Revolutions - 7.25- The Parliament of Professors

Episode Date: February 5, 2018

The Frankfurt Parliament is the symbol of the liberal German Revolution of 1848. That's not a compliment. 

Hello and welcome to revolutions. Episode 7.25, the Parliament of Professors. With the Habsburgs dominating the narrative lately, we have not been back to Germany since episode 7.20 when we talked about the initial organization of a pan-German parliament and the implications of nationalism and liberalism underlying this effort. The nationalism part triggered the first Schlurbanes. Leiswoldstein War, and the Greater Poland Uprising, to say nothing of later clashes in Bohemia and Austria, as everyone tried to figure out who was in and who was out of Germany. Meanwhile, the liberalism part had triggered the Hekhar uprising, as radical leaders who had been

pushed to one side took up arms in Baden to fight for a Democratic Republic. As the summer of 1848 unfolded, German radicals would grow only further disillusioned with the liberals convening in Frankfurt, but when the books finally closed on 1848, it was not the radicals who would destroy the project of liberal German nationalism, but rather the slowly regrouping forces of traditional conservatism, who could see the divide in the revolutionary camp between liberals and radicals, and who planned to exploit that disunity, to crush them both. Elections for what history has dubbed the Frankfurt Parliament unfolded over April and May of 1848. There were supposed to be 649 members of the Parliament, but only 585 wound up being elected,

as boycotts in many districts invited to participate, notably in Bohemia and Austria, led to quite a few vacancies. There are also a few problems with men being elected who were deemed unacceptable. So, for example, the voters down in Bauden awarded Friedrich Hecker a seat, and since he was currently in exile in Switzerland after a failed treasonous uprising, the Committee of 50, The overseeing things in Frankfurt rejected him and ordered the voters to try again. But then they voted for Hacker again. And they rejected him again. So with the boycotts and the calling, the men elected to the Frankfurt Parliament wound up coming from a pretty narrow bandwidth of university-educated Germans with an interest in politics who were nationalists at heart and with a liberal bent of some kind or another.

Everyone in the room was a liberal at a minimum. truly conservative conservatives had been among those boycotting the elections as they wanted to give this parliament no legitimacy whatsoever. So everyone there also had some degree of formal education. Seventy-five percent had gone to university and 50 percent were lawyers. Of the 585, fully 50 were university professors themselves, 110 judges or prosecutors, and then another 115 were high administrative clerks. With so many well-educated intellectuals, convenes, meaning in the same room, the Frankfurt Parliament got the somewhat derisive nickname, the Parliament of Professors. The not-so-suttle implication being that these were a bunch of

bookworms from the ivory tower of academia who were going to get cooked like vampires in the sun now that they were out dealing with the real world. The first session of the Frankfurt Parliament convened on May the 18th, 1848, with about 330 of the delegates in attendance. Now, what they were all there to do, and under whose authority they would be doing it is a bit nebulous. Now, if you ask the delegates, it was not nebulous at all. They were there to draft a constitution for a new United German state, and were convening under the authority of the German people. But there was no legal basis for any of that. Remember, the German Confederation and its federal diet was the legally constituted representative body of the German states, all duly done up

with mutually agreed upon rules and rights and responsibilities by multilateral treaty. The Frankfurt Diet had none of that. All they had was the federal diet of the German Confederation giving their permission for elections to a pan-German assembly to be held in the various member states. The German Confederation had not said, oh, and by the way, yes, you are the constitutional Convention who's drafting a new constitution for United Germany that will supplant us, the German Confederation. So there was no guarantee that the work the Frankfurt Parliament did would ever actually go into effect. So though the Parliament had something like a popular mandate and something like moral authority, they were operating outside the actual sovereign

