Hello and welcome to Revolutions.
…
So getting back to the Revolutions of 1848. Not counting the fun digression on the spectre that was haunting Europe in the 1840s, it was the French Revolution, we left off our story in Paris on the morning of February 25, 1848.
In a few shocking days, the July Monarchy had invited a confrontation with opposition leaders that they expected would shore up their authority, but which instead led to fighting in the streets, the dismissal of François Guizot, and the abdication and exile of Louis Philippe. And then when the provisional government emerged from an all-night meeting in the Hôtel de Ville on the morning of February 25, they announced that they would not be replacing one bourbon with another this time around. This time around, France would become a republic.
And if we trot out the volcano metaphor one last time before I think I retire it, this is the top of the mountain blowing off. This is the explosion that is going to trigger a chain reaction of further explosions that will set off eruptions across Europe.
So news of the fall of the July monarchy spread across Europe. But at least initially, it looked like it would lead to a wave of reform in Europe, but not necessarily a wave of revolution. The first territories to learn about and respond to, news from France, was in southwestern Germany. These were the small and middle-sized German states, many of which already had some kind of rudimentary constitutional government.
Now we’re going to talk more about events in Germany in two weeks, so I’m going to pass over these initial reactions because most of the southern German states acted quickly to inoculate themselves from revolution. So in the face of petitions and demonstrations demanding further liberalization of law and politics, these states let their conservative ministers go. They appointed new liberal ministers, and they allowed for a number of liberal reforms.
The sudden collapse of the French monarchy was spooky, and many of the German dukes and princes decided it was better to compromise with liberal reformers rather than follow Louis Philippe to England.
So what we will talk about today is the next great revolutionary moment of 1848, which will hit the imperial capital of Vienna in the second week of March. Because unlike the smaller German states, the imperial government in Vienna, still under the sway of the aging Chancellor Metternich, would try to resist rather than embrace reform.
And yes, I’ve already sort of given away the plot by calling today’s episode the fall of Metternich. After a life spent steadfastly resisting the forces of revolution, the barbarians would finally reach the gates. And by the end of today’s episode, Metternich will be following Guizot and Louis Philippe to England.
The word of the revolution in France reached Vienna on February the 29th, 1848. And Metternich got the news just a few hours ahead of everyone else, thanks to, you know, being the foreign minister. But when news hit the city, it created a powerful buzz inside the capital of the Austrian Empire.
In conservative and government circles, it was, oh my God, how do we respond to this? What does this mean? What do we do? Because remember, Vienna had already spent the last month and a half or so getting reports of a constitutional frenzy sweeping up the Italian peninsula. The Italians were extremely restless, and the possibility of war with Piedmont Sardinia in the spring was like an open secret inside the imperial government. So with news of the fall of the July monarchy now in hand, conservatives in Vienna felt like old conservative Europe might be collapsing beneath their feet.
But if conservatives in Vienna were getting scared, liberals in Vienna were getting positively giddy. These were the educated middle class reformers and liberal nobles in Vienna who had spent the last few years meeting in semi-secret clubs that passed around banned books and anonymous critiques of the government. We went through some of them in Episode 7.8, from those in the liberal nobility who wanted more power for the various estates and diets where the interests of the landowners would hold sway to middle class professionals who wanted more democratic access to politics.
But wherever one fell on the reform spectrum, there were two big things they all shared in common. First, they were absolutely reformers, not revolutionaries. The Viennese liberals, as we’ll see even today at this early stage, were interested in reform. They did not want to turn the world upside down. They did not, for example, want to overthrow the Emperor.
Second, they all agreed that the problem with the empire was its stagnant and corrupt absolutism. And further, they agreed that no one exemplified that stagnant and corrupt absolutism better than old Chancellor Metternich. So in the first days of March 1848, the cafes and reading rooms and private clubs in Vienna were alive with talk that the fall of the July monarchy might just be the spark they needed to get going on the project of reform. Maybe, just maybe, the imperial government would be so afraid of revolution that they would give in to reform.
