[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 King Frederick William had withdrawn to Potsdam, where the leaders of reaction gathered round him.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 Malmoe 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 Windischgraetz 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 Windischgraetz 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 Wuertemberg—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 Olmuetz, 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 Wuertemberg, 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 Wuertemberg 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 Wuertemberg. 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 mediaeval 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 Olmuetz, 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 Olmuetz. 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 Olmuetz, 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 Olmuetz 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.]

The cause of Schleswig-Holstein, so intimately bound up with the efforts of the Germans towards national union, sank with the failure of these efforts; and in the final humiliation of Prussia it received what might well seem its death-blow. The armistice of Malmoe, which was sanctioned by the Assembly of Frankfort in the autumn of 1848, lasted until March 26th, 1849. War was then recommenced by Prussia, and the lines of Dueppel were stormed by its troops, while the volunteer forces of Schleswig-Holstein unsuccessfully laid siege to Fredericia. Hostilities had continued for three months, when a second armistice, to last for a year, and Preliminaries of Peace, were agreed upon. At the conclusion of this armistice, in July, 1850, Prussia, in the name of Germany, made peace with Denmark. The inhabitants of the Duchies in consequence continued the war for themselves, and though defeated with great loss at Idstedt on the 24th of July, they remained unconquered at the end of the year. This was the situation of affairs when Prussia, by the Treaty of Olmuetz, agreed that the restored Federal Diet should take upon itself the restoration of order in Schleswig-Holstein, and that the troops of Prussia should unite with those of Austria to enforce its decrees. To the Cabinet of Vienna, the foe in equal measure of German national union and of every democratic cause, the Schleswig-Holsteiners were simply rebels in insurrection against their sovereign, They were required by the Diet, under Austrian dictation, to lay down their arms; and commissioners from Austria and Prussia entered the Duchies to compel them to do so. Against Denmark, Austria, and Prussia together, it was impossible for Schleswig-Holstein to prolong its resistance. The army was dissolved, and the Duchies were handed over to the King of Denmark, to return to the legal status which was defined in the Treaties of Peace. This was the nominal condition of the transfer; but the Danish Government treated Schleswig as part of its national territory, and in the northern part of the Duchy the process of substituting Danish for German nationality was actively pursued. The policy of foreign Courts, little interested in the wish of the inhabitants, had from the beginning of the struggle of the Duchies against Denmark favoured the maintenance and consolidation of the Danish Kingdom. The claims of the Duke of Augustenburg, as next heir to the Duchies in the male line, were not considered worth the risk of a new war; and by a protocol signed at London on the 2nd of August, 1850, the Powers, with the exception of Prussia, declared themselves in favour of a single rule of succession in all parts of the Danish State. By a Treaty of the 8th of May, 1852, to which Prussia gave its assent, the pretensions of all other claimants to the disputed succession were set aside, and Prince Christian, of the House of Gluecksburg, was declared heir to the throne, the rights of the German Federation as established by the Treaties of 1815 being reserved. In spite of this reservation of Federal rights, and of the stipulations in favour of Schleswig and Holstein made in the earlier agreements, the Duchies appeared to be now practically united with the Danish State. Prussia, for a moment their champion, had joined with Austria in coercing their army, in dissolving their Government, in annulling the legislation by which the Parliament of Frankfort had made them participators in public rights thenceforward to be the inheritance of all Germans. A page in the national history was obliterated; Prussia had turned its back on its own professions; there remained but one relic from the time when the whole German people seemed so ardent for the emancipation of its brethren beyond the frontier. The national fleet, created by the Assembly of Frankfort for the prosecution of the struggle with Denmark, still lay at the mouth of the Elbe. But the same power which had determined that Germany was not to be a nation had also determined that it could have no national maritime interests. After all that had passed, authority had little call to be nice about appearances; and the national fleet was sold by auction, in accordance with a decree of the restored Diet of Frankfort, in the summer of 1852. [453]

[Germany after 1849.]

