1848 (19 page)

 

Yet the firebrands were not listening. Instead, they actively supported foreign revolutionaries in their efforts to topple their own governments - and the provisional government was still wary of taking rigorous measures to prevent them from exporting the republican revolution. A massive demonstration on 17 March, in which some hundred thousand members of the left-wing Parisian clubs participated, was an impressive show of force that put the ministers on the defensive. Consequently, the government reacted belatedly to the efforts of Lyon radicals who helped the attempt of expatriates from Savoy, then under Piedmontese rule, to prepare the duchy for its annexation by France. A fifteen-hundred-strong legion crossed into Savoy, taking Chambéry on 3 April, but the local peasantry did not take kindly to the ragged, poorly armed invaders. The next day they swept from the mountains and expelled the legion, killing five men and capturing eight hundred.
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Even more serious was an armed clash on the Belgian frontier, when some two thousand unemployed Belgian workers in Paris, organised into legions by republican exiles, travelled northwards to topple the monarchy in Brussels. Cautiously, the French authorities offered no more support than providing rail transport for the unarmed Belgians as far as the border. The first train, though, was accidentally allowed to roll over the frontier, delivering its consignment of would-be revolutionaries into the waiting arms of the Belgian authorities. A second, twelve-hundred-strong Belgian legion, however, was allowed to acquire weapons in Lille and, in the night of 28 March, it stole into Belgium. There it marched straight towards the gun-muzzles of the primed Belgian forces. In an hour-long skirmish at the aptly named village of Risquons-tout, the legion was torn apart by musket fire and grapeshot.
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Lamartine had to work hard to defuse these diplomatic bombshells. The exasperated foreign minister smoothed over one fiasco by (rather redundantly) offering French military assistance to Charles Albert in expelling the legion from Savoy.
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The assault on Belgium was potentially more damaging, since Britain was a guarantor of Belgian neutrality and took any French intrusion there as a serious threat to its own vital interests. Lamartine calmed tempers by frankly avowing that the provisional government was not yet secure enough to use force against radical troublemakers within France, but he accepted that other governments were perfectly entitled to receive them ‘with gunshot'.
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Adroitly managing these profound embarrassments, Lamartine made diplomatic headway. While only the American ambassador to Paris, Richard Rush, gave immediate and full recognition to the Second Republic, the Manifesto to Europe did soothe the inevitable fears about French intentions. Lamartine privately explained the finer points to various European ambassadors, and, one by one, each European state - even Russia - declared its intention not to intervene against the new republic.

Initially, the potential threat from France - and the grim possibility of being directly in the path of any Russian army intent on crushing revolution in Europe - had concentrated German minds on building up national strength through unity. The Mannheim Petition of 27 February neatly encapsulated the German sense of being trapped between the French hammer of revolution and the Russian anvil of reaction: ‘In a few days French armies might well be standing on our borders, while Russia assembles its own armies to the north . . . Germany can no longer stand by patiently and allow itself to be kicked.'
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Yet the drive for German unity was powered not only by fear: in the immediate aftermath of the March days it was also energised by hope and expectation. The German republican Carl Schurz would later recall the ‘People's Springtime' for its ‘enthusiastic spirit of self-sacrifice for a great cause which for a while pervaded almost every class of society with rare unanimity . . . I knew hosts of men who were ready at any moment to abandon and risk all for the liberty of the people and the greatness of the Fatherland.'
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The first problem was precisely what form that ‘liberty' would take. Should the new, free Germany be a democratic republic or a parliamentary monarchy? The other question was: where should the boundaries of the ‘Fatherland' lie? The latter problem revolved, first, around the national minorities who lived within the boundaries of the existing German states - particularly the Danes and the Poles - and second, around to what extent Austria - with its polyglot empire - should be included. The liberals and radicals clashed over the former question politically at the meeting of the ‘pre-parliament' in Frankfurt, and then violently in the Grand Duchy of Baden.

