1848 (12 page)

With Habsburg rule now in full retreat, the Czechs were also able to assert themselves. Late in the night of 29 February the cream of the city's intelligentsia was holding a masqued ball, during which the first letters arrived from Paris, bearing the news of the republic. To avoid the ubiquitous ears of the police, the word was whispered among the revellers. Quietly, friends clustered together and toasted the revolution.
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The hopes and expectations grew when word of Kossuth's speech reached Prague. On 8 March the liberal organisation Repeal posted up placards calling a public meeting at the Saint Václav's Baths on 11 March. The venue was perilously close to the working-class quarter of Podskalí, and the time of 6 p.m. on a Saturday gave the district's workers ample opportunity to draw their wages and down some alcohol before attending. The destructive power of the workers had been brutally demonstrated (and then equally brutally repressed) only four years previously, and the social fear among the propertied classes was now reignited. Even the leading liberal lights of Bohemia, the historian František Palacký and journalist Karel Havlíček, stood aloof from the political activities, because they were reluctant to stray from the path of ‘legality'. The mayor (or Burgermeister) Josef Müller called out the respectably bourgeois civic guard, but he turned down the request of Prague's wealthiest citizens, who were mostly German-speaking industrialists, to allow all burghers to bear arms. The manufacturers also demanded that the authorities ban the meeting altogether. This the governor of Bohemia, Rudolf Stadion, would not do, for fear of sparking a confrontation; but he put the garrison on alert.

Several thousand people turned out on the appointed day. Eight hundred of the more ‘respectable' demonstrators - young intellectuals, officials, burghers, artisans, almost all of them Czech - were allowed into the baths by Repeal's ushers. The excluded workers huddled together in the street, battered by a heavy rain. The almost complete absence of Germans at the meeting suggested that it attracted those who had been aroused by the Czech national movement and felt frozen out of Bohemian political structures.
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A petition was read out, demanding a constitution, press freedom and trial by jury, and, more radically, the ‘organisation of work and wages' for the workers and the abolition of both labour obligations (the
robot
) and manorial courts for the peasants. Nationalism was expressed in the demand for a union of all the lands of the ancient Czech crown: Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia, collectively represented by a single assembly of the Estates, the official equality of Czech with the German language, the reduction of the standing army and a bar on ‘foreigners' - the meaning was ambiguous - from holding office. The meeting ended with the election of a committee of twenty to prepare the petition for signature. It was only now that Palacký lent his considerable intellectual weight to the demands.

On 15 March thousands of people signed the petition under clear blue skies. In the festive atmosphere that evening a train from Vienna arrived bearing the news of the imperial promise of a constitution. ‘Champagne', one newspaper reported, ‘flowed in torrents' and total strangers embraced one another on the streets. The word ‘constitution' suddenly became fashionable, as artisans started to produce ‘constitutional' hats and parasols, while ‘constitutional pastries' rose in bakers' ovens. The newspaper
Bohemia
suggested that it was no longer polite to doff one's hat in greeting, as this seemed counter to the equality promised by a constitution and, in any case, it was inconvenient in inclement weather.
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As in Vienna, a national guard and academic legion were set up in Bohemia and Moravia to keep order. These organisations recruited from both Germans and Czechs, but the Saint Václav committee also established Svornost, an exclusively Czech militia. Meanwhile, the students formed a political society, the Slavie, or Slavic Linden.

