Iron Kingdom : The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947 (84 page)

Another sign of the vitality of popular conservatism was the proliferation of ‘military clubs’ for patriotic veterans. Groups of this kind had existed since the 1820s, but they generally catered specifically to veterans of the Wars of Liberation and there were few of them. Their numbers rocketed from the summer of 1848; in Silesia, where there were eight military clubs before 1848, a further sixty-four were founded in the immediate aftermath of the revolution. In all, it is estimated that around 50,000 men in Brandenburg, Pomerania and Silesia joined such associations during the years 1848 and 1849.
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In this sense it could be said that the revolution of 1848 represented a coming of age for Prussian conservatism, which began to find its way towards a practical partisan articulation of conservative interests as well as ways of incorporating the voices and aspirations of ordinary people.

Most important of all was the continuing loyalty and effectiveness of the Prussian army. It hardly needs saying that the army played a crucial role in the suppression of the revolution. It marched into Posen in May 1848 to put an end to the Polish uprising there; it expelled the National Assembly from its Berlin premises in November and closed down its successor in Brandenburg a few weeks later; it was called in to deal with countless local tumults across the country. Yet the loyalty of the army was a less straightforward phenomenon than we might imagine. It was, after all, an army of Prussian citizens. The majority of soldiers were drawn from the very social strata that supported the revolution. Moreover, many of them were recalled at short notice from leave during the summer, which meant that they went directly from participating in the revolution to assisting in its suppression.
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It thus makes sense to ask why more men of the ranks did not defect or refuse to serve, or form revolutionary cells within the armed forces. Some did, of course. The radicals in particular made strenuous efforts to woo soldiers into crossing the picket line, and they were sometimes successful. Some local Landwehr units split into opposing democratic and loyalist factions – in Breslau, a radical Landwehr Club succeeded in attracting a membership of over 2,000.
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Despite the worst fears of the
military leadership, however, the great majority of troops remained loyal to the king and their commanders. This was true not only of the East-Elbian troops (though it was especially true of them), but also of most of those who hailed from hotspots such as Westphalia and the Rhineland. The motivations for their compliance obviously varied according to local conditions and individual circumstances, but one factor stands out. This is the widespread belief among soldiers entrusted with the repression of local insurgencies that they were not closing down, but on the contrary
protecting
the revolution, safeguarding the constitutional order against the anarchy and disorder of the radicals. Soldiers did not, on the whole, see themselves as the shock troops of counter-revolution, but as the preservers of the ‘March achievements’ against the threat posed by radical tumult. Indeed, so strong was the identification of some units with the struggle of the Prussian state to restore order that it could temporarily sweep aside the particularism of local and regional identities. So it was that the tax boycott campaign supported by radicals in Düsseldorf was brought to an end in November 1848 by two companies of the XVI Westphalian Infantry Regiment, who marched into the city singing the ‘Prussia Song’: ‘I am a Prussian, do you know my colours?’
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This perspective acquired a certain plausibility from the fact that the focus of initiative within the revolution did indeed pass swiftly to the radical left. From mid-April until July 1849, the German states were rocked once again by a wave of insurrections that extended from Saxony and the Prussian Rhineland to Baden, Württemberg and the Bavarian Palatinate. Although the insurgents involved in this second revolution claimed to be rising in support of the Frankfurt Parliament and its national constitution, they were essentially social revolutionaries whose programme recalled the politics of Jacobin radicalism. The position was especially critical in Baden, where the collapse of morale within the army opened the way to the establishment of a Committee of Public Safety and a revolutionary provisional government. Prussian troops, working beside contingents from Württemberg, Nassau and Hesse, played a crucial role in suppressing this last radical spasm of the revolution: they assisted the Saxon army in putting down the insurrection in the city of Dresden (in which Richard Wagner and the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin both participated) and then marched south to retake the Palatinate. On 21 June, Confederal forces defeated an insurgent army at
Waghaäusel and ended the revolution in the Grand Duchy of Baden. These were bitter and deadly encounters: unlike in 1848, the revolutionaries of the second phase formed an armed force numbering over 45,000 men and fought pitched battles with the enemy, in which they defended themselves with courage and desperation.

The campaign in the south ended only with the capitulation of the hungry and demoralized remainder of the revolutionary army at the fortress of Rastatt on 23 July 1849. Under a Prussian occupation administration, three special courts were established in Freiburg, Mannheim and Rastatt to try the leading insurrectionists. Staffed by Badenese jurists and Prussian officers and operated in accordance with Baden law, these tribunals issued verdicts against sixty-four civilians and fifty-one military personnel. There were thirty-one death sentences, of which twenty-seven were actually carried out – executed by Prussian troops. According to one eyewitness, who saw the firing squads at work inside the walls of Rastatt fortress, the Prussians obeyed their orders to a man, though they returned from the execution grounds with faces ‘as white as chalk’.
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1848 was the year of the nationalists. Across Europe, the political and social upheavals of the revolution were intertwined with national aspirations. Nationalism was contagious. German and Italian nationalists were inspired by the example of the Swiss liberals, whose conquest of the conservative
Sonderbund
in 1847 paved the way to the creation of the first Swiss federal state. In the southern German states, republican nationalists even formed volunteer brigades to fight alongside the Protestant Swiss cantons. Italian revolutionary nationalism in turn stirred the ambitions of the Croats, whose chief nationalist organ, in the absence of an agreed Croatian literary idiom, was the Italian-language
L’Avventura
in Dubrovnik. German nationalism stimulated the Czech patriotic movement. So powerful was the spell cast by the national idea that Europeans could derive vicarious excitement from each other’s national causes. Liberals in Germany, France and Britain became enthusiasts of Polish, Greek and Italian liberty. Nationalism was a potentially radical force for two reasons. Firstly, nationalists, like liberals and radicals, claimed to speak for ‘the people’ rather than the crown. For liberals, ‘the
people’ was a political community composed of educated, tax-paying citizens; for the nationalists it denoted an ethnicity defined by a common language and culture. In this sense, liberalism and nationalism were ideological cousins. Indeed nationalism was in some respects more inclusive than liberalism, whose horizons were confined to a wealthy, educated and largely urban elite. Nationalism by contrast, in theory at least, embraced every last member of the ethnic community. There was a close affinity here with the democratic orientation of mid-century radicalism; it is no coincidence that many German radicals became uncompromising nationalists. Secondly, nationalism was subversive because in many parts of Europe, the realization of the national vision implied fundamental transformations of the political map. Hungarian nationalists sought to separate themselves from the commonwealth of peoples under Habsburg rule; Lombard and Venetian patriots chafed under Habsburg rule; the Poles dreamed of a reconstituted Poland within the borders of 1772 – some Polish nationalists even called for the ‘return’ of Pomerania. Greek, Romanian and Bulgarian nationalists dreamed of throwing off the yoke of Ottoman imperial power.

