1848 (45 page)

These counter-revolutionaries were gathering their forces. Leopold von Gerlach's brother, Ernst, had created the Association for King and Fatherland in early July. This organisation aimed at rolling back the revolutionary gains of March 1848, dissolving parliament and restoring royal power. The only representative institutions would be the provincial estates - dominated, of course, by the landed nobility. The ‘Fatherland', too, meant Prussia, not Germany, for the conservatives knew that a distinctly
Prussian
patriotism still lingered among the masses. During parades in honour of Archduke John - the regent of the new Germany - on 6 August, some thousand peasants showed up pointedly waving the Prussian black-white banner rather than Germany's black-red-gold. Many Prussians feared that merging into Germany would obscure the kingdom's own sense of identity, diluting its greatness among the weakling states and threatening its Protestantism by too close an association with southern Catholics.
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Gerlach also founded an ultra-conservative newspaper, the
Neue Preussische Zeitung
, which was rapidly dubbed the
Kreuzzeitung
because of the iron cross motif on its front page - a patriotic symbol dating from the ‘War of Liberation' against Napoleon. Its appeal lay in the fact that it combined wit, political discussion and polemic with hard facts: Bismarck, one of its most important contributors, understood that a newspaper would be influential beyond its natural constituency if it was useful as a source of actual news, not just opinion. This did not prevent him, however, from writing some brutal pieces against the conservatives' opponents.
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The Association for King and Fatherland rapidly spread across Prussia, where local organisations affiliated to it. By the autumn, there were some one hundred of these societies, and by the following spring as many as three hundred, boasting a total membership of sixty thousand, showing that this was not merely a movement of irascibly reactionary country squires.
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Enlisting the support of the masses was for some members of the old social elites a leap into the dark that they took with some trepidation. A generation gap may have come into play here: old-style conservatives like the Gerlachs idealised the hierarchical, deferential society that was meant to have existed before the revolution. Thrusting young men like Bismarck, however, took a much more pragmatic view of the popular role. The principles of a newer form of conservatism were hammered out in the
Kreuzzeitung
and among the members of the Association for the Protection of the Interests of Landed Property, established by Bismarck and his allies in order to unite the Prussian Junkers and to rally the peasantry behind them. For this reason, the association added to its name ‘and for the Maintenance of the Prosperity of All Classes of the People' - as if the original title was somehow too catchy. Four hundred people attended its general assembly in Berlin on 18-19 August, which its opponents scornfully dubbed the ‘Junker Parliament'. For Bismarck, it was not enough simply to expect that the masses would tug their forelocks and follow the lead of their social ‘superiors', as traditionalists hoped. Instead, the old nobility had to stress that they shared the same material interests as the rest of the population. Liberalism, Bismarck argued, was the ideology solely of the propertied, urban middle class - a narrow social group. Anyone else who supported it - peasants, artisans, retailers and delusional Prussian noblemen - were betraying their own best social and economic interests. Bismarck's brand of conservatism therefore offered not a return to an ossified past, but rather a combination of measures that would serve the peasants and the lower middle class well, such as confirmation of the abolition of the last remnants of ‘feudalism' for the peasants and tariffs to protect small businesses. Popular support would thus be enrolled behind the traditional elites, an alliance that would be invincible against liberalism and radicalism.
