Chapter XX (3)

In the preparation of a Constitution for Germany the Assembly could draw little help from the work of legislators in other countries. Belgium, whose institutions were at once recent and successful, was not a Federal State; the founders of the American Union had not had to reckon with four kings and to include in their federal territory part of the dominions of an emperor. Instead of grappling at once with the formidable difficulties of political organisation, the Committee charged with the drafting of a Constitution determined first to lay down the principles of civil right which were to be the basis of the German commonwealth. There was something of the scientific spirit of the Germans in thus working out the substructure of public law on which all other institutions were to rest; moreover, the remembrance of the Decrees of Carlsbad and of the other exceptional legislation from which Germany had so heavily suffered excited a strong demand for the most solemn guarantees against arbitrary departure from settled law in the future. Thus, regardless of the absence of any material power by which its conclusions were to be enforced, the Assembly, in the intervals between its stormy debates on the politics of the hour, traced with philosophic thoroughness the consequences of the principles of personal liberty and of equality before the law, and fashioned the order of a modern society in which privileges of class, diversity of jurisdictions, and the trammels of feudalism on industrial life were alike swept away. Four months had passed, and the discussion of the so-called Primary Rights was still unfinished, when the Assembly was warned by an outbreak of popular violence in Frankfort itself of the necessity of hastening towards a constitutional settlement.

[The Armistice of Malmö, Aug. 26.]

[Outrages at Frankfort, Sept. 18.]

The progress of the insurrection in Schleswig-Holstein against Danish sovereignty had been watched with the greatest interest throughout Germany; and in the struggle of these provinces for their independence the rights and the honour of the German nation at large were held to be deeply involved. As the representative of the Federal authority, King Frederick William of Prussia had sent his troops into Holstein, and they arrived there in time to prevent the Danish army from following up its first successes and crushing the insurgent forces. Taking up the offensive, General Wrangel at the head of the Prussian troops succeeded in driving the Danes out of Schleswig, and at the beginning of May he crossed the border between Schleswig and Jutland and occupied the Danish fortress of Fredericia. His advance into purely Danish territory occasioned the diplomatic intervention of Russia and Great Britain; and, to the deep disappointment of the German nation and its Parliament, the King of Prussia ordered his general to retire into Schleswig. The Danes were in the meantime blockading the harbours and capturing the merchant-vessels of the Germans, as neither Prussia nor the Federal Government possessed a fleet of war. For some weeks hostilities were irresolutely continued in Schleswig, while negotiations were pursued in foreign capitals and various forms of compromise urged by foreign Powers. At length, on the 26th of August, an armistice of seven months was agreed upon at Malmö in Sweden by the representatives of Denmark and Prussia, the Court of Copenhagen refusing to recognise the German central Government at Frankfort or to admit its envoy to the conferences. The terms of this armistice, when announced in Germany, excited the greatest indignation, inasmuch as they declared all the acts of the Provisional Government of Schleswig-Holstein null and void, removed all German troops from the Duchies, and handed over their government during the duration of the armistice to a Commission of which half the members were to be appointed by the King of Denmark. Scornfully as Denmark had treated the Assembly of Frankfort, the terms of the armistice nevertheless required its sanction. The question was referred to a committee, which, under the influence of the historian Dahlmann, himself formerly an official in Holstein, pronounced for the rejection of the treaty. The Assembly, in a scene of great excitement, resolved that the execution of the measures attendant on the armistice should be suspended. The Ministry in consequence resigned, and Dahlmann was called upon to replace it by one under his own leadership. He proved unable to do so. Schmerling resumed office, and demanded that the Assembly should reverse its vote. Though in severance from Prussia the Central Government had no real means of carrying on a war with Denmark, the most passionate opposition was made to this demand. The armistice was, however, ultimately ratified by a small majority. Defeated in the Assembly, the leaders of the extreme Democratic faction allied themselves with the populace of Frankfort, which was ready for acts of violence. Tumultuous meetings were held; the deputies who had voted for the armistice were declared traitors to Germany. Barricades were erected, and although the appearance of Prussian troops prevented an assault from being made on the Assembly, its members were attacked in the streets, and two of them murdered by the mob (Sept. 17th). A Republican insurrection was once more attempted in Baden, but it was quelled without difficulty. [444]

[Berlin, April-Sept., 1848.]

