1848 (11 page)

No sooner had the president of the Estates, Count Albert Montecuccoli, tried to pacify the crowd by allowing a delegation to present the petition in the Landhaus than a Tyrolean journalist named Franz Putz arrived on the square. Holding aloft copies of Kossuth's speech, he clambered on to the central fountain. Everyone knew of the great Magyar's oration, but few had read or heard the precise content. Putz's powerful lungs now bellowed the explosive words - including ‘liberty', ‘rights' and ‘constitution' - across the sea of enthralled faces. When a window of the Landhaus squeaked open and copies of the Estates' own petition fluttered down to the crowd, it was disappointingly meek by comparison and ‘each paragraph . . . was saluted with ringing laughter'.
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The constitutional cat was now out of the bag: students angrily tore up the Estates' supplication. Cries of ‘No half measures!', ‘No delay!' and ‘Constitution! Constitution!' rippled through the crowd. The mood was beginning to turn ugly, but a minor blunder now tipped it into violence. With commendable but, in the circumstances, tactless efficiency, the porter performed his noonday duty of locking the side door of the Landhaus. For the people unaware of the routine, this was a sign that their twelve delegates were being arrested. A crowd of students and, as Baron Carl von Hügel put it curiously, ‘intruders of the better class'
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battered down the doors and invaded the meeting chamber. To calm tempers, Montecuccoli agreed to adopt the liberal programme and to proceed to the royal residence in the Hofburg to present the demands to the Emperor.

By now the imperial court had finally ordered its soldiers out of barracks under the command of Archduke Albert. His orders were to compel the crowds to disperse, but to avoid any loss of life if at all possible. The flood of humanity now stretched from the Landhaus, poured into the Ballhausplatz and spilled towards the Hofburg, where it confronted the gaping mouths of cannon and a line of fixed bayonets. The crowd showered the stone-faced soldiers with a barrage of insults and missiles. Vienna drew breath for a violent confrontation: retailers boarded up their shops and clusters of workers, who had marched in from the suburbs armed with tools, iron bars, pitchforks and wooden shafts, tramped through the streets. The authorities stemmed the proletarian flow by closing all the gates to traffic, but the workers tried to smash their way through. In the fighting the lamp-posts that lit the glacis - the open ground in front of the city walls - were torn up for use as battering rams. The hissing, escaping gas ignited and cast an eerie halo around the city. The troops won the first battle for the city gates and wheeled cannon on to the bastions. Barred from joining the political revolution taking place within, the frustrated workers now gave full vent to their economic grievances. They broke into factories and smashed up machinery, plundered bakeries and groceries and attacked landlords' property.
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Outside the Hofburg, Archduke Albert was struck by a rock when he called on the citizens to return to their homes. The troops at last moved forward, but they were bombarded with stones and even furniture hurled from upper windows. His nerves at breaking point, a regimental commander barked out the fateful order: ‘Move forward with fixed bayonets and fire!' The first shots of the Austrian revolution killed four people and a woman was trampled to death as the crowd stampeded away from the smoking muskets.
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Street-fighting now exploded across the city and only the timely intervention of his soldiers prevented Archduke Albert from being hauled off his horse.
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The suburban workers finally crashed through one of the city gates - the Schottentor - and tried unsuccessfully to storm the arsenal. The troops could control the main thoroughfares and squares, but the crowds of students, bourgeois and workers defended the side-streets with barricades. At 5 p.m. an uneasy truce was negotiated, in which the bourgeois militia, the Bürgergarde, promised to maintain order provided that the troops were withdrawn from Vienna, that the students were allowed to form their own militia (an ‘Academic Legion') and that Metternich was dismissed by 9 p.m. The government conceded all but Metternich's head. The Viennese willingly submitted to the Bürgergarde and the Academic Legion, for they had already been alarmed by the destructive power of the factory workers. It was for this reason, as much as enthusiasm for the revolution, that the ranks of the civic guard were suddenly swelled by new, middle-class recruits, who cleared some forty thousand arms from the arsenal.