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In September, Frederick William had appointed the outright reactionary General Friedrich von Wrangel to command the army around Berlin. Coarse and rather eccentric, Wrangel (who habitually sported a well-polished cavalry breastplate) soon appeared in Berlin, where he gave a clumsy speech assuring the locals of his desire not to have to shoot them. On 21 September, Helmuth von Moltke, then a junior staff officer but destined to become one of Prussia's great generals, wrote to his brother:

 

As if to emphasise the point, a new uprising took place in Berlin in mid-October. The excitement generated by the constitutional battle allowed the radicals to mobilise large numbers of people in political clubs such as the Linden and Friedrich Held's Democratic Club. What was more, since March, anyone was allowed to bear arms, and, alongside the official civic guard, there were ‘mobile associations' of workers, students and artisans. On 13 October, the National Assembly - trying desperately to cling to the subsiding middle ground - decided that it was time to disarm the radicals and voted to declare the primarily middle-class civic guard the only legitimate police force in the capital. The liberals and the democrats now came to direct blows. Radical protests erupted in the city and, on 16 October, the canal workers seized the opportunity to riot against the steam pumps that they saw as a threat to their livelihoods. The civic guard drew up and shot dead eleven of them. Further pressure was brought to bear on the Assembly when the radical Democratic Congress and the ‘anti-parliament', intended to be a counterweight to the more moderate German Assembly in Frankfurt, met in Berlin at the end of the month. Among its participants was Franz Zitz - one of the instigators of the September crisis in Frankfurt - and Johann Jacoby, who called on Prussia to send troops to help the Viennese in their struggle against the Habsburg reaction. This demand was presented beneath streaming red flags by a one-thousand-strong protest march on the Prussian National Assembly on 31 October. When a parliamentary majority rejected the petition, the crowd outside roared angrily. One deputy was struck in the face by a flaming torch when he tried to leave the chamber. His colleagues were forced to escape through a side door, clambering through storerooms and over ladders to get to it. As they emerged into the street, a shot was fired and pandemonium erupted as club-wielding civic guards and workers swinging torches struck at each other. The locomotive workers arrived and broke up the fighting, but in the confusion the civic guard had turned its weapons on them, too.
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The incident showed that there was an unbridgeable gap between the moderates and the radical left, which provided the conservatives with their opportunity. Pfuel resigned, his efforts at compromise in tatters. The King sensed that the divisions between the liberals and the democrats were so irreconcilable that he could at last strike, but even now he wavered: should he, he asked a friend, ‘continue with the constitutional comedy . . . or suddenly march in with Wrangel and then, as conqueror, fulfil the letter of my promises'?
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This last phrase was telling: it suggested that the King was not set on an outright reaction, but wanted to impose a ‘revolution from above'; that is, reform, but on the monarchy's own terms. A constitution of ‘the most liberal sort' was being considered, but it was one which, when the moment was right, would later be reformed to the monarch's satisfaction. On 1 November, he heeded Bismarck's advice and appointed the conservative Count von Brandenburg as prime minister. The situation then went from extremely bad to irretrievable. Frederick William snubbed a parliamentary delegation desperately trying to fend off a
coup d'état
(one of its members was an exasperated Jacoby, who exclaimed, ‘That's the trouble with kings: they don't want to hear the truth!'). This provoked fifteen hundred protesters to take to the streets in a show of radical defiance, which they called ‘a last fight for the fatherland and right and freedom'. On the other side of the political divide, the shrieks for an end to ‘anarchy' and ‘lawlessness' from the conservative press became shriller. Fanny Lewald returned to her city on 7 November to find the mood extremely depressing and the political bitterness harsher than before, learning that the ‘stable friends of order' were waiting impatiently for the ‘verdict by shrapnel'.
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Two days later, Count Brandenburg appeared before the National Assembly and read a royal proclamation explaining that, for their own protection, the deputies were to be dismissed until the end of the month, when they would reconvene in Brandenburg. The majority in the Assembly rose in support of its president when he declared that such an act was illegal. It was only now that liberals and radicals rediscovered their common ground and talked about combining their forces - the democratic clubs and the civic guard - to defend the parliament, but it was too late. All that remained was passive resistance - the commander of the civic guard refused to use his men against the Assembly - but this merely provided the government with the pretext to send thirteen thousand of Wrangel's troops, supported by sixty cannon, into Berlin on 10 November.

