Nationalism and Culture (37 page)

There is no doubt that these efforts were based on a sound principle, the theoretical equal right of every nation and nationality without regard to its political or social importance. But right here it was soon apparent that from the very beginning such equal rights could not be harmonized with the efforts of the state for political power. The more the rulers of the individual European states came to realize that their countries could not be closed against the entrance of democratic ideas, the more clearly they saw that the principle of nationality would serve most excellently as a cover under which to advance their own interests. Napoleon I, who because of his ancestry was less plagued by false prejudices than many representatives of legitimate royalty, understood quite thoroughly how to further his own secret plans with the aid of nationalist principles. Thus, in May, 1809, he sent from Schonbrunn his well-known message to the Hungarians in which he appealed to them to throw off the yoke of the Austrians. "I ask nothing of you," says the imperial message. "I only wish to see you a free and independent nation."

We know what this unselfish expression meant. Napoleon was just as indifferent to the independence of the Hungarians as, in his heart of hearts, he was to that of the French who in spite of his foreign descent had made him their national hero. What he really had at heart was his plans for political power. To realize these he played with Italians, Illyrians, Poles and Hungarians the same comedy he had played for fourteen years with the grande nation. How clearly Napoleon recognized the importance of the principle of nationality for his own political purposes is shown by a remark recorded by one of his companions on St. Helena: He could not marvel enough why, among the German princes, not a single one had been found with courage enough to use the idea of the national unity of

Germany, widely spread among the people, as a pretext for uniting the Germans under a definite dynasty.

Since then, the principle of nationality has assumed an important place in European politics. Thus, after the Napoleonic wars, England on principle supported the rights of the oppressed peoples on the continent only for the reason that she thereby created difficulties for continental diplomacy —which could but react to England's political and economic advancement. But of course the English diplomatists never for a moment thought of giving the Irish the same rights. Lord Palmerston directed his whole foreign policy by this method, but it never entered the mind of the cunning English statesman to help the suppressed nationalities when they most needed his assistance. On the contrary, he looked on with a most peaceful soul while their attempts at liberation perished under the claws of the Holy Alliance.

Napoleon III pursued the same cunning policy, pretending to be the defender of suppressed nationalities while having in view only the interests of his own dynasty. His part in the movement for Italian liberation, which resulted in the inclusion of Nice and Savoy in France, is convincing proof of this.

King Carl Albert of Sardinia likewise supported the movement for national liberation in Italy with all means in his power, as with clever prevision he had recognized what advantages would accrue to his dynasty. Mazzini and Garibaldi, the most radical supporters of revolutionary nationalism, had later to stand by and observe how the successor of the Sardinian garnered the fruits of their lifelong activities for himself as king of united Italy—which they had envisioned as a democratic republic.

That the national feeling took root so rapidly in France during the revolution and achieved such a mighty growth is principally traceable to the fact that the revolution had opened an enormous chasm between the French and old Europe, which the continued wars widened still more. For all that, the best and most valuable minds in all countries greeted the "declaration of human rights" with unmixed enthusiasm, firmly believing that now the era of liberty and equality had begun in Europe. Even many men who later risked everything to enflame in Germany the revolt against the foreign rule of Napoleon, greeted the revolution with inner joy. Fichte, Gorres, Hardenberg, Schleiermacher, Benzenberg, and many others stood at first wholly under the spell of the revolutionary ideas emanating from France. It was the bitter disappointment of this craving for liberty which moved men like Jean Paul, Beethoven, and many others who formerly had been among the most glowing admirers of General Bonaparte—seeing in him the instrument of a coming social reconstruction in Europe—to turn from him after he had made himself

emperor and began to show more and more clearly the intentions of the conqueror.

