1848 (3 page)

The real oppression was bad enough for those who dared to voice their thoughts too loudly. In 1836, when the liberal intellectual Petr Chaadaev lambasted Russia for its backwardness, he met the fate that would be shared by some twentieth-century Soviet dissidents: the government declared him insane and confined him to an asylum.
¹²
Even (or perhaps, given his quick temper, especially) the great poet Pushkin had to tread carefully: he was tolerated because the Tsar liked his work, but even he was subjected to the occasional rap on the knuckles. Intellectuals and writers cautiously circulated their writings in manuscript among friends first, and only later approached publishers - if they approached them at all. The Tsarist regime did not only fear dissent from among Russia's intellectuals, it was anxious - perhaps more justifiably - of the possibility of a mass uprising by the peasantry, twenty million of whom were serfs and who had risen up with startling vengeance in the past, most recently under the renegade Cossack Emilian Pugachev in the early 1770s. It also worried about opposition from the downtrodden subject nationalities of the Empire, especially the Poles, who bore their subjugation only between fits of rebelliousness.

The third great absolute monarchy in Europe, Prussia, had been governed since 1840 by King Frederick William IV, who moved rapidly after his accession to dash liberal hopes that he would introduce a constitution. His father, Frederick William III, had promised his eager subjects to abandon absolute rule several times, but that had been during the Napoleonic Wars, when he wanted to arouse the patriotism of his loyal Prussians against the hated French. A generation later, Frederick William IV explained to a disappointed liberal official that ‘I feel I am king solely by the grace of God.' A constitution would, he said, make the whole idea of monarchy ‘an abstract concept, by dint of a piece of paper. A paternal governance is the way of true German princes.'
¹³
Prussia did have provincial estates, but these representative bodies were stacked heavily in favour of the nobles and great landowners and they were not permitted to correspond with one another, to avoid any notion that they could merge into a national parliament. This was especially galling to liberals, many of whom were Prussians of recent vintage. The Rhineland, with its advanced economy and relatively positive experience of Napoleonic rule, had been given to Prussia in 1815, to strengthen Germany against France. This made Prussia a kingdom of two halves - the east dominated by the landed nobility, with their great estates and their peasants, who until 1807 had been enserfed, and the west, with its strong manufacturing base and burgeoning middle class. One of the latter, on learning of the imminent Prussian annexation of the Rhineland in 1815, sniffed that they had married into poor relations - meaning the agrarian, noble-dominated east. It was perhaps no surprise that much of the liberal leadership of the Prussian revolution in 1848 sprang from the Rhineland. As well as its formidable army, it was however the combined wealth of its manufacturing and agricultural bases that made Prussia one of the greatest powers not just of Germany but of Europe.

Thanks, then, to the peace settlement at Vienna in 1815, Central and Eastern Europe had been thrust under the domination of these three absolute monarchies. Since 1795 the old Polish kingdom (except for the Napoleonic interlude of the Grand Duchy of Warsaw, established in 1807), had been wiped off the map, partitioned between Russia, Prussia and Austria - and this was confirmed at the peace congress. The three ‘eastern monarchies' therefore tried (in vain) to asphyxiate Polish nationalism under their combined weight.

They were equally determined to keep German nationalism locked inside its Pandora's box. Austria shared with Prussia a dominant position in Germany, which, after the destruction of the Holy Roman Empire and a dramatic reordering of territory under Napoleon, was now divided into thirty-nine states (including Austria and Prussia), bound together in a confederation (Bund), with a diet that met at Frankfurt. This assembly was not a parliament of elected representatives, but rather a meeting of diplomats sent by the governments of the separate states, a sort of German ‘United Nations'. Its purpose was not to encourage Germany into closer union - quite the opposite. The Bund was intended to preserve the conservative order and to ensure that disputes between the states were resolved peacefully, which of course reassured the smaller ‘middle states' that they would be protected against the domineering tendencies of Prussia and Austria. It could call on the various German governments to provide soldiers to defend Germany from foreign invasion, but also against domestic revolutionary threats. In 1819 it issued the repressive Karlsbad Decrees against the German radical and liberal movements, and especially against the student nationalist organisations, the
Burschenschaften
. These edicts were reiterated in 1832 in response to a wave of revolution and protest that swept across Europe. Behind the decrees stood Metternich, who had also looked askance at the constitutionalism beginning to take root in Germany in the years immediately following the Napoleonic Wars. The southern German states of Baden, Württemberg, Bavaria, Nassau and Hesse-Darmstadt had all emerged with constitutions. This process was actually in keeping with the act that created the German Confederation, and which declared that all German states should have ‘constitutions of the territorial estates'. This, however, was a deliberately ambiguous phrase, since it could mean either (as the southern German states interpreted it) a modern, parliamentary monarchy or a more conservative style of traditional ‘estates' in which the nobles, the clergy and the good burghers of the towns were separately represented, ensuring that the estates were always weighted towards conservative interests. Metternich had exerted his influence on King Frederick William III of Prussia and then on the German Confederation to ensure, first, that Prussia did not join the constitutional dance and, second, that the Bund's ‘Final Act' of 1820 interpreted the term ‘constitution' in Metternich's sense, to mean estates rather than parliaments. Even then, they were to be stacked in favour of the ‘monarchic principle', meaning that the prince would always enjoy most of the power.
¹⁴

