At about eleven o’clock on the morning of 23 March 1819, a man in his early twenties presented himself at the door of the writer August von Kotzebue in the small town of Mannheim in the grand duchy of Baden. He told the maid who opened it that he wished to pay his respects to the great man. She told him her master was out, but would be available in the afternoon. The young man went for a walk and had lunch at the Weinberg Inn, during which he discussed the Reformation with a couple of clergymen.
The fifty-seven-year-old Kotzebue was the author of over two hundred plays, which had been performed as far and wide as Moscow and New York, more frequently in Germany even than those of Goethe and Schiller, and of numerous stories and novellas, which had been translated into over a dozen languages. In the 1780s he had gone to Russia, where he had been given a senior legal post, married a Russian general’s daughter and been ennobled. He had subsequently spent time as a theatre director in Vienna before returning to Germany in 1816 and settling in Mannheim. He received pensions from the Emperor of Austria, the King of Prussia and Tsar Alexander, for whom he acted as a foreign correspondent, sending him reports on what was going on in the literary and artistic world of Germany.
Kotzebue epitomised everything most German students and patriots despised. Born of the Enlightenment and steeped in eighteenth-century sentimentality, his work doted on themes such as the fall and redemption of female virtue, which accorded ill with the patriots’ pseudo-medieval asceticism and concomitant view of women as a corrupting influence; he was accused of being ‘the archservant of the false female era’. His conservatism grated on their liberalism. His derogatory views on the universities and the Teutonic antics of the students insulted them. He had already had his windows smashed, and his history of Germany had been one of the books burned at the Wartburg festival.1
The young man who had called on him that morning, Karl Ludwig Sand, was the son of a minor Prussian official. He had studied theology at the University of Erlangen in Bavaria, where he had joined the local Burschenschaft. Dissatisfied with its narrow aims, he formed a splinter group with the name of Teutonia and conducted moonlight ceremonies at an ancient German burial site. His efforts to persuade his colleagues to become more assertive and create a pan-German student body came to nothing, so in 1817 he left Erlangen for Jena, whose university was the centre of the Burschenschaft movement. He attended the Wartburg festival, where he produced a manifesto, a mash of Lutheran and nationalist slogans calling for a spiritual liberation of Germany to be achieved through chivalric self-denial. Sand was a weak and ineffectual character, acutely aware of these defects and determined to conquer them through some act of will and courage (he had enlisted in 1814, but the war was over before he saw battle). Under the influence of the professor of theoretical philosophy Jakob Friedrich Fries, a fanatical German chauvinist and notorious anti-Semite, Sand hardened his will and looked for an opportunity to prove himself.
When he returned to Kotzebue’s house at around five o’clock in the afternoon he was shown upstairs and into the drawing room, where he was received by the writer. After exchanging a few words with him, Sand reached into his sleeve and drew out a dagger, with which he proceeded to stab him several times, calling him a ‘traitor to the fatherland’. As Kotzebue’s horrified family and servants rushed into the room, the assassin stabbed himself in the stomach and stumbled downstairs and out of the house. In the street outside he fell to his knees and, loudly thanking God for the success of his enterprise, stabbed himself twice in the chest. Kotzebue died, but Sand survived.
