Although he considered Aix to have been a success, credit for which he generously awarded himself, Metternich ended the year 1818 on a world-weary note. From Koblenz, which he reached at the beginning of December, he wrote to Dorothea Lieven, telling her the story of his life and assuring her that while he had many defects presumption was not one of them, that he was ill-suited to being a statesman, and that the only thing that kept him going was the thought that he was doing good. From his castle at Johannisberg, he wrote that he wanted to drown himself in the Rhine, which he could see from his window. A couple of days later he was staying at Amrobach with the Duchess of Kent, who was pregnant (with the future Queen Victoria), and he reached Vienna on 11 December. ‘The next day I was engulfed by all the horrors of my life,’ he wrote to Dorothea. ‘Court, the arrival of the Emperor Alexander, fifty people to dinner, three hundred at the soirée. My darling, I felt very lonely in my drawing room surrounded by them all!’ Every day was spent attending Alexander as he reviewed troops, inspected barracks, took tea with old flames from the days of the Congress of Vienna and spent evenings in conversation of excruciating boredom. Metternich concluded that ‘there are in the world no two people more fundamentally different than him and me’. He took advantage of the tsar’s presence to try to persuade him to have Lieven posted as ambassador to Vienna, so he might be able to pursue his affair, but without success. ‘You know how much I detest the Court and everything that pertains to it,’ he wrote, complaining that ‘a minister’s life is a terrible one’. The new year brought with it challenges which were to rouse him from his depression.1
Not long after the last allied troops had evacuated French territory, at the end of November 1818, the discouraged Richelieu had handed in his resignation as prime minister. This had been prompted by his inability to bridge the widening gap between the warring parties in the Chamber. The electoral reform of 1817, which favoured the middle classes, had brought in a liberal majority which was opposed at every step by the increasingly hysterical Ultras. Much of the political argument was over trivial issues, but it was conducted in extraordinarily vicious manner, as beneath it lurked visceral hatreds. ‘I belong to those who are guillotined, you to those who are hanged,’ one woman told Decazes, summing up both the triviality and the ferocity. The king was unable to rein in his brother and the Ultras, and Richelieu could not restrain the liberals. His departure was followed by the formation on 18 December 1818 of a new ministry under the marquis Dessolles. It soon became evident that the real head of the government was the minister of the interior, Decazes. This caused uproar among the Ultras, who regarded him as little better than a revolutionary and detested him for his influence over Louis XVIII.2
Decazes’s assumption of power caused a mild panic in conservative circles around Europe. Alexander heard the news while he was still in Vienna, and promptly urged the Emperor Francis to begin mobilising his troops. The situation seemed all the more alarming as the King of France’s health was giving grounds for concern. Wellington believed his death would lead to the fall of the French monarchy, and Metternich went so far as to consult with the other courts as to what action should be taken when the moment came. Louis, having got wind of this, drily informed him that he was quite well, and that when he did come to die, he would be succeeded by his rightful heir.3
Metternich was far from reassured. He charged Lebzeltern, who had been given leave to travel to Lisbon to wind up family affairs following his father’s death, with a mission to deliver a letter to Decazes on his way through Paris, and to sound him out. Following a long talk with the French minister on 28 January 1819, Lebzeltern reported back that ‘the revolution … is now advancing by leaps and bounds, without any restraint or opposition’. In almost hysterical tones he explained that regicides had been brought to power, along with men who had proved their disloyalty during the Hundred Days. Louis XVIII was, according to Lebzeltern, besotted by Decazes, whom he described as a misguided liberal who was being dragged helplessly towards the abyss.4
