Book: History of Modern Europe 1792 1878

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[Insurrection in Holstein, March 24.]

[War between Germany and Denmark.]

Such was the situation of affairs when, on the 20th of January, 1848, King
Christian VIII. died, leaving the throne to Frederick VII., the last of the
male line of his House. Frederick's first act was to publish the draft of a
Constitution, in which all parts of the Monarchy were treated as on the
same footing. Before the delegates could assemble to whom the completion of
this work was referred, the shock of the Paris Revolution reached the North
Sea ports. A public meeting at Altona demanded the establishment of a
separate constitution for Schleswig-Holstein, and the admission of
Schleswig into the German Federation. The Provincial Estates accepted this
resolution, and sent a deputation to Copenhagen to present this and other
demands to the King. But in the course of the next few days a popular
movement at Copenhagen brought into power a thoroughly Danish Ministry,
pledged to the incorporation of Schleswig with Denmark as an integral part
of the Kingdom. Without waiting to learn the answer made by the King to the
deputation, the Holsteiners now took affairs into their own hands. A
Provisional Government was formed at Kiel (March 24), the troops joined the
people, and the insurrection instantly spread over the whole province. As
the proposal to change the law of succession to the throne had originated
with the King of Denmark, the cause of the Holsteiners was from one point
of view that of established right. The King of Prussia, accepting the
positions laid down by the Holstein Estates in 1844, declared that he would
defend the claims of the legitimate heir by force of arms, and ordered his
troops to enter Holstein. The Diet of Frankfort, now forced to express the
universal will of Germany, demanded that Schleswig, as the sister State of
Holstein, should enter the Federation. On the passing of this resolution,
the envoy who represented the Denmark. King of Denmark at the Diet, as Duke
of Holstein, quitted Frankfort, and a state of war ensued between Denmark
on the one side and Prussia with the German Federation on the other.

[The German Ante-Parliament, March 30-April 4.]

[Republican rising in Baden.]

The passionate impulse of the German people towards unity had already
called into being an organ for the expression of national sentiment, which,
if without any legal or constitutional authority, was yet strong enough to
impose its will upon the old and discredited Federal Diet and upon most of
the surviving Governments. At the invitation of a Committee, about five
hundred Liberals who had in one form or another taken part in public
affairs assembled at Frankfort on the 30th of March to make the necessary
preparations for the meeting of a German national Parliament. This
Assembly, which is known as the Ante-Parliament, sat but for five days. Its
resolutions, so far as regarded the method of electing the new Parliament,
and the inclusion of new districts in the German Federation, were accepted
by the Diet, and in the main carried into effect. Its denunciation of
persons concerned in the repressive measures of 1819 and subsequent
reactionary epochs was followed by the immediate retirement of all members
of the Diet whose careers dated back to those detested days. But in the
most important work that was expected from the Ante-Parliament, the
settlement of a draft-Constitution to be laid before the future National
Assembly as a basis for its deliberations, nothing whatever was
accomplished. The debates that took place from the 31st of March to the 4th
of April were little more than a trial of strength between the Monarchical
and Republican parties. The Republicans, far outnumbered when they
submitted a constitutional scheme of their own, proposed, after this
repulse, that the existing Assembly should continue in session until the
National Parliament met; in other words, that it should take upon itself
the functions and character of a National Convention. Defeated also on this
proposal, the leaders of the extreme section of the Republican party,
strangely miscalculating their real strength, determined on armed
insurrection. Uniting with a body of German refugees beyond the Rhine, who
were themselves assisted by French and Polish soldiers of revolution, they
raised the Republican standard in Baden, and for a few days maintained a
hopeless and inglorious struggle against the troops which were sent to
suppress them. Even in Baden, which had long been in advance of all other
German States in democratic sentiment, and which was peculiarly open to
Republican influences from France and Switzerland, the movement was not
seriously supported by the population, and in the remainder of Germany it
received no countenance whatever. The leaders found themselves ruined men.
The best of them fled to the United States, where, in the great struggle
against slavery thirteen years later, they rendered better service to their
adopted than they had ever rendered to their natural Fatherland.

[Meeting of the German National Assembly, May 18.]

