1848 (36 page)

 

Stiles noted that the city was transformed from a garden of hedonistic delights to an arena of dreary political activities: ‘constant spectacles, processions, consecrations of flags, festivities of fraternity'. He also noted that the flight of the court and the nobility had severely reduced spending in the capital, crippling the city's artisans who produced luxury items - an assessment with which Engels agreed. It was therefore more than just the middle class that joined in the ‘shout for a return to a regular system of government, and for a return of the Court'.
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When, on 12 August, Emperor Ferdinand finally returned after being persuaded of his safety by a deputation from the parliament, he was greeted joyfully, with girls scattering flowers in the imperial family's path as they stepped off the Danube steamer. Watching the procession, Hübner was impressed by one of the royals, the eighteen-year-old Franz Joseph, nephew of the Emperor, who was wearing a military uniform: ‘his cold demeanour, the severity of his look, betrayed the emotions which were agitating him. It was sadness, but not discouragement: I would almost say that it was anger being contained with difficulty. For me, it was a revelation and a hope.'
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The radicals responded to Ferdinand's return by holding a stormy mass meeting of ten thousand members of the democratic clubs at the Odeon Hall, where they declared their adherence to the extreme left of the Frankfurt parliament. This provoked an outcry among the more moderate Viennese, who accused the Academic Legion and the radicals of nurturing republicanism. There remained, meanwhile, the economic crisis, and the issue of the public works. The government, mindful of the example of the June days in Paris, was reluctant to shut down the projects altogether. Instead, it announced a reduction in pay, which provoked the crisis. On 21 August, there were street demonstrations, with women in the lead, in the suburbs. The following day, the workers built an effigy of the public works minister and gave him a mock-funeral, saying that he had choked to death on the money he had extracted from the unemployed. When the National Guard tried to disperse the protesters, there were clashes, which escalated on 23 August. The Academic Legion, though refusing to join in the repression, was reluctant to side with the insurgents and stood back, a mere spectator to what followed. Lacking the support of the very people whom they regarded as their leaders, the workers stood no chance. Demonstrators were beaten with the flats of sabres, bayoneted and shot. Between 6 and 18 workers were killed, and between 36 and 152 seriously wounded (depending upon whether one believes government or radical counts). When the fighting was over, women from the more prosperous quarters of the city garlanded the National Guards' bayonets with flowers.

As with the Parisian June days, the workers' protests had been spontaneous, owing little to radical political leadership. Yet one conclusion seemed inescapable: the conservative
Wiener Zeitung
declared that ‘the workers have seen the contrast between their defenceless poverty and armed property. And at this moment there came into being a proletariat that formerly did not exist.'
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Middle-class radicals tried to deny the existence of a social schism. The Democratic Club shouted down Marx, who was then visiting Vienna, when he tried to argue that the violence was a class struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. For Engels, 23 August was the moment when the middle class abandoned the cause of the people: ‘thus the unity and strength of the revolutionary force was broken; the class-struggle had come in Vienna, too, to a bloody outbreak, and the counter-revolutionary
camarilla
saw the day approaching on which it might strike its grand blow'.
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But Marx found that it was not only the middle class who were deserting the revolution; there was little sympathy for his ideas even when he addressed workers' meetings. On 7 September, he left Vienna, grumbling at the stubborn refusal of the workers to see that they should be waging a class war against the bourgeoisie. However, the social fear was very real, even if it was not always expressed in the class-conscious terms that Marx would have liked, and these social tensions would help tear apart the liberal order.