It was in Italy, however, that Metternich pursued the most active counter-revolutionary and anti-liberal policies. He famously derided the claims of Italian nationalists for unification by calling Italy ‘a geographical expression',
¹⁵
split as it was among ten kingdoms, duchies and statelets. He saw Austria's role to keep it that way. Besides ensuring that Austria had a strong direct Italian presence, by virtue of its annexation of Lombardy and Venetia in the north, the Congress of Vienna had arranged Italian affairs so that Austria would be the predominant power in the entire peninsula. After the long experience of Napoleonic occupation, the purpose was initially to ward off French influence, but the role soon developed into one of repressing Italian liberalism and nationalism. Tuscany was ruled by a Habsburg grand duke, while the Duchies of Parma and Modena were also governed by relatives of the Emperor. Beyond these dynastic ties, the Austrians were given the right to garrison the fortress of Ferrara in the Papal States. The Bourbon King of the Two Sicilies (meaning southern Italy and the eponymous island, since 1816 deprived of its separate parliament and ruled directly from Naples) signed an alliance and a military convention with Austria, which bound the kingdom tightly to Habsburg policy. Only the north-western Kingdom of Sardinia (which included the island of the same name and, on the mainland, Piedmont and Genoa) remained completely independent: it was militarily the most powerful of all Italian states and provided a strong buffer between France and the Austrians in Lombardy. Yet Austrian power in Italy was such that it was able to intervene militarily against liberal revolutions in both Naples and even in Piedmont itself in 1820-1. In the aftermath the Austrians tried over ninety leading Lombard liberals (although they had little to do with the uprisings) and condemned forty of them to rot in the dark Spielberg fortress in Bohemia. Among them was Silvio Pellico, who on his release in 1830 wrote
My Prisons
, a testimony to both Austrian oppression and to the power of religious faith in the face of adversity. The book became a bestseller and contributed to a ‘black legend' of Austrian misrule in Italy. Metternich merely reinforced the grim image of Germanic oppression when he again sent troops southwards in 1831-2 to crush insurrections in Modena, Parma and the Papal States (where the Austrians had the brass neck to hold on to Bologna until 1838).

Austrian power and influence therefore spread from Germany down to the toe of Italy and into Eastern Europe. It was, Count Anton Kolowrat-Liebsteinsky disparagingly said, a ‘forest of bayonets'. Kolowrat was no liberal, but he was Metternich's great rival in the Staatskonferenz. He agreed with the Chancellor ‘that people must strive for conservatism and do everything to achieve it. Yet we differ about means. Your means consist of a forest of bayonets and fixed adherence to things as they are. To my mind, by following these lines we are playing into the hands of the revolutionaries.'
¹⁶
Metternich's more rigid form of conservatism, he fretted, would merely create such pressure that ‘your ways will lead us . . . to our ruin'. The outspoken British statesman Lord Palmerston bluntly criticised Austria's ‘repressive and suffocating policy' because it ‘will lead to an explosion just as certainly as would a boiler that was hermetically sealed and deprived of an outlet for steam'.
¹⁷
Kolowrat was also deeply concerned about the financial cost of maintaining Austrian power in Europe at such intensity: between 1815 and 1848, the army swallowed some 40 per cent of the government budget, and paying interest alone on the state debt digested a further 30 per cent. One of the great weaknesses of Metternich's ‘system' that was exposed in 1848 was that it had scant money left in its coffers to cope with the worst economic downturn of the nineteenth century and so could do little to soothe the people's distress.

