools, permitted the use of Latin in the Diet for the next six years. In the meantime the Diet had shouted down every speaker who began with the usual Latin formula, and fighting had taken place in Agram, the Croatian capital, between the national and the Magyar factions.
[The Slavic national movements.]
It was in vain that the effort was made at Presburg to resist all claims but those of one race. The same quickening breath which had stirred the Magyar nation to new life had also passed over the branches of the Slavic family within the Austrian dominions far and near. In Bohemia a revival of interest in the Czech language and literature, which began about 1820, had in the following decade gained a distinctly political character. Societies originally or professedly founded for literary objects had become the centres of a popular movement directed towards the emancipation of the Czech elements in Bohemia from German ascendancy, and the restoration of something of a national character to the institutions of the kingdom. Among the southern Slavs, with whom Hungary was more directly concerned, the national movement first became visible rather later. Its earliest manifestations took, just as in Bohemia, a literary or linguistic form. Projects for the formation of a common language which, under the name of Illyrian, should draw together all the Slavic populations between the Adriatic and the Black Sea, occupied for a while the fancy of the learned; but the more ambitious part of this design, which had given some umbrage to the Turkish Government, was abandoned in obedience to instructions from Vienna; and the movement first gained political importance when its scope was limited to the Croatian and Slavonic districts of Hungary, and it was endowed with the distinct task of resisting the imposition of Magyar as an official language. In addition to their representation in the Diet of the Kingdom at Presburg, the Croatian landowners had their own Provincial Diet at Agram. In this they possessed not only a common centre of action, but an organ of communication with the Imperial Government at Vienna, which rendered them some support in their resistance to Magyar pretensions. Later events gave currency to the belief that a conflict of races in Hungary was deliberately stimulated by the Austrian Court in its own interest. But the whole temper and principle of Metternich’s rule was opposed to the development of national spirit, whether in one race or another; and the patronage which the Croats appeared at this time to receive at Vienna was probably no more than an instinctive act of conservatism, intended to maintain the balance of interests, and to reduce within the narrowest possible limits such changes as might prove inevitable.
[Agitation after 1843.]
Of all the important measures of reform which were brought before the Hungarian Diet of 1843, one alone had become law. The rest were either rejected by the Chamber of Magnates after passing the Lower House, or were thrown out in the Lower House in spite of the approval of the majority, in consequence of peremptory instructions sent to Presburg by the county assemblies. The representative of a Hungarian constituency was not free to vote at his discretion; he was the delegate of the body of nobles which sent him, and was legally bound to give his vote in accordance with the instructions which he might from time to time receive. However zealous the Legislature itself, it was therefore liable to be paralysed by external pressure as soon as any question was raised which touched the privileges of the noble caste. This was especially the case with all projects involving the expenditure of public revenue. Until the nobles bore their share of taxation it was impossible that Hungary should emerge from a condition of beggarly need; yet, be the inclination of the Diet what it might, it was controlled by bodies of stubborn squires or yeomen in each county, who fully understood their own power, and stoutly forbade the passing of any measure which imposed a share of the public burdens upon themselves. The impossibility of carrying out reforms tinder existing conditions had been demonstrated by the failures of 1843. In order to overcome the obstruction as well of the Magnates as of the county assemblies, it was necessary that an appeal should be made to the country at large, and that a force of public sentiment should be aroused which should both overmaster the existing array of special interests, and give birth to legislation merging them for the future in a comprehensive system of really national institutions. To this task the Liberal Opposition addressed itself; and although large differences existed within the party, and the action of Kossuth, who now exchanged the career of the journalist for that of the orator, was little fettered by the opinions of his colleagues, the general result did not disappoint the hopes that had been formed. Political associations and clubs took vigorous root in the country. The magic of Kossuth’s oratory left every hearer a more patriotic, if not a wiser man; and an awakening passion for the public good seemed for a while to throw all private interests into the shade.
[Government Policy of Reform.]
[Programme of the Opposition.]
It now became plain to all but the blindest that great changes were inevitable; and at the instance of the more intelligent among the Conservative party in Hungary the Imperial Government resolved to enter the lists with a policy of reform, and, if possible, to wrest the helm from the men who were becoming masters of the nation. In order to secure a majority in the Diet, it was deemed requisite by the Government first to gain a predominant influence in the county-assemblies. As a preliminary step, most of the Lieutenants of counties, to whose high dignity no practical functions attached, were removed from their posts, and superseded by paid administrators, appointed from Vienna. Count Apponyi, one of the most vigorous of the conservative and aristocratic reformers, was placed at the head of the Ministry. In due time the proposals of the Government were made public. They comprised the taxation of the nobles, a reform of the municipalities, modifications in the land-system, and a variety of economic measures intended directly to promote the material development of the country. The latter were framed to some extent on the lines laid down by Szechenyi, who now, in bitter antagonism to Kossuth, accepted office under the Government, and gave to it the prestige of his great name. It remained for the Opposition to place their own counter-proposals before the country. Differences within the party were smoothed over, and a manifesto, drawn up by Deák, gave statesmanlike expression to the aims of the national leaders. Embracing every reform included in the policy of the Government, it added to them others which the Government had not ventured to face, and gave to the whole the character of a vindication of its own rights by the nation, in contrast to a scheme of administrative reform worked out by the officers of the Crown. Thus while it enforced the taxation of the nobles, it claimed for the Diet the right of control over every branch of the national expenditure. It demanded increased liberty for the Press, and an unfettered right of political association; and finally, while doing homage to the unity of the Crown, it required that the Government of Hungary should be one in direct accord with the national representation in the Diet, and that the habitual effort of the Court of Vienna to place this kingdom on the same footing as the Emperor’s non-constitutional provinces should be abandoned. With the rival programmes of the Government and the Opposition before it, the country proceeded to the elections of 1847. Hopefulness and enthusiasm abounded on every side; and at the close of the year the Diet assembled from which so great a work was expected, and which was destined within so short a time to witness, in storm and revolution, the passing away of the ancient order of Hungarian life.
[The Rural System of Hungary.]
The directly constitutional problems with which the Diet of Presburg had to deal were peculiar to Hungary itself, and did not exist in the other parts of the Austrian Empire. There were, however, social problems which were not less urgently forcing themselves upon public attention alike in Hungary and in those provinces which enjoyed no constitutional rights. The chief of these was the condition of the peasant-population. In the greater part of the Austrian dominions, though serfage had long been abolished, society was still based upon the manorial system. The peasant held his land subject to the obligation of labouring on his lord’s domain for a certain number of days in the year, and of rendering him other customary services: the manor-court, though checked by the neighbourhood of crown-officers, retained its jurisdiction, and its agents frequently performed duties of police. Hence the proposed extinction of the so-called feudal tie, and the conversion of the semi-dependent cultivator into a freeholder bound only to the payment of a fixed money-charge, or rendered free of all obligation by the surrender of a part of his holding, involved in many districts the institution of new public authorities and a general reorganisation of the minor local powers. From this task the Austrian Government had shrunk in mere lethargy, even when, as in 1835, proposals for change had come from the landowners themselves. The work begun by Maria Theresa and Joseph remained untouched, though thirty years of peace had given abundant opportunity for its completion, and the legislation of Hardenberg in 1810 afforded precedents covering at least part of the field.
[Insurrection in Galicia, Feb., 1846.]
[Rural Edict, Dec., 1845.]
At length events occurred which roused the drowsiest heads in Vienna from their slumbers. The party of action among the Polish refugees at Paris had determined to strike another blow for the independence of their country. Instead, however, of repeating the insurrection of Warsaw, it was arranged that the revolt should commence in Prussian and Austrian Poland, and the beginning of the year 1846 was fixed for the uprising. In Prussia the Government crushed the conspirators before a blow could be struck. In Austria, though ample warning was given, the precautions taken were insufficient. General Collin occupied the Free City of Cracow, where the revolutionary committee had its headquarters; but the troops under his command were so weak that he was soon compelled to retreat, and to await the arrival of reinforcements. Meanwhile the landowners in the district of Tarnow in northern Galicia raised the standard of insurrection, and sought to arm the country. The Ruthenian peasantry, however, among whom they lived, owed all that was tolerable in their condition to the protection of the Austrian crown-officers, and detested the memory of an independent Poland. Instead of following their lords into the field, they gave information of their movements, and asked instructions from the nearest Austrian authorities. They were bidden to seize upon any persons who instigated them to rebellion, and to bring them into the towns. A war of the peasants against the nobles forthwith broke out. Murder, pillage, and incendiary fires brought both the Polish insurrection and its leaders to a miserable end. The Polish nobles, unwilling to acknowledge the humiliating truth that their own peasants were their bitterest enemies, charged the Austrian Government with having set a price on their heads, and with having instigated the peasants to a communistic revolt. Metternich, disgraced by the spectacle of a Jacquerie raging apparently under his own auspices, insisted, in a circular to the European Courts, that the attack of the peasantry upon the nobles had been purely spontaneous, and occasioned by attempts to press certain villagers into the ranks of the rebellion by brute force. But whatever may have been the measure of responsibility incurred by the agents of the Government, an agrarian revolution was undoubtedly in full course in Galicia, and its effects were soon felt in the rest of the Austrian monarchy. The Arcadian contentment of the rural population, which had been the boast, and in some degree the real strength, of Austria, was at an end. Conscious that the problem which it had so long evaded must at length be faced, the Government of Vienna prepared to deal with the conditions of land-tenure by legislation extending over the whole of the Empire. But the courage which was necessary for an adequate solution of the difficulty nowhere existed within the official world, and the Edict which conveyed the last words of the Imperial Government on this vital question contained nothing more than a series of provisions for facilitating voluntary settlements between the peasants and their lords. In the quality of this enactment the Court of Vienna gave the measure of its own weakness. The opportunity of breaking with traditions of impotence had presented itself and had been lost. Revolution was at the gates; and in the unsatisfied claim of the rural population the Government had handed over to its adversaries a weapon of the greatest power. [408]
[Vienna.]