The 574-strong pre-parliament consisted of members invited from existing German state assemblies, others summoned individually for their progressive reputations, and a handful who had been spontaneously elected by popular meetings. The radicals managed to send a respectable number of delegates because their networks were already primed to seize any opportunities offered by the political crisis. Most notable among the radical leadership was the Prussian Johann Jacoby, the Saxon Robert Blum and the Badensians Gustav Struve and Friedrich Hecker.
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The rupture between liberals and radicals occurred at the very first meeting on 31 March. Struve rose and pressed his republican programme for a single, unitary and democratic German state, watched in awe by the two thousand spectators crammed into the public galleries. The following day, Heinrich von Gagern, a moderate, liberal-minded nobleman from Hesse (who had fought at Waterloo at the age of sixteen), stemmed the radical assault. Fanny Lewald - no great political admirer - described him as ‘tall and strongly built . . . his posture, his voice, his manner of expression all bear the imprint of his masculinity'.
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Gagern believed in law, order and monarchy, but he accepted that it was necessary to wrest the initiative from the radicals - ‘to become revolutionary in order to avoid a revolution', as one observer put it.
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He and other moderates respected the individual German states, but believed that some overarching political unity was required if Germany were to be strong and succeed in realising its mission as a great, civilising influence. For the liberals, Germany would be a federation of constitutional monarchies, with an emperor chosen by its parliament. On 1 April Gagern rose to the tribune and silenced the noisy assembly with a sweep of his steely gaze, but his victory was almost a foregone conclusion, for some 425 deputies were liberal monarchists by conviction. The moderates pressed their advantage when the pre-parliament separated on 3 April, electing a ‘Committee of Fifty', which would act as a caretaker until the actual German parliament was due to meet in May. Neither Hecker nor Struve was elected on to this committee. Hecker stormed out, taking a rump of deputies with him, while the more compromising Blum and the other democrats stayed, hoping to work for a federal Germany that would allow for the coexistence of both monarchies and republics. Blum stood apart from many of his fellow democrats not only because of his eloquence (which spoke directly to the impoverished masses since he drew on his childhood experience of privation) or because of his shaggy beard and the worker's blouse that he sometimes wore, but because he saw the wisdom of political compromise.
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Yet the radical left was not only defeated but irretrievably fractured.

