Book: History of Modern Europe 1792 1878

C >> C. A. Fyffe >> History of Modern Europe 1792 1878




[Government Policy of Reform.]

[Programme of the Opposition.]

It now became plain to all but the blindest that great changes were
inevitable; and at the instance of the more intelligent among the
Conservative party in Hungary the Imperial Government resolved to enter the
lists with a policy of reform, and, if possible, to wrest the helm from the
men who were becoming masters of the nation. In order to secure a majority
in the Diet, it was deemed requisite by the Government first to gain a
predominant influence in the county-assemblies. As a preliminary step, most
of the Lieutenants of counties, to whose high dignity no practical
functions attached, were removed from their posts, and superseded by paid
administrators, appointed from Vienna. Count Apponyi, one of the most
vigorous of the conservative and aristocratic reformers, was placed at the
head of the Ministry. In due time the proposals of the Government were made
public. They comprised the taxation of the nobles, a reform of the
municipalities, modifications in the land-system, and a variety of economic
measures intended directly to promote the material development of the
country. The latter were framed to some extent on the lines laid down by
Szechenyi, who now, in bitter antagonism to Kossuth, accepted office under
the Government, and gave to it the prestige of his great name. It remained
for the Opposition to place their own counter-proposals before the country.
Differences within the party were smoothed over, and a manifesto, drawn up
by Deak, gave statesmanlike expression to the aims of the national leaders.
Embracing every reform included in the policy of the Government, it added
to them others which the Government had not ventured to face, and gave to
the whole the character of a vindication of its own rights by the nation,
in contrast to a scheme of administrative reform worked out by the officers
of the Crown. Thus while it enforced the taxation of the nobles, it claimed
for the Diet the right of control over every branch of the national
expenditure. It demanded increased liberty for the Press, and an unfettered
right of political association; and finally, while doing homage to the
unity of the Crown, it required that the Government of Hungary should be
one in direct accord with the national representation in the Diet, and that
the habitual effort of the Court of Vienna to place this kingdom on the
same footing as the Emperor's non-constitutional provinces should be
abandoned. With the rival programmes of the Government and the Opposition
before it, the country proceeded to the elections of 1847. Hopefulness and
enthusiasm abounded on every side; and at the close of the year the Diet
assembled from which so great a work was expected, and which was destined
within so short a time to witness, in storm and revolution, the passing
away of the ancient order of Hungarian life.

[The Rural System of Hungary.]

The directly constitutional problems with which the Diet of Presburg had to
deal were peculiar to Hungary itself, and did not exist in the other parts
of the Austrian Empire. There were, however, social problems which were not
less urgently forcing themselves upon public attention alike in Hungary and
in those provinces which enjoyed no constitutional rights. The chief of
these was the condition of the peasant-population. In the greater part of
the Austrian dominions, though serfage had long been abolished, society was
still based upon the manorial system. The peasant held his land subject to
the obligation of labouring on his lord's domain for a certain number of
days in the year, and of rendering him other customary services: the
manor-court, though checked by the neighbourhood of crown-officers,
retained its jurisdiction, and its agents frequently performed duties of
police. Hence the proposed extinction of the so-called feudal tie, and the
conversion of the semi-dependent cultivator into a freeholder bound only to
the payment of a fixed money-charge, or rendered free of all obligation by
the surrender of a part of his holding, involved in many districts the
institution of new public authorities and a general reorganisation of the
minor local powers. From this task the Austrian Government had shrunk in
mere lethargy, even when, as in 1835, proposals for change had come from
the landowners themselves. The work begun by Maria Theresa and Joseph
remained untouched, though thirty years of peace had given abundant
opportunity for its completion, and the legislation of Hardenberg in 1810
afforded precedents covering at least part of the field.

[Insurrection in Galicia, Feb., 1846.]

[Rural Edict, Dec., 1845.]

