that in their eyes every means was good if it only tended to
strengthen the shaken foundations of authority. They, poor deluded
wretches, thought every danger of a restoration of the old system had
passed away; and thus they made use of the whole of the old State
machinery for the purpose of restoring "order." Not a single
bureaucrat or military officer was dismissed; not the slightest change
was made in the old bureaucratic system of administration. These
precious constitutional and responsible ministers even restored to
their posts those functionaries whom the people, in the first heat of
revolutionary ardor, had driven away on account of their former acts
of bureaucratic overbearing. There was nothing altered in Prussia but
the persons of the ministers; even the ministerial staffs in the
different departments were not touched upon, and all the
constitutional place-hunters, who had formed the chorus of the
newly-elevated rulers, and who had expected their share of power and
office, were told to wait until restored stability allowed changes to
be operated in the bureaucratic personnel which now were not without
danger.
The King, chap-fallen in the highest degree after the insurrection of
the 18th of March, very soon found out that he was quite as necessary
to these "liberal" ministers as they were to him. The throne had been
spared by the insurrection; the throne was the last existing obstacle
to "anarchy"; the liberal middle class and its leaders, now in the
ministry, had therefore every interest to keep on excellent terms with
the crown. The King, and the reactionary camerilla that surrounded
him, were not slow in discovering this, and profited by the
circumstance in order to fetter the march of the ministry even in
those petty reforms that were from time to time intended.
The first care of the ministry was to give a sort of legal appearance
to the recent violent changes. The United Diet was convoked in spite
of all popular opposition, in order to vote as the legal and
constitutional organ of the people a new electoral law for the
election of an Assembly, which was to agree with the crown upon a new
constitution. The elections were to be indirect, the mass of voters
electing a number of electors, who then were to choose the
representative. In spite of all opposition this system of double
elections passed. The United Diet was then asked for a loan of
twenty-five millions of dollars, opposed by the popular party, but
equally agreed to.
These acts of the ministry gave a most rapid development to the
popular, or as it now called itself, the Democratic party. This party,
headed by the petty trading and shopkeeping class, and uniting under
its banner, in the beginning of the revolution, the large majority of
the working people, demanded direct and universal suffrage, the same
as established in France, a single legislative assembly, and full and
open recognition of the revolution of the 18th of March, as the base
of the new governmental system. The more moderate faction would be
satisfied with a thus "democratized" monarchy, the more advanced
demanded the ultimate establishment of the republic. Both factions
agreed in recognizing the German National Assembly at Frankfort as
the supreme authority of the country, while the Constitutionalists and
Reactionists affected a great horror of the sovereignty of this body,
which they professed to consider as utterly revolutionary.
The independent movement of the working classes had, by the
revolution, been broken up for a time. The immediate wants and
circumstances of the movement were such as not to allow any of the
specific demands of the Proletarian party to be put in the foreground.
In fact, as long as the ground was not cleared for the independent
action of the working men, as long as direct and universal suffrage
was not yet established, as long as the thirty-six larger and smaller
states continued to cut up Germany into numberless morsels, what
else could the Proletarian party do but watch the--for them
all-important--movement of Paris, and struggle in common with the
petty shopkeepers for the attainment of those rights, which would
allow them to fight afterwards their own battle?
There were only three points, then, by which the Proletarian party in
its political action essentially distinguished itself from the petty
trading class, or properly so-called Democratic party; firstly, in
judging differently the French movement, with regard to which the
democrats attacked, and the Proletarian revolutionists defended, the
extreme party in Paris; secondly, in proclaiming the necessity of
establishing a German Republic, one and indivisible, while the very
extremest ultras among the democrats only dared to sigh for a
Federative Republic; and thirdly, in showing upon every occasion, that
revolutionary boldness and readiness for action, in which any party
headed by, and composed principally of petty tradesmen, will always be
deficient.
The Proletarian, or really Revolutionary party, succeeded only very
gradually in withdrawing the mass of the working people from the
influence of the Democrats, whose tail they formed in the beginning of
the Revolution. But in due time the indecision, weakness, and
cowardice of the Democratic leaders did the rest, and it may now be
said to be one of the principal results of the last years'
convulsions, that wherever the working-class is concentrated in
anything like considerable masses, they are entirely freed from that
Democratic influence which led them into an endless series of blunders
and misfortunes during 1848 and 1849. But we had better not
anticipate; the events of these two years will give us plenty of
opportunities to show the Democratic gentlemen at work.