On breaking up on the 4th of April, the Ante-Parliament left behind it a
Committee of Fifty, whose task it was to continue the work of preparation
for the National Assembly to which it had itself contributed so little. One
thing alone had been clearly established, that the future Constitution of
Germany was not to be Republican. That the existing Governments could not
be safely ignored by the National Assembly in its work of founding the new
Federal Constitution for Germany was clear to those who were not blinded by
the enthusiasm of the moment. In the Committee of Fifty and elsewhere plans
were suggested for giving to the Governments a representation within the
Constituent Assembly, or for uniting their representatives in a Chamber
co-ordinate with this, so that each step in the construction of the new
Federal order should be at once the work of the nation and of the
Governments. Such plans were suggested and discussed; but in the haste and
inexperience of the time they were brought to no conclusion. The opening of
the National Assembly had been fixed for the 18th of May, and this brief
interval had expired before the few sagacious men who understood the
necessity of co-operation between the Governments and the Parliament had
decided upon any common course of action. To the mass of patriots it was
enough that Germany, after thirty years of disappointment, had at last won
its national representation. Before this imposing image of the united race,
Kings, Courts, and armies, it was fondly thought, must bow. Thus, in the
midst of universal hope, the elections were held throughout Germany in its
utmost federal extent, from the Baltic to the Italian border; Bohemia
alone, where the Czech majority resisted any closer union with Germany,
declining to send representatives to Frankfort. In the body of deputies
elected there were to be found almost all the foremost Liberal politicians
of every German community; a few still vigorous champions of the time of
the War of Liberation, chief among them the poet Arndt; patriots who in the
evil days that followed had suffered imprisonment and exile; historians,
professors, critics, who in the sacred cause of liberty have, like
Gervinus, inflicted upon their readers worse miseries than ever they
themselves endured at the hands of unregenerate kings; theologians,
journalists; in short, the whole group of leaders under whom Germany
expected to enter into the promised land of national unity and freedom. No
Imperial coronation ever brought to Frankfort so many honoured guests, or
attracted to the same degree the sympathy of the German race. Greeted with
the cheers of the citizens of Frankfort, whose civic militia lined the
streets, the members of the Assembly marched in procession on the afternoon
of the 18th of May from the ancient banqueting-hall of the Kaisers, where
they had gathered, to the Church of St. Paul, which had been chosen as
their Senate House. Their President and officers were elected on the
following day. Arndt, who in the frantic confusion of the first meeting had
been unrecognised and shouted down, was called into the Tribune, but could
speak only a few words for tears. The Assembly voted him its thanks for his
famous song, "What is the German's Fatherland?" and requested that he would
add to it another stanza commemorating the union of the race at length
visibly realised in that great Pailiament. Four days after the opening of
the General Assembly of Frankfort, the Prussian national Parliament began
its sessions at Berlin. [420]

[Europe generally in March, 1848.]

At this point the first act in the Revolutionary drama of 1848 in Germany,
as in Europe generally, may be considered to have reached its close. A
certain unity marks the memorable epoch known generally as the March Days
and the events immediately succeeding. Revolution is universal; it scarcely
meets with resistance; its views seem on the point of being achieved; the
baffled aspirations of the last half-century seem on the point of being
fulfilled. There exists no longer in Central Europe such a thing as an
autocratic Government; and, while the French Republic maintains an
unexpected attitude of peace, Germany and Italy, under the leadership of
old dynasties now penetrated with a new spirit, appear to be on the point
of achieving each its own work of Federal union and of the expulsion of the
foreigner from its national soil. All Italy prepares to move under Charles
Albert to force the Austrians from their last strongholds on the Mincio and
the Adige; all Germany is with the troops of Frederick William of Prussia
as they enter Holstein to rescue this and the neighbouring German province
from the Dane. In Radetzky's camp alone, and at the Court of St.
Petersburg, the old monarchical order of Europe still survives. How
powerful were these two isolated centres of anti-popular energy the world
was soon to see. Yet they would not have turned back the tide of European
affairs and given one more victory to reaction had they not had their
allies in the hatred of race to race, in the incapacity and the errors of
peoples and those who represented them; above all, in the enormous
difficulties which, even had the generation been one of sages and martyrs,
the political circumstances of the time would in themselves have opposed to
the accomplishment of the ends desired.

[The French Provisional Government.]

[The National Workshops.]