The political restrictions imposed on Europe could not help but provoke opposition. Just as Metternich and his ilk felt the heavy weight of recent history in their political calculations, so that same history proved to be an inspiration to their opponents. The French Revolution of 1789 and its Napoleonic progeny had provoked dread among conservatives, but - in the true Romantic fashion of the age - their memory could stir the blood of liberals, radicals and patriots who felt constricted in the stifling atmosphere of Metternich's Europe. The first post-war generation of European liberals had personally engaged in the struggles of the revolutionary era. With the final allied victory in 1815, they had lost either because they had supported Napoleonic rule - and its often empty promises of freedom - or because, having opposed the French, they had hoped in vain that from the ruins of the old European order would rise a new, constitutional system.

There were unsuccessful revolutionary outbreaks in Italy in 1820-1, led in Naples by liberal army officers (including Guglielmo Pepe, a former Napoleonic officer with a central role to play in 1848), who were members of a secret revolutionary society called the
Carbonari
, dedicated to the overthrow of Austrian domination and to the establishment of a liberal order in Italy. The French equivalent, the Charbonnerie, drew much of its strength from the seething resentment felt by former servants of the Napoleonic state who had been purged in the royalist reaction, the violent ‘White Terror' of 1815 - so-called to distinguish it from the ‘Red' Jacobin Terror of 1793-4. Among those who joined the underground opposition was a teenage Louis-Auguste Blanqui. His family had fallen on hard times after his father, the Napoleonic prefect of the Alpes-Maritimes, lost his post when the territory (better known as Nice) was returned to Piedmont in the peace settlement of 1815. Blanqui thus began a lifetime of revolutionary activism that would last until his death in 1881. In Spain the liberals yearned for the Constitution of 1812, which had been forged in Cadiz by a parliament that had met not far from the hostile muzzles of cannon belonging to the besieging French army. Yet when King Ferdinand VII returned triumphantly in 1814, he brushed aside the constitution and sent many of the liberals scurrying into exile. They had their revenge in 1820, when they seized power and compelled Ferdinand to rule as a constitutional monarch for three years - until they in turn were overwhelmed by French troops (the ‘100,000 sons of Saint Louis') sent over the Pyrenees by Louis XVIII, who was intent on restoring the royal absolutism of his fellow Bourbon.

Even autocratic Russia could not remain untouched by the explosive legacy of the Napoleonic epoch. Russian army officers who had marched across Europe during the war, ultimately occupying Paris, had met their French, German and British counterparts and, over the course of the genteel, intellectual conversations with these fellow officers, began to wonder at the backwardness of their own country, while absorbing western ideas of constitutional government and civil liberties. This germinating seed finally bore its bitter fruit in Russia's first revolution, the Decembrist uprising of 1825. In the month which gave the insurrection its name, liberal army officers, taking advantage of the confusion following the sudden death of Tsar Alexander I, raised the standard of revolt against his successor, Nicholas I. The insurrection was easily crushed by loyal troops, first in Saint Petersburg and then in the Ukraine, but it was this experience at the very moment of his accession that set the new Tsar on a reactionary course for his entire reign - although there were some occasional, hopeful glimmers that serfdom would be reformed.

The most dramatic wave of revolutions occurred several years later. In 1830 the Bourbon Charles X was toppled by a three-day uprising in the streets of Paris, to be replaced by the more liberal-minded Louis-Philippe. This was rapidly followed by a revolution in Belgium, where liberals overthrew Dutch rule (imposed in 1815), eventually to secure an independent state with a constitutional monarchy. In Germany the French example inspired liberal opponents of the conservative order to demand - or force - constitutions from their rulers, so that Hanover, Saxony and a few others joined the still small group of German states that had representative institutions. The opposition pressed for more, unleashing a protest movement that culminated in the Hambach Festival of 1832, a mass meeting - the largest in Germany before 1848 - demanding political reform and a united Germany. This display of opposition muscle spurred Metternich into repeating the Karlsbad Decrees.