He was bandaged and searched. A proclamation was found in which he declared that he had been preparing his act for a long time, and called on the German people to rise up and continue the work of the Reformation, unite Church and state, and follow his example of self-sacrifice. He was also apparently in possession of a death warrant passed on Kotzebue by the Burschenschaft of his university.2
Metternich, who was in Rome with his emperor as a guest of the pope when he heard the news, struck brave attitudes as Francis warned him to be on his guard, retorting that he was not afraid of meeting his fate. ‘We will both be assassinated,’ the emperor concluded gloomily. Metternich was ‘absolutely certain’ that the murder had been decreed by a secret tribunal of students at the University of Jena which had passed the order for Kotzebue’s execution to their comrades at Erlangen, and that the man who had carried it out should be regarded as ‘a veritable Haschischin’, a drug-crazed religious fanatic. ‘What can one do against men who kill themselves?’ he asked rhetorically.3
His question was immediately answered by Gentz. ‘The most violent catastrophes both in the moral sphere and in the physical can be useful and even salutary,’ he argued, ‘if not for the victims they have already claimed, at least for those whom they have spared, on condition that they give birth to resolutions and provoke measures which it would be impossible to implement in other circumstances.’ The event was ‘an unmistakable symptom of the degree of malignity that the pestilential fever of our times has attained in Germany’, which was ‘incomparably more diseased’ than France. The enemy was in their midst, he warned, and there was no time to lose. As the murder had profoundly shocked public opinion throughout Germany, confirmed all the conspiracy theorists in their beliefs, and even made large numbers of converts, it provided the perfect opportunity to act and an excellent excuse to clamp down on the universities. Metternich agreed. The students themselves were not the problem, and their societies no more than ‘a puerile game which has no practical effect’; it was the teachers who were dangerous – ‘they can produce a whole generation of revolutionaries if one does not manage to check the evil’.4
The evil was by no means imaginary. Wilhelm de Wette, professor of theology at the University of Berlin, wrote Sand’s mother a letter, copies of which were widely circulated, in which he consoled her by stating that while her son’s act had been ‘unlawful and punishable by the worldly magistrate’, he was redeemed by his personal conviction: ‘he believed it was right to do what he did, and so he was right’. He assured her that the murderer would be rewarded in heaven and that his deed was ‘a beautiful sign of the times’. Wittgenstein had de Wette dismissed from his post, but the damage had been done. All over Germany, students abandoned the subjects they were studying and opted for theology. When Sand was executed, by beheading with a sword, onlookers dipped handkerchiefs in his blood and distributed shreds of them as relics.5
News of the assassination of Kotzebue reverberated across Europe, arousing fear and outrage and giving rise to multiple theories as to what lay behind it. These were enriched by the attempted assassination on 1 July of the head of the government of the duchy of Nassau, Karl Friedrich von Ibell, by another student, Karl Löning, who told the interrogators that he had meant to kill Ibell because he was an ‘oppressor of his Fatherland’. He then committed suicide. Löning had been an associate of Follen and a member of his group of Unconditionals, about which sinister stories circulated. Speculation about the events developed a life of its own, fed by the publication of a book entitled Des Sociétés secrètes en Allemagne et en d’autres contrées, by a former revolutionary, Lombard de Langres. ‘Europe is experiencing a unique crisis,’ he warned. ‘Its condition, both moral and political, utterly at odds with nature, prophesies inevitable catastrophe … I must reveal terrifying conspiracies, perverted principles, plans worthy of hell. And let no one think that Germany is the only source of the fire; it is burning in Spain, in France, in Italy, in Poland; it is gaining ground in Russia; England itself has not escaped it.’ He was putting his life at risk by revealing these secrets, he said, and claimed to be living in fear of the conspirators’ special poison, acqua tofana, which was alleged to have done for the Emperors Joseph II and Leopold II, both of whom had died unexpectedly.6