The peasantry in Prussia, the same as in Austria, but with less
energy, feudalism pressing, upon the whole, not quite so hardly upon
them here, had profited by the revolution to free themselves at once
from all feudal shackles. But here, from the reasons stated before,
the middle classes at once turned against them, their oldest, their
most indispensable allies; the democrats, equally frightened with the
bourgeoisie, by what was called attacks upon private property, failed
equally to support them; and thus, after three months' emancipation,
after bloody struggles and military executions, particularly in
Silesia, feudalism was restored by the hands of the, until yesterday,
anti-feudal bourgeoisie. There is not a more damning fact to be
brought against them than this. Similar treason against its best
allies, against itself, never was committed by any party in history,
and whatever humiliation and chastisement may be in store for this
middle class party, it has deserved by this one act every morsel of
it.
OCTOBER, 1851.
VII.
THE FRANKFORT NATIONAL ASSEMBLY.
FEBRUARY 27, 1852.
It will perhaps be in the recollection of our readers that in the six
preceding papers we followed up the revolutionary movement of Germany
to the two great popular victories of March 13th in Vienna, and March
18th in Berlin. We saw, both in Austria and Prussia, the establishment
of constitutional governments and the proclamation, as leading rules
for all future policy, of Liberal, or middle class principles; and the
only difference observable between the two great centers of action was
this, that in Prussia the liberal bourgeoisie, in the persons of two
wealthy merchants, Messrs. Camphausen and Hansemann, directly seized
upon the reins of power; while in Austria, where the bourgeoisie was,
politically, far less educated, the Liberal bureaucracy walked into
office, and professed to hold power in trust for them. We have further
seen, how the parties and classes of society, that were heretofore all
united in opposition to the old government, got divided among
themselves after the victory, or even during the struggle; and how
that same Liberal bourgeoisie that alone profited from the victory
turned round immediately upon its allies of yesterday, assumed a
hostile attitude against every class or party of a more advanced
character, and concluded an alliance with the conquered feudal and
bureaucratic interests. It was in fact, evident, even from the
beginning of the revolutionary drama, that the Liberal bourgeoisie
could not hold its ground against the vanquished, but not destroyed,
feudal and bureaucratic parties except by relying upon the assistance
of the popular and more advanced parties; and that it equally
required, against the torrent of these more advanced masses, the
assistance of the feudal nobility and of the bureaucracy. Thus, it was
clear enough that the bourgeoisie in Austria and Prussia did not
possess sufficient strength to maintain their power, and to adapt the
institutions of the country to their own wants and ideas. The Liberal
bourgeois ministry was only a halting-place from which, according to
the turn circumstances might take, the country would either have to go
on to the more advanced stage of Unitarian republicanism, or to
relapse into the old clerico-feudal and bureaucratic _regime_. At all
events, the real, decisive struggle was yet to come; the events of
March had only engaged the combat.
Austria and Prussia being the two ruling states of Germany, every
decisive revolutionary victory in Vienna or Berlin would have been
decisive for all Germany. And as far as they went, the events of
March, 1848, in these two cities, decided the turn of German affairs.
It would, then, be superfluous to recur to the movements that occurred
in the minor States; and we might, indeed, confine ourselves to the
consideration of Austrian and Prussian affairs exclusively, if the
existence of these minor states had not given rise to a body which
was, by its very existence, a most striking proof of the abnormal
situation of Germany and of the incompleteness of the late revolution;
a body so abnormal, so ludicrous by its very position, and yet so full
of its own importance, that history will, most likely, never afford a
pendant to it. This body was the so-called _German National Assembly_
at Frankfort-on-Main.
After the popular victories of Vienna and Berlin, it was a matter of
course that there should be a Representative Assembly for all Germany.