In the purely German provinces of Austria there lingered whatever of the spirit of tranquillity was still to be found within the Empire. This, however, was not the case in the districts into which the influence of the capital extended. Vienna had of late grown out of its old careless spirit. The home in past years of a population notoriously pleasure-loving, good-humoured, and indifferent to public affairs, it had now taken something of a more serious character. The death of the Emperor Francis, who to the last generation of Viennese had been as fixed a part of the order of things as the river Danube, was not unconnected with this change in the public tone. So long as the old Emperor lived, all thought that was given to political affairs was energy thrown away. By his death not only had the State lost an ultimate controlling power, if dull, yet practised and tenacious, but this loss was palpable to all the world. The void stood bare and unrelieved before the public eye. The notorious imbecility of the Emperor Ferdinand, the barren and antiquated formalism of Metternich and of that entire system which seemed to be incorporated in him, made Government an object of general satire, and in some quarters of rankling contempt. In proportion as the culture and intelligence of the capital exceeded that of other towns, so much the more galling was the pressure of that part of the general system of tutelage which was especially directed against the independence of the mind. The censorship was exercised with grotesque stupidity. It was still the aim of Government to isolate Austria from the ideas and the speculation of other lands, and to shape the intellectual world of the Emperor’s subjects into that precise form which tradition prescribed as suitable for the members of a well-regulated State. In poetry, the works of Lord Byron were excluded from circulation, where custom-house officers and market-inspectors chose to enforce the law; in history and political literature, the leading writers of modern times lay under the same ban. Native production was much more effectively controlled. Whoever wrote in a newspaper, or lectured at a University, or published a work of imagination, was expected to deliver himself of something agreeable to the constituted authorities, or was reduced to silence. Far as Vienna fell short of Northern Germany in intellectual activity, the humiliation inflicted on its best elements by this life-destroying surveillance was keenly felt and bitterly resented. More perhaps by its senile warfare against mental freedom than by any acts of direct political repression, the Government ranged against itself the almost unanimous opinion of the educated classes. Its hold on the affection of the capital was gone. Still quiescent, but ready to unite against the Government when opportunity should arrive, there stood, in addition to the unorganised mass of the middle ranks, certain political associations and students’ societies, a vigorous Jewish element, and the usual contingent furnished by poverty and discontent in every great city from among the labouring population. Military force sufficient to keep the capital in subjection was not wanting; but the foresight and the vigour necessary to cope with the first onset of revolution were nowhere to be found among the holders of power.
[Prussia.]
[Frederick William IV., 1840.]
At Berlin the solid order of Prussian absolutism already shook to its foundation. With King Frederick William III., whose long reign ended in 1840, there departed the half-filial, half-spiritless acquiescence of the nation in the denial of the liberties which had been so solemnly promised to it at the epoch of Napoleon’s fall. The new Sovereign, Frederick William IV., ascended the throne amid high national hopes. The very contrast which his warm, exuberant nature offered to the silent, reserved disposition of his father impressed the public for awhile in his favour. In the more shining personal qualities he far excelled all his immediate kindred. His artistic and literary sympathies, his aptitude of mind and readiness of speech, appeared to mark the man of a new age, and encouraged the belief that, in spite of the mediæval dreams and reactionary theories to which, as prince, he had surrendered himself, he would, as King, appreciate the needs of the time, and give to Prussia the free institutions which the nation demanded. The first acts of the new reign were generously conceived. Political offenders were freely pardoned. Men who had suffered for their opinions were restored to their posts in the Universities and the public service, or selected for promotion. But when the King approached the constitutional question, his utterances were unsatisfactory. Though undoubtedly in favour of some reform, he gave no sanction to the idea of a really national representation, but seemed rather to seek occasions to condemn it. Other omens of ill import were not wanting. Allying his Government with a narrow school of theologians, the King offended men of independent mind, and transgressed against the best traditions of Prussian administration. The prestige of the new reign was soon exhausted. Those who had believed Frederick William to be a man of genius now denounced him as a vaporous, inflated dilettante; his enthusiasm was seen to indicate nothing in particular; his sonorous commonplaces fell flat on second delivery. Not only in his own kingdom, but in the minor German States, which looked to Prussia as the future leader of a free Germany, the opinion rapidly gained ground that Frederick William IV. was to be numbered among the enemies rather than the friends of the good cause.
[United Diet convoked at Berlin, Feb. 3, 1847.]
In the Edicts by which the last King of Prussia had promised his people a Constitution, it had been laid down that the representative body was to spring from the Provincial Estates, and that it was to possess, in addition to its purely consultative functions in legislation, a real power of control over all State loans and over all proposed additions to taxation. The interdependence of the promised Parliament and the Provincial Estates had been seen at the time to endanger the success of Hardenberg’s scheme; nevertheless, it was this conception which King Frederick William IV. made the very centre of his Constitutional policy. A devotee to the distant past, he spoke of the Provincial Estates, which in their present form had existed only since 1823, as if they were a great national and historic institution which had come down unchanged through centuries. His first experiment was the summoning of a Committee from these bodies to consider certain financial projects with which the Government was occupied (1842). The labours of the Committee were insignificant, nor was its treatment at the hands of the Crown Ministers of a serious character. Frederick William, however, continued to meditate over his plans, and appointed a Commission to examine the project drawn up at his desire by the Cabinet. The agitation in favour of Parliamentary Government became more and more pressing among the educated classes; and at length, in spite of some opposition from his brother, the Prince of Prussia, afterwards Emperor of Germany, the King determined to fulfil his father’s promise and to convoke a General Assembly at Berlin. On the 3rd of February, 1847, there appeared a Royal Patent, which summoned all the Provincial Estates to the capital to meet as a United Diet of the Kingdom. The Diet was to be divided into two Chambers, the Upper Chamber including the Royal Princes and highest nobles, the Lower the representatives of the knights, towns, and peasants. The right of legislation was not granted to the Diet; it had, however, the right of presenting petitions on internal affairs. State-loans and new taxes were not, in time of peace, to be raised without its consent. No regular interval was fixed for the future meetings of the Diet, and its financial rights were moreover reduced by other provisions, which enacted that a United Committee from the Provincial Estates was to meet every four years for certain definite objects, and that a special Delegation was to sit each year for the transaction of business relating to the National Debt. [409]
[King Frederick William and the Diet.]
The nature of the General Assembly convoked by this Edict, the functions conferred upon it, and the guarantees offered for Representative Government in the future, so little corresponded with the requirements of the nation, that the question was at once raised in Liberal circles whether the concessions thus tendered by the King ought to be accepted or rejected. The doubt which existed as to the disposition of the monarch himself was increased by the speech from the throne at the opening of the Diet (April 11). In a vigorous harangue extending over half an hour, King Frederick William, while he said much that was appropriate to the occasion, denounced the spirit of revolution that was working in the Prussian Press, warned the Deputies that they had been summoned not to advocate political theories, but to protect each the rights of his own order, and declared that no power on earth should induce him to change his natural relation to his people into a constitutional one, or to permit a written sheet of paper to intervene like a second Providence between Prussia and the Almighty. So vehement was the language of the King, and so uncompromising his tone, that the proposal was forthwith made at a private conference that the Deputies should quit Berlin in a body. This extreme course was not adopted; it was determined instead to present an address to the King, laying before him in respectful language the shortcomings in the Patent of February 3rd. In the debate on this address began the Parliamentary history of Prussia. The Liberal majority in the Lower Chamber, anxious to base their cause on some foundation of positive law, treated the Edicts of Frederick William III. defining the rights of the future Representative Body as actual statutes of the realm, although the late King had never called a Representative Body into existence. From this point of view the functions now given to Committees and Delegations were so much illegally withdrawn from the rights of the Diet. The Government, on the other hand, denied that the Diet possessed any rights or claims whatever beyond those assigned to it by the Patent of February 3rd, to which it owed its origin. In receiving the address of the Chambers, the King, while expressing a desire to see the Constitution further developed, repeated the principle already laid down by his Ministers, and refused to acknowledge any obligation outside those which he had himself created.