At length events occurred which roused the drowsiest heads in Vienna from
their slumbers. The party of action among the Polish refugees at Paris had
determined to strike another blow for the independence of their country.
Instead, however, of repeating the insurrection of Warsaw, it was arranged
that the revolt should commence in Prussian and Austrian Poland, and the
beginning of the year 1846 was fixed for the uprising. In Prussia the
Government crushed the conspirators before a blow could be struck. In
Austria, though ample warning was given, the precautions taken were
insufficient. General Collin occupied the Free City of Cracow, where the
revolutionary committee had its headquarters; but the troops under his
command were so weak that he was soon compelled to retreat, and to await
the arrival of reinforcements. Meanwhile the landowners in the district of
Tarnow in northern Galicia raised the standard of insurrection, and sought
to arm the country. The Ruthenian peasantry, however, among whom they
lived, owed all that was tolerable in their condition to the protection of
the Austrian crown-officers, and detested the memory of an independent
Poland. Instead of following their lords into the field, they gave
information of their movements, and asked instructions from the nearest
Austrian authorities. They were bidden to seize upon any persons who
instigated them to rebellion, and to bring them into the towns. A war of
the peasants against the nobles forthwith broke out. Murder, pillage, and
incendiary fires brought both the Polish insurrection and its leaders to a
miserable end. The Polish nobles, unwilling to acknowledge the humiliating
truth that their own peasants were their bitterest enemies, charged the
Austrian Government with having set a price on their heads, and with having
instigated the peasants to a communistic revolt. Metternich, disgraced by
the spectacle of a Jacquerie raging apparently under his own auspices,
insisted, in a circular to the European Courts, that the attack of the
peasantry upon the nobles had been purely spontaneous, and occasioned by
attempts to press certain villagers into the ranks of the rebellion by
brute force. But whatever may have been the measure of responsibility
incurred by the agents of the Government, an agrarian revolution was
undoubtedly in full course in Galicia, and its effects were soon felt in
the rest of the Austrian monarchy. The Arcadian contentment of the rural
population, which had been the boast, and in some degree the real strength,
of Austria, was at an end. Conscious that the problem which it had so long
evaded must at length be faced, the Government of Vienna prepared to deal
with the conditions of land-tenure by legislation extending over the whole
of the Empire. But the courage which was necessary for an adequate solution
of the difficulty nowhere existed within the official world, and the Edict
which conveyed the last words of the Imperial Government on this vital
question contained nothing more than a series of provisions for
facilitating voluntary settlements between the peasants and their lords. In
the quality of this enactment the Court of Vienna gave the measure of its
own weakness. The opportunity of breaking with traditions of impotence had
presented itself and had been lost. Revolution was at the gates; and in the
unsatisfied claim of the rural population the Government had handed over to
its adversaries a weapon of the greatest power. [408]

[Vienna.]

In the purely German provinces of Austria there lingered whatever of the
spirit of tranquillity was still to be found within the Empire. This,
however, was not the case in the districts into which the influence of the
capital extended. Vienna had of late grown out of its old careless spirit.
The home in past years of a population notoriously pleasure-loving,
good-humoured, and indifferent to public affairs, it had now taken
something of a more serious character. The death of the Emperor Francis,
who to the last generation of Viennese had been as fixed a part of the
order of things as the river Danube, was not unconnected with this change
in the public tone. So long as the old Emperor lived, all thought that was
given to political affairs was energy thrown away. By his death not only
had the State lost an ultimate controlling power, if dull, yet practised
and tenacious, but this loss was palpable to all the world. The void stood
bare and unrelieved before the public eye. The notorious imbecility of the
Emperor Ferdinand, the barren and antiquated formalism of Metternich and of
that entire system which seemed to be incorporated in him, made Government
an object of general satire, and in some quarters of rankling contempt. In
proportion as the culture and intelligence of the capital exceeded that of
other towns, so much the more galling was the pressure of that part of the
general system of tutelage which was especially directed against the
independence of the mind. The censorship was exercised with grotesque
stupidity. It was still the aim of Government to isolate Austria from the
ideas and the speculation of other lands, and to shape the intellectual
world of the Emperor's subjects into that precise form which tradition
prescribed as suitable for the members of a well-regulated State. In
poetry, the works of Lord Byron were excluded from circulation, where
custom-house officers and market-inspectors chose to enforce the law; in
history and political literature, the leading writers of modern times lay
under the same ban. Native production was much more effectively controlled.
Whoever wrote in a newspaper, or lectured at a University, or published a
work of imagination, was expected to deliver himself of something agreeable
to the constituted authorities, or was reduced to silence. Far as Vienna
fell short of Northern Germany in intellectual activity, the humiliation
inflicted on its best elements by this life-destroying surveillance was
keenly felt and bitterly resented. More perhaps by its senile warfare
against mental freedom than by any acts of direct political repression, the
Government ranged against itself the almost unanimous opinion of the
educated classes. Its hold on the affection of the capital was gone. Still
quiescent, but ready to unite against the Government when opportunity
should arrive, there stood, in addition to the unorganised mass of the
middle ranks, certain political associations and students' societies, a
vigorous Jewish element, and the usual contingent furnished by poverty and
discontent in every great city from among the labouring population.
Military force sufficient to keep the capital in subjection was not
wanting; but the foresight and the vigour necessary to cope with the first
onset of revolution were nowhere to be found among the holders of power.