The intervention of foreign Courts on behalf of Denmark had given ostensible ground to the Prussian Government for not pursuing the war with greater resolution; but though the fear of Russia undoubtedly checked King Frederick William, this was not the sole, nor perhaps the most powerful influence that worked upon him. The cause of Schleswig-Hulstein was, in spite of its legal basis, in the main a popular and a revolutionary one, and between the King of Prussia and the revolution there was an intense and a constantly deepening antagonism. Since the meeting of the National Assembly at Berlin on the 22nd of May the capital had been the scene of an almost unbroken course of disorder. The Assembly, which was far inferior in ability and character to that of Frankfort, soon showed itself unable to resist the influence of the populace. On the 8th of June a resolution was moved that the combatants in the insurrection of March deserved well of their country. Had this motion been carried the King would have dissolved the Assembly: it was outvoted, but the mob punished this concession to the feelings of the monarch by outrages upon the members of the majority. A Civic Guard was enrolled from citizens of the middle class, but it proved unable to maintain order, and wholly failed to acquire the political importance which was gained by the National Guard of Paris after the revolution of 1830. Exasperated by their exclusion from service in the Guard, the mob on the 14th of June stormed an arsenal and destroyed the trophies of arms which they found there. Though violence reigned in the streets the Assembly rejected a proposal for declaring the inviolability of its members, and placed itself under the protection of the citizens of Berlin. King Frederick William had withdrawn to Potsdam, where the leaders of reaction gathered round him. He detested his Constitutional Ministers, who, between a petulant king and a suspicious Parliament, were unable to effect any useful work and soon found themselves compelled to relinquish their office. In Berlin the violence of the working classes, the interruption of business, the example of civil war in Paris, inclined men of quiet disposition to a return to settled government at any price. Measures brought forward by the new Ministry for the abolition of the patrimonial jurisdictions, the hunting-rights and other feudal privileges of the greater landowners, occasioned the organisation of a league for the defence of property, which soon became the focus of powerful conservative interests. Above all, the claims of the Archduke John, as Administrator of the Empire, to the homage of the army, and the hostile attitude assumed towards the army by the Prussian Parliament itself, exasperated the military class and encouraged the king to venture on open resistance. A tumult having taken place at Schweidnitz in Silesia, in which several persons were shot by the soldiery, the Assembly, pending an investigation into the circumstances, demanded that the Minister of War should publish an order requiring the officers of the army to work with the citizens for the realisation of Constitutional Government; and it called upon all officers not loyally inclined to a Constitutional system to resign their commissions as a matter of honour. Denying the right of the Chamber to act as a military executive, the Minister of War refused to publish the order required. The vote was repeated, and in the midst of threatening demonstrations in the streets the Ministry resigned (Sept. 7th). [445]

[The Prussian army.]

[Count Brandenburg Minister, Nov. 2.]

[Prorogation of the Prussian Assembly, Nov. 9.]

It had been the distinguishing feature of the Prussian revolution that the army had never for a moment wavered in its fidelity to the throne. The success of the insurrection of March 18th had been due to the paucity of troops and the errors of those in command, not to any military disaffection such as had paralysed authority in Paris and in the Mediterranean States. Each affront offered to the army by the democratic majority in the Assembly supplied the King with new weapons; each slight passed upon the royal authority deepened the indignation of the officers. The armistice of Malmö brought back to the neighbourhood of the capital a general who was longing to crush the party of disorder, and regiments on whom he could rely; but though there was now no military reason for delay, it was not until the capture of Vienna by Windischgrätz had dealt a fatal blow at democracy in Germany that Frederick William determined to have done with his own mutinous Parliament and the mobs by which it was controlled. During September and October the riots and tumults in the streets of Berlin continued. The Assembly, which had rejected the draft of a Constitution submitted to it by the Cabinet, debated the clauses of one drawn up by a Committee of its own members, abolished nobility, orders and titles, and struck out from the style of the sovereign the words that described him as King by the Grace of God. When intelligence arrived in Berlin that the attack of Windischgrätz upon Vienna had actually begun, popular passion redoubled. The Assembly was besieged by an angry crowd, and a resolution in favour of the intervention of Prussia was brought forward within the House. This was rejected, and it was determined instead to invoke the mediation of the Central Government at Frankfort between the Emperor and his subjects. But the decision of the Assembly on this and every other point was now matter of indifference. Events outstripped its deliberations, and with the fall of Vienna its own course was run. On the 2nd of November the King dismissed his Ministers and called to office the Count of Brandenburg, a natural son of Frederick William II., a soldier in high command, and one of the most outspoken representatives of the monarchical spirit of the army. The meaning of the appointment was at once understood. A deputation from the Assembly conveyed its protest to the King at Potsdam. The King turned his back upon them without giving an answer, and on the 9th of November an order was issued proroguing the Assembly, and bidding it to meet on the 27th at Brandenburg, not at Berlin.

[Last days of the Prussian Assembly.]

[Dissolution of the Assembly, Dec. 5.]

[Prussian Constitution granted by edict.]