[Proceedings and Dissolution of the Diet.]
When, after a series of debates on the political questions at issue, the actual business of the Session began, the relations between the Government and the Assembly grew worse rather than better. The principal measures submitted were the grant of a State-guarantee to certain land-banks established for the purpose of extinguishing the rent-charges on peasants’ holdings, and the issue of a public loan for the construction of railways by the State. Alleging that the former measure was not directly one of taxation, the Government, in laying it before the Diet, declared that they asked only for an opinion, and denied that the Diet possessed any right of decision. Thus challenged, as it were, to make good its claims, the Diet not only declined to assent to this guarantee, but set its veto on the proposed railway-loan. Both projects were in themselves admitted to be to the advantage of the State; their rejection by the Diet was an emphatic vindication of constitutional rights which the Government seemed indisposed to acknowledge. Opposition grew more and more embittered; and when, as a preliminary to the dissolution of the Diet, the King ordered its members to proceed to the election of the Committees and Delegation named in the Edict of February 3rd, an important group declined to take part in the elections, or consented to do so only under reservations, on the ground that the Diet, and that alone, possessed the constitutional control over finance which the King was about to commit to other bodies. Indignant at this protest, the King absented himself from the ceremony which brought the Diet to a close (June 26th). Amid general irritation and resentment the Assembly broke up. Nothing had resulted from its convocation but a direct exhibition of the antagonism of purpose existing between the Sovereign and the national representatives. Moderate men were alienated by the doctrines promulgated from the Throne; and an experiment which, if more wisely conducted, might possibly at the eleventh hour have saved all Germany from revolution, left the Monarchy discredited and exposed to the attack of the most violent of its foes.
[Louis Philippe.]
The train was now laid throughout central Europe; it needed but a flash from Paris to kindle the fire far and wide. That the Crown which Louis Philippe owed to one popular outbreak might be wrested from him by another, had been a thought constantly present not only to the King himself but to foreign observers during the earlier years of his reign. The period of comparative peace by which the first Republican movements after 1830 had been succeeded, the busy working of the Parliamentary system, the keen and successful pursuit of wealth which seemed to have mastered all other impulses in France, had made these fears a thing of the past. The Orleanist Monarchy had taken its place among the accredited institutions of Europe; its chief, aged, but vigorous in mind, looked forward to the future of his dynasty, and occupied himself with plans for extending its influence or its sway beyond the limits of France itself. At one time Louis Philippe had hoped to connect his family by marriage with the Courts of Vienna or Berlin; this project had not met with encouragement; so much the more eagerly did the King watch for opportunities in another direction, and devise plans for restoring the family-union between France and Spain which had been established by Louis XIV. and which had so largely influenced the history of Europe down to the overthrow of the Bourbon Monarchy. The Crown of Spain was now held by a young girl; her sister was the next in succession; to make the House of Orleans as powerful at Madrid as it was at Paris seemed under these circumstances no impossible task to a King and a Minister who, in the interests of the dynasty, were prepared to make some sacrifice of honour and good faith.
[The Spanish Marriage, October, 1846.]
While the Carlist War was still continuing, Lord Palmerston had convinced himself that Louis Philippe intended to marry the young Queen Isabella, if possible, to one of his sons. Some years later this project was unofficially mentioned by Guizot to the English statesman, who at once caused it to be understood that England would not permit the union. Abandoning this scheme, Louis Philippe then demanded, by a misconstruction of the Treaty of Utrecht, that the Queen’s choice of a husband should be limited to the Bourbons of the Spanish or Neapolitan line. To this claim Lord Aberdeen, who had become Foreign Secretary in 1841, declined to give his assent; he stated, however, that no step would be taken by England in antagonism to such marriage, if it should be deemed desirable at Madrid. Louis Philippe now suggested that his youngest son, the Duke of Montpensier, should wed the Infanta Fernanda, sister of the Queen of Spain. On the express understanding that this marriage should not take place until the Queen should herself have been married and have had children, the English Cabinet assented to the proposal. That the marriages should not be simultaneous was treated by both Governments as the very heart and substance of the arrangement, inasmuch as the failure of children by the Queen’s marriage would make her sister, or her sister’s heir, inheritor of the Throne. This was repeatedly acknowledged by Louis Philippe and his Minister, Guizot, in the course of communications with the British Court which extended over some years. Nevertheless, in 1846, the French Ambassador at Madrid, in conjunction with the Queen’s mother, Maria Christina, succeeded in carrying out a plan by which the conditions laid down at London and accepted at Paris were utterly frustrated. Of the Queen’s Spanish cousins, there was one, Don Francisco, who was known to be physically unfit for marriage. To this person it was determined by Maria Christina and the French Ambassador that the young Isabella should be united, her sister being simultaneously married to the Duke of Montpensier. So flagrantly was this arrangement in contradiction to the promises made at the Tuileries, that, when intelligence of it arrived at Paris, Louis Philippe declared for a moment that the Ambassador must be disavowed and disgraced. Guizot, however, was of better heart than his master, and asked for delay. In the very crisis of the King’s perplexity the return of Lord Palmerston to office, and the mention by him of a Prince of Saxe-Coburg as one of the candidates for the Spanish Queen’s hand, afforded Guizot a pretext for declaring that Great Britain had violated its engagements towards the House of Bourbon by promoting the candidature of a Coburg. In reality the British Government had not only taken no part in assisting the candidature of the Coburg Prince, but had directly opposed it. This, however, was urged in vain at the Tuileries. Whatever may have been the original intentions of Louis Philippe or of Guizot, the temptation of securing the probable succession to the Spanish Crown was too strong to be resisted. Preliminaries were pushed forward with the utmost haste, and on the 10th of October, 1846, the marriages of Queen Isabella and her sister, as arranged by the French Ambassador and the Queen-Mother, were simultaneously solemnised at Madrid. [410]
[Louis Philippe and Guizot, 1847.]
Few intrigues have been more disgraceful than that of the Spanish Marriages; none more futile. The course of history mocked its ulterior purposes; its immediate results were wholly to the injury of the House of Orleans. The cordial understanding between France and Great Britain, which had been revived after the differences of 1840, was now finally shattered, Louis Philippe stood convicted before his people of sacrificing a valuable alliance to purely dynastic ends; his Minister, the austere and sanctimonious Guizot, had to defend himself against charges which would have covered with shame the most hardened man of the world. Thus stripped of its garb of moral superiority, condemned as at once unscrupulous and unpatriotic, the Orleanist Monarchy had to meet the storm of popular discontent which was gathering over France as well as over neighbouring lands. For the lost friendship of England it was necessary to seek a substitute in the support of some Continental Power. Throwing himself into the reactionary policy of the Court of Vienna, Guizot endeavoured to establish a diplomatic concert from which England should be excluded, as France had been in 1840. There were circumstances which gave some countenance to the design. The uncompromising vigour with which Lord Palmerston supported the Liberal movement now becoming so formidable in Italy made every absolute Government in Europe his enemy; and had time been granted, the despotic Courts would possibly have united with France in some more or less open combination against the English Minister. But the moments were now numbered; and ere the projected league could take substance, the whirlwind descended before which Louis Philippe and his Minister were the first to fall.
[Demand for Parliamentary Reform.]