[Prussia.]

[Frederick William IV., 1840.]

At Berlin the solid order of Prussian absolutism already shook to its
foundation. With King Frederick William III., whose long reign ended in
1840, there departed the half-filial, half-spiritless acquiescence of the
nation in the denial of the liberties which had been so solemnly promised
to it at the epoch of Napoleon's fall. The new Sovereign, Frederick William
IV., ascended the throne amid high national hopes. The very contrast which
his warm, exuberant nature offered to the silent, reserved disposition of
his father impressed the public for awhile in his favour. In the more
shining personal qualities he far excelled all his immediate kindred. His
artistic and literary sympathies, his aptitude of mind and readiness of
speech, appeared to mark the man of a new age, and encouraged the belief
that, in spite of the mediaeval dreams and reactionary theories to which,
as prince, he had surrendered himself, he would, as King, appreciate the
needs of the time, and give to Prussia the free institutions which the
nation demanded. The first acts of the new reign were generously conceived.
Political offenders were freely pardoned. Men who had suffered for their
opinions were restored to their posts in the Universities and the public
service, or selected for promotion. But when the King approached the
constitutional question, his utterances were unsatisfactory. Though
undoubtedly in favour of some reform, he gave no sanction to the idea of a
really national representation, but seemed rather to seek occasions to
condemn it. Other omens of ill import were not wanting. Allying his
Government with a narrow school of theologians, the King offended men of
independent mind, and transgressed against the best traditions of Prussian
administration. The prestige of the new reign was soon exhausted. Those who
had believed Frederick William to be a man of genius now denounced him as a
vaporous, inflated dilettante; his enthusiasm was seen to indicate nothing
in particular; his sonorous commonplaces fell flat on second delivery. Not
only in his own kingdom, but in the minor German States, which looked to
Prussia as the future leader of a free Germany, the opinion rapidly gained
ground that Frederick William IV. was to be numbered among the enemies
rather than the friends of the good cause.

[United Diet convoked at Berlin, Feb. 3, 1847.]

In the Edicts by which the last King of Prussia had promised his people a
Constitution, it had been laid down that the representative body was to
spring from the Provincial Estates, and that it was to possess, in addition
to its purely consultative functions in legislation, a real power of
control over all State loans and over all proposed additions to taxation.
The interdependence of the promised Parliament and the Provincial Estates
had been seen at the time to endanger the success of Hardenberg's scheme;
nevertheless, it was this conception which King Frederick William IV. made
the very centre of his Constitutional policy. A devotee to the distant
past, he spoke of the Provincial Estates, which in their present form had
existed only since 1823, as if they were a great national and historic
institution which had come down unchanged through centuries. His first
experiment was the summoning of a Committee from these bodies to consider
certain financial projects with which the Government was occupied (1842).
The labours of the Committee were insignificant, nor was its treatment at
the hands of the Crown Ministers of a serious character. Frederick William,
however, continued to meditate over his plans, and appointed a Commission
to examine the project drawn up at his desire by the Cabinet. The agitation
in favour of Parliamentary Government became more and more pressing among
the educated classes; and at length, in spite of some opposition from his
brother, the Prince of Prussia, afterwards Emperor of Germany, the King
determined to fulfil his father's promise and to convoke a General Assembly
at Berlin. On the 3rd of February, 1847, there appeared a Royal Patent,
which summoned all the Provincial Estates to the capital to meet as a
United Diet of the Kingdom. The Diet was to be divided into two Chambers,
the Upper Chamber including the Royal Princes and highest nobles, the Lower
the representatives of the knights, towns, and peasants. The right of
legislation was not granted to the Diet; it had, however, the right of
presenting petitions on internal affairs. State-loans and new taxes were
not, in time of peace, to be raised without its consent. No regular
interval was fixed for the future meetings of the Diet, and its financial
rights were moreover reduced by other provisions, which enacted that a
United Committee from the Provincial Estates was to meet every four years
for certain definite objects, and that a special Delegation was to sit each
year for the transaction of business relating to the National Debt. [409]

[King Frederick William and the Diet.]

