As far as the fate of our [German] Fatherland is concerned, the dice have not fallen in accordance with the forces of light. We can only build [the Fatherland] from within through courageous and loyal attitudes and through disseminating real hatred against all things foreign [Waelsch]. There will be no lack of storms from without which will drive us more and more towards unity.
Ernst Moritz Arndt, 18141
What is the great mission of our times? . . . It is emancipation. Not merely the Irish, Greeks, Frankfurt Jews, West Indies blacks and such oppressed peoples, rather it is the emancipation of the world, Europe in particular, which has come of age and now tears itself loose from the iron leading strings of the privileged, the aristocracy.
Heinrich Heine2
The Germanic Confederation is not a Union formed solely by the voluntary association of the states that compose it, and which therefore can be altered and modified at the absolute will of these states without reference to a consultation with any other parties. The German Confederation is a Union of a different character and kind. It is the result and creation of a European treaty concluded at Vienna in 1815, and it forms part of the general settlement of Europe which that Treaty established and regulated.
Lord Palmerston, 3 December 18503
The treaties which brought to an end to the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars and the struggle between Britain and the United States transformed European geopolitics. In Europe, they reconstituted the old Holy Roman Empire under a new guise, and reordered northern Italy and the Low Countries in order to contain France. Russia held on to most of her gains. Austria and Prussia made substantial territorial acquisitions which reoriented both powers: south and south-east in the first case, and westwards in the second. The impact of these changes on European geopolitics over the next fifty years was profound, nowhere more so than in the fulcrum of the system, Germany. In North America, the United States shut Britain out of the west, but her claims in Central America and the Caribbean were still contested by the major powers. Moreover, the domestic provisions of the treaties were full of geopolitical implications on both sides of the Atlantic. Thanks to the provisions on Jewish emancipation, the international slave trade and constitutional arrangements, the battle lines were now drawn within polities, dividing the United States and most European states down the middle, especially Germany. The classic geopolitical themes of buffers, encirclement and expansion were now seen through the prisms of national, political, religious and slave emancipation. By the end of this process, both the Americans and Germans were well on the way to finding, albeit at great cost, the national unity they needed to survive in a world of predatory great powers.
Once Napoleon had lost control of Germany at the battle of Leipzig in October 1813, his position in Europe quickly crumbled. The allied armies – swelled by contingents from the defecting Rheinbund states – now advanced inexorably westwards into France, while the Duke of Wellington crossed the Pyrenees from Spain and headed north. Despite plucky resistance on home territory, the French were soon overwhelmed. Napoleon abdicated at the Treaty of Fontainebleau in mid-April 1814, and was sent into exile on the Mediterranean island of Elba. The Bourbon monarchy was restored under Louis XVIII, and, by the relatively generous First Treaty of Paris, France was permitted to keep the territory she had acquired between the Revolution and the outbreak of the Revolutionary Wars in 1792, in particular Savoy. In September 1814, the victorious powers sent representatives to Vienna to establish a stable post-war order. Shortly after, Europe was convulsed by the return from Elba, during the ‘Hundred Days’, of Napoleon, who gave his guards the slip and was welcomed back by a French population which had tired quickly of the Bourbons and sought to regain the hegemony they had enjoyed for the past two decades. Britain, most of whose best troops were in America, was caught badly off balance. After some early successes, however, Napoleon was beaten at Waterloo in June 1815 by an allied army made up largely of Germans of one sort or another.4 Napoleon was exiled once again, this time to St Helena, from where he did not return.
Meanwhile, the Anglo-American struggle over the Great Lakes was reaching a climax. The expectation of the Congressional ‘war hawks’ that Canada would soon be ‘liberated’ from British rule was soon dashed. A prolonged slugging match on land and sea followed, as London was able to deploy troops released by the defeat of Napoleon. The war caused deep fissures within the Union: the mainly Republican south and west largely supported Madison’s decision, but Federalist New England was solidly opposed. Several northern states refused to send their militia to Canada or withdrew them soon after the outbreak of hostilities. The Massachusetts Senate roundly condemned a war ‘waged without justifiable cause, and prosecuted in a manner which indicates that conquest and ambition are its real motives’ and announced that ‘it is not becoming a moral and religious people to express any approbation of military or naval exploits which are not immediately connected with the defence of our sea-coast and soil’. Secession seemed on the cards.5 A spate of belated US successes then supervened, forcing London to sue for peace. Thanks to the communications lag in the pre-telegraph age, the last and most spectacular American victory – the battle of New Orleans – was fought some days after peace had been agreed. An inter-American civil conflict had been narrowly averted through a victorious war over the common British enemy.
By then, the Vienna Congress was in full swing. Right at the top of the agenda was the containment of future French expansionism through territorial reorganization – the British Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Viscount Castlereagh, argued that ‘to keep France in order, we require great masses . . . Prussia, Austria and Russia ought to be as great and powerful as they ever have been’,6 if not more so. The establishment of a moderate regime in Paris would also curb French adventurism. Hardly less urgent was the issue of how to deal with the explosion of Russian power, which had erupted into central and western Europe to the consternation of all.7 The tsar’s new role as the arbiter of Europe was epitomized by a massive review of some 150,000 Russian troops and 540 artillery pieces which he staged on the plain of Champagne, not far from Paris, in early September 1815. This spectacle made a deep impression on the attending allied leaders, who included the King of Prussia, the Emperor of Austria and the Duke of Wellington.8
All these concerns merged in the central issue at Vienna: the ‘German Question’. In February 1814, the allies committed themselves to a central European framework ‘composed of sovereign princes united by a federal bond which will assure and guarantee the independence of Germany’.9 Eight months later, Castlereagh elaborated that Germany should constitute ‘an intermediary system between Russia and France’,10 which would contain both states without threatening them. Britain was determined to prevent Russia from filling the vacuum in central Europe. A resurrected Poland which was ‘really Russian’, Castlereagh’s diplomat-brother, Charles Stewart, warned, would ‘advanc[e] the Russian frontier . . . almost into the heart of Germany’.11 At the same time, the Austrian chancellor was anxious to stop the Prussians from gaining hegemony in Germany, and from helping themselves to too much territory, especially at the expense of Napoleon’s defeated ally Saxony, which was an important buffer between the two powers, and in Poland. So in late 1815 the great powers came up with a settlement designed to keep the British in, the Russians out and the French down.
The Treaty of Vienna forced France to disgorge all lands acquired between 1789 and 1792, and to pay a crippling indemnity. Poland remained partitioned between Russia, Austria and Prussia; part of the tsar’s share was turned into a kingdom with its own army and parliament. Alexander retained most of the massive gains of the past decades, including Bessarabia, taken from Turkey, and Finland, ceded by the Swedes. Stockholm was compensated with territory to the west. The treaty ending the war between Denmark and Sweden in January 1814 had already decided the struggle for mastery in Scandinavia in favour of Sweden, which wrested Norway from Denmark, thus depriving it of 40 per cent of its population and nearly 85 per cent of its territory. Piedmont-Sardinia recovered Savoy from France and was enlarged with a view to blocking French designs on Italy. Strategic depth in the peninsula was provided by the Austrians, who were granted Lombardy and Venetia, along with the old Venetian Republic’s coastal strip in Dalmatia, as well as collateral Habsburg branches in the smaller principalities of Tuscany, Modena and Parma. Switzerland was guaranteed perpetual neutrality within its traditional cantonal system.
The most profound changes, however, took place in the lands of the former Holy Roman Empire. Austria ceded Belgium to Holland to form the Kingdom of the United Netherlands, intended as a bulwark against French expansion into the Low Countries; the scattered territories in the west known as ‘Anterior Austria’ were also given up for good. Prussia’s hopes of rounding off her borders with neighbouring territory were largely disappointed; she had to make do with the northern half of Saxony, rather than the entire kingdom. Instead, Prussia was awarded the enormous prizes of the Rhineland and Westphalia with the express intention, as Castlereagh put it, of putting her ‘more in military contact with France’, in order to ‘provide effectually against the systematic views of France to possess herself of the Low Countries and the territories on the left bank of the Rhine’.12 It was only with some difficulty that Potsdam managed to fend off the British offer of a large slice of southern Belgium as well. The myriad of smaller principalities which had been such a feature of German politics before the 1790s were not restored for the most part, whereas Bavaria, Württemberg, Baden, Hanover and a number of other states survived the fall of Napoleon greatly enlarged. Britain made no large-scale territorial gains in Europe, though she did retain her colonial booty (including Ceylon and the Cape Colony) and a number of bases, including Malta; the personal union with Hanover was restored. This restraint was deliberate. ‘Our reputation on the continent as a feature of our strength, power and confidence,’ Castlereagh argued in mid-April 1814, ‘is of more real moment than any acquisition.’13 He parlayed this standing into the Quadruple Alliance of 1815 between Russia, Prussia, Austria and Britain. Article 6 of this agreement pledged the parties to meet regularly in order to maintain the European balance of power and other matters of pressing common concern. This arrangement has become known as the ‘Congress System’.
Castlereagh’s determination to collaborate with, rather than dictate to, the European powers had implications for the question of slavery. British abolitionists bombarded the Congress, including the tsar and the King of Prussia, with demands for the banning of the trade. Thomas Clarkson’s suggestion that Britain should cede France ‘some little territory in Germany’ in order to sweeten the pill of ending its slaving was rejected.14 To the fury of British abolitionists, the final treaty did not stipulate an immediate and complete end to the international slave trade, or – failing that – permit Britain to annex the French colonies with which it was carried out. ‘We were masters of the negotiation,’ the Whig Lord Grenville lamented, ‘[i]n this cause the example of Great Britain was all-powerful . . . her determination final.’15 Most European powers, including many opposed to slavery, feared that the issue was really a stalking horse for British naval dominance, and a pretext to continue with the right of search even after the end of hostilities. France, in particular, regarded the enforced end to her slave trade as an unbearable national humiliation. As a compromise solution, the Russian tsar proposed a maritime league to suppress the trade. Castlereagh, anxious not to undermine the domestic standing of the restored French Bourbon regime, did not press the point. In the end, the powers agreed a common statement that the slave trade was ‘repugnant to the principles of humanity and universal morality’. For the moment this was mere aspiration, but the potentially huge international ramifications of the issue were already clear.
The Vienna Settlement regulated not only the borders but also the internal structure of the new Europe. Britain and the eastern powers both rejected republicanism in favour of the ‘monarchical principle’, the former preferring constitutional monarchies, the latter insisting on ‘corporate’ or absolutist systems. ‘Congress Poland’ was given a parliament and a constitution; many of the southern and western German states, such as Bavaria and Württemberg, held on to or were granted constitutions; and in Prussia the promulgation of a constitution was much discussed in 1814–15. In France, the allies restored the Bourbon monarchy, whose authority was balanced by a charter of rights and a parliament elected on a very narrow franchise. The intention was to defuse popular tendencies towards military adventurism, but to be on the safe side allied governments vetted legislation beforehand; they even demanded to see an advance copy of Louis XVIII’s opening speech to parliament. An army of occupation was deployed to keep an eye on residual Bonapartism, to ensure that the indemnity was paid in full and to assist the Dutch in protecting against French attempts to revise the Vienna Settlement.16 The general intention of the allies was to promote governments which would be robust enough to withstand revolutionary pressures from below, and sufficiently effective to deter external aggressors, but not so strong as to menace their neighbours.
At the heart of this new order was the German Confederation – Deutscher Bund – which replaced the defunct Holy Roman Empire. It was designed to maintain the European balance by being strong enough to contain Franco-Russian ambitions, yet not sufficiently powerful to develop hegemonic ambitions of its own. The preamble to the constitutive German Federal Act therefore called for a ‘strong and durable union for the independence of Germany and the peace and equilibrium of Europe’.17 This was envisaged as a commonwealth of parts as well as the whole; sacrificing any individual state for strategic reasons was expressly prohibited. The eleventh article of the Confederation bound members to provide mutual assistance in the event of an invasion, not to make separate peace with the aggressor and not to conclude agreements which threatened the integrity of the Bund. To this end, the defence of Germany was entrusted to federal military contingents from Prussia, Austria and the middling and smaller states, also known as the Third Germany, and a number of ‘federal’ fortresses in the west: Mainz, Landau, Luxemburg, and later Rastatt and Ulm. Political coordination was to be provided by the Diet at Frankfurt, under the presidency of Austria. At the same time, the Bund was charged with maintaining the internal political balance in Germany, both between and within the member states.18 This was essential to prevent outside powers from being sucked into the resulting conflict, or exploiting German quarrels to gain unilateral advantage. The whole arrangement was guaranteed by all the signatory powers to the Vienna Final Act; indeed, the constitution of the Bund was written into the Vienna Final Act, which thus became a new European Treaty of Westphalia.19
All this amounted to a geopolitical revolution in Europe. The inexorable eighteenth-century Russian march westwards continued: Congress Poland jutted perilously into Prussia and the Habsburg Empire. Denmark had been destroyed as a Baltic and Scandinavian power; her attention was once more turned southwards. But the greatest shift had taken place in Germany. Prussia, a power of increasingly ‘eastern’ orientation during the past hundred years, now became the guardian of the gate against France in the west. Austria, for centuries a western power intimately involved in the politics of the Rhineland, Burgundy and the Low Countries, now acquired a largely Balkan, eastern European and especially Italian focus.20 There was also a fundamental transformation in the way the great powers did business. They had learned the virtues of cooperation and restraint during the final stages of the struggle with Napoleon, and this culture continued to permeate diplomacy after 1815. At the same time, the great powers were agreed as never before that what happened inside European states – questions of slavery, toleration, political oppression and radical subversion – had profound implications for relations between states. The fifty or so years following the Treaty of Vienna are the story of how these contradictions played themselves out, of how Europeans unlearned the habit of consensus, at differing speeds and at differing times, with consequences which were as fatal to the stability of Europe as they were conducive to political and social change.
Meanwhile, the Treaty of Ghent brought the war between Britain and the United States to a formal close in December 1814. Its implications were no less revolutionary. The United States had survived its first major trial of strength with a great power since independence. Both parties agreed to work towards the abolition of the slave trade, though the institution of slavery itself was now not challenged. Britain returned the disputed territory around the Great Lakes and promised to return slaves who had run away from their American masters. London failed to fulfil the latter clause, instead making a substantial cash payment in compensation. The future battle lines between Britain and the young republic were now clear. The two powers would continue to jockey for influence, partly in North America – where the final border between the United States and Canada had not yet been clearly determined – but especially in Central and South America and the Caribbean.21 The pan-European commitment to the abolition of the slave trade entered into at Vienna clashed directly with the increasing determination of the United States to exclude outside intervention of any kind in the western hemisphere. The intertwined issues of territorial expansion and slavery were an explosive charge which brought Americans into conflict with Europe on more than one occasion, and ultimately drove them to go to war against each other.
With Napoleon safely incarcerated in the South Atlantic, many European governments now attempted to cash in their ‘peace dividends’. In Britain, the traditional ‘fiscal-military state’ gave way to the ‘laissez-faire state’.22 An army of more than 600,000 was cut to about 100,000, half of them serving overseas. This was in part driven by financial considerations, but it also reflected a politico-cultural shift. In 1816, the young Whig Lord John Russell spoke against expenditure on the army on the grounds that it would transform Britain from ‘a naval into a military nation, and, instead of continuing a mighty island, into a petty continental state’.23 In Prussia and Austria, governments also sought to get to grips with the debts of the Napoleonic Wars by reducing their armies, and state spending more broadly. The Habsburgs were desperate to avoid having to summon a Hungarian Diet to raise the necessary money for the army. In Prussia the king broke his promise to promulgate a constitution and ‘national representation’. On the other hand, the Prussian government accepted that it could not increase taxes or take out substantial fresh loans without consulting its population, in effect forswearing all great-power ambitions. For this reason, the Prussian Staatschuldengesetz (State Indebtedness Law) of 1820 promised to do neither without summoning a general representation of the people. In 1823, as a stopgap, Frederick William III set up a regionally based system of noble-dominated assemblies, the Provinziallandstände. These were consultative bodies only, with no fiscal powers, and during the early years they suffered from apathy and low turnouts. For now, the social and political order in the eastern monarchies was safe, but only so long as developments in the European state system did not disturb these fragile domestic compromises.
Across the Atlantic, Americans watched European developments closely. The ‘monarchical principle’ enunciated at Vienna was seen as an ideological threat to the young republic. There were also two pressing geopolitical problems requiring immediate action. The Barbary pirates had resurfaced during the war with Britain. So in 1815 an American fleet was dispatched to chasten Omar Pasha of Algiers, destroying his fleet and occupying his harbour. Closer to home, the vacuum created by the loosening Spanish imperial grip made a decision on Florida urgent. The territory itself was considered next to worthless, but it could not be allowed to ‘fall into the hands of an enemy possessing a superiority on the ocean’, especially Britain. That would leave the republic encircled north and south. So in 1819 Florida was bought from Spain, and in 1820 the northern frontier of the Union was buttressed by the creation of the state of Maine.24 All this required considerable state intervention to put the United States on a military footing to guard against European interference, and to take advantage of opportunities for territorial expansion. In 1816, Congress passed a large naval expansion bill designed to remedy defects that had become evident during the war of 1812. Even Andrew Jackson, who is often mythologized as a doughty individualist, did not doubt that it was necessary. In March 1817, he criticized Congress’s ‘mania for retrenchment’, accused it of losing ‘sight of the safety of our country at home, and its character abroad’. ‘Every man with a gun in his hand,’ he thundered, ‘all Europe combined cannot hurt us.’25 Europe, indeed, was the central preoccupation of much of Andrew Jackson’s presidency: between a third and a half of his annual messages to Congress were devoted to foreign affairs.26
The challenges to the settlement of 1814–15 came quick and fast. French power revived quickly: the army was reconstituted, albeit on a much smaller basis. In 1818 the indemnity was paid off, the allied army of occupation was withdrawn, and selective conscription by ballot was introduced. For the moment, French intent was clearly defensive. That summer, a defence commission met to discuss the threat to France’s eastern border and concluded that only a large-scale programme of military expansion and fortress construction could guarantee security against the German Confederation. Indeed, Germany remained the principal preoccupation of French planners and strategic debate until the Prussian invasion of 1870.27 Likewise, for all its imperial preoccupations, the primary British strategic concern throughout the fifty years after 1815 remained Europe: the security of the British Isles, and especially the protection of the south coast and London against French invasion.28 There were restless powers to the east and south too. Tsar Alexander showed remarkable restraint after 1815,29 but the extent of Russia’s power continued to unsettle her neighbours not least because the bulk of her army – more than two thirds – was stationed in Poland or along the western border. In Italy, the enlarged state of Piedmont-Savoy was looking for ways to guard against her continued vulnerability. The best way of achieving this, the Savoyard diplomat Joseph de Maistre continued, was for the monarchy to ‘embrace’, and thus ‘stifle’, the revolutionary nationalist currents in the peninsula. ‘The King’, in fact, ‘should make himself chief of the Italians.’30 A new Piedmontese geopolitics, based on the assumption that the territorial buffers necessary for dynastic security could only be achieved by appropriating the national cause, was in the making.
European stability was also challenged by the emergence of domestic critiques and revolutionary movements on both sides of the Atlantic after 1815. The greatest potential threat came from the growth of revanchism in the French parliament and public sphere. Nearly 40 per cent of the deputies elected under the constitutional charter introduced by the Bourbons in 1817 had been Bonapartists during the Hundred Days, and even many royalists believed passionately that France should be the arbiter of Europe. They relentlessly hammered the Bourbon government for its toleration of allied interference in French domestic politics, its acquiescence in the unjust ‘treaties of 1815’, for permitting the encirclement of France by a hostile coalition, and for its failure more generally to articulate a vision for French greatness. In particular, critics demanded the return of the Rhineland and Savoy, the natural borders which could serve both as buffers and as sluice gates through which French power could inundate Italy and Germany at will. As yet, these tendencies were kept in check by Bourbon repression and by the restricted franchise of 100,000 voters; and for the moment the regime resisted the temptation to compensate for its unpopularity through an adventurous foreign policy. There was every likelihood, however, that increasing popular pressures at home would lead to a more assertive policy abroad.
A similar debate was taking place across the Rhine. Here, too, the emerging national and liberal public sphere was deeply dissatisfied with the Vienna Settlement.31 Many critics had wanted the creation of a German nation state on French lines, which would have facilitated the implementation of liberal reforms, and would have been robust enough to withstand external aggression. They got neither, and were profoundly unhappy with the loose ties offered by the Confederation. At the heart of this critique was continued fear of France. ‘In the Bourbon lilies,’ the veteran nationalist Joseph Görres warned, ‘there remain Napoleonic bees and wasps seeking honey.’32 For the moment, though, the resulting frustration was channelled inwards against the local barriers to German unity. Liberal nationalist agitation soon grew from a few hundred students in duelling fraternities to mass rallies such as the Wartburgfest, held in 1817 to mark the 300th anniversary of the posting of Luther’s theses. In 1819, matters came to a head when the Russian agent and reactionary playwright August von Kotzebue was murdered by a student radical. Fearful of imminent revolution, and anxious to pre-empt outside intervention, Metternich persuaded the Prussians to agree the repressive Karlsbad Decrees that same year. What would happen, however, when the force of German liberal nationalism burst these fetters, or when one or the other power sought to harness that energy for its own ends, was anybody’s guess.
South of the Alps, Italian liberal nationalists also took aim at the Vienna Settlement. This was accompanied by the cultural and patriotic nationalist surge of the Risorgimento unleashed by the great social and administrative upheavals of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic period.33 Illegal secret societies such as the Carbonari attacked the dominance of Austria, and the subservience of repressive local dynasties to its dictates. Above all, critics lamented the continuing territorial fragmentation of Italy and demanded national unification. This reflected partly a burgeoning sense of common identity, and partly the belief that Italians would have to stick closer together if they were to survive in an increasingly predatory world where the trend was towards ever larger state formations.34
In Russia, too, discontent with the established order, and especially with tsarist foreign policy, was stirring. A myriad of secret and semisecret societies sprang up, their ranks swelled by returning officers. Underpinning this was the development of a public space in which political questions could be debated: the first quarter of the nineteenth century saw the founding of over 120 new magazines in Russia, and the rate was increasing with each passing year. The principal bone of contention was Poland, which some Russian liberal nationalists – especially the ‘Southern Society’ of ‘Decembrists’, as they later became known, founded in 1817 – saw as a potential ally, and others regarded with the deepest suspicion. When Alexander proclaimed the Kingdom of Poland in May 1815, and referred to the possible future ‘internal aggrandizement’ of the new polity, many Russians interpreted this as a signal that territories lost to the Tsarist Empire in 1772 were to be returned. Critics also felt that he was not doing enough on behalf of the Orthodox Christian cause in the Ottoman Empire.
It was against this background that a series of revolutionary crises erupted on both sides of the Atlantic. In 1819, a former Russian officer, tsarist confidant and Greek patriot, Alexander Ypsilanti, led a revolt against Ottoman rule in the Danubian provinces of Moldavia and Wallachia, which are today part of Romania. By 1821, the fighting had spread to the Peloponnese and Greece proper, and in January of the following year a Greek national assembly elected a president of the Hellenic Republic, agreed a constitution, and declared the independence of the ‘Greek Nation’. Turkey reacted with extreme brutality. Patriarch Gregorius V of Constantinople was hanged in public, and in 1822 the Ottomans murdered or deported the entire population of the island of Chios. Meanwhile, Spain was confronting independence movements in America.35 To Spaniards, including liberals, these revolts threatened their plans to use the empire to recover their European stature, or at least to support them against renewed external aggression. So, in January and February 1820, King Ferdinand VII assembled a large force to recapture Buenos Aires. As they waited in Cadiz for transportation to South America, however, liberal officers rebelled and established constitutional government. A few months later, in July 1820, Carbonari and liberal officers in southern Italy combined with liberal officers against Ferdinand I of Naples and Sicily. He was forced to adopt a constitution on the Spanish model. Shortly after, the same happened in Portugal. By the spring of the following year, the revolutionary spirit had travelled northwards. In early March 1821 elements of the Piedmontese army rebelled, and called upon King Victor Emmanuel I not only to grant a constitution, but also to rescue Italy from the Habsburgs.
All this was accompanied by the emergence of a pan-European liberal humanitarian public sphere. This was most pronounced in Britain, where the anti-slave trade movement was dominant. In 1817, however, the cause experienced a serious setback when in the Le Louis judgment, the British courts rejected the Royal Navy’s right to stop suspected slave ships belonging to powers which had not given it permission to do so. ‘Forc[ing] the way to the liberation of Africa by trampling on the independence of other states’, it was held, was tantamount to ‘pressing forward with a great principle by breaking through every other great principle that stands in the way of its establishment’. For this reason, the British government sought to build a diplomatic consensus for abolition, and to avoid unilateral action. Even when such agreements were forthcoming, however, attention to legal norms made them difficult to enforce; a vibrant multiculturally run illegal slave trade continued across the Atlantic for much of the early nineteenth century.36 For this reason, activists and their parliamentary sympathizers were constantly pressing ministers to deploy the Royal Navy more vigorously against slaving stations off West Africa and the ships carrying their human cargo across the Atlantic.37 In the early 1820s, the geopolitics of empathy was extended to include the Greeks, whose plight struck a chord among liberals and romantics, particularly in Britain, Russia and the United States – often for very different reasons – but also across much of western and central Europe. There were widespread calls for intervention to halt Ottoman atrocities. Some, such as the British poet Byron, volunteered to fight on behalf of Greece.
The Greek, Latin American, Spanish and Italian crises sparked a debate which dominated European diplomacy – and often domestic politics – throughout the early and mid-1820s. At one level, most of the great powers were agreed, most of the time, that these eruptions were the expression of some deeply subversive streak in European and colonial society which might unhinge the established order and the state system. Metternich, in particular, was obsessed with the idea of an international revolutionary conspiracy orchestrated by a mythical central Comité Directeur. Alexander, who had previously dallied with liberalism, was shocked into agreement with him by events in Spain and Italy. The Prussians, at this stage very much in Metternich’s thrall, tended to go along with him on all broader European questions.38 In Paris, the restored French monarchy was also deeply uneasy about revolutionary activity, especially in bordering Spain and Piedmont. Britain was more cautious about interfering in the domestic affairs of a foreign power, but even Castlereagh announced in January 1821 that ‘no government can be more prepared than the British government is, to uphold the right of any state or states to interfere, where their own immediate security or essential interests are seriously endangered by the internal transactions of another state’.39 He was not opposed to the principle of intervention as such, merely to its exclusive application in support of the reactionary interest in Europe.
At the same time, the great powers interpreted the revolutionary crises in the context of post-1815 geopolitics. For France, intervention in Spain or Italy would provide a vehicle to escape the constraints of the Vienna Settlement, and to rally domestic opinion behind an unpopular regime. For Britain, France and the United States, the Spanish American eruptions were an opportunity for territorial and commercial expansion. For Russia, the Greek revolt was a chance to resume Catherine the Great’s steady southward advance. At the same time, European powers were concerned to deny these opportunities to their rivals. Russia was anxious that her western rivals would establish a monopoly position in the former Spanish Empire. Alexander even speculated that the revolts were part of a design to put ‘all the treasure of the Americas at the disposition of Britain’.40 Metternich, for his part, feared a Russian advance into the Danubian principalities, which would further encircle the empire’s south-eastern flank. He was also far more concerned about French penetration of Italy than about the revolutions themselves. Metternich was deeply ambivalent about a French intervention across the Pyrenees for similar reasons, and the thought of Alexander leading a restoration of the Bourbon monarchy there filled everybody with even greater horror. Castlereagh warned that a universal principle of interventionism would give the Russians ‘an almost irresistible claim to march through the territories of all the Confederate states to the most distant point of Europe’.41 Very often, in short, the fear of allowing one power a unilateral strategic advantage exceeded the ideological common ground against revolutionary tendencies.
In November 1820, the Russians, Prussians and Austrians met at Troppau and agreed that ‘States which have undergone a change of government due to revolution, the results of which threaten other states’ needed to be brought back into line ‘by peaceful means, or if need be by arms’. On this basis, the powers met again at Laibach in 1821 to authorize Austrian intervention in Naples and Piedmont. Once the revolutionary outbreaks in Italy had been dealt with, another Congress was convened at Verona ostensibly in order to discuss the implementation of reforms in the pacified areas to forestall further eruptions. Very soon, however, the meeting became embroiled in debate about what do about Greece and especially Spain; tempers flared, not least because the French delegates used the occasion to demand revision of the Rhine frontier. This time, no agreement was reached and the French intervention in Spain in April 1823, which crushed the revolution and reinstated Ferdinand, was a unilateral action heartily disapproved of by Metternich. The elephant in the room at the Congresses and throughout the intervention debate was the German Confederation. Castlereagh argued that ‘[t]he general security of Germany’ was ‘inseparable’ from that of ‘Europe’ as a whole. He was adamant, however, that the threat from revolution had to be ‘direct and imminent’ as well as ‘military in character, actual and existent’; otherwise it would provide the Russians with a pretext to move into Germany.42
The most robust opposition to the principle of intervention, however, came from across the Atlantic. Public and governmental opinion saw Spain and Greece, especially the former, as ideological bulwarks against the advance of European absolutism. Matters came to a head when France not only crushed the Spanish revolution, but offered to provide naval support to ferry Spanish and French Bourbon princes across the Atlantic to establish conservative monarchies in the former Spanish Empire in place of local radicals. John Quincy Adams suspected European powers of an intention to ‘recolonize’ the Spanish lands and ‘partition [them] out among themselves’. An appalling vista now presented itself: ‘Russia might take California, Peru [and] Chile; France [might take] Mexico – where we know she has been intriguing to get a monarchy under a Prince of Bourbon. And Great Britain, as her last resort, if she could not resist this course of things, would take at least the island of Cuba for her share of the scramble. Then what would be our situation – England holding Cuba, France Mexico?’43 The United States, in other words, would be encircled by hostile European powers.
This was the context in which President Monroe famously addressed Congress in his ‘Seventh Annual Message’ in early December 1823. He observed that Europe was the ‘quarter of the globe, with which we have so much intercourse and from which we derive our origin’, and of whose events ‘we have always been anxious and interested spectators’. He warned that while the United States was pledged to respect ‘existing colonies’, it would ‘consider any attempt [by European powers] to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere’, by ‘oppressing’ the new Latin American republics, ‘as dangerous to our peace and safety’. He also announced unambiguously that ‘the American continents, by the free and independent condition which they have assumed and maintain, are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers’. In other words, the ‘Monroe Doctrine’ reflected not a turn towards hemispheric isolationism, but a continuing American belief that events in Europe were of profound relevance to the security of the republic.
*
The international turbulence of the 1820s resonated across Europe. The huge costs of intervening in Italy forced the Habsburgs to summon the Hungarian Diet again in 1825. A stand-off ensued: the Magyars under their leader, István Széchenyi, failed to have Hungarian adopted as the official language, while the Austrian government went away empty-handed. In Britain, the international situation – and especially the legacy of the struggle against Napoleon – shaped the debate on reform. When Roman Catholic emancipation was finally passed in 1829, the argument in its favour owed much to the Duke of Wellington’s famous speech in which he reminded parliament that his victories would not have been possible without the contribution made by Catholic Irishmen. The Tsarist Empire, too, was rocked by internal disturbances brought on by strategic factors. A ‘war party’ at court felt that Alexander was not doing enough to help their Greek brethren;44 so did the Union for Salvation, a liberal nationalist clandestine organization. Infuriated by the failure to act in the Balkans, and determined to exploit the power vacuum left by the death of Alexander in December 1825, the conspirators launched the unsuccessful revolt from they have since taken their name. They ensured, however, that Nicholas I ascended the throne with a consciousness that Russian grand strategy would henceforth have to take these voices into account.
It was in this context that the European powers contemplated the next phase of the Greek crisis. In February 1825, frustrated by the continuing resistance of the Hellenes, the Sultan called upon his nominal Egyptian vassal Mehmet Ali to suppress the rising. He agreed, in return for the promise of Syria, and very soon his powerful army was advancing inexorably – and bloodily – through Greece. Pro-Greek committees lobbied furiously for intervention against the Sultan. The new tsar, too, felt the force of popular sentiment on Greece. In April 1826 he concluded the Convention of St Petersburg with Great Britain, at which both parties agreed to mediate in Greece, and forswore any commercial or territorial gains. At the Convention of Akkerman six months later, Britain, France and Russia further agreed that Greece should become a semi-autonomous vassal state of Turkey. Both Paris and London hoped that a strong Greece, far from being an agent of tsarist expansionism, would actually function as a barrier to St Petersburg; in any case, the British prime minister, Earl Grey, was more concerned to keep the Russians out of Germany than the Balkans. Humanitarian concerns about Turkish atrocities also played a role.45 The initial intervention was carried out by an Anglo-French naval force, which – following a misunderstanding – completely destroyed the joint Ottoman and Egyptian fleet at Navarino in October 1827. Right at the end of that year, Sultan Mahmud II decided to pre-empt the looming coalition against him by declaring a jihad on Russia. After a short campaign the Turks were forced to come to terms at the Treaty of Adrianople in September 1829. Greece became independent, Wallachia and Moldavia received autonomy, while Russia made only very modest territorial gains in the Caucasus.
The international controversy over Spain, Italy, Greece and Latin America temporarily distracted attention from the principal issue in European politics: the future of Germany. Here Prussia regarded the revival of French power in the 1820s with growing concern. Frustrated by what he saw as Austrian apathy, the new Prussian foreign minister, Count Bernstorff, began to cultivate the middling and smaller German states, many of whom feared renewed French aggression. At the heart of his more assertive policy was the creation of a Customs Union, whose primary purpose was political and strategic, rather than commercial.46 The Prussian finance minister, Friedrich von Motz, predicted that ‘political unity’ would be ‘the necessary consequence of commercial’ union. The ultimate aim, he concluded, was a ‘united, internally and externally truly free Germany under Prussian leadership and protection’. The link between German unity and Prussian security was thus articulated for the first time.
Across the Rhine, French observers watched the growth of German military capacity with anxiety. There were many voices inside and especially outside parliament that took the monarch and his ministers to task for failing to revise the hated ‘treaties of 1815’ more quickly. It was for this reason that King Charles X speculated that ‘perhaps a war against the court of Vienna would be useful to me in terminating the internal debates and occupying the nations en grand as it desires’.47 Rather than take on the Habsburgs, the French government picked on the ailing Ottomans in North Africa. In early July 1830, it seized Algiers, partly to root out the Barbary pirates once and for all, partly to secure the looming vacuum on her southern flank before it was occupied by another power, but mainly in order to revive the popular standing of the ministry. It was too late. Later that month, the accumulated resentment at the restored monarchy’s domestic policies, and its inability to reclaim France’s rightful role in Europe, exploded in revolution. The main line of the House of Bourbon was deposed, and Louis-Philippe, Duke of Orleans, ascended the throne as the ‘citizen king’.
Over the next two years, revolutionary discontent spread across Europe in response to or at least in tandem with events in France. In late August 1830, the Belgians revolted against King William IV of the United Netherlands, and declared their independence; Luxemburg also rebelled and was claimed by Belgians, in defiance of the German Confederation. Three months later, the Poles rose in Warsaw against Russian rule. Most German states remained relatively quiet, but there were revolutionary eruptions in Saxony and Brunswick. The beginning of 1831 saw revolts in Italy, in Parma and Modena. Meanwhile, domestic unrest bubbled in Britain as demands for franchise reform grew. And, in late 1831, Mehmet Ali – whose relations with the Ottoman Empire had been sour since the failed intervention in Greece and the refusal to award him Syria in compensation – finally broke with his overlord and advanced on Constantinople. In December 1832, he inflicted a heavy defeat on the Turkish army at the battle of Konya. Tsar Nicholas began to fear that Mehmet would over-run the whole of Turkey and lead the Crimean Tartars into an Islamic crusade against Russia. From the Atlantic to the Bosphorus and beyond, Europe was in turmoil.
The implications of these upheavals for European stability were far more serious than they had been in the 1820s. This time, revolution had struck France itself, and to diehard reactionaries such as Metternich the subsequent reverberations across the continent were too numerous, and apparently similar, to be entirely coincidental. He suspected, as he had for a long time, that dark forces were orchestrating the violence from the shadows. ‘The directing committee of Paris will triumph,’ Metternich warned a Russian diplomat in August 1831, ‘and no government will remain standing.’48 The main threat to the system was not ideological, however, but geopolitical. There was every sign that the new regime in Paris would pursue the activist foreign policy its supporters demanded. ‘The cannon of Paris,’ General Lamarque declaimed to the French parliament in mid-January 1831, ‘has silenced the cannon of Waterloo.’ Radicals now routinely called for a pre-emptive war of liberation in Europe, or at the very least for a crusade to help the Belgians, Italians and Poles. This reflected not just a desire to spread freedom for its own sake, but a belief that the French revolution would only be safe in a Europe that was also ‘free’. Pro-Polish rioters rampaged through the streets of Paris. In January 1832, troops were landed at Ancona to keep an eye on Austrian troop movements in the Papal States. Most worryingly of all, from the point of view of the rest of Europe, were the demands for union with Belgium, which reached a climax when the Belgians themselves offered Louis-Philippe’s younger son, the Duke of Nemours, the crown in place of William.
In short, the revolutions of 1830–32 hit at the very core of the European states system in Germany and the Low Countries. A union between France and Belgium would destroy the barrier erected in 1815, expose the southern coast of England to attack and rip open the western border of the Confederation. Unlike recent tsarist advances, it would also be a unilateral French territorial gain large enough to unhinge the European balance. Any internal or external threat to the Bund was a mortal threat to international stability and thus British security. ‘Our real interest in Germany,’ the British ambassador to Austria argued in September 1832, ‘is that it should be strong, united, monarchical and federal, under these conditions, incapable of aggression itself, and repelling it from the East and from the West, it becomes the key stone of the peace of Europe.’49 The political unification demanded by the German national movement would destroy the balance of power. For this reason, the British ambassador to the Confederation warned against the ‘extravagant doctrine of the Unity of Germany’.50 A European conflict seemed inevitable. ‘Perhaps [all] this looks very much like a general war,’ one left-wing Parisian newspaper wrote breezily in August 1831, ‘but the opposition does not mind a general war.’51
Faced with these challenges, the great powers did not embark on a counter-revolutionary crusade as both Metternich and Nicholas had initially suggested. Instead, they agreed to contain, not to crush, France; they would not interfere with the revolution, but any French attack across the Rhine would be instantly repelled. The crucial future of Belgium was settled at the London Conference in December 1830. It was to be separated from Holland, but only on condition that it was neutralized and accepted an uncontentious – that is non-French – monarch. To add credibility to their diplomacy, Austrian forces put down the Italian revolutions, while a much larger, Prussian-led confederal force was assembled in Germany to deter France. The German revolutions were also quickly suppressed. Belgium was more complicated: William IV refused to accept the loss of Belgium and, in early August, Dutch forces attempted to recapture it. This provided France with a pretext to intervene in turn, and to besiege William’s men in Antwerp amid great patriotic fanfare, and under the watchful eyes of Britain, Prussia, Austria and Russia. It took until the very end of 1832 to subdue the Dutch and guarantee the integrity of a new neutralized Belgian state; French troops withdrew shortly afterwards. Meanwhile, the tsar suppressed the Poles in September 1831 and in February 1833 sent troops to the Straits at the Sultan’s behest, where they stopped Mehmet Ali in his tracks. The resulting Treaty of Unkiar Skelessi in July 1833 was a clear victory for the tsar. It left the Straits open to Russian ships in time of war, but closed them to the navies of other powers.
When all the smoke had cleared in 1833–4, the contours of a new European geopolitics were visible across the continent. In this way, the Ottoman Empire was turned into a massive barrier defending Russia’s southern flank, with Constantinople functioning as a sally-port into the Mediterranean. For the moment, the Russians exercised their newfound influence with restraint, partly because they had internalized the rules of the Congress System, and partly because they feared provoking a balancing coalition against them. When Alexander Menshikov called for further advances south some years later, he was told by the foreign minister, Charles de Nesselrode, that this would simply provoke the British and French to establish naval bases in the Black Sea.52
The liberal nationalist challenge had been checked but not contained. The formal foundation of Greece by the Treaty of London in 1830 signalled the emergence of a restless power on the western flank of the Ottoman Empire. Most Greeks, about three quarters, still lived outside the boundaries of the state, in Macedonia, Thessaly, the islands, Asia Minor and of course in Constantinople. Uniting them all now became the ‘Great Idea’ – or ‘Megale Idea’ – of Greek foreign policy, and the dominant subject of debate in Greek domestic politics for the next ninety years or so; indeed, it was the only uniting principle in an otherwise fragmented society.
A more immediate issue was the continued growth of Italian nationalism, reflected in the ‘Young Italy’ movement under the leadership of the liberal nationalist Giuseppe Mazzini. As he put it in his ‘General instructions for the members of Young Italy’ (1831), the peninsula needed unity because without it ‘there is no real strength; and Italy surrounded as she is by powerful, united and jealous nations, has need of strength before all things’. It rejected federalism: ‘by reducing her to the political impotence of Switzerland, [it] would necessarily place her under the influence of one of the neighbouring nations’. Mazzini embedded his programme for Italian unity within a broader vision for European unity, which was ‘the great mission Italy [was] destined to accomplish towards humanity’. He was confident of ultimate victory, because he believed that ‘Europe [was] undergoing a progressive series of transformations, which [were] gradually and irresistibly guiding European society to form itself into a vast and united mass’. In April 1834, these sentiments found expression in the foundation of ‘Young Europe’ in Berne by Italian, German and Polish delegates. For the moment, at least, the group planned to avoid conspiratorial activity and intended to subvert the established order by the power of their ideas alone.53
Most importantly of all, the revolutions of 1830–32 accelerated the transformation of German geopolitics which had begun in 1815. Austria showed herself too preoccupied with events in Italy to pay much attention to the defence of the Confederation generally or of Luxemburg in particular. The middling German states, for their part, were manifestly unable to provide for their own security. Bavarian military expenditure, for example, had fallen by over one third annually between 1819 and 1830.54 The chief minister of Bavaria, Karl August von Wangenheim, even prided himself on ‘doing the minimum’ for the common defence. The confederal fortresses either had not been built, or were in a state of disrepair. It was Prussia, not Austria, which pleaded the cause of Luxemburg before the timid Diet at Frankfurt. She did so not just out of a sense of German patriotism, but because of a growing belief that the security of Prussia in the European state system depended on rallying the whole of Germany to her cause. At the same time, the realization was setting in throughout Baden, Württemberg and even Bavaria that only Berlin could protect them against France. ‘I know no south Germany and no north Germany,’ King Ludwig of Bavaria wrote in March 1831, ‘only Germany. I am convinced that safety is only to be found in firm connection with Prussia.’ Not long after the crises subsided, most of Germany agreed to join Prussia in the famous Customs Union – Zollverein – in 1833. The chief minister of Hesse-Darmstadt, Freiherr von Thil, was quite open about the political implications. ‘I do not hide the fact,’ he wrote, ‘that once we are bound in a commercial way to a great power, we will also be bound in a political sense.’55
The revolutionary crisis also gave nationalist and liberal sentiment a massive boost. In 1832, the ‘German patriotic association for the support of the free press’ was set up. It soon commanded a membership of more than 5,000 across state boundaries, and played an important role in organizing the Hambach Festival that same year. Well over 20,000 Germans turned up there to show their patriotic colours. Liberal sentiment inside and outside the south German parliaments, particularly in areas directly neighbouring France such as Baden, began to look to Prussia for their security.56 The Palatine democrat and Bavarian subject Johan Georg Wirth even called for a league of German constitutional states to be led by Prussia. In Prussia itself, the Rhenish liberal David Hansemann called for constitutional reforms in order to ‘maintain and increase the power of the state both internally and with respect to its external relations’, in particular the containment of France. A German liberal national public sphere had been born, whose primary preoccupation was the achievement of national unity against the French threat.57 This link between internal political reform and external defence was spelled out by Prince Joseph zu Salm-Dyck, a delegate to the Rhenish provincial Diet. ‘It is precisely the creation of a unified representation,’ he wrote to the Prussian governor of the Rhineland in late January 1831, ‘which will overcome harmful differences [between the various regions of the state] and allow the merely aggregated parts of the monarchy to dissolve into a unified whole.’ He also noted that ‘the power of France and the influence which it exercises on its neighbours derives from its liberal institutions’ and claimed that ‘Prussia can claim the same power and influence’ but only by ‘putting itself at the head’ of the constitutional movement.58
Developments in Germany were watched closely, west and east. The speed and size of the Prussian mobilization deeply impressed the French military establishment. Henceforth, they considered Prussia rather than Russia the principal threat. More generally, France feared the force of German nationalism. ‘We must have the Treaty of Vienna,’ the diplomat Adolphe de Bourqueney remarked in July 1832. ‘The independence of the small German princes is what must be the foundation of our policy in Germany. Do with your subjects what you please . . . we cannot consent to the disappearance of a single German state, no matter how small it is.’59 The Russians, for their part, saw Austria and Prussia as a counter-revolutionary dam or breakwater which would halt, or at least slow down, subversive currents before they reached Poland, and ultimately Russia itself. It was with this in mind that the tsar exerted pressure on Berlin to disavow ministers who wanted to cooperate with liberal nationalism. He got his way after the death of Motz and the replacement of Bernstorff by the conservative Friedrich Ancillon as foreign minister in the early 1830s. In 1833, the three eastern powers came together at Münchengrätz, to agree a joint policy of stability on conservative principles in central Europe and the Ottoman Empire. Two years later, Berlin and St Petersburg advertised their solidarity by holding joint military manoeuvres in Poland. The counter-revolution was closing ranks across Europe.
In the west, liberal and constitutionalist powers were quick to pick up the gauntlet. British foreign policy, in particular, manifested an emancipatory and at times almost messianic streak. This reflected a strong sense that European peace and Britain’s own security depended, as the Foreign Secretary, Lord Palmerston, put it, on the ‘maint[enance] of the liberties and independence of all other nations’. On his reading, the survival of freedom in Britain required its defence throughout Europe: constitutional states were thus her ‘natural allies’. There was also a broader feeling that Britain should, as Palmerston argued in August 1832, ‘interfer[e] by friendly counsel and advice’, in order to ‘maintain the liberties and independence of all other nations’ and thus to ‘throw her moral weight into the scale of any people who are spontaneously striving for . . . rational gov[ernmen]t, and to extend as far and as fast as possible civilization all over the world’.60 In other words, Britain would not ‘interfere’ in the internal affairs of other countries, or impose her values on unwilling populations, but she pledged her support to those who were willing to take the initiative – who were ‘spontaneously striving’ – to claim their liberal birthright.
Globally, the main battlefront was the international slave trade, and, increasingly, the institution of slavery itself. In 1833, slavery was finally abolished throughout the British Empire, which led a year later to the establishment of a French abolitionist society.61 A cross-Channel Franco-British agitation against the slave trade now began, and a joint governmental programme for its eradication became a real possibility. This cleared the way for a more robust policy against the international slave trade, which the Royal Navy had been battling with varying success since 1807.62 The newly independent Central and South American states had just abolished slavery, while Britain forced Madrid to give up the legal importation of slaves in 1820, and was increasing the pressure on Spain to abolish slavery altogether in her only remaining large colony of Cuba.63 In 1835, London and Madrid concluded a treaty to limit the slave trade; for the moment this agreement was not honoured on the Spanish side, but it was a further step in the international de-legitimation of the trade. The British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society was founded in 1838, and two years later the World Anti-Slavery Convention took place in London. Tensions with Portugal, whose ships still carried the lucrative human cargo to Brazil, rose.
In the United States, on the other hand, the issue of slavery became increasingly contentious in domestic and foreign policy, at the very moment when the new cotton economy was taking off in the South.64 In January 1820, the Missouri Compromise determined that – with the exception of the state of Missouri itself – there should be no slavery north of the 36° 30´ parallel, but this agreement was under attack from both sides of the divide. William Lloyd Garrison founded his abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator, in 1831. Public opinion in the Northern states became more and more radical in opposition if not to slavery in the South, then at least to its extension in the west. Southerners, for their part, eyed not only the domestic but also the international scene with misgivings. Further west, French influence in Mexico was on the rise, reflected in their temporary occupation of Veracruz, ostensibly in order to enforce the repayment of Mexico’s international debt; they were also active in California. It was clear that if the United States did not move into the vacuum to her west and south, another power would. And yet, so long as slavery divided North and South, no domestic consensus on expansion was possible. The inexorable westwards march of the United States therefore ground to a twenty-year halt.
The main focus of the new geopolitics, however, was Europe. With liberal – but not radical – governments in Paris after 1830, and in London from 1832, France and Britain were now ideologically aligned. In 1834, both powers responded to Münchengrätz by coming together with liberal-constitutionalist Spain and Portugal to form the Quadruple Alliance. ‘The Triple League of despotic governments,’ Palmerston exulted, ‘will now be counter-balanced by a Quadruple Alliance in the west.’ The continent was now split into two ideologically divided camps. Once hopeful of Alexander’s intentions, liberal opinion saw the Tsarist Empire of Nicholas I as the bulwark of reaction across Europe. The British writer Robert Bremner noted at the end of the decade that the European press was teeming with books painting Russia as the ‘most boundless, irresistible . . . most formidable, and best consolidated [power] that ever threatened the liberties and rights of man’.65
This cold war was hottest in the Iberian peninsula, the principal battleground in the confrontation between west and east. Portugal had been convulsed by civil war ever since the late 1820s; Spain erupted in 1833, when the death of Ferdinand led to a succession struggle between the governing liberals who supported the infant Queen Isabella, and her conservative uncle, Don Carlos. The eastern powers supported Iberian conservatives with arms, money and diplomatic assistance. Spanish and Portuguese liberals, for their part, sent no fewer than six requests for international intervention in the next decade and a half; Britain and France responded with naval support, diplomatic leverage and the loan of the Foreign Legion. The French interior minister, Adolphe Thiers, claimed that it was in the French national interest that the internal government of Spain should correspond to that of France. This made the defence of Spanish liberalism imperative. Moreover, Thiers argued, the law of ‘neighbourhood’ – ‘voisinage’ – gave France the right to intervene;66 this was the same argument from ‘vicinage’ which Burke had advanced in the 1790s. To Palmerston, the first task of his ‘western confederacy’ was the protection of constitutionalism in the Iberian peninsula, which he saw as the first line of defence for freedom closer to home.
The western European liberal international consensus began to fragment towards the end of the decade. It came under increasing attack domestically in both countries. In France, the restive parliamentary and public sphere felt that not enough was being done to help the cause of liberty across the continent, and – for this amounted in their eyes to the same thing – to re-establish France’s position within the state system. Louis-Philippe was battered not only over his cautious policy towards Spain, but also for tolerating the Austrian military repression of riots in the Free City of Cracow. In Britain, the liberal camp was split between Palmerstonian interventionists and the orthodox economic liberal followers of Cobden. Breaking with the Russophobe consensus – which embraced Britons of all stripes, but particularly liberals – Cobden rejected intervention (‘no foreign politics’). Not only did he minimize the tsarist threat, but Cobden also believed that an activist foreign policy necessitated a backward domestic policy complete with a large standing army, spiralling national debt, colonies, and Corn Laws designed to entrench aristocratic supremacy in state, society and armed forces. For him, the repeal of the Corn Laws and the promotion of international free trade were instruments to secure liberalism at home and thus peace abroad – and vice versa.67
In the end, it was events, not opinions, which shattered the liberal geopolitics of the 1830s. Even at the best of times, France and Britain had competed as much as they had cooperated in the Iberian peninsula, overseas and elsewhere. Their relations were thrown into turmoil, however, by the renewed outbreak of war between Mehmet Ali and the Ottoman Empire. In 1839, Mehmet declared the independence of Egypt, provoking a disastrous invasion by the Sultan.68 Encouraged by France – where opinion regarded Mehmet as a liberal modernizer – the Egyptians advanced deep into the Ottoman Empire. In the middle of this drama, another crisis erupted from Damascus, where news reached Europe in early 1840 that leading Jews of the city had been convicted of ritual murder by Mehmet’s authorities on the basis of evidence supplied by the French consul. Liberal public opinion in Britain – already excited over slavery – was outraged by the treatment of the Jews, and prominent anti-slavery campaigners such as Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton and the Irish parliamentary leader Daniel O’Connell took up their cause. More importantly, the London government and politicians of almost every stripe were deeply concerned about French penetration of the Near East. So was Metternich, and on this matter he was assured of Prussian diplomatic support. The Russians, needless to say, regarded the prospect of a French-backed dynamic modernizer in Constantinople with horror. So, in mid-July 1840, all four powers agreed to prop up the Ottoman Empire and protect the Straits from occupation by a third party. In September 1840, the Royal Navy was dispatched to the Lebanon, where it landed a force of British and Austrian marines north of Beirut, to force Mehmet to relinquish Syria. Palmerston told the British consul to leave Mehmet in no doubt about ‘the extreme disgrace’ which the barbarities of Damascus ‘reflected upon his administration’.69 Faced with this united front, Mehmet released the Jews, and evacuated Syria. Not for the first time in European history, the west had produced not only the disease but also the cure.
In France, the eastern crisis detonated a popular and parliamentary explosion. Enthusiasm for Mehmet – who was seen not only as a modernizer, but also as a Russophobe and opponent of British ‘maritime despotism’ – ran high in 1839, so the government had no difficulty in securing monies that July to increase the Mediterranean fleet. The real aim of the exercise was not so much the promotion of French influence in the Middle East, however, as to secure a bargaining counter which could be traded for progress on the Rhine frontier. Against this background, it is hardly surprising that the exclusion of France from the four-power agreement of July 1840 on the Straits struck Paris like a thunderbolt. Press, parliament and popular opinion erupted in outrage at the humiliation. The French political writer Alexis de Tocqueville warned that ‘there is no government, indeed no dynasty, that would not be exposing itself to destruction if it wished to persuade this country to stand idly by’.70 The outraged masses demanded war and electoral reform; the Beirut landings provoked yet another assassination attempt against the king. Thiers felt he had no choice but to raise the stakes, and demand ‘compensation’ for France’s disappointment in the Near East through a revision of the Rhine frontier. He ostentatiously decorated his office with military maps of the Rhineland, threatened the Austrians on their ‘weak side’ in Italy, and generally talked up the prospect of a European war in order to keep domestic opinion at bay. ‘I prefer to fall on the banks of the Rhine or the Danube,’ the Duc d’Orléans announced, ‘than in a gutter of the Rue Saint Denis.’71 In other words, either the French would go to war in Germany or they would go to war with each other.
Across the Rhine, the French eruption produced a corresponding German reaction. A surge of nationalism engulfed the country, especially in the south and west, where the prospect of a second French occupation in a lifetime did not appeal. Once again, however, the inadequacy of the confederal defence arrangements was cruelly exposed. Between them, Württemberg, Baden, Bavaria and all the other middling or smaller states could only muster a fraction of the forces required. The Austrians, afflicted by a cantankerous Hungarian Diet, heavily committed in Italy and crippled by debt, were in no position to act either. Once again, it was Prussia which rose to the challenge, and within a very short period of time had not only put the western confederal fortresses in order but also mobilized nearly 200,000 men. In the end, Louis-Philippe lost his nerve, Thiers resigned, France climbed down, and war was averted.
The Eastern and Central European Crises of 1839–40 triggered a series of transformations in European foreign and domestic politics. They accelerated the tendency of the Third Germany to look to Prussia for protection against French revanchism. Even if they still stubbornly refused total military subordination to Berlin, the smaller German states were forced to concede that the idea of an independent military deterrent was unrealistic. For every step back towards a particularist past, they now took two steps forward into the Prussian future. The Rhine Crisis also gave a powerful boost to the emergence of a German liberal nationalist geopolitics which transcended state boundaries. ‘The German [empire] must be mighty and strong,’ the Rhenish liberal David Hansemann wrote in a widely distributed memorandum in 1840, ‘for we have dangerous neighbours.’ In the east, he wrote, there lay Russia, ‘the most consistently expansionist state since Roman times, which has already taken up a threatening position in the heart of Prussia [i.e. in Poland]’, and was threatening East Prussia. To the west lay France, ‘a state which is dangerous because of its internal cohesion, the warlike and excitable nature of its inhabitants and because of their tenacious and unhappy belief in the need to control the Rhine border sooner or later’. It therefore fell to Prussia to unite Germany and save it from being the ‘cockpit of all major European wars’.72 Similar views were expressed by liberals the length and breadth of Germany, even including the south. The French had thus scored an own goal with fateful consequences. Metternich remarked in November 1840 that it taken Thiers ‘only a short time to lead Germany to a place where Napoleon had brought it by ten years of oppression’.73
Like their monarchic predecessors, German liberal nationalists agreed that domestic structure should reflect the needs of foreign policy. Unlike them, however, they took this as a mandate for constitutional government. Prussia, as Hansemann noted, was made up of ‘widely dispersed’ provinces. It needed a ‘correspondingly vibrant, general and national’ patriotism to hold them together; ‘only freedom,’ he averred, ‘can create such a patriotism in Prussia’. German liberal nationalists therefore sought to compensate for their geopolitical vulnerability between east and west through a programme of internal reforms. ‘If you unify and liberate the nation at home,’ the liberal Robert Prutz argued, ‘you will also make it great and powerful externally.’ In particular, liberals wanted to harness the power of the middle classes: only public opinion, a popular militia and ‘homogeneity of principles’ could guarantee security; traditional monarchic power was no longer enough. It was in this context that liberals renewed their demand for a Prussian, and ultimately a German, ‘national representation’, as the only vehicle which could mobilize the nation against external enemies.74
The events of 1839–40 also led to profound geopolitical shifts in the Balkans. Russia had frustrated a French coup at the Straits, but the London Convention between Britain, Austria, Prussia, France, the Ottoman Empire and herself, which took place in the summer of 1841, was in most respects a defeat. The agreement explicitly forbade the passage of Russian ships, and those of all other foreign powers, through the Dardanelles and Bosphorus in peacetime. Even more worrying was the sense that the Ottoman Empire was on the verge of internal collapse, or dismemberment at the hands of Mehmet Ali and other local potentates. In January 1844, the tsar raised the problem on a visit to London and urged the British government to consider how to react if ‘unforeseen circumstances’ led to a power vacuum at Constantinople.75 Rather than join in the scramble to despoil the Ottoman Empire, Britain tried to encourage the Sultan’s reforming efforts, in the hope of making Turkey less prone to internal explosions and less vulnerable to external attack. Central to this endeavour was the defence of minority religious rights. London wanted the transformation of the Ottoman Empire not to humiliate or dominate it, but to strengthen it against external predators and reduce the danger of internal unrest. ‘There is no reason,’ Palmerston remarked of the Tanzimat reforms, ‘why [Turkey] should not become a respectable power.’76 She was being asked to join the west, not to submit to it.
It was across the Atlantic, however, that the impact of the renewed west European liberal geopolitics was most keenly felt. In 1839, the French government announced its intention to abolish slavery, which it finally did six years later (allowing a transitional period in her colonies), drawing the net ever tighter around slavery and slave-trading. Palmerston refused to recognize the independent state of Texas – which had broken away from Mexico – until it had abjured slavery in 1841. In May of that year, Palmerston signalled his intent to bring the long campaign to an end with a treaty between the five European great powers. American slave-owners observed these developments with mounting concern. In August 1843, the US Secretary of State, Abel P. Upshur, predicted that ‘England is determined to abolish slavery throughout the American continent and islands’.77 Southern strategists increasingly drew the conclusion that, in order to survive, slavery would have to expand, and in order to expand the slave lobby – far from barricading itself behind the principle of ‘states’ rights’ – would have to take over the apparatus of US foreign policy, ending nearly two decades of relative strategic restraint. In 1844, the Tennessee Democrat James Polk was duly elected president on a platform of further territorial expansion after a contest in which relations with neighbouring states and with the great powers, and developments in Europe more generally, featured prominently.78
Back in Europe, new transnational ideological and geopolitical fault-lines were opening up within European societies. The Damascus Affair, and the accompanying western and central European outbreaks of anti-Jewish sentiment, hastened the growth of an international Jewish public sphere from 1840. ‘We have no country of our own,’ Rabbi Isaac Leeser told a meeting of Jews in Philadelphia in August 1840, ‘we no longer have a united government under the shadow of which we can live securely’ and yet ‘we hail the Israelite as brother, no matter if his home be the torrid zone or where the poles encircle the earth’.79 Financially and morally supported by the wealthy diaspora in France and Britain, activists began to target governments and organizations which pursued openly anti-Jewish policies. Thus Moses Montefiore and the Frenchman Adolphe Crémieux went to Damascus to demand the release of the accused, while the Rothschilds intervened on behalf of Jews threatened with expulsion from the Russian Pale of Settlement. The Jewish international locked horns with individual states, especially the Tsarist Empire, but its main focus was on the transnational enemy, Roman Catholicism. Of course, the Jewish response also helped to create the very phenomenon which it was trying to combat. ‘The Hebrew nationality is not dead,’ the French Catholic newspaper Univers thundered in 1840. ‘What religious connection is there between the Talmudists of Alsace, Cologne or the East, and Messrs. Rothschild and Crémieux.’ It went on to speak of ‘a sense of unity [that] binds Jews together, making them act as one man in all parts of the world [so that] by means of their money they can, when it suits them, control almost the entire press in Europe’.80 This was the paradox of Jewish internationalism: it raised the cost of discrimination, but it also left Jews everywhere more vulnerable to paranoia and oppression.
This Jewish internationalism was universalist rather than nationally exclusive. Most Jews believed that their own freedom would only be possible as part of a broader process of European social and political emancipation; they had not yet grasped that it might also free antisemites from state restraint, or that their own national rights might have to be secured at the expense of the rights of others. Just before Montefiore set off for Damascus in 1840, he announced that he was vindicating ‘the claims of [the whole] of humanity’, which was ‘outraged in the persons of our persecuted and suffering brethren’. Montefiore explained that his visit therefore had a purpose much wider than that of purely Jewish solidarity, which was ‘to infuse into the governments of the east more enlightened principles of legislation . . . and in particular to prevail on those governments to abolish the use of torture, and to establish the supremacy of law over undefined and arbitrary power’.81 The purpose behind these ‘humanitarian’ endeavours was not to colonize the states in question, but to make them better places for their populations and ultimately more viable members of the state system.
The 1840s also marked the emergence of another European transnational geopolitics, reflecting the massive social and economic changes of the past fifty years or so. Britain had already seen an ‘industrial revolution’, and many other states, particularly in the west, were on the verge of following suit. Industrialization, urbanization, the railway boom, the growth of the bourgeoisie, the emergence of the embryonic ‘working classes’ – these were all, to a greater or lesser degree and at different speeds, pan-European developments. So were alienation, industrial protest and class conflict. Observing all this in the early 1840s was the radical young journalist Karl Marx. He was living and writing in the Prussian Rhineland, a rapidly industrializing area in which many of Germany’s first railways were being built. It was in this environment that he began to develop his materialist conception of history as a process of class conflict based on socio-economic interests. In 1844, he met up with the like-minded Friedrich Engels and both men started work on The German ideology. The only answer to the prevailing capitalist system of injustice, they argued, was ‘communism . . . an ideal to which reality [would] have to adjust itself’. This could only be realized if European workers recognized that they had more in common with each other than with their oppressors. In late September 1845, a group of left-wing British Chartists, German workers and artisans, and various other European revolutionaries convened in London to found the Fraternal Democrats; though Marx and Engels did not attend themselves, they were instrumental in preparing the event. Socialist internationalism had been born.82
The international scene remained relatively stable until mid-decade, but from 1845 on all hell broke loose. In December of that year, faced with the threat of British and French penetration of Mexico, and the relentless advance of the anti-slave trade movement around the periphery of the republic, the United States annexed Texas as a slave state. It did so partly to pre-empt a European power, and partly because the Southern lobby required the extension of slavery to new territories in order to maintain their domestic position against the abolitionist threat in the North. Border tensions soon escalated into a war which Mexico lost decisively.
Europe was also entering a phase of severe domestic unrest and international tension. It took place against the background of escalating Anglo-French colonial differences, and the fear that the advent of steam would undermine British naval supremacy; the first of many invasion scares along the south coast followed in 1844–5. ‘The Channel is no longer a barrier,’ Palmerston warned the House of Commons in June 1845. ‘Steam navigation has rendered that which was before impassable by a military force nothing more than a river passable by a steam bridge.’83 In 1846, the Franco-British entente was crippled by a row over the marriage of Queen Isabella’s younger sister – and expected heir – to Louis-Philippe’s son. This coup infuriated London, which had hoped that she would marry a cousin of Prince Albert. Britain was rocked by another invasion scare which lasted into 1847. At around the same time, a Polish revolt in Habsburg Galicia was put down by the Austrian authorities with some difficulty and considerable bloodshed. The really important developments, however, took place in Germany. In early August, King Christian VIII of Denmark issued an ‘open letter’ declaring the Duchies of Schleswig and Holstein to be an integral part of the Danish monarchy. This was an affront not only to the German Confederation, of which Holstein was a member, but also to the German national movement, which claimed both duchies for their planned united German nation state.
These events interacted with the geopolitical discourses within European states. The French invasion scare drove a debate about British military preparedness, which was widely believed to have declined since 1815, and precipitately during the 1840s. The London government responded to this challenge innovatively, embracing Cobden’s call for international peace through free trade. Often seen as a reflection of shifts in British society, the abolition of the Corn Laws in 1846 actually had its roots in foreign policy. It was expected not merely to destroy the domestic bases of British militarism by crushing landlord power, but also to link states commercially through what we would today call ‘interdependence’, thus making war all but impossible. Free trade, Cobden predicted, would inaugurate ‘the greatest revolution that ever happened in the world’s history’, destroy ‘the antagonism of race, and creed and language’, and make ‘large and mighty empires . . . gigantic armies and great navies’ redundant.84 In France, the continuing failure of the Orleanist regime to overturn or at least revise the Vienna Settlement led to a terminal crisis of legitimacy. ‘It is above all the mistrust caused by the government’s handling of the foreign question,’ the socialist Étienne Cabet remarked in 1840, ‘that makes us desire the reign of democracy so strongly: that is the main cause of our internal agitations.’85 The resulting tension between the administration, the small and largely pacifist electorate and the much larger group of nationalist republican hawks began to tear the country apart. Foreign policy featured prominently in the 1846 election campaign, which mobilized far more people than were actually entitled to vote.
Across the Rhine, German public opinion erupted in fury over Schleswig-Holstein. The Confederation fumbled; Metternich remained studiously inactive. In Baden, the radical Friedrich Hecker threatened to send volunteers to the duchies if the Confederation and the princes refused to act. All eyes now turned to Berlin. ‘Prussia must put herself at the head of Germany,’ the liberal Heidelberg historian G. G. Gervinus argued. ‘This requires three things,’ he continued, ‘Prussia must promulgate a constitution, it must allow freedom of the press and it must attempt a forceful foreign policy.’86 After a prolonged period of vacillation, Berlin was forced to concede that Prussia’s exposed geopolitical position between west and east required a military and logistic mobilization which only greater domestic political participation could guarantee. This was not possible, however, because raising new taxes or taking out substantial new loans required the consent of a national representation, something which the king and conservatives were desperate to avoid. The question became acute after the autumn of 1845, when the French government began a network of strategic railways threatening the western border of the Confederation. When, in April 1846, a federal commission stressed the need for an equivalent German system of strategic railways, the issue could no longer be deferred.
Once again, the Confederation dithered. Austria, preoccupied by escalating revolutionary violence in Italy, did nothing; the southern German states were unable even to agree the gauge of an integrated rail network. If Germany was to have the system of strategic railways she so desperately needed, Prussia would have to act alone, or at least take the lead. In order to do so, however, she would have to submit to a fundamental reform of her political economy. The only way out of fiscal-political gridlock was to call a national representation in order to sanction the extraordinary taxation required for railway construction. So, in 1846, Frederick William finally bit the bullet and summoned a United Diet to meet in the following year. When this assembled in the summer of 1847, it provided a national forum at which liberal grievances could be articulated. This growing confidence and activism of the liberal nationalist public sphere found expression in the founding of the Deutsche Zeitung in May 1847. Its programme consisted of three main demands: a competitive position for German goods in foreign markets, an end to the diplomatic dependence on Russia, and an active ‘German’ foreign policy in pursuit of political unity; these were to be achieved through an alliance between the Prussian state and the nationalist movement.
The Prussian Adjutant-General, Ludwig von Thile, met these concerns halfway in his opening address to the Diet. Prussia, he argued, was ‘called by its geographic location to be the champion of Germany’, because its ‘lands everywhere comprise the vanguard of Germany and enemies first have to step over our bodies before they can penetrate further into Germany’.87 To this end, the government argued, a railway linking the two halves of the monarchy was not only commercially desirable, but strategically vital. The majority of the mostly liberal delegates agreed with this analysis. ‘If our brothers cannot hurry to our aid,’ one remarked, ‘then we shall be . . . flooded by Cossacks, Kalmuks and Kirgizians.’88 They were sceptical, however, as to whether the government had the backbone to deliver on nationalist demands. This concern merged with their determination to use the monarchy’s financial embarrassment to promote constitutional change. The United Diet refused to vote Frederick William the monies for the Ostbahn until he agreed to the establishment of a permanent national representation across the monarchy. They forced him to agree to various other reforms, such as extending the emancipation of the Jews to all provinces. Soon after, Hansemann demanded Prussian action in support of German interest in Schleswig-Holstein. Meanwhile, in central and southern Germany, deputies from the representative assemblies met to debate how best to achieve national unification, as well as social and constitutional reform.
In Austria, Metternich faced fiscal-political gridlock. Huge sums were required to fund the programme of railway construction started in 1842, and to keep a lid on revolutionaries in Italy. These could not be found in Hungary, where a new radical leadership under Lajos Kossuth was emerging. Raising taxes still further in some of the other territories risked provoking unrest unless it was accompanied by obnoxious constitutional concessions. The only alternative, borrowing on the international money markets, depended on maintaining Habsburg credibility at home and abroad. For when the Vienna syndicate agreed to advance substantial loans to the government, it did so on condition that the level of public bonds did not fall below par. To cap it all, the opposition triumphed in 1847 elections to the Hungarian parliament. In the late 1840s, therefore, the Austrian state found itself being slowly strangled by the very same fiscal-political vice which had destroyed the French ancien régime in 1787–8. Something would have to give.
Matters were brought to a head across central and western Europe by two interlocking crises. There been a poor harvest in many European countries in 1845–6. Impoverished artisans became progressively more restive. A collective credit crunch, rocketing unemployment and rising interest rates – in many ways the first crisis of the capitalist system – added to government woes in 1847. What gave the established order the coup de grâce, however, was its failure in foreign policy. The final straw was the Swiss crisis of 1847, triggered by the victory of the liberal Protestant cantons, led by Berne, over the smaller conservative Catholic cantons of the Sonderbund. According to the Vienna Settlement, the great powers were guarantors of the Swiss constitution, and there was every prospect that Austria, which sympathized with the conservatives, and France, which backed the liberals, would soon find themselves engaged in a proxy diplomatic and ideological struggle. At stake here was not so much Switzerland, as the stability of Germany and the whole European system. Metternich feared that the liberal victory would act as a magnet for revolutionary tendencies in south Germany, from where events in Switzerland were being closely watched. Indeed, German liberals launched a massive petition campaign in support of the Swiss liberals; they were particularly impressed by the performance of the liberal militia, which they wished to adopt as a model for themselves. Metternich failed, however, to impose his will on Switzerland, not least because he lacked the financial resources to do so.
Taken together, the socio-economic and politico-diplomatic crises of late 1847 rapidly destroyed the remaining legitimacy, and thus the financial credibility, of the ancien régime in France, Austria and Prussia. François Guizot, the French prime minister, was on his last legs. Anxiety about the growth of Prussian power and the security of the eastern frontier had been mounting from the mid-1840s, and the administration was also under heavy radical fire for acquiescing in the annexation of Cracow, and abandoning Italian nationalists. In parliament, Victor Hugo extolled Napoleon and condemned materialism. Across Paris, ‘banquets’ – in reality opposition demonstrations of up to 20,000 people – were held to demand a broader franchise and a more active foreign policy to destroy the treaties of 1815 and support nationalist revolutionaries in Italy, Poland and Germany. In Austria, Metternich – who had been so determined to learn from Joseph II’s mistakes – found himself locked into an ever-tightening vicious circle of foreign-political confrontation, domestic unrest and fiscal constraint. In early March 1848, as the public bonds plummeted, the banks finally pulled the plug. The government was forced to summon the estates to dig itself out of the financial morass. As in France in 1789, therefore, the strength of the established order had been comprehensively eroded by a searing fiscal and foreign policy critique from the vibrant public sphere long before the first protestors took to the streets in Paris, Vienna or Berlin. ‘The government was not overthrown,’ Tocqueville remarked, ‘it was allowed to fall.’
The revolutionary virus struck first at the weakest point of the old order: Palermo.89 It quickly spread from Sicily to the mainland, and very soon the King of Naples and Sicily was forced to grant a constitution. The rulers of Piedmont and Tuscany, seeking to pre-empt revolution in their territories, followed suit. These events were not enough, however, to provoke a European upheaval. The revolution in Paris, which erupted in February, was another matter. The flight of Louis-Philippe, the proclamation of the Republic and the emergence of a coalition of radicals, socialists and moderates were a profound challenge to the whole Vienna Settlement. There was an immediate war scare in southern and western Germany, especially Baden and the Prussian Rhine Province, where a French attack was imminently expected, and where the continuing failure of the established authorities to provide for the common defence undermined their legitimacy still further. In Italy, revolutionaries seized power in Venice and Milan, the Habsburg forces retreating into a network of fortresses; later that year, they took over Rome as well. At around the same time, revolutionaries took control of Berlin, and compelled the king to agree to a constitution and sign up to German unification. Liberals and nationalists also grabbed power in Schleswig-Holstein, Baden, Bavaria and various other German territories. In the Habsburg Empire, liberal insurgents forced Metternich into exile and formed a coalition government with conservatives in Vienna. Liberals and nationalists also took control in Hungary, Prague and Cracow.
All this already represented a huge ideological challenge to the Vienna Settlement, but it was the potential geopolitical impact of the revolutionary takeover which most concerned the two remaining great powers, Great Britain and Russia. The liberal nationalist foreign policy programme in France, Germany and Italy was effectively a declaration of permanent war against conservative Europe. A crusade to free the Poles and Italians, to unify the Germans, and generally roll back Tsarist despotism seemed on the cards. An intervention to support Italian revolutionaries was right at the top of the list of radical demands in Paris. The new Prussian liberal government sent troops to support German nationalists in Schleswig-Holstein against the Danes. It openly considered war with Russia on behalf of the Poles. In Italy, the revolutionaries looked to not only the creation of a unitary state, but also the export of their principles. ‘The end which I pursue,’ Mazzini announced, ‘is Italian unity, the Italian thought concentrating itself in the Rome of the people, and radiating from there across Europe.’90 His revolutionary agenda coincided – in part – with that of the Piedmontese ruler, Charles Albert, who was seeking to expand at Habsburg expense. Appealing to Italian national sentiment, he vowed to ‘do it alone’ and attacked the Austrians, threatening to overturn the carefully constructed balance in the peninsula. The proliferation of nationalist revolts within the Habsburg Empire also had profound implications for the European system, because they seemed to presage Austria’s collapse as a major power.
There was much that was impractical and utopian in the liberal nationalist vision, but it was also grounded in a keen sense of strategic priorities. The main enemy in France and Germany was not the Habsburg Empire but the tsarist colossus, which was seen as the reactionary lender of last resort. Not even the most optimistic radical thought that it could be destroyed; it would have to be contained. At this point, in fact, the French favoured a German federation to block Russia – the foreign minister, Édouard Drouyn de Lhuys, called for a Franco-German fraternal pact to reconstruct a ‘free and independent’ Poland as a buffer in the east.91 They also wanted to keep Austria as strong as possible for the same reason. To that end, the new French prime minister, Alphonse de Lamartine, offered to compensate the Habsburgs for the loss of Italy with the Danubian principalities. In July 1848, the French foreign minister, Jules Bastide, explained that an expanded Austria would serve as ‘a barrier between Russia and the complete domination of east Europe’.92 Paris sought to square these national and strategic circles by recommending a ‘Danubian federation’. In the same vein, the German liberal nationalists assembled at Frankfurt looked to a restored Poland as the bulwark of European liberalism against tsarist despotism.
Disagreements over foreign policy radicalized the revolutions. This was particularly the case in France, where irritations with Lamartine’s cautious policy quickly surfaced. In mid-May 1848, the Constituent Assembly was invaded by leftist demonstrators calling – unsuccessfully – for an army to be sent to Germany to deter Prussia and help the Poles, all to be financed by a tax on the rich. Not long after, Napoleon Bonaparte’s nephew, Louis Napoleon, was elected to the National Assembly, and in December he won the presidency in a landslide. This was a vote if not for immediate then certainly for urgent revision of the Vienna Settlement. ‘The name of Napoleon,’ he himself boasted a year later, ‘is a programme in itself’,93 a clear wink at a territorially revisionist agenda. On receiving news of the election, King Frederick William IV of Prussia told a group of German parliamentarians that ‘You can see Germany threatened on the Rhine. I hope that when I call my people to arms it will show itself worthy of its fathers and will gloriously protect her borders as in 1813’; he even called for the erection of a ‘bronze curtain’ (mur d’airain) against France in the west.94 In the short term, however, Louis Napoleon contented himself with sending an expedition to Rome in April 1849, in order to pre-empt an Austrian attack on the Roman Republic. He restored the pope, partly to appease Catholic opinion at home but mainly to reassert French power in the peninsula and thus rally the public more generally behind the new regime.
The revolutions also saw the articulation of an even more radical geopolitics. In late January 1848, the League of Communists reacted to news of revolution in Naples and Sicily with a request to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels to speed up their planned programmatic statement. The result, after a mad scramble, was The communist manifesto, which appeared in February, the same month as Paris erupted. ‘A spectre is haunting Europe,’ the authors announced, ‘the spectre of communism.’ It existed, they claimed, because it ‘was already acknowledged by all European powers to be itself a power’. Unlike all other working-class or socialist parties, Marx and Engels claimed, the communists ‘point out and bring to the front the common interest of the entire proletariat, independent of all nationality’. Indeed, they continued, ‘working men have no country . . . [because] national differences and antagonisms between peoples [were] daily more and more vanishing, owing to the development of the bourgeoisie, to freedom of commerce, to the world market, to uniformity in the mode of production and in the conditions of life corresponding thereto’. In this interconnected world a new geopolitics which pitted the common interest of the exploited against their oppressors was the only answer. It would render state and national conflict redundant because ‘in proportion as the exploitation of one individual by another is put an end to, the exploitation of one nation by another will also be put an end to’.95
All this posed a massive challenge to Britain and Russia. Liberal and socialist plans for the reconstitution of Poland threatened the very core of the Tsarist Empire. ‘Poland as understood by the Poles,’ the Russian diplomat Baron Peter von Meyendorff warned in March 1848, ‘extends to the mouth of the Vistula and Duna, as well as to the Dniepr at Kiev and Smolensk.’ ‘Such a Poland,’ he continued, ‘enters Russia like a wedge, destroys her political and geographical unity, throws her back into Asia, [and] puts her back two hundred years.’ Stopping this, Meyendorff concluded, was the cause of ‘every Russian’.96 The British were also worried about Italy, because it destroyed the southern bulwark against the expansion of French power. The region was, as Palmerston put it in June 1848, no longer ‘the shield of Ajax’, but ‘the heel of Achilles’.97 Recognizing that the Habsburgs had had their day in the peninsula, he and Russell now began to search for a new solution to the barrier problem.
But the central battleground for all the parties in 1848–9, conservatives, liberals, radicals, socialists and communists, and the great powers, was Germany. Here the revolutions threatened to overturn the whole basis of the Vienna Settlement, ideologically and geopolitically. The British, for their part, observed the collapse of the Habsburg position in 1848–9 with deep concern. ‘The exclusion of Austria from the organization of Germany,’ the British ambassador to Munich, Sir John Milbanke, cautioned in late April 1848, ‘appears, if examined in connection with the balance of power in Europe, only in the light of an aggrandizement of Prussia. It completely alters the balance. It destroys the treaties which form the basis of European national law. The great powers would be fully justified in declaring it a casus belli.’98
On the other side of the divide, there was a corresponding sense of expectation. ‘The communists turn their attention chiefly to Germany,’ Marx and Engels wrote in the Communist manifesto, ‘because that country is on the eve of a bourgeois revolution.’ This, they argued, was bound to take place ‘under more advanced conditions of civilization, and with a much more developed proletariat’ than the revolutions in seventeenth-century England and eighteenth-century France. Indeed, Marx and Engels were convinced that ‘the bourgeois revolution in Germany [would] be but the prelude to an immediately following proletarian revolution’.99 The German liberals at Frankfurt, for their part, wanted a united constitutional Germany in place of the loose confederal conglomerate established at Vienna. They were divided, however, on the question of whether this should be a Kleindeutschland – a ‘small Germany’ excluding the Habsburg lands – under Prussian leadership, or a Grossdeutschland – a ‘greater Germany’ which included them – under Austrian leadership.
Both London and St Petersburg were aware that a united Germany would have profound implications for the overall balance, particularly if allied to a dynamic liberal nationalist movement. ‘Our whole system,’ Nesselrode, the Russian foreign minister, remarked in April 1848, ‘must change because a new power is arising in Germany which, united, democratic and ambitious, has the means to make considerable difficulties for us.’100 In particular, St Petersburg was worried about the situation in Schleswig-Holstein, which affected the security of the Baltic.101 Neither Britain nor Russia objected to the idea of greater German unity per se, but they both had very different conceptions of what the ideological complexion of the new state should be. As early as March 1848, Palmerston welcomed any initiative that aimed ‘to consolidate Germany and give it more unity and political vigour’, as ‘productive of additional security of the balance of power in Europe’.102 A moderate liberal Prussian-led united Germany, Palmerston remarked in July 1849, ‘would be . . . a solid barrier between the powers of the continent’,103 which would contain France and exclude Russia. The Tsarist Empire, on the other hand, wanted a strong conservative Germany under Prussian or Austrian leadership, or managed as a condominium, which would suppress revolutionary activity in the confederation, cease to interfere in Poland, and act as a bulwark against the spread of revolutionary ideas from France. Russia was therefore firmly opposed to German unity as a ‘democratic project’.104
The Austrians came up with the most radical plan for central Europe. The Habsburgs were determined to maintain their position in Germany, and to make their empire more effective through greater centralization. Right at the end of 1848, Prince Schwarzenberg, the chief minister, advanced a scheme to create ‘a great, united, powerful’105 Germany incorporating the existing lands of the Confederation as well as all the Habsburg Slav, Hungarian, Polish and Italian territories. Although the ostensible purpose of this ‘Empire of Seventy Millions’ was to enable Germany to deter external aggression by great powers, it was rejected by the great powers as a threat to the European balance. The French warned that a huge territorial expansion of the Confederation – which would greatly increase the military power that could be brought to bear on their eastern border and particularly by the Habsburgs in Lombardy – would not be tolerated. Britain took the same view, as much for ideological as geopolitical reasons. ‘The whole mass,’ Russell warned in mid-November 1850, ‘might in the name of the Confederation be employed against France or Belgium. This is a serious matter . . . inconsistent with the balance of power in Europe.’106 Both powers argued that the territorial and constitutional order of the Confederation formed an integral part of the European balance and ‘public law’, and could therefore not be altered unilaterally. The Russians welcomed the idea of a strong conservative Germany, but were not prepared to fight a European war to implement it. Isolated, Austria was forced to back down and Schwarzenberg’s plan was quietly shelved.
The European revolutions had failed for many reasons. Revolutionary unity was fractured by divides between town and country, liberals and radicals, Protestants and Catholics. In most cases, the peasantry were bought off with concessions at an early stage and became a largely conservative force; in Italy, this helped the Habsburgs in their struggle against the largely bourgeois and artisanal revolutionaries. After the initial period of shock had worn off, conservatives in Prussia, Austria, France and across Europe rallied, founded newspapers and went on the offensive. The King of Prussia refused to accept a crown offered – ‘from the gutter’ – by the liberal nationalists at Frankfurt. He would not countenance a united Germany except by the consent of all the powers involved. The armies, which had proved so unreliable in 1847–8, were purged of subversive elements and deployed to devastating effect by General Prittwitz in Berlin, General Cavaignac in Paris and Marshal Radetzky in northern Italy. In eastern and central Europe, where 1848 had dawned with hopes of a ‘springtime of the peoples’, the nationalities were soon at each other’s throats.
The really decisive factor, however, was the strategic failure of the European revolutionaries. Lamartine issued a circular to the great powers in March 1848, abjuring any intent to subvert the Vienna Settlement by force. The republic celebrated ‘her reinstatement in the rank she is entitled to occupy among the great powers of Europe’, but she accepted that the existing ‘territorial limits’ were ‘facts which the Republic admits as a basis . . . in her relations with foreign nations’ and she promised not to ‘pursue secret or incendiary propaganda among neighbouring states’.107 This made clear that the pan-liberal crusade so frequently invoked in the late 1840s would not materialize. Moreover, many Frenchmen were uneasy about German unity, even under liberal auspices: the Gazette de France warned against a ‘colosse allemand’ in 1848, and Jules Bastide, the minister of foreign affairs, feared for France if all 45 million Germans followed a ‘single impetus’. He therefore advocated a policy of ‘division and balance of power’ towards the eastern neighbour.108 When Britain and Russia, concerned for the balance in the Baltic, imposed the armistice of Malmo on the Prussian troops supporting the German national cause in Schleswig-Holstein, there was nothing to stop them. Lacking any military force of its own, the Frankfurt parliament was helpless to intervene and never recovered from the resulting humiliation. More generally, German revolutionaries took fright at the national aspirations of Poles, Czechs and other minorities.109 In Italy, Charles Albert was crushed – twice – by Austrian troops and was forced to abdicate in favour of his son, Victor Emmanuel. Piedmont itself survived largely unscathed due to its value as a buffer state. Finally, in 1849, the Russians intervened militarily in Hungary to restore Habsburg power in Budapest. In the end, contrary to what liberals, socialists and communists had proclaimed, counter-revolution proved to be international, while revolution remained national and even regional in scope. Liberals and workers had not united, but conservatives and reactionaries had.
Despite their failure, the revolutions wrought huge domestic and geopolitical changes. The election of Prince Louis Napoleon as French president in November 1849 led to vigorous, if ultimately futile, negotiations with the Russians, Prussians and Austrians about French expansion into the Rhineland in return for balancing gains by the eastern powers elsewhere. He combined this activist foreign policy with a populist domestic stance in support of a broad franchise. At the beginning of December 1851, he seized power in a largely bloodless coup, won elections in February 1852 and in November of that year carried a plebiscite for the restoration of the empire. The new constitution created a monarchy with near-absolutist power, which monopolized the right to introduce legislation, for example, but one buttressed by popular support. Napoleon was ‘responsible before the people, to whom he has always the right of appeal’,110 through plebiscites. This was a formula for a highly activist foreign policy, driven by Napoleon’s neo-Bonapartist ambitions and the revisionist sentiments of French public opinion. The Rhine border and the Italian settlement, and the ‘grandeur’ of France more generally, were firmly back on the international agenda.
Austria reacted to the traumas of 1848–9, and the humiliation of rescue by the Russians, with a programme of ‘neo-absolutist’ state-sponsored modernization. The Sylvester Patent of 1851 attempted some long-overdue agrarian reform; peasants now became equal before the law. At one level, the measures were a success: foreign trade doubled, state revenue was increased by two thirds, and Hungary was finally compelled to pull its fiscal weight.111 Unfortunately for the Habsburgs, centralization alienated the Hungarians (who paid four times more in taxes under the new system), Poles and Italians, and it found few takers among the increasingly vociferous Slav populations. To the north, the new Prussian Landtag elected on a limited three-class property franchise lost no time in demanding both greater efforts in support of ‘German’ interests and control of the budget. The same was true of the parliaments of the southern and western states. Moreover, many German liberals were taking a long hard look at their failure in 1848–9, and were increasingly unnerved by Louis Napoleon’s revival of French claims to the Rhine border. There were widespread fears that – as the Augsburg Allgemeine Zeitung put it in November 1850 – ‘our land will once again become the arena in which cocky foreigners will fight out their quarrels with our blood’ as they had during the Thirty Years War; there was a huge upsurge of interest in the mid seventeenth century as a site of national trauma, massacre, division and humiliation. Around Christmas 1853, the Kölnische Zeitung warned that Germany ‘could not consider itself safe from Poland’s fate’.112 These liberals began to accept that some sort of grand bargain with the Prussian state might have to be struck in order to achieve German unity. They would have to choose not only between Austria and Prussia, but between freedom (Freiheit) and unity (Einheit).113
For the moment, though, Prussian conservatives and the government kept nationalist groups at arm’s length, partly for fear of contamination by the liberal virus but also because – as Otto von Bismarck told the Landtag in March 1851 – parliamentary control of the budget would make a coherent foreign policy impossible. ‘Prussia’s greatness,’ he argued in a memorandum to the crown prince two years later, ‘was by no means achieved through liberalism and free-thinking, but through a series of strong, resolute and wise rulers, who carefully nourished and saved the military and financial resources of the state.’ For this reason, he laid down that ‘every Prussian should [only] enjoy the degree of freedom which is consonant with the public welfare and with the course which Prussia has to take in European politics, but no more’. ‘One can have this freedom,’ Bismarck remarked pointedly, ‘without parliamentary government.’114
In the mid-1850s, the European and global system was roiled by a fresh round of crises. Unsettled by the manifest weakness of the Porte in the face of Egyptian aggression and western European interference, the Tsarist Empire moved pre-emptively to secure its share in the expected breakup. ‘We have on our hands a sick man,’ Nicholas I famously remarked, ‘a very sick man. It will be . . . a great misfortune if, one of these days, he should slip away from us, especially before all necessary arrangements were made.’115 In February 1853, the Russian foreign minister, Menshikov, delivered an ultimatum demanding that the Sultan grant the tsar sovereignty over the Orthodox populations in the Ottoman Empire, and five months later Russian troops occupied the Danubian principalities, provoking the Sultan to declare war. In November 1853, the tsar demanded the independence of the Danubian principalities, Serbia, Bosnia and Bulgaria, and an expanded Greece; all this was accompanied by a call for a general Christian rising against Ottoman rule. That same month, the Russian navy destroyed an Ottoman squadron at Sinope on the Black Sea. A Franco-British ultimatum demanding that Russia withdraw from Moldavia and Wallachia was ignored. On the contrary, in March 1854, Russian troops poured across the Danube and pushed south.
All this sent shock waves across Europe. The real issue was not the Ottoman Empire, but Germany and the whole balance of power. To Vienna, the presence of Russian troops in Moldavia and Wallachia extended the ring of encirclement around the empire’s eastern border; it was imperative to get them out as quickly as possible. That was also the view in France and Britain, where central European concerns took priority over very real worries about Turkey and – in the latter case – the security of India.116 Coming after Russian military intervention in Hungary and diplomatic intervention in Germany in 1848–9, the occupation of the principalities seemed to signal the tsar’s intent not merely to partition the Ottoman Empire but to dominate Europe as a whole. In the great parliamentary debate in February 1854 on the eve of the declaration of war, Russell argued that Britain should confront Russia in order to ‘maintain the independence, not only of Turkey, but of Germany and of all European nations’.117 Likewise, the Foreign Secretary, Lord Clarendon, emphasized that ‘Germany by its geographical position must be the principal bulwark against Russian aggression’.118 The French agreed.
Britain, France and – a little later – Piedmont therefore declared war on Russia and sent a substantial expeditionary force to attack the tsar on his southern flank in the Crimea. For the next two years, the conflict raged with fluctuating fortunes. After initial disasters, the western powers captured Sevastopol in September 1855, inflicting a humiliating defeat on the tsar. The really decisive blow was struck in Germany, however. Vienna persuaded the Prussians – though neutral – to support their demand that the Diet commit itself to the defence of Austria on the Danube. This meant that the tsar would potentially face the combined power of Germany on his western front. The Habsburgs issued an ultimatum to the Russians to withdraw from Moldavia and Wallachia. Gnashing their teeth, the tsarist forces made way for an Austrian garrison for the duration of the conflict. This deprived the Russians of their forward base for an attack on the Ottomans, and the opportunity to deliver a knock-out blow on land by the shortest route. In December 1855, the Austrians even joined the French and British in an ultimatum to the new tsar – Nicholas I had died in March of that year – to end hostilities or face combined action against him. Isolated in Europe, Alexander II sued for peace. The resulting Treaty of Paris in 1856 was a devastating blow to Russian ambitions. Not only was the tsar forced to back off from plans to partition the Ottoman Empire and co-opt the Balkan Christians, but he was forbidden from maintaining ships or arsenals in the Black Sea. More generally, the preamble to the treaty stated that the independence and integrity of Turkey were central to ‘the peace of Europe’, while its second article called on the Porte to ‘take advantage of public law and the European concert’. The Ottoman Empire was being invited to join the state system on an equal basis, because its stability and strength were considered vital to international peace.
The reverberations of the Crimean War were felt across the world. In the United States, there were fears that the victory of France and Britain would lead to increased interference by the western powers in ‘their’ hemisphere. If London and Paris could send an army by sea to the other end of Europe and impose their will on Russia, there was nothing to stop them from crossing the Atlantic. For this reason, most Americans, North and South, had cheered on the Russians. The anxiety was strongest, however, among the slave interest, which was further isolated by the Ottoman abolition of slavery in 1856 as part of its entry fee to polite international society, and feared an Anglo-French crusade against itself. These concerns came at a time when domestic tension over slavery was steadily increasing. Southerners had long resisted the formation of nonslave states in the Nebraska Territory north of the Mason–Dixon Line. They feared, as the Missouri senator David R. Aitchison put it, that they would be ‘surrounded by free territory’,119 and exposed to constant attack by abolitionists. The Kansas–Nebraska Act of 1854 was therefore a Southern victory, which broke with the Missouri Compromise by creating two states, in which ‘popular sovereignty’, that is the will of the white settlers, would determine the question of slavery. At the same time, the slave interest sought to expand southwards, perhaps in order to counter-balance the steady increase in ‘free’ states by increasing Southern seats in the House of Representatives, and to pre-empt the spread of abolitionist British and French influence in those areas.120 In the Ostende Manifesto in the autumn of 1854, issued while Britain was distracted in the Crimea, US diplomats warned Europe not to force emancipation upon Cuba. In 1856, as Britain and France triumphed in the Crimea, President Buchanan was elected on a platform of acquiring Cuba by purchase, and three years later he eventually approached Congress with a request for 30 million dollars to that end. United States foreign policy had been well and truly captured by the slave interest.
It was in central Europe, however, that the Crimean War had its greatest geopolitical impact.121 Hitherto, the Tsarist Empire had tried to stay on good terms with both Prussia and Austria, but tilted strongly towards the latter on ideological grounds. During the war, both powers had blotted their copybooks in St Petersburg, but Austria’s humiliating ultimatum had given far more offence than Prussia’s timid neutrality. Henceforth, the Russians saw the Austrians as the principal barrier to their Balkan ambitions, and the idea that the path to Constantinople ran through Vienna – a common slogan in later decades – began to gain currency in St Petersburg. Even more crucially, the Russians were determined that they would never again face the full force of the German Confederation under the aegis of Austria. Vienna would have to be unbolted from the leadership of Germany. So in late August 1856 the new Russian foreign minister, Alexander Gorchakov, announced in a widely discussed circular that the tsar would no longer support his fellow monarchs. The message was clear: the Habsburgs would face the next revolutionary challenge on their own.
The Crimean War provoked a sustained round of domestic reform in Russia. Defeat had shown that the traditional social forms were not up to the challenge of mid-nineteenth-century western powers. The problem lay in the fact that, thanks to the constraints of serfdom, most of the empire’s vast population was not pulling its weight militarily, with perhaps a tenth of those eligible actually available for military service.122 The choice facing the tsarist regime was stark. Either the agrarian system had to be reformed, or the empire risked further defeats in the European state system. So, in March 1856, Alexander II told an audience of Moscow gentry that serfdom should be abolished, sweetening the pill with the observation that it was better to do so ‘from above’ before it took place spontaneously ‘from below’. He eventually signed the legislation into law in mid-February 1861. What the tsar was determined not to concede, however, was any sort of political participation on the western model. The resulting imbalance between socio-economic modernization and political stasis was remarked on by contemporary observers: the revolutionary activist Alexander Herzen famously spoke of Russia being ‘Chingis-Khan with telegraphs’.123
The Crimean War also had a profound impact on domestic politics in the British Empire.124 News of the military and organizational fiascos in the peninsula provoked widespread consternation in parliament and the public sphere. Lord Aberdeen’s government fell in January 1855 over his defeat in a vote to establish a parliamentary select committee to look into the conduct of military operations; Palmerston replaced him as the man who could win the war. There was disagreement, however, over how best to bring British society into line with the needs of the European state system. Some such as Samuel Morley, a Nottingham hosiery manufacturer and later MP, argued in June 1855 that failure in the war reflected a lack of popular legitimacy and that ‘the people themselves’ should take more responsibility for their own security through the militia and franchise reform.125 Others pointed to the conservatism and unprofessionalism of the army, where officers bought their commissions rather than acquiring them through merit. To liberal and radical critics, all this was evidence of continuing ‘aristocratic’ dominance of British institutions which enfeebled the nation in its struggle with external enemies. In order to prepare for the challenges ahead, Britain embarked on a round of internal and imperial reforms. Over the next few years, a Royal Commission into the defences of the United Kingdom was set up, the Foreign Office was reformed, and military expenditure was substantially increased. London also attempted to put India in a better state of readiness against Russian attack by modernizing the East India Company’s forces. These reforms provoked the Mutiny of 1857, which was brought under control only with great difficulty.
It was in Italy, however, that the impact of the Crimean War was most acutely felt. The prime minister of Piedmont, Count Cavour, was now able to exploit the goodwill he had built up in London and Paris through participation in the war. To Cavour, the security of Piedmont could only be guaranteed by embracing the Italian national cause. His efforts chimed with those of the disparate radicals in the National Society such as the Venetian Daniel Manin, the Sicilian Giuseppe la Farina and (from July 1856) the Savoyard defender of the Roman Republic, Giuseppe Garibaldi. These men had undergone a fundamental rethink after the failure of the revolutions of 1848–9. They would have preferred a confederation of republics or better still a unitary republic, but, like German nationalists and Prussia, they came to see a powerful Piedmont as their only hope of getting rid of the Austrians.126 Cavour played to this sentiment brilliantly. ‘Events have led Piedmont to take up a definite and firm position in Italy,’ he wrote in 1857. ‘Since Providence has willed that Piedmont alone in Italy should be free and independent, Piedmont must use her freedom and independence to plead before Europe the cause of the unhappy peninsula.’127 When he met with Napoleon III at Plombières in July 1858 to discuss the expulsion of the Habsburgs, the circumstances were uniquely favourable. Russia, still furious about Austrian ‘betrayal’ during the Crimean War, had signalled her intention to stand aside; in a secret Franco-Russian treaty of early March 1859, the tsar agreed to changes in Italy and to neutralize the German Confederation, in return for an implicit pledge to revise the hated ‘Black Sea’ clauses. In Britain, public sentiment was strongly pro-Italian and government opinion was increasingly convinced that a strong Italy would be a more effective barrier to the French than the ramshackle Habsburgs. Neither Cavour nor Napoleon III, in fact, desired a united Italy. What they agreed at Plombières were the cession of Nice and Savoy to France, large-scale compensatory Piedmontese annexations in northern Italy, the continued independence of Rome itself (which was important to appease French Catholic opinion at home) and Naples, while Tuscany and the Papal States were to be combined into a Kingdom of Central Italy. All these territories were to be linked through an Italian Confederation.128
Vienna decided to pre-empt the looming attack by issuing an ultimatum in April 1859 demanding that Piedmont cease military preparations. This turned out to be a serious mistake, because the failure to explore diplomatic avenues to war cost Austria valuable goodwill in Europe. This was especially true for the German Confederation, where most states feared being dragged into a war with France on account of Habsburg ambitions in Italy; Prussia initially observed a strict neutrality. Austria was quickly and decisively beaten in costly battles at Magenta and Solferino. At this point, however, the Confederation began to stir under Prussian leadership in order to prevent a complete Austrian collapse. A large force was mobilized threatening France on her eastern border. Napoleon lost his nerve: fearing Prussian intervention, he came to an agreement with the emperor Francis Joseph at Villafranca on terms which fell far short of those outlined at Plombières. Lombardy was ceded by Austria to Napoleon III, and by him to Piedmont, but the central Italian principalities were to be restored. Nationalist opinion was outraged; Cavour resigned in disgust. For the second time in less than a decade, the German card had been played in Europe to decisive effect.129
It was too late, however, to stop the rush to Italian unity. Popular movements took advantage of the vacuum left by the departing Austrians to seize power in central Italy, followed soon after by Piedmontese troops under the pretext of ‘restoring order’. The occupations were swiftly ratified by plebiscites. Not long afterwards, Garibaldi occupied the Bourbon Kingdom of the Two Sicilies on his own initiative with a band of nationalist volunteers. Once again, Piedmontese soldiers arrived hot on his heels partly to complete the unification of Italy and partly to ensure that the masses did not get out of hand. In October 1860, the new Kingdom of Italy was proclaimed under King Victor Emmanuel II. It included all of the peninsula, with the exception of Nice and Savoy, which were ceded to France as a reward for military assistance, and Venetia, which remained Austrian for the time being. The first great breach in the Vienna Settlement had been made.
The Italian war had a major impact on European domestic politics and the states system. In Austria, the first loss of territory since the Napoleonic Wars drove the authorities to abandon ‘neo-absolutism’ and attempt a liberalization to shore up the empire. To Napoleon, the victory, and the recovery of some of the lands lost in 1815, was a vindication of his view that the reorganization of Europe on ‘national’ lines was fully compatible with French interests. For the moment, he had silenced internal critics who rallied to the cause of national ‘glory’. In Britain, the events in Italy were regarded with ambivalence. On the one hand, the annexation of Savoy, the defeat of Austria and French naval ambitions produced another invasion scare, and a fresh ‘volunteering’ movement.130 On the other hand, the Italian victory promoted a sense of liberal triumphalism: the conviction that the tide of events in Europe was heading inexorably towards nationalist and constitutionalist modernity on English lines. Gladstone, when asked what had turned him from a Conservative into a Liberal, replied succinctly: ‘Italy.’131
The most profound impact of the Italian war, however, was felt in Germany. It further reduced Austrian prestige, partly because of the defeats at Magenta and Solferino but also because of fears that the Confederation would be dragged into alien Habsburg conflicts. It also produced a fresh wave of German national feeling.132 This was sympathetic to the Austrians, who were – when all was said and done – still Germans deserving of solidarity, and imitative of the Italians, who had blazed the way for national unification. In mid-August 1859, nationalist liberals set up the Nationalverein to agitate for the unification of Germany under a single national parliament.133 It demanded the abolition of the Confederation, the creation of a central authority and the transfer of all political and military powers to Prussia until this had been achieved. The Hohenzollerns were once again being offered the liberal-constitutionalist ‘German mission’ which they had refused to accept in 1848–9. Adolphe de Bourqueney, a veteran French diplomat, warned that Napoleon III had opened a Pandora’s box in central Europe. ‘We have played too much with the empty pompous words of nationalism,’ he wrote in 1859. ‘The only serious nationalism which we have brought to light is that of Germany. Without a single afterthought we have restored to German opinion its antipathy for France.’134
The mobilization of 1859 had certainly intimidated Napoleon, but it also exposed the profound military unpreparedness of Germany, and even of Prussia. This belief sparked two intertwining reform debates which were to set the agenda for the next decade. Prussia now sought to ensure a more effective response to the next French challenge, but her attempts impaled themselves immediately and predictably on the objections of the other German states, led by Austria, which feared a loss of sovereignty. Inside Prussia itself, the government now had to address the fact that financial constraints were preventing the size of the army from reflecting the growth in population. Only half of those eligible for conscription in the 1850s were in fact recruited. The army, and the regent, Prince Wilhelm, wanted to expand the regular army through the introduction of a three-year training period for conscripts, rather than relying on the traditional Landwehr. This was fiercely resisted by the strong liberal faction in the Prussian parliament, the Landtag. They, and the German liberal nationalists in the Nationalverein generally, required no persuading of the need for greater military preparedness against France. The society’s paper announced in early June 1860 that ‘No-one doubts any more that the German Rhine frontier is threatened with a French attack.’135 There was widespread unease, however, about the cost of the proposed reforms and the political implications of breaking with the concept of a citizens’ militia. Liberals argued instead that constitutional change would give the monarchy the internal coherence necessary to deter external predators.136 The result was deadlock, in Prussia as in Germany as a whole.
Meanwhile, the core problem of Prussian and German geopolitics had not gone away – if anything, it had got worse. The Hohenzollern monarchy and the Confederation still felt marooned in the centre of Europe, wedged between the Tsarist Empire and a France rampant after victory in the Crimea and Italy. Ever since she had taken on the role of guardian of the gate in the west in 1815, Prussia had sought to rally Germany behind her. These schemes hit an immovable object in Austrian opposition and the continuing refusal of the Third Germany to compromise her sovereignty in return for increased security; economic integration did not lead inexorably to political unity. Reform of the German Confederation seemed more remote than ever, and yet Conservative dynasticism was no longer a sufficient basis of legitimation for the Hohenzollern monarchy. So, by the end of the 1850s, the Prussian leadership faced a series of interlocking and seemingly intractable problems at home, in Germany and in the European states system.
Otto von Bismarck, however, saw how these liabilities could be turned to Prussia’s advantage. The idea that the security of Prussia required her to take the lead in Germany was not new. ‘There is nothing more German,’ Bismarck observed in 1858, ‘than Prussian particularism properly understood.’ Bismarck also believed that Prussia could only survive if it secured ‘safe borders’, either through leading a reformed German Confederation, or though straightforward territorial annexation.137 In 1859 he described these ‘natural frontiers of Prussia’ as nothing less than the Baltic, the North Sea, the Rhine, the Alps and the Lake of Constance. This was a programme for Prussian dominance which would bring the independence of the Third Germany to an abrupt end. It could only be achieved if Bismarck could secure the acceptance of the other powers to a massive change in the European territorial order, or isolate those who objected; sideline or at least gain parity with Austria; win over the Third Germany, or crush those elements who refused to cooperate; co-opt the German national movement; and either persuade or bypass the liberals in the Landtag, in order to secure the funds to pay for the necessary military action. A few months before taking office as Prussian chancellor in late September 1862, Bismarck announced privately that ‘My first care will be to reorganize the army, with or without the help of the Landtag . . . As soon as the army shall have been brought into such a condition as to inspire respect, I shall seize the first best pretext to declare war against Austria, dissolve the German Diet, subdue the minor states and give national unity to Germany under Prussian leadership.’ His interlocutor, the future British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli, afterwards remarked to the Austrian ambassador: ‘Take care of that man; he means what he says.’138
As Prussia prepared to give herself and Germany the cohesion it needed to survive in an unstable Europe, the confrontation in North America came to a head during the presidential campaign of 1860. At issue were not Northern demands for the abolition of slavery; all but the most ardent abolitionists accepted that some form of gradual and consensual emancipation was the only way of avoiding a secession which would damage the Union beyond repair. It was the Southerners who took the offensive. They demanded territorial aggrandizement – and thus the extension of slavery – as the price of remaining in the Union. By contrast, the Republican candidate, Abraham Lincoln, promised to frustrate the absorption of Cuba as a slave state. Following his victory at the polls, the negotiations for the purchase of Cuba collapsed. ‘In the Union,’ the Georgian state senator Philemon Tracy warned just after the election, ‘you cannot have an inch of new territory.’139 Worse still, slavery was now completely isolated internationally. Britain made its fierce opposition to the annexation of Cuba clear, and was increasing pressure on Madrid to promulgate a decree of emancipation there. After the Russian abolition of serfdom in mid-February 1861, the ‘peculiar institution’ of slavery stood entirely alone in the civilized world. Having failed to coerce Washington into an expansionist policy on its own terms, and observing the deteriorating global situation, the South launched a pre-emptive strike.140 In April 1861, Southern artillery shelled Fort Sumter, signalling the start of hostilities with the North. The seceding states set up a Confederacy explicitly designed not only to keep the abolitionist North at arm’s length, but also to facilitate territorial expansion. Its constitution looked forward to the acquisition of new lands, which could only be slave states. The South thus went to war with the Union over the same issue which had driven London and the thirteen colonies apart: territorial expansion.
To Britain and France, the American Civil War seemed a heaven-sent opportunity to cripple a global rival. ‘England will never find a more favourable occasion,’ Napoleon III told the British ambassador to Paris in 1862, ‘to abase the pride of the Americans or to establish her influence in the world.’141 London, however, preferred to wait until the Confederacy had landed a military blow; and although slavery did not deter even many Liberals – such as Gladstone – from sympathizing with the Confederacy, it did incline public opinion firmly against active intervention in support of the South. France seized the chance to meddle openly in Mexico, where Napoleon III wanted to establish the Habsburg Archduke Maximilian as emperor under his protection. A substantial military force was sent to back him, including several thousand men from France’s ally, Egypt;142 this was proof, once again, that nonintervention in the Middle East was no guarantee that the Middle East would not attempt to interfere in the affairs of the western hemisphere. These initiatives provoked an allergic reaction in Washington. ‘The people of the United States can never regard with indifference,’ the Republican platform in the 1864 election campaign warned, ‘the attempt of any European power to overthrow by force or to supplant by fraud the institutions of any Republican government on the western continent.’ Indeed, they would view ‘with extreme jealousy, as menacing to the peace and independence of their own country, the efforts of any such power to obtain any such footholds for monarchical government sustained by foreign military force, in near proximity to the United States’.143 For the moment, however, the Union had its hands full fighting the Confederacy and had to bide its time.
Taken together, the inability to mobilize more effectively, the North’s slave emancipation proclamation and the failure to secure outside intervention doomed the Confederacy. Public opinion in Britain was not opposed to cutting the Americans down to size, but it was passionately opposed to a war in support of slavery. Tension between the two countries continued, not least because British-built ships, such as the Alabama, played havoc with Northern shipping. In autumn 1863, Lincoln went so far as to warn that the construction of ships which could break the Union blockade would lead to war. Napoleon III remained obsessed with Mexico, where his imperial ambitions were already running into difficulties. So the Confederacy was left to soldier on alone, and was gradually choked by the weight of Northern numbers and industrial superiority. In 1865, General Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox courthouse. The war of American reunification was over.
In Europe, the struggle for German unity was by then in full swing. This pitted Bismarck’s radical project against the liberal geopolitics of Britain and France, and Austria, a conservative power in both the ideological and geopolitical sense. The decisive factor was Russia, which the Prussian chancellor was able to win over through luck and good judgement. For, in January 1863, the Poles, emboldened by Russia’s defeat in the Crimea, spurred by the triumph of nationalism in Italy, hopeful of French aid, and taking advantage of a more liberal regime designed to conciliate them, rose in revolt against the tsar. There was momentary panic in St Petersburg, where Alexander feared a revival of the ‘Crimean Coalition’. British and French publics were strongly sympathetic to the Poles, and both governments provided powerful rhetorical support. Since military intervention was out of the question, this only had the effect of prolonging the agony, until the final victory of Russian forces. ‘If the British government do not mean to fight,’ the British ambassador to St Petersburg remarked in frustration, ‘let them say so, and stop the loss of life and the suffering attendant on a rising, which unaided cannot succeed.’144 The Austrians, anxious to appease liberal, Catholic and Polish opinion at home, remained uneasily neutral, compounding the offence they had caused during the Crimean War. Bismarck, by contrast, came out strongly in support of the tsar, concluding a convention to seal off the border between Prussia and Russian Poland.
The chancellor was now in an excellent position to exploit the next opportunity to promote his Prusso-German agenda. In March 1863 the Danes announced the incorporation of Schleswig into the monarchy. The Diet of the German Confederation, under heavy pressure from outraged nationalists, declared war on Denmark. Most German liberals, including those outside Prussia, cheered Bismarck on. The old Prussian doctrines of encirclement, in other words, had gained wider currency throughout the nation. Unlike 1848, Russia stood aside; so did France, planning to use the resulting international turbulence to reopen the Vienna Settlement. Prussian and Austrian troops crushed the Danes in the spring and summer of 1864. Schleswig and Holstein were taken under the joint administration of Vienna and Berlin. Once again, Britain was forced to watch impotently from the sidelines.145 German liberals and nationalists, on the other hand, exulted in the first victory for their cause under Prussian leadership. Despite commanding a large majority in the Landtag, they decided to swallow their objections to the fact that the war had been fought by troops paid for by taxes levied without parliamentary approval. Bismarck had hit on a formula which solved his domestic and foreign policy difficulties in one fell swoop.
While Bismarck was striking at the roots of the Vienna Settlement from without, the stability of the European order was being threatened from within. Industrialization had led to a huge growth in the proletariat, to class consciousness and ultimately the establishment of international political organizations. In July 1863, anarchists and socialists had met in support of Polish independence. Like their liberal counterparts, they saw the Tsarist Empire as the principal reactionary force in Europe, and consequently regarded all its opponents as progressive elements. German nationalism was particularly favoured: ‘Germany takes Schleswig,’ Karl Marx had earlier announced (in August 1848), ‘with the right of civilization over barbarism, of progress against stability.’ In September 1864, various leftist groups came together to form the International Working Men’s Association, to work for international socialist revolution across state boundaries.146 Thus was born a new European power, ‘The International’, which was to feature in the rhetoric and policies of conservative statesmen and on the agenda of European summits throughout the decade and those following. It created fresh geopolitical fronts, cutting across traditional alignments.
For the moment, however, the pace was being set by state-sponsored radicalism. In 1865, Bismarck turned to deal with Austria, the principal obstacle both to Prussian territorial expansion and to the realization of German national aspirations. Vienna was on the back foot, having only just kept up with Prussia in the Danish war and suffering from a new round of Hungarian obstructionism. The Magyars were firmly opposed to a forward policy in the Confederation, especially not if it involved military action. ‘Their wars are not our wars,’ the Hungarian patriot leader, Ferenc Déak, warned in 1861.147 Hungary’s unwillingness to pull its weight had always been the Achilles heel of the Habsburgs, and in the mid-1860s it was particularly fatal because Hungary could have covered Austria’s entire state deficit if it had only met its obligations. Russia would continue to observe a benevolent neutrality towards Prussia. ‘Our current relations with foreign powers,’ Nesselrode’s successor as Russian foreign minister, Alexander Gorchakov, reminded one interlocutor in September 1865, ‘have been shaped by the period of the Polish crisis.’148 Russia, he continued, was opposed to France’s revolutionary ‘nationality principle’, in which ‘Germany was the path to Poland’. Germany was the key, as always, and Russia was determined that ideologically congenial Prussia should dominate there.
In this context, the attitude of France was decisive. Napoleon III was the great victor of the past decade, and he planned to use the showdown between Austria and Prussia to assert his own interests in Germany. He was once again, however, under severe domestic pressure to broaden political participation and defend French national interests more vigorously. Failure to protect the Poles had dented Napoleon’s reputation at home, but what really worried critics was Germany. By promoting nationalism Europe-wide, undermining Austria and encouraging Prussia, so the argument ran, the emperor had broken the first rule of French foreign policy, which was to prevent the emergence of a strong Germany on her eastern flank. ‘One of my greatest reproaches against Italian unity,’ the veteran Thiers warned the Corps Législatif in mid-April 1865, ‘is that it is destined to be the mother of German unity.’149 In August 1865, French opinion and Napoleon himself were shocked by the Convention of Gastein, at which Austria and Prussia settled the administration of Schleswig and Holstein without reference to Paris. Despite these warning signs, Napoleon failed to support the Austrians in the looming showdown. He was distracted by the situation in Mexico, where Maximilian’s fortunes began to decline spectacularly after the defeat of the South in the Civil War. Britain, too, was preoccupied with overseas matters. ‘England is no longer a mere European power,’ the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Benjamin Disraeli, explained, ‘but the centre of a great maritime empire . . . she really is more an Asiatic power than a European.’150
In 1866, Bismarck struck. He refused to support proposals for confederal reform from Vienna and the Third Germany. In April, the Prussian chancellor concluded an alliance with the Italians, promising them Venetia in return for opening up a front on Austria’s southern flank; he also encouraged Hungarian separatism in order to weaken Francis Joseph at home. That same month, Prussian troops occupied Holstein, which was supposed to be under Austrian administration. Austria – supported by virtually the whole of the rest of Germany – mobilized for war, partly to divert attention from her multiplying national problems, but mainly to head off the Prussian challenge to her position in Germany.151 To the surprise of many, Prussian forces used the new rail network to assemble rapidly in Bohemia and crushed the Austrians at the battle of Sadowa in June 1866. The armies of the Third Germany secured some local successes against the Prussians, but were quickly shrugged aside. In August, Austria accepted her exclusion from Germany at the Treaty of Prague; two months later, she ceded Venetia to France, who then gifted it to Italy at the Treaty of Vienna. Prussia annexed Schleswig-Holstein, Hanover, Hesse-Cassel and Frankfurt. Much of the rest of Germany, some twenty-two states in all, was corralled into the North German Confederation under the leadership of Berlin. The south German states retained their independence, but were forced to sign secret military agreements which tied them ever closer to Prussia. For the first time ever in modern European history, most of Germany was now organized as a single power centre. The struggle for mastery in Germany was over; a new phase in the struggle for supremacy in Europe was about to begin.
In the fifty years after the Vienna Congress, European geopolitics had remained as globalized as ever. The great powers contended over Egypt, Syria and the Ottoman Empire in general. A new humanitarian geopolitics centred on slavery and protection of the Jews merged with longstanding beliefs about the link between good governance and international stability. Britain and France faced off against the United States, and each other, in Central America and the Caribbean. They went to the brink of intervening in the American Civil War. The central contestation, however, was in Europe: in the Iberian peninsula, Italy and, above all, Germany. It was in the German Confederation that geopolitical interests clashed most loudly, and where the liberal and national sentiments roiling the whole continent had the profoundest implications for the whole European balance; these stresses ultimately destroyed the central European order and paved the way for a completely new geopolitics based on an independent united Germany rather than a loose confederation under international supervision.
The losers in all this were some of the most backward actors in the state system. By the end of our period the American Confederacy had been destroyed, tsarist Russia defeated in the Crimea, and the Austrian Habsburgs ejected from Germany. Britain, by contrast, had prevailed diplomatically across Europe through the adoption of anti-slavery as an international norm, and support for the survival of the Ottoman Empire, the emergence of a united Italy and the progressive unification of Germany. France had enjoyed more mixed success, but overall she could be well satisfied with the containment of Russia and the destruction of Austrian influence in Italy. The most successful polity by far was Abraham Lincoln’s United States, which had not only crushed secession but deterred outside intervention. Bismarck’s Prussia, which had co-opted constitutional nationalists, also did remarkably well. Moreover, although the unification of Germany and the United States was far from complete, both states seemed well on the way towards great power status based on representative government of one sort or another. To liberals, all this seemed to suggest the dawn of a new era. Little did they know that popular participation would take European geopolitics in unanticipated directions in the years ahead, leading eventually to a confrontation between these two mighty unions.