Revolutions - 7.16- We Crawled On Our Stomachs

Episode Date: November 20, 2017

The fall of the July Monarchy set off a chain reaction throughout Germany that climaxed with intense fighting in Berlin.  

Hello and welcome to revolutions. Episode 7.16, we crawled on our stomachs. Okay, welcome back. Last time, we got into the guts of the Hungarian Revolution, and this week we are going to get things going in Germany, but I do need to open with a small correction. When I was rattling off all the minority nationalities in the Kingdom of Hungary last week, I threw the checks in there by mistake.

As a few of you helpfully pointed out, there was not, repeat not, any significant Czech population in Hungary, so they should not have been included on that list. And while I'm here, I may as well also mention to my patriotic Czech listeners that yes, indeed, I know that there is a Prague revolution that's going to go along with all of this general 1848 madness. I am trying to find a good place to shoehorn it into the story. But today, we are going to focus on the revolutions in Germany. As I already briefly mentioned a few episodes back, the southwestern German states were among the first to respond to the word of the fall of the July monarchy with a flurry of demonstrations and petitions and demands for liberal reform.

But as I said, I was going to have to come back around for the details after we launched the revolutions in the Habsburg territories, and, well, we've done that. So here we are. So in today's episode, I want to cover those early details, then introduce a few of the more important German revolutionaries, and then, and wrap it all up with the insurrection in Berlin. That exploded after word of the fall of Metternich hit the city. One of the last capitals to be hit by violence, the fighting in Berlin turned out to be amongst the fiercest and bloodiest in the whole cycle of the March revolutions in 1848.

So to begin with, let us recall that Germany is at this point about 40 sovereign units that were being kept intentionally disunited and under the double conservative thumb of Prussia and Austria. Though the population of greater Germany was still mostly rural, artisans and their guilds were still strong in the urban areas and presently under threat from industrial factory goods and the rising competition created by the breaking down of that lattice work of customs barriers and the creation of the pan-German customs union called the sulfurine.

Though the sulfurine was destabilizing from an economic perspective, it was also a key step in the project of liberal nationalism, in Germany. And remember, in Germany at this point, liberalism and nationalism are essentially synonymous, as the men and women of the middle class intellectual set who wanted to shake off repressive conservative absolutism and introduce civil rights and the rule of law, naturally believed that the only way that it could be done was by sweeping aside the 40 different little sovereign units and joining all Germany together into a thing called Germany. But there were among that intellectual set, more radical voices who did want to push things even further than

mere unification and a few civil rights. And I want to introduce you to two of them right now. First, Friedrich Hecker and then Gustav Strauva. So Friedrich Hecker was born in September 1811, making him 36 years old when the revolutions of 1848 broke out. He was born in the Duchy of Baden, one of those middle-sized German states down in the southwest that already had a rudimentary constitution. Haccar's father was a revenue official in the Dutchie's bureaucracy, and Hickr went to school in Heidelberg, where he joined one of those student fraternities that had been causing so much trouble for the old conservative order of Germany going back to the 1820s. By 1838, Hickr had graduated and was working in Monheim as a lawyer. But he had long had an abominable.

passion for politics, and in 1842 was elected to Baden's Chamber of Deputies. He gave up his private practice to become a full-time politician, and in short order, he was one of the leading members of the liberal opposition. Hekhar was as charismatic and charming and small intimate settings as he was out on the big public stage, and it did not take him long to become one of the most important liberals in the chamber in Baden. And indeed, he had a huge role in turning that liberal opposition in a more radical direction. Now, if you remember from our episode on the political question, we know that the aim of the people who did not have a constitution was to get a constitution, but the aim of those who already

lived under a constitution was to make that constitution more democratic and more representative. And living under a constitutional regime in Baden, Hekhar was dedicated to making it more democratic, and he campaigned for that even outside of Baden. He campaigned everywhere for Germans to have more democratic rights, and it actually gets him deported from Prussia. He was, of course, a committed German nationalist and in favor of full German unification. And he made a big splash in 1845 by opposing Denmark's early attempt to annex the Schleswig Holstein, a disputed territory that would have major importance down the road for the revolutions of 1848, because we are going to talk about the first Schleswig Holstein.