states of Germany. But still, as I said, the men who convened in Frankfurt in May of 1848 were there to draft a constitution. More than half of those who showed up were avowed monarchists, who saw this all resulting in a federal union of the German principalities with an elected emperor as executive head of state. But there were a lot of Republicans there, too, who could see this, yes, being a federal union, but without a crowned head. Only about 15% of the delegates there could be counted among truly left-wing radicals, strong Democrats who wanted a single unitary republic, something that would sweep aside the past. And even in that group of radicals, only about half of them, so like seven or eight percent of the total delegates, were really hardliner about that, and who wanted to confront the liberals rather than work with them. Most of the rest of the hardliners had taken up arms with Hecker, and were now currently living in emigrate communities in Switzerland and France, so they kind of just weren't around. The other half of the radicals, though, saw their eventual triumph, the triumph of a republic, going through a tactical alliance with the liberals and the constitutional

monarchists for the time being. And the leader of this group was a man who I am long overdue to introduce. His name is Robert Bloom. Robert Bloom was born in 1807, but unlike most of the people we've dealt with so far, he was not a noble or the son of some middle class professionals, and he did not get a university education. Instead, he was born to a failed theologian who was forced to become a cooper when the mysteries of God couldn't pay the bills. Bloom himself spent years bouncing from job to job. He was an apprentice goldsmith, an apprentice gardener, and eventually he worked in a lamp factory. So almost unique among the leaders in 1848, except for the French working class leader Albert, Bloom himself actually knew the relentless grind of working class poverty.

He knew what it looked like, felt like, smelled like, and tasted like. He was 23 years old when the revolutionary wave of 1830 swept across Europe, and he was intoxicated by radical politics. Now working at the front of a house for a theater company, he began composing poems and plays and articles. He joined the Freemasons and bummed around with Amont Guard radicals. By the early 1840s, he had risen to be a cashier at a theater in Leipzig, but he finally quit the business in 1844 to start a bookstore. He simultaneously started up a series of newsletters, but predictably kept running afoul of the censors. But by now he was coming into his own as a writer and a public speaker of some renown, at least in liberal and radical circles.

And when the German pre-parliament was being convened, Robert Bloom was among those invited to participate. Now, he was a Democratic Republican, no less than Hecker and Struve, and disappointed at the cautious liberalism on display at the pre-parliament. But when Hecker and Strove stormed out, Bloom decided to stay behind. And for his willingness to work with others, he got a position on the committee of 50 that stayed in session in Frankfurt while the elections for the real parliament got underway. When he found out that Hekhar and Struve had marched off to start an insurrection in Baden, he was furious, and he believed that their recklessness threatened the whole lot of them. This permanent breach between them put Bloom in one of those weird hybrid political positions. He was

either a radical liberal or a liberal radical. Possibly neither. Possibly both. So Bloom entered the parliament wanting a republic, but understanding that guys like Hekhar and Shroof were weakening the case rather than making it stronger. While they, of course, thought that he was just a stooge. Now, the good news was that Bloom got himself assigned to the Constitutional Committee. That was good. But then he lost a fight at the end of June about how best to form a provision. executive government that would start to adopt the form and function of a real government should this all actually wind up with a new German state in force. Bloom fought a losing battle to prevent Archduke John of Austria from being named

Executive Regent, which was clearly the first step towards a German monarchy rather than a German republic. Although at the same time, Bloom could take solace in the fact that with Archduke John as regent, the federal diet of the German Confederation voted to recognize Archduke John's authority and see decision-making powers to him and his ministry, which was a fairly momentous step in the attempt to create a unified Germany built on popular sovereignty. Would that have happened if the Frankfurt Parliament was dominated by a bunch of fire-breathing radicals? Probably not. So the Frankfurt Parliament, though, was not the only major new

assembly convening in Germany in May of 1848. Because at that very same moment, the first truly representative national diet was convening in the Kingdom of Prussia. So we move now over to the Kingdom of Prussia. Good to the promise that he had been forced to make back in March, King Friedrich Wilhelm approved a basically democratic election to a national diet that would help settle a constitution for Prussia. Now, unlike the Fronkfort Parliament, which was turning out to be slightly more conservative than anticipated, the Prussian diet was slightly more radical, though the context does matter a bit. Of the 395 men elected the Prussian national diet, 120 could be counted as Democrats, that is, they truly believed in popular sovereignty and