France had given to Central Europe the signal for the Revolution of 1848,
and it was in France, where the conflict was not one for national
independence but for political and social interests, that the Revolution
most rapidly ran its course and first exhausted its powers. On the flight
of Louis Philippe authority had been entrusted by the Chamber of Deputies
to a Provisional Government, whose most prominent member was the orator and
poet Lamartine. Installed at the Hotel de Ville, this Government had with
difficulty prevented the mob from substituting the Red Flag for the
Tricolor, and from proceeding at once to realise the plans of its own
leaders. The majority of the Provisional Government were Republicans of a
moderate type, representing the ideas of the urban middle classes rather
than those of the workmen; but by their side were Ledru Rollin, a
rhetorician dominated by the phrases of 1793, and Louis Blanc, who
considered all political change as but an instrument for advancing the
organisation of labour and for the emancipation of the artisan from
servitude, by the establishment of State-directed industries affording
appropriate employment and adequate remuneration to all. Among the first
proclamations of the Provisional Government was one in which, in answer to
a petition demanding the recognition of the Right to Labour, they undertook
to guarantee employment to every citizen. This engagement, the heaviest
perhaps that was ever voluntarily assumed by any Government, was followed
in a few days by the opening of national workshops. That in the midst of a
Revolution which took all parties by surprise plans for the conduct of a
series of industrial enterprises by the State should have been seriously
examined was impossible. The Government had paid homage to an abstract
idea; they were without a conception of the mode in which it was to be
realised. What articles were to be made, what works were to be executed, no
one knew. The mere direction of destitute workmen to the centres where they
were to be employed was a task for which a new branch of the administration
had to be created. When this was achieved, the men collected proved useless
for all purposes of industry. Their numbers increased enormously, rising in
the course of four weeks from fourteen to sixty-five thousand. The
Revolution had itself caused a financial and commercial panic, interrupting
all the ordinary occupations of business, and depriving masses of men of
the means of earning a livelihood. These, with others who had no intention
of working, thronged to the State workshops; while the certainty of
obtaining wages from the public purse occasioned a series of strikes of
workmen against their employers and the abandonment of private factories.
The chocks which had been intended to confine enrolment at the public works
to persons already domiciled in Paris completely failed; from all the
neighbouring departments the idle and the hungry streamed into the capital.
Every abuse incidental to a system of public relief was present in Paris in
its most exaggerated form; every element of experience, of wisdom, of
precaution, was absent. If, instead of a group of benevolent theorists, the
experiment of 1848 had had for its authors a company of millionaires
anxious to dispel all hope that mankind might ever rise to a higher order
than that of unrestricted competition of man against man, it could not have
been conducted under more fatal conditions. [421]

[The Provisional Government and the Red Republicans.]

[Elections, April 23.]

The leaders of the democracy in Paris had from the first considered that
the decision upon the form of Government to be established in France in
place of the Orleanist monarchy belonged rather to themselves than to the
nation at large. They distrusted, and with good reason, the results of the
General Election which, by a decree of the Provisional Government, was to
be held in the course of April. A circular issued by Ledru Rollin, Minister
of the Interior, without the knowledge of his colleagues, to the
Commissioners by whom he had replaced the Prefects of the Monarchy gave the
first open indication of this alarm, and of the means of violence and
intimidation by which the party which Ledru Rollin represented hoped to
impose its will upon the country. The Commissioners were informed in plain
language that, as agents of a revolutionary authority, their powers were
unlimited, and that their task was to exclude from election all persons who
were not animated by revolutionary spirit, and pure from any taint of
association with the past. If the circular had been the work of the
Government, and not of a single member of it who was at variance with most
of his colleagues and whose words were far more formidable than his
actions, it would have clearly foreshadowed a return to the system of 1793.
But the isolation of Ledru Rollin was well understood. The attitude of the
Government generally was so little in accordance with the views of the Red
Republicans that on the 16th of April a demonstration was organised with
the object of compelling them to postpone the elections. The prompt
appearance in arms of the National Guard, which still represented the
middle classes of Paris, baffled the design of the leaders of the mob, and
gave to Lamartine and the majority in the Government a decisive victory
over their revolutionary colleague. The elections were held at the time
appointed; and, in spite of the institution of universal suffrage, they
resulted in the return of a body of Deputies not widely different from
those who had hitherto appeared in French Parliaments. The great majority
were indeed Republicans by profession, but of a moderate type; and the
session had no sooner opened than it became clear that the relation between
the Socialist democracy of Paris and the National Representatives could
only be one of more or less violent antagonism.

[The National Assembly, May 4.]

[Riot of May 15.]

[Measures against the National Workshops.]

