The revolution of 1848–49 altered the history of politics and the nation in Germany. ‘The idea of unity became historical – that is the great result of 1848, which cannot be turned back by any means of violence or cunning,’ wrote the liberal publicist Ludwig August von Rochau in 1853: ‘By becoming historical, the idea of unity entered the same stage of development in which designs for internal reform in the individual states have existed for a long period of time.’1 In Grundsätze der Realpolitik (1853), the former insurrectionary, who had fled life-long imprisonment in Frankfurt in 1833 and had only returned to Germany in 1848, purportedly helped to usher in a realistic age spanning the reaction of the 1850s and Bismarck’s wars of unification in the 1860s, after the ‘failure’ of the revolution. He was joined by Hermann Baumgarten, a neighbour in Heidelberg before 1861, whose ‘self-critique’ had supposedly exposed the fatal weaknesses of German liberalism in 1866, outmanoeuvred by the Prussian Minister-President. Even if it ‘had to fail’, wrote the journalist and academic, 1848 had been ‘the first attempt to solve the German question’.2 The Reich constitution of 1849 was ‘a considerable advance’, albeit an unreliable one, ‘on our politicisation until that date’.3 ‘Its main merit consisted in … casting the first bright light into the night of our political dreams and indicating the path which could lead us out of the labyrinth of German fragmentation,’ Baumgarten admitted, despite his intention of highlighting the naivety and inefficacy of his fellow liberals during and after the revolution.4 Like Rochau, the Karlsruhe academic was anxious to debunk liberal myths of the Vormärz and revolutionary periods, yet he, too, understood 1848–49 as establishing a long-lasting nexus of the nation, politics and, especially, liberalism.
This study examines such a nexus, in conjunction and conflict with other emerging political milieux and parties. It argues that many of the elements of the case for a kleindeutsch (small German) solution to the ‘German question’ had been decided by 1849, most notably through the discussion and enactment of the Reich constitution in March. These elements were defining features of political debate and activity over the next two decades. Contemporaries were right, of course, to doubt whether a constitutional, federal and democratic Kleindeutschland (small German state) was attainable in or after 1849. A powerful coalition of states and conservative political interests had blocked its realisation during the revolution itself and it had successfully resurrected a reactionary German Confederation, backed by most small and middling states and by the largest and most forceful German Great Power, the Habsburg monarchy. Despite such obvious obstacles, the revolutionary model of a German nation-state remained influential in the 1850s and, it is proposed, became decisive in the 1860s, as the principal alternatives to a small German state, which had already been partially discredited in 1848–49, proved not to be feasible. Since unification continued to be a political priority for many parties, especially those in the critical areas of the third Germany, the narrowing of the range of ‘national’ options available to ministers and policy-makers was highly significant, even for Austrian and Prussian statesmen, whose pursuit of their own state’s interests forced them to take account of ‘public opinion’ and party preferences in Saxony, Bavaria, Hanover, Württemberg, Baden and other principalities. The effective preclusion of national alternatives to Kleindeutschland within some of the most prominent political debates of the previous 18 years helped to ease the very difficult transition towards a Prussian-dominated North German Confederation in 1867 and German Empire in 1871. The fact that so many features of the Reichsverfassung of 1849 seemed to have been retained made the new German states acceptable to most liberals and many democrats.
The transition towards Kleindeutschland was by no means inevitable. The forces – or balance of powers in a changing set of historical conditions – working against the formation of a small German state were considerable, dominating the 1850s and early 1860s. Recent historical accounts, correctly seeking to revise the persistent pro-Prussian orthodoxy of pre-war ‘Borussian’ historiography, have emphasised the significance of such hindrances to the creation of a ‘small German’ polity. Historians like Heinrich Lutz and Helmut Rumpler have underlined the continuing predominance of the Habsburg monarchy in German affairs.5 From their point of view, the most pressing question concerns the timing of and reasons for the withdrawal of Austria from Germany. Lutz’s answer, in contrast to those of the majority of authors who concentrate on the Austro-Prussian War (1866), points to the period after 1866, suggesting that Austrian policy-makers gave up their German ambitions more slowly than previously assumed, renouncing them definitively only in 1879 with the signature of the Dual Alliance.6 Other historians have focused on the Habsburg monarchy’s main allies in the third Germany before 1871. Abigail Green, Manfred Hanisch, Andreas Neemann, Dieter Langewiesche, Lothar Gall and Michael John have demonstrated the extent to which the Mittelstaaten served as an alternative point of identification and loyalty after 1848.7 As a consequence, any solution to the German question had to pay attention to the wishes of governments in Munich, Dresden, Stuttgart, Karlsruhe and Hanover and to the affiliations of the German ‘tribes’. It would also have to confront the German Confederation, which had become the principal diplomatic framework of the middling states and the main legal obstacle to unification according to the revolutionary small German model. How far could the Bund be reformed through the initiatives of the Mittelstaaten and of Austria in order to become a workable political structure for the German nation? This is the question posed by scholars such as Jürgen Müller, Jonas Flöter, Anselm Doering-Manteuffel and Jürgen Angelow, lending new credence to the Confederation as a political and legal framework for very disparate German states.8 A confederal solution appeared more attractive because of the unpopularity of a Prussian alternative, with widespread antipathy to the Hohenzollern monarchy, especially in the South German states. In this respect, perceived geographical, cultural and religious differences were exacerbated by internal divisions within Prussia itself.9 Amongst other things, recent research has revealed just how ambivalent Prussian conservatives and courtiers were towards kleindeutsch nationalism.10
