Roman States, and the deeper the hostility of the educated classes to the
restored power the more active became the system of repression. For liberty
of person there was no security whatever, and, though the offences of 1848
were now professedly amnestied, the prisons were soon thronged with persons
arrested on indefinite charges and detained for an unlimited time without
trial. Nor was Rome more unfortunate in its condition than Italy generally.
The restoration of Austrian authority in the north was completed by the
fall of Venice. For months after the subjugation of the mainland, Venice,
where the Republic had again been proclaimed and Manin had been recalled to
power, had withstood all the efforts of the Emperor's forces. Its hopes had
been raised by the victories of the Hungarians, which for a moment seemed
almost to undo the catastrophe of Novara. But with the extinction of all
possibility of Hungarian aid the inevitable end came in view. Cholera and
famine worked with the enemy; and a fortnight after Görgei had laid down
his arms at Vilagos the long and honourable resistance of Venice ended with
the entry of the Austrians (August 25th). In the south, Ferdinand of Naples
was again ruling as despot throughout the full extent of his dominions.
Palermo, which had struck the first blow for freedom in 1848, had soon
afterwards become the seat of a Sicilian Parliament, which deposed the
Bourbon dynasty and offered the throne of Sicily to the younger brother of
Victor Emmanuel. To this Ferdinand replied by a fleet to Messina, which
bombarded that city for five days and laid a great part of it in ashes. His
violence caused the British and French fleets to interpose, and hostilities
were suspended until the spring of 1849, the Western Powers ineffectually
seeking to frame some compromise acceptable at once to the Sicilians and to
the Bourbon dynasty. After the triumph of Radetzky at Novara and the
rejection by the Sicilian Parliament of the offer of a separate
constitution and administration for the island, Ferdinand refused to remain
any longer inactive. His fleet and army moved southwards from Messina, and
a victory won at the foot of Mount Etna over the Sicilian forces, followed
by the capture of Catania, brought the struggle to a close. The Assembly at
Palermo dispersed, and the Neapolitan troops made their entry into the
capital without resistance on the 15th of May. It was in vain that Great
Britain now urged Ferdinand to grant to Sicily the liberties which he had
hitherto professed himself willing to bestow. Autocrat he was, and autocrat
he intended to remain. On the mainland the iniquities practised by his
agents seem to have been even worse than in Sicily, where at least some
attempt was made to use the powers of the State for the purposes of
material improvement. For those who had incurred the enmity of Ferdinand's
Government there was no law and no mercy. Ten years of violence and
oppression, denounced by the voice of freer lands, had still to be borne by
the subjects of this obstinate tyrant ere the reckoning-day arrived, and
the deeply rooted jealousy between Sicily and Naples, which had wrought so
much ill to the cause of Italian freedom, was appeased by the fall of the
Bourbon throne. [442]
[Germany from May, 1848.]
[The National Assembly at Frankfort.]
[Archduke John chosen Administrator, June 29.]
We have thus far traced the stages of conflict between the old monarchical
order and the forces of revolution in the Austrian empire and in that
Mediterranean land whose destiny was so closely interwoven with that of
Austria. We have now to pass back into Germany, and to resume the history
of the German revolution at the point where the national movement seemed to
concentrate itself in visible form, the opening of the Parliament of
Frankfort on the 18th of May, 1848. That an Assembly representing the
entire German people, elected in unbounded enthusiasm and comprising within
it nearly every man of political or intellectual eminence who sympathised
with the national cause, should be able to impose its will upon the
tottering Governments of the individual German States, was not an unnatural
belief in the circumstances of the moment. No second Chamber represented
the interests of the ruling Houses, nor had they within the Assembly itself
the organs for the expression of their own real or unreal claims. With all
the freedom of a debating club or of a sovereign authority like the French
Convention, the Parliament of Frankfort entered upon its work of moulding
Germany afresh, limited only by its own discretion as to what it should
make matter of consultation with any other power. There were thirty-six
Governments in Germany, and to negotiate with each of these on the future
Constitution might well seem a harder task than to enforce a Constitution
on all alike. In the creation of a provisional executive authority there
was something of the same difficulty. Each of the larger States might, if
consulted, resist the selection of a provisional chief from one of its
rivals; and though the risk of bold action was not denied, the Assembly, on
the instance of its President, Von Gagern, a former Minister of
Hesse-Darmstadt, resolved to appoint an Administrator of the Empire by a
direct vote of its own. The Archduke John of Austria, long known as an
enemy of Metternich's system of repression and as a patron of the idea of
German union, was chosen Administrator, and he accepted the office. Prussia
and the other States acquiesced in the nomination, though the choice of a
Hapsburg prince was unpopular with the Prussian nation and army, and did
not improve the relations between the Frankfort Assembly and the Court of
Berlin. [443] Schmerling, an Austrian, was placed at the head of the
Archduke's Ministry.
[The National Assembly. May-Sept.]
In the preparation of a Constitution for Germany the Assembly could draw
little help from the work of legislators in other countries. Belgium, whose
institutions were at once recent and successful, was not a Federal State;
the founders of the American Union had not had to reckon with four kings
and to include in their federal territory part of the dominions of an
emperor. Instead of grappling at once with the formidable difficulties of
political organisation, the Committee charged with the drafting of a
Constitution determined first to lay down the principles of civil right
which were to be the basis of the German commonwealth. There was something
of the scientific spirit of the Germans in thus working out the
substructure of public law on which all other institutions were to rest;
moreover, the remembrance of the Decrees of Carlsbad and of the other
exceptional legislation from which Germany had so heavily suffered excited
a strong demand for the most solemn guarantees against arbitrary departure
from settled law in the future. Thus, regardless of the absence of any
material power by which its conclusions were to be enforced, the Assembly,
in the intervals between its stormy debates on the politics of the hour,
traced with philosophic thoroughness the consequences of the principles of
personal liberty and of equality before the law, and fashioned the order of
a modern society in which privileges of class, diversity of jurisdictions,
and the trammels of feudalism on industrial life were alike swept away.
Four months had passed, and the discussion of the so-called Primary Rights
was still unfinished, when the Assembly was warned by an outbreak of
popular violence in Frankfort itself of the necessity of hastening towards
a constitutional settlement.
[The Armistice of Malmö, Aug. 26.]
[Outrages at Frankfort, Sept. 18.]
The progress of the insurrection in Schleswig-Holstein against Danish
sovereignty had been watched with the greatest interest throughout Germany;
and in the struggle of these provinces for their independence the rights
and the honour of the German nation at large were held to be deeply
involved. As the representative of the Federal authority, King Frederick
William of Prussia had sent his troops into Holstein, and they arrived
there in time to prevent the Danish army from following up its first
successes and crushing the insurgent forces. Taking up the offensive,
General Wrangel at the head of the Prussian troops succeeded in driving the
Danes out of Schleswig, and at the beginning of May he crossed the border
between Schleswig and Jutland and occupied the Danish fortress of
Fredericia. His advance into purely Danish territory occasioned the
diplomatic intervention of Russia and Great Britain; and, to the deep
disappointment of the German nation and its Parliament, the King of Prussia
ordered his general to retire into Schleswig. The Danes were in the
meantime blockading the harbours and capturing the merchant-vessels of the
Germans, as neither Prussia nor the Federal Government possessed a fleet of
war. For some weeks hostilities were irresolutely continued in Schleswig,
while negotiations were pursued in foreign capitals and various forms of
compromise urged by foreign Powers. At length, on the 26th of August, an
armistice of seven months was agreed upon at Malmö in Sweden by the
representatives of Denmark and Prussia, the Court of Copenhagen refusing to
recognise the German central Government at Frankfort or to admit its envoy
to the conferences. The terms of this armistice, when announced in Germany,
excited the greatest indignation, inasmuch as they declared all the acts of
the Provisional Government of Schleswig-Holstein null and void, removed all
German troops from the Duchies, and handed over their government during the
duration of the armistice to a Commission of which half the members were to
be appointed by the King of Denmark. Scornfully as Denmark had treated the
Assembly of Frankfort, the terms of the armistice nevertheless required its
sanction. The question was referred to a committee, which, under the
influence of the historian Dahlmann, himself formerly an official in
Holstein, pronounced for the rejection of the treaty. The Assembly, in a
scene of great excitement, resolved that the execution of the measures
attendant on the armistice should be suspended. The Ministry in consequence
resigned, and Dahlmann was called upon to replace it by one under his own
leadership. He proved unable to do so. Schmerling resumed office, and
demanded that the Assembly should reverse its vote. Though in severance
from Prussia the Central Government had no real means of carrying on a war
with Denmark, the most passionate opposition was made to this demand. The
armistice was, however, ultimately ratified by a small majority. Defeated
in the Assembly, the leaders of the extreme Democratic faction allied
themselves with the populace of Frankfort, which was ready for acts of
violence. Tumultuous meetings were held; the deputies who had voted for the
armistice were declared traitors to Germany. Barricades were erected, and
although the appearance of Prussian troops prevented an assault from being
made on the Assembly, its members were attacked in the streets, and two of
them murdered by the mob (Sept. 17th). A Republican insurrection was once
more attempted in Baden, but it was quelled without difficulty. [444]
[Berlin, April-Sept., 1848.]
The intervention of foreign Courts on behalf of Denmark had given
ostensible ground to the Prussian Government for not pursuing the war with
greater resolution; but though the fear of Russia undoubtedly checked King
Frederick William, this was not the sole, nor perhaps the most powerful
influence that worked upon him. The cause of Schleswig-Hulstein was, in
spite of its legal basis, in the main a popular and a revolutionary one,
and between the King of Prussia and the revolution there was an intense and
a constantly deepening antagonism. Since the meeting of the National
Assembly at Berlin on the 22nd of May the capital had been the scene of an
almost unbroken course of disorder. The Assembly, which was far inferior in
ability and character to that of Frankfort, soon showed itself unable to
resist the influence of the populace. On the 8th of June a resolution was
moved that the combatants in the insurrection of March deserved well of
their country. Had this motion been carried the King would have dissolved
the Assembly: it was outvoted, but the mob punished this concession to the
feelings of the monarch by outrages upon the members of the majority. A
Civic Guard was enrolled from citizens of the middle class, but it proved
unable to maintain order, and wholly failed to acquire the political
importance which was gained by the National Guard of Paris after the
revolution of 1830. Exasperated by their exclusion from service in the
Guard, the mob on the 14th of June stormed an arsenal and destroyed the
trophies of arms which they found there. Though violence reigned in the
streets the Assembly rejected a proposal for declaring the inviolability of
its members, and placed itself under the protection of the citizens of
Berlin. King Frederick William had withdrawn to Potsdam, where the leaders
of reaction gathered round him. He detested his Constitutional Ministers,
who, between a petulant king and a suspicious Parliament, were unable to
effect any useful work and soon found themselves compelled to relinquish
their office. In Berlin the violence of the working classes, the
interruption of business, the example of civil war in Paris, inclined men
of quiet disposition to a return to settled government at any price.