The nature of the General Assembly convoked by this Edict, the functions
conferred upon it, and the guarantees offered for Representative Government
in the future, so little corresponded with the requirements of the nation,
that the question was at once raised in Liberal circles whether the
concessions thus tendered by the King ought to be accepted or rejected. The
doubt which existed as to the disposition of the monarch himself was
increased by the speech from the throne at the opening of the Diet (April
11). In a vigorous harangue extending over half an hour, King Frederick
William, while he said much that was appropriate to the occasion, denounced
the spirit of revolution that was working in the Prussian Press, warned the
Deputies that they had been summoned not to advocate political theories,
but to protect each the rights of his own order, and declared that no power
on earth should induce him to change his natural relation to his people
into a constitutional one, or to permit a written sheet of paper to
intervene like a second Providence between Prussia and the Almighty. So
vehement was the language of the King, and so uncompromising his tone, that
the proposal was forthwith made at a private conference that the Deputies
should quit Berlin in a body. This extreme course was not adopted; it was
determined instead to present an address to the King, laying before him in
respectful language the shortcomings in the Patent of February 3rd. In the
debate on this address began the Parliamentary history of Prussia. The
Liberal majority in the Lower Chamber, anxious to base their cause on some
foundation of positive law, treated the Edicts of Frederick William III.
defining the rights of the future Representative Body as actual statutes of
the realm, although the late King had never called a Representative Body
into existence. From this point of view the functions now given to
Committees and Delegations were so much illegally withdrawn from the rights
of the Diet. The Government, on the other hand, denied that the Diet
possessed any rights or claims whatever beyond those assigned to it by the
Patent of February 3rd, to which it owed its origin. In receiving the
address of the Chambers, the King, while expressing a desire to see the
Constitution further developed, repeated the principle already laid clown
by his Ministers, and refused to acknowledge any obligation outside those
which he had himself created.

[Proceedings and Dissolution of the Diet.]

When, after a series of debates on the political questions at issue, the
actual business of the Session began, the relations between the Government
and the Assembly grew worse rather than better. The principal measures
submitted were the grant of a State-guarantee to certain land-banks
established for the purpose of extinguishing the rent-charges on peasants'
holdings, and the issue of a public loan for the construction of railways
by the State. Alleging that the former measure was not directly one of
taxation, the Government, in laying it before the Diet, declared that they
asked only for an opinion, and denied that the Diet possessed any right of
decision. Thus challenged, as it were, to make good its claims, the Diet
not only declined to assent to this guarantee, but set its veto on the
proposed railway-loan. Both projects were in themselves admitted to be to
the advantage of the State; their rejection by the Diet was an emphatic
vindication of constitutional rights which the Government seemed indisposed
to acknowledge. Opposition grew more and more embittered; and when, as a
preliminary to the dissolution of the Diet, the King ordered its members to
proceed to the election of the Committees and Delegation named in the Edict
of February 3rd, an important group declined to take part in the elections,
or consented to do so only under reservations, on the ground that the Diet,
and that alone, possessed the constitutional control over finance which the
King was about to commit to other bodies. Indignant at this protest, the
King absented himself from the ceremony which brought the Diet to a close
(June 26th). Amid general irritation and resentment the Assembly broke up.
Nothing had resulted from its convocation but a direct exhibition of the
antagonism of purpose existing between the Sovereign and the national
representatives. Moderate men were alienated by the doctrines promulgated
from the Throne; and an experiment which, if more wisely conducted, might
possibly at the eleventh hour have saved all Germany from revolution, left
the Monarchy discredited and exposed to the attack of the most violent of
its foes.

[Louis Philippe.]

