1848 (20 page)

The republican revolution in Baden had irrevocably divided the German revolutionaries. Blum's reaction to the uprising was damning: ‘Hecker and Struve have betrayed the country in the eyes of the law - that's trivial - but they betrayed the people by their insane insurrection and checked us on the way to victory. That is a hideous crime.'
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This analysis of radical political chances was almost certainly flawed, but Blum's indictment illustrated the decisive split in the radical movement. For the liberals, the insurrection was an offence against the emerging constitutional order and they had shown that against the radicals they were willing to use force to consolidate what had been gained in March. Ominously for them, however, the troops had been provided by the German princes involved at the behest of the Confederation, showing that, after the initial shock of the revolution, the old order still had some considerable power.

For the time being, however, the spilling of blood on the snow of the Black Forest did nothing to dampen the revolutionary ardour of the more extreme republicans: they had lost a battle, but the war for the revolution was still to be won. The support gathered by Hecker had suggested that there was still much economic distress and political dissatisfaction among the wider population to be harnessed.
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Karl Marx's associate Arnold Ruge tried to keep up the revolutionary momentum by appealing to the workers and the poor on the streets of cities like Frankfurt, Berlin and Cologne. His newspaper,
Die Reform
, called openly for a second revolution to establish a Jacobin-style dictatorship that would lay the foundations of a republic and an egalitarian democracy.

While the liberal monarchists and republicans locked horns, the problem of the non-German nationalities also exploded on the political landscape. Trouble arose with the Danes over the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein. Lord Palmerston once remarked with characteristic gruffness that he knew only three men who had ever understood the issue: one was dead, another had been driven insane by it and Palmerston himself, the third, had forgotten what it was all about.
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In 1460 the King of Denmark had taken over the duchies on condition that they would be forever inseparable. In fact, Holstein (which had a German majority) joined the Holy Roman Empire and then, from 1815, was part of the German Confederation. The Danish sovereign remained its duke, but even the most exuberant Danish patriots agreed with the German nationalists on one thing: that Holstein would always remain part of Germany. The true controversy was over Schleswig, which had a Danish majority. The ‘Eider Dane' nationalists argued that Denmark extended to the River Eider, the southern boundary of Schleswig. The thorny issue was therefore whether Schleswig could be separated from Holstein and fully absorbed into Denmark. The nationalists' German opponents, by contrast, declared that Schleswig should be detached from Denmark and, along with Holstein, join Germany. For both sides, this was an emotive issue. Danish feeling had been excited by the news of the February revolution in France. Liberals wanted to press for a ‘modern' parliamentary system, in which, by contrast to the Joint Estates promised by King Frederick VII, Schleswig would have no special status, but be incorporated into Denmark as a single province, like any other, with representation proportionate to its population, while Holstein would join the new Germany. Danish nationalism and Danish liberalism were inextricable.
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Yet the former seemed to have more emotive impact: in March a crowd of fired-up Danish nationalists marching through Copenhagen chanted ‘Denmark to the Eider!' The situation was particularly tense in the duchies, because Frederick VII had no heirs, so the succession was open to debate. For German nationalists, the obvious choice was the Duke of Augustenburg, a German of the cadet branch of the ruling Danish Oldenburg dynasty, who would bring
both
duchies into the German Confederation.