universal manhood suffrage, but only a handful of them could then be further called Republicans. Everyone else was some version of constitutional monarchists. But still, in conservative Prussia, this was quite a thing, and it really did shock the conservatives who had not really organized for the election because, A, they didn't have much ideological predilection for it, or B, any practical experience trying to mobilize public opinion. Though, they were about to learn fast how to do that. When the Diet convened on May the 22nd, 1848, the King's representatives presented to the delegates a pre-written draft of a constitution that the King was prepared to benevolently bestow upon his people. This caused an outraged ripple of shock. Most of those in a tenant

believed that they had come to draft a constitution, not rubber-stamp some royal decree. The people had a right to draft a constitution and deliver it to the king, not the other way around. So without even reading the king's draft, the Diet voted to form a committee to write their own constitution for Prussia. And showing the early influence of the more left-wing Democrats in the room, The man appointed to head this committee was an old Westphalian judge, who was in fact one of those few out-and-out Republicans. This was all unsettling enough. But out in the streets of Berlin, everyone was then reminded that the social and economic conditions that had produced the barricade fighting back in March had not gone anywhere. On June the 4th, a mass march of Berlin workers paraded through the city representing every side of the working classes,

from prosperous and respectable artisans to unemployed menial laborers carrying signs. that said, the workers have no bread. The left wing of the diet then continued their early momentum by putting forward a motion on June the 8th that called on the diet to recognize the principle of popular sovereignty rather than the divine right of kings. And then they put forward another motion to thank and congratulate the men and women who had risen up in Berlin back in March for the good patriotic work they had done for the fatherland. More conservative members barely managed to squeak by a rejection of these incendiary motions, but that only led to a sharp outburst in the streets. In the wake of the rejected motions, a popular democratic leader in Berlin

by the name of Friedrich Held started rallying his strong base of support inside the railway workers community. A former army officer, turned former actor, held, was now the editor of a popular newspaper called the Locomotive, where he espoused a very hodge-podge ideology that preached a sort of authoritarian populism, bits of socialism backed up by the force of a militant citizen army, all under the quasi-religious sovereignty of the king. Held was now ginning up fear that the old conservative nobility was going to send the Prussian army into Berlin to disperse the national diet. And on June the 14th, he led a crowd to the Berlin arsenal to demand that they reliance. He lease arms and ammunition to the people so they could defend themselves. The guards refused and instead

opened fire, killing a pair of demonstrators and triggering a riot that saw the guards overrun and the armory plundered. Now, neither the king nor the nobles had in fact been planning to send in the Prussian army, an order was eventually restored, but the riot in Berlin sharpened the divide between left and right. It was the final proof to conservatives that Medernick had always been right when he said that reform was just the precursor to revolution. The left wing, meanwhile, was feeling very self-confident. They were standing up to the old guard and winning, so they believed that this was still just the beginning. So the liberals were caught in the middle. But if the choice was going to be between order and anarchy, we know which way they're going to break. When push comes

to shove, the liberals will break for order. It's one of the overarching themes. It's one of the overarching themes of 1848. This is the final gasp of liberalism as a revolutionary force. That mantle is now being taken up by the just emerging socialists and communists, and yes, anarchists. But as I said at the beginning of today's episode, it would not be the radicals or the revolutionary socialists who would crush the liberal revolution of 1848, but rather the power of traditional conservatism. And by the end of June 1848, there was a real conservative. reaction building up inside of Prussia. Given the political climate at the moment, the king was forced to officially recognize a pack of

damned liberals as his official cabinet ministers, but he neither liked nor trusted them. So he took solace in private audiences with conservatives who shared his fundamental belief that he was the king of Prussia by the grace of God. Increasingly influential among these conservative advisors was an energetic, 33-year-old, star coming out of the old nobility, Otto von Bismarck. Now, I am not going to dive headlong into the life of Otto von Bismarck, one of the giants of European history and the man who would in time successfully unify Germany, albeit on very different terms than those currently being discussed in the Frankfurt Parliament.