In February, the Ultras who dominated the upper Chamber voted in a new law reforming the electoral system, narrowing the suffrage in such a manner as to exclude most of the liberal deputies. In order to give Decazes the necessary majority in the upper Chamber, the king created sixty new peers. In Metternich’s eyes, this was ‘a catastrophe’. ‘Louis XVIII is himself at the head of the revolutionary movement which is shaking his throne,’ he wrote to his ambassador baron Vincent.5
Nesselrode’s wife, who was in Paris and moving in Ultra circles, warned her husband that the situation was so bad that Russia and the other powers would be obliged to intervene militarily. ‘There can be no more doubt about it, by the summer you will be on the march,’ she wrote on 18 March. ‘I cannot think without sadness of all the desolation that will follow, of the revolution which will spread even to the border of Asia … I cannot express to you the terror and the horror which reign here among decent people.’ If he could take his wife’s alarms with a pinch of salt, Nesselrode could not ignore Gentz, who warned him that ‘All over Germany minds are being whipped up into a state of fermentation by the ever-increasing temerity of the incendiary papers,’ that France was ‘severely agitated’ and England ‘in a highly alarming condition’.6
In Metternich’s view, it was Prussia that gave the greatest cause for concern. The country was on the verge of bankruptcy, and rocked by violent argument over whether a constitution should or should not be introduced. In January 1819 the king called on Wilhelm von Humboldt to take office and bring in a constitution. Humboldt declined, anticipating that in the prevailing hysteria he would not be allowed a free hand. Metternich’s assessment was that the country was ripe for revolution.7
Napoleon’s humiliation of Prussia following his victories at Jena and Auerstadt in 1806 had inspired a rapid administrative, legal, economic, educational and social transformation of the country, a ‘revolution from above’ in the words of Freiherr vom Stein, one of its principal motors. It was also perceived as a challenge, and the deep resentment it stirred up fired nationalist feeling all over Germany. This was a Romantic nationalism based on the ‘rediscovery’ of supposedly ancient traditions and values, and involved a semi-religious view of the ‘genius’ of the German people, Volkstum, and its destiny. In 1808 a League of Virtue, Tugendbund, was founded at Königsberg. The predominantly young men it brought together sought self-perfection with the aim of regenerating their country. A more middle-class version, the Deutsche Bund, was founded in Berlin the following year by Ludwig Jahn, who would subsequently also set up a network of Turnvereine, athletic associations meant to develop the physical and spiritual powers of the young. Jahn was an eccentric Teutomaniac, sporting a spectacular beard and advocating, amongst other things, the resurrection of an ‘Old German’ language which existed principally in his own imagination, and the substitution of saints’ days in the calendar with those of victorious German generals. His gymnastic associations had been formed with the aim of reviving the spirit of young Germans. His followers wore a coarse linen tunic with a dagger in the belt, used supposedly medieval forms of address and sang a great deal when they were not holding contests to test their mettle and keep themselves fit for Germany.8
These associations had inspired men from various parts of Germany to take part in the Freiheitskrieg, the ‘war of liberation’ against France in 1813, and the events of that year took on huge significance as a historic moment when the German nation came together to throw off its shackles. The prime emblem of this was the Free Corps of idealistic volunteers formed by the aristocratic firebrand Major Adolf von Lützow, which adopted a supposedly old German uniform consisting of a long tunic, baggy pants and a large black beret, and drew to its ranks the young poet Theodor Körner, who immortalised it in verse before being killed in action.