It was with deep disappointment and humiliation that the Liberals of Germany, and all in whom the hatred of democratic change had not overpowered the love of country, witnessed the issue of the movement of 1848. In so far as that movement was one directed towards national union it had totally failed, and the state of things that had existed before 1848 was restored without change. As a movement of constitutional and social reform, it had not been so entirely vain; nor in this respect can it be said that Germany after the year 1848 returned altogether to what it was before it. Many of the leading figures of the earlier time re-appeared indeed with more or less of lustre upon the stage. Metternich though excluded from office by younger men, beamed upon Vienna with the serenity of a prophet who had lived to see most of his enemies shot and of a martyr who had returned to one of the most enviable Salons in Europe. No dynasty lost its throne, no class of the population had been struck down with proscription as were the clergy and the nobles of France fifty years before. Yet the traveller familiar with Germany before the revolution found that much of the old had now vanished, much of a new world come into being. It was not sought by the re-established Governments to undo at one stroke the whole of the political, the social, the agrarian legislation of the preceding time, as in some other periods of reaction. The nearest approach that was made to this was in a decree of the Diet annulling the Declaration of Rights drawn up by the Frankfort Assembly, and requiring the Governments to bring into conformity with the Federal Constitution all laws and institutions made since the beginning of 1848. Parliamentary government was thereby enfeebled, but not necessarily extinguished. Governments narrowed the franchise, curtailed the functions of representative assemblies, filled these with their creatures, coerced voters at elections; but, except in Austria, there was no open abandonment of constitutional forms. In some States, as in Saxony under the reactionary rule of Count Beust, the system of national representation established in 1848 was abolished and the earlier Estates were revived; in Prussia the two Houses of Parliament continued in existence, but in such dependence upon the royal authority, and under such strong pressure of an aristocratic and official reaction, that, after struggling for some years in the Lower House, the Liberal leaders at length withdrew in despair. The character which Government now assumed in Prussia was indeed far more typical of the condition of Germany at large than was the bold and uncompromising despotism of Prince Schwarzenberg in Austria. Manteuffel, in whom the Prussian epoch of reaction was symbolised, was not a cruel or a violent Minister; but his rule was stamped with a peculiar and degrading meanness, more irritating to those who suffered under it than harsher wrong. In his hands government was a thing of eavesdropping and espionage, a system of petty persecution, a school of subservience and hypocrisy. He had been the instrument at Olmuetz of such a surrender of national honour and national interests as few nations have ever endured with the chances of war still untried. This surrender may, in the actual condition of the Prussian army, have been necessary, but the abasement of it seemed to cling to Manteuffel and to lower all his conceptions of government. Even where the conclusions of his policy were correct they seemed to have been reached by some unworthy process. Like Germany at large, Prussia breathed uneasily under an oppression which was everywhere felt and yet was hard to define. Its best elements were those which suffered the most: its highest intellectual and political aims were those which most excited the suspicion of the Government. Its King had lost whatever was stimulating or elevated in his illusions. From him no second alliance with Liberalism, no further effort on behalf of German unity, was to be expected: the hope for Germany and for Prussia, if hope there was, lay in a future reign.

[Austria after 1851.]

[Austrian Concordat, Sept. 18, 1855.]

The powerlessness of Prussia was the measure of Austrian influence and prestige. The contrast presented by Austria in 1848 and Austria in 1851 was indeed one that might well arrest political observers. Its recovery had no doubt been effected partly by foreign aid, and in the struggle with the Magyars a dangerous obligation had been incurred towards Russia; but scarred and riven as the fabric was within, it was complete and imposing without. Not one of the enemies who in 1848 had risen against the Court of Vienna now remained standing. In Italy, Austria had won back what had appeared to be hopelessly lost; in Germany it had more than vindicated its old claims. It had thrown its rival to the ground, and the full measure of its ambition was perhaps even yet not satisfied. "First to humiliate Prussia, then to destroy it," was the expression in which Schwarzenberg summed up his German policy. Whether, with his undoubted firmness and daring, the Minister possessed the intellectual qualities and the experience necessary for the successful administration of an Empire built up, as Austria now was, on violence and on the suppression of every national force, was doubted even by his admirers. The proof, however, was not granted to him, for a sudden death carried him off in his fourth year of power (April 5th, 1852). Weaker men succeeded to his task. The epoch of military and diplomatic triumph was now ending, the gloomier side of the reaction stood out unrelieved by any new succession of victories. Financial disorder grew worse and worse. Clericalism claimed its bond from the monarchy which it had helped to restore. In the struggle of the nationalities of Austria against the central authority the Bishops had on the whole thrown their influence on to the side of the Crown. The restored despotism owed too much to their help and depended too much on their continued goodwill to be able to refuse their demands. Thus the new centralised administration, reproducing in general the uniformity of government attempted by the Emperor Joseph II., contrasted with this in its subservience to clerical power. Ecclesiastical laws and jurisdictions were allowed to encroach on the laws and jurisdiction of the State; education was made over to the priesthood; within the Church itself the bishops were allowed to rule uncontrolled. The very Minister who had taken office under Schwarzenberg as the representative of the modern spirit, to which the Government still professed to render homage, became the instrument of an act of submission to the Papacy which marked the lowest point to which Austrian policy fell. Alexander Bach, a prominent Liberal in Vienna at the beginning of 1848, had accepted office at the price of his independence, and surrendered himself to the aristocratic and clerical influences that dominated the Court. Consistent only in his efforts to simplify the forms of government, to promote the ascendency of German over all other elements in the State, to maintain the improvement in the peasant's condition effected by the Parliament of Kremsier, Bach, as Minister of the Interior, made war in all other respects on his own earlier principles. In the former representative of the Liberalism of the professional classes in Vienna absolutism had now its most efficient instrument; and the Concordat negotiated by Bach with the Papacy in 1855 marked the definite submission of Austria to the ecclesiastical pretensions which in these years of political languor and discouragement gained increasing recognition throughout Central Europe. Ultramontanism had sought allies in many political camps since the revolution of 1848. It had dallied in some countries with Republicanism; but its truer instincts divined in the victory of absolutist systems its own surest gain. Accommodations between the Papacy and several of the German Governments were made in the years succeeding 1849; and from the centralised despotism of the Emperor Francis Joseph the Church won concessions which since the time of Maria Theresa it had in vain sought from any ruler of the Austrian State.

[France after 1848.]

[Louis Napoleon.]

The European drama which began in 1848 had more of unity and more of concentration in its opening than in its close. In Italy it ends with the fall of Venice; in Germany the interest lingers till the days of Olmuetz; in France there is no decisive break in the action until the Coup d'Etat which, at the end of the year 1851, made Louis Napoleon in all but name Emperor of France. The six million votes which had raised Louis Napoleon to the Presidency of the Republic might well have filled with alarm all who hoped for a future of constitutional rule; yet the warning conveyed by the election seems to have been understood by but few. As the representative of order and authority, as the declared enemy of Socialism, Louis Napoleon was on the same side as the Parliamentary majority; he had even been supported in his candidature by Parliamentary leaders such as M. Thiers. His victory was welcomed as a victory over Socialism and the Red Republic; he had received some patronage from the official party of order, and it was expected that, as nominal chief of the State, he would act as the instrument of this party. He was an adventurer, but an adventurer with so little that was imposing about him, that it scarcely occurred to men of influence in Paris to credit him with the capacity for mischief. His mean look and spiritless address, the absurdities of his past, the insignificance of his political friends, caused him to be regarded during his first months of public life with derision rather than with fear. The French, said M. Thiers long afterwards, made two mistakes about Louis Napoleon: the first when they took him for a fool, the second when they took him for a man of genius. It was not until the appearance of the letter to Colonel Ney, in which the President ostentatiously separated himself from his Ministers and emphasised his personal will in the direction of the foreign policy of France, that suspicions of danger to the Republic from his ambition arose. From this time, in the narrow circle of the Ministers whom official duty brought into direct contact with the President, a constant sense of insecurity and dread of some new surprise on his part prevailed, though the accord which had been broken by the letter to Colonel Ney was for a while outwardly re-established, and the forms of Parliamentary government remained unimpaired.

[Message of Oct. 31, 1849.]

The first year of Louis Napoleon's term of office was drawing to a close when a message from him was delivered to the Assembly which seemed to announce an immediate attack upon the Constitution. The Ministry in office was composed of men of high Parliamentary position; it enjoyed the entire confidence of a great majority in the Assembly, and had enforced with at least sufficient energy the measures of public security which the President and the country seemed agreed in demanding. Suddenly, on the 31st of October, the President announced to the Assembly by a message carried by one of his aides-de-camp that the Ministry were dismissed. The reason assigned for their dismissal was the want of unity within the Cabinet itself; but the language used by the President announced much more than a ministerial change. "France, in the midst of confusion, seeks for the hand, the will of him whom it elected on the 10th of December. The victory won on that day was the victory of a system, for the name of Napoleon is in itself a programme. It signifies order, authority, religion, national prosperity within; national dignity without. It is this policy, inaugurated by my election, that I desire to carry to triumph with the support of the Assembly and of the people." In order to save the Republic from anarchy, to maintain the prestige of France among other nations, the President declared that he needed men of action rather than of words; yet when the list of the new Ministers appeared, it contained scarcely a single name of weight. Louis Napoleon had called to office persons whose very obscurity had marked them as his own instruments, and guaranteed to him the ascendency which he had not hitherto possessed within the Cabinet. Satisfied with having given this proof of his power, he resumed the appearance of respect, if not of cordiality, towards the Assembly. He had learnt to beware of precipitate action; above two years of office were still before him; and he had now done enough to make it clear to all who were disposed to seek their fortunes in a new political cause that their services on his behalf would be welcomed, and any excess of zeal more than pardoned. From this time there grew up a party which had for its watchword the exaltation of Louis Napoleon and the derision of the methods of Parliamentary government. Journalists, unsuccessful politicians, adventurers of every description, were enlisted in the ranks of this obscure but active band. For their acts and their utterances no one was responsible but themselves. They were disavowed without compunction when their hardihood went too far; but their ventures brought them no peril, and the generosity of the President was not wanting to those who insisted on serving him in spite of himself.

[Law limiting the Franchise, May 31, 1850.]

France was still trembling with the shock of the Four Days of June; and measures of repression formed the common ground upon which Louis Napoleon and the Assembly met without fear of conflict. Certain elections which were held in the spring of 1850, and which gave a striking victory in Paris and elsewhere to Socialist or Ultra-Democratic candidates, revived the alarms of the owners of property, and inspired the fear that with universal suffrage the Legislature itself might ultimately fall into the hands of the Red Republicans. The principle of universal suffrage had been proclaimed almost by accident in the midst of the revolution of 1848. It had been embodied in the Constitution of that year because it was found already in existence. No party had seriously considered the conditions under which it was to be exercised, or had weighed the political qualifications of the mass to whom it was so lightly thrown. When election after election returned to the Chamber men whose principles were held to menace society itself, the cry arose that France must be saved from the hands of the vile multitude; and the President called upon a Committee of the Assembly to frame the necessary measures of electoral reform. Within a week the work of the Committee was completed, and the law which it had drafted was brought before the Assembly. It was proposed that, instead of a residence of six months, a continuous residence of three years in the same commune should be required of every voter, and that the fulfilment of this condition should be proved, not by ordinary evidence, but by one of certain specified acts, such as the payment of personal taxes. With modifications of little importance the Bill was passed by the Assembly. Whether its real effect was foreseen even by those who desired the greatest possible limitation of the franchise is doubtful; it is certain that many who supported it believed, in their ignorance of the practical working of electoral laws, that they were excluding from the franchise only the vagabond and worthless class which has no real place within the body politic. When the electoral lists drawn up in pursuance of the measure appeared, they astounded all parties alike. Three out of the ten millions of voters in France were disfranchised. Not only the inhabitants of whole quarters in the great cities but the poorer classes among the peasantry throughout France had disappeared from the electoral body. The Assembly had at one blow converted into enemies the entire mass of the population that lived by the wages of bodily labour. It had committed an act of political suicide, and had given to a man so little troubled with scruples of honour as Louis Napoleon the fatal opportunity of appealing to France as the champion of national sovereignty and the vindicator of universal suffrage against an Assembly which had mutilated it in the interests of class. [454]

[Prospects of Louis Napoleon.]

The duration of the Presidency was fixed by the Constitution of 1848 at four years, and it was enacted that the President should not be re-eligible to his dignity. By the operation of certain laws imperfectly adjusted to one another, the tenure of office by Louis Napoleon expired on the 8th of May, 1852, while the date for the dissolution of the Assembly fell within a few weeks of this day. France was therefore threatened with the dangers attending the almost simultaneous extinction of all authority. The perils of 1852 loomed only too visibly before the country, and Louis Napoleon addressed willing hearers when, in the summer of 1850, he began to hint at the necessity of a prolongation of his own power. The Parliamentary recess was employed by the President in two journeys through the Departments; the first through those of the south-east, where Socialism was most active, and where his appearance served at once to prove his own confidence and to invigorate the friends of authority; the second through Normandy, where the prevailing feeling was strongly in favour of firm government, and utterances could safely be made by the President which would have brought him into some risk at Paris. In suggesting that France required his own continued presence at the head of the State Louis Napoleon was not necessarily suggesting a violation of the law. It was provided by the Statutes of 1848 that the Assembly by a vote of three-fourths might order a revision of the Constitution; and in favour of this revision petitions were already being drawn up throughout the country. Were the clause forbidding the re-election of the President removed from the Constitution, Louis Napoleon might fairly believe that an immense majority of the French people would re-invest him with power. He would probably have been content with a legal re-election had this been rendered possible; but the Assembly showed little sign of a desire to smooth his way, and it therefore became necessary for him to seek the means of realising his aims in violation of the law. He had persuaded himself that his mission, his destiny, was to rule France; in other words, he had made up his mind to run such risks and to sanction such crimes as might be necessary to win him sovereign power. With the loftier impulses of ambition, motives of a meaner kind stimulated him to acts of energy. Never wealthy, the father of a family though unmarried, he had exhausted his means, and would have returned to private life a destitute man, if not laden with debt. When his own resolution flagged, there were those about him too deeply interested in his fortunes to allow him to draw back.

[Louis Napoleon and the army.]

[Dismissal of Changarnier, Jan., 1851.]

It was by means of the army that Louis Napoleon intended in the last resort to make himself master of France, and the army had therefore to be won over to his personal cause. The generals who had gained distinction either in the Algerian wars or in the suppression of insurrection in France were without exception Orleanists or Republicans. Not a single officer of eminence was as yet included in the Bonapartist band. The President himself had never seen service except in a Swiss camp of exercise; beyond his name he possessed nothing that could possibly touch the imagination of a soldier. The heroic element not being discoverable in his person or his career, it remained to work by more material methods. Louis Napoleon had learnt many things in England, and had perhaps observed in the English elections of that period how much may be effected by the simple means of money-bribes and strong drink. The saviour of society was not ashamed to order the garrison of Paris double rations of brandy and to distribute innumerable doles of half a franc or less. Military banquets were given, in which the sergeant and the corporal sat side by side with the higher officers. Promotion was skilfully offered or withheld. As the generals of the highest position were hostile to Bonaparte, it was the easier to tempt their subordinates with the prospect of their places. In the acclamations which greeted the President at the reviews held at Paris in the autumn of 1850, in the behaviour both of officers and men in certain regiments, it was seen how successful had been the emissaries of Bonapartism. The Committee which represented the absent Chamber in vain called the Minister of War to account for these irregularities. It was in vain that Changarnier, who, as commander both of the National Guard of Paris and of the first military division, seemed to hold the arbitrament between President and Assembly in his hands, openly declared at the beginning of 1851 in favour of the Constitution. He was dismissed from his post; and although a vote of censure which followed this dismissal led to the resignation of the Ministry, the Assembly was unable to reinstate Changarnier in his command, and helplessly witnessed the authority which he had held pass into hostile or untrustworthy hands.

[Proposed Revision of the Constitution.]

[Revision of the Constitution rejected, July 19.]

There now remained only one possible means of averting the attack upon the Constitution which was so clearly threatened, and that was by subjecting the Constitution itself to revision in order that Louis Napoleon might legally seek re-election at the end of his Presidency. An overwhelming current of public opinion pressed indeed in the direction of such a change. However gross and undisguised the initiative of the local functionaries in preparing the petitions which showered upon the Assembly, the national character of the demand could not be doubted. There was no other candidate whose name carried with it any genuine popularity or prestige, or around whom even the Parliamentary sections at enmity with the President could rally. The Assembly was divided not very unevenly between Legitimists, Orleanists, and Republicans. Had indeed the two monarchical groups been able to act in accord, they might have had some hope of re-establishing the throne; and an attempt had already been made to effect a union, on the understanding that the childless Comte de Chambord should recognise the grandson of Louis Philippe as his heir, the House of Orleans renouncing its claims during the lifetime of the chief of the elder line. These plans had been frustrated by the refusal of the Comte de Chambord to sanction any appeal to the popular vote, and the restoration of the monarchy was therefore hopeless for the present. It remained for the Assembly to decide whether it would facilitate Louis Napoleon's re-election as President by a revision of the Constitution or brave the risk of his violent usurpation of power. The position was a sad and even humiliating one for those who, while they could not disguise their real feeling towards the Prince, yet knew themselves unable to count on the support of the nation if they should resist him. The Legitimists, more sanguine in temper, kept in view an ultimate restoration of the monarchy, and lent themselves gladly to any policy which might weaken the constitutional safeguards of the Republic. The Republican minority alone determined to resist any proposal for revision, and to stake everything upon the maintenance of the constitution in its existing form. Weak as the Republicans were as compared with the other groups in the Assembly when united against them, they were yet strong enough to prevent the Ministry from securing that majority of three-fourths without which the revision of the Constitution could not be undertaken. Four hundred and fifty votes were given in favour of revision, two hundred and seventy against it (July 19th). The proposal therefore fell to the ground, and Louis Napoleon, who could already charge the Assembly with having by its majority destroyed universal suffrage, could now charge it with having by its minority forbidden the nation to choose its own head. Nothing more was needed by him. He had only to decide upon the time and the circumstances of the coup d'etat which was to rid him of his adversaries and to make him master of France.