One can readily understand the unlimited enthusiasm of many of the best minds in Germany for the French when one views the hopeless political conditions which were a tragic reality in Germany on the eve of the revolution. The German empire was now only a group of countries rotting in their own filth, their ruling caste no longer capable of an inner creative impulse, and for that reason clinging the more closely to the old institutions. The frightful misfortune of the Thirty Years' War, whose hardly-healed wounds had been freshly opened by Frederick IPs conquests, had marked the people of the unfortunate countries with its unmistakable stamp. "A generation filled with nameless woes," says Treitschke in his German History, "had broken the courage of the citizens and had habituated the little man to crawl before the mighty. Our free-spirited language learned the trick of abject submission, and came to contain that over-rich treasury of distorted, slavish forms of speech which even today it has not completely shaken off."

Two-thirds of the population at the beginning of the revolution was in a state of serfdom under unspeakably miserable conditions. The country groaned under the hard yoke of countless little despots whose heartless egoism did not shrink from peddling their own subjects as cannon fodder to foreign powers in order to fill their ever empty coffers with the blood money paid them for the lives of these miserable beings. All thoughtful historians are agreed that no liberation could come to this unhappy country from within. Even so grim a hater of the French as Ernst Morris Arndt could not dispute this conclusion.

So the French invasion had at first the effect of a cleansing thunder storm. The French armies brought the revolutionary spirit into the land and aroused in the hearts of its inhabitants a feeling of human dignity they had not known before. The spreading of revolutionary ideas beyond their frontiers was one of the most dreaded weapons of the French republic in its successful struggle against European absolutism j for it was most of all intent on separating the cause of the people from that of the princes. Napoleon never for a moment thought of giving up this invaluable weapon. So wherever his victorious flag floated over a nation he introduced far-reaching reforms in order to attach the inhabitants of the occupied territory to himself.

The peace of Luneville in 1801 had forced the German emperor to recognize the Rhine as the frontier between France and Germany. According to the treaties the temporal rulers of the left shore of the Rhine were to be compensated by territories in the interior of the empire. So now began the shameful barter of the German princes with the "hereditary enemy" for every scrap of land which the one hoped to grab at the expense

of the others, and all of them together at the expense of the people. The "noblest of the nation" fawned like whipped curs before Napoleon and his ministers for favorable consideration in the proposed partition. A comparable example of degradation of character, history has hardly shown. Quite rightly Freiherr von Stein told the Russian empress before the assembled court that Germany's ruin had been caused by the baseness of its princes. Stein surely was no revolutionary. He was an upright man who had the courage to proclaim a truth that was known to all. The German patriot, Ernst Morris Arndt, moreover, wrote with bitter contempt:

Those who could help returned; the others were crushed. Thus stood the union of the mighty with the enemies, and no open shame marked the dishonored ones; they even dared to proclaim themselves as liberators; even those who carried on dishonorable trade in their own and others' honor. They bargained about the peace; there was much said about the German princes, never anything about the German people. Never had the princes stood so far from the nation as a separate party—indeed even opposed to it— and they did not blush before the gaze of a strong, virtuous, great people whom they treated as vanquished in order to participate in the loot. . . . Injustice is born from injustice, force from force, shame from shame, and, like the Mongolian empire, Europe will sink into ruins. . . . Thus you stood, and thus you stand, like traders, not like princes; like Jews with the money-bags, not like judges with the scales nor like marshals with the sword.^

After the battle of Austerlitz (1805) and the foundation of the Rhenish League there was nothing left to the Emperor Francis but to proclaim the dissolution of the German Empire: as a matter of fact it had not existed for a long time. Sixteen German princes had put themselves under Napoleon's protectorate and had reaped a rich harvest for this master example of patriotic attitude. But when patriotic historians make it appear as if, after this open treason to the nation, the Prussian monarchy was now the last bulwark of the German people against the foreign rule of the French, it is a deliberate falsification of historic facts. Prussia was internally just as diseased and morally rotten as the other parts of the empire. The debacle of 1806, the frightful defeat of the Prussian armies at Jena and Auerstadt, the shameful surrender of the fortresses to the French without even an attempt at any real resistance by the noble defenders, the flight of the king to the Russian frontier, the wretched machinations of the Prussian junkers (who in the midst of this gruesome catastrophe thought of nothing but to preserve their miserable prerogatives)—sufficiently characterize the then prevailing conditions in Prussia.