War. Hekhar wanted a union of all German-speaking peoples, and he did not want the people in the Schlaeswig Holstein annexed by the Danes. With his star rising at the same time as the economic crisis of the mid-1840s was hitting, Hekhar also started to combine his democratic radicalism with socialist policies to alleviate the rotten conditions endured by the poor workers. By 1847, Hekhar was the champion of the people, and he became the president of the people. And he became the president of a political club called the Volksferain, which roughly translates as the people's club, which was formed as a more radical alternative to conservative liberal clubs that already existed in Baden at the time. It was during this period that Hecker met and began

a working partnership with the other German revolutionary I want to tell you about today, Gustav Strava. Eight years older than Hekhar, Struva was born Gustav von Strava. indicating that he came from nobility. But though he was born in Munich in 1805 and then raised in Germany, he was actually the son of a Russian noble, who was a diplomat in the Russian Foreign Service and who was posted to various locales across Germany. Struva was a capable student who, like Hekker, studied in Heidelberg, and he joined a student fraternity in the early 1820s that was shortly thereafter forced to disband. Emerging from school, Strouva went to work in the civil service but was never comfortable in the job, and he left after just a few years to take up a private legal practice, eventually settling in Monheim. Unlike Heckart, Strouva did not enter politics as a politician, but rather as a writer and sometimes journalist who penned articles in support of the radical opposition.

In these articles, and at political meetings he attended, Strouva, too, started combining democratic radicalism with proto-socialism, and he constantly argued against the inert conservatism of Metternich that failed to address either the political or the social question. Meeting Hecker during the turbulent days in the mid-1840s, the two co-mingled their ideas and became strong proponents of sweeping aside the whole monarchical system, and would soon be advocating for just. German unification by way of a federal republic, rather than through the auspices of the existing

monarchies. Now, over the course of 1847, political radicals in Baden, like Hekhar and Strava, began planning a big meeting where they could all get together and hash out a united political program that would be more aggressive than the one offered by cautious liberals. So on September the 12th, 1847, something like eight or nine hundred, radicals assembled at Offenberg for the creatively titled Offenberg Assembly. There, Hekhar dazzled the assembly with another of his great speeches, where he introduced them all to the 13 demands, which would, unbeknownst to them at the time, become the founding

platform of their coming revolutionary movement. The 13 demands included everything from the standard list of liberal political goals. So cancel the repressive Karlsbad decrees and open the door to freedom of the press and academic freedom, freedom of conscience, freedom of assembly, freedom of movement, equality before the law, all the greatest hits. But unlike many of the more conservative liberal programs out there, the 13 demands move beyond merely the political question. It moved to the social question. It called for a progressive income tax, for universal free education, and then for a demand that the government use its power to defend the rights of workers against unjust exploitation by business owners.

It also called for a pan-German parliament to begin the process of unification, unification that Hekhar and Struva and the others hoped would be Republican in character. Responding to these more radical demands made in the Offenburg Assembly, a small group of just 18 conservative liberals from across southwestern Germany got together a month later for the Hoppenheim conference. The Hoppenheim conference was the purest expression of the most basic forms of German liberal nationalism. Their program was simple and twofold, a German nation state and the guarantee of certain civil rights. They demanded nothing more, certainly nothing that would excite the passions of the peasants and workers who they were as afraid of as Metternich was.

And the tension between liberals and radicals in Germany was already readily apparent to both sides. But for the moment, their shared hostility towards Matternick's conservative order helped paper over their differences. But though they did have these differences and those differences would prove to be irreconcilable, both liberals and radicals believed that as soon as the opportunity presented itself, that they would all join forces to push hard to take those 40 sovereign German units and fuse it together into a single unit, a single Germany. They also agreed that basic civil rights must be guaranteed in this new Germany, freedom of speech and the press and assembly, all that good stuff. But beyond that, everything was pretty vague and the future