The book, which regurgitated Barruel’s theme of a permanently evolving conspiracy, linked the Burschenschaft to the Tugendbund, to Cromwell, the Levellers, the magician Cagliostro, turncoat Jesuits and the Illuminati, and explained in bloodcurdling language how a congregation of thousands of ‘new men who know each other without having met, who understand each other without having spoken, who serve each other without friendship’ had issued from ‘the depth of the darkest shadows’. Their goal was to take power and govern the world. It was ‘a conspiracy of a sect against the human race’. They operated in circles which instructed whole areas: that of Frankfurt am Main instructed Mainz, Darmstadt, Nieuwied and Cologne; Weimar directed Cassel, Göttingen, Wetzlar, Brunswick and Gotha; Dessau directed Torgau, Wittemberg, Magdeburg, Mecklemburg and Berlin; and so on, reaching all over Germany and beyond. These circles sent out emissaries, usually literary figures, to collect information on targeted individuals, whose names were written down in a ‘blood-book’, so that this ‘infernal inquisition’ should know the weaknesses of every person of power and influence, in order to be able to manipulate and destroy them. Their ultimate weapon, acqua tofana, was a colourless, odourless, tasteless liquid, based on opium and cantharide flies, whose very emanations could kill instantly, leaving no trace.7
The readers of this best-selling nonsense were treated to a description of the conspirators’ rites of induction. The adept was first taken into a cave draped in black cloth, scattered with red flowers and slithering with snakes. The décor included three dim lamps, assorted skeletons and dusty books of curses. He would spend eight hours meditating there, visited by several ghosts which would vanish, leaving behind a bad smell. Then two men would appear, present him with three cups containing a greenish potion and bind his forehead with a blood-soaked bandanna adorned with hieroglyphs. He would be given a crucifix to hold. He would be stripped, patterns would be drawn on his flesh with blood, and amulets placed about his neck. His testicles would be bound with pink ribbon. Then five men would come and prostrate themselves. His clothes would be burned, and out of the fire would step another man, whereupon the five would be seized by convulsions. Then a booming voice from nowhere would tell him to abjure all his earthly ties, to his father, mother, family and friends. After swearing a terrible oath, he would be bathed in blood. The whole process took twenty-four hours. If he disobeyed or betrayed the sect he would be cast into the underground dungeon of a castle outside Paris and left to die slowly.8
Paris naturally drew to itself the thoughts of those who believed in conspiracy. Many, including Wellington, saw it as the fount of the evil, and the Austrian ambassador there, Vincent, agreed that it was where ‘the centre of a sect which wants to substitute a new order of things’ must be sought. The Ultras encouraged this notion, depicting Decazes as the instrument of the revolutionaries and the king as his puppet. ‘Everything is falling apart here,’ Countess Nesselrode wrote to her husband from Paris on 9 April. ‘The first Jacobin is the king; he will end up with the red cap on his head.’ She felt that only Russia could save the situation. ‘Oh! If only the Emperor could grow disgusted with liberty, that word which is destroying Europe!’ she wrote three days later. More letters followed, urging Nesselrode to act and predicting catastrophe. ‘The assassination of Kotzebue makes one shudder and proves that these men will stop at nothing,’ she wrote on 7 May. ‘Count Stackelberg, who called on me just now told me that they have uncovered at Montorio the sect of Carbonari which was planning to poison the Emperor of Austria and, generally, to make attempts on the lives of all the sovereigns. I believe that all this merits serious attention, as none of this is exaggerated; people are overexcited to the point of being capable of anything …’9