Instead, I want to stick to the specific insights young Bismarck brought to the king here in the early summer of 1848. The older generation of conservative nobles simply wanted to restore things to the way that they had been before the people had gotten into the game. But the much younger Bismarck believed that maybe they could ride the wave rather than try to fight against it, that the king should harness popular energy and direct it to traditional conservative ends rather than give that field over to the liberals and the socialists. This fit in perfectly with the king's embittered belief that the liberals were a small pack of troublesome intellectuals, standing between him and his people. His people still loved him. Of course they did.

So Bismarck proposed to take the people's love for their king and their love for their traditional ways of life and organize it. Bismarck, along with his allies, helped form the association for king and fatherland, which would act as a political society to match and counter liberal and socialist political societies. The plan was to fuse the nobles and the peasants into a single force that could obliterate the urban middle-class liberals, who were, after all, such a tiny part of the population. And the association for King and Fatherland was undeniably popular. It spread across Prussia, and at its height, had over 60,000 active members. As this conservative reaction was getting organized, the Prussian Diet came back with their

draft of the Constitution on July the 26th, and it was shockingly liberal, shockingly radical. Though it kept the form of a constitutional monarchy, the Constitution was clearly aimed at destroying the old pillars of Prussian power, the king, the nobility, and the army. In addition to all the standard civil rights, a new Prussian parliament would have broad executive oversight. They would control their own citizen militia. They would approve all treaties. The king would be given a suspensive veto only. That is, he could only delay, not stop, legislation he did not like. Cabinet ministers would be answerable to the Parliament, not to the king. And then the Constitution swept aside all the old noble trappings. Titles and privileges gone.

Conservatives, including conservative liberals, were aghast. This was a republic in all but name. But once they got over their initial shock, it turned out this Constitution was actually kind of a blessing in disguise for the conservatives, as it gave them fodder to take out to the general population and say, you see what these madmen are trying to do, is this what you want? And very often the answer was, no, that's not what we want. That is, if the answer wasn't, why are you standing in my field waving that piece of paper in my face? I don't care about politics, which is, I'm sure, also a fairly standard response

from your average Prussian farmer. Now, a few days later, the things again neared a boiling point. On July the 31st, a demonstration in a small city in Cilicia, in favor of a robust, citizen militia under the control of the National Diet, led to shots being fired by the local army garrison and 14 people getting killed. When the members of the National Diet heard the news, the left wing forced through a motion on August 9th that the army must swear an oath to uphold the Constitution and pledge to defend it. The king blew his top when he found out about this.

He was the king of Prussia. The army was his to command. That was the whole point of being the king. King of Prussia. So Frinierkvohm was becoming increasingly willing to listen to those advisors who were telling him to push back hard, that the people didn't really want any of this. Then the Conservatives organized a representative assembly of their own that was later dubbed the Yonker Parliament, Yonker being the name for the Prussian landed nobility in case I haven't mentioned that yet. But they met on August the 18th and 19th, and looked to create that

sought after fusion of peasant and nobility, rallying together behind traditional Prussian values. Now, the nobles did accept that serfdom, and many of the old feudal obligations, were now a thing of the past, but the group of 400 conservatives who assembled in Berlin denounced liberalism as a narrow ideology that was only favored by the urban middle classes, a tiny sliver of the population. Who are they to claim that they speak for the people? Now, everything we've talked about so far today, happening in Frankfurt and Berlin, could fall under the category of domestic politics. But it was going to be foreign affairs that would drive things to a head on multiple fronts, because a major international incident was about to force a confrontation between German liberals and German radicals on the one hand, and then between German liberals and German conservatives on the other. At the end of these confrontations, the liberals in Frankfurt would be left impotent and isolated.

So what is this oh so important international incident? That's right, it's our old friend, the Schleswig-Holstein question. So recall, please, that the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein are legally inseparable, even though Holstein was ethnically German and Schleswig was traditionally at least ethnically Dane, though by now most of the southern part of the Dutchie had been settled by migrating Germans. So German nationalists claimed Holstein. Danish nationalist claimed Schleswig, and a shooting war had broken out in March that had then led the Prussians to invade the Dutchies in support of the German population.