[Preparations for the coup d'etat.]

Louis Napoleon had few intimate confidants; the chief among these were his half-brother Morny, one of the illegitimate offspring of Queen Hortense, a man of fashion and speculator in the stocks; Fialin or Persigny, a person of humble origin who had proved himself a devoted follower of the Prince through good and evil; and Fleury, an officer at this time on a mission in Algiers. These were not men out of whom Louis Napoleon could form an administration, but they were useful to him in discovering and winning over soldiers and officials of sufficient standing to give to the execution of the conspiracy something of the appearance of an act of Government. A general was needed at the War Office who would go all lengths in illegality. Such a man had already been found in St. Arnaud, commander of a brigade in Algiers, a brilliant soldier who had redeemed a disreputable past by years of hard service, and who was known to be ready to treat his French fellow-citizens exactly as he would treat the Arabs. As St. Arnaud's name was not yet familiar in Paris, a campaign was arranged in the summer of 1851 for the purpose of winning him distinction. At the cost of some hundreds of lives St. Arnaud was pushed into sufficient fame; and after receiving congratulations proportioned to his exploits from the President's own hand, he was summoned to Paris, in order at the right moment to be made Minister of War. A troop of younger officers, many of whom gained a lamentable celebrity as the generals of 1870, were gradually brought over from Algiers and placed round the Minister in the capital. The command of the army of Paris was given to General Magnan, who, though he preferred not to share in the deliberations on the coup d'etat, had promised his cooperation when the moment should arrive. The support, or at least the acquiescence, of the army seemed thus to be assured. The National Guard, which, under Changarnier, would probably have rallied in defence of the Assembly, had been placed under an officer pledged to keep it in inaction. For the management of the police Louis Napoleon had fixed upon M. Maupas, Prefet of the Haute Garonne. This person, to whose shamelessness we owe the most authentic information that exists on the coup d'etat, had, while in an inferior station, made it his business to ingratiate himself with the President by sending to him personally police reports which ought to have been sent to the Ministers. The objects and the character of M. Maupas were soon enough understood by Louis Napoleon. He promoted him to high office; sheltered him from the censure of his superiors; and, when the coup d'etat was drawing nigh, called him to Paris, in the full and well-grounded confidence that, whatever the most perfidious ingenuity could contrive in turning the guardians of the law against the law itself, that M. Maupas, as Prefet of Police, might be relied upon to accomplish.

[The coup d'etat fixed for December.]

Preparations for the coup d'etat had been so far advanced in September that a majority of the conspirators had then urged Louis Napoleon to strike the blow without delay, while the members of the Assembly were still dispersed over France in the vacation. St. Arnaud, however, refused his assent, declaring that the deputies, if left free, would assemble at a distance from Paris, summon to them the generals loyal to the Constitution, and commence a civil war. He urged that, in order to avoid greater subsequent risks, it would be necessary to seize all the leading representatives and generals from whom resistance might be expected, and to hold them under durance until the crisis should be over. This simultaneous arrest of all the foremost public men in France could only be effected at a time when the Assembly was sitting. St. Arnaud therefore demanded that the coup d'etat should be postponed till the winter. Another reason made for delay. Little as the populace of Paris loved the reactionary Assembly, Louis Napoleon was not altogether assured that it would quietly witness his own usurpation of power. In waiting until the Chamber should again be in session, he saw the opportunity of exhibiting his cause as that of the masses themselves, and of justifying his action as the sole means of enforcing popular rights against a legislature obstinately bent on denying them. Louis Napoleon's own Ministers had overthrown universal suffrage. This might indeed be matter for comment on the part of the censorious, but it was not a circumstance to stand in the way of the execution of a great design. Accordingly Louis Napoleon determined to demand from the Assembly at the opening of the winter session the repeal of the electoral law of May 31st, and to make its refusal, on which he could confidently reckon, the occasion of its destruction.