would have to be improvised on the fly, if, say, some random catalyst came along and made their dreams into reality. So that catalyst, of course, came along at the end of February 1848, just a few months after these guys had gotten together, when word of the revolution in France spread across Central Europe. And the reaction in Germany was pretty much the same as we've already seen in Vienna and Pressburg and Budapest. In cities across Germany, crowds would gather in cafes and beer halls to listen for news, to read and reread newspapers that carried stories of the events in France. Liberals and radicals both recognized the golden opportunity they had been presented with to aggressively push their various rulers for concessions, concessions that were required if those rulers wanted to

avoid the fate of Louis-Philippe. But as I said before, this first wave of German responses to the news from France was not really of a revolutionary nature. They were trying to use the threat of revolution to secure reform. And since, for example, Baden was already a constitutional monarchy, the people had some political rights, and they were allowed to make demands of their sovereign without it being considered treasonous, as was the case for the Viennese. But the radicals in Germany planned to push the envelope. Meeting on February the 27th, Hekhar, Strouve, and the other radicals in Baden distilled the 13 demands down to four key points. You must arm the people, give us freedom of the press, trial by jury, and most important, we must

must convene a pan-German parliament. But Southern Germany also had a wrinkle in it that was not really present in most other places in Europe in 1848. They had a full-blown peasant uprising. The rural areas of especially southwestern Germany were overcrowded. There was not enough land, and there were a lot of unhappy day laborers who were fed up up both with their lack of land and the feudal obligations that they continued to labor under, obligations that they were dimly aware that their French neighbors had gotten rid of way back in 1789.

So the news from France lit a fire under the rural peasantry, and they started joining forces with each other and targeting the Grand Manor houses of the local nobility at the end of February 1848. They would push their way into these houses. They would find the records that mark down everyone's feudal rights and obligations, and they would methodically burn them. And so it was not just the fear of going the way of Louis Philippe, but the fear of their own peasants rising up that led the leaders of southwestern Germany to make concessions to the liberals very quickly to shore up the strength of their monarchies. So the Grand Duke of Baden was quick to grant trial by jury and freedom of the press and order the formation of a citizen militia.

A few days later, on March the 2nd, he went even further. He threw out his conservative cabinet and formed a new liberal government. He also announced that Baden would be unilaterally withdrawing from the Carlsbad decrees, those decrees that had so drastically curtailed freedom of speech and the press, and put universities under incredibly strict surveillance. This was a swift victory for the forces of liberal reform. This basic pattern was then followed throughout the rest of Germany. The first week of March saw the rulers of Wurtenberg,

Hesse Darmstadt, Hanover, and Bavaria all dropped their existing conservative ministries and replaced them with more liberal leaders. These liberal ministries usually made pledges guaranteeing civil rights and getting ready for some kind of pan-German assembly. Then on March the 5th, 51 representatives from six different German states met in Heidelberg and issued what is known as the Heidelberg Declaration, which said that as soon as as possible, a more complete assembly of men of trust from all German peoples should come together in order to continue deliberation of this most important matter, and to offer its cooperation

to the fatherland as well as to the governments. And for the most part, the sovereign heads of the small German states went along with all this, but they were acting from common sense and prudence and expedience. They were going with reform to head off revolution. and most importantly, they were going with reform to keep their thrones. Though Ludwig, the conservative and not at all popular king of Bavaria, decided he did not want to keep his throne, because he could not live with even these moderate reforms. He was determined, as he said, to not become a mere signing machine,

and so he would abdicate his throne in favor of his son on March the 19th. And it's very possible that he got out when he did, because he realized that events were probably not going to stop at mere reform, because by March the 19th, the other huge piece of news had spread throughout greater Germany. Up in Vienna, Chancellor Mearnik, the rock-solid foundation of reactionary conservatism in Europe, had fallen to a mob. With Metternich gone, all now seemed truly possible. And even Almighty Prussia, the largest and strongest of the German states,

was about to succumb to the forces of liberal nationalist revolution. So to jog our memories a bit about Prussia, King Frederick Wilhelm IV had ascended to the throne in 1840, and after briefly giving liberals in his kingdom the hope that he might finally deliver the constitution that his father had been promising off and on since 1810, the new king slammed the door shut on that idea. Friedrich Wilhelm IV was a died-in-the-war, absoluteist, and he believed that he ruled by the grace of God alone. A romantic, when it came to the