This body was consequently elected, and met at Frankfort, by the side
of the old Federative Diet. The German National Assembly was expected,
by the people, to settle every matter in dispute, and to act as the
highest legislative authority for the whole of the German
Confederation. But, at the same time, the Diet which had convoked it
had in no way fixed its attributions. No one knew whether its decrees
were to have force of law, or whether they were to be subject to the
sanction of the Diet, or of the individual Governments. In this
perplexity, if the Assembly had been possessed of the least energy, it
would have immediately dissolved and sent home the Diet--than which
no corporate body was more unpopular in Germany--and replaced it by a
Federal Government, chosen from among its own members. It would have
declared itself the only legal expression of the sovereign will of the
German people, and thus have attached legal validity to every one of
its decrees. It would, above all, have secured to itself an organized
and armed force in the country sufficient to put down any opposition
on the parts of the Governments. And all this was easy, very easy, at
that early period of the Revolution. But that would have been
expecting a great deal too much from an Assembly composed in its
majority of Liberal attorneys and _doctrinaire_ professors, an
Assembly which, while it pretended to embody the very essence of
German intellect and science, was in reality nothing but a stage where
old and worn-out political characters exhibited their involuntary
ludicrousness and their impotence of thought, as well as action,
before the eyes of all Germany. THIS Assembly of old women was, from
the first day of its existence, more frightened of the least popular
movement than of all the reactionary plots of all the German
Governments put together. It deliberated under the eyes of the Diet,
nay, it almost craved the Diet's sanction to its decrees, for its
first resolutions had to be promulgated by that odious body. Instead
of asserting its own sovereignty, it studiously avoided the discussion
of any such dangerous question. Instead of surrounding itself by a
popular force, it passed to the order of the day over all the violent
encroachments of the Governments; Mayence, under its very eyes, was
placed in a state of siege, and the people there disarmed, and the
National Assembly did not stir. Later on it elected Archduke John of
Austria Regent of Germany, and declared that all its resolutions were
to have the force of law; but then Archduke John was only instituted
in his new dignity after the consent of all the Governments had been
obtained, and he was instituted not by the Assembly, but by the Diet;
and as to the legal force of the decrees of the Assembly, that point
was never recognized by the larger Governments, nor enforced by the
Assembly itself; it therefore remained in suspense. Thus we had the
strange spectacle of an Assembly pretending to be the only legal
representative of a great and sovereign nation, and yet never
possessing either the will or the force to make its claims recognized.
The debates of this body, without any practical result, were not even
of any theoretical value, reproducing, as they did, nothing but the
most hackneyed commonplace themes of superannuated philosophical and
juridical schools; every sentence that was said, or rather stammered
forth, in that Assembly having been printed a thousand times over, and
a thousand times better, long before.
Thus the pretended new central authority of Germany left everything as
it had found it. So far from realizing the long-demanded unity of
Germany, it did not dispossess the most insignificant of the princes
who ruled her; it did not draw closer the bonds of union between her
separated provinces; it never moved a single step to break down the
customhouse barriers that separated Hanover from Prussia, and Prussia
from Austria; it did not even make the slightest attempt to remove the
obnoxious dues that everywhere obstruct river navigation in Prussia.
But the less this Assembly did the more it blustered. It created a
German fleet--upon paper; it annexed Poland and Schleswig; it allowed
German-Austria to carry on war against Italy, and yet prohibited the
Italians from following up the Austrians into their safe retreat in
Germany; it gave three cheers and one cheer more for the French
republic, and it received Hungarian embassies, which certainly went
home with far more confused ideas about Germany than they had come
with.
This Assembly had been, in the beginning of the Revolution, the
bugbear of all German Governments. They had counted upon a very
dictatorial and revolutionary action on its part--on account of the
very want of definiteness in which it had been found necessary to
leave its competency. These Governments, therefore, got up a most
comprehensive system of intrigues in order to weaken the influence of
this dreaded body; but they proved to have more luck than wits, for
this Assembly did the work of the Governments better than they
themselves could have done. The chief feature among these intrigues
was the convocation of local Legislative Assemblies, and in
consequence, not only the lesser States convoked their legislatures,
but Prussia and Austria also called constituent assemblies. In these,
as in the Frankfort House of Representatives, the Liberal middle
class, or its allies, liberal lawyers, and bureaucrats had the
majority, and the turn affairs took in each of them was nearly the
same. The only difference is this, that the German National Assembly
was the parliament of an imaginary country, as it had declined the
task of forming what nevertheless was its own first condition of
existence, viz. a United Germany; that it discussed the imaginary and
never-to-be-carried-out measures of an imaginary government of its own
creation, and that it passed imaginary resolutions for which nobody
cared; while in Austria and Prussia the constituent bodies were at
least real parliaments, upsetting and creating real ministries, and
forcing, for a time at least, their resolutions upon the princes with
whom they had to contend. They, too, were cowardly, and lacked
enlarged views of revolutionary resolutions; they, too, betrayed the
people, and restored power to the hands of feudal, bureaucratic, and
military despotism. But then they were at least obliged to discuss
practical questions of immediate interest, and to live upon earth with
other people, while the Frankfort humbugs were never happier than when
they could roam in "the airy realms of dream," _im Luftreich des
Traums_. Thus the proceedings of the Berlin and Vienna Constituents
form an important part of German revolutionary history, while the
lucubrations of the Frankfort collective tomfoolery merely interest
the collector of literary and antiquarian curiosities.