The barriers to the realisation of the national settlement outlined in the Reich constitution of 1849 rested on existing powers, institutions and conditions – restored political elites, the borders of 1815, the Confederation, regional economies, the armies of the German Great Powers – which were the product of the ‘reaction’ rather than the revolution. It is contended here, however, that more or less continuous debates about a German nation-state after 1848 had a decisive impact on such powers, institutions and conditions, not least because the ‘public sphere’, the press and ‘public opinion’, which were often referred to collectively as ‘die Öffentlichkeit’, were heeded by governments in the aftermath of 1848, particularly in the third Germany. It is true that relatively little was – and is – known of the opinions, beliefs and assumptions of the majority of subjects, but it can be argued that what mattered most in the formulation and execution of policy was ministers’ evaluation and understanding of ‘opinion’, as it was interpreted and shaped by journalists, academics, and politicians. For the public sphere was, at the same time, a rapidly evolving political forum, connected to emerging political parties, networks and milieux. Thus, ‘opposition’ groups, whose parliamentary activities were regularly reported in the press, existed in virtually all German states during the 1850s and 1860s, playing an important part in political debate, if only through their public protestations, and in sanctioning and blocking legislation and ministerial actions, most famously – if also unsuccessfully – during the Prussian constitutional crisis after 1862. Two years earlier, in Baden, liberals from the opposition had even entered government. This study examines the relationship between ministers and policy-makers, on the one hand, and politicians, journalists and other publicists, on the other. It proposes that, when statesmen addressed the German question, they did so partly – and increasingly – on terms established by liberals in the public sphere. Policy-makers kept returning to the national question because it constituted a priority of the dominant liberal parties, which figured in the domestic deliberations of the governments of the small and middling German states and, in part as a result, in the external calculations of the German Great Powers. Prussian ministers and diplomats, in particular, sought to court parties and opinion-makers in the third Germany in order to avoid the Austrian-engineered machinery of the Bund.
Such arguments about the linkages between nationalism and politics are necessarily framed in the wider context of debates, which have been central to the controversy about a German Sonderweg, concerning the putative failure of revolution in 1848, the weakness of liberalism, the circumscribed role of representative assemblies, and the formation of contradictory, authoritarian or sham-democratic systems of government in the individual states, the North German Confederation and the Kaiserreich, with far-reaching consequences for later, twentieth-century German regimes.11 Critics and defenders of the thesis about a ‘special path’ have already qualified most of these claims – and others relating to the Prussian Chancellor’s ‘Bonapartism’, the position of Junkers or the ‘feudalisation’ of the Bürgertum, for example – in respect of Bismarckian and Wilhelmine Germany, but they have paid less attention to the decade or so after 1848, when many of the critical political and national questions first surfaced. This study seeks, in common with other research into specific political constituencies, to reassess the legacy of 1848 and the continuities of public debate and party organisation.12 Like recent works on individual German states, it investigates and evaluates the tenacity, variety and extent of associational life and politics. Unlike these works, it also explores the reciprocal relationship between local politics and the formation of national political networks, nationalist ideologies and a German public sphere, revealing how such political activity fostered the emergence of a small German state.
From a national perspective, the period examined here connected the first and second attempts to unify the German lands. Despite significant diplomatic, military, political, social and economic changes, the ways in which politics and the nation were conceptualised remained remarkably constant between 1848–49 and 1866–67, with many of the tentative questions and answers of the revolution being confirmed over the succeeding two decades. The first unification of Germany was inaugurated in 1848, establishing a nation-state on paper and many elements of one in practice by early 1849, including the Central Power and National Assembly in Frankfurt. Clearly, such a unification – or the nationally legitimated formation of a single nation-state from several existing states – remained incomplete, with Friedrich Wilhelm IV eventually rejecting the Frankfurt Parliament’s offer to become ‘Kaiser of the Germans’ in April 1849, yet the process was at an advanced stage, with the creation of an executive, assembly and constitution, and it enjoyed broad legitimacy in the third Germany and in Prussia, especially in the period before the appointment of the conservative Brandenburg ministry in November 1848.13 Twenty-eight German states had jointly accepted the Reich constitution on 14 April 1849, with King Wilhelm I of Württemberg forced by his own ministry to join them on 24 April and with the lower chambers of Hanover, Saxony and Bavaria putting pressure on their own monarchs – ultimately unsuccessfully – to do the same.14 Although the Reich constitution was never implemented, it was seen to be legitimate by the majority of deputies and much of the political nation. From their point of view, a German nation-state had been illegally suppressed by a small minority of reactionaries.