All of this talk was given a major rhetorical jolt on March the 3rd when the great Hungarian radical, Lajos Kossuth, delivered one of his classic fiery speeches in the Hungarian diet. Meeting in Pressberg, that is modern day Bratislava, Kossuth took the news from France as nothing less than an invitation for a top to bottom reevaluation of the imperial system. In this speech, Kossuth professed loyalty to the Emperor, but demanded parliamentary rule for the constituent nationalities of the Austrian Empire. And to guarantee those rights, he also said that Austria proper needed to accept the same constitutional parliamentary government. Absolutism must be swept aside as a broken relic of a time gone by.
Now, since he was speaking to the Hungarian diet, Kossuth also rattled off further reforms for Hungary, including the immediate taxation of the nobility and political rights for the non-noble middle classes. But it was his general call for reform that would light up everyone in Vienna. He said that corrupt absolutism was, quote,
“a pestilence in the air that dulls our nerves and paralyzes our spirit and comes to us from the charnel house of the cabinet at Vienna.”
Sometimes called the inaugural address of the revolution, Kossuth’s speech laid bare what was at stake for the imperial government.
He thundered that, quote,
“the dynasty must choose between its own welfare and the preservation of a rotten system.”
The next day, the speech was translated into German and raced from Pressburg to Vienna, which was just about 50 miles up the Danube River.
So copies of Kossuth’s speech caused a sensation in Vienna when they appeared, and they were passed around and copied by hand. Emboldened, various liberal reform groups started drawing up petitions that they planned to present to the imperial government. The Political Reading Club, one of the more prestigious reform groups, drew up an 11-point petition that ticked off most of the boxes of what would be included in all of these liberal petitions. This petition demanded representative diets at both the local and imperial level, and the further demand that these diets have real, actual political power.
They also called for the abolition of censorship and the curtailing of police power, reform to the bureaucracy, improvements to the education system, and a universal right to petition the government.
Then a few days later, on March 6, the Lower Austrian Manufacturers Association, ostensibly a business group who was always ready to talk politics, drew up a petition asking for many of the same things, and they managed to get it into the hands of the Emperor’s brother, who was friendly with many of the members of the group, and who promised to take it to the Emperor. Then another petition made the rounds on March 9, this one drawn up and signed by liberal nobles who sat in the lower Austrian estates, a body I’m going to talk more about here in a second.
The point I want to reiterate here, though, is that all of these petitions were fairly tame by the standards of the time. All were drawn up as imploring requests of the Emperor to whom they were all still loyal. This was not about overthrowing the regime, but about rejecting corrupt absolutism. And really, even that simply is a means of saving the empire, not destroying it.
The problem, though, was that thanks to Metternich’s regime of absolutist repression, there was no right to petition, and so there was no official legal way to present these demands. Thanks to censorship, there was no political journals to write in. And thanks to centralized absolutism, there was no parliament within which to make a speech. So that meant that what they were doing, simply drawing up and signing a petition, already put them outside the law. And so almost by a self-fulfilling prophecy, these reformers wound up on the same side of the lines as more radical revolutionary elements inside the city.
The most radical element inside Vienna were the university students. Life as a university student, then as now, was often lived on the edge of poverty. Most students barely had enough to keep a roof over their heads and enough to eat and drink. They also suffered through what I have only ever seen described as interminably boring lectures built around rote memorization and forced obedience to the conservative faculty who were not there to cultivate a love of learning, but to hammer in whatever might be needed to enter the civil service, if one of these students might be lucky enough to have a shot at slaving away in the imperial civil service.
But students being students, then as now, many rebelled against this conservatism, and they joined secret societies dedicated to passing around all the really interesting books they were not supposed to be reading. But because Metternich had specifically identified the universities as a hotbed of sedition, nowhere in the empire was more under the constant surveillance of his political police.
So all the students knew that they were just one knock on the door away from being expelled and ruined. So after suffering through the last few years of economic recession, and after yet another long, cold, hungry winter, the student population of Vienna was ready to pop. And so in those same buzzing days of early March, they drew up their own petition. This one focused most especially on freedom of speech and the press, improvements to education, and the introduction of academic freedom.