This intervention alarmed the British and the Russians, who combined to bring heavy pressure on both sides to come to terms and not risk upsetting the balance of power in the Baltic Sea and the North Sea. and by that they meant stop Prussian expansion. Recall also, please, the King Friedrich Wilhelm of Prussia had never wanted to go to war in the first place, but he had been compelled to by popular nationalist pressures. Well, since we last left our intractable little duchies at the end of May, a de facto ceasefire has been in effect. And by the late summer of 1848, that de facto ceasefire would turn into an official armistice.

Representatives from both Denmark and Prussia signed the Treaty of Malmou on August the 26th, which would stay in effect for seven months while a permanent accord was reached. During that time, both Prussia and Denmark agreed to pull out of Schlaeswig Holstein. The provisional government that had been established there by the local nobility would be abolished, and a joint German-Dain administration would be put in place. It was exactly the kind of agreement that was designed to please no one, except for maybe the British and the Russians. For his part, the king of Denmark had already concluded that he was going to use that seven months to get ready to go back to war the second the

treaty expired. The cry of Denmark to the Ider was too powerful for him to stop. Meanwhile, on the other side, German nationalists howled the minute they heard the terms. In the Frankfurt Parliament, speaker after speaker rose, including the forceful rubber. Bloom and said, this is an abomination. It's a national disgrace. We will never be able to hold our heads high again. And on September the 5th, the parliament took a very provocative vote. They voted to reject the Treaty of Malmou. Now, though this is often portrayed as the Frankfurt Parliament like unanimously rejecting the treaty, it is worth noting that the vote was 238 to 221, so they were still very divided, even if generally offended. Now, the vote to reject the treaty had very few

practical implications. It's not like the Frankfurt Parliament could actually do anything about it. But as German national unification was coalescing around the parliament, it was a clear indication that if the German people had their way, they would keep fighting, even if it meant a general engagement with the rest of Europe. After this vote, Archduke John stayed on as regent. but the rest of his ministers refused to be a party to it and resigned. And then it started to dawn on many who had voted to reject the treaty what they had just done. Are we really gunning for war with Europe? Well, actually, it probably won't even come to that,

because the king of Prussia will probably steamroll the lot of us into the dustbin of history before it gets to that. So on September the 16th, a second vote was held, and this time they voted to accept the treaty. but this opened them up to attacks from strident nationalists and radicals who now lost any lingering faith they might have had in the Frankfurt Parliament, which they determined was full of weak-willed, weak-need, turncoat, traitorous liberals. This all led to a confrontation in the streets of Frankfurt. The very next day, about 12,000 people gathered to listen to speeches from the outraged far-left delegates of the parliament who denounced everything.

They just denounced everything. and said that it was time for a second revolution. Now, we did a whole episode about the specter of the French Revolution, but unfortunately, I don't know how much of this incident is informed by that old 1789, 1792 split. But clearly, the gist of all these speeches was, The boys of 1789 are selling us out. It's time to break out 1792. So they planned a mass demonstration for the next day.

But as the work was getting going, the authorities got wind of it, and the new prime minister, Anton von Schmerling, called for regular army troops from Prussia and Austria to come into the city the next morning. Von Schmerling is an interesting footnote to all of this. He was an Austrian liberal and a former member of the lower Austrian estates, and he had been in the room when the Vienna crowds had pushed their way in back in March, and he had been the one to carry their demands to the emperor. In the wake of all that, he had then helped organize the Vienna civic.

Guard before heading to Frankfurt as one of the few Austrian delegates. He had been Minister of the Interior but had resigned in protest over the Treaty of Malmow vote. Now he was recalled by Archduke John and given more or less carte blanche to cede to the security of Frankfurt. On the morning of September the 18th, 1848, crowds swarmed into the middle of Frankfurt and demonstrated in front of the Parliament. and some members of the crowd managed to find an unlocked door on the side of the parliament building, and a bunch of them rushed in.