As contemporaries, but not all later historians, seem to have been aware, debates about a polity, constitution and nation-state had coincided during the revolution. This remained the case after 1848–49. Even a sceptical Bavarian and Catholic periodical such as the Historisch-politische Blätter was still confident, a decade later, that ‘the movements of 1848 had two great ideas as their foundation’: ‘These were the ideas of nationality and inner freedom; the best part of the nation (Nation) took them up, and they handed power to public opinion, on which the uprising foundered.’15 The convergence of politics and nationalism in Germany already had a long history by the time of the revolution, deriving from opposition to petty or absolutist German states and from criticism of a German Confederation dominated by the Great Powers.16 The perceived collapse of existing polities in 1848 appeared to have cleared the way for the construction of a new regime, a product of the revolution in which political and national imperatives seemed to be combined unconditionally. This type of ‘revolutionary nationalism’, where political elements were seen to play an essential part in the formation or perpetuation of a nation-state, was accompanied by – and depended on – a series of transformations which altered the scope and significance of political and national debates and actions.17
The revolution had created the conditions for a reorganisation of institutions and for the realisation of ideas which had been discussed within the limited, sometimes persecuted, circles of the Bildungsbürgertum since the French Revolution and, in some instances, beforehand. To the majority of commentators from the middling strata of the larger towns, the nation seemed a natural framework for such institutions. Many creeds – liberalism, conservatism and ‘democracy’ – were transformed and redefined during the revolution, creating a ferment of ideas in which politics and the nation were ‘naturally’ and intimately combined.18 Political parties, although existing in some localities and within a web of regional associations, changed fundamentally after 1848 and extended beyond individual cities and states, developing from pre-revolutionary regional networks of politicians, journalists and officials and from the informal groups of deputies who met regularly at taverns and hotels – the Café Milani, the Deutscher Hof, the Westendhalle – in Frankfurt.19 Partly as a result of the creation of mass political organisations with connections to parties, such as the democratic Zentralmärzverein, conservative ‘King and Fatherland’ associations and Catholic Pius Associations, the public sphere expanded dramatically, informing as well as enfranchising significant numbers of citizens – up to 75 per cent of men – across the German lands. The revolution, recalled the novelist and publicist Gustav Freytag, ‘was a wonderful apprenticeship for German journalism, and it is no coincidence that many capable editors of our greatest political newspapers emerged from 1848, clever, worldly-wise, skilful, of sure judgement in great questions, not fully matched by a younger generation’.20 To journalists like Freytag, many of whom spent time in Frankfurt during the revolution, Politik, in the full sense of the German word, was being discussed and acted on: as a set of specific policies, the character of which had not been determined; as the concentration and distribution of power within a state; as a territory at the centre of Europe, whose borders were negotiable for the first time since 1815; and as a power within a collapsing states’ system. These political debates impinged on, and were affected by, assumptions about the nature and extent of the German nation.
Debates about a new – or revolutionary – German nation-state or national polity were dominated by political ‘parties’ after 1848. The revolution was critical in creating the conditions necessary for party politics, introducing representative assemblies for the first time in Prussia and Austria, reinstalling them in states such as Hanover and Kurhessen, and briefly granting freedom to assemble, to form political associations, to vote and to express political opinions in the press, all of which extended across the traditional barriers of state borders. Political Vereine (associations) had been outlawed in the lands of the Confederation before 1848, though tolerated in states with more liberal constitutions and more established Landtage such as Baden and Württemberg.21 Parties in the sense of organised groups distinguished by their shared political convictions, not occupational interests, and designed to return their representatives to a parliament and to influence state decision-making and public opinion over an extended period of time had, at most, existed in an inchoate form in the South German Mittelstaaten.22 In Württemberg in 1847, lamented one of the mouthpieces of the opposition, the Beobachter, there were ‘no political parties, but at most political opinions’: ‘Party is nothing other than a vitally integrated organisation of common strivings.’23 In most localities, there were merely overlapping associations, with a variety of public functions – civic improvement, the coordination of occupational or economic interests, scientific endeavour and cultural activity – but with little more than concealed and unarticulated political purposes, frequently lacking a focus in the form of a powerful Landtag opposition.24 Where state assemblies existed, usually with highly restricted or corporate franchises, the opposition was, in effect, ‘a great liberal party, if one could use the term “party” for a strange mixture of all possible elements of opposition against the government without a specifically formulated programme’, wrote one correspondent of the Deutsche Monatsschrift in 1851 of the era ‘before March 1848’.25 Where Landtage did not exist, in most of North Germany, Vereine constituted the principal forum of political organisation and activity. They remained essential during and after the revolution but their objectives and membership differed from the overtly political purposes and activities of parties.26
In 1848–49, the organised factions of the Frankfurt Parliament crystallised into identifiable parties with programmes and close connections to an extensive network of associations. The main impulse for such organisation came from the democratic party (Donnersberg, Deutscher Hof and parts of the Westendhalle), which was instrumental in the formation of the Zentralmärzverein, but it also had an effect on conservatives, Catholics and liberals, all of whom formed ties with their own associations in spite of residual resistance to the very notion of what Brockhaus’s Conversationslexikon had bemoaned in 1846 as ‘organised, consciously calculating parties’.27 ‘Let us learn from our enemy!’ proclaimed the liberal Darmstädter Journal in August 1849: ‘It is already organised! Democratic associations and their transparent reflection, the loyally genuflecting Märzvereine, are the majority in our Hessian land and, indeed, a well-disciplined majority, bound together by the unified business of the opposition.’28 Within the next year or so, most party organisations had been dissolved. According to the confederal law of association of 13 July 1854, which formalised on a national level what had already occurred in many states, political Vereine were not allowed to affiliate with each other, effectively preventing the creation of anything other than purely local organisations. Such legislation ensured that parties remained, as the Social Democratic leader Wilhelm Liebknecht later put it, organisational ‘embryos’, without the classic features – party agents, a central committee, a national conference, a political programme, voting discipline, affiliations, membership dues and a large budget – of the SPD and Centre Party during the imperialera.29