Alexander and Metternich were particularly concerned about the French army, which Decazes had transformed. Believing that the demi-soldes and former Napoleonic officers constituted a greater threat when left idle on the outside, he had nominated the former Napoleonic marshal Laurent de Gouvion Saint-Cyr to head it. Gouvion Saint-Cyr had got rid of many of the royalist placemen, brought back capable Napoleonic officers and made the army more professional. This alarmed Wellington, who pointed out that the French army was not like other armies, being by its very nature a political force. Lebzeltern warned that it had become ‘bonapartist, or rather, revolutionary’. Pozzo di Borgo assured Nesselrode that ‘the army of Waterloo is being recreated in its entirety’. By September he had convinced himself that the war ministry was ‘in the hands of the secret military committee’, a branch of the central organ of the grand revolutionary conspiracy.10
Metternich briefly considered Alexander’s suggestion of concerting with the other three powers to demand the removal of Gouvion Saint-Cyr, and entertained the idea of reinstating the conference of ambassadors, discontinued by mutual agreement at Aix. But he feared such measures would be seen in France as an affront and would provoke more trouble than they could prevent. He was, in any case, more interested in exploiting the opportunities that had opened up in Germany.11
He played on the awesome threat of the suicidal terrorist, and without a shred of evidence warned that ‘today in Germany one can count hundreds of men ready to sacrifice their property and their lives to the cause they espouse’. Evidence was unnecessary in the current mood of panic; Gentz himself, after receiving an anonymous letter which stated that he was to be assassinated, alerted the police and took to his bed, where he cowered for eight days. Metternich meant to extract the greatest possible advantage from the situation, and deal with what he saw as the German problem once and for all. But he also realised that he must act quickly, while the panic still gripped the public, and force the Bundestag, which was to meet in Frankfurt in September, to pass a package of repressive legislation. To prepare the ground he convoked the delegates of the principal German states to a conference at the spa town of Karlsbad (Karlovy Vary) in August. He was confident that he would be able to manipulate this, and could not wait to reach ‘the battlefield’, as he referred to it.12
‘I think that before long, even quite soon, you will hear a great clamour against me, but it will be the canaille which will be doing the shouting, and I regard such invective as so much praise,’ he wrote to Dorothea Lieven from Munich on 18 July. ‘As the rascals have begun murdering in Germany in the name of virtue and the motherland, I may be assassinated myself, and you may yet weep for me, along with a great many of those decent people who have not yet been gripped by madness.’ He reached Karlsbad on 21 July in belligerent mood. ‘With the help of God, I hope to destroy the German revolution, just as I vanquished the conqueror of the world [Napoleon],’ he wrote to his wife five days later.13
The next day he met Frederick William and Hardenberg at Töplitz (Teplice) to assure himself of their cooperation beforehand. The king felt helpless. ‘Six years ago, we faced an enemy in open country; now he is hovering around us in disguise,’ he complained. Metternich took advantage of this to undermine the king’s confidence in those Prussian ministers who did not see eye to eye with him, suggesting that if they had not actually been suborned by the conspiracy themselves, they were harbouring revolutionaries who were plotting to bring about the collapse of the Prussian monarchy. The following morning he reported to the Emperor Francis that he felt he had convinced Frederick William. On 6 August representatives of the nine major German states assembled at Karlsbad held their first meeting. They convened almost every day for the next two weeks. The Prussian foreign minister, Christian von Bernstorff, and some of the others were not convinced by Metternich’s arguments, but he and Gentz had orchestrated the proceedings so well that he carried them all with him. In this he was greatly assisted by the arrival of shocking news from England.14
Perhaps inspired by the Wartburg festival, a group of English Radicals, including Henry Hunt, had held a grand dinner in London in January 1818 to mark the tercentenary of the Reformation. Vibrant speeches were made and lofty toasts drunk, but they could not obscure the fact that the movement for parliamentary reform had run out of steam, and particularly of support among the working classes. In the June elections a number of Radicals and fighting Whigs were returned to Parliament, including General Wilson, but this did not produce much in the way of results.