The minutes ticked away as the Staatskonferenz argued about Metternich's fate. The Chancellor, who had reached the Hofburg from the Ballhausplatz under guard, resplendent in his green coat and silk cravat and bearing his gold-handled cane, was agonisingly pressed into resigning. Metternich slipped out the Hofburg minutes before the deadline expired. He and Melanie left Vienna that night in a discreet fiacre, boarded another carriage outside the city and drove to a train, which spirited them across Europe. They spent almost a fortnight in The Hague, waiting until the apparently revolutionary threat from the Chartists had dissipated in London.
The Times
announced their arrival off a steamer from Rotterdam on 21 April.
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As daylight broke on 14 March the Viennese celebrated the fall of Metternich, but they suspected - rightly - that the government would yield not another inch and hoped to restore order by imposing martial law. Metternich's last act as Chancellor had been to persuade the Staatskonferenz to give the fire-breathing Prince Alfred Windischgrätz full civil and military powers to restore imperial authority in Vienna. The army was still a brooding presence outside the city walls and, except for press freedom and the creation of a new National Guard, there were no further promises of civil liberties or a constitution. The balance was finally tipped when, on 15 March, Windischgrätz declared Vienna under a state of siege in all but name. The embers of revolution were fanned once more - although in the suburbs they had never died down, since working-class attacks on factories and shops had continued almost unchecked. At midday Ferdinand was persuaded to ride through the city to soothe passions, and he was cheered sincerely by the crowds. Yet this parade was merely a panacea, for people still hovered expectantly around the Hofburg that afternoon. It had at last dawned on the Staatskonferenz, including a thunder-faced Windischgrätz, that it was better to grant a constitution and then resist any further demands than risk the possibility of a mass insurrection. At 5 p.m. on 15 March a herald rode up to the palace gate and read the imperial proclamation. All Austria would be asked to send delegates to an assembly that would discuss ‘the Constitution which We have decided to grant'.
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The imperial capital, at last, rejoiced:

 

One Viennese wrote excitedly that ‘The word “constitution” is giving a new movement to the waves of the time - a movement that will be felt over the whole globe and which will strike many a pillar of absolutism with thunder and lightning.'
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Those parts of Central Europe that so far had merely effervesced at the news from Paris now boiled over on the word from Vienna.

In the small hours of 14 March Archduke Stephen, the Palatine (Viceroy) of Hungary, was woken by a messenger from Vienna who had come thundering down the road on horseback, bearing the news of Metternich's fall. Stephen had Hungarian sympathies and he summoned an emergency meeting of the upper house of the Hungarian Diet in Pressburg. There, everyone agreed that the Diet would demand a separate Hungarian government, with reform of the counties, wider representation of the people and (here the theme of nationalism rose to the surface) the full union of Transylvania with Hungary. It was also decreed that delegates from both houses would travel to Vienna and present this petition to the Emperor in person. That night Kossuth was hailed as a hero by students in a torchlit procession. In return, Kossuth was emboldened to present the liberal Count Lajos Batthyány as the next Hungarian prime minister. The following day, underneath a blustery, cloudy sky, a 150-strong Hungarian deputation - including the firebrand Kossuth and the moderate Count Istvan Széchenyi - boarded two steamers on the Danube for Vienna. Their arrival in the imperial capital at 2 p.m., just hours before the Emperor promised his Austrian subjects a constitution, was triumphant. Dubbed the ‘Argonauts' because they had arrived by boat, the Magyars were resplendent in plumed fur caps, gold-braided frock-coats, red trousers, richly ornamented scabbards and knee boots clinking with spurs.