Nevertheless, political groupings were organised as self-evident ‘parties’ – the term was now used universally, in contrast to the period before 1848 – in localities and in Landtage throughout the German lands, except in Austria and enclaves of ‘absolutism’ like Mecklenburg. Whereas theories of ‘party’ had earlier been contested, if not rejected outright, even by liberal supporters of ‘opposition’ to the government, they were advanced and discussed across the political spectrum during the 1850s and 1860s.30 1848 had demonstrated the possibility of party organisation on a national level and had created enduring memories of party affiliation – as an element of a wider revolutionary mythology – which many contemporaries aimed to revive after the ‘reaction’. The speed with which national and party organisations such as the Progressives and the Nationalverein were established after 1859 owed much to liberals’ and democrats’ experiences, recollections, acquaintances and myths of 1848–49.31 What was more, much of the structure of associational life, which had been so important during the revolution, continued to develop after it, with cultural, civic, professional and economic Vereine multiplying and expanding, partly as a consequence of urbanisation and industrialisation.32 The combination of such local milieux and national networks of politicians and journalists consolidated by the revolution – the connotations of ‘political culture’ or ‘sub-cultures’ are too exclusive, fixed or small-scale to describe these networks – allowed the survival and rapid reconstruction of nationwide or, at least, inter-state party organisations during the post-revolutionary decades.33
Debates about a German nation-state and polity, initiated and shaped by parties, could take place because of the continuing existence of national and state-wide public spheres. The German term for such a sphere, ‘die Öffentlichkeit’, or openness, was less ambiguous and much older than its English equivalent, dating from the eighteenth century.34 It described an open or public space between absolutist states and their successors, on the one hand, and a developing private sphere, on the other.35 Although it continued to coexist with corporations, to overlap with sectional and family interests, to be characterised by distinctions of status and to be subject to state interference and control, it became the principal locus, comprised of associations and the press, of civic progress and sociability in towns, and sometimes beyond them, during the late eighteenth and the nineteenth century, cultivating a degree of equality, individualism and freedom of expression.36 It was at once a political and a communicative sphere. Political discussion and criticism seemed to have many different causes and contexts, including the intervention of the state in supposedly autonomous markets, competition between officials and Vereine in areas of civic improvement, free scientific enquiry, and the habit of reading and finding out about the wider world via books, almanacs, periodicals and newspapers. Die Obrigkeit (authority), both local and state-wide, had become, in important instances, less personal, no longer as closely connected to kin, guilds and orders. States were conceived, in part, as fulfilling public functions and administering public goods, subjecting themselves in the process to public scrutiny and approval. The fact that officials played such a prominent role in the advent of politics in the German lands during the early nineteenth century, as the exponents of ‘official liberalism’, evinced the extent to which the public sphere was taken for granted as well as blurring the edges between state and ‘society’, for civil servants engaged in politics as citizens not just as agents of the state.37 Over half of the deputies of the Frankfurt Parliament were officials, despite the assembly’s revolutionary role and reputation. Their criticism of the individual states and their willingness to form a new German nation-state were founded on interlinking notions of impersonality, reason, legality, legitimacy and utility, which appalled conservative nobles more accustomed to patriarchalism, patrimony and reciprocal, hierarchical, personal bonds. Whereas Ernst Ludwig von Gerlach viewed Prussia and the Confederation as he viewed his family or his fatherland, admitting and chiding their ‘faults’, liberals and democrats seemed to treat them impersonally, with the result that they were willing to ‘pulverise’ them.38
Such distance, impartiality and ruthlessness were features of a communicative sphere which encouraged the conceptualisation of – and gave a sense of familiarity with – far-away events. Through a regular reading of the press, large and distant institutions could be imagined and understood, in a literary, discursive and purportedly factual form, separate from the physical, visual, symbolic and ritualistic ways of conceiving of authority at close quarters in towns and villages, which, of course, continued to exist.39 National festivals, as Heinrich von Treitschke acknowledged, were, amongst other things, an attempt to recreate the immediate, physical proximity and visual symbolism of local politics on a grand scale, yet most impressions of German and state affairs came from the press, which continued to grow throughout the nineteenth century.40 In 1826, there were 371 separate German-language newspapers, 688 in 1848, 845 in 1858, and 1,217 in 1867.41 The thirst for news on the part of readers was commonly remarked upon at the time, most obviously as momentous events – such as the outbreak of revolution – unfolded. ‘We have been living here recently in great excitement,’ wrote Clothilde Koch-Gontard from Frankfurt in March 1848: ‘Political news (Neuigkeiten) is awaited with incredible impatience’.42 In quieter times, too, a reading public avidly read reports and formed views of occurrences beyond their locality. Even a counter-revolutionary sceptic like the Saxon minister Ferdinand von Beust accepted, in 1857, that ‘the best way to attract readers is through good news reporting’.43 The words and opinions of the press allowed contemporaries to define, comprehend and evaluate the actions of leaders and the characteristics of institutions, notwithstanding the shifting focus of reportage, from the frank exchanges about domestic politics of 1848–49 and the New Era to the coverage of foreign politics in the 1850s. In certain circumstances, they appear to have prompted readers to envisage a different future.44
The public sphere was numerically small, with the readership of individual newspapers and periodicals numbering only thousands; it was socially restricted, with at least 70 per cent of readers of the Deutsche Zeitung during the revolution coming from the civil service (21.5 per cent), educated professions (35.8 per cent) and commerce (12 per cent); and it was personal, with readers identifying closely with ‘their’ publication and appealing to the editor with a collective ‘we’.45 It was also subject to government censorship and influence, although this was much more successful in some states – for instance, in Hanover, where ‘most of [the press] is in the hands of the government or otherwise influenced’, in the estimation of the Deutsche Reichszeitung in 1864 – than in others, where the retrospective seizure of editions and placement of articles proved relatively ineffective.46 In most regions, large-circulation liberal and even democratic newspapers and periodicals – the Kölnische Zeitung, the Frankfurter Journal, the National-Zeitung, the Berlin Volks-Zeitung, the Münchner Neueste Nachrichten, the Allgemeine Zeitung, the Schwäbischer Merkur, the Hamburger Correspondent, the Hamburger Nachrichten, the Grenzboten and Kladderadatsch – were dominant, extending from Berlin, Frankfurt, Munich, Stuttgart, Hamburg and Cologne into their hinterlands.47 It is notable that reactionary governments felt unable, after a rapid expansion of the press and the public sphere in 1848–49, to return to pre-revolutionary practices of censorship, resigning themselves to intimidation, the retrospective impounding of offending copy, the control of information, the establishment of more effective official publications and the insertion of articles in ‘independent’ newspapers. Such tactics undoubtedly led to self-censorship and a frequent muzzling of the press, but they failed to destroy the dominant liberal publications and the expression of unwelcome opinions and reportage, partly because of the contiguity of more and less liberal German states and the inefficacy of the Bund.