The summer of 1818 had seen numerous strikes, particularly in Lancashire, where spinners’ wages had fallen in the past three years from twenty-four shillings per week to eighteen, and by July there were 20,000 people, nearly one-fifth of the city’s entire population, on strike in Manchester. The suspension of habeas corpus had expired, which facilitated the preparation of demonstrations and strikes, and in some cases drilling exercises were held on heaths and areas of open country to ensure their orderly conduct. The workers were thus able to make an impressive show of force behind their banners, whose slogans grew more desperate as the poor harvest of that year and the glut in the textile industry made themselves felt. George Canning expressed the fear that the dangers were ‘greater than in 1793’.15
The French tricolour and the cap of liberty may have been favourite props, but it was bread-and-butter issues that dominated, and would continue to do so the following year. When 40,000 weavers met outside Glasgow on 16 June 1819, it was to support a petition to the prince regent for passage money to Canada for the unemployed, and it was only as a result of lobbying by some Radicals that an amendment was added demanding parliamentary reform. Five days later a meeting was held at Manchester’s St Peter’s Fields by distressed weavers also asking for passage money. In London the most revolutionary group, the Spenceans, restricted their energy to a ‘chapel’ in a hayloft in Soho, where they let off steam to the loud applause of the assembly, many of whom had come for the entertainment. They ranted on about Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights, threatened nobles, clergy and mean shopkeepers, and, while spouting republican slogans, stuck to the traditional trope of the prince regent being deceived by corrupt ministers.16
Although it was receiving regular reports from magistrates and informers of subversive talk, drilling, and pikes and other weapons being stockpiled, often concluding with assessments such as ‘some alarming insurrection is in contemplation’, and although it made much of these threats and issued statements which suggested it took them seriously, the government implemented no commensurate measures. The French chargé in London, Latour-Maubourg, reported on 20 July that the government ‘would not be sorry to see some kind of disturbance that would allow it to make use of the means of repression which the constitution places in its hands’.17
As the Radicals who had been returned to Westminster were making little impact there, Hunt, Cartwright and others took to agitating at open-air meetings, which could be well-attended. They provided a more gratifying platform, and demonstrated the support they enjoyed around the country. They were usually followed, once the starving unemployed audience had gone home, by hearty dinners for the speakers and organisers at some large inn, such as the Spread Eagle in Manchester, at which toasts were drunk to 1688, to Hampden, Cobbett, the poor weavers, Tom Paine, the Rights of Man, the people and various imprisoned colleagues, in a spirit of self-righteous jamboree. Instead of drawing up petitions to be sent to Parliament, they took to staging mock elections of their own ‘members of parliament’ or ‘legislatorial attorneys’ to plead their cause to Parliament in person. At a meeting due to be held in St Peter’s Fields on 22 July, Henry Hunt was billed to be elected to represent Manchester.
Manchester, the second-largest city in England, stood on land belonging to the Mosley family, and it was Sir Oswald Mosley who appointed the magistrates – all of them High Tory landowners or clergymen. These had whipped themselves up into such a state of anxiety that they formed a Committee in Aid of Civil Powers consisting of worthy citizens, in order to give themselves courage. In the event, this only meant that they had a group of jittery local worthies and insurrection-obsessives breathing down their necks. They were particularly alarmed by the drilling exercises being held by the workers, and could not accept that these were motivated by a sense of self-respect and the wish to present an orderly body rather than a disorganised rabble. On 5 August Mr Norris, the resident magistrate in Manchester, reported to Sidmouth that the practice of drilling was creating ‘the most formidable engine of rebellion’. ‘They affect to say, that it is for the purpose of appearing at Manchester in better order, &c. on Monday next,’ he continued, ‘but military discipline is not requisite for this purpose, and a more alarming object is so palpable, that it is impossible not to feel a moral conviction that insurrection and rebellion is their ulterior object.’18
The ‘Monday next’ he was referring to was the open-air meeting planned by Hunt at St Peter’s Fields for 16 August 1819. It had originally been announced in the following terms: ‘The public are respectfully informed, that a MEETING will be held here on MONDAY the 9th August, 1819, on the Area near ST PETER’S CHURCH, to take into consideration, the most speedy and effectual mode of obtaining Radical Reform in the Commons House of Parliament …’ The magistrates responded by branding the meeting illegal. The organisers consulted lawyers, as did Sidmouth, and they all agreed that it was legal. The meeting was rescheduled for the following week, and provocative words such as ‘Radical’ dropped from the billing.19