Measures brought forward by the new Ministry for the abolition of the
patrimonial jurisdictions, the hunting-rights and other feudal privileges
of the greater landowners, occasioned the organisation of a league for the
defence of property, which soon became the focus of powerful conservative
interests. Above all, the claims of the Archduke John, as Administrator of
the Empire, to the homage of the army, and the hostile attitude assumed
towards the army by the Prussian Parliament itself, exasperated the
military class and encouraged the king to venture on open resistance. A
tumult having taken place at Schweidnitz in Silesia, in which several
persons were shot by the soldiery, the Assembly, pending an investigation
into the circumstances, demanded that the Minister of War should publish an
order requiring the officers of the army to work with the citizens for the
realisation of Constitutional Government; and it called upon all officers
not loyally inclined to a Constitutional system to resign their commissions
as a matter of honour. Denying the right of the Chamber to act as a
military executive, the Minister of War refused to publish the order
required. The vote was repeated, and in the midst of threatening
demonstrations in the streets the Ministry resigned (Sept. 7th). [445]
[The Prussian army.]
[Count Brandenburg Minister, Nov. 2.]
[Prorogation of the Prussian Assembly, Nov. 9.]
It had been the distinguishing feature of the Prussian revolution that the
army had never for a moment wavered in its fidelity to the throne. The
success of the insurrection of March 18th had been due to the paucity of
troops and the errors of those in command, not to any military disaffection
such as had paralysed authority in Paris and in the Mediterranean States.
Each affront offered to the army by the democratic majority in the Assembly
supplied the King with new weapons; each slight passed upon the royal
authority deepened the indignation of the officers. The armistice of Malmö
brought back to the neighbourhood of the capital a general who was longing
to crush the party of disorder, and regiments on whom he could rely; but
though there was now no military reason for delay, it was not until the
capture of Vienna by Windischgrätz had dealt a fatal blow at democracy in
Germany that Frederick William determined to have done with his own
mutinous Parliament and the mobs by which it was controlled. During
September and October the riots and tumults in the streets of Berlin
continued. The Assembly, which had rejected the draft of a Constitution
submitted to it by the Cabinet, debated the clauses of one drawn up by a
Committee of its own members, abolished nobility, orders and titles, and
struck out from the style of the sovereign the words that described him as
King by the Grace of God. When intelligence arrived in Berlin that the
attack of Windischgrätz upon Vienna had actually begun, popular passion
redoubled. The Assembly was besieged by an angry crowd, and a resolution in
favour of the intervention of Prussia was brought forward within the House.
This was rejected, and it was determined instead to invoke the mediation of
the Central Government at Frankfort between the Emperor and his subjects.
But the decision of the Assembly on this and every other point was now
matter of indifference. Events outstripped its deliberations, and with the
fall of Vienna its own course was run. On the 2nd of November the King
dismissed his Ministers and called to office the Count of Brandenburg, a
natural son of Frederick William II., a soldier in high command, and one of
the most outspoken representatives of the monarchical spirit of the army.
The meaning of the appointment was at once understood. A deputation from
the Assembly conveyed its protest to the King at Potsdam. The King turned
his back upon them without giving an answer, and on the 9th of November an
order was issued proroguing the Assembly, and bidding it to meet on the
27th at Brandenburg, not at Berlin.
[Last days of the Prussian Assembly.]
[Dissolution of the Assembly, Dec. 5.]
[Prussian Constitution granted by edict.]
The order of prorogation, as soon as signed by the King was brought into
the Assembly by the Ministers, who demanded that it should be obeyed
immediately and without discussion. The President allowing a debate to
commence, the Ministers and seventy-eight Conservative deputies left the
Hall. The remaining deputies, two hundred and eighty in number, then passed
a resolution declaring that they would not meet at Brandenburg; that the
King had no power to remove, to prorogue, or to dissolve the Assembly
without its own consent; and that the Ministers were unfit to hold office.
This challenge was answered by a proclamation of the Ministers declaring
the further meeting of the deputies illegal, and calling upon the Civic
Guard not to recognise them as a Parliament. On the following day General
Wrangel and his troops entered Berlin and surrounded the Assembly Hall. In
reply to the protests of the President, Wrangel answered that the
Parliament had been prorogued and must disappear. The members peaceably
left the Hall, but reassembled at another spot that they had selected in
anticipation of expulsion; and for some days they were pursued by the
military from one place of meeting to another. On the 15th of November they
passed a resolution declaring the expenditure of state funds and the
raising of taxes by the Government to be illegal so long as the Assembly
should not be permitted to continue its deliberations. The Ministry on its
part showed that it was determined not to brook resistance. The Civic Guard
was dissolved and ordered to surrender its arms. It did so without striking
a blow, and vanished from the scene, a memorable illustration of the
political nullity of the middle class in Berlin as compared with that of
Paris. The state of siege was proclaimed, the freedom of the Press and the
right of public meeting were suspended. On the 27th of November a portion
of the Assembly appeared, according to the King's order, at Brandenburg,
but the numbers present were not sufficient for the transaction of
business. The presence of the majority, however, was not required, for the
King had determined to give no further legal opportunities to the men who
had defied him. Treating the vote of November 15th as an act of rebellion
on the part of those concerned in it, the King dissolved the Assembly
(December 5th), and conferred upon Prussia a Constitution drawn up by his
own advisers, with the promise that this Constitution should be subject to
revision by the future representative body. Though the dissolution of the
Assembly occasioned tumults in Breslau and Cologne it was not actively
resented by the nation at large. The violence of the fallen body during its
last weeks of existence had exposed it to general discredit; its vote of
the 15th of November had been formally condemned by the Parliament of
Frankfort; and the liberal character of the new Constitution, which agreed
in the main with the draft-Constitution produced by the Committee of the
Assembly, disposed moderate men to the belief that in the conflict between
the King and the popular representatives the fault had not been on the side
of the sovereign.
[The Frankfort Parliament and Austria, Oct.-Dec.]
In the meantime the Parliament of Frankfort, warned against longer delay by
the disturbances of September 17th, had addressed itself in earnest to the
settlement of the Federal Constitution of Germany. Above a host of minor
difficulties two great problems confronted it at the outset. The first was
the relation of the Austrian Empire, with its partly German and partly
foreign territory, to the German national State; the other was the nature
of the headship to be established. As it was clear that the Austrian
Government could not apply the public law of Germany to its Slavic and
Hungarian provinces, it was enacted in the second article of the Frankfort
Constitution that where a German and a non-German territory had the same
sovereign, the relation between these countries must be one of purely
personal union under the sovereign, no part of Germany being incorporated
into a single State with any non-German land. At the time when this article
was drafted the disintegration of Austria seemed more probable than the
re-establishment of its unity; no sooner, however, had Prince Schwarzenberg
been brought into power by the subjugation of Vienna, than he made it plain
that the government of Austria was to be centralised as it had never been
before. In the first public declaration of his policy he announced that
Austria would maintain its unity and permit no exterior influence to modify
its internal organisation; that the settlement of the relations between
Austria and Germany could only be effected after each had gained some new
and abiding political form; and that in the meantime Austria would continue
to fulfil its duties as a confederate. [446] The interpretation put upon
this statement at Frankfort was that Austria, in the interest of its own
unity, preferred not to enter the German body, but looked forward to the
establishment of some intimate alliance with it at a future time. As the
Court of Vienna had evidently determined not to apply to itself the second
article of the Constitution, and an antagonism between German and Austrian
policy came within view, Schmerling, as an Austrian subject, was induced to
resign his office, and was succeeded in it by Gagern, hitherto President of
the Assembly (Dec. 16th). [447]
[The Frankfort Parliament and Austria, Dec., Jan.]
In announcing the policy of the new Ministry, Gagern assumed the exclusion
of Austria from the German Federation. Claiming for the Assembly, as the
representative of the German nation, sovereign power in drawing up the
Constitution, he denied that the Constitution could be made an object of
negotiation with Austria. As Austria refused to fulfil the conditions of
the second article, it must remain outside the Federation; the Ministry
desired, however, to frame some close and special connection between
Austria and Germany, and asked for authority to negotiate with the Court of
Vienna for this purpose. Gagern's declaration of the exclusion of Austria
occasioned a vehement and natural outburst of feeling among the Austrian
deputies, and was met by their almost unanimous protest. Some days later
there arrived a note from Schwarzenberg which struck at the root of all
that had been done and all that was claimed by the Assembly. Repudiating
the interpretation that had been placed upon his words, Schwarzenberg
declared that the affairs of Germany could only be settled by an
understanding between the Assembly and the Courts, and by an arrangement
with Austria, which was the recognised chief of the Governments and
intended to remain so in the new Federation. The question of the inclusion
or exclusion of Austria now threw into the shade all the earlier
differences between parties in the Assembly. A new dividing-line was drawn.
On the one side appeared a group composed of the Austrian representatives,
of Ultramontanes who feared a Protestant ascendency if Austria should be
excluded, and of deputies from some of the smaller States who had begun to
dread Prussian domination. On the other side was the great body of
representatives who set before all the cause of German national union, who
saw that this union would never be effected in any real form if it was made
to depend upon negotiations with the Austrian Court, and who held, with the
Minister, that to create a true German national State without the Austrian
provinces was better than to accept a phantom of complete union in which
the German people should be nothing and the Cabinet of Vienna everything.
Though coalitions and intrigues of parties obscured the political prospect
from day to day, the principles of Gagern were affirmed by a majority of
the Assembly, and authority to negotiate some new form of connection with
Austria, as a power outside the Federation, was granted to the Ministry.