^ E. M. Arndt, Geist der Zcit: Erster Tcil, Kapitel VII.

The whole woeful history of the relations between the "exalted allies," Russia, Austria and Prussia, of whom each in turn, behind the others' backs, worked for or against Napoleon, is a very witches' sabbath of cowardly baseness and contemptible treason, of which the like in scope can hardly be found in history.

Only a small minority of upright men whose patriotism was more than lip-service dared resistance in the land by secret societies and open propaganda; which became constantly easier as Napoleon's military rule rested more heavily on the population of the exploited countries, whose sons were now being forced to fill the gaps the war had made in the French armies. Neither the Prussian monarchy nor the Prussian kraut-junkerdom was equal to such a task. On the contrary, they opposed all attempts which threatened to endanger their privileges and treated men like Stein, Gneisenau, Scharnhorst, Fichte, Arndt, Jahn, and even Blucher, with undisguised suspicion. Only when compelled did they yield to their urgency—and betrayed them at the first opportunity. The characterless attitude of Friedrich Wilhelm III toward Stein and the cowardly cabals by which Prussian officialdom sought to thwart the efforts of the German patriots, tell a very eloquent tale. The Prussian monarchy, therefore, forms no exception in this sad saga of the German princes, and Seume was quite right when he wrote:

Whatever might be hoped of the nation and for the nation the princes and the nobles are sure to destroy in order to preserve their senseless privileges. Napoleon's best satraps are the German princes and nobles. . . . We have now actually reached the point when we, like Cicero, do not know whether we are to wish for victory for our friends or our enemies. Here are whips; yonder are scorpions.

And yet the men who worked for the national awakening of Germany and took such an important part in the so-called "wars of liberation" were by no means revolutionaries, although they were often enough denounced as Jacobins by the Prussian junkers. Almost every one of them was king-loyal to the bone and entirely untouched by a real libertarian thought. But they had clearly recognized one thing: If a nation is to be formed from serfs and hereditary subjects without any rights, and the great masses of the people are to be aroused to fight against foreign rule, one must first of all begin by abolishing the outrageous privileges of the nobles and must secure for the man of the people the civil rights which have hitherto been denied to him. Scharnhorst says:

One must infuse in the nation a feeling of self-reliance. One must give it a chance to become acquainted with itself so that it may be interested in itself; for only thus will it learn to respect itself and compel respect from

others. To work toward this is all that we can do. To break the bonds of prejudice, to guide and nurse the rebirth and never to oppose free growth— beyond this our utmost effectiveness does not reach.

Also in the same way, Gneisenau, who in his memorial of July 1807 states that a European adjustment can be thought of only if one is resolved to emulate the French and by a constitution and the equalization of all classes to liberate the nation's natural forces:

If the other states want to reestablish this balance they must themselves reopen the sources of supply and use them. They must appropriate the results of the revolution and thus gain the double advantage of being able to oppose their own national power to a foreign one and also to escape the dangers of a revolution—which are not past for them for the simple reason that they have been unwilling to avoid a violent change by a voluntary one.

Hardenberg, who at the time of the peace of Tilsit was at Napoleon's behest dismissed by Friedrich Wilhelm, put it even more clearly. In his Memorial for the Reorganization 0/ the Prussian State^ September 12, 1807, he declares:

The illusion that the revolution can best be opposed by clinging to old institutions and by harsh persecution of the principles it announces has contributed greatly to aiding the revolution and giving it a steadily growing extension. The force of these principles is so great, they are so generally accepted and so widespread, that the state which does not adopt them goes either to its own destruction or to an enforced acceptance of these principles. . . . Democratic principles within a monarchic government, this seems to be the most suitable form for the present spirit of the age.