The reaction began slowly at first: the public works were suspended, but they were replaced by a ‘Committee for the Assistance of Destitute Tradesmen', which attempted to find work for the unemployed. In other words there was no more direct state intervention, but the committee at least set about its task enthusiastically, consulting with the guilds as to how the government could improve economic conditions. The National Guard was placed under the direct command of the Interior Ministry, which also assumed responsibility for law and order. This signalled the end for the Security Committee, whose moderate members carried a motion for its own dissolution on 25 August.
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In Vienna, the tide was beginning to turn back towards the conservatives. In Prague the counter-revolution was by then already complete. Social tensions in the Czech cities were complicated by the additional layer of ethnic strife between Czechs and Germans. The precise relationship between the social and national conflicts was complex. Workers formed a tiny segment of the population of the Czech lands, but memories of their destructive capacities in 1844 ensured that, four years later, there were palpable fears of a ‘communist uprising'.
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Yet little was done to address the root cause of their distress (although, in Prague, the prices of certain foods were reduced, relief funds were collected and the unemployed were set to work on public projects). Meanwhile, the best advice that a liberal newspaper,
Bohemia
, could offer was to await the drafting of a constitution, which would surely bring a brighter future for all. Yet the workers were effectively excluded from the new political order: they were denied the vote, first by the Moravian Diet in Brno in April and then by the National Committee when it drafted the electoral law for Bohemia on 28 May. The National Guard had, like elsewhere, been established to safeguard property and to keep the workers in check. The failure to enfranchise the latter came as supplies of raw materials (such as cotton from the United States) were choked off for lack of credit, so mills closed and unemployment continued to increase unabated. This was accompanied by a sharp rise in prices. It was small wonder that the workers remained restless, while the collapse of Austrian authority gave them the confidence to express their distress in acts of violence. They took to the streets of Prague in early May. There were strikes in Ostrava and Brno. Yet, while in Vienna the workers found spokesmen among the students and the democratic press, in Prague they were left with little voice. The call for the ‘organisation of work and wages' in the earlier March petitions had been quietly shelved by the National Committee. Czech students' focus on political and national issues did not begin to address the workers' bread-and-butter anxieties. There was, moreover, no evidence of any socialist-style class consciousness: Czech workers took out their anger and despair on more traditional scapegoats, not least the Jews. When the textile workers marched in a demonstration demanding better working conditions on 3 June, they were easily dispersed by the army, and the city authorities castigated the protesters for their ‘blind stubbornness'.
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None the less, the Czech workers did emerge as a political force in June 1848. As in so many other European cities, this played into conservative hands by arousing the fears of almost everyone else. The evidence is sketchy, but it appears that the imperial war minister, Count Theodor Latour, had thought of Radetzky's forces in Italy as a ‘southern army' that was to be complemented by the efforts of a ‘northern' force.
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This implied that some ministers, at least, had a strategic vision for the defeat of the revolutions in the Habsburg Empire. While Radetzky pressed forward in Italy, the fiery Alfred Windischgrätz would be sent to Prague to take command of the imperial forces in Bohemia. There could have been no better choice for the leadership of the counter-revolution in the north: the marshal had been bitterly opposed to the concessions made in March and he drew no distinction between moderates and radicals, who were all rebels to him, equally worthy of a dose of hot lead. It was he who had crushed the Prague workers' insurrection of 1844, so his return to the city seemed to presage a new ruthlessness in the way in which Vienna proposed to deal with the Czechs.

People immediately noticed a new vigour in the military presence: patrols were doubled, the size of Prague's garrison was increased and artillery was placed on the heights of Vyšehrad and Petřin, which dominated the city centre. The radical press appealed to the soldiers not to become the instruments of reaction and demanded that arms, artillery and ammunition be given to the National Guard and the Academic Legion, a request that, of course, Windischgrätz had no intention of granting. Strangely, a Slavonicthemed ball was held on 10 June, to which the Czech liberals, Windischgrätz and the governor of Bohemia, Leo Thun, had all been invited. Although the revellers hissed when the marshal entered the ballroom, there was no other aggravation.