Governments regularly found themselves following rather than leading the press, in the manner of Württemberg’s ministry in 1851, seeking to ensure that the official ‘Staats-Anzeiger is able to compete with the Schwäbischer Merkur, through providing the interesting daily news items, which secure the large readership of the latter’.48 The readers of such newspapers, who came preponderantly from the liberal milieux of the larger, pivotal cities, were seen, even by the chief of the Hanoverian Press Bureau Oskar Meding, to be unsusceptible to government influence.49 To this limited but significant reading public, the press was a bridge to the rest of Germany and beyond, fostering political reflection and discussion, even under conditions of censorship. Some titles were read throughout the German lands, including the Deutsche Zeitung, published by Georg Gottfried Gervinus in Heidelberg and with 36.5 per cent of its readers in the South, 20.3 per cent in the North, 26.2 per cent in Prussia, and 17 per cent in Central Germany.50 Most titles instilled in readers some sense of ‘Germany’, creating a discursive political sphere which was connected to the oral cultures of the locality, via discussions within families, reading societies (597 founded 1770–1820), lending libraries (656 in Prussia by 1846) and coffee houses, and which extended to a calendar and almanac-reading public – encompassing a significant part of the literate 80 per cent or so of men and 50 per cent or more of women of early nineteenth-century West German towns, for example – even if it also excluded the lower orders from regular daily or weekly exposure to state or national politics.51 In this national public sphere, characterised by a literary rather than visual culture and by the dense parliamentary reports of the press, which were supplemented but not contradicted by mass-circulation ‘entertainment’ periodicals such as Die Gartenlaube with its circulation of 100,000 by 1860, the ‘German question’ and the future German nation-state were described and debated.
The public sphere before 1866 was shaped above all by liberalism. Opposition newspapers and periodicals, factions and parties, associations and national organisations were preponderantly liberal after the persecution and exile of radicals and democrats in 1849. In the beginning, noted the conservative commentator Friedrich Julius Stahl, ‘liberal’ had denoted everyone belonging to the ‘party of movement’, irrespective of faction.52 Although different party creeds and groupings had emerged before the revolution, liberals had largely been followed by democrats and socialists until the present, Stahl asserted in 1862.53 Many democrats had joined the Progressive Party in the previous year. The first workers’ party, the Allgemeiner Deutscher Arbeiterverein (ADAV) was founded in Leipzig in May 1863 from a small minority of liberal-dominated Arbeiterbildungsvereine, but it only counted 4,600 members by the end of 1864. It was overshadowed by liberal–democratic workers’ education associations, which formed the Verband Deutscher Arbeitervereine (VDAV) in response to the establishment of the ADAV. Because of restricted franchises, workers’ parties remained insignificant in electoral terms until the imperial era. Political Catholicism was better represented, yet it lacked either a party organisation or programme before 1866: in the Prussian Landtag elections of that year, only 15 clerical deputies were elected from a Catholic population comprising about a third of the kingdom’s population.54 As a consequence, liberals remained dominant, controlling many of the ‘March ministries’ and the majority of the Frankfurt National Assembly in 1848, before being challenged briefly by radicals in the following year, dictating much of the content of the Reichsverfassung (1849), constituting the majority of the ‘opposition’ – albeit an initially small, undefined one – in most states in the 1850s, and making up the larger part of the national organisations – the Nationalverein, Abgeordnetentag, Handelstag, and Fortschrittspartei – of the 1860s.55 The liberal ‘party’ during this period derived from a persisting set of demarcations and self-definitions, which often used other labels such as ‘Gotha’ and ‘constitutional’ interchangeably, and it was built on a series of well-established local milieux, which left liberals such as Otto Elben in Stuttgart in no doubt of their political affiliation or background, having spent their youth – in Elben’s case – under the ‘star of liberalism’ with a father who was ‘a dyed-in-the-wool liberal’.56 The party was also based on a shared political programme and doctrine.