On the morning of 16 March Kossuth was carried to the Hofburg on the shoulders of cheering Austrians. At the palace the Hungarians found that the Emperor - drained, pale, and his head lolling - had already been persuaded by the Staatskonferenz to concede all that the Magyars asked. Overnight, in fact, Széchenyi and Batthyány had quietly persuaded Archduke Stephen to stand up to the arch-conservatives at court by arguing that it was better to yield than to provoke a rebellion for full Hungarian independence. Now the Hungarians pushed even further, also demanding that Batthyány be called to form a government and that all legislation passed by the Hungarian Diet be automatically ratified. This was going too far for the Emperor's inner circle, which rejected these new demands outright. What now followed would later ensure that Batthyány would end his life facing a firing squad and Stephen would finish his political career in exile. Stephen rushed straight to the Emperor himself - bypassing the Staatskonferenz altogether - and extracted the feeble-minded Ferdinand's personal agreement that Batthyány be made Hungarian Prime Minister. The Imperial Rescript that emerged on 17 March therefore gave Hungary its own government, responsible to the Diet, and appointed Stephen as the Emperor's plenipotentiary, with full powers to implement the reforms. Stephen immediately officially appointed Batthyány as his premier. The new cabinet included a kaleidoscope of views from the gradual reformist Széchenyi to the radical Kossuth. The former bristled at the thought of serving alongside the latter: ‘I have just signed my death sentence!' he wrote, adding later that ‘I shall be hanged with Kossuth.'
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The Staatskonferenz had been so pliable because Habsburg authority appeared to be collapsing in every corner of the empire - in Budapest, Prague, Milan and Venice. Concessions were made out of the grim necessity for survival. While Hungary's political leaders were wringing far-reaching constitutional concessions from Vienna, there was a full-blooded revolution occurring in Budapest. After he had delivered his famous speech of 3 March, Kossuth, anticipating stiff conservative opposition, opened a second front by urging the radicals of the capital - including fired-up students and journalists - to back his parliamentary speech with the weight of a popular petition. The radicals scheduled an enormous French-style banquet for 19 March, the date of a huge trade fair at which the petition could be signed by thousands of people. The task of drafting the document fell to the Society of Ten, drawn from a circle of Hungarian democratic writers who called themselves ‘Young Hungary'. Its leader was the poet Sándor Petőfi, but the petition was penned by the young journalist József Irinyi, whose ‘Twelve Points' became Hungary's revolutionary programme. They included the standard demands of 1848 - free speech, ‘responsible government' (meaning a ministry answerable to parliament), regular parliaments, civil equality and religious freedom, a national guard, equality of taxation and trial by jury. They called for the release of all political prisoners and an end to all ‘feudal burdens' for peasants. There was also some radically nationalist content. Besides a separate government in Budapest, all non-Hungarian troops should be evacuated from Hungarian soil. Transylvania, the Magyars argued, should become part of Hungary, regardless of Romanian feelings. The multi-ethnic character of Hungary made the apparently standard demand for a national guard especially acute. The regular Hungarian army was regarded by the radicals as a reactionary force: it was drafted mostly from the non-Magyar peasants of the kingdom, while many of its officers were German-speaking nobles.
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As these Twelve Points were being discussed, news of Metternich's departure arrived by steamer in Budapest on 14 March. At a pre-dawn meeting in Petőfi's apartment on 15 March, a small group of radicals decided to act immediately. ‘Till tomorrow, then,' Petőfi said as his comrades turned in for a few hours' sleep, ‘when the time will come to trample a few double-headed eagles underfoot!'
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In the morning they walked through the pouring rain to the Society of Ten's watering hole, the Café Pilvax, where a cheering, expectant crowd had assembled. ‘Inside the café', wrote one eyewitness, there was ‘great turbulence, excited talk and violent outbursts'. The Twelve Points were read out to explosions of cheering and applause. Petőfi then recited a poem, written only two days previously, the ‘National Song', the refrain of which brought a roar of approval: ‘We swear by the God of Hungarians, we swear, we shall not be slaves any more!'
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At 3 p.m. Petőfi addressed a ten-thousand-strong crowd in front of the National Museum before leading them to the city chambers. The masses filled the square outside ‘like a roaring sea before the storm'.
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The startled president signed the Twelve Points and a new municipal government - the Committee of Public Safety - was appointed, including radicals like Petőfi, pro-Kossuth nobles and liberals from the old Council. The National Guard was established, but since this was to be a citizens' militia, there was no uniform except for armbands and cockades in the Hungarian colours of red, white and green.
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The revolutionaries then marched across the river via a pontoon bridge (since Széchenyi's famous chain bridge was still under construction) and then tramped up the hill to Buda Castle, where the Vice-Regal Council met. ‘We marched', wrote the radical Alajos Degré, ‘with unbound enthusiasm up to the fortress where we saw artillery men standing next to their cannons holding burning fuses, the multitude in front of them shouting “Long live liberty! Long live equality!”'
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Confronted by a crowd now twenty thousand strong and with no clear direction coming from Vienna, the Palatine's councillors could do little else other than yield. Both sides, in fact, seemed thunder-struck by the situation. The Committee of Public Safety's spokesman presented the Twelve Points, ‘stammering in all humility and trembling like a pupil before his teacher', Petőfi later recalled scornfully, adding that ‘their Magnificences, the Vice-Regal Council, turned pale and were graciously pleased to tremble also. Within five minutes, they consented to everything.'
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