A demand for the reform of the French Parliamentary system had been made when Guizot was entering upon office in the midst of the Oriental crisis of 1840. It had then been silenced and repressed by all the means at the disposal of the Executive; King Louis Philippe being convinced that with a more democratic Chamber the maintenance of his own policy of peace would be impossible. The demand was now raised again with far greater energy. Although the franchise had been lowered after the Revolution of July, it was still so high that not one person in a hundred and fifty possessed a vote, while the property-qualification which was imposed upon the Deputies themselves excluded from the Chamber all but men of substantial wealth. Moreover, there existed no law prohibiting the holders of administrative posts under the Government from sitting in the Assembly. The consequence was that more than one-third of the Deputies were either officials who had secured election, or representatives who since their election had accepted from Government appointments of greater or less value. Though Parliamentary talent abounded, it was impossible that a Chamber so composed could be the representative of the nation at large. The narrowness of the franchise, the wealth of the Deputies themselves, made them, in all questions affecting the social condition of the people, a mere club of capitalists; the influence which the Crown exercised through the bestowal of offices converted those who ought to have been its controllers into its dependents, the more so as its patronage was lavished on nominal opponents even more freely than on avowed friends. Against King Louis Philippe the majority in the Chamber had in fact ceased to possess a will of its own. It represented wealth; it represented to some extent the common-sense of France; but on all current matters of dispute it only represented the executive government in another form. So thoroughly had the nation lost all hope in the Assembly during the last years of Louis Philippe, that even the elections had ceased to excite interest. On the other hand, the belief in the general prevalence of corruption was every day receiving new warrant. A series of State-trials disclosed the grossest frauds in every branch of the administration, and proved that political influence was habitually used for purposes of pecuniary gain. Taxed with his tolerance of a system scarcely distinguishable from its abuses, the Minister could only turn to his own nominees in the Chamber and ask them whether they felt themselves corrupted; invited to consider some measure of Parliamentary reform, he scornfully asserted his policy of resistance. Thus, hopeless of obtaining satisfaction either from the Government or from the Chamber itself, the leaders of the Opposition resolved in 1847 to appeal to the country at large; and an agitation for Parliamentary reform, based on the methods employed by O’Connell in Ireland, soon spread through the principal towns of France.
[Socialism.]
But there were other ideas and other forces active among the labouring population of Paris than those familiar to the politicians of the Assembly. Theories of Socialism, the property of a few thinkers and readers during the earlier years of Louis Philippe’s reign, had now sunk deep among the masses, and become, in a rough and easily apprehended form, the creed of the poor. From the time when Napoleon’s fall had restored to France its faculty of thought, and, as it were, turned the soldier’s eyes again upon his home, those questionings as to the basis of the social union which had occupied men’s minds at an earlier epoch were once more felt and uttered. The problem was still what it had been in the eighteenth century; the answer was that of a later age. Kings, priests, and nobles had been overthrown, but misery still covered the world. In the teaching of Saint-Simon, under the Restoration, religious conceptions blended with a great industrial scheme; in the Utopia of Fourier, produced at the same fruitful period, whatever was valuable belonged to its suggestions in co-operative production. But whether the doctrine propounded was that of philosopher, or sage, or charlatan, in every case the same leading ideas were visible;–the insufficiency of the individual in isolation, the industrial basis of all social life, the concern of the community, or of its supreme authority, in the organisation of labour. It was naturally in no remote or complex form that the idea of a new social order took possession of the mind of the workman in the faubourgs of Paris. He read in Louis Blanc, the latest and most intelligible of his teachers of the right to labour, of the duty of the State to provide work for its citizens. This was something actual and tangible. For this he was ready upon occasion to take up arms; not for the purpose of extending the franchise to another handful of the Bourgeoisie, or of shifting the profits of government from one set of place-hunters to another. In antagonism to the ruling Minister the Reformers in the Chamber and the Socialists in the streets might for a moment unite their forces: but their ends were irreconcilable, and the allies of to-day were necessarily the foes of to-morrow.
[The February Revolution, 1848.]
[Feb. 22nd.]
At the close of the year 1847 the last Parliament of the Orleanist Monarchy assembled. The speech from the Throne, delivered by Louis Philippe himself, denounced in strong terms the agitation for Reform which had been carried on during the preceding months, though this agitation had, on the whole, been the work of the so-called Dynastic Opposition, which, while demanding electoral reform, was sincerely loyal to the Monarchy. The King’s words were a challenge; and in the debate on the Address, the challenge was taken up by all ranks of Monarchical Liberals as well as by the small Republican section in the Assembly. The Government, however, was still secure of its majority. Defeated in the votes on the Address, the Opposition determined, by way of protest, to attend a banquet to be held in the Champs Elysées on the 22nd of February by the Reform-party in Western Paris. It was at first desired that by some friendly arrangement with the Government, which had declared the banquet illegal, the possibility of recourse to violence should be avoided. Misunderstandings, however, arose, and the Government finally prohibited the banquet, and made preparations for meeting any disturbance with force of arms. The Deputies, anxious to employ none but legal means of resistance, now resolved not to attend the banquet; on the other hand, the Democratic and Socialist leaders welcomed a possible opportunity for revolt. On the morning of the 22nd masses of men poured westwards from the workmen’s quarter. The city was in confusion all day, and the erection of barricades began. Troops were posted in the streets; no serious attack, however, was made by either side, and at nightfall quiet returned.
[Feb. 23rd.]
On the next morning the National Guard of Paris was called to arms. Throughout the struggle between Louis Philippe and the populace of Paris in the earlier years of his reign, the National Guard, which was drawn principally from the trading classes, had fought steadily for the King. Now, however, it was at one with the Liberal Opposition in the Assembly, and loudly demanded the dismissal of the Ministers. While some of the battalions interposed between the regular troops and the populace and averted a conflict, others proceeded to the Chamber with petitions for Reform. Obstinately as Louis Philippe had hitherto refused all concession, the announcement of the threatened defection of the National Guard at length convinced him that resistance was impossible. He accepted Guizot’s resignation, and the Chamber heard from the fallen Minister himself that he had ceased to hold office. Although the King declined for awhile to commit the formation of a Ministry to Thiers, the recognised chief of the Opposition, and endeavoured to place a politician more acceptable to himself in office, it was felt that with the fall of Guizot all real resistance to Reform was broken. Nothing more was asked by the Parliamentary Opposition or by the middle-class of Paris. The victory seemed to be won, the crisis at an end. In the western part of the capital congratulation and good-humour succeeded to the fear of conflict. The troops fraternised with the citizens and the National Guard; and when darkness came on, the boulevards were illuminated as if for a national festival.
[Feb. 24th.]
In the midst, however, of this rejoicing, and while the chiefs of the revolutionary societies, fearing that the opportunity had been lost for striking a blow at the Monarchy, exhorted the defenders of the barricades to maintain their positions, a band of workmen came into conflict, accidentally or of set purpose, with the troops in front of the Foreign Office. A volley was fired, which killed or wounded eighty persons. Placing the dead bodies on a waggon, and carrying them by torchlight through the streets in the workmen’s quarter, the insurrectionary leaders called the people to arms. The tocsin sounded throughout the night; on the next morning the populace marched against the Tuileries. In consequence of the fall of the Ministry and the supposed reconciliation of the King with the People, whatever military dispositions had been begun had since been abandoned. At isolated points the troops fought bravely; but there was no systematic defence. Shattered by the strain of the previous days, and dismayed by the indifference of the National Guard when he rode out among them, the King, who at every epoch of his long life had shown such conspicuous courage in the presence of danger, now lost all nerve and all faculty of action. He signed an act of abdication in favour of his grandson, the Count of Paris, and fled. Behind him the victorious mob burst into the Tuileries and devastated it from cellar to roof. The Legislative Chamber, where an attempt was made to proclaim the Count of Paris King, was in its turn invaded. In uproar and tumult a Provisional Government was installed at the Hôtel de Ville; and ere the day closed the news went out to Europe that the House of Orleans had ceased to reign, and that the Republic had been proclaimed. It was not over France alone, it was over the Continent at large, that the tide of revolution was breaking.
END OF VOL. II.
VOLUME III.
CHAPTER XIX.
Europe in 1789 and in 1848–Agitation in Western Germany before and after the Revolution at Paris–Austria and Hungary–The March Revolution at Vienna–Flight of Metternich–The Hungarian Diet–Hungary wins its independence–Bohemian movement–Autonomy promised to Bohemia– Insurrection of Lombardy–Of Venice–Piedmont makes war on Austria–A general Italian war against Austria imminent–The March Days at Berlin–Frederick William IV.–A National Assembly promised– Schleswig-Holstein–Insurrection in Holstein–War between Germany and Denmark–The German Ante-Parliament–Republican rising in Baden–Meeting of the German National Assembly at Frankfort–Europe generally in March, 1848–The French Provisional Government–The National Workshops–The Government and the Red Republicans–French National Assembly–Riot of May 15–Measures against the National Workshops–The Four Days of June– Cavaignac–Louis Napoleon–He is elected to the Assembly–Elected President.
[Europe in 1789 and 1848.]