Inside the imperial court, meanwhile, a conflict was breaking out about how to respond to all of this. The news from Italy, the news from France, the growing number of reform petitions floating around out there. And remember, at this point, Emperor Ferdinand I is just a figurehead. His mental and physical incapacities left power in the hands of that secret council of state, and that council was not of one mind about how to respond. Especially because one of the constant drumbeats out there in the streets was now that Metternich had to be fired.
The demand for Metternich’s head set off a debate inside the imperial court about what to do with the old chancellor. Some now believed that he really was an obstacle to peace and good order. Others simply had longstanding beefs with him and saw this as a good opportunity to run old Metternich through with a long knife.
But on the other side were conservatives led by Metternich himself who did not counsel flexibility and reform, and certainly not that he be let go, but rather firm repression and resistance. Metternich’s point was that even if these reforms were worth implementing, they could not come after the fall of a European monarchy and illegal petitions being brought in from the streets. It would make them look weak. So they had to resist all of this now, and then maybe revisit it later on down the road when things had cooled off.
And Metternich still had conservative allies who agreed with him, and it was through their initiative that the government formed a small committee on March the 9th to accept and review all of the petitions.
Now from the outside, the formation of this committee made it look like the government really was going to consider the reform petitions. After all, until now, there had been no official mechanism for accepting a petition from the people. And now, look, there is one. But haha, jokes on them. This committee accepted all the petitions, reviewed them, and came back with their considered recommendation. The petitions should all be summarily rejected, and those who had signed their names should be prosecuted. This abrupt whiplash did nothing to ease rising tensions in Vienna. I can assure you of that.
The debacle over the petitions got to the heart of how things went south for the government in Vienna. It was not that they were too harsh and reactionary, nor that they were too lenient and weak. It was that they kept sending these mixed signals. In this case, yes, we will listen to your petition, but then immediately follow that with, ha ha, your petitions are rejected.
A few days later, another batch of mixed signals went out. On March 11, it seemed like the government was going to go all in on repression when people started noticing that the army garrisons in Vienna were being reinforced, bringing their total strength up to about 14,000. But the very next day, a proclamation went out under the Emperor’s name that said that he had heard the people and that he would call a pan-imperial meeting of the old estates, so that the land-owning nobles, the clergy, and wealthy urban leaders to discuss the issues facing the empire. So was it going to be a crackdown or an open dialogue? No one, not even most of the people inside the government, could really say.
But by the time the Emperor’s proclamation was being sent out, the students at least were not going to be satisfied by a few token reforms. On Sunday, March 12, the faculty gathered all of their students in the university’s great hall to try to get these damned kids back in line. But the students were beyond the control of their professors now, and for the first time, their voices rose above that of the faculty. So rather than accepting admonishment, they decided that a planned meeting the next day of the lower Austrian estates should be a focal point for a mass demonstration.
Now, the local Austrian estates was like any of the other estates that was a holdover from the medieval era, so a collection of landed nobility and the clergy and rich guys from the major cities. But the lower Austrian estates were a toothless anachronism, a holdover from the days before the central imperial government had consolidated power and left the estates with nothing really to do. But they did still meet, and they did have one critical thing going for them. Even if they were a toothless old relic, the estates at least had some ancient legitimate right to petition the Emperor. So the plan was to rally as many people as possible to converge on this meeting of the estates on March 13 to pressure them into sending a reform petition to the Emperor.
So that night, some of the more radical students decided to boost their numbers by going outside the city walls of inner Vienna, out into the working class suburbs that surrounded the capital. Out there is where the poor workers lived, the suffering journeymen and apprentices whose miserable anger the more radical students hoped to harness. A huge angry mob of workers might be just the thing to scare the government into making political concessions. But as for actually addressing the grievances of that working class, well, opinion was much more divided among the liberal reformers, most of whom, as we will see, feared a worker insurrection as much as the government did.
So at about 7 a.m. on March 13, 1848, students and middle class reformers gathered to march as a group on the meeting of the lower Austrian estates. Other students went to their classes as usual, but on this particular morning, they were noisy and disruptive instead of sullen and docile. And soon after class began, they staged a mass walkout. By 8:30 a.m. about 4,000 people were all converging in front of the building where the estates met. The crowd that assembled there was uniformly described as either well dressed in middle class or young students. Despite the recruitment efforts the night before, only a few artisans showed up, and most of them were there to simply watch events unfold.