Windischgrätz had read the situation on the streets well: the students and their allies in the more militant companies of the National Guard could command at most three thousand rifles, while in time the marshal could muster close to ten thousand troops. He could also rely on the National Guards from more conservative and German-speaking districts. The odds were therefore stacked enormously against the liberals, but with both sides refusing to concede, a clash was almost inevitable. The spark in this tinder-box came on 12 June when, after hearing Mass beneath the statue of Saint Wenceslas, a large crowd of students, National Guards, members of Svornost (the exclusively Czech militia) and unemployed workers (some 2,500 of them, largely at the urging of radical students) marched in protest against Windischgrätz. This demonstration blundered into a delegation from the German Association, which had just met the marshal and promised him their support. The ensuing scuffles degenerated into full-scale running battles between workers, National Guards and soldiers. There were also stand-offs between Czech and German militia companies. With violence erupting spontaneously across the city, barricades were erected and six days of violence followed. Any hopes of an end to the fighting evaporated when, first, the insurgents took Governor Thun hostage and, second, when Windischgrätz's wife was killed by a stray bullet.

The revolutionaries had placed most of their four hundred barricades poorly: the marshal reckoned that he had to take only fifteen of them to keep communications open between the old and the new town. The flimsy fortifications were built hastily, and by end of the first day, the Austrian forces, led by grenadiers who acted as shock troops but backed by loyal units of the National Guard, had secured the city's main arteries. When the insurgents, led by Karel Havlíček, issued their demands, they were in the circumstances rather tame: the dismissal of Windischgrätz, the withdrawal of the troops and the establishment of a new provisional government. During a lull in the combat in the small hours of 15 June, Windischgrätz pulled his troops back from the barricades. It was an ominous sign. Shells then rained down on the city centre from the heights above: ten people were killed, three others later died of their wounds and some thirty mangled corpses were found among the rubble only after the fighting. By 17 June it was all over and martial law was declared. This was the first major victory of the counter-revolution in the Habsburg Empire since Kraków at the end of April.
¹⁰⁴

Windischgrätz established a dubious commission of inquiry to investigate those responsible for the insurrection. He more or less told it to ‘discover' that it was the fruit of a vast Slavic conspiracy to undermine and destroy the Habsburg monarchy. The evidence for this was found in the coincidental fact that the Slav Congress was meeting in Prague at the time. This had been convened by the Czechs to keep up the momentum from Palacký's rebuke to Frankfurt and rally all Slavs against German pretensions. For this reason it was originally planned to coincide with the opening of the German parliament in May. In the event, the 385 delegates gathered in Prague under Palacký's presidency on 2 June. Similar ideas for a congress had come from other Slavs with their own agendas, namely Slovaks like L'udovít Štúr, the Polish National Committee in Poznania (which had good reason to fear German nationalism) and southern Slav adherents of the ‘Illyrian ideal'.
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The congress therefore had a broad agenda. It was to discuss possibilities for the unification of all the Slav peoples of the Habsburg Empire, the relations between those Slavs and the other nationalities of the monarchy, links between the Austrian Slavs and the other Slav peoples and the relationship between all Slavs and the rest of Europe. Problems immediately arose with even the loosest notion of Slav unity: the Poles and the Ukrainians quarrelled over the question of Galicia. The Russians were conspicuous by their near absence: the congress was determined that neither the Germans nor the Magyars could accuse them of being tools of tsarist reaction. Of the seven Russian delegates, one was Mikhail Bakunin, an anarchist thinker who was scarcely representative of Russian opinion. The Czechs feared the Germans; but, for the Slovaks, the Magyars were the real worry. The Poles, who sympathised with the Magyars (for they were both anti-German and anti-Russian), wanted to mediate between the southern Slavs and the Magyars, rather than fully support the former.
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Bakunin criticised the congress for focusing primarily on the Austrian Slavs, and so ignoring the plight of those who lived under the Ottoman and Russian empires.
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Precisely because of these contradictory pressures the Slav Congress was, as Lewis Namier puts it, ‘a seed-plot of history',
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since it revealed the conflicts of aspirations, hopes and interests among the peoples who would emerge as the ‘successor states' to the East European empires after 1918.