There were few statesmen living in 1848 who, like Metternich and like Louis Philippe, could remember the outbreak of the French Revolution. To those who could so look back across the space of sixty years, a comparison of the European movements that followed the successive onslaughts upon authority in France afforded some measure of the change that had passed over the political atmosphere of the Continent within a single lifetime. The Revolution of 1789, deeply as it stirred men’s minds in neighbouring countries, had occasioned no popular outbreak on a large scale outside France. The expulsion of Charles X. in 1830 had been followed by national uprisings in Italy, Poland, and Belgium, and by a struggle for constitutional government in the smaller States of Northern Germany. The downfall of Louis Philippe in 1848 at once convulsed the whole of central Europe. From the Rhenish Provinces to the Ottoman frontier there was no government but the Swiss Republic that was not menaced; there was no race which did not assert its claim to a more or less complete independence. Communities whose long slumber had been undisturbed by the shocks of the Napoleonic period now vibrated with those same impulses which, since 1815, no pressure of absolute power had been able wholly to extinguish in Italy and Germany. The borders of the region of political discontent had been enlarged; where apathy, or immemorial loyalty to some distant crown, had long closed the ear to the voices of the new age, now all was restlessness, all eager expectation of the dawning epoch of national life. This was especially the case with the Slavic races included in the Austrian Empire, races which during the earlier years of this century had been wholly mute. These in their turn now felt the breath of patriotism, and claimed the right of self-government. Distinct as the ideas of national independence and of constitutional liberty are in themselves, they were not distinct in their operation over a great part of Europe in 1848; and this epoch will be wrongly conceived if it is viewed as no more than a repetition on a large scale of the democratic outbreak of Paris with which it opened. More was sought in Europe in 1848 than the substitution of popular for monarchical or aristocratic rule. The effort to make the State one with the nation excited wider interests than the effort to enlarge and equalise citizen rights; and it is in the action of this principle of nationality that we find the explanation of tendencies of the epoch which appear at first view to be in direct conflict with one another. In Germany a single race was divided under many Governments: here the national instinct impelled to unity. In Austria a variety of races was held together by one crown: here the national instinct impelled to separation. In both these States, as in Italy, where the predominance of the foreigner and the continuance of despotic government were in a peculiar manner connected with one another, the efforts of 1848 failed; but the problems which then agitated Europe could not long be set aside, and the solution of them complete, in the case of Germany and Italy, partial and tentative in the case of Austria, renders the succeeding twenty-five years a memorable period in European history.
[Agitation in Western Germany.]
The sudden disappearance of the Orleanist monarchy and the proclamation of the Republic at Paris struck with dismay the Governments beyond the Rhine. Difficulties were already gathering round them, opposition among their own subjects was daily becoming more formidable and more outspoken. In Western Germany a meeting of Liberal deputies had been held in the autumn of 1847, in which the reform of the Federal Constitution and the establishment of a German Parliament had been demanded: a Republican or revolutionary party, small but virulent, had also its own avowed policy and its recognised organs in the press. No sooner had the news of the Revolution at Paris passed the frontier than in all the minor German States the cry for reform became irresistible. Ministers everywhere resigned; the popular demands were granted; and men were called to office whose names were identified with the struggle for the freedom of the Press, for trial by jury, and for the reform of the Federal Constitution. The Federal Diet itself, so long the instrument of absolutism, bowed beneath the stress of the time, abolished the laws of censorship, and invited the Governments to send Commissioners to Frankfort to discuss the reorganisation of Germany. It was not, however, at Frankfort or at the minor capitals that the conflict between authority and its antagonists was to be decided. Vienna, the stronghold of absolutism, the sanctuary from which so many interdicts had gone forth against freedom in every part of Europe, was itself invaded by the revolutionary spirit. The clear sky darkened, and Metternich found himself powerless before the storm.
[Austria.]
There had been until 1848 so complete an absence of political life in the Austrian capital, that, when the conviction suddenly burst upon all minds that the ancient order was doomed, there were neither party-leaders to confront the Government, nor plans of reform upon which any considerable body of men were agreed. The first utterances of public discontent were petitions drawn up by the Chamber of Commerce and by literary associations. These were vague in purport and far from aggressive in their tone. A sterner note sounded when intelligence reached the capital of the resolutions that had been passed by the Hungarian Lower House on the 3rd of March, and of the language in which these had been enforced by Kossuth. Casting aside all reserve, the Magyar leader had declared that the reigning dynasty could only be saved by granting to Hungary a responsible Ministry drawn from the Diet itself, and by establishing constitutional government throughout the Austrian dominions. “From the charnel-house of the Viennese system,” he cried, “a poison-laden atmosphere steals over us, which paralyses our nerves and bows us when we would soar. The future of Hungary can never be secure while in the other provinces there exists a system of government in direct antagonism to every constitutional principle. Our task it is to found a happier future on the brotherhood of all the Austrian races, and to substitute for the union enforced by bayonets and police the enduring bond of a free constitution.” When the Hungarian Assembly had thus taken into its own hands the cause of the rest of the monarchy, it was not for the citizens of Vienna to fall short in the extent of their demands. The idea of a Constitution for the Empire at large was generally accepted and it was proposed that an address embodying this demand should be sent in to the Emperor by the Provincial Estates of Lower Austria, whose meeting happened to be fixed for the 13th of March. In the meantime the students made themselves the heroes of the hour. The agitation of the city increased; rumours of State bankruptcy and of the impending repudiation of the paper currency filled all classes with the belief that some catastrophe was near at hand. [411]
[The March Revolution at Vienna.]
The Provincial Estates of Lower Austria had long fallen into such insignificance that in ordinary times their proceedings were hardly noticed by the capital. The accident that they were now to assemble in the midst of a great crisis elevated them to a sudden importance. It was believed that the decisive word would be spoken in the course of their debates; and on the morning of the 13th of March masses of the populace, led by a procession of students, assembled round the Hall of the Diet. While the debate proceeded within, street-orators inflamed the passions of the crowd outside. The tumult deepened; and when at length a note was let down from one of the windows of the Hall stating that the Diet were inclining to half-measures, the mob broke into uproar, and an attack was made upon the Diet Hall itself. The leading members of the Estates were compelled to place themselves at the head of a deputation, which proceeded to the Emperor’s palace in order to enforce the demands of the people. The Emperor himself, who at no time was capable of paying serious attention to business, remained invisible during this and the two following days; the deputation was received by Metternich and the principal officers of State, who were assembled in council. Meanwhile the crowds in the streets became denser and more excited; soldiers approached, to protect the Diet Hall and to guard the environs of the palace; there was an interval of confusion; and on the advance of a new regiment, which was mistaken for an attack, the mob who had stormed the Diet Hall hurled the shattered furniture from the windows upon the soldiers’ heads. A volley was now fired, which cost several lives. At the sound of the firing still deeper agitation seized the city. Barricades were erected, and the people and soldiers fought hand to hand. As evening came on, deputation after deputation pressed into the palace to urge concession upon the Government. Metternich, who, almost alone in the Council, had made light of the popular uprising, now at length consented to certain definite measures of reform. He retired into an adjoining room to draft an order abolishing the censorship of the Press. During his absence the cry was raised among the deputations that thronged the Council-chamber, “Down with Metternich!” The old man returned, and found himself abandoned by his colleagues. There were some among them, members of the Imperial family, who had long been his opponents; others who had in vain urged him to make concessions before it was too late. Metternich saw that the end of his career was come; he spoke a few words, marked by all the dignity and self-possession of his greatest days, and withdrew, to place his resignation in the Emperor’s hands.
[Flight of Metternich.]
For thirty-nine years Metternich had been so completely identified with the Austrian system of government that in his fall that entire system seemed to have vanished away. The tumult of the capital subsided on the mere announcement of his resignation, though the hatred which he had excited rendered it unsafe for him to remain within reach of hostile hands. He was conveyed from Vienna by a faithful secretary on the night of the 14th of March, and, after remaining for a few days in concealment, crossed the Saxon frontier. His exile was destined to be of some duration, but no exile was ever more cheerfully borne, or sweetened by a profounder satisfaction at the evils which a mad world had brought upon itself by driving from it its one thoroughly wise and just statesman. Betaking himself in the general crash of the Continental Courts to Great Britain, which was still as safe as when he had visited it fifty-five years before, Metternich received a kindly welcome from the Duke of Wellington and the leaders of English society; and when the London season was over he sought and found at Brighton something of the liveliness and the sunshine of his own southern home. [412]
[The Hungarian Diet.]