But what events were going to unfold? Well, for a moment, it looked like nothing was going to unfold. All the planning had never gotten beyond, hey, let’s show up tomorrow. There were no real leaders, no agenda, and for a moment it looked like the whole demonstration was going to fizzle out for lack of direction. But as everyone was milling around, wondering who was in charge and what they should do, one guy seized the moment. He had four of his friends hoist him on their shoulders so he could deliver a speech denouncing corrupt absolutism and demanding political reform. This speech primed the pump, and when he stopped talking, others stepped forward, and a string of orations followed, where everybody cheered reform and cheered the Emperor and booed the corrupt government, and most especially they booed Metternich. Boo Metternich.
With all of this commotion outside, the presiding officer of the lower estates came out and said to this somewhat leaderless mob, OK, you’re here, we’re here, what do you want? The answer came back that they wanted a petition drawn up and delivered to the Emperor. The presiding officer said, OK, well, that’s what we want too, and that’s what we’re doing in here, so why don’t you pick a dozen of your guys to come in and deliberate with us?
It took a little bit to decide which 12 from among the 4,000 should go in, and in the subsequent lull in the action, someone started reading aloud the speech by Kossuth from the week before. Now, though the speech had been passed around, most people in the crowd had not yet heard it, and it had the effect of further riling everyone up.
Now, it’s hard for me to nail down the exact chronology of what happens next, but it appears that while Kossuth’s fiery denunciation of the corrupt imperial government was being read, man, revving up the crowd, the 12-man delegation went into the building, and then someone already inside the building leaked the petition that the estates had been working on by literally throwing it out of a window.
But when this draft was picked up and read, it turned out to be far tamer than the crowd wanted, and it was read aloud right after Kossuth’s speech and cries of betrayal went around, and the crowd got the sense that they were all about to be sold out.
So by now, we’re approaching noon, and a couple of things happened. With the demonstration now in full swing, but the working classes not yet present, some of the students had gone out to try to recruit workers and artisans to come join the fun. The interest of the workers was slightly more piqued when they learned that a real reform demonstration was in fact taking place. So some of them set aside their work, if they had work to do, and they passed through the gates of the city wall into inner Vienna. This put the guard posts on alert, and orders started going around to limit passage through the gates to stop the workers from joining the demonstration. So that’s one thing that’s happening.
Another is that back at the demonstration, a total coincidence is going to set off a chain reaction. Every day at noon, the porter of the building where the estates met went around closing and locking all the side doors of the building. This was simply his daily routine. But the demonstrators outside did not know that. And when they saw the doors being shut and locked, they instantly suspected a trap, that the 12 men they had sent inside had already been arrested. Then they heard gunfire off in the distance as the guard post tried to turn back a growing tide of workers who were coming to join the demonstration. So this all combined to break down any sense of order in the crowd, and they now started spilling out all over the streets and into all the adjacent squares and moving ominously towards the Imperial Palace.
Now up until this point, the orders to the Vienna army garrison had said explicitly that the soldiers were not to attack or fire on the demonstrators. But with things getting out of control around 1 o’clock, the army was finally ordered in to start restoring order. But contra Metternich’s suggestion that they strike fast and heavy to break the mob, others on the council of state balked at the idea of such heavy-handed brutality, and instead they ordered in a small force of cavalry, which was in hindsight the worst of all worlds. The cavalry numbered just enough to stir up further panic and conflict, but not enough to overwhelm the crowd. So these cavalry units showed up. They were quite predictably pelted with rocks and bricks, and some of the cavalry fired back into the crowd. And soon five lay dead, four shot, and one trampled in the ensuing chaos.
As in Paris a few weeks earlier, those bodies were then loaded onto carts and paraded around, proving that the government was murdering its own people. Clashes also continued at the walls that separated the working class slums in the suburbs from the richer inner city. And to help restore order, the government called in the Civic Guard.