Once inside the building, they broke through other locked doors with axes to force their way into the actual meeting room. But when they poured in, old Heinrich von Goghren, who had been one of the most popular liberal leaders of the parliament, took to the roster and sternly rebuked their illegal and immoral invasion of the parliament, and had they no sense of shame. And unlike the people of Paris, who, as we've seen long had a habit of blowing raspberries at the politicians when they had pushed their way into an assembly, the demonstrators in Frankfurt were, I guess, a little sheepish and shame-faced about what they had just done.

Maybe they'd gotten carried away, and they departed without further incident. But out in the streets, blood still ran hot, and then blood just ran. Two conservative members of the parliament were caught outside when the demonstrators started getting out of hand. They were identified and they were lynched by a mob. One of them was just straight up beaten to death. Then barricades started going up in the meantime, but the troops called in by Von Schmerling were right on top of them, and they did not spare the bullets in making sure that this did not turn into a full-blown insurrection. Within a few hours, the streets were cleared and Frankfurt was under martial law.

60 people lay dead. So as I noted last week, while discussing the events in Vienna, where that worker demonstration on August the 23rd had led to the liberal civic guard firing on the crowd, and that marking the permanent split between liberals and radicals, the same can now be said of September the 18th in Frankfurt. With the liberals recoiling from the radicals and the radicals disgusted by the liberals, the whole course of the revolution of 1848 is now lurching in the direction of Count. revolution. Now, certainly the Frankfurt Parliament was still going to go about its business, and it was still going to try to draft a constitution. But it now had no real basis of support. I mean, they lacked any support at all from conservatives who hoped that they failed, and, who I might add, had just provided the troops that the Frankfurt Parliament needed to survive. And now the liberals had alienated the radicals to the point where they ceased to be able to

call upon the energy of the people. And that was not a small thing. They had relied on, that energy to force their way into power back in March. So as the summer turned to the fall of 1848, the liberals turned their backs on the very revolutionary force that had propelled them forward in the first place. And so they were sitting ducks for the much stronger forces of conservative counter-revolution. But that's not to say that the radicals were like so powerful. News of the events of September the 18th spread across Europe and soon reached the community of emigre German radicals living in Switzerland.

And it would come as music to the ears of Gustav Stroove. In the months after the failed hecker uprising, Struve had bounced around in exile between Switzerland and France, living for a time in Straussburg, and even traveling up to Paris in time to witness firsthand the failed June uprising there. So disillusioned with the liberals even by then, the June days in Paris were just more proof that they could not be counted on. During these months of bouncing around in exile,

Strouve published a plan for revolution, which can be taken as his manifesto for the movement he hoped to lead to ultimate victory. What Strouve wanted was German unity under a republic, and his plan for revolution included all the basic political points, civil rights and democratic suffrage. But he also now included many social demands. He called for a department of labor to protect workers. He wanted to limit usury. He wanted equitable profit sharing, and he wanted a progressive income tax.

And really, I mean, yes, in the context of 1848, Strouve is a wild-eyed radical, but his plan for revolution sure sounds a lot like the fundamental assumptions that modern Germany is built on. Struve was in Switzerland when he got word of the violence in Frankfurt, and he decided the time had come for the second revolution, that the people would now finally see that the liberals did not represent the people and that they must be overthrown. And on September the 22nd, 1848, he and a small group of followers crossed the border back into Baden to restart their revolution. But as Shrew hastily prepared to renew the armed fight, he would not be joined by his old friend and comrade, Friedrich Hecker. Hecker's disillusionment had grown terminal. even before the events in Frankfurt, he had moved out of the community in Switzerland after having

his election to the Frankfurt Parliament dismissed twice. He also already had one major military fiasco behind him, and he just decided that none of this was going to work out, that the cause was lost. So, completely coincidentally, on that same day, September the 22nd, Hacker and a small company of his friends and followers were far away on the north coast of France, boarding a ship that would take them away to a new life in the United States, where they could be rid of the old hypocrisies and immovable tyrannies of conservative Europe. America already had what we're so miserably fighting for, so why don't we just give up and go build a new home there? Hecker would be among the first of the so-called 48ers, a major diaspora of German radicals, and then eventually