On the day, an estimated 50,000 to 60,000 people turned up, including families with small children, many of them dressed in their Sunday clothes. They marched in order behind banners, the most violent of which read ‘Equal Representation or Death’ – but even this was adorned by a heart, clasped hands and the word ‘Love’. The Oldham contingent included two hundred women dressed in white following a banner with the inscription ‘Universal Suffrage, Annual Parliaments, Election by Ballot, No Combination Acts’. Hunt rolled up in his barouche, attended by an escort of Manchester Female Reformers dressed in white. In his usual boastful manner, he noted that ‘ten or twelve bands struck up the same tune, “See the conquering hero comes”’. After he had mounted the podium everyone doffed their caps as the band played ‘God Save the King’.20
The magistrates had prepared for rebellion: their contingent of special constables was supported by the Manchester and Salford Yeomanry; out of sight were six troops of the 15th Hussars, the 31st Regiment of Foot, several companies of the 88th, and a troop of horse artillery. Without any preamble and in contravention of the law, the magistrates ordered Hunt’s arrest. The chief constable present said that he would not be able to do this without support, so the yeomanry were ordered to back him up. This force, consisting of an assortment of shopkeepers, merchants, manufacturers, lawyers, a couple of watchmakers, an insurance agent and a dancing master, had been breakfasting heartily, and many had drunk so much they had difficulty in mounting and controlling their horses. As they careered down the street making for St Peter’s Fields, one of them struck a woman holding a baby, which was killed as it fell to the ground. When the yeomanry appeared on the scene, Hunt called on the crowd to cheer them, which they did, little expecting what would happen next.21
The amateur soldiers waded unsteadily into the crowd and soon got stuck fast, unable to go forward or back. The magistrates later claimed that they read the Riot Act, but nobody heard them, and they did not wait for the statutory hour to elapse before sending in the hussars to assist the yeomanry. The hussars tried to clear their way with the flats of their sabres, but wounds were inflicted and a panicked rush for safety ensued. By the end of the day fifteen people had lost their lives and hundreds had been injured, some of whom, like John Lees, a survivor of Waterloo, would die of their wounds. The incident was immediately branded ‘the Peterloo massacre’.22
Far from giving the magistrates pause for thought, the events seem to have acted like a tonic, and that night troops patrolled the city looking for trouble. The following day the senior constable of Manchester informed the authorities that up to 50,000 men armed with pikes were marching on the city from Middleton and Oldham. The Exchange was closed down, as were most shops, and people were told to stay indoors while troops patrolled the silent town. The rumour had been entirely unfounded, and nothing happened.23
There was outrage around the country over the number of women and children among the dead and wounded, and the conduct of the Manchester magistrates and the yeomanry was widely denounced. The lord mayor, aldermen and Common Council of London were among the many bodies and individuals petitioning the prince regent to hold a public inquiry. But the government dug in its heels. The cabinet felt they had to stand by the forces of law and order, and sent an open letter to the Manchester magistrates congratulating them on their firmness and resolution. When asked about it over dinner by Lady Shelley, Wellington replied that ‘unless the magistrates had been supported in this instance, other magistrates on future occasions would not act at all; and then what a state the country would be in!’ The home secretary now declared that the meeting had been illegal and the magistrates had acted properly. He took the view that, in the words of one his correspondents, ‘every meeting for radical reform was not merely a seditious attempt to undermine the existing constitution of government, by bringing it into hatred and contempt, but it was an overt act of treasonable conspiracy against the constitution of government, including the king as its head’.24
Those calling for an inquiry were accused of sedition, and Earl Fitzwilliam was relieved of his lieutenancy for having attended a meeting in favour. The government held fast to its declared conviction that revolution was brewing, and did everything to encourage the sense of crisis. Sidmouth resorted to every argument and open falsehood to blacken the Radicals, and when challenged by Lord Grey in Parliament, declared that the demonstrators at St Peter’s Fields had been ‘carrying caps of liberty, bearing pikes apparently dipped in blood’.25