The order of prorogation, as soon as signed by the King was brought into the Assembly by the Ministers, who demanded that it should be obeyed immediately and without discussion. The President allowing a debate to commence, the Ministers and seventy-eight Conservative deputies left the Hall. The remaining deputies, two hundred and eighty in number, then passed a resolution declaring that they would not meet at Brandenburg; that the King had no power to remove, to prorogue, or to dissolve the Assembly without its own consent; and that the Ministers were unfit to hold office. This challenge was answered by a proclamation of the Ministers declaring the further meeting of the deputies illegal, and calling upon the Civic Guard not to recognise them as a Parliament. On the following day General Wrangel and his troops entered Berlin and surrounded the Assembly Hall. In reply to the protests of the President, Wrangel answered that the Parliament had been prorogued and must disappear. The members peaceably left the Hall, but reassembled at another spot that they had selected in anticipation of expulsion; and for some days they were pursued by the military from one place of meeting to another. On the 15th of November they passed a resolution declaring the expenditure of state funds and the raising of taxes by the Government to be illegal so long as the Assembly should not be permitted to continue its deliberations. The Ministry on its part showed that it was determined not to brook resistance. The Civic Guard was dissolved and ordered to surrender its arms. It did so without striking a blow, and vanished from the scene, a memorable illustration of the political nullity of the middle class in Berlin as compared with that of Paris. The state of siege was proclaimed, the freedom of the Press and the right of public meeting were suspended. On the 27th of November a portion of the Assembly appeared, according to the King's order, at Brandenburg, but the numbers present were not sufficient for the transaction of business. The presence of the majority, however, was not required, for the King had determined to give no further legal opportunities to the men who had defied him. Treating the vote of November 15th as an act of rebellion on the part of those concerned in it, the King dissolved the Assembly (December 5th), and conferred upon Prussia a Constitution drawn up by his own advisers, with the promise that this Constitution should be subject to revision by the future representative body. Though the dissolution of the Assembly occasioned tumults in Breslau and Cologne it was not actively resented by the nation at large. The violence of the fallen body during its last weeks of existence had exposed it to general discredit; its vote of the 15th of November had been formally condemned by the Parliament of Frankfort; and the liberal character of the new Constitution, which agreed in the main with the draft-Constitution produced by the Committee of the Assembly, disposed moderate men to the belief that in the conflict between the King and the popular representatives the fault had not been on the side of the sovereign.

[The Frankfort Parliament and Austria, Oct.-Dec.]

In the meantime the Parliament of Frankfort, warned against longer delay by the disturbances of September 17th, had addressed itself in earnest to the settlement of the Federal Constitution of Germany. Above a host of minor difficulties two great problems confronted it at the outset. The first was the relation of the Austrian Empire, with its partly German and partly foreign territory, to the German national State; the other was the nature of the headship to be established. As it was clear that the Austrian Government could not apply the public law of Germany to its Slavic and Hungarian provinces, it was enacted in the second article of the Frankfort Constitution that where a German and a non-German territory had the same sovereign, the relation between these countries must be one of purely personal union under the sovereign, no part of Germany being incorporated into a single State with any non-German land. At the time when this article was drafted the disintegration of Austria seemed more probable than the re-establishment of its unity; no sooner, however, had Prince Schwarzenberg been brought into power by the subjugation of Vienna, than he made it plain that the government of Austria was to be centralised as it had never been before. In the first public declaration of his policy he announced that Austria would maintain its unity and permit no exterior influence to modify its internal organisation; that the settlement of the relations between Austria and Germany could only be effected after each had gained some new and abiding political form; and that in the meantime Austria would continue to fulfil its duties as a confederate. [446] The interpretation put upon this statement at Frankfort was that Austria, in the interest of its own unity, preferred not to enter the German body, but looked forward to the establishment of some intimate alliance with it at a future time. As the Court of Vienna had evidently determined not to apply to itself the second article of the Constitution, and an antagonism between German and Austrian policy came within view, Schmerling, as an Austrian subject, was induced to resign his office, and was succeeded in it by Gagern, hitherto President of the Assembly (Dec. 16th). [447]

[The Frankfort Parliament and Austria, Dec., Jan.]

In announcing the policy of the new Ministry, Gagern assumed the exclusion of Austria from the German Federation. Claiming for the Assembly, as the representative of the German nation, sovereign power in drawing up the Constitution, he denied that the Constitution could be made an object of negotiation with Austria. As Austria refused to fulfil the conditions of the second article, it must remain outside the Federation; the Ministry desired, however, to frame some close and special connection between Austria and Germany, and asked for authority to negotiate with the Court of Vienna for this purpose. Gagern's declaration of the exclusion of Austria occasioned a vehement and natural outburst of feeling among the Austrian deputies, and was met by their almost unanimous protest. Some days later there arrived a note from Schwarzenberg which struck at the root of all that had been done and all that was claimed by the Assembly. Repudiating the interpretation that had been placed upon his words, Schwarzenberg declared that the affairs of Germany could only be settled by an understanding between the Assembly and the Courts, and by an arrangement with Austria, which was the recognised chief of the Governments and intended to remain so in the new Federation. The question of the inclusion or exclusion of Austria now threw into the shade all the earlier differences between parties in the Assembly. A new dividing-line was drawn. On the one side appeared a group composed of the Austrian representatives, of Ultramontanes who feared a Protestant ascendency if Austria should be excluded, and of deputies from some of the smaller States who had begun to dread Prussian domination. On the other side was the great body of representatives who set before all the cause of German national union, who saw that this union would never be effected in any real form if it was made to depend upon negotiations with the Austrian Court, and who held, with the Minister, that to create a true German national State without the Austrian provinces was better than to accept a phantom of complete union in which the German people should be nothing and the Cabinet of Vienna everything. Though coalitions and intrigues of parties obscured the political prospect from day to day, the principles of Gagern were affirmed by a majority of the Assembly, and authority to negotiate some new form of connection with Austria, as a power outside the Federation, was granted to the Ministry.

[The Federal Headship.]

[King Frederick William IV. elected Emperor, March 28.]

The second great difficulty of the Assembly was the settlement of the Federal headship. Some were for a hereditary Emperor, some for a President or Board, some for a monarchy alternating between the Houses of Prussia and Austria, some for a sovereign elected for life or for a fixed period. The first decision arrived at was that the head should be one of the reigning princes of Germany, and that he should bear the title of Emperor. Against the hereditary principle there was a strong and, at first, a successful opposition. Reserving for future discussion other questions relating to the imperial office, the Assembly passed the Constitution through the first reading on February 3rd, 1849. It was now communicated to all the German Governments, with the request that they would offer their opinions upon it. The four minor kingdoms--Saxony, Hanover, Bavaria, and Würtemberg--with one consent declared against any Federation in which Austria should not be included; the Cabinet of Vienna protested against the subordination of the Emperor of Austria to a central power vested in any other German prince, and proposed that the entire Austrian Empire, with its foreign as well as its German elements, should enter the Federation. This note was enough to prove that Austria was in direct conflict with the scheme of national union which the Assembly had accepted; but the full peril of the situation was not perceived till on the 9th of March Schwarzenberg published the Constitution of Olmütz, which extinguished all separate rights throughout the Austrian Empire, and confounded in one mass, as subjects of the Emperor Francis Joseph, Hungarians, Germans, Slavs and Italians. The import of the Austrian demand now stood out clear and undisguised. Austria claimed to range itself with a foreign population of thirty millions within the German Federation; in other words, to reduce the German national union to a partnership with all the nationalities of Central Europe, to throw the weight of an overwhelming influence against any system of free representative government, and to expose Germany to war where no interests but those of the Pole or the Magyar might be at stake. So deep was the impression made at Frankfort by the fall of the Kremsier Parliament and the publication of Schwarzenberg's unitary edict, that one of the most eminent of the politicians who had hitherto opposed the exclusion of Austria--the Baden deputy Welcker--declared that further persistence in this course would be treason to Germany. Ranging himself with the Ministry, he proposed that the entire German Constitution, completed by a hereditary chieftainship, should be passed at a single vote on the second reading, and that the dignity of Emperor should be at once offered to the King of Prussia. Though the Assembly declined to pass the Constitution by a single vote, it agreed to vote upon clause by clause without discussion. The hereditary principle was affirmed by the narrow majority of four in a House of above five hundred. The second reading of the Constitution was completed on the 27th of March, and on the following day the election of the sovereign took place. Two hundred and ninety votes were given for the King of Prussia. Two hundred and forty-eight members, hostile to the hereditary principle or to the prince selected, abstained from voting. [448]

[Frederick William IV.]

Frederick William had from early years cherished the hope of seeing some closer union of Germany established under Prussian influence. But he dwelt in a world where there was more of picturesque mirage than of real insight. He was almost superstitiously loyal to the House of Austria; and he failed to perceive, what was palpable to men of far inferior endowments to his own, that by setting Prussia at the head of the constitutional movement of the epoch he might at any time from the commencement of his reign have rallied all Germany round it. Thus the revolution of 1848 burst upon him, and he was not the man to act or to lead in time of revolution. Even in 1848, had he given promptly and with dignity what, after blood had been shed in his streets, he had to give with humiliation, he would probably have been acclaimed Emperor on the opening of the Parliament of Frankfort, and have been accepted by the universal voice of Germany. But the odium cast upon him by the struggle of March 18th was so great that in the election of a temporary Administrator of the Empire in June no single member at Frankfort gave him a vote. Time was needed to repair his credit, and while time passed Austria rose from its ruins. In the spring of 1849 Frederick William could not have assumed the office of Emperor of Germany without risk of a war with Austria, even had he been willing to accept this office on the nomination of the Frankfort Parliament. But to accept the Imperial Crown from a popular Assembly was repugnant to his deepest convictions. Clear as the Frankfort Parliament had been, as a whole, from the taint of Republicanism or of revolutionary violence, it had nevertheless had its birth in revolution: the crown which it offered would, in the King's expression, have been picked up from blood and mire. Had the princes of Germany by any arrangement with the Assembly tendered the crown to Frederick William the case would have been different; a new Divine right would have emanated from the old, and conditions fixed by negotiation between the princes and the popular Assembly might have been endured. That Frederick William still aspired to German leadership in one form or another no one doubted; his disposition to seek or to reject an accommodation with the Frankfort Parliament varied with the influences which surrounded him. The Ministry led by the Count of Brandenburg, though anti-popular in its domestic measures, was desirous of arriving at some understanding with Gagern and the friends of German union. Shortly before the first reading of the Constitution at Frankfort, a note had been drafted in the Berlin Cabinet admitting under certain provisions the exclusion of Austria from the Federation, and proposing, not that the Assembly should admit the right of each Government to accept or reject the Constitution, but that it should meet in a fair spirit such recommendations as all the Governments together should by a joint act submit to it. This note, which would have rendered an agreement between the Prussian Court and the Assembly possible, Frederick William at first refused to sign. He was induced to do so (Jan. 23rd) by his confidant Bunsen, who himself was authorised to proceed to Frankfort. During Bunsen's absence despatches arrived at Berlin from Schwarzenberg, who, in his usual resolute way, proposed to dissolve the Frankfort Assembly, and to divide Germany between Austria, Prussia, and the four secondary kingdoms. Bunsen on his return found his work undone; the King recoiled under Austrian pressure from the position which he had taken up, and sent a note to Frankfort on the 16th of February, which described Austria as a necessary part of Germany and claimed for each separate Government the right to accept or reject the Constitution as it might think fit. Thus the acceptance of the headship by Frederick William under any conditions compatible with the claims of the Assembly was known to be doubtful when, on the 28th of March, the majority resolved to offer him the Imperial Crown. The disposition of the Ministry at Berlin was indeed still favourable to an accommodation; and when, on the 2nd of April, the members of the Assembly who were charged to lay its offer before Frederick William arrived at Berlin, they were received with such cordiality by Brandenburg that it was believed the King's consent had been won.

[Frederick William IV. refuses the Crown, April 3.]

The reply of the King to the deputation on the following day rudely dispelled these hopes. He declared that before he could accept the Crown not only must he be summoned to it by the Princes of Germany, but the consent of all the Governments must be given to the Constitution. In other words, he required that the Assembly should surrender its claims to legislative supremacy, and abandon all those parts of the Federal Constitution of which any of the existing Governments disapproved. As it was certain that Austria and the four minor kingdoms would never agree to any Federal union worthy of the name, and that the Assembly could not now, without renouncing its past, admit that the right of framing the Constitution lay outside itself, the answer of the King was understood to amount to a refusal. The deputation left Berlin in the sorrowful conviction that their mission had failed; and a note which was soon afterwards received at Frankfort from the King showed that this belief was correct. [449]

[The Frankfort Constitution rejected by the Governments.]

The answer of King Frederick William proved indeed much more than that he had refused the Crown of Germany; it proved that he would not accept the Constitution which the Assembly had enacted. The full import of this determination, and the serious nature of the crisis now impending over Germany, were at once understood. Though twenty-eight Governments successively accepted the Constitution, these were without exception petty States, and their united forces would scarcely have been a match for one of its more powerful enemies. On the 5th of April the Austrian Cabinet declared the Assembly to have been guilty of illegality in publishing the Constitution, and called upon all Austrian deputies to quit Frankfort. The Prussian Lower Chamber, elected under the King's recent edict, having protested against the state of siege in Berlin, and having passed a resolution in favour of the Frankfort Constitution, was forthwith dissolved. Within the Frankfort Parliament the resistance of Governments excited a patriotic resentment and caused for the moment a union of parties. Resolutions were passed declaring that the Assembly would adhere to the Constitution. A Committee was charged with the ascertainment of measures to be adopted for enforcing its recognition; and a note was addressed to all the hostile Governments demanding that they should abstain from proroguing or dissolving the representative bodies within their dominions with the view of suppressing the free utterance of opinions in favour of the Constitution.

[End of the German National Assembly, June, 1849.]