The action of the Hungarian Diet under Kossuth’s leadership had powerfully influenced the course of events at Vienna. The Viennese outbreak in its turn gave irresistible force to the Hungarian national movement. Up to the 13th of March the Chamber of Magnates had withheld their assent from the resolution passed by the Lower House in favour of a national executive; they now accepted it without a single hostile vote; and on the 15th a deputation was sent to Vienna to lay before the Emperor an address demanding not only the establishment of a responsible Ministry but the freedom of the Press, trial by jury, equality of religion, and a system of national education. At the moment when this deputation reached Vienna the Government was formally announcing its compliance with the popular demand for a Constitution for the whole of the Empire. The Hungarians were escorted in triumph through the streets, and were received on the following day by the Emperor himself, who expressed a general concurrence with the terms of the address. The deputation returned to Presburg, and the Palatine, or representative of the sovereign in Hungary, the Archduke Stephen, forthwith charged Count Batthyány, one of the most popular of the Magyar nobles, with the formation of a national Ministry. Thus far the Diet had been in the van of the Hungarian movement; it now sank almost into insignificance by the side of the revolutionary organisation at Pesth, where all the ardour and all the patriotism of the Magyar race glowed in their native force untempered by the political experience of the statesmen who were collected at Presburg, and unchecked by any of those influences which belong to the neighbourhood of an Imperial Court. At Pesth there broke out an agitation at once so democratic and so intensely national that all considerations of policy and of regard for the Austrian Government which might have affected the action of the Diet were swept away before it. Kossuth, himself the genuine representative of the capital, became supreme. At his bidding the Diet passed a law abolishing the departments of the Central Government by which the control of the Court over the Hungarian body politic had been exercised. A list of Ministers was submitted and approved, including not only those who were needed for the transaction of domestic business, but Ministers of War, Finance, and Foreign Affairs; and in order that the entire nation might rally round its Government, the peasantry were at one stroke emancipated from all services attaching to the land, and converted into free proprietors. Of the compensation to be paid to the lords for the loss of these services, no more was said than that it was a debt of honour to be discharged by the nation.
[Hungary wins independence.]
Within the next few days the measures thus carried through the Diet by Kossuth were presented for the Emperor’s ratification at Vienna. The fall of Metternich, important as it was, had not in reality produced that effect upon the Austrian Government which was expected from it by popular opinion. The new Cabinet at Vienna was drawn from the ranks of the official hierarchy; and although some of its members were more liberally disposed than their late chief, they had all alike passed their lives in the traditions of the ancient system, and were far from intending to make themselves the willing agents of revolution. These men saw clearly enough that the action of the Diet at Presburg amounted to nothing less than the separation of Hungary from the Austrian Empire. With the Ministries of War, Finance, and Foreign Affairs established in independence of the central government, there would remain no link between Hungary and the Hereditary States but the person of a titular, and, for the present time, an imbecile sovereign. Powerless and distracted, Metternich’s successors looked in all directions for counsel. The Palatine argued that three courses were open to the Austrian Government. It might endeavour to crush the Hungarian movement by force of arms; for this purpose, however, the troops available were insufficient: or it might withdraw from the country altogether, leaving the peasants to attack the nobles, as they had done in Galicia; this was a dishonourable policy, and the action of the Diet had, moreover, secured to the peasant everything that he could gain by a social insurrection: or finally, the Government might yield for the moment to the inevitable, make terms with Batthyány’s Ministry, and quietly prepare for vigorous resistance when opportunity should arrive. The last method was that which the Palatine recommended; the Court inclined in the same direction, but it was unwilling to submit without making some further trial of the temper of its antagonists. A rescript was accordingly sent to Presburg, announcing that the Ministry formed by Count Batthyány was accepted by the Emperor, but that the central offices which the Diet had abolished must be preserved, and the functions of the Ministers of War and Finance be reduced to those of chiefs of departments, dependent on the orders of a higher authority at Vienna. From the delay that had taken place in the despatch of this answer the nationalist leaders at Pesth and at Presburg had augured no good result. Its publication brought the country to the verge of armed revolt. Batthyány refused to accept office under the conditions named; the Palatine himself declared that he could remain in Hungary no longer. Terrified at the result of its own challenge, the Court now withdrew from the position that it had taken up, and accepted the scheme of the Diet in its integrity, stipulating only that the disposal of the army outside Hungary in time of war, and the appointment to the higher commands, should remain with the Imperial Government. [413]
[Bohemian movement.]
[Autonomy promised.]
Hungary had thus made good its position as an independent State connected with Austria only through the person of its monarch. Vast and momentous as was the change, fatal as it might well appear to those who could conceive of no unity but the unity of a central government, the victory of the Magyars appears to have excited no feeling among the German Liberals at Vienna but one of satisfaction. So odious, so detested, was the fallen system of despotism, that every victory won by its adversaries was hailed as a triumph of the good cause, be the remoter issues what they might. Even where a powerful German element, such as did not exist in Hungary itself, was threatened by the assertion of provincial claims, the Government could not hope for the support of the capital if it should offer resistance. The example of the Magyars was speedily followed by the Czechs in Bohemia. Forgotten and obliterated among the nationalities of Europe, the Czechs had preserved in their language, and in that almost alone, the emblem of their national independence. Within the borders of Bohemia there was so large a German population that the ultimate absorption of the Slavic element by this wealthier and privileged body had at an earlier time seemed not unlikely. Since 1830, however, the Czech national movement had been gradually gaining ground. In the first days of the agitation of 1848 an effort had been made to impress a purely constitutional form upon the demands made in the name of the people of Prague, and so to render the union of all classes possible. This policy, however, received its deathblow from the Revolution in Vienna and from the victory of the Magyars. The leadership at Prague passed from men of position and experience, representing rather the intelligence of the German element in Bohemia than the patriotism of the Czechs, to the nationalist orators who commanded the streets. An attempt made by the Cabinet at Vienna to evade the demands drawn up under the influence of the more moderate politicians resulted only in the downfall of this party, and in the tender of a new series of demands of far more revolutionary character. The population of Prague were beginning to organise a national guard; arms were being distributed; authority had collapsed. The Government was now forced to consent to everything that was asked of it, and a legislative Assembly with an independent local administration was promised to Bohemia. To this Assembly, as soon as it should meet, the new institutions of the kingdom were to be submitted.
[Insurrection of Lombardy, March 18.]
Thus far, if the authority of the Court of Vienna, had been virtually shaken off by a great part of its subjects, the Emperor had at least not seen these subjects in avowed rebellion against the House of Hapsburg, nor supported in their resistance by the arms of a foreign Power. South of the Alps the dynastic connection was openly severed, and the rule of Austria declared for ever at an end. Lombardy had since the beginning of the year 1848 been held in check only by the display of great military force. The Revolution at Paris had excited both hopes and fears; the Revolution at Vienna was instantly followed by revolt in Milan. Radetzky, the Austrian commander, a veteran who had served with honour in every campaign since that against the Turks in 1788, had long foreseen the approach of an armed conflict; yet when the actual crisis arrived his dispositions had not been made for meeting it. The troops in Milan were ill placed; the offices of Government were moreover separated by half the breadth of the city from the military head-quarters. Thus when on the 18th of March the insurrection broke out, it carried everything before it. The Vice-Governor, O’Donell, was captured, and compelled to sign his name to decrees handing over the government of the city to the Municipal Council. Radetzky now threw his soldiers upon the barricades, and penetrated to the centre of the city; but he was unable to maintain himself there under the ceaseless fire from the windows and the housetops, and withdrew on the night of the 19th to the line of fortifications. Fighting continued during the next two days in the outskirts and at the gates of the city. The garrisons of all the neighbouring towns were summoned to the assistance of their general, but the Italians broke up the bridges and roads, and one detachment alone out of all the troops in Lombardy succeeded in reaching Milan. A report now arrived at Radetzky’s camp that the King of Piedmont was on the march against him. Preferring the loss of Milan to the possible capture of his army, he determined to evacuate the city. On the night of the 22nd of March the retreat was begun, and Radetzky fell back upon the Mincio and Verona, which he himself had made the centre of the Austrian system of defence in Upper Italy. [414]
[Insurrection of Venice.]
[Piedmont makes war.]
Venice had already followed the example of the Lombard capital. The tidings received from Vienna after the 13th of March appear to have completely bewildered both the military and the civil authorities on the Adriatic coast. They released their political prisoners, among whom was Daniel Manin, an able and determined foe of Austria; they entered into constitutional discussions with the popular leaders; they permitted the formation of a national guard, and finally handed over to this guard the arsenals and the dockyards with all their stores. From this time all was over. Manin proclaimed the Republic of St. Mark, and became the chief of a Provisional Government. The Italian regiments in garrison joined the national cause; the ships of war at Pola, manned chiefly by Italian sailors, were only prevented from sailing to the assistance of the rebels by batteries that were levelled against them from the shore. Thus without a blow being struck Venice was lost to Austria. The insurrection spread westwards and northwards through city and village in the interior, till there remained to Austria nothing but the fortresses on the Adige and the Mincio, where Radetzky, deaf to the counsels of timidity, held his ground unshaken. The national rising carried Piedmont with it. It was in vain that the British envoy at Turin urged the King to enter into no conflict with Austria. On the 24th of March Charles Albert published a proclamation promising his help to the Lombards. Two days later his troops entered Milan. [415]
[General war against Austria, beginning in Italy.]