If nationalism implied the political disintegration of the Habsburg monarchy, in Germany its thrust was integrative, it aimed to solder together the sundered parts of a putatively single German fatherland. How exactly the new Germany would look in practice was unclear. How would the unity of the new nation be reconciled with the rights and powers of the traditional monarchies? How much power would be concentrated in the central authority? Would the new German union be led by Austria or by Prussia? Where would its borders lie? These were questions that prompted endless contention and debate as the revolution unfolded. The national question was discussed in all the chancelleries and legislatures of the German states, but the pre-eminent theatre of public debate was the national parliament that opened on 18 April 1848 in St Paul’s Church in Frankfurt/Main. This assembly, comprising deputies from all over the German states elected under a national franchise, set itself the task of drawing up the constitution for a new united Germany. The interior of the parliamentary chamber, an elegant elliptical rotunda, was draped in the national colours and dominated by a huge painting of
Germania
by the artist Philip Veit. Veit’s monumental allegorical work, which was painted on to canvas and hung in front of the organ loft in the main chamber, showed a standing female figure
crowned in oak leaves, a cast-off manacle at her feet; behind her the rising sun loosed darts of light through the tricolour fabric of the national flag.

The attitude of the Prussian authorities to the national project was of necessity ambivalent. Inasmuch as nationalists posed a principled challenge to the authority of the German territorial crowns, they were recognized as a subversive and dangerous force. This was the logic behind the campaign waged against the ‘demagogues’ in the post-war years. On the other hand, Prussian governments had no objection in principle to the creation of a tighter and more cohesive political organization of the German states, so long as this process served Berlin’s power-political interests. This was the logic at work in Prussia’s sponsorship of the Customs Union and its support for stronger Confederal security arrangements. By the 1840s, this consistent and self-interested pursuit of greater inter-territorial cohesion implied a more nuanced response to nationalism than had been possible in the immediate post-war years: if national sentiment could be managed, if it could be co-opted into some kind of partnership with the Prussian state, then national enthusiasm was a force that might be cultivated and exploited. This policy could bear fruit, of course, only if the nationalists in question could be persuaded that Prussia’s interest and that of Germany as a whole were one and the same.

During the 1840s, the idea of an alliance between Prussia and the liberal nationalist movement came to appear increasingly plausible. In the aftermath of the war scare of 1840–41 and the crisis in 1846 over the future of the ethnically mixed duchies of Schleswig and Holstein on the border with Denmark, moderate liberals throughout Germany looked increasingly to Prussia as a surrogate for the underdeveloped security arrangements of the Confederation. ‘Prussia must place itself at the head of Germany,’ the Heidelberg professor Georg Gottfried Gervinus told Friedrich Engels in 1843, though he added that Berlin would first have to enact constitutional reform. The
Deutsche Zeitung
, a liberal journal founded in May 1847, explicitly advocated the pursuit of German unity through an active foreign policy, to be achieved through an alliance between the Prussian state and the nationalist movement.
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The appeal to national aspirations featured prominently in the Prussian king’s early reactions to the revolutionary upheaval of March 1848. On the morning of 21 March, two days after the uprising and the
departure of the army from the capital, a poster authorized by the king broadcast the following oracular announcement:

A new and glorious history is beginning for you today! You are henceforth once again a single great nation, strong free and powerful in the heart of Europe! Trusting in your heroic support and your spiritual rebirth, Prussia’s Frederick William IV has placed himself at the head of the movement for the redemption of Germany. You will see him on horseback today in your midst with the venerable colours of the German nation.
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Sure enough, the Prussian king appeared at midday, sporting a tricolour armband (some accounts speak of a sash in the national colours), with the national flag behind him, held aloft by a member of a Berlin shooting club. Throughout this curious royal perambulation through the capital the talk was of the nation. Students hailed the passing king as the new German Emperor, and Frederick William halted at intervals to address onlookers on the great importance of current developments for the future of the German nation. To drive the message home, the red, black and gold flag was flown that evening from the dome of the royal palace. A cabinet order despatched to the ministry of war announced that since the king would henceforth be devoting himself entirely to the ‘German question’ and expected Prussia to play a role in the resolution of the same, he wished the troops of his army to wear the ‘German cockade as well as the Prussian one’.
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Most astonishing of all was the declaration issued on the evening of 21 March under the title ‘To My People and to the German Nation’. The address began by recalling the dangerous days of 1813, when King Frederick William III had ‘rescued Prussia and Germany from shame and humiliation’ and went on to argue that in the current crisis, the collaboration of Germany’s princes under a unified leadership was essential: