1848 (10 page)

While the Château d'Eau burned, the King collapsed in a chair in his study, watched by his hapless courtiers. Politicians offered him conflicting advice, but it was the slippery newspaperman Émile Girardin, editor of
La Presse
, who at midday strode forward and brusquely urged Louis-Philippe: ‘Abdicate, Sire!' On being told that no further defence was possible, the exhausted King sat down at Napoleon's old maple desk and formally vacated his throne, leaving it to his grandson, the ten-year-old Count of Paris, with the boy's mother, Hélène, Duchess of Orléans, acting as regent. Louis-Philippe, dressed (as he liked to do) in plain, bourgeois clothes, walked briskly with his wife Marie-Amélie through the Tuileries Gardens and boarded a carriage waiting on the Place de la Concorde, from where, escorted by loyal cavalrymen, they drove off, reaching Honfleur on 26 February. There, the British vice-consul (showing either a profound lack of imagination or a wry sense of humour) gave the royal couple the alias of ‘Mr and Mrs Smith'. On 3 March they landed in Britain, where Louis-Philippe would die in August 1850.
³¹

The revolutionaries burst triumphantly into the now almost deserted palace. In another scene described by Flaubert, the crowd ‘surged up the stairs, a dizzying flood of bare heads, helmets, red bonnets, bayonets and shoulders'. Workers took turns to sit on the throne (the first, Flaubert writes, ‘beaming like an ape'). On the royal seat was written: ‘The People of Paris to All Europe: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. 24 February 1848'. Then the proceedings took a more sinister turn, as the crowd smashed up furniture, china and mirrors.
³²
The following day the throne was taken to the Place de la Bastille, where it was ceremonially burned.

The Duchess of Orléans and her son had taken refuge in the Chamber of Deputies, where she witnessed the demise of France's last monarchy, ‘dressed in mourning, pallid and calm', noted Tocqueville, who admired her courage. National Guards, their banners flying, jostled with enthusiastic Parisians brandishing sabres, muskets and bayonets. When they spilled over from the public galleries on to the floor, Barrot, seeking to secure the regency, was drowned out. (He was later seen wandering aimlessly in the streets, stunned and dishevelled.) Lamartine, ‘his tall frame thin and upright', rose to the tribune.
³³
He was no republican, but, scholar of history that he was, he also knew that regencies had generally been disastrous in France's past.
³⁴
To the acclamation of the crowd, he now read out a list of members of a provisional government - arranged by prior agreement with the republicans of the
National
tendency. Yet he was also pressed to acknowledge the Parisian role in the revolution, so, responding to the cry of ‘To the Hôtel de Ville!', the poet stepped down and fell in step with the likeable, left-leaning, eloquent republican Alexandre Ledru-Rollin. As they marched together towards the traditional seat of Parisian radicalism, the portly Ledru-Rollin struggled to keep up with Lamartine's long strides. To his breathless complaints, Lamartine replied, ‘We are climbing Calvary, my friend.'
³⁵
The provisional government was announced, minister by minister, from the windows of the city chambers; it revealed a compromise between the
National
and
Réforme
tendencies in the republican movement. The moderate majority included Lamartine as foreign minister, the astronomer and member of the French Institut François Arago at the army and navy, and Louis-Antoine Garnier-Pagès at finance. The strong minority appointed from the
Réforme
tendency included Ledru-Rollin as minister of the interior and two ministers without portfolio - the socialist Louis Blanc and a worker named Alexandre Martin, known as ‘Albert', who had won his republican and socialist spurs in the revolutionary underground. A living link back to the First Republic was found in the symbolic appointment of the aged veteran republican Jacques-Charles Dupont de l'Eure as another minister without portfolio. In the early hours of 25 February, Lamartine dramatically strode out on to a balcony, declaring: ‘The Republic has been proclaimed!' His words unleashed a roar of ecstatic cheering.

Word of the February days in Paris spread like a dynamic pulse and electrified Europe, hastened by the wonders of the modern world: railway, steamboat and telegraph. In the words of William H. Stiles, the American chargé d'affaires in Vienna, it ‘fell like a bomb amid the states and kingdoms of the Continent; and, like reluctant debtors threatened with legal terrors, the various monarchs hastened to pay their subjects the constitutions which they owed them'.
³⁶
The news spilled rapidly into Germany. At the University of Bonn, the eighteen-year-old radical student Carl Schurz was interrupted while at work in his garret by a friend bearing the tidings. He threw down his pen and joined the throng of other excited students in the market place: ‘We were dominated by a vague feeling as if a great outbreak of elemental forces had begun, as if an earthquake was impending of which we had felt the first shock, and we instinctively crowded together.' The black-red-gold of German unity, formerly banned as revolutionary, now fluttered openly, and even the good, cautious burghers of the city wore the colours in their hats.
³⁷

The enthusiasm among German liberals and radicals was infectious. In Mannheim in the Grand Duchy of Baden on 27 February, the republican lawyer Gustav Struve organised a political rally, drafting a petition demanding freedom of the press, trial by jury, a popular militia with elected officers, constitutions for every German state and the election of an all-German parliament. The Grand Duke, faced with a massive demonstration in his capital Karlsruhe, yielded two days later, appointed a liberal ministry and permitted work on a new constitution. Struve's petition was printed and circulated all over Germany and thrust before German rulers during the dizzying days of March. This is why the Mannheim programme became known as the ‘March demands'. The rulers of Württemberg and Nassau gave in. In Hesse-Darmstadt the Grand Duke abdicated in favour of his son on 5 March rather than yield himself. The only other German ruler to lose his throne in 1848 was the unfortunate King Ludwig of Bavaria, whose colourful and controversial mistress, the dancer and femme fatale Lola Montez, had been targeted by the opposition. While Lola had escaped the odium of the Munich crowd by fleeing the country on 12 February, the liberals struck the following month, while the iron of revolution was still hot. On the 4th, the royal armoury was stormed, and two days later Ludwig acceded to the March demands. Yet his relationship with Lola had shocked Catholic sensibilities at court and even the conservatives abandoned him. The situation was salvaged by the sage, moderate Prince Karl von Leiningen, who persuaded Ludwig to stand aside and allow his son, Maxmilian, to take the helm of the liberalised state. Leiningen was calmly performing this service to the Bavarian monarchy as his own estates in Amorbach were being invaded and ransacked by peasants. Further east, demonstrations organised in Dresden by the radical Robert Blum and the moderate liberal journalist Karl Biedermann on 6 March forced King Frederick Augustus II of Saxony to summon the Estates to enact reform and to dismiss Falkenstein, his unpopular conservative minister.

While individual states were being reformed, liberals and radicals sensed the opportunity to recast all of Germany into a new, more unified shape. In Heidelberg on 5 March an assembly of fifty-one delegates from the freshly liberalised states brushed aside the weakly protesting Diet of the old German Confederation and cut its own path towards the future. Working with a feverish sense of urgency, the meeting convoked ‘a more complete assembly of trusted men from all German peoples',
³⁸
a ‘pre-parliament', which would gather in Frankfurt to arrange elections for a German national assembly, which in turn would draft an all-German constitution.

So far the German revolution had swept up only the ‘Third Germany' - the smaller states lying between the two great power blocs of Prussia and Austria, which at first refused to buckle before the storm. In the west the Prussian Rhineland was swept along by the torrent - and it sent delegates to the Heidelberg Assembly. There was a demonstration of workers in Cologne on 3 March, led by the radical socialist Andreas Gottschalk, demanding, among other things, the right to work, free education and welfare measures to protect the poor. The army moved in and dispersed the three-thousand-strong protest, arresting its ringleaders. Prussia, therefore, had not as yet lost its footing. Nor had the other great German power, Austria, where the absolute monarchy, though its grip was weakening, still had a hold on its European empire. The uprising in the great Habsburg capital of Vienna of 13 March therefore gave fresh impetus to the revolution not only in Germany but throughout Europe. If the February revolution in Paris was the first great shock to the European conservative order in 1848, the second, equally fundamental blow for the old regime was the fall of Metternich.

The ageing Chancellor had been told of the revolution in France in a telegram from his friend, the banker Salamon Rothschild, whose tidings arrived at 5 p.m. on 29 February, just before the rest of the Viennese population learned the news from one of the few permitted foreign newspapers, the
Augsburger Zeitung
. The diplomat William Stiles observed that ‘the people, collected in groups throughout the streets, in the cafés, and reading-rooms, expressed themselves with a freedom and an earnestness altogether foreign to the habits of the calm and phlegmatic Germans'.
³⁹
The Chancellor himself remained sanguine: during the first ten days of March the chief of police, Count Josef von Sedlnitzky, never one to play down the risk of subversion, assured Metternich that there was nothing to fear in Vienna. Events in perennially troublesome Hungary, however, would dash this prediction. On 1 March word of the Parisian revolution reached the Hungarian Diet, which had been meeting at Pressburg since November. The parliament had been holding agonising debates about serfdom, but now even wider, root-and-branch reform seemed possible. On 3 March the fiery Lajos Kossuth rose in the lower house and gave the speech that would prove to be ‘the inaugural address of the revolution'.
⁴⁰
Habsburg absolutism, he declared, was ‘the pestilential air which . . . dulls our nerves and paralyses our spirit'. Hungary should be ‘independent, national and free from foreign interference', tied to Austria only through the dynastic link of having the Emperor continue as King of Hungary. Kossuth went further and remarked that a political overhaul which benefited Hungary would not be safe for as long as the rest of the empire remained unreformed, so fundamental change was needed for all the subjects of the Emperor. ‘The dynasty', he thundered, ‘must choose between its own welfare and the preservation of a rotten system.'
⁴¹

This lion's roar of a speech would have a profound impact, and it reached Vienna via a manuscript version translated into German and sent to the Legal-Political Reading Club. Very soon copies were clandestinely printed and circulating around the imperial capital. Initially, the meeting of the Lower Austrian Estates, due on 13 March, was the focus for liberal hopes and expectations. In excited anticipation a radical ‘party of progress', led by Alexander Bach, gathered several thousand signatures on a petition (carried by Bach through the streets on horseback). This demanded parliamentary government and Austrian participation in the reform of the German Confederation.
⁴²
Yet the Staatskonferenz - the inner circle of family and ministers that acted as a regency council on behalf of Emperor Ferdinand - was divided between those who advocated some concessions and those, including Metternich, who urged no weakness. Initially, the latter held sway.

The liberal opposition received an injection of youthful energy from the students of the University of Vienna. Many of these young people were the archetypical, impoverished, garret-dwelling scholars who relished banned political literature, joined secret societies and were taught by stuffily conservative professors. Now, intoxicated by the political excitement, the students circulated a petition that demanded freedom of the press, speech, religion and teaching, improvements in education, popular representation in government and the participation of all German-speaking parts of the empire in the new Germany. They were galvanised further at early morning mass on Sunday 12 March by the passionate oratory of the liberal and popular theologian Anton Füster, who declared that Lent was a time of hope and that truth would triumph if the students acted courageously.
⁴³
They occupied the Aula, the university's great hall, where, with tumultuous enthusiasm, the petition was soon covered with signatures. ‘The stormy air permeated everybody,' recalled one student. ‘The students gave orders to the professors for the first time. A topsy-turvy world was beginning. Pedants tore their hair and thought that the world was going to pieces or that the whole youth must receive a “2” in the next examination . . . Had the light or reflection of dawn finally broken through the dismal sky?'
⁴⁴
The students agreed that the following day they would march
en masse
to the opening of the Landhaus to present their petition to the Lower Austrian Estates. That night, to garner muscle for their cause, posses of students stole through the city gates into the poorer suburbs, where they roused the Viennese workers. To counter this the authorities put the gates under close guard, while it began to dawn on the court that some concessions might be necessary. These would prove to be too little, too late.

Early in the morning of 13 March some four thousand students streamed out of their lectures, deaf to the warnings of their professors, and marched on the Landhaus, which happened to be just around the corner from Metternich's Chancellery on the Ballhausplatz. A large, respectable gathering of mostly middle-class professionals - well-to-do lawyers, doctors, entrepreneurs and the odd bohemian writer and flamboyant artist - joined the throng in expectation as the Estates opened. Watching from the windows of the Chancellery, Metternich's third wife Melanie scornfully remarked, ‘All they need is a stand selling sausages to make themselves happy.'
⁴⁵
Yet, as the protest was running out of steam, a pale, bearded young doctor named Adolf Fischhof silenced the directionless hubbub when, standing on the shoulders of four companions, his booming voice declared, ‘It is a great, significant day on which we find ourselves assembled here,' and he urged the people to present the Estates with the demands of the liberal opposition.
⁴⁶
Now speaker after speaker - ‘pale with terror at their own daring,'
⁴⁷
noted Stiles perceptively - climbed on to railings and balconies to harangue their audience, which cheered the orators and turned its anger towards Metternich.