[The Federal Headship.]
[King Frederick William IV. elected Emperor, March 28.]
The second great difficulty of the Assembly was the settlement of the
Federal headship. Some were for a hereditary Emperor, some for a President
or Board, some for a monarchy alternating between the Houses of Prussia and
Austria, some for a sovereign elected for life or for a fixed period. The
first decision arrived at was that the head should be one of the reigning
princes of Germany, and that he should bear the title of Emperor. Against
the hereditary principle there was a strong and, at first, a successful
opposition. Reserving for future discussion other questions relating to the
imperial office, the Assembly passed the Constitution through the first
reading on February 3rd, 1849. It was now communicated to all the German
Governments, with the request that they would offer their opinions upon it.
The four minor kingdoms--Saxony, Hanover, Bavaria, and Würtemberg--with one
consent declared against any Federation in which Austria should not be
included; the Cabinet of Vienna protested against the subordination of the
Emperor of Austria to a central power vested in any other German prince,
and proposed that the entire Austrian Empire, with its foreign as well as
its German elements, should enter the Federation. This note was enough to
prove that Austria was in direct conflict with the scheme of national union
which the Assembly had accepted; but the full peril of the situation was
not perceived till on the 9th of March Schwarzenberg published the
Constitution of Olmütz, which extinguished all separate rights throughout
the Austrian Empire, and confounded in one mass, as subjects of the Emperor
Francis Joseph, Hungarians, Germans, Slavs and Italians. The import of the
Austrian demand now stood out clear and undisguised. Austria claimed to
range itself with a foreign population of thirty millions within the German
Federation; in other words, to reduce the German national union to a
partnership with all the nationalities of Central Europe, to throw the
weight of an overwhelming influence against any system of free
representative government, and to expose Germany to war where no interests
but those of the Pole or the Magyar might be at stake. So deep was the
impression made at Frankfort by the fall of the Kremsier Parliament and the
publication of Schwarzenberg's unitary edict, that one of the most eminent
of the politicians who had hitherto opposed the exclusion of Austria--the
Baden deputy Welcker--declared that further persistence in this course
would be treason to Germany. Ranging himself with the Ministry, he
proposed that the entire German Constitution, completed by a hereditary
chieftainship, should be passed at a single vote on the second reading, and
that the dignity of Emperor should be at once offered to the King of
Prussia. Though the Assembly declined to pass the Constitution by a single
vote, it agreed to vote upon clause by clause without discussion. The
hereditary principle was affirmed by the narrow majority of four in a House
of above five hundred. The second reading of the Constitution was completed
on the 27th of March, and on the following day the election of the
sovereign took place. Two hundred and ninety votes were given for the King
of Prussia. Two hundred and forty-eight members, hostile to the hereditary
principle or to the prince selected, abstained from voting. [448]
[Frederick William IV.]
Frederick William had from early years cherished the hope of seeing some
closer union of Germany established under Prussian influence. But he dwelt
in a world where there was more of picturesque mirage than of real insight.
He was almost superstitiously loyal to the House of Austria; and he failed
to perceive, what was palpable to men of far inferior endowments to his
own, that by setting Prussia at the head of the constitutional movement of
the epoch he might at any time from the commencement of his reign have
rallied all Germany round it. Thus the revolution of 1848 burst upon him,
and he was not the man to act or to lead in time of revolution. Even in
1848, had he given promptly and with dignity what, after blood had been
shed in his streets, he had to give with humiliation, he would probably
have been acclaimed Emperor on the opening of the Parliament of Frankfort,
and have been accepted by the universal voice of Germany. But the odium
cast upon him by the struggle of March 18th was so great that in the
election of a temporary Administrator of the Empire in June no single
member at Frankfort gave him a vote. Time was needed to repair his credit,
and while time passed Austria rose from its ruins. In the spring of 1849
Frederick William could not have assumed the office of Emperor of Germany
without risk of a war with Austria, even had he been willing to accept this
office on the nomination of the Frankfort Parliament. But to accept the
Imperial Crown from a popular Assembly was repugnant to his deepest
convictions. Clear as the Frankfort Parliament had been, as a whole, from
the taint of Republicanism or of revolutionary violence, it had
nevertheless had its birth in revolution: the crown which it offered would,
in the King's expression, have been picked up from blood and mire. Had the
princes of Germany by any arrangement with the Assembly tendered the crown
to Frederick William the case would have been different; a new Divine right
would have emanated from the old, and conditions fixed by negotiation
between the princes and the popular Assembly might have been endured. That
Frederick William still aspired to German leadership in one form or another
no one doubted; his disposition to seek or to reject an accommodation with
the Frankfort Parliament varied with the influences which surrounded him.
The Ministry led by the Count of Brandenburg, though anti-popular in its
domestic measures, was desirous of arriving at some understanding with
Gagern and the friends of German union. Shortly before the first reading of
the Constitution at Frankfort, a note had been drafted in the Berlin
Cabinet admitting under certain provisions the exclusion of Austria from
the Federation, and proposing, not that the Assembly should admit the right
of each Government to accept or reject the Constitution, but that it should
meet in a fair spirit such recommendations as all the Governments together
should by a joint act submit to it. This note, which would have rendered an
agreement between the Prussian Court and the Assembly possible, Frederick
William at first refused to sign. He was induced to do so (Jan. 23rd) by
his confidant Bunsen, who himself was authorised to proceed to Frankfort.
During Bunsen's absence despatches arrived at Berlin from Schwarzenberg,
who, in his usual resolute way, proposed to dissolve the Frankfort
Assembly, and to divide Germany between Austria, Prussia, and the four
secondary kingdoms. Bunsen on his return found his work undone; the King
recoiled under Austrian pressure from the position which he had taken up,
and sent a note to Frankfort on the 16th of February, which described
Austria as a necessary part of Germany and claimed for each separate
Government the right to accept or reject the Constitution as it might think
fit. Thus the acceptance of the headship by Frederick William under any
conditions compatible with the claims of the Assembly was known to be
doubtful when, on the 28th of March, the majority resolved to offer him the
Imperial Crown. The disposition of the Ministry at Berlin was indeed still
favourable to an accommodation; and when, on the 2nd of April, the members
of the Assembly who were charged to lay its offer before Frederick William
arrived at Berlin, they were received with such cordiality by Brandenburg
that it was believed the King's consent had been won.
[Frederick William IV. refuses the Crown, April 3.]
The reply of the King to the deputation on the following day rudely
dispelled these hopes. He declared that before he could accept the Crown
not only must he be summoned to it by the Princes of Germany, but the
consent of all the Governments must be given to the Constitution. In other
words, he required that the Assembly should surrender its claims to
legislative supremacy, and abandon all those parts of the Federal
Constitution of which any of the existing Governments disapproved. As it
was certain that Austria and the four minor kingdoms would never agree to
any Federal union worthy of the name, and that the Assembly could not now,
without renouncing its past, admit that the right of framing the
Constitution lay outside itself, the answer of the King was understood to
amount to a refusal. The deputation left Berlin in the sorrowful conviction
that their mission had failed; and a note which was soon afterwards
received at Frankfort from the King showed that this belief was
correct. [449]
[The Frankfort Constitution rejected by the Governments.]
The answer of King Frederick William proved indeed much more than that he
had refused the Crown of Germany; it proved that he would not accept the
Constitution which the Assembly had enacted. The full import of this
determination, and the serious nature of the crisis now impending over
Germany, were at once understood. Though twenty-eight Governments
successively accepted the Constitution, these were without exception petty
States, and their united forces would scarcely have been a match for one of
its more powerful enemies. On the 5th of April the Austrian Cabinet
declared the Assembly to have been guilty of illegality in publishing the
Constitution, and called upon all Austrian deputies to quit Frankfort. The
Prussian Lower Chamber, elected under the King's recent edict, having
protested against the state of siege in Berlin, and having passed a
resolution in favour of the Frankfort Constitution, was forthwith
dissolved. Within the Frankfort Parliament the resistance of Governments
excited a patriotic resentment and caused for the moment a union of
parties. Resolutions were passed declaring that the Assembly would adhere
to the Constitution. A Committee was charged with the ascertainment of
measures to be adopted for enforcing its recognition; and a note was
addressed to all the hostile Governments demanding that they should abstain
from proroguing or dissolving the representative bodies within their
dominions with the view of suppressing the free utterance of opinions in
favour of the Constitution.
[End of the German National Assembly, June, 1849.]
On the ground of this last demand the Prussian official Press now began to
denounce the Assembly of Frankfort as a revolutionary body. The situation
of affairs daily became worse. It was in vain that the Assembly appealed to
the Governments, the legislative Chambers, the local bodies, the whole
people, to bring the Constitution into effect. The moral force on which it
had determined to rely proved powerless, and in despair of conquering the
Governments by public opinion the more violent members of the democratic
party determined to appeal to insurrection. On the 4th of May a popular
rising began at Dresden, where the King, under the influence of Prussia,
had dismissed those of his Ministers who urged him to accept the
Constitution, and had dissolved his Parliament. The outbreak drove the King
from his capital; but only five days had passed when a Prussian army-corps
entered the city and crushed the rebellion. In this interval, short as it
was, there had been indications that the real leaders of the insurrection
were fighting not for the Frankfort Constitution but for a Republic, and
that in the event of their victory a revolutionary Government, connected
with French and Polish schemes of subversion, would come into power. In
Baden this was made still clearer. There the Government of the Grand Duke
had actually accepted the Frankfort Constitution, and had ordered elections
to be held for the Federal legislative body by which the Assembly was to be
succeeded. Insurrection nevertheless broke out. The Republic was openly
proclaimed; the troops joined the insurgents; and a Provisional Government
allied itself with a similar body that had sprung into being with the help
of French and Polish refugees in the neighbouring Palatinate. Conscious
that these insurrections must utterly ruin its own cause, the Frankfort
Assembly on the suggestion of Gagern called upon the Archduke John to
suppress them by force of arms, and at the same time to protect the free
expression of opinion on behalf of the Constitution where threatened by
Governments. John, who had long clung to his office only to further the
ends of Austria, refused to do so, and Gagern in consequence resigned. With
his fall ended the real political existence of the Assembly. In reply to a
resolution which it passed on the 10th of May, calling upon John to employ
all the forces of Germany in defence of the Constitution, the Archduke
placed a mock-Ministry in office. The Prussian Government, declaring the
vote of the 10th of May to be a summons to civil war, ordered all Prussian
deputies to withdraw from the Assembly, and a few days later its example
was imitated by Saxony and Hanover. On the 20th of May sixty-five of the
best known of the members, including Arndt and Dahlmann, placed on record
their belief that in the actual situation the relinquishment of the task of
the Assembly was the least of evils, and declared their work at Frankfort
ended. Other groups followed them till there remained only the party of the
extreme Left, which had hitherto been a weak minority, and which in no
sense represented the real opinions of Germany. This Rump-Parliament,
troubling itself little with John and his Ministers, determined to withdraw
from Frankfort, where it dreaded the appearance of Prussian troops, into
Würtemberg, where it might expect some support from the revolutionary
Governments of Baden and the Palatinate. On the 6th of June a hundred and
five deputies assembled at Stuttgart. There they proceeded to appoint a
governing Committee for all Germany, calling upon the King of Würtemberg to
supply them with seven thousand soldiers, and sending out emissaries to
stir up the neighbouring population. But the world disregarded them. The
Government at Stuttgart, after an interval of patience, bade them begone;
and on the 18th of June their hall was closed against them and they were
dispersed by troops, no one raising a hand on their behalf. The overthrow
of the insurgents who had taken up arms in Baden and the Palatinate was not
so easy a matter. A campaign of six weeks was necessary, in which the army
of Prussia, led by the Prince of Prussia, sustained some reverses, before
the Republican levies were crushed, and with the fall of Rastadt the
insurrection was brought to a close. [450]
[The Baden insurrection suppressed, July, 1849.]
[Prussia attempts to form a separate union.]
The end of the German Parliament, on which the nation had set such high
hopes and to which it had sent so much of what was noblest in itself,
contrasted lamentably with the splendour of its opening. Whether a better
result would have been attained if, instead of claiming supreme authority
in the construction of Federal union, the Assembly had from the first
sought the co-operation of the Governments, must remain matter of
conjecture. Austria would under all circumstances have been the great
hindrance in the way; and after the failure of the efforts made at
Frankfort to establish the general union of Germany, Austria was able
completely to frustrate the attempts which were now made at Berlin to
establish partial union upon a different basis. In notifying to the
Assembly his refusal of the Imperial Crown, King Frederick William had
stated that he was resolved to place himself at the head of a Federation to
be formed by States voluntarily uniting with him under terms to be
subsequently arranged; and in a circular note addressed to the German
Governments he invited such as were disposed to take counsel with Prussia
to unite in Conference at Berlin. The opening of the Conference was fixed
for the 17th of May. Two days before this the King issued a proclamation to
the Prussian people announcing that in spite of the failure of the Assembly
of Frankfort a German union was still to be formed. When the Conference
opened at Berlin, no envoys appeared but those of Austria, Saxony, Hanover,
and Bavaria. The Austrian representative withdrew at the end of the first
sitting, the Bavarian rather later, leaving Prussia to lay such foundations
as it could for German unity with the temporising support of Saxony and
Hanover. A confederation was formed, known as the League of the Three
Kingdoms. An undertaking was given that a Federal Parliament should be
summoned, and that a Constitution should be made jointly by this Parliament
and the Governments (May 26th). On the 11th of June the draft of a Federal
Constitution was published. As the King of Prussia was apparently acting in
good faith, and the draft-Constitution in spite of some defects seemed to
afford a fair basis for union, the question now arose among the leaders of
the German national movement whether the twenty-eight States which had
accepted the ill-fated Constitution of Frankfort ought or ought not to
enter the new Prussian League. A meeting of a hundred and fifty ex-members
of the Frankfort Parliament was held at Gotha; and although great
indignation was expressed by the more democratic faction, it was determined
that the scheme now put forward by Prussia deserved a fair trial. The whole
of the twenty-eight minor States consequently entered the League, which
thus embraced all Germany with the exception of Austria, Bavaria and
Würtemberg. But the Courts of Saxony and Hanover had from the first been
acting with duplicity. The military influence of Prussia, and the fear
which they still felt of their own subjects, had prevented them from
offering open resistance to the renewed work of Federation; but they had
throughout been in communication with Austria, and were only waiting for
the moment when the complete restoration of Austria's military strength
should enable them to display their true colours. During the spring of
1849, while the Conferences at Berlin were being held, Austria was still
occupied with Hungary and Venice. The final overthrow of these enemies
enabled it to cast its entire weight upon Germany. The result was seen in
the action of Hanover and Saxony, which now formally seceded from the
Federation. Prussia thus remained at the end of 1849 with no support but
that of the twenty-eight minor States. Against it, in open or in tacit
antagonism to the establishment of German unity in any effective form, the
four secondary Kingdoms stood ranged by the side of Austria.
[Prussia in 1849.]
[The Union Parliament at Erfurt, March 1850.]
It was not until the 20th of March, 1850, that the Federal Parliament,
which had been promised ten months before on the incorporation of the new
League, assembled at Erfurt. In the meantime reaction had gone far in many
a German State. In Prussia, after the dissolution of the Lower Chamber on
April 27th, 1849, the King had abrogated the electoral provisions of the
Constitution so recently granted by himself, and had substituted for them a
system based on the representation of classes. Treating this act as a
breach of faith, the Democratic party had abstained from voting at the
elections, with the result that in the Berlin Parliament of 1850
Conservatives, Reactionists, and officials formed the great majority. The
revision of the Prussian Constitution, promised at first as a concession to
Liberalism, was conducted in the opposite sense. The King demanded the
strengthening of monarchical power; the Feudalists, going far beyond him,
attacked the municipal and social reforms of the last two years, and sought
to lead Prussia back to the system of its mediæval estates. It was in the
midst of this victory of reaction in Prussia that the Federal Parliament at
Erfurt began its sittings. Though the moderate Liberals, led by Gagern and
other tried politicians of Frankfurt, held the majority in both Houses, a
strong Absolutist party from Prussia confronted them, and it soon became
clear that the Prussian Government was ready to play into the hands of this
party. The draft of the Federal Constitution, which had been made at
Berlin, was presented, according to the undertaking of May 28th, 1849, to
the Erfurt Assembly. Aware of the gathering strength of the reaction and of
the danger of delay, the Liberal majority declared itself ready to pass the
draft into law without a single alteration. The reactionary minority
demanded that a revision should take place; and, to the scandal of all who
understood the methods or the spirit of Parliamentary rule, the Prussian
Ministers united with the party which demanded alterations in the project
which they themselves had brought forward. A compromise was ultimately
effected; but the action of the Court of Prussia and the conduct of its
Ministers throughout the Erfurt debates struck with deep despondency those
who had believed that Frederick William might still effect the work in
which the Assembly of Frankfort had failed. The trust in the King's
sincerity or consistence of purpose sank low. The sympathy of the national
Liberal party throughout Germany was to a great extent alienated from
Prussia; while, if any expectation existed at Berlin that the adoption of a
reactionary policy would disarm the hostility of the Austrian Government to
the new League, this hope was wholly vain and baseless. [451]
[Action of Austria.]
Austria had from the first protested against the attempt of the King of
Prussia to establish any new form of union in Germany, and had declared
that it would recognise none of the conclusions of the Federal Parliament
of Erfurt. According to the theory now advanced by the Cabinet of Vienna
the ancient Federal Constitution of Germany was still in force. All that
had happened since March, 1848, was so much wanton and futile
mischief-making. The disturbance of order had at length come to an end, and
with the exit of the rioters the legitimate powers re-entered into their
rights. Accordingly, there could be no question of the establishment of new
Leagues. The old relation of all the German States to one another under the
ascendency of Austria remained in full strength; the Diet of Frankfort,
which had merely suspended its functions and by no means suffered
extinction, was still the legitimate central authority. That some
modifications might be necessary in the ancient Constitution was the most
that Austria was willing to admit. This, however, was an affair not for the
German people but for its rulers, and Austria accordingly invited all the
Governments to a Congress at Frankfort where the changes necessary might be
discussed. In reply to this summons, Prussia strenuously denied that the
old Federal Constitution was still in existence. The princes of the
numerous petty States which were included in the new Union assembled at
Berlin round Frederick William, and resolved that they would not attend the
Conference at Frankfort except under reservations and conditions which
Austria would not admit. Arguments and counter-arguments were exchanged;
but the controversy between an old and a new Germany was one to be decided
by force of will or force of arms, not by political logic. The struggle was
to be one between Prussia and Austria, and the Austrian Cabinet had well
gauged the temper of its opponent. A direct summons to submission would
have roused all the King's pride, and have been answered by war. Before
demanding from Frederick William the dissolution of the Union which he had
founded, Schwarzenberg determined to fix upon a quarrel in which the King
should be perplexed or alarmed at the results of his own policy. The
dominant conviction in the mind of Frederick William was that of the
sanctity of monarchical rule. If the League of Berlin could be committed to
some enterprise hostile to monarchical power, and could be charged with an
alliance with rebellion, Frederick William would probably falter in his
resolutions, and a resort to arms, for which, however, Austria was well
prepared, would become unnecessary. [452]
[Hesse-Cassel.]
[The Diet of Frankfort restored, Sept., 1850.]
[Prussia and Austria.]
[The Warsaw meeting, Oct. 29, 1850.]
[Manteuffel at Olmütz, Nov. 29.]
Among the States whose Governments had been forced by public opinion to
join the new Federation was the Electorate of Hesse-Cassel. The Elector
was, like his predecessors, a thorough despot at heart, and chafed under
the restrictions which a constitutional system imposed upon his rule.