Dating back to the Napoleonic era, the Guard were a sort of ceremonial Austrian version of the French National Guard, and they numbered about 14,000 total men. Composed of middle class bourgeoisie, they had never been deployed for anything but occasional parades and ceremonies, but they were now being mobilized on the assumption that they might have better luck restoring order, since it was, after all, their homes and property at stake if rioting and looting got out of hand. But as had happened in France, calling out the Civic Guard proved to be a double-edged sword, because, as in Paris, many of the Guard members were themselves liberal reformers who took their mobilization as an opportunity to push back against the government’s repression.
So far from using their power to join the army against the people, they instead joined the people and a stalemate with the regular army set in. No one really wanted a full-blown firefight, and so around five in the afternoon a ceasefire was called that would allow the Civic Guard a chance to present a list of demands to the Emperor. These demands would be a prerequisite to the Guard joining the forces of order.
Ten senior guardsmen went to the imperial palace and presented three demands. First, the army must withdraw from the city and leave order in the hands of the Civic Guard. Second, to do this job properly, you must allow us to arm the students. And then third, Chancellor Metternich must resign. When they presented these demands, they said that the court had until 9 p.m. to meet the demands, or the ceasefire would be broken, and it would be open war in the capital.
The council of state remained divided, but they wasted little time acquiescing to the first two demands. The regular army was ordered back to their barracks, and the Civic Guard was given the keys to the city arsenal, which housed something like 40,000 guns, which were then distributed to new middle class volunteers, but most especially to the eager students, who formed what was then dubbed the Academic Legion. So by the night of March 13, 1848, the forces of revolution, if it was to be a revolution, controlled the city.
And as you are likely already saying to yourself, yeah, this is kind of exactly how the deal went down in Paris. The difference being that the Parisians were going to keep going all the way to the fall of Louis Philippe, and the Viennese would pull back.
So though the Council of State acquiesced to the first two demands, dumping Metternich took a little bit longer. The old Chancellor was not going to resign without a fight, and he said, look, Louis Philippe did what the mob wanted, he dumped Guizot, and look what it had done for him. He was forced to abdicate and go into exile anyway. So it’s better to fight than to cave.
But by this point, the long knives were all out, and Metternich’s enemies inside the court put pressure on him and everyone else to admit that it was finally time for the old man to go. But still, it was not until minutes before the 9 p.m. deadline that Metternich finally relented and submitted a letter of resignation. After nearly 40 years as Austria’s foreign minister, he was first appointed all the way back in 1809. Metternich was now out of power. The next night, he would flee Vienna in disguise, beginning a weeks-long journey that would finally land him in exile in England where he could commiserate with Guizot about the ungrateful wretches of continental Europe.
As word filtered out in the streets that the three demands had been met, there was cheering everywhere. But now the students and middle-class reformers faced a possible war on two fronts. On the one front, obviously, they were not really sure they could trust the government’s concessions. We just won, but tomorrow they may revoke everything and order in the army. But the reform demonstrations had also now stirred up the beginnings of a working-class insurrection out in the suburbs that none of them really wanted, and in fact now had to go confront head-on. Because their end of the deal, the deal that they had just cut with the government, was let us restore order and we will restore order. But now they actually had to go do it.
So the gulf between the students and the liberal reformers on the one side and the now agitated workers on the other is an example of the divide between the political and the social question. All the petitions and demonstrations inside Vienna over the past week had been focused squarely on the political question, civil rights, representation in government, and the end of absolutism.
But the workers and artisans were motivated not by political grievances but by social grievances, grievances that all those middle class reformers not only did not share but kind of stood on the opposite side of. Because we are not far removed from the hungry 40s with economic recession, unemployment, low wages, high prices, miserable living conditions, and working class slums. These guys didn’t care about police surveillance, they cared about bread being too expensive and machines that were putting them out of work.
So after being called to action by radical student organizers looking for muscle to press for political reform, by the night of March the 13th, the workers were now off doing their own thing. They were attacking factories and smashing up machines. They were looting merchants and tradesmen who they blamed for their problems. And a lot of this turned pretty nakedly anti-Semitic, as Jewish owners of shops and factories were specifically targeted.