[Louis Napoleon demands repeal of Law of May 31.]

[The Assembly refuses.]

The conspirators were up to this time conspirators and nothing more. A Ministry still subsisted which was not initiated in the President's designs nor altogether at his command. On his requiring that the repeal of the law of May 31st should be proposed to the Assembly, the Cabinet resigned. The way to the highest functions of State was thus finally opened for the agents of the coup d'etat. St. Arnaud was placed at the War Office, Maupas at the Prefecture of Police. The colleagues assigned to them were too insignificant to exercise any control over their actions. At the reopening of the Assembly on the 4th of November an energetic message from the President was read. On the one hand he denounced a vast and perilous combination of all the most dangerous elements of society which threatened to overwhelm France in the following year; on the other hand he demanded, with certain undefined safeguards, the re-establishment of universal suffrage. The middle classes were scared with the prospect of a Socialist revolution; the Assembly was divided against itself, and the democracy of Paris flattered by the homage paid to the popular vote. With very little delay a measure repealing the Law of May 31st was introduced into the Assembly. It was supported by the Republicans and by many members of the other groups; but the majority of the Assembly, while anxious to devise some compromise, refused to condemn its own work in the unqualified form on which the President insisted. The Bill was thrown out by seven votes. Forthwith the rumour of an impending coup d'etat spread through Paris. The Questors, or members charged with the safeguarding of the Assembly, moved the resolutions necessary to enable them to secure sufficient military aid. Even now prompt action might perhaps have saved the Chamber. But the Republican deputies, incensed by their defeat on the question of universal suffrage, plunged headlong into the snare set for them by the President, and combined with his open or secret partisans to reject the proposition of the Questors. Changarnier had blindly vouched for the fidelity of the army; one Republican deputy, more imaginative than his colleagues, bade the Assembly confide in their invisible sentinel, the people. Thus the majority of the Chamber, with the clearest warning of danger, insisted on giving the aggressor every possible advantage. If the imbecility of opponents is the best augury of success in a bold enterprise, the President had indeed little reason to anticipate failure.

[The coup d'etat, Dec. 2.]

The execution of the coup d'etat was fixed for the early morning of December 2nd. On the previous evening Louis Napoleon held a public reception at the Elysee, his quiet self-possessed manner indicating nothing of the struggle at hand. Before the guests dispersed the President withdrew to his study. There the last council of the conspirators was held, and they parted, each to the execution of the work assigned to him. The central element in the plan was the arrest of Cavaignac, of Changarnier and three other generals who were members of the Assembly, of eleven civilian deputies including M. Thiers, and of sixty-two other politicians of influence. Maupas summoned to the Prefecture of Police in the dead of night a sufficient number of his trusted agents, received each of them on his arrival in a separate room, and charged each with the arrest of one of the victims. The arrests were accomplished before dawn, and the leading soldiers and citizens of France met one another in the prison of Mazas. The Palais Bourbon, the meeting-place of the Assembly, was occupied by troops. The national printing establishment was seized by gendarmes, and the proclamations of Louis Napoleon, distributed sentence by sentence to different compositors, were set in type before the workmen knew upon what they were engaged. When day broke the Parisians found the soldiers in the streets, and the walls placarded with manifestoes of Louis Napoleon. The first of these was a decree which announced in the name of the French people that the National Assembly and the Council of State were dissolved, that universal suffrage was restored, and that the nation was convoked in its electoral colleges from the 14th to the 21st of December. The second was a proclamation to the people, in which Louis Napoleon denounced at once the monarchical conspirators within the Assembly and the anarchists who sought to overthrow all government. His duty called upon him to save the Republic by an appeal to the nation. He proposed the establishment of a decennial executive authority, with a Senate, a Council of State, a Legislative Body, and other institutions borrowed from the Consulate of 1799. If the nation refused him a majority of its votes he would summon a new Assembly and resign his powers; if the nation believed in the cause of which his name was the symbol, in France regenerated by the Revolution and organised by the Emperor, it would prove this by ratifying his authority. A third proclamation was addressed to the army. In 1830 and in 1848 the army had been treated as the conquered, but its voice was now to be heard. Common glories and sorrows united the soldiers of France with Napoleon's heir, and the future would unite them in common devotion to the repose and greatness of their country.