The hopes raised in 1813 were dashed by the Congress of Vienna. The settlement disappointed both traditionalists hoping for a restoration of something on the lines of the old Holy Roman Empire, and radicals dreaming of a new unitary state that would give shape and expression to the German nation. Germany was left divided into thirty-nine political units, ruled in the main by those who had been the most agile in positioning themselves and the most servile to Napoleon. They were bound by the terms of the Vienna settlement to introduce constitutions, but only a few, such as Württemberg, Bavaria, Baden, Saxe-Weimar and Naussau, did, and even then the suffrage was severely restricted and the prerogatives of the rulers entrenched. They were tied into a federation under the presidency of Austria, the Bund, with its own diet, the Bundersversammlung or Bundestag, whose procedures, prerogatives and powers were to be fixed in due course. The Bundestag which met at Frankfurt in 1816, under the auspices of Metternich, showed no sign of growing into anything more than an obedient talking shop. Joseph Görres, who founded the Rhenische Merkur in 1814 to fight the liberal and national cause, branded the settlement ‘a gigantic fraud’.9
None of this bothered more than a small portion of the population, which was for the most part politically supine, but while they did not represent anything resembling a political force, those who felt like Görres made enough noise and struck attitudes calculated to frighten those wishing to be. The dissatisfaction was particularly strong in the army. There had been more than a whiff of revolutionary ardour about the patriotic surge of 1813, and many of those who took up arms to expel the French took the Spanish guerrilla against Napoleon as their inspiration, adopting some of its brutal tactics, such as the murder of prisoners. The whole episode had had a radicalising and decivilising influence on those involved. In January 1816, the British envoy in Berlin reported that the Prussian army was ‘infected with revolutionary stirrings’, and his superior, Castlereagh, feared that it was ‘by no means subordinate to the civil authorities’. Commanded by figures such as the ardently patriotic General Gneisenau, identified by some as the ‘generalissimo’ of what they regarded as a dangerous ‘sect’, the Prussian army did appear to pose a threat, and this was one reason Tsar Alexander gave for not standing down his own forces after 1815.10
What worried the Prussian authorities more than the state of the army were the various patriotic associations and the presumed existence of secret societies of one sort or another. The Tugendbund had dissolved in 1810, but its spirit survived. Young men had taken to wearing some version of ‘Old German’ wear, the Altdeutsch Tracht, or Jahn’s white equivalent, visiting the battlefields of 1813 and cultivating the memory of that year of hope, giving the impression of an organised movement. Caspar David Friedrich’s haunting paintings of such wanderers in their black costumes, lost in contemplation in some mythical landscape, were interpreted in many ways, and suggested to the suspicious and fearful an occult understanding. The student associations at the German universities, Burschenschaften, inspired little short of dread in conservative quarters. Their members, many of whom affected the Altdeutsch Tracht, were referred to as ‘Teutomaniacs’ and ‘Teutomagogues’. Gentz was one who could barely contain his dislike of these ‘grotesque and repulsive figures in filthy ancient German costumes, their books under their arms, abominations before God and man, on their way to absorb the false wisdom of their infamous professors’. As they were dedicated to the unification of Germany, they were ‘consummate Jacobins’, since that unification could, according to Gentz, not be achieved ‘without the most violent revolutions, without the overthrow of Europe’.11
It did look as though unification could only come in republican form. The behaviour of the various German rulers during the Napoleonic wars had forfeited them the respect of the patriots, and their determined efforts at the Congress of Vienna to hang on to titles and territory they had acquired through alliance with Napoleon only compounded this. German nationalists swung towards republicanism by default.
Prussia was particularly vulnerable. Over the previous half-century it had successively quadrupled in size, been reduced by over two-thirds, narrowly avoided being wiped off the map altogether, and then vastly expanded again. Some of its provinces were landlocked islands surrounded by other states, with no cultural or religious affinity with the core, awarded to Prussia in 1815 principally because Britain wished to see a strong German buffer on France’s border to stop it expanding into Belgium or Germany. The result was a large but loosely-knit kingdom whose very existence raised many questions.
It had been at the forefront of the war to expel Napoleonic rule from Germany in 1813. Its army had distinguished itself during the final campaigns against Napoleon and had clinched the outcome at Waterloo. Prussia therefore appeared as the natural focus for the ambitions of nationalists who longed for the unification of all Germans into one political unit. But its ruler feared that his throne might not survive the process. King Frederick William III was a kindly and well-meaning character dominated by a sense of personal failure. Painfully shy, the most unmartial of all Prussian kings, he had been defeated, forced to give up half of his kingdom and thoroughly humiliated by Napoleon. He had enjoyed a happy marriage to his queen, Luise, and when she died in 1810 he was utterly bereft. A member of the ‘Order of the Gold and Rosy Cross’, he believed unquestioningly in the Bible, and considered alchemy and astrology to be sciences.