glory days of German medieval history, he was never going to be a force for progressive liberal change, even if he was a patron of German arts and literature, and seemed genuinely interested in the idea of German unification, unification that he hoped would be for the glory of both Germany and Prussia. He was also not a cold-hearted reactionary, and he was also not a cold-hearted reactionary, and he embraced the old feudal conception of the monarch as the father protector, and while he had no interest in allowing his people political rights or a share in government, he did fund and coordinate some of the most generous poor relief efforts on behalf of his most impoverished subjects. But if you will recall from back in episode 7.8, though,

the king did run into some political trouble in 1847, when, in the midst of the European recession, he needed to raise more money from the international banking community, and those financiers refused to grant Prussia loans unless they were approved by an assembly of the Prussian estates, who would be able to back up the king's promises of repayment. So, much against his will, Friedrich Wilhelm called a united diet,

composed of representatives from the eight local meetings of the estates in Prussia. Expecting this united diet to simply do their duty to the king, and approve the new loans, they instead refused to do any such thing until the king agreed to grant them a regular and predictable meeting so that they could participate in the general administration of Prussia, or at least keep an eye on things. In the face of this obstruction, the king tried to change the subject by talking about how, hey, maybe the time has come to finally unified Germany. But instead of taking the bait, the assembled estates had kept the focus on regular meetings

for the United Diet. The King and the Estates at Loggerheads, this first United Diet melted away at the end of 1847, leaving behind only a few committees that the estate set up to keep working on a few loose ends, hopefully as a precursor to further regular meetings of the diet. When news of the Revolution in France reached Berlin, the King did not waste much time trying to head things off, though his conservative instincts took him in the opposite direction of his brother rulers to the south. On March the 6th, he ordered those last few holdover committees from the estates to cease their meetings, saying that this was no time for party squabbles, and that everyone must now rally without hesitation or reservation to the king. They must build around the monarch,

as he dubbed it, a wall of brass. But the king's instincts were all wrong in this case. The next day, March the 7th, large crowds gathered in an eating, drinking, and social hub of the city called the Seltin, which meant literally the tents, after the tent stalls that used to dominate the area, but which had long ago been replaced by permanent structures. Here, artisans, workers, journalists, students, professionals, would gather to eat and drink and party and talk, and on this particular day, the talk was all politics. The news from France, the news from their German neighbors to the south, the news of the king's response, which they were not enthusiastic about. Out in the crowd, the old black, red, and gold,

the colors now of German nationalism, began to pop up. Speakers then began to harangue the crowd, and someone drew up a simple petition that they planned to present to the king that asked for two things, recall the United Diet and grant freedom of the press. But after this petition gathered thousands of signatures, they took it to the palace, and the king refused to allow them to present it, as they had no right to be doing any of this. So, and I am not making this up, they put it in the mail to the king. They mailed it to him. The following day, an even bigger crowd assembled, and all the king would say is that he, too,

hoped that one day the Germans would all have freedom of the press. But at present, he was bound by the decision of the greater German Confederation to abide by the Karlsbad decrees. So, unfortunately, my hands are tied. It was quite a cop-out. I mean, he is, after all, the absolutist king of Prussia. Nobody was buying that he felt bound by the rules of the German Confederation, an unrest in the city grill. The minister of police in Berlin then told the king that he might have difficulty keeping order and that the army garrison might be their only hope.

The King was reluctant, though. He did not want to have to use the army to subdue people who he considered to be his children, but in the end, was persuaded it was the only thing to be done. For the moment, though, even after Army patrols started marching through the streets of Berlin, there was no dramatic clash. These units were simply out on show of force patrols to remind the Berliners that there was a force hanging around, that could put them all in their place, should it come to that. But the patrols did heighten tensions in the city.

And so what had at least for a few days been a sort of festive atmosphere of eating and drinking and asking the king for concessions turned into something darker and something a little more ominous. The army was composed of conservative aristocratic officers drawn from the upper nobility, while the rank and file were peasants from the rural part of the kingdom. Neither of those groups had much love for the Berliners, and the feeling was mutual. With tensions rising, workers and artisans started staging demonstrations on March the 13th, and run-ins with army units trying to keep order eventually led to the first casualties of the Revolution of 1848 on March the 16th, when two demonstrators were killed.