Emperor Ferdinand received a Bohemian delegation that presented the Saint Václav Petition on 22 March, but the Viennese court sensed the reluctance among both Moravians and Bohemian Germans to subscribe to Czech nationalism and got away with giving only vague promises of concessions. The celebrations planned in Prague were cancelled and popular anger at seeing their hopes dashed turned on the Czech delegates themselves, some of whom had their windows smashed.
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On 28 March there was a stormy meeting, at which members of the Saint Václav Committee struggled to make themselves heard over fierce cries of ‘Republic!' and chants against the Bohemian nobility. The committee drafted a more strident petition, demanding the unity of all the Czech lands, represented in a single, modern parliament elected on a wide franchise: the Estates were now jettisoned as archaic. Like the Hungarians, the Czechs now wanted a separate, unified kingdom, retaining only a dynastic link with the Habsburg monarchy. This new list of demands was gathered up and carried by the armed militia to Stadion's offices. The seething, humiliated governor was forced to fix his seal to the petition and, shortly afterwards, he resigned after warning Baron Pillersdorf, the minister of the interior in Austria's new cabinet, that he ‘could answer for nothing if all was not granted'.
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This time Vienna conceded, though not completely. The imperial reply of 8 April did not promise a single Czech parliament, but separate Bohemian and Moravian estates, elected on a franchise limited to property-owners, salaried employees and taxpayers, thus excluding the urban workers, domestic servants and rural labourers. The Czech language would be taught in all schools and used at every level of administration in the Czech lands, alongside German.
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These concessions - along with the later abolition of the obligations that weighed on the peasantry - were the high-water mark of the Czech revolutionary achievement in 1848.

As absolutism collapsed in the Austrian Empire, the other great pillar of the conservative order in Germany - Prussia - could not resist for long. Adolphe de Circourt, fresh from the street-fighting in Paris, had been appointed French ambassador to Berlin, where he had arrived on 9 March. Watching the capitulation of one German government after another, he commented that Prussia was surrounded by ‘a circle of fire'.
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When the explosion came, the Prussian capital would be the scene of the most grisly of all the revolutionary outbursts of March 1848. Students had excitedly filled cafés to read the European news, but of some fifteen hundred at the university, perhaps only a hundred were seriously engaged in politics. The obvious focal point for popular hopes and expectations, the permanent committee of the United Landtag, which had been meeting since January, was dismissed by the King on 6 March, on the grounds that at a time of crisis he needed unity rather than ‘party quarrels': ‘Rally around your King, around your best friend, like a bronze wall.'
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This, and Frederick William's promise that the Landtag would meet every four years, became the principal talking point. On Sundays, Berliners - artisans, workers, students, office workers, journalists - habitually wandered among the cafés, beer-halls and sausage-sellers of the Zelten (literally, the ‘tents', which had stood in the park before the permanent buildings were constructed). On 7 March a crowd gathered as journalists and academics stepped on to the bandstand to harangue them with speeches about the King's promise.
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A petition was drafted and signed by thousands of people on the spot, asking for the immediate recall of the Landtag and press freedom. When the King refused to receive the demands, the petitioners sent them to him in the post. Berliners also took to wearing the black-red-gold of German unity.

The following day the crowds grew bigger on the Zelten and the chief of police warned the King that he did not feel confident in his ability to control the situation. He suggested that the twelve-thousand-strong garrison be used in support. Frederick William, fatefully, agreed.
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Up to this point the crowds had been good-natured, even carnivalesque, but the appearance of army patrols clattering though the streets created a more menacing atmosphere and, to compound matters, the King reinforced the garrison with fresh troops from other provinces, eventually swelling the military presence to twenty thousand. Berliners always resented being given orders by soldiers, but this surged into anger when one violent incident after another flared up between the citizenry and the troops between 13 and 18 March. The initial engagements, noted General Leopold von Gerlach, the King's adjutant-general, were easily dealt with by the army. However, he later remarked, this was what caused such complacency among the authorities when the insurrection broke out in earnest on 18 March.
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The sight of troops breaking up public meetings by striking out with the flats of sabres, or clearing city squares at the point of the bayonet, turned the popular mood from one of cheerful excitement to dark anticipation. Circourt noted the change of atmosphere: ‘Everywhere there were gatherings, confused cries, whistling and vagabonds taking sinister shape on their nocturnal prowls.'
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Berliners hooted and threw stones at the soldiers, many of whom were drawn from the rural provinces of eastern Prussia and were unused to city life and suspicious of urban ways.