The friction between the two sides increased: on 18 March, a meeting of German nationalists in Rendsburg defiantly reiterated the German demands for both duchies. The gauntlet was taken up by the Danes and a massive popular demonstration in Copenhagen on 21 March forced the King to dismiss his conservative government and appoint a more liberal ministry, including the strong-willed figure of Orla Lehmann. Besides freeing the press and improving the lot of the peasantry by abolishing compulsory labour services and corporal punishment, this new government declared the ‘reunion' of Schleswig with Denmark ‘under a common, liberal constitution', which was given royal assent on 5 June (still celebrated as Denmark's ‘Constitution Day'). There was to be a broad male suffrage: all men over the age of thirty of a certain independence - ‘with their own cloth and table', as the law picturesquely put it - had the right to vote, although events would prevent the inhabitants of Schleswig from participating in the first elections, which were set for October. Ominously for what was to follow, conscription was also made universal.
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On 24 March the German nobles in the duchies declared their independence and established a provisional government in Kiel: ‘We will not tolerate the sacrifice of German territory as a prey to the Danes!'
³⁶
The issue set German nationalism aflame: the Committee of Fifty in Frankfurt declared Schleswig part of the German Confederation, while German patriots across the country flocked to the black-red-gold colours to support the military preparations being made in the duchies. Carl Schurz recalled fervent students enrolling in hastily mustered volunteer corps, although he himself was dissuaded by his professor and friend Gottfried Kinkel, who sagely argued that professional soldiers would do the job much better than a bunch of enthusiastic amateurs. One of Schurz's friends who did march was so short-sighted that he fired his musket at his own side before being felled by a Danish bullet and taken captive.
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On 4 April, responding to an appeal by the provisional government in Kiel, the Diet of the German Confederation asked Prussia to intervene against Denmark and provided contingents from other German states. The Prussian army crossed the Eider ten days later, and the forces mustered by the Bund, who were under the command of the Prussian general Friedrich von Wrangel, followed. On 3 May the German forces entered Denmark itself, provoking an international crisis. King Frederick William, who in any case had serious misgivings about aiding rebels, was soon put under intense diplomatic pressure from Britain, Russia and Sweden, all of whom were alarmed at a surge of Prussian power on the isthmus between the North Sea and the Baltic. The Germans were also in danger of overextending themselves, since the Danish navy was now mounting a blockade of northern Germany to which the Germans could offer no serious reply. In the deadlock, the European powers tried to broker a peace deal. When they succeeded, it would provoke a crisis within the German revolution of 1848.

The conflict revealed, once again, that the old order still had vitality, since it was the old Confederation and the Prussian army, not the Committee of Fifty, which provided the military muscle to prosecute the war. It also demonstrated that the revolutionaries all too easily confused ‘Germany' with ‘liberty': an essentially aristocratic uprising in the duchies, which offered no liberal reforms to its own people, was conflated with the wider German national cause.
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The German (and, to be fair, the Danish) reaction to the crisis demonstrated that, when the cosmopolitan flowering of the ‘Springtime of Peoples' clashed with brute national interest, the latter would be carried with much more conviction.

This was violently illustrated even more amply by the intractable problem of German-Polish relations. The Poles would prove to be one of the European nationalities that emerged with little to show from 1848.
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At first glance, this is surprising, because the Poles had been among the most dogged of all the European revolutionaries and, along with the Italians, attracted the most widespread sympathy. The flame of the Polish revolution had been kept alight by the ‘great emigration' of Polish exiles, whose activities were concentrated mostly in France, but they were divided among themselves. The more conservative nobles around Prince Adam Czartoryski, ‘the uncrowned King of Poland' who conducted his business from his Paris home, the Hôtel Lambert, believed that their country could regain its freedom only if it had broad European diplomatic support and military assistance.
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The more radical tendency was represented by the Polish Democratic Society, founded in Paris in 1832 by republicans who feared Czartoryski's monarchical ambitions and believed that Poland should rely primarily on its own revolutionary muscle. To this end, the society declared openly in favour of abolishing serfdom and all aristocratic privileges, in the hope of securing peasant support for the next insurrection. On the eve of the 1848 revolutions, it boasted a membership of some fifteen hundred exiles, mostly in France, but with branches in Brussels, London and New York.
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The March revolutions in Berlin and Vienna at last opened Prussian-ruled Poznania and Austrian Galicia to the activities of Polish patriots. Czartoryski - seventy-eight years old but energised by new hope - boarded a train for Berlin on 24 March in order to press the liberalised Prussian government into war against Russia. Meanwhile, members of the Democratic Society were behind the great demonstration in Paris on 26 March that demanded money and arms for the coming insurrection in Poland. Over the following week, patriotic Poles left Paris by foot or on trains, and (thanks to free rail transport provided by the German Confederation, which was keen to ensure that no Polish revolutionary lingered) crossed Germany, making their way towards Poznania and Galicia. The conflict of Polish and German interests would be fought out in the former.