the defeated German liberals, who would move to the United States in the wake of the revolution of 1848. We'll talk a bit more about them later as we wrap up our series on 1848, as they do have an interesting role to play in the build-up to an unfolding of the American Civil War. But Gustav Strau had not given up the ghost just yet, and he believed that if the radical Democrats could carve out a space in Baden that they could continue to press the revolution forward. And if nothing else, they could create a safe haven for the German radical left, who must now surely see the folly of trying to work with the fools in Frankfurt. But his headlong rush back to take up arms was not greeted warmly even amongst his fellow

radicals. Plenty felt that this was not actually the right time, nor were they ready to take on the regular armies of Germany. And Shroove would later be criticized for blowing a longer-term project that was allegedly in the works. And a few of his more bitter personal rivals in the movement hinted that his life as an emigrate had been hard, that it had left him penniless, and that is why he was so eager and willing to embrace what turned out to be a disaster, no less miserable, than Hecker's uprising. Undeterred, though, Struve and a few others crossed into Baden on September the 22nd, and with the help of a corps band of allies waiting for them, they seized control of the city hall of Loroc, a city just on the other side of the Swiss-German border. There, from the balcony

of the city hall, Struve proclaimed a German republic. And this rather dramatic gesture marks the official beginning of what history has dubbed the Struve putch. Struve and his lieutenants then said about raising troops and organizing a provisional committee to lead what they hoped would be the beginning of a prolonged effort to carve out a democratic republic from the map of Germany. With the left-wing delegates to the Frankfurt Parliament surely on the way, they would then be able to move on to forming a more coherent provisional government. Recruiters fanned out across the countryside, tapping into old militia networks,

and to their credit, they were able to raise a few thousand men, though not likely the 10,000 that Struve later claimed. They also had a pretty decent cadre of saboteurs, who went to work on the rail lines to hinder the response of the Grand Duke of Bodden's army. But unfortunately, they were not able to raise enough men fast enough, and even more importantly, they were just not armed enough. There were not enough guns. There was not enough powder.

The criticism of Struve rushing into things was not just 2020 hindsight. These deficiencies were known at the time. But yet off he rushed. Leading about a thousand men down the Rhine, hoping to gather up more men and munitions as he went, they made it about as far as the town of Stauphin before they ran into a detachment of the Baden army. This means they made it all of about, oh, 30 miles from the Swiss border. There, on September the 24th, 800 Republicans battled 900 regular troops, and the battle did not quite last two hours, before the ill-trained and underarmed radicals broke and fled.

And that was the rather unceremonious end to the abrupt Strue Puch. Now, as had happened during the Hecker uprising, there was another column that was supposed to link, up with Struve. But when they heard that he was defeated, they turned around and retreated, and then scattered and fled upon news that even more regular army troops were on the way. Struve himself was then arrested by a local militia company, who decided they could head off harsh reprisals if they handed the radical leader over. Struve was tossed into prison, where he would later be tried for treason, though he would not, it is important to note, be summarily shot. And so this will not be the last that we hear

of Gustav Stroove. The failure of the Second Bodden uprising or the Struve-Putch or whatever you want to call it only deepened the now very mutual divide between the liberals and radicals, as the liberals back in Frankfurt and frankly everywhere else in Central Europe now sought radical insurgents as the enemy and the regular army troops of the old powers of Europe as their friends. But as I said, this leaves them without really any friends at all, because the only reason the liberals have gotten this far in the first place was fear in the various courts of Europe of a popular uprising. With the liberals now saying, yeah, we're actually with you and we're done giving those guys political cover, the crown heads of Europe started feeling pretty good about

their chances to put the genie of both radicalism and liberalism back in the bottle. And next week, we will head back to Vienna, where the once-ascendant students and workers of the imperial capital are about to get bombed into oblivion.