1848 (34 page)

The Fraternity had sprung, however, from the hard work of Stephan Born, who was not preparing for a class war but who dreamed more prosaically of forging all German workers into a wider political association, beginning with the Berlin Central Committee. Its demands reflected traditional artisan concerns, such as that a fair share of government contracts would go to smaller workshops and that cheap credit would be provided to invest in small-scale technology. In addition, there should be a progressive income tax, pensions and the right to work to ensure that everyone could provide for himself. The Berlin Central Committee demanded free education for all, so that eventually working-class candidates could be elected to parliament. It also proposed a commission of both workers and employers to prevent labour disputes. There was no talk of nationalisation, or of attacking private property: rather, this programme was the cry of the craft worker against industrialisation, a protest against the deskilling of the artisan, forced by economic pressures to abandon his trade and submit to the factory, the discipline of the relentless pace of the machine or to the new rhythms of work imposed by the entrepreneurs.
⁷⁰

Born organised the Fraternity at a workers' congress in Berlin - representing thirty-one associations across twenty-five cities - between 23 August and 3 September. The fraternity's resolutions included a ten-hour day, the abolition of taxes on consumption (which hit the poor proportionately harder), free public education, the reduction of the voting age and the division of large landed estates. The Frankfurt parliament was also to be asked to establish a ‘social chamber', a German form of the Luxembourg Commission, which would draft legislation on social and economic matters for parliamentary debate. The Fraternity was based in Leipzig with district committees in twenty-seven German cities, creating a nationwide network for German workers. These regional branches acted quite pragmatically to help the beleaguered craft workers: some formed cartels of artisans who would buy their raw materials in bulk; others established job agencies and provided money for journeymen travelling in search of work. The Berlin branch created an insurance scheme for disability, which attracted some twenty thousand subscribers. So, despite its occasionally fiery class rhetoric, the Fraternity emphasised that stolidly liberal value - self-help. To realise this tenet, it offered a programme of education: if they so chose, workers could be edified by lectures on topics as diverse as religion, morality, the 1789 French revolution, geography and political economy.
⁷¹
All this was perfectly respectable and posed no direct challenge to the emerging liberal order: indeed, the demand for a ‘social chamber' to be appended to the Frankfurt parliament was a strong signal that the Fraternity wanted to work with, not against, the new regime. The journeymen's workers' congress in Frankfurt, whose members joined the Fraternity in droves, rallied not around a red flag but around a green banner with a golden oak wreath. ‘The long-term aim', writes Wolfram Siemann, ‘was the integration of the workers into political democracy.'
⁷²
Marx later scoffed that if German revolutionaries ever stormed a railway station, they would buy a platform ticket.

The essential moderation of the German labour movement did not prevent displays of working-class strength from stirring middle-class anxieties. On 4 June a massive demonstration of Berlin's democratic clubs marched down Unter den Linten, waving the red-black-gold of German unity: artisans, civic guards and the wives and daughters of the (exclusively) male members of the clubs marched with them. Fanny Lewald, still clinging to her hope of a new era of peace, commented that ‘it would be bad if we could still not find a different argument for the truth than the thunder of cannons and the blade of the guillotine'. Yet the demonstration graphically illustrated the social divisions within German urban society. After the established artisans, who bore the banners of their old guilds, came the unemployed, the impoverished craft workers and journeymen marching behind the Fraternity's green banner, which was emblazoned with a slogan - a plea, as much as a threat: ‘The Workers without Bread!' Lewald shuddered: ‘the workers will be justified in fighting for a place in society and for the enjoyment of life, if we do not find peaceful means to do enough for them.'
⁷³
As if heeding this plea, the primarily middle-class and artisan Democratic Club worked hard to feed three hundred unemployed labourers a week. Yet since the March revolution no fewer than seventy thousand people had fled Berlin out of fear for their safety. Events in June seemed to prove them right, while delivering a body-blow to liberal hopes of a conciliatory, peaceful progress towards a new Prussia.