Acting under Austrian instigation, he dismissed his Ministers in the spring
of 1850, and placed in office one Hassenpflug, a type of the worst and most
violent class of petty tyrants produced by the officialism of the minor
German States. Hassenpflug immediately quarrelled with the Estates at
Cassel, and twice dissolved them, after which he proceeded to levy taxes by
force. The law-courts declared his acts illegal; the officers of the army,
when called on for assistance, began to resign. The conflict between the
Minister and the Hessian population was in full progress when, at the
beginning of September, Austria with its vassal Governments proclaimed the
re-establishment of the Diet of Frankfort. Though Prussia and most of the
twenty-eight States confederate with it treated this announcement as null
and void, the Diet, constituted by the envoys of Austria, the four minor
Kingdoms, and a few seceders from the Prussian Union, commenced its
sittings. To the Diet the Elector of Hesse forthwith appealed for help
against his subjects, and the decision was given that the refusal of the
Hessian Estates to grant the taxes was an offence justifying the
intervention of the central power. Fortified by this judgment, Hassenpflug
now ordered that every person offering resistance to the Government should
be tried by court-martial. He was baffled by the resignation of the entire
body of officers in the Hessian army; and as this completed the
discomfiture of the Elector, the armed intervention of Austria, as
identified with the Diet of Frankfort, now became a certainty. But to the
protection of the people of Hesse in their constitutional rights Prussia,
as chief of the League which Hesse had joined, stood morally pledged. It
remained for the King to decide between armed resistance to Austria or the
humiliation of a total abandonment of Prussia's claim to leadership in any
German union. Conflicting influences swayed the King in one direction and
another. The friends of Austria and of absolutism declared that the
employment of the Prussian army on behalf of the Hessians would make the
King an accomplice of revolution: the bolder and more patriotic spirits
protested against the abdication of Prussia's just claims and the evasion
of its responsibilities towards Germany. For a moment the party of action,
led by the Prince of Prussia, gained the ascendant. General Radowitz, the
projector of the Union, was called to the Foreign Ministry, and Prussian
troops entered Hesse. Austria now ostentatiously prepared for war.
Frederick William, terrified by the danger confronting him, yet unwilling
to yield all, sought the mediation of the Czar of Russia. Nicholas came
to Warsaw, where the Emperor of Austria and Prince Charles, brother of
the King of Prussia, attended by the Ministers of their States, met him.
The closest family ties united the Courts of St. Petersburg and Berlin
but the Russian sovereign was still the patron of Austria as he had been
in the Hungarian campaign. He resented the action of Prussia in
Schleswig-Holstein, and was offended that King Frederick William had not
presented himself at Warsaw in person. He declared in favour of all
Austria's demands, and treated Count Brandenburg with such indignity that
the Count, a high-spirited patriot, never recovered from its effect. He
returned to Berlin only to give in his report and die. Manteuffel,
Minister of the Interior, assured the King that the Prussian army was so
weak in numbers and so defective in organisation that, if it took the
field against Austria and its allies, it would meet with certain ruin.
Bavarian troops, representing the Diet of Frankfort, now entered Hesse at
Austria's bidding, and stood face to face with the Prussians. The moment
had come when the decision must be made between peace and war. At a
Council held at Berlin on November and the peace-party carried the King
with them. Radowitz gave up office; Manteuffel, the Minister of
repression within and of submission without, was set at the head of the
Government. The meaning of his appointment was well understood, and with
each new proof of the weakness of the King the tone of the Court of
Austria became more imperious. On the 9th of November Schwarzenberg
categorically demanded the dissolution of the Prussian Union, the
recognition of the Federal Diet, and the evacuation of Hesse by the
Prussian troops. The first point was at once conceded, and in hollow,
equivocating language Manteuffel made the fact known to the members of
the Confederacy. The other conditions not being so speedily fulfilled,
Schwarzenberg set Austrian regiments in motion, and demanded the
withdrawal of the Prussian troops from Hesse within twenty-four hours.
Manteuffel begged the Austrian Minister for an interview, and, without
waiting for an answer, set out for Olmütz. His instructions bade him to
press for certain concessions; none of these did he obtain, and he made
the necessary submission without them. On the 29th of November a convention
was signed at Olmütz, in which Prussia recognised the German Federal
Constitution of 1815 as still existing, undertook to withdraw all its
troops from Hesse with the exception of a single battalion, and consented
to the settlement of affairs both in Hesse and in Schleswig-Holstein by the
Federal Diet. One point alone in the scheme of the Austrian statesman was
wanting among the fruits of his victory at Olmütz and of the negotiations
at Dresden by which this was followed. Schwarzenberg had intended that the
entire Austrian Empire should enter the German Federation; and if he had
had to reckon with no opponents but the beaten and humbled Prussia, he
would have effected his design. But the prospect of a central European
Power, with a population of seventy millions, controlled as this would
virtually be by the Cabinet of Vienna, alarmed other nations. England
declared that such a combination would undo the balance of power in Europe
and menace the independence of Germany; France protested in more
threatening terms; and the project fell to the ground, to be remembered
only as the boldest imagination of a statesman for whom fortune, veiling
the Nemesis in store, seemed to set no limit to its favours.
[Schleswig-Holstein.]
[The German National Fleet sold by auction, June, 1852.]
The cause of Schleswig-Holstein, so intimately bound up with the efforts of
the Germans towards national union, sank with the failure of these efforts;
and in the final humiliation of Prussia it received what might well seem
its death-blow. The armistice of Malmö, which was sanctioned by the
Assembly of Frankfort in the autumn of 1848, lasted until March 26th, 1849.
War was then recommenced by Prussia, and the lines of Düppel were stormed
by its troops, while the volunteer forces of Schleswig-Holstein
unsuccessfully laid siege to Fredericia. Hostilities had continued for
three months, when a second armistice, to last for a year, and
Preliminaries of Peace, were agreed upon. At the conclusion of this
armistice, in July, 1850, Prussia, in the name of Germany, made peace with
Denmark. The inhabitants of the Duchies in consequence continued the war
for themselves, and though defeated with great loss at Idstedt on the 24th
of July, they remained unconquered at the end of the year. This was the
situation of affairs when Prussia, by the Treaty of Olmütz, agreed that the
restored Federal Diet should take upon itself the restoration of order in
Schleswig-Holstein, and that the troops of Prussia should unite with those
of Austria to enforce its decrees. To the Cabinet of Vienna, the foe in
equal measure of German national union and of every democratic cause, the
Schleswig-Holsteiners were simply rebels in insurrection against their
Sovereign. They were required by the Diet, under Austrian dictation, to lay
down their arms; and commissioners from Austria and Prussia entered the
Duchies to compel them to do so. Against Denmark, Austria, and Prussia
together, it was impossible for Schleswig-Holstein to prolong its
resistance. The army was dissolved, and the Duchies were handed over to the
King of Denmark, to return to the legal status which was defined in the
Treaties of Peace. This was the nominal condition of the transfer; but the
Danish Government treated Schleswig as part of its national territory, and
in the northern part of the Duchy the process of substituting Danish for
German nationality was actively pursued. The policy of foreign Courts,
little interested in the wish of the inhabitants, had from the beginning of
the struggle of the Duchies against Denmark favoured the maintenance and
consolidation of the Danish Kingdom. The claims of the Duke of
Augustenburg, as next heir to the Duchies in the male line, were not
considered worth the risk of a new war; and by a protocol signed at London
on the 2nd of August, 1850, the Powers, with the exception of Prussia,
declared themselves in favour of a single rule of succession in all parts
of the Danish State. By a Treaty of the 8th of May, 1852, to which Prussia
gave its assent, the pretensions of all other claimants to the disputed
succession were set aside, and Prince Christian, of the House of
Glücksburg, was declared heir to the throne, the rights of the German
Federation as established by the Treaties of 1815 being reserved. In spite
of this reservation of Federal rights, and of the stipulations in favour of
Schleswig and Holstein made in the earlier agreements, the Duchies appeared
to be now practically united with the Danish State. Prussia, for a moment
their champion, had joined with Austria in coercing their army, in
dissolving their Government, in annulling the legislation by which the
Parliament of Frankfort had made them participators in public rights
thenceforward to be the inheritance of all Germans. A page in the national
history was obliterated; Prussia had turned its back on its own
professions; there remained but one relic from the time when the whole
German people seemed so ardent for the emancipation of its brethren beyond
the frontier. The national fleet, created by the Assembly of Frankfort for
the prosecution of the struggle with Denmark, still lay at the mouth of the
Elbe. But the same power which had determined that Germany was not to be a
nation had also determined that it could have no national maritime
interests. After all that had passed, authority had little call to be nice
about appearances; and the national fleet was sold by auction, in
accordance with a decree of the restored Diet of Frankfort, in the summer
of 1852. [453]
[Germany after 1849.]
It was with deep disappointment and humiliation that the Liberals of
Germany, and all in whom the hatred of democratic change had not
overpowered the love of country, witnessed the issue of the movement of
1848. In so far as that movement was one directed towards national union it
had totally failed, and the state of things that had existed before 1848
was restored without change. As a movement of constitutional and social
reform, it had not been so entirely vain; nor in this respect can it be
said that Germany after the year 1848 returned altogether to what it was
before it. Many of the leading figures of the earlier time re-appeared
indeed with more or less of lustre upon the stage. Metternich though
excluded from office by younger men, beamed upon Vienna with the serenity
of a prophet who had lived to see most of his enemies shot and of a martyr
who had returned to one of the most enviable Salons in Europe. No dynasty
lost its throne, no class of the population had been struck down with
proscription as were the clergy and the nobles of France fifty years
before. Yet the traveller familiar with Germany before the revolution found
that much of the old had now vanished, much of a new world come into being.