The first act of the Assembly, which met on the 4th of May, was to declare
that the Provisional Government had deserved well of the country, and to
reinstate most of its members in office under the title of an Executive
Commission. Ledru Rollin's offences were condoned, as those of a man
popular with the democracy, and likely on the whole to yield to the
influence of his colleagues. Louis Blanc and his confederate, Albert, as
really dangerous persons, were excluded. The Jacobin leaders now proceeded
to organise an attack on the Assembly by main force. On the 15th of May the
attempt was made. Under pretence of tendering a petition on behalf of
Poland, a mob invaded the Legislative Chamber, declared the Assembly
dissolved, and put the Deputies to flight. But the triumph was of short
duration. The National Guard, whose commander alone was responsible for the
failure of measures of defence, soon rallied in force; the leaders of the
insurgents, some of whom had installed themselves as a Provisional
Government at the Hotel de Ville, were made captive; and after an interval
of a few hours the Assembly resumed possession of the Palais Bourbon. The
dishonour done to the national representation by the scandalous scenes of
the 15th of May, as well as the decisively proved superiority of the
National Guard over the half armed mob, encouraged the Assembly to declare
open war against the so-called social democracy, and to decree the
abolition of the national workshops. The enormous growth of these
establishments, which now included over a hundred thousand men, threatened
to ruin the public finances; the demoralisation which they engendered
seemed likely to destroy whatever was sound in the life of the working
classes of Paris. Of honest industry there was scarcely a trace to be found
among the masses who were receiving their daily wages from the State.
Whatever the sincerity of those who had founded the national workshops,
whatever the anxiety for employment on the part of those who first resorted
to them, they had now become mere hives of disorder, where the resources of
the State were lavished in accumulating a force for its own overthrow. It
was necessary, at whatever risk, to extinguish the evil. Plans for the
gradual dispersion of the army of workmen were drawn up by Committees and
discussed by the Assembly. If put in force with no more than the necessary
delay, these plans might perhaps have rendered a peaceful solution of the
difficulty possible. But the Government hesitated, and finally, when a
decision could no longer be avoided, determined upon measures more violent
and more sudden than those which the Committees had recommended. On the
21st of June an order was published that all occupants of the public
workshops between the ages of seventeen and twenty-five must enlist in the
army or cease to receive support from the State, and that the removal of
the workmen who had come into Paris from the provinces, for which
preparations had already been made, must be at once effected. [422]

[The Four Days of June, 23-26.]

The publication of this order was the signal for an appeal to arms. The
legions of the national workshops were in themselves a half-organised force
equal in number to several army-corps, and now animated by something like
the spirit of military union. The revolt, which began on the morning of the
23rd of June, was conducted as no revolt in Pans had ever been conducted
before. The eastern part of the city was turned into a maze of barricades.
Though the insurgents had not artillery, they were in other respects fairly
armed. The terrible nature of the conflict impending now became evident to
the Assembly. General Cavaignac, Minister of War, was placed in command,
and subsequently invested with supreme authority, the Executive Commission
resigning its powers. All the troops in the neighbourhood of Paris were at
once summoned to the capital, Cavaignac well understood that any attempt to
hold the insurrection in check by means of scattered posts would only end,
as in 1830, by the capture or the demoralisation of the troops. He treated
Paris as one great battle-field in which the enemy must be attacked in mass
and driven by main force from all his positions. At times the effort
appeared almost beyond the power of the forces engaged, and the insurgents,
sheltered by huge barricades and firing from the windows of houses, seemed
likely to remain masters of the field. The struggle continued for four
days, but Cavaignac's artillery and the discipline of his troops at last
crushed resistance; and after the Archbishop of Paris had been mortally
wounded in a heroic effort to stop further bloodshed, the last bands of the
insurgents, driven back into the north-eastern quarter of the city, and
there attacked with artillery in front and flank, were forced to lay down
their arms.

[Fears left by the events of June.]

Such was the conflict of the Four Days of June, a conflict memorable as one
in which the combatants fought not for a political principle or form of
Government, but for the preservation or the overthrow of society based on
the institution of private property. The National Guard, with some
exceptions, fought side by side with the regiments of the line, braved the
same perils, and sustained an equal loss. The workmen threw themselves the
more passionately into the struggle, inasmuch as defeat threatened them
with deprivation of the very means of life. On both sides acts of savagery
were committed which the fury of the conflict could not excuse. The
vengeance of the conquerors in the moment of success appears, however, to
have been less unrelenting than that which followed the overthrow of the
Commune in 1871, though, after the struggle was over, the Assembly had no
scruple in transporting without trial the whole mass of prisoners taken
with arms in their hands. Cavaignac's victory left the classes for whom he
had fought terror-stricken at the peril from which they had escaped, and
almost hopeless of their own security under any popular form of Government
in the future. Against the rash and weak concessions to popular demands
that had been made by the administration since February, especially in the
matter of taxation and finance, there was now a deep, if not loudly
proclaimed, reaction. The national workshops disappeared; grants were made
by the Legislature for the assistance of the masses who were left without
resource, but the money was bestowed in charitable relief or in the form of
loans to associations, not as wages from the State. On every side among the
holders of property the cry was for a return to sound principles of finance
in the economy of the State, and for the establishment of a strong central
power.