Now, though, came perhaps the National Assembly's finest hour. Protected by the civic guard drawn up outside (with Wrangel's men only two hundred paces away), and watched in respectful silence by supporters in the public galleries, the deputies went on with their business as the sky darkened and the lamps were lit. They discussed such matters as the abolition of the taxes on quill pens, dog biscuits and the feed for a peasant's ‘house cow'. ‘They debated very calmly', explained Lewald, ‘because they found themselves on the firm ground of true law.' At one stage during the evening's proceedings, the president sent a polite letter to Wrangel, asking how long his troops intended to stand outside, since their presence was not needed. Wrangel, his coarseness not attuned to such subtle humour, replied bluntly that he would not budge, since he recognised neither the National Assembly nor its president.
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Sitting casually on a chair in front of his troops, looking pointedly at his watch, the general gave the Assembly fifteen minutes to adjourn. In the end the parliamentarians meekly dispersed and the civic guard allowed itself to be disarmed. Even the backbone of the popular movement, the locomotive workers, who had gathered angrily in front of the royal palace, had no stomach for a fight against Wrangel's well-drilled soldiers. They abandoned the square with only a formal protest.
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A sizeable proportion of the deputies hastily reassembled in the Berlin sharpshooters' club (members of the same society had wreaked havoc on the army during the March revolution), where they voted in favour of a radical proposal to call on Prussian citizens to go on tax strike. Yet Brandenburg was not finished: on 12 November, he declared martial law and Wrangel's artillery was wheeled ominously into positions around the city. The civic guard was disarmed, the democratic clubs were scattered and newspapers were closed down. Berlin was full of soldiers tramping the streets in their hob-nailed boots, or lounging in stairwells. The museum was turned into a barracks, where rifles were propped up against statues and helmets were piled on antiques. Streets were periodically sealed off as patrols searched houses for weapons.
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The tax strike had little impact, since the people who paid the most were precisely those who wanted a return to order. None the less, the conservatives avoided a complete reaction. On 5 December Prussia ‘received' a constitution that had been ‘granted' by Frederick William (over the protests of outright reactionaries like Brandenburg). There was to be a two-chamber parliament, with a lower house elected by universal male suffrage. Parliamentary controls over the machinery of the Prussian state were, though, swept aside: the King had full executive powers, including command of the armed forces. Soldiers and officials had to swear an oath to obey the King, not parliament; and on 30 May 1849, when he felt strong enough to do so, Frederick William handed down a revised electoral law, which divided each constituency into three classes of taxpayer, to ensure that the wealthiest voters elected one-third of all the delegates. He also confirmed the emancipation of the peasants from their remaining obligations, along with the abolition of noble tax privileges and of the local policing and judicial powers of the Junkers. Some artisans were satisfied with the restoration of the guilds in seventy trades, but the revolution in Prussia was well and truly over.
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The victory of conservatism in Austria and Prussia endangered the liberal regimes elsewhere in Germany. Some moderates who had been profoundly worried by the rising tide of radicalism welcomed Frederick William's bloodless coup in Berlin: Gustav Mevissen hailed the ‘bold move' and called on all men of courage ‘to place themselves on the basis of the new legal order and fight the impending anarchy'.
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After all, Prussia still had a constitution, which was an important fact. First, it showed that, while the revolution had been smashed by the instruments of the Prussian state, in the process the monarchy had accepted some of the opposition's concepts of law and rights. Second, it meant that Prussia could remain the focus of German national aspirations, because it gave the kingdom some credentials for leadership of a united, constitutional Germany. However, other Frankfurt delegates made loud protests against the royal
coup d'état
. The entire German left at last rediscovered the unity that had been shattered in the spring. The moderate left-wing delegates established the Central March Association, aimed at uniting all shades of opinion in support of the revolutionary achievements against the gathering forces of reaction. It was an impressive network, boasting some half a million members in 950 affiliated clubs, which dwarfed the efforts of the more radical democrats who had been behind the troublesome Democratic Congress in Berlin in October (which counted 260 affiliated clubs). Meanwhile, the Frankfurt parliament soldiered on in its task of hammering out a German constitution.