These early defeats convinced some radicals that ‘the reaction' was already gathering pace and that, as Carl Schurz recalled, ‘there was no safety for popular liberty except in a republic'.
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But there was no chance of a republic being established by legal means. Hecker fumed: ‘Nothing can be done in Frankfurt. We have to strike in Baden' - where grassroots republicanism had found rich soil. The grand duchy had been politically one of the most liberal since 1815, but its territory included large landed estates that belonged to princes or knights of the former Holy Roman Empire who had lost their political power during the territorial reshuffles of the Napoleonic era but still burdened their peasantry with the relics of seigneurialism. During the March revolution, peasants in the Black Forest seized their landlords' property and demanded weapons to defend their claims. Such rebels offered a willing ear to republican propaganda,
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but the Baden republicans had more than just peasant anger to sustain them. Over the Swiss border, a German ‘national committee' recruited a paramilitary force from among the twenty thousand expatriates, while the former soldier Franz Sigel organised his own republican legion at Mannheim and, in Paris, Georg Herwegh, leader of the eight-hundred-member German Democratic Society, was boasting that he could raise a force of some five thousand Germans. The Prussian ambassador to Baden warned that ‘with a word - that may already have been spoken - an army of more than twenty thousand desperate and fanatic proletarians could unite under [Hecker's] command'.
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A new revolution in Baden itself was certainly feasible, but Hecker and his comrades seem to have vastly overestimated the appeal of their democratic ideas across Germany as a whole. They thought that, with one decisive push in the grand duchy, they could bring about the collapse of the entire monarchist edifice in Germany. But the March revolutions had not swept away much of the old conservative order, and it was already beginning to show signs of renewed vigour. The thoroughly alarmed Baden liberal government appealed to the still-existing German Confederation for military assistance on 4 April, and the Diet granted it. Meanwhile, the radical-turned-moderate Karl Mathy and the cool-headed democrat Adam von Itzstein - both Badensian members of the Committee of Fifty - travelled to Baden to try to dissuade Hecker from fomenting civil war. The uprising was sparked, however, when the capable republican propagandist Joseph Fickler was arrested at Karlsruhe railway station - Mathy himself spotted the journalist and ordered the stationmaster to prevent his train from leaving. With this news, Hecker made his way to Konstanz, where he met up with Struve. Donning a blue worker's shirt, a slouch hat with a cock's feather and pistols in his belt, he proclaimed a republic on 12 April and called on all able-bodied men to join him in marching on the grand duchy's capital, Karlsruhe. Hecker's small group of sixty followers grew as it moved north-west until it numbered some eight hundred men - mostly representing a cross-section of urban or small-town life: professionals, tradesmen, master-craftsmen, journeymen, students and workers.
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Many were armed with scythes rather than firearms, and Hecker's band could not combine with the other republican forces. The German legion in Switzerland was blocked by the Swiss army, determined that their neutrality should not be violated. In France the government was desperate to wash its hands of Herwegh's troublemaking legion, which endangered Lamartine's finely balanced foreign policy. Warning the Baden and Bavarian governments of Herwegh's intentions, Lamartine promised not to arm the legion, but he added that the provisional government was not yet strong enough to force it to disband.
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Meanwhile, Herwegh sent his indefatigable wife Emma into Germany in an effort to make contact with Hecker's men. Dressed in trousers, a dark blouse, feathered slouch hat and with a brace of pistols in her belt, she found Hecker on his march and told him that her husband's twelve-hundred-strong force was poised uncertainly on the French frontier. She asked Hecker for a time and place for the two legions to link up. Hecker was surprisingly vague - possibly because he believed that Herwegh's legion was full of foreigners, which would make its incursion look like a foreign invasion. Meanwhile, the more professionally minded Franz Sigel was marching his well-disciplined force - all three thousand of them - across southern Baden in an attempt to find Hecker. One evening, after a gruelling march through snow, mud and driving rain, Hecker, his wet clothes steaming as he luxuriated in the warmth of an inn, scornfully rejected an appeal from the Committee of Fifty to abandon his enterprise.
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Meanwhile, the liberal Baden government had mustered a crushing superiority in professional soldiers. While Grand Duke Leopold's own army was of questionable loyalty, the German Confederation had sent forces from Hesse and Nassau, joined by troops from Württemberg and Bavaria. This combined army of thirty thousand men was put under the command of Friedrich von Gagern, Heinrich's brother, who insisted on dressing in civilian clothes, the better to convey the image of a ‘citizen general'. This, after all, was no struggle between revolution and counter-revolution, but a fight between moderates and radicals.

The two forces clashed at the village of Kandern on 20 April. Leading from the front, Gagern was the first to fall, but the professionalism and sheer numbers of the government forces soon told. Hecker's legion scattered in all directions, while its leader scampered across the Swiss frontier which lay fewer than ten miles away. Some of his men ran into Sigel's force, which was finally and belatedly following their tracks. The cool-headed soldier managed to rally the fugitives, but his force was then crushed at Freiburg when, attacked on three sides, they ran out of ammunition. Sigel himself managed to escape. In the night of 24 April, Herwegh's legion crossed secretly from France into Baden, where they heard of the disasters at Kandern and Freiburg. Emma and Georg Herwegh agreed that it was best to abandon the insurrection and march their legion into Switzerland, gather the shattered republican remnants, and try again in more propitious times. But on their way through the Black Forest, their force was ambushed and routed. Some of the fugitives found in the darkness were summarily shot or hanged, their limp corpses dangling from branches of the sombre trees. Emma and Georg eventually slipped across the border dressed as peasants, carrying pitchforks.
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