Revolutionary relations between the Germans and the Poles began promisingly enough. Some one hundred Polish political prisoners, jailed in Prussia for their part in the abortive 1846 insurrection, were freed on 20 March. As befitted the Springtime of Peoples, most Germans expressed solidarity with the Poles. On 23 March King Frederick William received a deputation from the Grand Duchy of Posen (or, as the Polish majority would have called it, Poznania). The region was part of Prussia's share of partitioned Poland, with a sizeable German minority (figures vary depending on national bias, but there were roughly two Poles for every German). Led by the Archbishop of Poznań, the deputation told the King that, since Germany was about to be united ‘on the principle of nationality', it was also ‘the hour of Poland's resurrection'.
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They asked for a ‘national reorganisation' to be carried out. The following day the King's liberalised cabinet granted the request, establishing a committee of Germans and Poles to discuss some form of autonomy for the grand duchy. On 4 April, having listened sympathetically to a further declaration from a Polish ‘national committee' in Poznań - ‘we as Poles cannot and will not join the German Reich' - the pre-parliament declared ‘the partition of Poland a shameful injustice' and recognised ‘the sacred duty of the German people to collaborate in the restoration of Poland'.
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If such aspirations were to be fulfilled, however, it meant war with by far the most powerful of the three partitioning powers: Russia. That was a prospect which was relished by many German revolutionaries: the resurrection of Poland would create a bulwark between the new Germany and reactionary Russia and it would help forge national unity against the common eastern enemy. War between Prussia and Russia was also precisely what Czartoryski, who arrived in Berlin on 28 March, was trying to ignite. Yet he found that the Prussian King was now drawing back in horror from the prospect. Once the implications of his earlier warmth sank in, Frederick William exclaimed, ‘By God, never, never, shall I draw the sword against Russia.'
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Adolphe de Circourt, now French ambassador to Berlin, who met with the Prince daily, found that, by early April, Czartoryski was ‘perpetually waiting . . . neither the King of Prussia nor his ministers wanted to meet with him personally'. Moreover, Circourt, mindful of his friend Lamartine's pacific foreign policy, frankly apologised to the Polish aristocrat for being unable to offer any concrete French help to his national cause.
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Meanwhile, the Russians shrewdly made no hostile gestures against Prussia: if the Polish volunteers crossed into the Russian Empire, it would be they, not the Russians, who would appear to be the aggressors.

The determination of all the great powers to avoid a general, Napoleonic-scale European conflict was therefore the first reason for the failure of the Polish national movement in 1848. With Czartoryski's diplomatic offensive hitting the buffers, the focus shifted to revolutionary efforts on the ground.

In Silesia Polish peasants had risen against their German landlords, while Polish coalminers rioted. The first Polish newspapers appeared and demands were heard for the creation of Polish schools and for the official use of the language. Yet there was no direct challenge to the nascent German state.
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The situation was different in Poznania, where patriotic Polish nobles had established their National Committee, but they demanded little more than autonomy for the grand duchy, not the reconstruction of the entire Polish state. It was the arrival of agents from the Polish Democratic Society that radicalised the movement and tried to channel energies towards truly national aspirations. Foremost of these delegates was Ludwik Mierosławski, who saw the liberation of Poland as his destiny. Mierosławski (whose mother was French and whose Polish father had fought for Napoleon) subscribed to the all-too-common view among European nationalists of the day that warfare was invigorating and prevented decadence. No sooner was he freed, along with the other Polish political prisoners, from Berlin's Moabit Prison on 20 March than he sent agents into both Poznania and Galicia to arm and train the Poles for war with Russia. Yet, in the former, the fragile solidarity between German and Polish liberals was already falling apart. With the encouragement of the National Committee, the Poles seized local power in the grand duchy, removing unpopular officials and organising militias. On his arrival, Mierosławski was given command of these forces, which numbered ten thousand by the beginning of April. As the realities of separation from Prussia began to bite, the German minority began to protest to Frankfurt: ‘We are Germans, and want to remain Germans . . . you cannot, must not, abandon us.' In Poznania itself the Germans started forming their own militias and citizens' committees: ‘the German cause', wrote one local schoolteacher, ‘was at stake'.
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