The elections for the Prussian Diet had taken place on the basis of indirect, but universal, male suffrage in May, returning a mixture of peasants, nobles, artisans, shopkeepers, plenty of civil servants, but (surprisingly) few lawyers and no workers. The parliament met for the first time on 22 May and there was a strong left-wing showing, with some 120 democratic delegates out of 395, including some republicans on the fringes. It was a composition that astounded contemporaries - not least the government itself. Frederick William IV had retained the moderate Rhenish liberal Ludolf Camphausen as his minister-president. The latter was no revolutionary, believing that only close cooperation between the Prussian state and reformers would prevent what he called the
Kommunistencliquen
from running riot.
⁷⁴
Lewald understood that ‘he wants conciliatory transitions', but the strain could be read on his face: ‘sorrowful sleepless nights and the hours of struggle are evident on his pale features'.
⁷⁵
It was clear that Camphausen could neither command a majority in the parliament nor control the Berlin democrats. When the King handed down a draft constitution when he opened parliament on 22 May, it was rejected out of hand, and a parliamentary commission was established to produce its own version. The left again flexed its muscles on 8 June by putting forward a motion which, in effect, asked the representatives to approve the principle of popular sovereignty and to legitimise the revolution against royal power: the Diet was to declare that those insurgents who fought in the March revolution ‘had rendered outstanding services to the Fatherland'.
⁷⁶
Camphausen managed to muster enough votes to defeat this highly charged motion, but the left still seemed to be running amok.

The defeat of the motion provoked an insurrection six days later, aimed at arming a democratic citizens' militia, which would not be limited to students and men of property. The leader of the uprising, Friedrich Held, was neither an orthodox socialist nor a democrat: a former lieutenant in the Prussian army and one-time actor and writer, he used his bitter pen and sharp tongue to galvanise the crowds in the Zelten. His granite core of support lay among the railway workers as he was the editor of their newspaper,
Die Lokomotive
. He had a vision of an authoritarian and populist mix of socialism, militarism and royal power - a precursor of modern, extreme right-wing ideologies that would combine social revolution with iron rule. Held exploited a widespread fear that the army was preparing to attack the city, and on 14 June his supporters crammed into the small square in front of the royal armoury, clamouring for arms. As the crowd pressed forward, the soldiers protecting the building fired, killing two demonstrators. The predictable riot followed, in which the guards were overwhelmed and the armoury plundered. The affair raised the political excitement in Berlin to fever-pitch. Moderate democrats, such as Born, tried to distance themselves from the insurrection (he called Held's locomotive workers ‘plunderers' while the left-leaning Fanny Lewald condemned the attack as ‘criminal'), but the affair was a gift to the conservatives, who could now plausibly claim that Berlin was endangered by armed workers. A despairing Lewald noted at the end of the month that ‘the tone of the opposing parties is becoming more violent on both sides. Even the remembrance of the terrible street fighting in Paris seems to arouse the fury of the contesting factions instead of calming and exhorting them to peace.' Like French observers of the Parisian tragedy, Lewald saw the gathering crisis in Berlin in social terms: ‘This battle of the “have-nots” against the “haves” was something that seemed a certain eventuality to me long before this present revolution came upon our horizon. Now it has broken out and one does not know how to deal with it except with the power of the bayonet and with cannon balls.'
⁷⁷
The liberals, meanwhile, were caught in the middle, having to choose between the authoritarian urge to restore order and the desire to preserve the hard-won freedoms that now seemed to be encouraging the ‘reds'. No one, not even the conservatives, was ready to contemplate a full-blown counter-revolution, but Camphausen's resignation on 20 June - he was unwilling to call troops, the instrument of the old absolute monarchy, into the city to protect parliament - convinced many people that the extreme left was out of control. Many anxious liberals began to swing towards the conservatives. One of them, a philosopher named David Strauss, now candidly admitted that ‘to a nature like mine it was much better under the old police state, when we had quiet in the streets and were not always meeting with excited people, new-fashioned slouch hats, and beards' (radicals, labelled the ‘wild reds', distinguished themselves by wearing fur caps and long beards).
⁷⁸
Strauss was almost certainly representative of Berliners who wanted peace and order. The former enemies, the royal troops, were now greeted cheerfully on the streets as the protectors of law-abiding citizens.