On the ground of this last demand the Prussian official Press now began to denounce the Assembly of Frankfort as a revolutionary body. The situation of affairs daily became worse. It was in vain that the Assembly appealed to the Governments, the legislative Chambers, the local bodies, the whole people, to bring the Constitution into effect. The moral force on which it had determined to rely proved powerless, and in despair of conquering the Governments by public opinion the more violent members of the democratic party determined to appeal to insurrection. On the 4th of May a popular rising began at Dresden, where the King, under the influence of Prussia, had dismissed those of his Ministers who urged him to accept the Constitution, and had dissolved his Parliament. The outbreak drove the King from his capital; but only five days had passed when a Prussian army-corps entered the city and crushed the rebellion. In this interval, short as it was, there had been indications that the real leaders of the insurrection were fighting not for the Frankfort Constitution but for a Republic, and that in the event of their victory a revolutionary Government, connected with French and Polish schemes of subversion, would come into power. In Baden this was made still clearer. There the Government of the Grand Duke had actually accepted the Frankfort Constitution, and had ordered elections to be held for the Federal legislative body by which the Assembly was to be succeeded. Insurrection nevertheless broke out. The Republic was openly proclaimed; the troops joined the insurgents; and a Provisional Government allied itself with a similar body that had sprung into being with the help of French and Polish refugees in the neighbouring Palatinate. Conscious that these insurrections must utterly ruin its own cause, the Frankfort Assembly on the suggestion of Gagern called upon the Archduke John to suppress them by force of arms, and at the same time to protect the free expression of opinion on behalf of the Constitution where threatened by Governments. John, who had long clung to his office only to further the ends of Austria, refused to do so, and Gagern in consequence resigned. With his fall ended the real political existence of the Assembly. In reply to a resolution which it passed on the 10th of May, calling upon John to employ all the forces of Germany in defence of the Constitution, the Archduke placed a mock-Ministry in office. The Prussian Government, declaring the vote of the 10th of May to be a summons to civil war, ordered all Prussian deputies to withdraw from the Assembly, and a few days later its example was imitated by Saxony and Hanover. On the 20th of May sixty-five of the best known of the members, including Arndt and Dahlmann, placed on record their belief that in the actual situation the relinquishment of the task of the Assembly was the least of evils, and declared their work at Frankfort ended. Other groups followed them till there remained only the party of the extreme Left, which had hitherto been a weak minority, and which in no sense represented the real opinions of Germany. This Rump-Parliament, troubling itself little with John and his Ministers, determined to withdraw from Frankfort, where it dreaded the appearance of Prussian troops, into Würtemberg, where it might expect some support from the revolutionary Governments of Baden and the Palatinate. On the 6th of June a hundred and five deputies assembled at Stuttgart. There they proceeded to appoint a governing Committee for all Germany, calling upon the King of Würtemberg to supply them with seven thousand soldiers, and sending out emissaries to stir up the neighbouring population. But the world disregarded them. The Government at Stuttgart, after an interval of patience, bade them begone; and on the 18th of June their hall was closed against them and they were dispersed by troops, no one raising a hand on their behalf. The overthrow of the insurgents who had taken up arms in Baden and the Palatinate was not so easy a matter. A campaign of six weeks was necessary, in which the army of Prussia, led by the Prince of Prussia, sustained some reverses, before the Republican levies were crushed, and with the fall of Rastadt the insurrection was brought to a close. [450]

[The Baden insurrection suppressed, July, 1849.]

[Prussia attempts to form a separate union.]

The end of the German Parliament, on which the nation had set such high hopes and to which it had sent so much of what was noblest in itself, contrasted lamentably with the splendour of its opening. Whether a better result would have been attained if, instead of claiming supreme authority in the construction of Federal union, the Assembly had from the first sought the co-operation of the Governments, must remain matter of conjecture. Austria would under all circumstances have been the great hindrance in the way; and after the failure of the efforts made at Frankfort to establish the general union of Germany, Austria was able completely to frustrate the attempts which were now made at Berlin to establish partial union upon a different basis. In notifying to the Assembly his refusal of the Imperial Crown, King Frederick William had stated that he was resolved to place himself at the head of a Federation to be formed by States voluntarily uniting with him under terms to be subsequently arranged; and in a circular note addressed to the German Governments he invited such as were disposed to take counsel with Prussia to unite in Conference at Berlin. The opening of the Conference was fixed for the 17th of May. Two days before this the King issued a proclamation to the Prussian people announcing that in spite of the failure of the Assembly of Frankfort a German union was still to be formed. When the Conference opened at Berlin, no envoys appeared but those of Austria, Saxony, Hanover, and Bavaria. The Austrian representative withdrew at the end of the first sitting, the Bavarian rather later, leaving Prussia to lay such foundations as it could for German unity with the temporising support of Saxony and Hanover. A confederation was formed, known as the League of the Three Kingdoms. An undertaking was given that a Federal Parliament should be summoned, and that a Constitution should be made jointly by this Parliament and the Governments (May 26th). On the 11th of June the draft of a Federal Constitution was published. As the King of Prussia was apparently acting in good faith, and the draft-Constitution in spite of some defects seemed to afford a fair basis for union, the question now arose among the leaders of the German national movement whether the twenty-eight States which had accepted the ill-fated Constitution of Frankfort ought or ought not to enter the new Prussian League. A meeting of a hundred and fifty ex-members of the Frankfort Parliament was held at Gotha; and although great indignation was expressed by the more democratic faction, it was determined that the scheme now put forward by Prussia deserved a fair trial. The whole of the twenty-eight minor States consequently entered the League, which thus embraced all Germany with the exception of Austria, Bavaria and Würtemberg. But the Courts of Saxony and Hanover had from the first been acting with duplicity. The military influence of Prussia, and the fear which they still felt of their own subjects, had prevented them from offering open resistance to the renewed work of Federation; but they had throughout been in communication with Austria, and were only waiting for the moment when the complete restoration of Austria's military strength should enable them to display their true colours. During the spring of 1849, while the Conferences at Berlin were being held, Austria was still occupied with Hungary and Venice. The final overthrow of these enemies enabled it to cast its entire weight upon Germany. The result was seen in the action of Hanover and Saxony, which now formally seceded from the Federation. Prussia thus remained at the end of 1849 with no support but that of the twenty-eight minor States. Against it, in open or in tacit antagonism to the establishment of German unity in any effective form, the four secondary Kingdoms stood ranged by the side of Austria.

[Prussia in 1849.]

[The Union Parliament at Erfurt, March 1850.]

It was not until the 20th of March, 1850, that the Federal Parliament, which had been promised ten months before on the incorporation of the new League, assembled at Erfurt. In the meantime reaction had gone far in many a German State. In Prussia, after the dissolution of the Lower Chamber on April 27th, 1849, the King had abrogated the electoral provisions of the Constitution so recently granted by himself, and had substituted for them a system based on the representation of classes. Treating this act as a breach of faith, the Democratic party had abstained from voting at the elections, with the result that in the Berlin Parliament of 1850 Conservatives, Reactionists, and officials formed the great majority. The revision of the Prussian Constitution, promised at first as a concession to Liberalism, was conducted in the opposite sense. The King demanded the strengthening of monarchical power; the Feudalists, going far beyond him, attacked the municipal and social reforms of the last two years, and sought to lead Prussia back to the system of its mediæval estates. It was in the midst of this victory of reaction in Prussia that the Federal Parliament at Erfurt began its sittings. Though the moderate Liberals, led by Gagern and other tried politicians of Frankfurt, held the majority in both Houses, a strong Absolutist party from Prussia confronted them, and it soon became clear that the Prussian Government was ready to play into the hands of this party. The draft of the Federal Constitution, which had been made at Berlin, was presented, according to the undertaking of May 28th, 1849, to the Erfurt Assembly. Aware of the gathering strength of the reaction and of the danger of delay, the Liberal majority declared itself ready to pass the draft into law without a single alteration. The reactionary minority demanded that a revision should take place; and, to the scandal of all who understood the methods or the spirit of Parliamentary rule, the Prussian Ministers united with the party which demanded alterations in the project which they themselves had brought forward. A compromise was ultimately effected; but the action of the Court of Prussia and the conduct of its Ministers throughout the Erfurt debates struck with deep despondency those who had believed that Frederick William might still effect the work in which the Assembly of Frankfort had failed. The trust in the King's sincerity or consistence of purpose sank low. The sympathy of the national Liberal party throughout Germany was to a great extent alienated from Prussia; while, if any expectation existed at Berlin that the adoption of a reactionary policy would disarm the hostility of the Austrian Government to the new League, this hope was wholly vain and baseless. [451]

[Action of Austria.]

Austria had from the first protested against the attempt of the King of Prussia to establish any new form of union in Germany, and had declared that it would recognise none of the conclusions of the Federal Parliament of Erfurt. According to the theory now advanced by the Cabinet of Vienna the ancient Federal Constitution of Germany was still in force. All that had happened since March, 1848, was so much wanton and futile mischief-making. The disturbance of order had at length come to an end, and with the exit of the rioters the legitimate powers re-entered into their rights. Accordingly, there could be no question of the establishment of new Leagues. The old relation of all the German States to one another under the ascendency of Austria remained in full strength; the Diet of Frankfort, which had merely suspended its functions and by no means suffered extinction, was still the legitimate central authority. That some modifications might be necessary in the ancient Constitution was the most that Austria was willing to admit. This, however, was an affair not for the German people but for its rulers, and Austria accordingly invited all the Governments to a Congress at Frankfort where the changes necessary might be discussed. In reply to this summons, Prussia strenuously denied that the old Federal Constitution was still in existence. The princes of the numerous petty States which were included in the new Union assembled at Berlin round Frederick William, and resolved that they would not attend the Conference at Frankfort except under reservations and conditions which Austria would not admit. Arguments and counter-arguments were exchanged; but the controversy between an old and a new Germany was one to be decided by force of will or force of arms, not by political logic. The struggle was to be one between Prussia and Austria, and the Austrian Cabinet had well gauged the temper of its opponent. A direct summons to submission would have roused all the King's pride, and have been answered by war. Before demanding from Frederick William the dissolution of the Union which he had founded, Schwarzenberg determined to fix upon a quarrel in which the King should be perplexed or alarmed at the results of his own policy. The dominant conviction in the mind of Frederick William was that of the sanctity of monarchical rule. If the League of Berlin could be committed to some enterprise hostile to monarchical power, and could be charged with an alliance with rebellion, Frederick William would probably falter in his resolutions, and a resort to arms, for which, however, Austria was well prepared, would become unnecessary. [452]

[Hesse-Cassel.]

[The Diet of Frankfort restored, Sept., 1850.]

[Prussia and Austria.]

[The Warsaw meeting, Oct. 29, 1850.]

[Manteuffel at Olmütz, Nov. 29.]