Now, until this point, the Berliners had typically backed down whenever the army showed up. But now that blood had been shed, they geared up for stiffer resistance. And then, most especially, they were emboldened by the spectacular news from Vienna. Chancellor Metternich had been ousted by mobs in Vienna. The wicked witch of the conservative order was dead, and the Berliners resolved to dance on his grave. Word of Metternich's fall also changed the dynamic inside the royal palace, as the king and his ministers met for stormy sessions to decide how to respond. Hardline conservatives now argued that overwhelming force was the only possible response to the sedition in Berlin.

But the king was genuinely upset by the idea that he might have to brutally suppress these people who he considered his children. So he listened to those at court who said, look at the path the other German rulers have taken. Get out in front of events. Make a show of concessions. But also, try again to change the subject, change it from political reform inside of Prussia, to the possibility of German unification, which might actually allow you to thread a very tight needle. Because if Prussia took the lead on German unification, this little bit of unrest here in 1848 might actually leave the Prussian monarchy stronger than ever.

So after two days of wrangling, the king finally settled on issuing a conciliating. proclamation on March the 18th. With word having gone out that the king was going to make this proclamation, crowds gathered in front of the palace at about noon, and the proclamation was read. The king had heard his people. He would recall the United Diet, but he would do so specifically so they could begin to explore how to begin the process of German unification, which, it was hinted, was the necessary precursor to all the liberal demands for freedom of speech and assembly that had reached the king's ears.

Then the king himself appeared on the balcony of the palace to share the good news with the people, and they all cheered him. But once the cheering died out, and the king had gone back inside, the people realized that there was a really big thing they had been waiting to hear, but which the king was clearly not going to say. A big thing right now that was even more important than freedom of the press, German unification, was that they wanted the army withdrawn from the city. And the king did not do it. Instead, he just went back inside, even as the crowd started chanting, away with the army, away with the army. And in fact, it was even worse than the crowd realized, because to go along with the

conciliatory proclamations he had just issued, which the king believed would be the carrot, He also had a stick, which was appointing an arch-conservative general to now lead the Berlin Garrison, and that guy definitely believed that cracking skulls was the only way to go, even as the king rather weakly ordered him to bring peace to the city, but to please not shoot anyone. With the crowd in front of the palace refusing to disperse, this arch-conservative general ordered companies of dragoons to advance, but did tell them to only use the flats of the flats of the city. their sabers to intimidate the people.

Then to back up the dragoons, he ordered in two units of infantry, who were supposed to just wield their bayonets in a menacing manner. But you can probably guess what happened next. I mean, what always happens next? That's right, a couple of gunshots went off by accident, either from the soldiers or from someone in the crowd who was armed. So far as I can tell, the shots didn't even kill anyone. They just were fired up into the air.

but it was enough to trigger a full-blown insurrection inside Berlin. The crowds in front of the palace were already feeling betrayed by the king for offering them some empty platitudes before ordering in the army to kill them all. So they broke for the narrow streets of the inner city and began constructing barricades all over the place and arming themselves as best they could, often with nothing more than cudgels for hand-to-hand fighting. Black, red, and gold flags were unfurled,

and they now fluttered from atop buildings and from hastily cobbled together barricades. After the last week or so, where the army was always able to break up and disperse demonstrators without too much difficulty, the soldiers were now shocked at the ferocity of the Berliners. Standing their ground and forcing the soldiers to charge headlong at the barricades, the insurrectionary population would fight tooth and nail until they fell back to another barricade that had been built behind the first. so the soldiers would finally clear out the first barricade they hit, only to find themselves facing a brand-new barricade that would be just as difficult to assault and destroy. And even when they took that one, there was yet another barricade behind it. And all the while, attacks

were coming from the tops of buildings and from windows. The soldiers had no experience in this kind of close quarters chaotic urban combat. Angry and demoralized, they stopped even attempting to discriminate between active combatants and unarmed civilians that they just shot at anything that moved. Then, to speed things along, they turned to their artillery units to simply blast the barricades and the insurrectionaries out of the water. It was a loud and gruesome business, and bodies started piling up left and right. But only the morale of the army seemed to be suffering. The Berliners kept fighting as hard as ever, even as they died by the hundreds. By dawn the next day, 800 insurgent Berliners and about 100 soldiers lay dead, and somewhere around 2,500 were wounded.