So from about 9 o’clock until midnight on the evening of March the 13th, detachments of the Civic Guard and the academic legions made forays out into the suburbs to restore order. And luckily for them, the workers did generally greet them as allies rather than enemies. And the word was still that we are winning, even if the civic guard guys were likely sitting there thinking, man, there is no we here and no less than the emperor. I am terrified of you guys going and sacking my house.
The next morning though, some of what the now ousted Metternich had warned his colleagues about started to come to pass. With the city under the control of the Civic Guard and the Academic Legion, the limited demands of the night before were no longer enough to satisfy them. They now wanted to move forward with the other items on their petition list to make sure the government committed itself to the project of reform. Front and center would be the abolition of censorship and a curtailing of the power of the political police.
But as many suspected, once the disturbances of the day before had been contained, the mood at court had already changed. Those inside the government who had advised granting concessions the night before now joined again with the hardliners to recommend firm repressive action. So at around 3 o’clock that afternoon on March 14, the Council of state appointed the Bohemian Field Marshal Prince Alfred von Windisch-Grätz to head the Vienna garrison. All you need to know about Prince Alfred is that he was a hardline conservative who had recommended a crackdown at the earliest possible opportunity, and his reputation for such hardline policies was well known.
The announcement that it would be Prince Alfred taking over the Vienna garrison was yet another example of these mixed signals that were going out there. And it was certainly taken as proof by some in the streets that the government did plan a major crackdown, and in no time, radical students were passing around a plan to storm the imperial palace. But then came the other side of the mixed signal, as indecisiveness and fear inside the imperial court showed itself. Alfred was not removed from his post, but the court announced further concessions later in the afternoon. They confirmed that the Civic Guard was in charge of keeping order in Vienna, not the army, and then they announced a biggie. Censorship of the press was hereby abolished.
Just like the day before, this was greeted with cheering, but everyone still suspected that the minute the demonstrators turned their backs, that the governments would crack down and renege on all their promises.
So by the end of the day on March the 14th, a sort of final demand that would guarantee all the other demands started to percolate up through the ranks of the Civic Guard and the academic legions. We want a constitution. Now, what the constitution would look like or how it would function, that was not important. Not unlike the Italians, the word constitution became a panacea for the people of Vienna. But if nothing else, they knew that a constitution would guarantee all the other liberal reforms the government was beginning to promise.
So over that night, the civic guard continued their nervous patrols through Vienna. Patrols that got even more nervous when the rumor started to swirl that Prince Alfred had decided to place Vienna under a state of siege and that come the dawn, there might be a real battle for control of the city.
So by the morning of May 15, 1848, the students and the reformers had lost all faith in the honesty and reliability of the government, and so they issued their final demand. You remember that pan-imperial diet that the Emperor already promised to call? Well, he will still call that diet, but its sole object will be to draft a constitution for the Austrian Empire. Then they all braced for a battle with the army that never materialized. Whether the rumor had been true or not, it was no longer true that Vienna was going to be placed under a state of siege.
The government really did want to resolve this peacefully, and to that end, they got the Emperor to go take a personal ride out through the streets. Since everyone was still loyal to the Emperor, when he rode by, everyone cheered him on, and swept up in the moment he announced that he promised his people everything. So with happy crowds now surrounding the palace, happy crowds that could of course turn angry at the drop of a hat, a proclamation was read out at 5 p.m. which said, among other things, “the necessary provisions have been made to convene as soon as possible delegates from all the provincial estates and from the central congregation of the Lombardo Venetian kingdom with an increased representation of the middle classes and with due regard to the existing provincial constitutions with a view of establishing the Constitution of the Fatherland, which we have resolved to establish.”
Even though Chancellor Metternich wasn’t dead, he was already spinning in his grave.
Next week, we will stay in Vienna to greet a large delegation of Hungarians coming up the Danube to make common cause with the Viennese liberals and to press for their own agenda. Among these Hungarians was the massively influential but cautious reformer Istvan Szechenyi, but his star was already being eclipsed by the man that everyone really wanted to see, Lajos Kossuth.
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