Among the States whose Governments had been forced by public opinion to join the new Federation was the Electorate of Hesse-Cassel. The Elector was, like his predecessors, a thorough despot at heart, and chafed under the restrictions which a constitutional system imposed upon his rule. Acting under Austrian instigation, he dismissed his Ministers in the spring of 1850, and placed in office one Hassenpflug, a type of the worst and most violent class of petty tyrants produced by the officialism of the minor German States. Hassenpflug immediately quarrelled with the Estates at Cassel, and twice dissolved them, after which he proceeded to levy taxes by force. The law-courts declared his acts illegal; the officers of the army, when called on for assistance, began to resign. The conflict between the Minister and the Hessian population was in full progress when, at the beginning of September, Austria with its vassal Governments proclaimed the re-establishment of the Diet of Frankfort. Though Prussia and most of the twenty-eight States confederate with it treated this announcement as null and void, the Diet, constituted by the envoys of Austria, the four minor Kingdoms, and a few seceders from the Prussian Union, commenced its sittings. To the Diet the Elector of Hesse forthwith appealed for help against his subjects, and the decision was given that the refusal of the Hessian Estates to grant the taxes was an offence justifying the intervention of the central power. Fortified by this judgment, Hassenpflug now ordered that every person offering resistance to the Government should be tried by court-martial. He was baffled by the resignation of the entire body of officers in the Hessian army; and as this completed the discomfiture of the Elector, the armed intervention of Austria, as identified with the Diet of Frankfort, now became a certainty. But to the protection of the people of Hesse in their constitutional rights Prussia, as chief of the League which Hesse had joined, stood morally pledged. It remained for the King to decide between armed resistance to Austria or the humiliation of a total abandonment of Prussia's claim to leadership in any German union. Conflicting influences swayed the King in one direction and another. The friends of Austria and of absolutism declared that the employment of the Prussian army on behalf of the Hessians would make the King an accomplice of revolution: the bolder and more patriotic spirits protested against the abdication of Prussia's just claims and the evasion of its responsibilities towards Germany. For a moment the party of action, led by the Prince of Prussia, gained the ascendant. General Radowitz, the projector of the Union, was called to the Foreign Ministry, and Prussian troops entered Hesse. Austria now ostentatiously prepared for war. Frederick William, terrified by the danger confronting him, yet unwilling to yield all, sought the mediation of the Czar of Russia. Nicholas came to Warsaw, where the Emperor of Austria and Prince Charles, brother of the King of Prussia, attended by the Ministers of their States, met him. The closest family ties united the Courts of St. Petersburg and Berlin but the Russian sovereign was still the patron of Austria as he had been in the Hungarian campaign. He resented the action of Prussia in Schleswig-Holstein, and was offended that King Frederick William had not presented himself at Warsaw in person. He declared in favour of all Austria's demands, and treated Count Brandenburg with such indignity that the Count, a high-spirited patriot, never recovered from its effect. He returned to Berlin only to give in his report and die. Manteuffel, Minister of the Interior, assured the King that the Prussian army was so weak in numbers and so defective in organisation that, if it took the field against Austria and its allies, it would meet with certain ruin. Bavarian troops, representing the Diet of Frankfort, now entered Hesse at Austria's bidding, and stood face to face with the Prussians. The moment had come when the decision must be made between peace and war. At a Council held at Berlin on November and the peace-party carried the King with them. Radowitz gave up office; Manteuffel, the Minister of repression within and of submission without, was set at the head of the Government. The meaning of his appointment was well understood, and with each new proof of the weakness of the King the tone of the Court of Austria became more imperious. On the 9th of November Schwarzenberg categorically demanded the dissolution of the Prussian Union, the recognition of the Federal Diet, and the evacuation of Hesse by the Prussian troops. The first point was at once conceded, and in hollow, equivocating language Manteuffel made the fact known to the members of the Confederacy. The other conditions not being so speedily fulfilled, Schwarzenberg set Austrian regiments in motion, and demanded the withdrawal of the Prussian troops from Hesse within twenty-four hours. Manteuffel begged the Austrian Minister for an interview, and, without waiting for an answer, set out for Olmütz. His instructions bade him to press for certain concessions; none of these did he obtain, and he made the necessary submission without them. On the 29th of November a convention was signed at Olmütz, in which Prussia recognised the German Federal Constitution of 1815 as still existing, undertook to withdraw all its troops from Hesse with the exception of a single battalion, and consented to the settlement of affairs both in Hesse and in Schleswig-Holstein by the Federal Diet. One point alone in the scheme of the Austrian statesman was wanting among the fruits of his victory at Olmütz and of the negotiations at Dresden by which this was followed. Schwarzenberg had intended that the entire Austrian Empire should enter the German Federation; and if he had had to reckon with no opponents but the beaten and humbled Prussia, he would have effected his design. But the prospect of a central European Power, with a population of seventy millions, controlled as this would virtually be by the Cabinet of Vienna, alarmed other nations. England declared that such a combination would undo the balance of power in Europe and menace the independence of Germany; France protested in more threatening terms; and the project fell to the ground, to be remembered only as the boldest imagination of a statesman for whom fortune, veiling the Nemesis in store, seemed to set no limit to its favours.

[Schleswig-Holstein.]

[The German National Fleet sold by auction, June, 1852.]