Hello and welcome to Revolutions.
In 1848, Germany did not exist on any map in Europe. It only existed in the minds of a handful of idealists, dreamers, romantics, and political reformers, whose imaginations had been swept away by the tidal wave of the French Revolution and Napoleon’s conquest of Europe, but who were then left high and dry in the reactionary retreat of that tidal wave after Waterloo.
The Revolutions of 1848 would not create Germany, but the Revolutions of 1848 were inextricably bound up in the desire to create Germany. So today, we’re going to pick our way through the constituent parts of Germanic central Europe, a land that was on the eve of 1848, not yet Germany, and was after 1848 still not yet Germany, but which was in the process of becoming Germany.
To begin this little tour of central Europe, I want to go back to even before the Congress of Vienna, which will create the system that the Revolutions of 1848 will be revolting against. I want to go back instead to the truly formative event in the history of Central Europe, the death of the Holy Roman Empire. For 900 years, the Holy Roman Empire had existed in its fractured, multi-tentacled, multi-crossed-over, interrelated, incestuously weird hodgepodge of over 300 kingdoms, duchies, principalities, ecclesiastic principalities, free cities, you name it, it was in there, and had been for nearly a millennium. Among all those little pebbles of territory, there had emerged by the mid 1700s the two big boulders, two of our five great powers, Austria and Prussia, both of whom were constituent members of the Holy Roman Empire, while also holding territory that was outside the Holy Roman Empire. It’s all very confusing, let me tell you, but you don’t have to worry about it too much, because once Napoleon rolled out the Grand Army, the Holy Roman Empire was pushed into the dustbin of history.
The dismantling of the Holy Roman Empire and the conquest of central Europe by the French unfolded over three big stages. The first stage unfolded during the early part of the French Revolutionary Wars. By 1795, the levée en masse was rolling, the French had gobbled up all the little principalities on the west side of the Rhine, and straight up annexed most of them into the French Republic. During that period, German liberals and reformers in many of the small constituent parts of the Holy Roman Empire positively welcomed the French as liberators, and those on the east side of the Rhine pined for their arrival. They pined for the revolutionary release from the overbearing Austrians.
Now, if you’ll remember from the later episodes of the French Revolution series, the French armies then repeatedly crossed the Rhine, but failed to make significant territorial inroads until Bonaparte comes along. And even then, it was not until his massive push east against the Russians and the Austrians, the decisive victory at Austerlitz in 1805, and the subsequent Treaty of Pressburg in 1806 that stage 2 unfolded. And this was the big one. Again, with active help from many of the smaller German states, the Holy Roman Empire was disbanded. Those smaller states were then reformed as the Confederation of the Rhine, a confederation that purposefully excluded the two powers that had heretofore dominated German affairs, Austria and Prussia. Now, because the Confederation of the Rhine was a collection of principalities, it wouldn’t be technically accurate to call them one of France’s sister republics. But they did share in the fate of those sister republics, which was that they celebrated the arrival of the French and freedom from the Austrians, only to learn that the French had only come to pump them for food, cash, men, and material, so that the war could feed itself.
Then the third and final stage unfolded just a few months later. Prussia, remember, had pursued a strict policy of neutrality, going all the way back to the peace at Basel in 1794. Well, after the collapse of the Holy Roman Empire, Prussia abandoned neutrality and gambled everything on a decisive strike at the French, which, boy oh boy, did that not work out for them at all. I mean, they’re going up against peak Napoleon, peak Grand Army. Crushed at the Battle of Jena in October of 1806, and then demoralized and humiliated by the Treaty of Tilsit in 1807, Prussia lost over half its territory, and was required to pay a massive indemnity to the French to maintain their own occupation. Napoleon and the French were now the masters of central Europe.
After conquering central Europe, Napoleon kept moving and continued to drag the peoples of Europe on a great murderous migratory wave from west to east until the pendulum reached Moscow, and that murderous migratory wave swung the peoples of Europe back from east to west until they all reached Paris. The Germans of central Europe were absorbed into Napoleon’s armies after the conquests of 1806 and 1807, and were thus dragged out to Russia and back. But when they were pushed into retreat through their own homelands, they rejected Napoleon and defected back to the Allies. Most, but not all, just prior to the massive Battle of Leipzig in October of 1813. The Confederation of the Rhine officially dissolved in November of 1813. Then the Germans helped chase Napoleon back to Paris and participated each in their own way in the destruction of the Napoleonic Empire at Waterloo in 1815.
So after everyone in Europe had successfully put the French back into France, how to resettle the German territories of Central Europe was one of the primary concerns of the Congress of Vienna. Now, we’ve talked about the Congress of Vienna from a couple of different angles now, most especially in the supplemental episode on Metternich. Remember, the guiding principle was to restore the legitimate governments of Europe after the French explosion had consumed the previous generation.
Now, it was not going to be practical to literally restore every principality, kingdom, and duchy to the status quo antebellum, but that did not mean they could not restore the overriding principle that the divinely ordained monarchical dynasties were the true and proper rulers of Europe and that dangerously revolutionary ideas like national sovereignty and the rights of man had no place in the new old order.
And there were men who came to Vienna looking to keep those ideas alive in post-Napoleonic Europe. Germans who wanted a Germany. Italians who wanted an Italy. And those guys were not just Francophiles who had been introduced to the idea of national sovereignty and the rights of man and now wanted to keep them. That is that the first stirrings of German nationalism were not necessarily about a positive embrace of abstract French ideas so much as a negative shared experience, the negative shared experience of French imperial occupation and domination. With the French ascendant across central Europe, the difference between a Westphalian and a Saxon and a Hessian suddenly seemed quite small, especially when they were all then forced to follow Napoleon into the Russian winter and then fought alongside each other to expel him from their homelands. Having formed a wider German identity in the heat of the Napoleonic Wars, these budding nationalists were bitterly disappointed to find that they were going to be returned to the dominion of a bunch of petty tyrants.
To block these nationalist aspirations, not just of the Germans, but all the peoples of Europe, Metternich and the other diplomats of the Congress of Vienna built on the one hand the large and purposefully multi-ethnic Austrian Empire that we’ll talk about next week, and on the other hand, returned Germanic Europe to its divided and decentralized state of a collection of small kingdoms, principalities, and free cities. But the Congress of Vienna would not recreate every particular unit of the old Holy Roman Empire. The Holy Roman Empire was dead. And if you compare a map of Europe in 1789 to a map of Europe in 1815, you would see a ten-fold decrease in the number of sovereign German units. Before the French Revolution, there were about 300 sovereign German units. After the Congress of Vienna, there were not quite 40.
Now, this process is called German mediatization, the folding of smaller sovereign units into larger sovereign bodies, the beginning, really, of German unification. The French invasion, occupation, and reorganization of central Europe was a huge part of this mediatization process, as free cities and ecclesiastical principalities and minor duchies were stripped of their tiny bit of sovereignty and mashed in together into some larger group. And most of that was kept in place at the Congress of Vienna, with only a few of the units Napoleon had wiped off making a comeback and a few of the ones he had created broken up and dispersed elsewhere. The upshot of all this was that the map created by the Congress of Vienna now had one-tenth the total number of sovereign units in Greater Germany.
But though there were so many fewer units, the point of this was still to keep the Germans disunited, mostly so that Austria and Prussia would still be the two biggest things around without getting too big for each other’s comfort. So to ensure that Germanic Europe stayed divided, the Congress of Vienna created the German Confederation, which was the heir of Napoleon’s Confederation of the Rhine, except that instead of excluding Austria and Prussia, it made Austria and Prussia the two dominant states inside the Confederation.
Now the exact membership changed a lot around the edges, but at its height, I think that there were 39 members. It’s actually kind of hard to tell, and different sources will report different numbers at different times, but we’re talking about the high 30s anyway. Most of these states were absolutist regimes. Prussia and Austria were both absolutist regimes, and they had no interest in popular sovereignty, constitutional government, or the rights of man. Now, there were a few exceptions to this general rule, though, and I’m going to mention three in particular, and they’re worth highlighting especially because they will be epicenters of action in 1848. First, there was the Kingdom of Bavaria, and then inside of Bavaria, a special subset called the Palatinate, the Kingdom of Saxony, and the Grand Duchy of Baden.
Bavaria and Baden, for reasons we will explore in greater detail when we get into the guts of the Revolutions proper, had both promulgated constitutions before 1820. They were not absolutist regimes. Now, they weren’t like liberal British-style parliamentary monarchies, but they were constitutional governments.
The Kingdom of Saxony would then get a constitution in the fearful aftermath of the July Revolution when the king decided it was better to give an inch than lose a mile. And then the Palatinate was just a special case. It was now a constituent part of the Kingdom of Bavaria, but it had been annexed directly into the French Republic pretty early and for nearly 20 years lived under the French administrative apparatus and adopted the Napoleonic Code. So technically a part of the Kingdom of Bavaria, the Palatinate was given a great deal of local autonomy, and their attempt to declare independence from Bavaria in the midst of the Revolutions of 1848 will be a chapter unto itself.
So the German Confederation was managed through a federal assembly that met in Frankfurt, and it was far more of an institutionalized summit of ambassadors than shared government. Delegates to the assembly were chosen by the German rulers. Popular election by the people was not even remotely considered. The federal assembly was presided over by the Austrian delegate, though that did not technically give Austria any more power than anyone else. Of the members, Prussia and Austria each had one vote, as did Bavaria, Saxony, Hannover, Württemberg, Baden, and the two Hesses. The four free cities that remained on the map, Bremen, Frankfurt, Hamburg, and Lubeck, shared one collective vote, and then the 23 little petty states shared a small block of five votes. And also thrown in for good measure, thanks to personal dynastic claims to sovereign units inside the confederacy, the Kings of Great Britain, Denmark, and the Netherlands also each had one vote in the federal assembly.
Now the German confederation was not a political union. This was an assembly of sovereigns, not an assembly of delegates or representatives from one single political entity. And it was also not an economic union. So I guess the question is, what is the point of the German confederation? What would these guys be voting on? Well, the official rationale was mutual defense. The point was to pool German military resources to check the rise of the French to the west and the Russians to the east, and then inside the Germanic lands to give the Austrians and Prussians a little diplomatic arena to check each other. Everyone would pledge a quota of conscripts, supplies and cash in case of war, and in times of peace, collectively maintain the various great German fortresses. So the German confederation was at the outset really a military alliance. But the unofficial rationale was that the Federal Assembly was a place where the ruling German aristocracy could get together and compare notes on how best to keep the people of Germany, their subjects, under their myriad thumbs.
Now, as I just said, the German Confederation was not an economic union, and was not really intended to be an economic union, but it was about to turn into an economic union. Central Europe was still predominantly rural and agrarian, with heavy doses of artisanal craftwork and proto-industrialization starting up in the Northwest, specifically in the Rhineland. As you went east and south, the situation still looked virtually unchanged from the old feudal days. Though in the years surrounding the French arrival and retreat, serfdom had been mostly abolished in the places where it had still remained, particularly in eastern Prussia. But freedom for the serfs simply turned millions of families, who had once been legally bound to their property of their nobles, into millions of families now completely cut adrift in a big bad world. Most had no land at all, and those that maybe did couldn’t compete, and their lands were swallowed up by the larger estates anyway. So serfs became tenant farmers and sharecroppers and day laborers, because as you may have heard, freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose.
Now, as we discussed politically, the German states were kept purposefully disunited. But on the economic front, even the rulers could start to see the benefits of greater cooperation and unity. Post-Napoleonic Germans faced an insane array of tariffs and custom lines. The political fracturing of Germany meant that each little unit had its own slate of regulations and taxes, tariffs and dues that had to be paid for goods passing through their lands. Inside the German Confederation, there were 2,000 total of these invisible customs barriers crisscrossing the countryside. Even inside a large unified state like Prussia, there were more than 60 of these invisible lines, that if you crossed them, you had to stop, get harassed by a customs inspector, and then pay up. Trying to move something from the west end of the German Confederation to the east end might require as many as 20 such stops for inspection and payment. It was nuts.
Many in Germany looked to places like France and Great Britain that did not have to deal with this kind of nonsense with a great deal of jealousy. The British were always way ahead of everybody on this sort of thing, and then the French Revolution had successfully abolished all these cumbersome custom duties that we talked about at the very beginning of our series on the French Revolution.
So Prussia was the first to begin the process of tearing down these barriers, and they worked to abolish the invisible lines inside their own domains, while also beginning to negotiate with neighboring smaller states to form unified customs unions that would allow free trade across the political borders while maintaining a common customs duty for goods coming in and out. So internal free trade, external protectionist trade. These initial negotiations were the beginning of a novel experiment in economic union without political union. That is, you could do things like tear down all the internal customs barriers in France and Great Britain because they only had a single sovereign. But now they were talking about doing it for areas under different sovereigns. Now Prussia’s motivation here is, first of all, that they would benefit the most. Given their oversized economic weight, they would come out ahead on the deal if they abandoned a few petty taxes in exchange for the free circulation of their goods. But it would also naturally lead them to take on a more dominant position inside the German Confederation, bringing more and more states over to their side in the great balance of power with Austria. And in this, the Austrians actually helped them out. Metternich did not like the idea of a Germanic free trade zone and refused to join it. And the Prussians did not want the Austrians to join it. In fact, if all went well, Prussia might be on its way to becoming the dominant political, military, and economic power inside the German Confederation.
But a few of those medium-sized powers that we just mentioned, so like not the 23 petty states, but rather larger countries like Bavaria and Baden and Saxony, well, they didn’t necessarily like the idea of being forced into economic union with Prussia. And in the 1820s, they started forming rival unions amongst themselves. So that by the late 1820s, there were actually three major competing customs unions inside the German Confederation. But then in the early 1830s, members of all three unions agreed that it would be in everyone’s best interest to just cut all the customs barriers. And in 1833, the three big unions consolidated into what is called the Zollverein. With a few minor exceptions that would later be brought into the fold, there was now a single customs barrier ringing the German Confederation, except in Austria, where goods could move freely. It was a watershed moment in the history of German unification, even if politically, they were still divided.
Now, the two principal effects of the Zollverein that we need to talk about, aside from being a watershed moment in the history of German unification, was the impact it had on the artisans and the rising industrial bourgeoisie, particularly in Western Germany. Now, the German artisans, remember from Episode 7.1, still had a lot of the old guild rules in place. And even where those guild rules had been modified or reformed, they were still able to hide behind all those little customs barriers, all of which protected them from competition, not just from cheap English goods, but also from internal German competition.
With the arrival of the Zollverein, these protections were removed, and the artisans now faced dislocating pressure that left them unable to sell their goods at a price that they were used to selling them for, and it led them to sink into cycles of working more for less and then more for less. The other effect was on the western areas around the Rhine, who had always made their living as merchants and traders, and who were now being joined by a rising industrial class. The Zollverein only increased their prosperity.
This advancing middle class was full of those kinds of intellectuals and educated types who held the revolutionary liberal and nationalistic ideas that were proving to be so potent. Their increasing economic prosperity was not being matched by political access, and they chafed badly. So remember, it will be the artisans and the intellectuals who will be joining forces in the Revolutions of 1848. And in the German experience, both of these groups were activated by the Zollverein, but for diametrically opposed reasons.
So we’re going to round our episode out today with a brief discussion of our driving revolutionary ideologies, liberalism and nationalism, which were in Germany more tightly bound to one another than almost anywhere else. Italian nationalists, for example, would run the gamut from radical Republicans to Catholic theocrats, or if you were particularly loyal to Piedmont Sardinia, you were angling for Piedmont Sardinia to just take over the whole peninsula. If you were a French nationalist, you might be a Bonapartist and be happy with controlled autocracy. And if you were a French liberal, you might dutifully wave the tricolor while also not really buying in to the whole national glory schtick. But in Germany, the liberals and the nationalists were almost one-to-one. They were almost the same thing. And there was only a strain of more radical republicans who also shared the nationalist vision that was just enough to not make it truly just the same people.
If you were a German, and you believed in freedom of the press and freedom of speech and assembly, and you wanted out from under surveillance and informers and arrests, and you wanted political rights to match your economic prosperity and education, then national unification was the path. National unification meant sweeping aside the petty absolutist tyrannies that were such obviously artificial anachronisms. It meant joining the German nation together so that popular sovereignty could take root, so that power would rise up from the people rather than down from the divine hand of God. Pursuing liberalism meant pursuing nationalism, and pursuing nationalism meant pursuing liberalism.
Now, one of the principal ways that this dangerous and revolutionary combination of ideas was passed around was through student organizations. Despite all the repression and anachronistic political absolutism, German education, especially in Prussia, was pretty strong, and its universities were some of the finest in the world. But it shouldn’t surprise you that it was therefore in the universities that men like Metternich most rightly feared a challenge, both from students and faculty. So this created a negative feedback loop, where the government’s repression of the students led to discontentment, which led to organizing, which led to further fears that these were revolutionary societies, and so more repression, and so more organizing, and on and on and on.
So students started to form fraternities, called Burschenschaft (maybe I’m saying that right) that espoused and shared liberal and nationalist ideals. And it is in fact from these fraternities that the red, black, and gold would become the national German colors. Now just like Metternich suspected, these guys did indeed want to spread liberal and nationalist ideals, and they were briefly tolerated, though with increasing annoyance and then a lot of trepidation by the leaders in the German Confederation. But as we discussed in our episode on Metternich, one successful student assassination of a conservative writer in 1819 was followed by another failed assassination attempt by a student, and these two attacks convinced the members of the Federal Assembly to go all in with the Carlsbad decrees. Those are the decrees that banned those fraternities. They put tight surveillance on students and professors and dramatically tightened censorship and press laws and just generally tried to put the freeze on anything that smelled of liberal nationalism.
So since it was now dangerous to overtly pursue political goals like liberalism and nationalism, that led to a lot of intellectual energy being funneled into investigating and celebrating the German common cultural roots. Language, music, art, folk tales, and then spreading that around as like a cultural stand-in for the outlawed political program. This is, for example, where the Brothers Grimm come from, with their folklore compilations and their German dictionaries. This is a lot of what Wagner was up to. Anything that would help cultivate and promote and celebrate a German national consciousness could not help but challenge the backward parochialism and anachronistic petty dynasties that they were all forced to live under.
So the 1820s then were a time of discontentment amongst the educated classes, the former students who were now becoming rising professionals. They all thrilled with the news of the July Revolution, even if the government tried to prevent them from learning about the July Revolution, and the underground student fraternities went back to work. But because all forms of political assembly were banned, they had a bright idea. Let’s just hold an apolitical festival. Just a big party. So in 1832, they held this apolitical festival at Hambach Castle in the Palatinate, which is that subset of Bavaria on the west side of the Rhine that had lived under the French for so long, and was now a bit of a haven for liberals and nationalists and dissidents. So upon throwing this Hambacher Fest, something like 20,000 or 30,000 people shilled up from all across Germany, from all walks of life, and wouldn’t you know it, they all basically agreed with each other, and then spontaneously speakers began addressing the crowds on such verboten topics as national German unity, political liberty, and railing against absolutism and Metternich’s legitimate masters of Europe. It was at this festival that the red, black, and gold really, really took root as the official colors of national unity. But the Hambacher Fest also exposed one serious crack between the liberals on the one hand and more radical democrats on the other, who were ready right then and there to try to declare a republic, much to the mortification of the more cautious liberals.
Now, the Hambacher Fest did not immediately turn into anything, and it is just another milestone on the road to both the Revolutions of 1848 and eventually German unification. But for the moment, it was an isolated event. It did not trigger any dramatic upswing in revolutionary activity, and in fact had the opposite effect. As with the assassinations of 1819, the Hambacher Fest put the powers of the German Confederation on notice that liberal nationalism had not gone anywhere, and so they all voted to extend and tighten the scope of the Carlsbad decrees to make it even harder for the enemies of the legitimate rulers of Germany to coordinate with each other. So in 1833, when they planned a follow-up, they found Bavarian soldiers manning the site at Hambach Castle, and the whole thing was shut down before it even had a chance to begin.
So I’m going to cut things off there for the day because the Germans don’t really get going again with anything exciting until after the turn of the 1840s, and especially once the economy takes a severe downturn in the middle of that decade. So next week, we will hop over to the other great Germanic power, the Austrians, and Metternich’s beloved multi-ethnic empire. We will do a grand tour of said multi-ethnic empire and try to at least touch on as many of the Czechs, Slovaks, Romanians, Ukrainians, Poles, Croatians, Slovenes, Serbs, Hungarians, and Italians as we can fit in. They will all have their part to play in 1848, the great springtime of the peoples.
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