It was not sought by the re-established Governments to undo at one stroke
the whole of the political, the social, the agrarian legislation of the
preceding time, as in some other periods of reaction. The nearest approach
that was made to this was in a decree of the Diet annulling the Declaration
of Rights drawn up by the Frankfort Assembly, and requiring the Governments
to bring into conformity with the Federal Constitution all laws and
institutions made since the beginning of 1848. Parliamentary government was
thereby enfeebled, but not necessarily extinguished. Governments narrowed
the franchise, curtailed the functions of representative assemblies, filled
these with their creatures, coerced voters at elections; but, except in
Austria, there was no open abandonment of constitutional forms. In some
States, as in Saxony under the reactionary rule of Count Beust, the system
of national representation established in 1848 was abolished and the
earlier Estates were revived; in Prussia the two Houses of Parliament
continued in existence, but in such dependence upon the royal authority,
and under such strong pressure of an aristocratic and official reaction,
that, after struggling for some years in the Lower House, the Liberal
leaders at length withdrew in despair. The character which Government now
assumed in Prussia was indeed far more typical of the condition of Germany
at large than was the bold and uncompromising despotism of Prince
Schwarzenberg in Austria. Manteuffel, in whom the Prussian epoch of
reaction was symbolised, was not a cruel or a violent Minister; but his
rule was stamped with a peculiar and degrading meanness, more irritating to
those who suffered under it than harsher wrong. In his hands government was
a thing of eavesdropping and espionage, a system of petty persecution, a
school of subservience and hypocrisy. He had been the instrument at Olmütz
of such a surrender of national honour and national interests as few
nations have ever endured with the chances of war still untried. This
surrender may, in the actual condition of the Prussian army, have been
necessary, but the abasement of it seemed to cling to Manteuffel and to
lower all his conceptions of government. Even where the conclusions of his
policy were correct they seemed to have been reached by some unworthy
process. Like Germany at large, Prussia breathed uneasily under an
oppression which was everywhere felt and yet was hard to define. Its best
elements were those which suffered the most: its highest intellectual and
political aims were those which most excited the suspicion of the
Government. Its King had lost whatever was stimulating or elevated in his
illusions. From him no second alliance with Liberalism, no further effort
on behalf of German unity, was to be expected: the hope for Germany and for
Prussia, if hope there was, lay in a future reign.
[Austria after 1851.]
[Austrian Concordat, Sept. 18, 1855.]
The powerlessness of Prussia was the measure of Austrian influence and
prestige. The contrast presented by Austria in 1848 and Austria in 1851 was
indeed one that might well arrest political observers. Its recovery had no
doubt been effected partly by foreign aid, and in the struggle with the
Magyars a dangerous obligation had been incurred towards Russia; but
scarred and riven as the fabric was within, it was complete and imposing
without. Not one of the enemies who in 1848 had risen against the Court of
Vienna now remained standing. In Italy, Austria had won back what had
appeared to be hopelessly lost; in Germany it had more than vindicated its
old claims. It had thrown its rival to the ground, and the full measure of
its ambition was perhaps even yet not satisfied. "First to humiliate
Prussia, then to destroy it," was the expression in which Schwarzenberg
summed up his German policy. Whether, with his undoubted firmness and
daring, the Minister possessed the intellectual qualities and the
experience necessary for the successful administration of an Empire built
up, as Austria now was, on violence and on the suppression of every
national force, was doubted even by his admirers. The proof, however, was
not granted to him, for a sudden death carried him off in his fourth year
of power (April 5th, 1852). Weaker men succeeded to his task. The epoch of
military and diplomatic triumph was now ending, the gloomier side of the
reaction stood out unrelieved by any new succession of victories. Financial
disorder grew worse and worse. Clericalism claimed its bond from the
monarchy which it had helped to restore. In the struggle of the
nationalities of Austria against the central authority the Bishops had on
the whole thrown their influence on to the side of the Crown. The restored
despotism owed too much to their help and depended too much on their
continued goodwill to be able to refuse their demands. Thus the new
centralised administration, reproducing in general the uniformity of
government attempted by the Emperor Joseph II., contrasted with this in its
subservience to clerical power. Ecclesiastical laws and jurisdictions were
allowed to encroach on the laws and jurisdiction of the State; education
was made over to the priesthood; within the Church itself the bishops were
allowed to rule uncontrolled. The very Minister who had taken office under
Schwarzenberg as the representative of the modern spirit, to which the
Government still professed to render homage, became the instrument of an
act of submission to the Papacy which marked the lowest point to which
Austrian policy fell. Alexander Bach, a prominent Liberal in Vienna at the
beginning of 1848, had accepted office at the price of his independence,
and surrendered himself to the aristocratic and clerical influences that
dominated the Court. Consistent only in his efforts to simplify the forms
of government, to promote the ascendency of German over all other elements
in the State, to maintain the improvement in the peasant's condition
effected by the Parliament of Kremsier, Bach, as Minister of the Interior,
made war in all other respects on his own earlier principles. In the former
representative of the Liberalism of the professional classes in Vienna
absolutism had now its most efficient instrument; and the Concordat
negotiated by Bach with the Papacy in 1855 marked the definite submission
of Austria to the ecclesiastical pretensions which in these years of
political languor and discouragement gained increasing recognition
throughout Central Europe. Ultramontanism had sought allies in many
political camps since the revolution of 1848. It had dallied in some
countries with Republicanism; but its truer instincts divined in the
victory of absolutist systems its own surest gain. Accommodations between
the Papacy and several of the German Governments were made in the years
succeeding 1849; and from the centralised despotism of the Emperor Francis
Joseph the Church won concessions which since the time of Maria Theresa it
had in vain sought from any ruler of the Austrian State.
[France after 1848.]
[Louis Napoleon.]
The European drama which began in 1848 had more of unity and more of
concentration in its opening than in its close. In Italy it ends with the
fall of Venice; in Germany the interest lingers till the days of Olmütz; in
France there is no decisive break in the action until the Coup d'Etat
which, at the end of the year 1851, made Louis Napoleon in all but name
Emperor of France. The six million votes which had raised Louis Napoleon to
the Presidency of the Republic might well have filled with alarm all who
hoped for a future of constitutional rule; yet the warning conveyed by the
election seems to have been understood by but few. As the representative of
order and authority, as the declared enemy of Socialism, Louis Napoleon was
on the same side as the Parliamentary majority; he had even been supported
in his candidature by Parliamentary leaders such as M. Thiers. His victory
was welcomed as a victory over Socialism and the Red Republic; he had
received some patronage from the official party of order, and it was
expected that, as nominal chief of the State, he would act as the
instrument of this party. He was an adventurer, but an adventurer with so
little that was imposing about him, that it scarcely occurred to men of
influence in Paris to credit him with the capacity for mischief. His mean
look and spiritless address, the absurdities of his past, the
insignificance of his political friends, caused him to be regarded during
his first months of public life with derision rather than with fear. The
French, said M. Thiers long afterwards, made two mistakes about Louis
Napoleon: the first when they took him for a fool, the second when they
took him for a man of genius. It was not until the appearance of the letter
to Colonel Ney, in which the President ostentatiously separated himself
from his Ministers and emphasised his personal will in the direction of the
foreign policy of France, that suspicions of danger to the Republic from
his ambition arose. From this time, in the narrow circle of the Ministers
whom official duty brought into direct contact with the President, a
constant sense of insecurity and dread of some new surprise on his part
prevailed, though the accord which had been broken by the letter to Colonel
Ney was for a while outwardly re-established, and the forms of
Parliamentary government remained unimpaired.
[Message of Oct. 31, 1849.]
The first year of Louis Napoleon's term of office was drawing to a close
when a message from him was delivered to the Assembly which seemed to
announce an immediate attack upon the Constitution. The Ministry in office
was composed of men of high Parliamentary position; it enjoyed the entire
confidence of a great majority in the Assembly, and had enforced with at
least sufficient energy the measures of public security which the President
and the country seemed agreed in demanding. Suddenly, on the 31st of
October, the President announced to the Assembly by a message carried by
one of his aides-de-camp that the Ministry were dismissed. The reason
assigned for their dismissal was the want of unity within the Cabinet
itself; but the language used by the President announced much more than a
ministerial change. "France, in the midst of confusion, seeks for the hand,
the will of him whom it elected on the 10th of December. The victory won on
that day was the victory of a system, for the name of Napoleon is in itself
a programme. It signifies order, authority, religion, national prosperity
within; national dignity without. It is this policy, inaugurated by my
election, that I desire to carry to triumph with the support of the
Assembly and of the people." In order to save the Republic from anarchy, to
maintain the prestige of France among other nations, the President declared
that he needed men of action rather than of words; yet when the list of the
new Ministers appeared, it contained scarcely a single name of weight.
Louis Napoleon had called to office persons whose very obscurity had marked
them as his own instruments, and guaranteed to him the ascendency which he
had not hitherto possessed within the Cabinet. Satisfied with having given
this proof of his power, he resumed the appearance of respect, if not of
cordiality, towards the Assembly. He had learnt to beware of precipitate
action; above two years of office were still before him; and he had now
done enough to make it clear to all who were disposed to seek their
fortunes in a new political cause that their services on his behalf would
be welcomed, and any excess of zeal more than pardoned. From this time
there grew up a party which had for its watchword the exaltation of Louis
Napoleon and the derision of the methods of Parliamentary government.
Journalists, unsuccessful politicians, adventurers of every description,
were enlisted in the ranks of this obscure but active band. For their acts
and their utterances no one was responsible but themselves. They were
disavowed without compunction when their hardihood went too far; but their
ventures brought them no peril, and the generosity of the President was not
wanting to those who insisted on serving him in spite of himself.
[Law limiting the Franchise, May 31, 1850.]
France was still trembling with the shock of the Four Days of June; and
measures of repression formed the common ground upon which Louis Napoleon
and the Assembly met without fear of conflict. Certain elections which were
held in the spring of 1850, and which gave a striking victory in Paris and
elsewhere to Socialist or Ultra-Democratic candidates, revived the alarms
of the owners of property, and inspired the fear that with universal
suffrage the Legislature itself might ultimately fall into the hands of the
Red Republicans. The principle of universal suffrage had been proclaimed
almost by accident in the midst of the revolution of 1848. It had been
embodied in the Constitution of that year because it was found already in
existence. No party had seriously considered the conditions under which it
was to be exercised, or had weighed the political qualifications of the
mass to whom it was so lightly thrown. When election after election
returned to the Chamber men whose principles were held to menace society
itself, the cry arose that France must be saved from the hands of the vile
multitude; and the President called upon a Committee of the Assembly to
frame the necessary measures of electoral reform. Within a week the work of
the Committee was completed, and the law which it had drafted was brought
before the Assembly. It was proposed that, instead of a residence of six
months, a continuous residence of three years in the same commune should be
required of every voter, and that the fulfilment of this condition should
be proved, not by ordinary evidence, but by one of certain specified acts,
such as the payment of personal taxes. With modifications of little
importance the Bill was passed by the Assembly. Whether its real effect was
foreseen even by those who desired the greatest possible limitation of the
franchise is doubtful; it is certain that many who supported it believed,
in their ignorance of the practical working of electoral laws, that they
were excluding from the franchise only the vagabond and worthless class
which has no real place within the body politic. When the electoral lists
drawn up in pursuance of the measure appeared, they astounded all parties
alike. Three out of the ten millions of voters in France were
disfranchised. Not only the inhabitants of whole quarters in the great
cities but the poorer classes among the peasantry throughout France had
disappeared from the electoral body. The Assembly had at one blow converted
into enemies the entire mass of the population that lived by the wages of
bodily labour. It had committed an act of political suicide, and had given
to a man so little troubled with scruples of honour as Louis Napoleon the
fatal opportunity of appealing to France as the champion of national
sovereignty and the vindicator of universal suffrage against an Assembly
which had mutilated it in the interests of class. [454]
[Prospects of Louis Napoleon.]