Austria had for thirty years consistently laid down the principle that its own sovereignty in Upper Italy vested it with the right to control the political system of every other State in the peninsula. It had twice enforced this principle by arms: first in its intervention in Naples in 1820, afterwards in its occupation of the Roman States in 1831. The Government of Vienna had, as it were with fixed intention, made it impossible that its presence in any part of Italy should be regarded as the presence of an ordinary neighbour, entitled to quiet possession until some new provocation should be given. The Italians would have proved themselves the simplest of mankind if, having any reasonable hope of military success, they had listened to the counsels of Palmerston and other statesmen who urged them not to take advantage of the difficulties in which Austria was now placed. The paralysis of the Austrian State was indeed the one unanswerable argument for immediate war. So long as the Emperor retained his ascendency in any part of Italy, his interests could not permanently suffer the independence of the rest. If the Italians should chivalrously wait until the Cabinet of Vienna had recovered its strength, it was quite certain that their next efforts in the cause of internal liberty would be as ruthlessly crushed as their last. Every clearsighted patriot understood that the time for a great national effort had arrived. In some respects the political condition of Italy seemed favourable to such united action. Since the insurrection of Palermo in January, 1848, absolutism had everywhere fallen. Ministries had come into existence containing at least a fair proportion of men who were in real sympathy with the national feeling. Above all, the Pope seemed disposed to place himself at the head of a patriotic union against the foreigner. Thus, whatever might be the secret inclinations of the reigning Houses, they were unable for the moment to resist the call to arms. Without an actual declaration of war troops were sent northwards from Naples, from Florence, and from Rome, to take part, as it was supposed, in the national struggle by the side of the King of Piedmont. Volunteers thronged to the standards. The Papal benediction seemed for once to rest on the cause of manhood and independence. On the other hand, the very impetus which had brought Liberal Ministries into power threatened to pass into a phase of violence and disorder. The concessions already made were mocked by men who expected to win all the victories of democracy in an hour. It remained to be seen whether there existed in Italy the political sagacity which, triumphing over all local jealousies, could bend to one great aim the passions of the multitude and the fears of the Courts, or whether the cause of the whole nation would be wrecked in an ignoble strife between demagogues and reactionists, between the rabble of the street and the camarilla round the throne. [416]
[The March Days at Berlin.]
Austria had with one hand held down Italy, with the other it had weighed on Germany. Though the Revolutionary movement was in full course on the east of the Rhine before Metternich’s fall, it received, especially at Berlin, a great impetus from this event. Since the beginning of March the Prussian capital had worn an unwonted aspect. In this city of military discipline public meetings had been held day after day, and the streets had been blocked by excited crowds. Deputations which laid before the King demands similar to those now made in every German town received halting and evasive answers. Excitement increased, and on the 13th of March encounters began between the citizens and the troops, which, though insignificant, served to exasperate the people and its leaders. The King appeared to be wavering between resistance and concession until the Revolution at Vienna, which became known at Berlin on the 15th of March, brought affairs to their crisis. On the 17th the tumult in the streets suddenly ceased; it was understood that the following day would see the Government either reconciled with the people or forced to deal with an insurrection on a great scale. Accordingly on the morning of the 18th crowds made their way towards the palace, which was surrounded by troops. About midday there appeared a Royal edict summoning the Prussian United Diet for the 2nd of April, and announcing that the King had determined to promote the creation of a Parliament for all Germany and the establishment of Constitutional Government in every German State. This manifesto drew fresh masses towards the palace, desirous, it would seem, to express their satisfaction; its contents, however, were imperfectly understood by the assembly already in front of the palace, which the King vainly attempted to address. When called upon to disperse, the multitude refused to do so, and answered by cries for the withdrawal of the soldiery. In the midst of the confusion two shots were fired from the ranks without orders; a panic followed, in which, for no known reason, the cavalry and infantry threw themselves upon the people. The crowd was immediately put to flight, but the combat was taken up by the population of Berlin. Barricades appeared in the streets; fighting continued during the evening and night. Meanwhile the King, who was shocked and distressed at the course that events had taken, received deputations begging that the troops might be withdrawn from the city. Frederick William endeavoured for awhile to make the surrender of the barricades the condition for an armistice; but as night went on the troops became exhausted, and although they had gained ground, the resistance of the people was not overcome. Whether doubtful of the ultimate issue of the conflict or unwilling to permit further bloodshed, the King gave way, and at daybreak on the 19th ordered the troops to be withdrawn. His intention was that they should continue to garrison the palace, but the order was misunderstood, and the troops were removed to the outside of Berlin. The palace was thus left unprotected, and, although no injury was inflicted upon its inmates, the King was made to feel that the people could now command his homage. The bodies of the dead were brought into the court of the palace; their wounds were laid bare, and the King, who appeared in a balcony, was compelled to descend into the court, and to stand before them with uncovered head. Definite political expression was given to the changed state of affairs by the appointment of a new Ministry. [417]
The conflict between the troops and the people at Berlin was described, and with truth, as the result of a misunderstanding. Frederick William had already determined to yield to the principal demands of his subjects; nor on the part of the inhabitants of Berlin had there existed any general hostility towards the sovereign, although a small group of agitators, in part foreign, had probably sought to bring about an armed attack on the throne. Accordingly, when once the combat was broken off, there seemed to be no important obstacle to a reconciliation between the King and the people. Frederick William chose a course which spared and even gratified his own self-love. In the political faith of all German Liberals the establishment of German unity was now an even more important article than the introduction of free institutions into each particular State. The Revolution at Berlin had indeed been occasioned by the King’s delay in granting internal reform; but these domestic disputes might well be forgotten if in the great cause of German unity the Prussians saw their King rising to the needs of the hour. Accordingly the first resolution of Frederick William, after quiet had returned to the capital, was to appear in public state as the champion of the Fatherland. A proclamation announced on the morning of the 21st of March that the King had placed himself at the head of the German nation, and that he would on that day appear on horseback wearing the old German colours. In due time Frederick William came forth at the head of a procession, wearing the tricolor of gold, white, and black, which since 1815 had been so dear to the patriots and so odious to the Governments of Germany. As he passed through the streets he was saluted as Emperor, but he repudiated the title, asserting with oaths and imprecations that he intended to rob no German prince of his sovereignty. At each stage of his theatrical progress he repeated to appropriate auditors his sounding but ambiguous allusions to the duties imposed upon him by the common danger. A manifesto, published at the close of the day, summed up the utterances of the monarch in a somewhat less rhetorical form. “Germany is in ferment within, and exposed from without to danger from more than one side. Deliverance from this danger can come only from the most intimate union of the German princes and people under a single leadership. I take this leadership upon me for the hour of peril. I have to-day assumed the old German colours, and placed myself and my people under the venerable banner of the German Empire. Prussia henceforth is merged in Germany.” [418]
[National Assembly promised.]
The ride of the King through Berlin, and his assumption of the character of German leader, however little it pleased the minor sovereigns, or gratified the Liberals of the smaller States, who considered that such National authority ought to be conferred by the nation, not assumed by a prince, was successful for the moment in restoring to the King some popularity among his own subjects. He could now without humiliation proceed with the concessions which had been interrupted by the tragical events of the 18th of March. In answer to a deputation from Breslau, which urged that the Chamber formed by the union of the Provincial Diets should be replaced by a Constituent Assembly, the King promised that a national Representative Assembly should be convoked as soon as the United Diet had passed the necessary electoral law. To this National Assembly the Government would submit measures securing the liberty of the individual, the right of public meeting and of associations, trial by jury, the responsibility of Ministers, and the independence of the judicature. A civic militia was to be formed, with the right of choosing its own officers, and the standing army was to take the oath of allegiance to the Constitution. Hereditary jurisdictions and manorial rights of police were to be abolished; equality before the law was to be universally enforced; in short, the entire scheme of reforms demanded by the Constitutional Liberals of Prussia was to be carried into effect. In Berlin, as in every other capital in Germany, the victory of the party of progress now seemed to be assured. The Government no longer represented a power hostile to popular rights; and when, on the 22nd of March, the King spontaneously paid the last honours to those who had fallen in combat with his troops, as the long funeral procession passed his palace, it was generally believed that his expression of feeling was sincere.
[Schleswig-Holstein.]