Liberalism as a creed in mid-nineteenth-century Germany was a collection of ideas from varied sources. Although it had been distinguished before 1848 – and routinely after that date – from ‘democracy’ in particular, it remained flexible enough to serve as a rallying-point for opposition to existing German states and support for a new nation-state.57 The premise of attaining individual freedoms and removing unnecessary constraints on such liberties remained attractive during and after the reaction, with Catholics, democrats and socialists agreeing with the basic rights of free association, assembly, expression and conscience which had occupied such a prominent place in the revolution and the Reich constitution, and which was taken up explicitly by the Nationalverein when it officially adopted the Reichsverfassung in the 1860s.58 Until the late 1860s, at the earliest, secularism and anti-Catholicism played a relatively minor role in liberal and national politics, aided by the existence of powerful ‘Catholic’ states (Austria and Bavaria), a largely secular state tradition, the weak ties of the Protestant and Catholic churches beyond the borders of the states, and the absence of a Catholic party. Notwithstanding resentment at the frequent charge of ‘ultramontanism’ and occasional attacks on liberal ‘absolutism’, ‘intolerant, ruthless centralisation’ and the deification of the state, in the words of Wilhelm Emmanuel von Ketteler, Catholics proved capable of cooperating with liberals in elections and on questions such as disestablishment and the separation of church and state.59 Similarly, doctrinaire economic liberalism, even if more salient in the 1850s than the 1840s, continued to be overlooked by most contemporaries, for whom the gradual extension of freer trade within the Zollverein was a point of agreement rather than division.60 Almost by default, the principal liberal questions still concerned the state, in defence of individuals’ rights against state interference and coercion, in the championing of state-led reform, especially in the field of social policy, or in the actual restructuring of the state and the creation of a nation-state. The apparent ubiquity of reactionary governments in Germany during the 1850s made continued support for basic rights comparatively uncontroversial. Likewise, the need to address the ‘social question’ was barely questioned by liberals or, indeed, others – even conservatives such as Hermann Wagener and Victor Aimé Huber – since the problem appeared unavoidable before and after 1848, although there was no agreement about how to solve it.61 The restructuring of the state was more divisive, with many radicals harbouring a desire for a republic and many liberals fearing the consequences of universal suffrage. Nonetheless, a majority on both sides came to accept the necessity of a ‘federal’ and ‘constitutional’ – rather than ‘parliamentary’ – monarchy, at least temporarily, and of manhood suffrage, underpinned by a common belief in popular sovereignty.62 The influence of the ‘historical school’ of law and a distancing of German liberals from the ‘French’ model had prepared the ground for such moderate ‘constitutionalism’ in the 1830s and 40s.63 Yet they did not prevent liberals openly countenancing ‘revolution’ and seeking to construct a nation-state from scratch, even if legitimately or legally, in and after 1848.
To the Saxon historian Heinrich von Treitschke, who was rare amongst scholars-cum-publicists in not having experienced 1848 as an adult, the attempt to create a constitutional Bundesstaat within the Confederation was ‘simply a revolutionary step’.64 In 1848–49, few, if any, liberals had balked at this revolutionary course of action. Although some subsequently altered their position, most upheld the rectitude of the Frankfurt Parliament’s ‘national revolution’. Many were fearful of what the young deputy Rudolf Haym described as ‘the descent into the terrorism of the masses and the ruin of any reasonable development of the state’, but they usually believed, like Haym, that ‘reasonable development’ was possible.65 The academic lawyer Georg Beseler, travelling to Frankfurt from Greifswald, where his ‘circle’ had taken ‘a most lively interest in public affairs’, was aware that ‘order, public tranquillity, even personal security and property were in danger in many places, especially in the South West, where the parliament had its seat’, yet he was also confident that the assembly ‘in its majority was ready to back not only freedom, but also order and law’, as ‘it became the focal point for the consolidation of the profoundly shaken legal conditions of Germany’.66 The majority of deputies maintained that the transfer of power from the German Confederation to the National Assembly was a legal one, with the Bundesversammlung in Beseler’s account simply ‘dissolving itself, after it had passed all its powers to the Reichsverweser’, who had just been appointed by the parliament to head a provisional executive.67 ‘Everyone saw that the Bundestag no longer worked’, he went on, arguing that the King of Prussia himself ‘wanted to escape from [its] misery’.68 In Saxony, another academic deputy, Karl Biedermann, likewise justified his actions in part by revealing the complicity of his government, which the Confederation supposedly served, in setting up ‘a Bundesstaat with a head of state’ and in accepting the ‘necessity of “a limitation of the independence of the individual members of the (future) federal state for the benefit of unity”’, which was ‘completely in the spirit of the words spoken to me by His Majesty’.69 Excitedly taking the stagecoach with Friedrich Christoph Dahlmann to Frankfurt along with a crowd of other deputies, a 24-hour journey from Saxony since the railway line terminated at Eisenach, Biedermann was expectant, not anxious.70 Throughout the revolution, he and most of his counterparts felt that they were in control of events and that they could maintain law and order.
Legality in the conditions of 1848–49 meant due process. It was not perceived to preclude a change in the ultimate grounds of the legal order, not least because the dynastic, confederal and, often, absolutist basis of the old order was held to be illegitimate. The new constitutional regime was justified in part because it replaced arbitrariness with the reasonable, predictable precepts of the law. More importantly, it was founded on the sovereignty of the nation, with citizens deserving a clear, codified statement of constitutional principles and individual freedoms and duties. As Haym explained to his voters on 1 May 1848, proud of his ‘great and pure love of the fatherland, an unshakeable confidence in the creation of a Germany powerful in its freedom and unity, and trust in the eternal idea of right and truth’, the transformation which was taking place was a national one:
I am of the opinion that one cannot bind the spirit of nations and achieve the happiness of states through the rigid orders of an artificial system of government, but that the particular form and nature of each individual nation deserves sensible and caring attention. It is a question now, at the time of the great divisions of the peoples, of imbuing forms of government created and consolidated over centuries with a newly-awoken national feeling and of consciously doing justice to the instinct of the Völker about what they need.71
Although the ‘constitution of Germany could only be that of its individual states’, ‘the constitutional system with all its consequences is to be transferred from the parts to the whole’, with ‘the life of the individual parts’ rooted ‘in the greater body of the constitution’.72
The ‘conflict of the dynasties’ would dissolve ‘in the unanimity of the tribes’ and the Bund could be abolished almost as an afterthought, as Haym put it to the Prussian Finance Minister David Hansemann in June.73 The notion that the constitution needed to be agreed by treaty with the princes, which was put forward by Georg von Vincke and – on ‘the extreme right’ – by Heinrich von Arnim-Boitzenburg, was ‘a highly unfortunate and fully discredited position’.74 What counted was the approval or disapproval of the Volk.75 In this sense, a moderate liberal such as Haym was ready to swear allegiance to ‘the revolution’, even if it required ‘nerves of a kind which I don’t have’.76 His allegiance went back to the very start of the revolution, as he had celebrated the fall of Metternich, ‘the last bulwark of reaction in Germany’, and had welcomed the Austrian statesman’s opponents as ‘the liberators of the fatherland’: ‘a single, general, German development of our history has become possible, and I no longer hold anything, not even a German parliament in a popular sense, to be impossible.’77 Most of the Greifswald lawyer’s liberal colleagues concurred.78 Within the limits of a novel constitutional order, which would guarantee legal process and outlaw violence, liberals were ‘revolutionary nationalists’, willing to create a new system of government on the dual foundation of freedom and unity, if necessary against the wishes of the representatives – individual governments or the Bundestag – of an illegitimate old regime. Despite the fact, as conservative critics later pointed out, that there was no natural affinity between liberalism and nationalism, the German revolution had helped to create an enduring historical one. The emancipatory political components of such revolutionary or liberal nationalism proved resilient.79
In the nineteenth century, nation-building constituted an important part of politics. National movements in Poland, Ireland, Hungary, Italy and Germany and the national independence of Greece (1821) and Belgium (1830) had helped to legitimise the nation-state. By 1848, it seemed obvious to the majority of German commentators that a national culture and political structure should coincide. ‘Up until a few decades ago, the common inherited particularity (Stammeseigenthümlichkeit) of a population was only viewed by statecraft in a very secondary way’, wrote the Badenese academic and diplomat Robert von Mohl in 1860: ‘One was almost proud to be able to show a great exemplary map of nationalities.’80 This had ‘altered radically,’ he went on:
Conditions and demands based on nationality have taken up one of the most important places in practical policy. Acquisitions and partitions of lands, which in part have existed for centuries, are now fought over because they do not correspond to the borders of nationalities. The formation of individual states is demanded solely on the basis of the descent of their populations, even at the expense of secession from – and the destruction of – a great whole, or through the merger of hitherto divided fragments.81
By the mid-nineteenth century, argued the former deputy of the Frankfurt Parliament, nothing could stand in the way of ‘claims resting on the observance of the particularity of the Volk’.82 The elements making up nationality were barely contested: to Mohl, these were the ‘facts’ of ‘race’ and ‘tribe’, ‘climate, the fertility of the soil and its products, historical events too, religion, important personalities’, ‘a bodily and mental individuality, which manifests itself externally in physique, mentally above all in language, but also in manners and morals, which ultimately rest on innate and constant natural attributes, but which are then determined more closely by historical events and are cultivated in the individual’.83 For most of human history, states – or ‘inclusion in a certain state organism’ – had not been ‘a significant feature’ of nationality, but as the state ceased to be ‘an end in itself’ and began to exist ‘only to further the purposes of the Volk’, it was forced to take nationality into account.84 To liberals such as Mohl, nations did not coincide with the old borders of dynastic states and they had rightly complicated, in a more representative era, state-building and politics.
The converse was also true, however. After 1848, the most important feature of a nationality, even a democratic proponent of federalism such as Julius Fröbel conceded, was its will and ability to form a state. ‘A nationality, according to the linguistic usage of the revolutionary law of states and Völker of our days, is a group of people which grounds a claim, on the basis of its historical character, to form a state for itself’, wrote the former forty-eighter in 1864.85 The most powerful national groups deserved to create their own states, with ‘the right of a group of people to build a state’ resting ‘on the power to do so’.86 Although, in contrast to most of his contemporaries, the former revolutionary was prepared to question the role of race, culture and language in the definition of nations, he still believed in the existence and significance of the principle of nationality, emphasising territory and history, as well as descent and character. Nevertheless, many aspiring nations did not become states, and those which had succeeded had been obliged to conform to – and had been affected by – the existing configuration of states:
Do you want to split from us and found a state for yourselves?’ existing powers typically asked of national movements: ‘Very well, try it. We shall seek to prevent it with all the means at our disposal!’ – Or: ‘Do you desire violently to unite us with yourselves and your state? Come and try it! We shall defend ourselves!87
The ineluctable relationship in the revolutionary era between statehood and nationality, power and culture, had led to a confusion of terms, so that Nationalität meant ‘something other than race, something other than Volk, something other than Nation’.88 ‘What does nation mean?’ asked the liberal politician and academic Johann Caspar Bluntschli on the eve of the Franco-German war in 1870.89 The English and French very often understood ‘nation’ to mean what ‘we understand by Volk (populus), i.e. the political totality of citizens’, and they used ‘peuple’ or ‘people’ to denote ‘what we mean, according to the origin of the word, by Nation, i.e. the natural racial community (Rassegemeinschaft), separate from the state’.90 Yet the terms were rarely so unambiguous, not least because the entity itself was amorphous: ‘It is not easy to agree about the concept of the nation (Nation), since usage varies, and the expressions Nation and Volk are sometimes held to be, and valued as, the same thing, and are sometimes used in a different sense.’91 Subjects of the German states were both citizens and nationals. A future German nation-state would be both an expression of a national character and a political structure, designed to represent a national will and safeguard national interests, and fashioned from existing relations of power. It was this combination of national and political objectives, threatening respectively to sweep away individual dynastic states and to pull down traditional institutions, which proved so explosive in Germany during the revolution, as contemporary onlookers realised. ‘In 1848 the Germans prepared a surprise for the world, in that they wanted to become a nation (Volk) again, and not only in the ethnographic sense of a species of people (Menschenart) bound by language and descent, not only in the literary field, as they had been to an eminent degree for a hundred years, but in the political sense,’ wrote Baumgarten in 1870: ‘They wanted to have a state again, to be a power again, to bring their national interests emphatically to bear in the world, as their neighbours, organised in states, had done for a long time.’92 The revolution in Germany was not merely an attempt to establish a new system of government or to install different political elites, it was the establishment, which remained incomplete, of a national polity, with novel borders and an uncertain relationship with existing German states and neighbouring powers.