Frederick William had been open to the idea of reform when it could save what was left of his kingdom from disintegration, but once peace had settled he feared it could only serve to limit his power. He surrounded himself with a circle of courtiers, including his son’s tutor the Huguenot preacher Johann Peter Ancillon, his privy councillor Daniel Ludwig Albrecht, the nonagenarian lady of the court Countess Voss, a devoted companion of the last three kings, and Prince Wilhelm Ludwig Georg von Sayn-Wittgenstein, who became minister of police. This camarilla of diehard conservatives undermined the prime minister, Hardenberg, and fed the worst phobias of the king. These were also being nourished, and voiced, by Anton Heinrich Schmalz, professor of law at Berlin University, who made out that German nationalism was essentially republican and inimical to the Prussian state.
In May 1815, Frederick William had vowed to bring in a constitution for Prussia, but he showed little enthusiasm to fulfil this promise, and the process stalled. Conservative opinion rallied behind Schmalz, who published a pamphlet arguing that constitutions were mere tools to undermine all the dynasties in Germany, and the king made his preference clear by awarding him a decoration. Schmalz contended that the Tugendbund was still in existence, and that together with the Burschenschaften and other associations it was secretly propagating republican values under the guise of national sentiment. A witch-hunt was duly launched to root out this supposed threat. ‘I suspect that those who have made it their business to spread this notion, with the exception of one or two, do not believe in such a secret society themselves but have merely been trying to arouse alarm as a tool for their persecutions,’ commented General Gneisenau.12
Prussia had never had much in the way of police structures before 1806, when the kingdom became a virtual vassal of France. New measures were called for by the need to keep an eye on what the French were doing and to monitor their collaborators, and at the same time to prevent anti-French feeling from turning into anti-government action. The privy councillor Karl von Nagler was put in charge of the small police networks of the ministries of the interior and foreign affairs, and given control of the postal service. He found himself in competition with a rival police network, set up by the French, which paid spies better than he could and intercepted letters with greater finesse. In 1809 he was joined by Justus Grüner as Polizeipräsident of Berlin, technically his junior but effectively in control of operations.13
Grüner was a thirty-two-year-old Prussian civil servant with a keen interest in the law who had published a number of works on jurisprudence. A brave and ardent patriot, nourishing a profound hatred of Napoleon and his treatment of Germany, he repressed his idealism in the national interest, and since one of his principal tasks was to counteract the French police he soon began employing the same methods as Fouché. ‘It is necessary to observe clubs, coffee houses, gaming houses, where foreigners meet along with people who speak ill, equivocal writers, grumblers,’ he explained, specifying that every government official should be an informant, and that liberal use should be made of spies in the ‘observation of suspects’.14
In 1811 Grüner was promoted to head the state police, and he expanded his field of activity considerably. His Fremdenpolizei monitored every foreigner passing through Prussian territory, he had agents in every foreign embassy in Berlin, in every gambling den and brothel, and spies in foreign capitals and major cities. He intercepted mail and placed disinformation in the post for the French to read. He developed a discreet way of dealing with suspects, arranging for them to be lured, by women or the promise of a good card game, to an isolated spot, where they would be picked up and bundled away into the fortress of Spandau. Special commissions were set up so that their cases could be kept outside the judicial system.15
The struggle between Prussian patriots and the French faction intersected with one between the conservatives grouped in the court party and the reformers bent on regenerating Prussia. Grüner thus found himself navigating in murky waters. Society was divided, with wives and mistresses in some cases working for a different interest than their husbands and lovers in what was becoming an underground struggle for the soul of Prussia. The French viewed the reformers and members of the Tugendbund as Jacobins threatening the European pax Gallica. Grüner allied with the patriotic elements, working closely with the Tugendbund in the common cause against the French. In the same cause, he collaborated with the Austrian ambassador in Berlin, passing intelligence through him to Metternich. The French quickly recognised Grüner as ‘a leading member of the sect’ and concluded that his dismissal was essential. With the signature in 1812 of a military alliance between Prussia and France prior to Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, Grüner was forced to resign.16
He was provided with funds by the Russian and British governments and went to Prague, from where he began to organise pan-German resistance to the French, creating an intelligence-gathering network which provided information on French troop numbers and movements to Russia, and at the behest of the Russian minister of police General Balashov laid plans for armed insurrections in the rear of the French armies. In August 1812 he was denounced by the Prussian police he had created, arrested on Metternich’s orders and incarcerated in the fortress of Peterwardein.17
When Napoleon’s fortunes waned, Grüner was released and re-employed by the Prussians in various administrative capacities, then as head of the military police, and in 1815 he set up a police network for the allies in Paris. Once he had achieved this, and reaction had set in in Berlin, he was sidelined in various minor posts. But he continued to play an undercover role on behalf of Hardenberg, putting together a pan-German network with the aim of promoting the idea of unification under Prussian rule.18
The man who had taken over from Grüner as head of Prussia’s police was of a very different stamp. Prince Wilhelm Ludwig von Sayn-Wittgenstein was seven years older than Grüner. Although he bore a sonorous title, he came from an impoverished line of the family. The French Revolution broke out just as he finished his studies at the University of Marburg, and while his brother set off for Russia, where he would have a distinguished military career, Wilhelm went to join the counter-revolutionary army of the Bourbon princes at Koblenz. This turned out not to have been a good choice.