That's about the same as were killed in the Paris revolutions of 1830 and 1848 combined, all in a single day. Back at the palace, the king listened to the sounds of the fighting with real dread, and there are reports that he cried when the cannons started going off, though how self-serving those rumors are is hard to say. But for sure, though, he was caught up in a real personal crisis by the time the general in charge of the city told him as night fell on March the 18th, that if the army didn't successfully restore order in the next day or two, they didn't have enough troops to operate a full military occupation of the city. The only option left would be to evacuate, put the city under siege, and then bombard Berlin until the people raised the white flag and agreed to lay down their arms. But the king did not want to have to literally bomb Berlin into submission. So after this meeting with the general, he was in a proper state of mind to listen to the recommendation of a liberal from Westphalia, whose name was Jorg von Vique, who had been called in for an audience at around midnight. One of the leaders of the liberal opposition inside the recently dissolved United Diet, Von Vick said, Sire, you have lost the trust of your people, and there is only one way to get it back.

you have to order the army to stand down and withdraw from Berlin. Only then will the people believe that you trust them, and it is the only way for them to ever trust you. So overnight, the king composed a new proclamation, issued to his dear Berliners. It said that if the city returned to a peaceful state, that the king would order the army to stand down and withdraw and only leave enough units to protect the palace

and a few key government building. With March 19th being a Sunday, a ceasefire was brokered along with the proclamation so that everyone could attend church as usual. When the morning unfolded without incident, the king, good to his word, ordered the army to leave Berlin while the Berliners formed a civic guard to take over policing the city. But disgusted at receiving this order to retreat, the Conservative General in charge of the Berlin Garrison followed his orders as expansively as possible and pulled out all the troops.

He did not even leave behind any to guard those government buildings, not enough to guard the palace. If the king didn't want the army in Berlin, then the army would not be in Berlin. Pretty soon, the Berliners realized that there was nothing standing between them and the king. But rather than invade the palace, They gathered out in front with many of the bodies of the dead,

and they demanded that the king and queen come out and bear witness to their suffering and sacrifice. When the king appeared on the balcony, he made a point of removing his hat to show respect, and the crowd responded by singing a popular hymn as the king, shaking, went back inside. With the civic guard now in charge of the city, the king made a foray out onto the streets two days later on March the 21st, and he now wore a black, red, and gold ribbon. He then met with the leaders of the civic guard and thanked them for their service and for maintaining order. He then furthered his promise to pursue German unification and said that Prussia would be merged into Germany and then all that they all desired could be accomplished.

The next day, a mass funeral was held for the dead in Berlin, and the king with an air of grand mourning promised that his people would now, have a constitution. But these last few promises were made disingenuously. The king realized that he had been defeated by the people of Berlin, and so he may as well just say whatever he could to appease them and then extract himself from the city. Three days later, the royal family decamped Berlin for the relative safety of their strongholds in Potsdam. The king bitterly griped that we crawled on our stomachs. As Berlin celebrated the promise of their new rights, their king was not yet done fighting for his old rights, and he would be back. But with the King of Prussia now clearly on board,

the movement towards unification was now rolling headlong downhill. But we will leave Germany in the dust next week, and instead return to Italy, where the revolutions of 1848 had originally begun. The wave of constitutions that had swept up the Italian peninsula had put the Austrian forces inside the Kingdom of Lumberty, Venetia, on guard that Italy might be gearing

up to go to war to evict them. And the Italians inside Lumberty Venetia felt the same way. And that was before the fall of the July monarchy upended the political order of Europe. So with the old order of Europe collapsing, the people of

Lombardy Venetia would rise up to overthrow their Austrian overlords. And next week, we will spend five days in Milan.