The duration of the Presidency was fixed by the Constitution of 1848 at
four years, and it was enacted that the President should not be re-eligible
to his dignity. By the operation of certain laws imperfectly adjusted to
one another, the tenure of office by Louis Napoleon expired on the 8th of
May, 1852, while the date for the dissolution of the Assembly fell within a
few weeks of this day. France was therefore threatened with the dangers
attending the almost simultaneous extinction of all authority. The perils
of 1852 loomed only too visibly before the country, and Louis Napoleon
addressed willing hearers when, in the summer of 1850, he began to hint at
the necessity of a prolongation of his own power. The Parliamentary recess
was employed by the President in two journeys through the Departments; the
first through those of the south-east, where Socialism was most active, and
where his appearance served at once to prove his own confidence and to
invigorate the friends of authority; the second through Normandy, where the
prevailing feeling was strongly in favour of firm government, and
utterances could safely be made by the President which would have brought
him into some risk at Paris. In suggesting that France required his own
continued presence at the head of the State Louis Napoleon was not
necessarily suggesting a violation of the law. It was provided by the
Statutes of 1848 that the Assembly by a vote of three-fourths might order a
revision of the Constitution; and in favour of this revision petitions were
already being drawn up throughout the country. Were the clause forbidding
the re-election of the President removed from the Constitution, Louis
Napoleon might fairly believe that an immense majority of the French people
would re-invest him with power. He would probably have been content with a
legal re-election had this been rendered possible; but the Assembly showed
little sign of a desire to smooth his way, and it therefore became
necessary for him to seek the means of realising his aims in violation of
the law. He had persuaded himself that his mission, his destiny, was to
rule France; in other words, he had made up his mind to run such risks and
to sanction such crimes as might be necessary to win him sovereign power.
With the loftier impulses of ambition, motives of a meaner kind stimulated
him to acts of energy. Never wealthy, the father of a family though
unmarried, he had exhausted his means, and would have returned to private
life a destitute man, if not laden with debt. When his own resolution
flagged, there were those about him too deeply interested in his fortunes
to allow him to draw back.
[Louis Napoleon and the army.]
[Dismissal of Changarnier, Jan., 1851.]
It was by means of the army that Louis Napoleon intended in the last resort
to make himself master of France, and the army had therefore to be won over
to his personal cause. The generals who had gained distinction either in
the Algerian wars or in the suppression of insurrection in France were
without exception Orleanists or Republicans. Not a single officer of
eminence was as yet included in the Bonapartist band. The President himself
had never seen service except in a Swiss camp of exercise; beyond his name
he possessed nothing that could possibly touch the imagination of a
soldier. The heroic element not being discoverable in his person or his
career, it remained to work by more material methods. Louis Napoleon had
learnt many things in England, and had perhaps observed in the English
elections of that period how much may be effected by the simple means of
money-bribes and strong drink. The saviour of society was not ashamed to
order the garrison of Paris double rations of brandy and to distribute
innumerable doles of half a franc or less. Military banquets were given, in
which the sergeant and the corporal sat side by side with the higher
officers. Promotion was skilfully offered or withheld. As the generals of
the highest position were hostile to Bonaparte, it was the easier to tempt
their subordinates with the prospect of their places. In the acclamations
which greeted the President at the reviews held at Paris in the autumn of
1850, in the behaviour both of officers and men in certain regiments, it
was seen how successful had been the emissaries of Bonapartism. The
Committee which represented the absent Chamber in vain called the Minister
of War to account for these irregularities. It was in vain that
Changarnier, who, as commander both of the National Guard of Paris and of
the first military division, seemed to hold the arbitrament between
President and Assembly in his hands, openly declared at the beginning of
1851 in favour of the Constitution. He was dismissed from his post; and
although a vote of censure which followed this dismissal led to the
resignation of the Ministry, the Assembly was unable to reinstate
Changarnier in his command, and helplessly witnessed the authority which he
had held pass into hostile or untrustworthy hands.
[Proposed Revision of the Constitution.]
[Revision of the Constitution rejected, July 19.]
There now remained only one possible means of averting the attack upon the
Constitution which was so clearly threatened, and that was by subjecting
the Constitution itself to revision in order that Louis Napoleon might
legally seek re-election at the end of his Presidency. An overwhelming
current of public opinion pressed indeed in the direction of such a change.
However gross and undisguised the initiative of the local functionaries in
preparing the petitions which showered upon the Assembly, the national
character of the demand could not be doubted. There was no other candidate
whose name carried with it any genuine popularity or prestige, or around
whom even the Parliamentary sections at enmity with the President could
rally. The Assembly was divided not very unevenly between Legitimists,
Orleanists, and Republicans. Had indeed the two monarchical groups been
able to act in accord, they might have had some hope of re-establishing the
throne; and an attempt had already been made to effect a union, on the
understanding that the childless Comté de Chambord should recognise the
grandson of Louis Philippe as his heir, the House of Orleans renouncing its
claims during the lifetime of the chief of the elder line. These plans had
been frustrated by the refusal of the Comté de Chambord to sanction any
appeal to the popular vote, and the restoration of the monarchy was
therefore hopeless for the present. It remained for the Assembly to decide
whether it would facilitate Louis Napoleon's re-election as President by a
revision of the Constitution or brave the risk of his violent usurpation of
power. The position was a sad and even humiliating one for those who, while
they could not disguise their real feeling towards the Prince, yet knew
themselves unable to count on the support of the nation if they should
resist him. The Legitimists, more sanguine in temper, kept in view an
ultimate restoration of the monarchy, and lent themselves gladly to any
policy which might weaken the constitutional safeguards of the Republic.
The Republican minority alone determined to resist any proposal for
revision, and to stake everything upon the maintenance of the constitution
in its existing form. Weak as the Republicans were as compared with the
other groups in the Assembly when united against them, they were yet strong
enough to prevent the Ministry from securing that majority of three-fourths
without which the revision of the Constitution could not be undertaken.
Four hundred and fifty votes were given in favour of revision, two hundred
and seventy against it (July 19th). The proposal therefore fell to the
ground, and Louis Napoleon, who could already charge the Assembly with
having by its majority destroyed universal suffrage, could now charge it
with having by its minority forbidden the nation to choose its own head.
Nothing more was needed by him. He had only to decide upon the time and the
circumstances of the _coup d'état_ which was to rid him of his adversaries
and to make him master of France.
[Preparations for the _coup d'état_.]
Louis Napoleon had few intimate confidants; the chief among these were his
half-brother Morny, one of the illegitimate offspring of Queen Hortense, a
man of fashion and speculator in the stocks; Fialin or Persigny, a person
of humble origin who had proved himself a devoted follower of the Prince
through good and evil; and Fleury, an officer at this time on a mission in
Algiers. These were not men out of whom Louis Napoleon could form an
administration, but they were useful to him in discovering and winning over
soldiers and officials of sufficient standing to give to the execution of
the conspiracy something of the appearance of an act of Government. A
general was needed at the War Office who would go all lengths in
illegality. Such a man had already been found in St. Arnaud, commander of a
brigade in Algiers, a brilliant soldier who had redeemed a disreputable
past by years of hard service, and who was known to be ready to treat his
French fellow-citizens exactly as he would treat the Arabs. As St. Arnaud's
name was not yet familiar in Paris, a campaign was arranged in the summer
of 1851 for the purpose of winning him distinction. At the cost of some
hundreds of lives St. Arnaud was pushed into sufficient fame; and after
receiving congratulations proportioned to his exploits from the President's
own hand, he was summoned to Paris, in order at the right moment to be made
Minister of War. A troop of younger officers, many of whom gained a
lamentable celebrity as the generals of 1870, were gradually brought over
from Algiers and placed round the Minister in the capital. The command of
the army of Paris was given to General Magnan, who, though he preferred not
to share in the deliberations on the _coup d'état_, had promised his
co-operation when the moment should arrive. The support, or at least the
acquiescence, of the army seemed thus to be assured. The National Guard,
which, under Changarnier, would probably have rallied in defence of the
Assembly, had been placed under an officer pledged to keep it in inaction.
For the management of the police Louis Napoleon had fixed upon M. Maupas,
Préfet of the Haute Garonne. This person, to whose shamelessness we owe the
most authentic information that exists on the _coup d'état_, had,
while in an inferior station, made it his business to ingratiate himself
with the President by sending to him personally police reports which ought
to have been sent to the Ministers. The objects and the character of M.
Maupas were soon enough understood by Louis Napoleon. He promoted him to
high office; sheltered him from the censure of his superiors; and, when the
_coup d'état_ was drawing nigh, called him to Paris, in the full and
well-grounded confidence that, whatever the most perfidious ingenuity could
contrive in turning the guardians of the law against the law itself, that
M. Maupas, as Préfet of Police, might be relied upon to accomplish.
[The _coup d'état_ fixed for December.]
Preparations for the _coup d'état_ had been so far advanced in
September that a majority of the conspirators had then urged Louis Napoleon
to strike the blow without delay, while the members of the Assembly were
still dispersed over France in the vacation. St. Arnaud, however, refused
his assent, declaring that the deputies, if left free, would assemble at a
distance from Paris, summon to them the generals loyal to the Constitution,
and commence a civil war. He urged that, in order to avoid greater
subsequent risks, it would be necessary to seize all the leading
representatives and generals from whom resistance might be expected, and to
hold them under durance until the crisis should be over. This simultaneous
arrest of all the foremost public men in France could only be effected at a
time when the Assembly was sitting. St. Arnaud therefore demanded that the
_coup d'état_ should be postponed till the winter. Another reason made
for delay. Little as the populace of Paris loved the reactionary Assembly,
Louis Napoleon was not altogether assured that it would quietly witness his
own usurpation of power. In waiting until the Chamber should again be in
session, he saw the opportunity of exhibiting his cause as that of the
masses themselves, and of justifying his action as the sole means of
enforcing popular rights against a legislature obstinately bent on denying
them. Louis Napoleon's own Ministers had overthrown universal suffrage.