He never got the chance to march into France and fight at Valmy, as he was arrested on the orders of the Austrian and Prussian police authorities for his contacts with French émigrés. ‘Escorted on foot, by soldiers, like a common criminal, and thrown into gaol’, he was stripped of his possessions and not allowed to write letters. He was kept in solitary confinement for nine weeks, without an inkling of the reason, since he was never interrogated and was released without explanation.19
His fortunes picked up when Hardenberg, who had noted his pleasant manner and discreet ways, started using him for various errands, and most notably as a ‘postillion d’amour’ in his communications with his mistress. He also drew close to the court, which proved to be his natural element. ‘Prince Wittgenstein had all the qualities to obtain a good position for himself,’ according to Stein, ‘clever, cold, calculating, tenacious and pliable to the point of utter sliminess …’ He was indeed the perfect courtier, emollient with superiors, contemptuous of those out of favour, self-serving and mean, yet careful and scrupulous in his calculations, a master of intrigue and of what Stein called ‘the influence of the wardrobe’. The king trusted him implicitly, and Wittgenstein soon supplanted Hardenberg, becoming, in the words of the war minister Hermann von Boyen, ‘the prime minister behind the curtain’. In 1812 he was appointed to succeed Grüner.20
Wittgenstein took over the structures created by Grüner, and merely redirected them from acting against the French to assisting them in their persecution of Prussian patriots. He continued in the same vein even when, the following year, Prussia changed sides, as by then he had come to the conclusion that the patriots were Jacobins in disguise. He was deeply suspicious of the patriotic surge of 1813, and saw the newly created Landsturm, or volunteer army, as a revolutionary force dedicated to ‘Anarchy and the overthrow of thrones’, so he dissolved it.21
In 1816 Hardenberg decreed that the secret police should be abolished, its personnel sacked and its archives destroyed, arguing that it had only been called into being out of wartime necessity. Wittgenstein responded by declaring that there was no secret police as such, only the bare essential of surveillance of foreigners. Nobody was taken in by this. Far from scaling back its activity once the threat of French-inspired Jacobinism had been seen off, the Prussian police continued to extend their sphere of interest in the years following 1815 under the energetic direction of Wittgenstein’s deputy, the jurist Karl Albert von Kamptz.