The train was now laid throughout central Europe; it needed but a flash
from Paris to kindle the fire far and wide. That the Crown which Louis
Philippe owed to one popular outbreak might be wrested from him by another,
had been a thought constantly present not only to the King himself but to
foreign observers during the earlier years of his reign. The period of
comparative peace by which the first Republican movements after 1830 had
been succeeded, the busy working of the Parliamentary system, the keen and
successful pursuit of wealth which seemed to have mastered all other
impulses in France, had made these fears a thing of the past. The Orleanist
Monarchy had taken its place among the accredited institutions of Europe;
its chief, aged, but vigorous in mind, looked forward to the future of his
dynasty, and occupied himself with plans for extending its influence or its
sway beyond the limits of France itself. At one time Louis Philippe had
hoped to connect his family by marriage with the Courts of Vienna or
Berlin; this project had not met with encouragement; so much the more
eagerly did the King watch for opportunities in another direction, and
devise plans for restoring the family-union between France and Spain which
had been established by Louis XIV. and which had so largely influenced the
history of Europe down to the overthrow of the Bourbon Monarchy. The Crown
of Spain was now held by a young girl; her sister was the next in
succession; to make the House of Orleans as powerful at Madrid as it was at
Paris seemed under these circumstances no impossible task to a King and a
Minister who, in the interests of the dynasty, were prepared to make some
sacrifice of honour and good faith.

[The Spanish Marriage, October, 1846.]

While the Carlist War was still continuing, Lord Palmerston had convinced
himself that Louis Philippe intended to marry the young Queen Isabella, if
possible, to one of his sons. Some years later this project was
unofficially mentioned by Guizot to the English statesman, who at once
caused it to be understood that England would not permit the union.
Abandoning this scheme, Louis Philippe then demanded, by a misconstruction
of the Treaty of Utrecht, that the Queen's choice of a husband should be
limited to the Bourbons of the Spanish or Neapolitan line. To this claim
Lord Aberdeen, who had become Foreign Secretary in 1841, declined to give
his assent; he stated, however, that no step would be taken by England in
antagonism to such marriage, if it should be deemed desirable at Madrid.
Louis Philippe now suggested that his youngest son, the Duke of
Montpensier, should wed the Infanta Fernanda, sister of the Queen of Spain.
On the express understanding that this marriage should not take place until
the Queen should herself have been married and have had children, the
English Cabinet assented to the proposal. That the marriages should not be
simultaneous was treated by both Governments as the very heart and
substance of the arrangement, inasmuch as the failure of children by the
Queen's marriage would make her sister, or her sister's heir, inheritor of
the Throne. This was repeatedly acknowledged by Louis Philippe and his
Minister, Guizot, in the course of communications with the British Court
which extended over some years. Nevertheless, in 1846, the French
Ambassador at Madrid, in conjunction with the Queen's mother, Maria
Christina, succeeded in carrying out a plan by which the conditions laid
down at London and accepted at Paris were utterly frustrated. Of the
Queen's Spanish cousins, there was one, Don Francisco, who was known to be
physically unfit for marriage. To this person it was determined by Maria
Christina and the French Ambassador that the young Isabella should be
united, her sister being simultaneously married to the Duke of Montpensier.
So flagrantly was this arrangement in contradiction to the promises made at
the Tuileries, that, when intelligence of it arrived at Paris, Louis
Philippe declared for a moment that the Ambassador must be disavowed and
disgraced. Guizot, however, was of better heart than his master, and asked
for delay. In the very crisis of the King's perplexity the return of Lord
Palmerston to office, and the mention by him of a Prince of Saxe-Coburg as
one of the candidates for the Spanish Queen's hand, afforded Guizot a
pretext for declaring that Great Britain had violated its engagements
towards the House of Bourbon by promoting the candidature of a Coburg. In
reality the British Government had not only taken no part in assisting the
candidature of the Coburg Prince, but had directly opposed it. This,
however, was urged in vain at the Tuileries. Whatever may have been the
original intentions of Louis Philippe or of Guizot, the temptation of
securing the probable succession to the Spanish Crown was too strong to be
resisted. Preliminaries were pushed forward with the utmost haste, and on
the 10th of October, 1846, the marriages of Queen Isabella and her sister,
as arranged by the French Ambassador and the Queen-Mother, were
simultaneously solemnised at Madrid. [410]

Copyright (c) 2007. knowncrafts.net. All rights reserved.