The pressure intensified when the news of Metternich's dismissal reached the Prussian capital on 16 March. To defuse the situation, Frederick William was persuaded to make concessions, but only after a ferocious debate among his ministers, with diehard conservatives like Gerlach and the Prince of Prussia (the heir to the throne, who in 1871 would become the first emperor of the newly united Germany) roaring that the shooting of rebellious subjects would make an impression. Instead, on 18 March, Frederick William let it be known that a proclamation was imminent. At 2 p.m. a herald in fact read out two proclamations to an expectant crowd gathered outside the royal castle. The first abolished censorship. The second promised to call the Prussian Estates on 2 April and to consider the reform of the German Confederation, including a German law code, flag and the creation of a German navy (this last was an important aspiration for nationalists). Inside the palace, Gerlach fumed, ‘I had rather have had a hand chopped off than have signed these edicts',
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but when Frederick William himself appeared on the balcony, he was cheered by the joyful crowds.

Yet one promise had not been made: to pull the troops out of the city. A well-dressed cohort of some twenty civilians began to shout in chorus, ‘Away with the military!' - a chant that was taken up by everyone else. This was a revolutionary stake thrust at the very heart of the Prussian monarchy. The King's foremost role was to lead the Prussian army, which was itself virtually a state within a state. Liberals may have wanted the King to rest his authority instead on the trust and goodwill of all citizens, but this was to ask Frederick William to kick away the central pillar of the Prussian monarchy. The revolutionary challenge stiffened the King's resolve and strengthened the ultra-conservatives, who replaced the dithering General Ernst von Pfuel with the reactionary martinet General von Prittwitz as Governor of Berlin. This conservative pill was sugared by the appointment of a new ministry that included the Rhenish liberal businessman Ludolf Camphausen. Prittwitz then made the fateful decision to clear the square in front of the Schloss. The dragoons rode forward at a slow trot, led by Prittwitz himself, who drew his sabre to make his orders clear over the tumult. The horsemen followed suit, making their advance look like a charge. Some civilians surged forward to seize the bridles of the horses, crying, ‘Soldiers back!' When two infantry companies also marched out, two mysterious shots were fired. No one was hurt, but the crack of musketry was enough to scatter the crowd in all directions. There were yells of ‘Betrayal!' and ‘They're killing people on the Schlossplatz!' The newly appointed prime minister, Count von Arnim-Boitzenburg, tried haplessly to calm the situation by appearing on the square waving a white flag, but he was ignored.
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Within hours, hundreds of barricades had been thrown up in the streets and topped with black-red-gold banners. One flag was rather defiantly hoisted above the luxurious d'Heureuse confectioner's shop, in full view of the royal palace. Men, women and children put their backs into the construction of the barricades, ‘which was achieved with astonishing virtuosity, as if the population never had any other business', and they used the material that modern urban life offered: ‘cabs, omnibuses, a post wagon which had been stopped, wool sacks, beams, overturned well-enclosures'.
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They were fashioned from the heavy paving stones prised out of the streets, planks of wood torn from buildings, guttering, barrels, overturned carriages and stalls. The square in front of the Rosenthal Gate was turned into a fortress, with barricades blocking every entrance. The ensuing battle was one of civilian against soldier, in which all the fury stoked up on both sides was unleashed. Prittwitz himself later wrote of the soldiers' sense ‘of having a definite enemy in front of them and of having reached the end of the hitherto existing trial of their patience'.
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Artisans clambered into the church towers and pealed the bells, sounding the tocsin of revolt. Middle-class property owners, respectably dressed in top hats and long black coats, journalists and professionals, the ‘petty bourgeoisie' of shopkeepers, low-ranking officials, teachers and skilled artisans, about a hundred students and, of course, the workers all mounted the barricades. Summoned by the bell-ringing, the Borsig locomotive workers picked up their iron bars and hammers and determinedly marched some nine hundred strong towards the fighting, still wearing their oily smocks. Women and children brought food and drink to the insurgents.