The number of police spies increased noticeably, and when people went for a walk they would look around and see men following them, taking notes. Mail was intercepted wholesale. ‘I do not write to you how things are here, because this is quite impossible for me,’ the biographer and diplomat Karl August Varnhagen von Ense wrote from Berlin to his publisher; ‘give my regards to all my friends, but tell them not to write to me, for it would be critical under present circumstances when every word can be interpreted in a bad sense; paper is nowadays an evil treasure, at any moment it may become a red-hot coal.’22
The climate of repression provoked mounting anger among young people in particular. A greater proportion of the population attended university in Germany than elsewhere in Europe, creating a pool of educated young men with aspirations. Outlets for these were limited in the pre-industrial conditions in which most of the country stagnated. The German states and their capitals were both small (the dozen largest cities in Germany could have fitted comfortably into Paris in terms of population) and provincial. The lack of prospects for educated young men naturally made them long for a larger state with a proper capital that could accommodate their talents, and this could only be achieved through the unification of Germany. The absence of functioning political structures and the fitful application of the law in many of the states also offended their sense of justice, hence their calls for constitutions. One group, led by the twenty-two-year-old lawyer Karl Follen, known as the Giessen ‘blacks’ on account of the old German costume they wore, alternately as the Unbedingten, Unconditionals, petitioned the Grand Duke of Hesse, their ruler, to bring in a constitution and improve the administration of his realm.
On 18 October 1817 a group of students from twelve universities came together at the castle on the Wartburg in Thuringia to mark the fourth anniversary of the Battle of Leipzig and the tercentenary of Martin Luther’s revolt against the Church of Rome. The castle was where Luther had translated the Bible into German, but it was not the religious aspect of his rebellion that enthralled the students: what resonated with them was his call for the spiritual purification and regeneration of the German nation, and for a restoration of the German realm to greatness.
They gathered at the foot of the hill, dressed in the Altdeutsch Tracht, and lit a bonfire, on which they proceeded to immolate a number of objects that stood for institutions which, they felt, prevented Germany from recovering its true greatness. These included some bizarre symbols, such as a Hessian soldier’s wig and a Prussian guardsman’s corset, as well as copies of the Code Napoléon, the text of the 1815 Treaty of Vienna, the Prussian Codex der Gendarmerie, and a variety of books which offended their sensibilities. After listening to rousing speeches and singing patriotic hymns, they marched up the hill to the castle, where the festivities continued in gothick mode.
This incident, which involved fewer than five hundred people, caused a grossly disproportionate stir. ‘The mischief of the Wartburg assaults all sovereigns, great and small, promotes terrorism, intolerance, and demagogic despotism,’ wrote Duke Charles of Mecklemburg, a relative and courtier of the King of Prussia; ‘from there it is only a few steps to outright revolutionary actions’. Wittgenstein exploited the episode to stoke up fears of revolution (which he did not take seriously himself).23
The tsar urged Austria and Prussia to unite in forcing the Grand Duke of Weimar to punish the authors of the ‘excesses’ which had taken place in his realm. But things were not that simple, as Metternich pointed out. ‘We foresee, and receive daily confirmation of our opinion, that the centre of German Jacobinism is to be found in Prussia and particularly in Berlin,’ he wrote to his ambassador there, Count Zichy, on 28 January 1818; ‘the revolution is, it is true, being openly organised only in Weimar, but the men who are working this vein are to be found in Berlin’. The Austrian police chief Sedlnitzky was convinced that the associations at universities throughout Germany were following ‘a deep and carefully laid plan to kindle and encourage, not only among students but also among most teachers, a political and religious fanaticism which evidently has as its end the revolutionary overthrow of all monarchical institutions in favour of a demagogic, representative freedom and unity of the German people’, which was all part of the Schwindelgeist.24
Tsar Alexander’s adviser Aleksandr Sturdza published a pamphlet attacking the Prussian universities, which he claimed encouraged young people to ‘plunge into the excesses that derive from the rebellion of the mind and the corruption of the heart’. He suggested abolishing academic privileges and placing students under police supervision. Germany, ‘where all the calamities are concentrating’, was, according to him, ‘about to be swallowed up by the abyss of revolution’, and the salvation of Europe and the whole universe demanded drastic action.25
The publication of this pamphlet came as a shock to German liberals and patriots, who, feeling betrayed by their own rulers, looked on Alexander, the liberator of Germany in 1813, as a kindred spirit, and fondly imagined him to be their champion. For all the alarmist nonsense written about them, their associations were small and weak, and they were defenceless in the face of the growing power of state organs of repression. Let down on all sides, they felt a growing desperation – which was to express itself in a way that played into the hands of their enemies.26