[Cavaignac and Louis Napoleon.]

[Louis Napoleon elected Deputy but resigns, June 14.]

General Cavaignac after the restoration of order had laid down the supreme
authority which had been conferred on him, but at the desire of the
Assembly he continued to exercise it until the new Constitution should be
drawn up and an Executive appointed in accordance with its provisions.
Events had suddenly raised Cavaignac from obscurity to eminence, and seemed
to mark him out as the future ruler of France. But he displayed during the
six months following the suppression of the revolt no great capacity for
government, and his virtues as well as his defects made against his
personal success. A sincere Republican, while at the same time a rigid
upholder of law, he refused to lend himself to those who were, except in
name, enemies of Republicanism; and in his official acts and utterances he
spared the feelings of the reactionary classes as little as he would have
spared those of rioters and Socialists. As the influence of Cavaignac
declined, another name began to fill men's thoughts. Louis Napoleon, son of
the Emperor's brother Louis, King of Holland, had while still in exile been
elected to the National Assembly by four Departments. He was as yet almost
unknown except by name to his fellow-countrymen. Born in the Tuileries in
1808, he had been involved as a child in the ruin of the Empire, and had
passed into banishment with his mother Hortense, under the law that
expelled from France all members of Napoleon's family. He had been brought
up at Augsburg and on the shores of the Lake of Constance, and as a
volunteer in a Swiss camp of artillery he had gained some little
acquaintance with military life. In 1831 he had joined the insurgents in
the Romagna who were in arms against the Papal Government. The death of his
own elder brother, followed in 1832 by that of Napoleon's son, the Duke of
Reichstadt, made him chief of the house of Bonaparte. Though far more of a
recluse than a man of action, though so little of his own nation that he
could not pronounce a sentence of French without a marked German accent,
and had never even seen a French play performed, he now became possessed by
the fixed idea that he was one day to wear the French Crown. A few obscure
adventurers attached themselves to his fortunes, and in 1836 he appeared at
Strasburg and presented himself to the troops as Emperor. The enterprise
ended in failure and ridicule. Louis Napoleon was shipped to America by the
Orleanist Government, which supplied him with money, and thought it
unnecessary even to bring him to trial. He recrossed the Atlantic, made his
home in England, and in 1840 repeated at Boulogne the attempt that had
failed at Strasburg. The result was again disastrous. He was now sentenced
to perpetual imprisonment, and passed the next six years in captivity at
Ham, where he produced a treatise on the Napoleonic Ideas, and certain
fragments on political and social questions. The enthusiasm for Napoleon,
of which there had been little trace in France since 1815, was now
reviving; the sufferings of the epoch of conquest were forgotten; the
steady maintenance of peace by Louis Philippe seemed humiliating to young
and ardent spirits who had not known the actual presence of the foreigner.
In literature two men of eminence worked powerfully upon the national
imagination. The history of Thiers gave the nation a great stage-picture of
Napoleon's exploits; Beranger's lyrics invested his exile at St. Helena
with an irresistible, though spurious, pathos. Thus, little as the world
concerned itself with the prisoner at Ham, the tendencies of the time were
working in his favour; and his confinement, which lasted six years and was
terminated by his escape and return to England, appears to have deepened
his brooding nature, and to have strengthened rather than diminished his
confidence in himself. On the overthrow of Louis Philippe he visited Paris,
but was requested by the Provisional Government, on the ground of the
unrepealed law banishing the Bonaparte family, to quit the country. He
obeyed, probably foreseeing that the difficulties of the Republic would
create better opportunities for his reappearance. Meanwhile the group of
unknown men who sought their fortunes in a Napoleonic restoration busily
canvassed and wrote on behalf of the Prince, and with such success that, in
the supplementary elections that were held at the beginning of June, he
obtained a fourfold triumph. The Assembly, in spite of the efforts of the
Government, pronounced his return valid. Yet with rare self-command the
Prince still adhered to his policy of reserve, resigning his seat on the
ground that his election had been made a pretext for movements of which he
disapproved, while at the same time he declared in his letter to the
President of the Assembly that if duties should be imposed upon him by the
people he should know how to fulfil them. [423]

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