In the passage of his address in which King Frederick William spoke of the external dangers threatening Germany, he referred to apprehensions which had for a while been current that the second French Republic would revive the aggressive energy of the first. This fear proved baseless; nevertheless, for a sovereign who really intended to act as the champion of the German nation at large, the probability of war with a neighbouring Power was far from remote. The cause of the Duchies of Schleswig-Holstein, which were in rebellion against the Danish Crown, excited the utmost interest and sympathy in Germany. The population of these provinces, with the exception of certain districts in Schleswig, was German; Holstein was actually a member of the German Federation. The legal relation of the Duchies to Denmark was, according to the popular view, very nearly that of Hanover to England before 1837. The King of Denmark was also Duke of Schleswig and of Holstein, but these were no more an integral portion of the Danish State than Hanover was of the British Empire; and the laws of succession were moreover different in Schleswig-Holstein, the Crown being transmitted by males, while in Denmark females were capable of succession. On the part of the Danes it was admitted that in certain districts in Holstein the Salic law held good; it was, however, maintained that in the remainder of Holstein and in all Schleswig the rules of succession were the same as in Denmark. The Danish Government denied that Schleswig-Holstein formed a unity in itself, as alleged by the Germans, and that it possessed separate national rights as against the authority of the King’s Government at Copenhagen. The real heart of the difficulty lay in the fact that the population of the Duchies was German. So long as the Germans as a race possessed no national feeling, the union of the Duchies with the Danish Monarchy had not been felt as a grievance. It happened, however, that the great revival of German patriotism resulting from the War of Liberation in 1813 was almost simultaneous with the severance of Norway from the Danish Crown, which compelled the Government of Copenhagen to increase very heavily the burdens imposed on its German subjects in the Duchies. From this time discontent gained ground, especially in Altona and Kiel, where society was as thoroughly German as in the neighbouring city of Hamburg. After 1830, when Provincial Estates were established in Schleswig and Holstein, the German movement became formidable. The reaction, however, which marked the succeeding period generally in Europe prevailed in Denmark too, and it was not until 1844, when a posthumous work of Lornsen, the exiled leader of the German party, vindicated the historical rights of the Duchies, that the claims of German nationality in these provinces were again vigorously urged. From this time the separation of Schleswig-Holstein from Denmark became a question of practical politics. The King of Denmark, Christain VIII., had but one son, who, though long married, was childless, and with whom the male line of the reigning House would expire. In answer to an address of the Danish Provincial Estates calling upon the King to declare the unity of the Monarchy and the validity of the Danish law of succession for all its parts, the Holstein Estates passed a resolution in November, 1844, that the Duchies were an independent body, governed by the rule of male descent, and indivisible. After an interval of two years, during which a Commission examined the succession-laws, King Christian published a declaration that the succession was the same in Schleswig as in Denmark proper, and that, as regarded those parts of Holstein where a different rule of succession existed, he would spare no effort to maintain the unity of the Monarchy. On this the Provincial Estates both of Schleswig and of Holstein addressed protests to the King, who refused to accept them. The deputies now resigned in a mass, whilst on behalf of Holstein an appeal was made to the German Federal Diet. The Diet merely replied by a declaration of rights; but in Germany at large the keenest interest was aroused on behalf of these severed members of the race who were so resolutely struggling against incorporation with a foreign Power. The deputies themselves, passing from village to village, excited a strenuous spirit of resistance throughout the Duchies, which was met by the Danish Government with measures of repression more severe than any which it had hitherto employed. [419]
[Insurrection in Holstein, March 24.]
[War between Germany and Denmark.]
Such was the situation of affairs when, on the 20th of January, 1848, King Christian VIII. died, leaving the throne to Frederick VII., the last of the male line of his House. Frederick’s first act was to publish the draft of a Constitution, in which all parts of the Monarchy were treated as on the same footing. Before the delegates could assemble to whom the completion of this work was referred, the shock of the Paris Revolution reached the North Sea ports. A public meeting at Altona demanded the establishment of a separate constitution for Schleswig-Holstein, and the admission of Schleswig into the German Federation. The Provincial Estates accepted this resolution, and sent a deputation to Copenhagen to present this and other demands to the King. But in the course of the next few days a popular movement at Copenhagen brought into power a thoroughly Danish Ministry, pledged to the incorporation of Schleswig with Denmark as an integral part of the Kingdom. Without waiting to learn the answer made by the King to the deputation, the Holsteiners now took affairs into their own hands. A Provisional Government was formed at Kiel (March 24), the troops joined the people, and the insurrection instantly spread over the whole province. As the proposal to change the law of succession to the throne had originated with the King of Denmark, the cause of the Holsteiners was from one point of view that of established right. The King of Prussia, accepting the positions laid down by the Holstein Estates in 1844, declared that he would defend the claims of the legitimate heir by force of arms, and ordered his troops to enter Holstein. The Diet of Frankfort, now forced to express the universal will of Germany, demanded that Schleswig, as the sister State of Holstein, should enter the Federation. On the passing of this resolution, the envoy who represented the Denmark. King of Denmark at the Diet, as Duke of Holstein, quitted Frankfort, and a state of war ensued between Denmark on the one side and Prussia with the German Federation on the other.
[The German Ante-Parliament, March 30-April 4.]
[Republican rising in Baden.]
The passionate impulse of the German people towards unity had already called into being an organ for the expression of national sentiment, which, if without any legal or constitutional authority, was yet strong enough to impose its will upon the old and discredited Federal Diet and upon most of the surviving Governments. At the invitation of a Committee, about five hundred Liberals who had in one form or another taken part in public affairs assembled at Frankfort on the 30th of March to make the necessary preparations for the meeting of a German national Parliament. This Assembly, which is known as the Ante-Parliament, sat but for five days. Its resolutions, so far as regarded the method of electing the new Parliament, and the inclusion of new districts in the German Federation, were accepted by the Diet, and in the main carried into effect. Its denunciation of persons concerned in the repressive measures of 1819 and subsequent reactionary epochs was followed by the immediate retirement of all members of the Diet whose careers dated back to those detested days. But in the most important work that was expected from the Ante-Parliament, the settlement of a draft-Constitution to be laid before the future National Assembly as a basis for its deliberations, nothing whatever was accomplished. The debates that took place from the 31st of March to the 4th of April were little more than a trial of strength between the Monarchical and Republican parties. The Republicans, far outnumbered when they submitted a constitutional scheme of their own, proposed, after this repulse, that the existing Assembly should continue in session until the National Parliament met; in other words, that it should take upon itself the functions and character of a National Convention. Defeated also on this proposal, the leaders of the extreme section of the Republican party, strangely miscalculating their real strength, determined on armed insurrection. Uniting with a body of German refugees beyond the Rhine, who were themselves assisted by French and Polish soldiers of revolution, they raised the Republican standard in Baden, and for a few days maintained a hopeless and inglorious struggle against the troops which were sent to suppress them. Even in Baden, which had long been in advance of all other German States in democratic sentiment, and which was peculiarly open to Republican influences from France and Switzerland, the movement was not seriously supported by the population, and in the remainder of Germany it received no countenance whatever. The leaders found themselves ruined men. The best of them fled to the United States, where, in the great struggle against slavery thirteen years later, they rendered better service to their adopted than they had ever rendered to their natural Fatherland.
[Meeting of the German National Assembly, May 18.]
On breaking up on the 4th of April, the Ante-Parliament left behind it a Committee of Fifty, whose task it was to continue the work of preparation for the National Assembly to which it had itself contributed so little. One thing alone had been clearly established, that the future Constitution of Germany was not to be Republican. That the existing Governments could not be safely ignored by the National Assembly in its work of founding the new Federal Constitution for Germany was clear to those who were not blinded by the enthusiasm of the moment. In the Committee of Fifty and elsewhere plans were suggested for giving to the Governments a representation within the Constituent Assembly, or for uniting their representatives in a Chamber co-ordinate with this, so that each step in the construction of the new Federal order should be at once the work of the nation and of the Governments. Such plans were suggested and discussed; but in the haste and inexperience of the time they were brought to no conclusion. The opening of the National Assembly had been fixed for the 18th of May, and this brief interval had expired before the few sagacious men who understood the necessity of co-operation between the Governments and the Parliament had decided upon any common course of action. To the mass of patriots it was enough that Germany, after thirty years of disappointment, had at last won its national representation. Before this imposing image of the united race, Kings, Courts, and armies, it was fondly thought, must bow. Thus, in the midst of universal hope, the elections were held throughout Germany in its utmost federal extent, from the Baltic to the Italian border; Bohemia alone, where the Czech majority resisted any closer union with Germany, declining to send representatives to Frankfort. In the body of deputies elected there were to be found almost all the foremost Liberal politicians of every German community; a few still vigorous champions of the time of the War of Liberation, chief among them the poet Arndt; patriots who in the evil days that followed had suffered imprisonment and exile; historians, professors, critics, who in the sacred cause of liberty have, like Gervinus, inflicted upon their readers worse miseries than ever they themselves endured at the hands of unregenerate kings; theologians, journalists; in short, the whole group of leaders under whom Germany expected to enter into the promised land of national unity and freedom. No Imperial coronation ever brought to Frankfort so many honoured guests, or attracted to the same degree the sympathy of the German race. Greeted with the cheers of the citizens of Frankfort, whose civic militia lined the streets, the members of the Assembly marched in procession on the afternoon of the 18th of May from the ancient banqueting-hall of the Kaisers, where they had gathered, to the Church of St. Paul, which had been chosen as their Senate House. Their President and officers were elected on the following day. Arndt, who in the frantic confusion of the first meeting had