This might indeed be matter for comment on the part of the censorious, but
it was not a circumstance to stand in the way of the execution of a great
design. Accordingly Louis Napoleon determined to demand from the Assembly
at the opening of the winter session the repeal of the electoral law of May
31st, and to make its refusal, on which he could confidently reckon, the
occasion of its destruction.
[Louis Napoleon demands repeal of Law of May 31.]
[The Assembly refuses.]
The conspirators were up to this time conspirators and nothing more. A
Ministry still subsisted which was not initiated in the President's designs
nor altogether at his command. On his requiring that the repeal of the law
of May 31st should be proposed to the Assembly, the Cabinet resigned. The
way to the highest functions of State was thus finally opened for the
agents of the _coup d'état_. St. Arnaud was placed at the War Office,
Maupas at the Prefecture of Police. The colleagues assigned to them were
too insignificant to exercise any control over their actions. At the
reopening of the Assembly on the 4th of November an energetic message from
the President was read. On the one hand he denounced a vast and perilous
combination of all the most dangerous elements of society which threatened
to overwhelm France in the following year; on the other hand he demanded,
with certain undefined safeguards, the re-establishment of universal
suffrage. The middle classes were scared with the prospect of a Socialist
revolution; the Assembly was divided against itself, and the democracy of
Paris flattered by the homage paid to the popular vote. With very little
delay a measure repealing the Law of May 31st was introduced into the
Assembly. It was supported by the Republicans and by many members of the
other groups; but the majority of the Assembly, while anxious to devise
some compromise, refused to condemn its own work in the unqualified form on
which the President insisted. The Bill was thrown out by seven votes.
Forthwith the rumour of an impending _coup d'etat_ spread through
Paris. The Questors, or members charged with the safeguarding of the
Assembly, moved the resolutions necessary to enable them to secure
sufficient military aid. Even now prompt action might perhaps have saved
the Chamber. But the Republican deputies, incensed by their defeat on the
question of universal suffrage, plunged headlong into the snare set for
them by the President, and combined with his open or secret partisans to
reject the proposition of the Questors. Changarnier had blindly vouched for
the fidelity of the army; one Republican deputy, more imaginative than his
colleagues, bade the Assembly confide in their invisible sentinel, the
people. Thus the majority of the Chamber, with the clearest warning of
danger, insisted on giving the aggressor every possible advantage. If the
imbecility of opponents is the best augury of success in a bold enterprise,
the President had indeed little reason to anticipate failure.
[The _coup d'etat_, Dec. 2.]
The execution of the _coup d'etat_ was fixed for the early morning of
December 2nd. On the previous evening Louis Napoleon held a public
reception at the Elysée, his quiet self-possessed manner indicating nothing
of the struggle at hand. Before the guests dispersed the President withdrew
to his study. There the last council of the conspirators was held, and they
parted, each to the execution of the work assigned to him. The central
element in the plan was the arrest of Cavaignac, of Changarnier and three
other generals who were members of the Assembly, of eleven civilian
deputies including M. Thiers, and of sixty-two other politicians of
influence. Maupas summoned to the Prefecture of Police in the dead of night
a sufficient number of his trusted agents, received each of them on his
arrival in a separate room, and charged each with the arrest of one of the
victims. The arrests were accomplished before dawn, and the leading
soldiers and citizens of France met one another in the prison of Mazas. The
Palais Bourbon, the meeting-place of the Assembly, was occupied by troops.
The national printing establishment was seized by gendarmes, and the
proclamations of Louis Napoleon, distributed sentence by sentence to
different compositors, were set in type before the workmen knew upon what
they were engaged. When day broke the Parisians found the soldiers in the
streets, and the walls placarded with manifestoes of Louis Napoleon. The
first of these was a decree which announced in the name of the French
people that the National Assembly and the Council of State were dissolved,
that universal suffrage was restored, and that the nation was convoked in
its electoral colleges from the 14th to the 21st of December. The second
was a proclamation to the people, in which Louis Napoleon denounced at once
the monarchical conspirators within the Assembly and the anarchists who
sought to overthrow all government. His duty called upon him to save the
Republic by an appeal to the nation. He proposed the establishment of a
decennial executive authority, with a Senate, a Council of State, a
Legislative Body, and other institutions borrowed from the Consulate of
1799. If the nation refused him a majority of its votes he would summon a
new Assembly and resign his powers; if the nation believed in the cause of
which his name was the symbol, in France regenerated by the Revolution and
organised by the Emperor, it would prove this by ratifying his authority. A
third proclamation was addressed to the army. In 1830 and in 1848 the army
had been treated as the conquered, but its voice was now to be heard.
Common glories and sorrows united the soldiers of France with Napoleon's
heir, and the future would unite them in common devotion to the repose and
greatness of their country.
[Paris on Dec. 2.]
The full meaning of these manifestoes was not at first understood by the
groups who read them. The Assembly was so unpopular that the announcement
of its dissolution, with the restoration of universal suffrage, pleased
rather than alarmed the democratic quarters of Paris. It was not until some
hours had passed that the arrests became generally known, and that the
first symptoms of resistance appeared. Groups of deputies assembled at the
houses of the Parliamentary leaders; a body of fifty even succeeded in
entering the Palais Bourbon and in commencing a debate: they were, however,
soon dispersed by soldiers. Later in the day above two hundred members
assembled at the Mairie of the Tenth Arrondissement. There they passed
resolutions declaring the President removed from his office, and appointing
a commander of the troops at Paris. The first officers who were sent to
clear the Mairie flinched in the execution of their work, and withdrew for
further orders. The Magistrates of the High Court, whose duty it was to
order the impeachment of the President in case of the violation of his oath
to the Constitution, assembled, and commenced the necessary proceedings;
but before they could sign a warrant, soldiers forced their way into the
hall and drove the judges from the Bench. In due course General Forey
appeared with a strong body of troops at the Mairie, where the two hundred
deputies were assembled. Refusing to disperse, they were one and all
arrested, and conducted as prisoners between files of troops to the
Barracks of the Quai d'Orsay. The National Guard, whose drums had been
removed by their commander in view of any spontaneous movement to arms,
remained invisible. Louis Napoleon rode out amidst the acclamations of the
soldiery; and when the day closed it seemed as if Paris had resolved to
accept the change of Government and the overthrow of the Constitution
without a struggle.
[December 3.]
[December 4.]
There were, however, a few resolute men at work in the workmen's quarters;
and in the wealthier part of the city the outrage upon the National
Representation gradually roused a spirit of resistance. On the morning of
December 3rd the Deputy Baudin met with his death in attempting to defend a
barricade which had been erected in the Faubourg St. Antoine. The artisans
of eastern Paris showed, however, little inclination to take up arms on
behalf of those who had crushed them in the Four Days of June; the
agitation was strongest within the Boulevards, and spread westwards towards
the stateliest district of Paris. The barricades erected on the south of
the Boulevards were so numerous, the crowds so formidable, that towards the
close of the day the troops were withdrawn, and it was determined that
after a night of quiet they should make a general attack and end the
struggle at one blow. At midday on December 4th divisions of the army
converged from all directions upon the insurgent quarter. The barricades
were captured or levelled by artillery, and with a loss on the part of the
troops of twenty-eight killed, and a hundred and eighty wounded resistance
was overcome. But the soldiers had been taught to regard the inhabitants of
Paris as their enemies, and they bettered the instructions given them.
Maddened by drink or panic, they commenced indiscriminate firing in the
Boulevards after the conflict was over, and slaughtered all who either in
the street or at the windows of the houses came within range of their
bullets. According to official admissions, the lives of sixteen civilians
paid for every soldier slain; independent estimates place far higher the
number of the victims of this massacre. Two thousand arrests followed, and
every Frenchman who appeared dangerous to Louis Napoleon's myrmidons, from
Thiers and Victor Hugo down to the anarchist orators of the wineshops, was
either transported, exiled, or lodged in prison. Thus was the Republic
preserved and society saved.
[The Plébiscite, Dec. 20.]
[Napoleon III. Emperor, Dec. 2, 1852.]
France in general received the news of the _coup d'etat_ with indifference:
where it excited popular movements these movements were of such a character
that Louis Napoleon drew from them the utmost profit. A certain fierce,
blind Socialism had spread among the poorest of the rural classes in the
centre and south of France. In these departments there were isolated
risings, accompanied by acts of such murderous outrage and folly that a
general terror seized the surrounding districts. In the course of a few
days the predatory bands were dispersed, and an unsparing chastisement
inflicted on all who were concerned in their misdeeds; but the reports sent
to Paris were too serviceable to Louis Napoleon to be left in obscurity;
and these brutish village-outbreaks, which collapsed at the first
appearance of a handful of soldiers, were represented as the prelude to a
vast Socialist revolution from which the _coup d'etat_, and that alone, had
saved France. Terrified by the re-appearance of the Red Spectre, the French
nation proceeded on the 20th of December to pass its judgment on the
accomplished usurpation. The question submitted for the _plébiscite_ was,
whether the people desired the maintenance of Louis Napoleon's authority
and committed to him the necessary powers for establishing a Constitution
on the basis laid down in his proclamation of December 2nd. Seven million
votes answered this question in the affirmative, less than one-tenth of
that number in the negative. The result was made known on the last day of
the year 1851. On the first day of the new year Louis Napoleon attended a
service of thanksgiving at Notre Dame, took possession of the Tuileries,
and restored the eagle as the military emblem of France. He was now in all
but name an absolute sovereign. The Church, the army, the ever-servile body
of the civil administration, waited impatiently for the revival of the
Imperial title. Nor was the saviour of society the man to shrink from
further responsibilities. Before the year closed the people was once more
called upon to express its will. Seven millions of votes pronounced for
hereditary power; and on the anniversary of the _coup d'etat_ Napoleon III.
was proclaimed Emperor of the French.