All this was grist to the conservative mill, which was beginning to crank into action. Frederick William, shaken by the revolution, had withdrawn to the peaceful surroundings of the palace of Sans Souci. ‘Shame and self-reproach lie heavy upon him,' wrote a Hessian diplomat. ‘His weariness is actually visible.'
⁷⁹
Yet, travelling to Berlin for only a few hours at a time to consult with liberal ministers in whom he had little confidence, the King had given himself the space to become the figurehead for such conservatives as Leopold von Gerlach, who was later described by Otto von Bismarck as ‘a noble and unselfish character, and a loyal servant of the King'.
⁸⁰
Gerlach urged his royal master to resist the revolution and ‘not to deviate by a hair's breadth'.
⁸¹
Frederick William was all ears: privately, he thought that the revolution was a sin. His royal mission was to reconnect with his ‘true' people, who really loved him. Among the men who appeared at the court to offer their services was Bismarck, who spent time reassuring the King that his power still rested on firm foundations.
⁸²

While Frederick William was rebuilding his confidence, the conservatives in parliament, sensing that public opinion was turning away from the revolution in disgust at the disorder, finally made a stand. The occasion was the presentation of the draft constitution on 26 July. The chair of the constitutional committee was held by Benedikt Waldeck, an elderly judge from Westphalia, whose combination of stern virtue, Catholic faith and awareness of the travails of everyday life made him a convinced republican. The ‘Charte Waldeck', as the draft became jocularly known, was a dagger aimed at the heart of Prussia's monarchical, military and Junker traditions. It assigned to parliament control of a people's militia and broad powers of executive oversight (including the right to approve diplomatic treaties); it gave the King a suspensive rather than an absolute veto; it abolished aristocratic titles and the remnants of seigneurial privilege. Up to the summer, the conservatives in parliament had at least paid lip-service to the idea of a constitutional monarchy, but now they were strident in their denunciations of the ‘republican' articles. After fourteen people demonstrating in favour of the citizens' militia were mowed down by regular troops in the small Silesian town of Schweidnitz on 31 July, parliament passed a decree on 9 August demanding that all soldiers swear an oath of loyalty to the constitution and ‘distance themselves from all reactionary efforts'.
⁸³
It was a desperate attempt to ensure the fidelity of the army, but at the same time it was a tacit admission of just how weak the nascent liberal order was when confronted with the Prussian military.

Similar vulnerabilities were exposed in Frankfurt, where the German parliament met for the first time on 18 May. The precise mode of election had been left to the separate states. The guidelines issued on 7 April had declared that voters must be adult males who were ‘independent', but the term was not defined. Most of the German governments were therefore able to restrict the franchise to those who owned property, paid certain types or levels of tax, or were not dependent on wages alone for their existence.
⁸⁴
The vast majority of states also made voting indirect, which gave disproportionate influence to local worthies, since they were usually chosen to fill the electoral colleges. Nevertheless, across Germany, it has been estimated that some three-quarters of all adult males had the right to vote, and turnout was generally high. Significantly, those states with broader franchises, like Prussia, tended to return constitutional monarchist or even conservative deputies, while those states with a more confined electorate, like Baden and Saxony, chose democratic delegates. Like most of the European peasantry, the predominantly rural population of Germany was conservative and monarchist. The radicals appealed mostly to the small-town urban middle classes, so republican candidates did better wherever their votes were not diluted by a wider, rural electorate.
⁸⁵
Few truly blue-blooded conservatives were elected, since most of them had disdainfully shunned the elections altogether, so popular support for monarchy was expressed in the strong showing that the liberal, constitutional monarchists enjoyed in the 585-seat parliament, accounting for half of the deputies, although they were split between moderates and leftists. There was also a vocal group of radicals, making up 15 per cent of the deputies. They were divided equally between the likes of Robert Blum who, for tactical reasons, were willing to work with the constitutional monarchists, and the more fiery democrats who wanted to brook no compromise with the remnants of the old regime. The Assembly was dubbed the ‘Parliament of Professors' because the vast majority of its deputies were middle class and university educated. But this epithet also implied that the politicians were full of pedantic hot air, with no practical solutions to meet the challenges of the day.