To some contemporaries, it seemed that unresolved national questions – the inclusion or exclusion of Poles in Posen and Danes in Schleswig, competition between advocates of Kleindeutschland and Grossdeutschland, conflicts with hostile powers – posed the greatest menace to the Central Power and National Assembly in Frankfurt. Others, including Baumgarten, believed that political disagreements proved most decisive, with Germans finding, despite ‘unanimous’ support for unification, that ‘the attempt to establish their national unity led to the most sensitive division’: ‘All desired the same end of German power and greatness, but the ways to it ran hopelessly apart.’93 This study explores the insight of Baumgarten and other forty-eighters, treating German unification primarily as an interconnecting series of political problems which first manifested themselves to a wider public in 1848. Nationalism here was principally a form of politics, with ‘voluntary’ considerations giving substance to the process of unification and causing the greatest difficulty for contemporaries.94 As a political movement, it relied on an extensive public sphere and emerging party milieux, as well as on parliamentary assemblies, the existence of well-defined bureaucracies, and co-ordinated reactions to state intervention.95 The ways in which the nation was conceived of – its putatively ‘organic’ nature – changed far less during and after the revolution and had correspondingly little impact on the content of unification in 1848–49 and after 1866.96 The ‘facts’ of a common descent and national character were widely accepted, and they constituted a precondition of unification, explaining why large numbers of liberals, democrats and others looked to a nation-state rather than to a supranational Mitteleuropa, a confederation or to their own individual states or localities as the main locus of political reform. National sentiment was a significant source of motivation and mobilisation, helping to create revolutionary zeal and self-sacrifice, but it was open political questions which proved most troublesome and time-consuming in and after 1848–49 and which played the largest part in determining the precise nature of the nation-state. What form should a national polity take – a republic or a monarchy, federal or unitary, with a universally and directly elected National Assembly or not? How centralised should a nation-state’s executive and bureaucracy be, and what type of army should it have? How should it define and treat German citizens, national minorities and foreigners? How extensive should the territory of the nation-state be, and was such a territorial nation-state militarily and diplomatically defensible within the states’ system?
Revolutionaries had arrived at answers to these questions with the passing of the Reich constitution and the offering of the title of ‘Kaiser of the Germans’ to the King of Prussia on 28 March 1849. The study begins with the debates and actions of such revolutionaries, leading to the production of a blueprint of a German nation-state which remained influential in liberal and democratic circles during the following decades and which was incorporated into the programme of the Nationalverein in the 1860s. It ends in 1866 with the definitive expulsion of Austria from Germany, the dissolution of the German Confederation for the second time, after it had been replaced by the revolutionary Reich in 1848–49, and Bismarck’s drafting of the constitution of the North German Confederation, which contained important elements of the Reichsverfassung and which became the basis of the constitution of the Kaiserreich in 1871. My intention is to re-evaluate the national legacy of the revolution, treating it as a first unification of Germany, and to investigate its effect on the politics of the ‘missing’ decade and a half between the end of the revolution and the ‘wars of unification’, examining the articulation of intertwined party programmes and national ideas prior to the second unification of Germany after the Austro-Prussian war.97
The study investigates the impact of nationalism and politics on each other in order to answer the question – which is still open – of when, how and why the process of unification began in Germany. It looks, in Chapter 2, at the diplomatic conditions in which decisions about unification were made. It asks how the German question was viewed by the governments of the Great Powers, including those of the Habsburg monarchy, which – backed by majority opinion – usually kept ‘Austria’ separate from ‘Germany’, even if they continued to pursue putatively vital interests in the German lands. Conversely, how were international conditions and constraints, including those imposed by Vienna, understood by German observers? Chapter 3 examines party and press depictions of the Habsburg monarchy in light of such Austrian detachment and self-exclusion from most plans for German unification. It was widely assumed that the governments of the individual states were prepared to support Vienna out of self-interest, but what did their compatriot politicians and journalists make of Austria and its role in German politics? Chapter 4 assesses the stance of the governments and publics of the third Germany in more detail, as well as investigating external opinions and judgements of the position and role of the Mittelstaaten. It analyses the limits of the ‘reaction’ in the 1850s, especially in the smaller and middling states, and of attempts to reform the Confederation in the 1850s and 1860s. Chapter 5 enquires how Prussia was perceived during the New Era and the years of constitutional crisis after 1862, focusing on the relationship between the Prussian government and liberals. Finally, Chapter 6 determines how far opinion of Prussia shifted as a result of the diplomatic and military conflict in Schleswig-Holstein between 1863 and 1866, which served as a dress-rehearsal for the military unification of Germany in and after 1866, not least because it came to hinge on Berlin’s relations with Vienna and the Bund.
By assessing the national ideas and actions of those in dominant liberal milieux, in conjunction with those of other parties, it is intended, first, to question the existence of a broad shift from liberal to conservative nationalism; second, to challenge the notion that cultural and ethnic forms of nationalism were particularly pronounced in Germany as a result of late unification; and, third, to qualify the idea of a ‘revolution from above’ and the supposed neglect and manipulation of weak political parties, a muzzled or intimidated press, and a fragmented and immature electorate, all of which have been connected to a traditional concentration and undue emphasis on Bismarck.98 Arguably, the Prussian Minister-President was constrained by parties and a public sphere produced or consolidated by the German revolution, which had obliged newly formed political elites hastily to design both a new polity and a German nation-state. The first chapter investigates how revolutionaries reconciled these two – often clashing – imperatives.