The people of Germany, deeply feeling the necessity of doing away with
the obnoxious territorial division that scattered and annihilated the
collective force of the nation, for some time expected to find, in the
Frankfort National Assembly at least, the beginning of a new era. But
the childish conduct of that set of wiseacres soon disenchanted the
national enthusiasm. The disgraceful proceedings occasioned by the
armistice of Malmoe (September, 1848,) made the popular indignation
burst out against a body which, it had been hoped, would give the
nation a fair field for action, and which, instead, carried away by
unequalled cowardice, only restored to their former solidity the
foundations upon which the present counter-revolutionary system is
built.
LONDON, January, 1852.
VIII.
POLES, TSCHECHS, AND GERMANS.
MARCH 5th, 1852.
From what has been stated in the foregoing articles, it is already
evident that unless a fresh revolution was to follow that of March,
1848, things would inevitably return, in Germany, to what they were
before this event. But such is the complicated nature of the
historical theme upon which we are trying to throw some light, that
subsequent events cannot be clearly understood without taking into
account what may be called the foreign relations of the German
Revolution. And these foreign relations were of the same intricate
nature as the home affairs.
The whole of the eastern half of Germany, as far as the Elbe, Saale,
and Bohemian Forest, has, it is well known, been reconquered during
the last thousand years, from invaders of Slavonic origin. The greater
part of these territories have been Germanized, to the perfect
extinction of all Slavonic nationality and language, for several
centuries past; and if we except a few totally isolated remnants,
amounting in the aggregate to less than a hundred thousand souls
(Kassubians in Pomerania, Wends or Sorbians in Lusatia)[7], their
inhabitants are, to all intents and purposes, Germans. But the case is
different along the whole of the frontier of ancient Poland, and in
the countries of the Tschechian tongue, in Bohemia and Moravia. Here
the two nationalities are mixed up in every district, the towns being
generally more or less German, while the Slavonic element prevails in
the rural villages, where, however, it is also gradually disintegrated
and forced back by the steady advance of German influence.
The reason of this state of things is this: ever since the time of
Charlemagne, the Germans have directed their most constant and
persevering efforts to the conquest, colonization, or, at least,
civilization of the east of Europe. The conquest of the feudal
nobility between the Elbe and the Oder, and the feudal colonies of the
military orders of knights in Prussia and Livonia, only laid the
ground for a far more extensive and effective system of Germanization
by the trading and manufacturing middle classes, which in Germany, as
in the rest of Western Europe, rose into social and political
importance since the fifteenth century. The Slavonians, and
particularly the Western Slavonians (Poles and Tschechs), are
essentially an agricultural race; trade and manufactures never were in
great favor with them. The consequence was that, with the increase of
population and the origin of cities in these regions, the production
of all articles of manufacture fell into the hands of German
immigrants, and the exchange of these commodities against agricultural
produce became the exclusive monopoly of the Jews, who, if they belong
to any nationality, are in these countries certainly rather Germans
than Slavonians. This has been, though in a less degree, the case in
all the east of Europe. The handicraftsman, the small shopkeeper, the
petty manufacturer, is a German up to this day in Petersburg, Pesth,
Jassy, and even Constantinople; while the money-lender, the publican,
the hawker--a very important man in these thinly populated
countries--is very generally a Jew, whose native tongue is a horribly
corrupted German. The importance of the German element in the Slavonic
frontier localities, thus rising with the growth of towns, trade and
manufactures, was still increased when it was found necessary to
import almost every element of mental culture from Germany; after the
German merchant and handicraftsman, the German clergyman, the German
school-master, the German _savant_ came to establish himself upon
Slavonic soil. And lastly, the iron thread of conquering armies, or
the cautious, well-premeditated grasp of diplomacy, not only followed,
but many times went ahead of the slow but sure advance of
denationalization by social development. Thus, great parts of Western
Prussia and Posen have been Germanized since the first partition of
Poland, by sales and grants of public domains to German colonists, by
encouragements given to German capitalists for the establishment of
manufactories, etc., in those neighborhoods, and very often, too, by
excessively despotic measures against the Polish inhabitants of the
country.