Wellington, who had been warned by Liverpool in September that ‘the state of Lancashire and its immediate neighbourhood is very alarming’, notified Major General Sir John Byng, commanding the troops stationed in the north, that ‘the proceedings of the Radicals in different parts of the country tend to prove that we are not far removed from a general and simultaneous rising in different parts and at different places’. He further informed him that ‘their business … will be neither more nor less than the Radical plunder of the rich towns and houses which will fall in their way’, and that as long as the general kept his nerve and managed to avoid allowing a single unit to be defeated, ‘the mischief will be confined to plunder and a little murder, and will not be irretrievable’.26
The sense of fear generated by this kind of talk affected even the Whig grandee Earl Grey, who wrote to a fellow supporter of parliamentary reform that ‘the Mob’ wanted ‘not Reform but Revolution’, and that if they continued to agitate for reform they themselves might well end up ‘on the scaffold’. Many felt, like Robert Southey, that ‘there is an infernal spirit abroad’, and Francis Place, at the other end of the spectrum, thought the country was on the brink of civil war. Samuel Bamford thought that if anyone had wanted to start a revolution, they could not have hoped for a more propitious moment.27
When another meeting was scheduled by the Radicals, the Manchester constables warned that ‘open violence’ would break out and took appropriate measures: the New Bailey prison was turned into a fortress, with trenches and earthworks, and the barracks fortified. But the doom-sayers were disappointed. The numerous meetings of protest after Peterloo passed off peacefully wherever troops did not interfere. Thousands did manifest their anger, but they did so by joining the Union Societies for parliamentary reform set up the previous year by a Methodist clergyman. The government and its supporters were not prepared to accept that the instincts of the people were essentially law-abiding. In a self-congratulatory letter to Pozzo di Borgo in Paris, Wellington announced that they had weathered the storm and set a good example of how to deal with ‘the universal revolution which seems to menace us all’.28
Alleging the inadequacy of existing legislation for dealing with such a threat, the cabinet brought forward Bills in December which became known as the Six Acts. The Training Prevention Bill made any kind of drilling punishable by transportation for seven years; the Seizure of Arms Bill limited the right to bear arms and gave magistrates wide powers of search; the Misdemeanours Bill streamlined the administration of punishment; the Seditious Meetings Bill imposed restrictions on the right to hold public meetings of more than fifty people, outlawed marching and banners, and reduced the dispersal time from one hour to fifteen minutes; the Blasphemous and Seditious Libels Bill and the Stamp Duties Bill imposed censorship by the back door.
Speaking against the proposed legislation in the House of Lords, Lord Holland argued that the new legislation would ‘exasperate discontent and hostility’ and would do nothing ‘to defeat the designs of turbulent men, or to reclaim the alienated affections of a mistaken multitude’. ‘Large meetings, in periods of political ferment, furnish the means of ascertaining the designs, and measuring the strength of the malcontents,’ he argued; ‘they tend to disunite and discredit the rash and mischievous agitators of a mistaken multitude; and they not infrequently serve as a vent, comparatively innoxious, of that illhumour and discontent which, if suppressed, might seek refuge in secret cabals and conspiracies, dangerous to the safety of individuals in authority, and subversive of the peace and happiness of Society.’29
In the event, the measures proved superfluous. An improvement in the economic climate sapped the Lancashire textile workers’ interest in agitating, and in politics altogether. Their colleagues further north continued to plan meetings and demonstrations, and in April attempted to stage a general strike in Glasgow and the surrounding country, which may have been the work of government agents provocateurs. About five hundred people paraded with weapons, and twenty of them tried to start a revolution but fled once they realised there was no appetite for one among the population. Another forty men set out under Andrew Hardie to enlist the support of the ironworkers, but were rounded up by a troop of cavalry. The ease with which these and other such attempts were put down corroborates other evidence that while there was a hard core bent on violence, the overwhelming majority were, however bloodthirsty their slogans, indulging in little more than mass protest. The London mob’s manner of demonstrating its discontent was breaking the windows of ministers’ houses – a mark of aimless frustration if ever there was one, and hardly a prelude to revolution. As the future judge and Whig minister James Abercrombie wrote to a friend at the beginning of January 1820, ‘No rational person ever thought the deluded Radicals could overturn the state’. But overreaction and unnecessary legislation were the order of the day, nowhere more so than in Germany, where the actions of Sand and Löning had provoked reactions bordering on the hysterical.30
Metternich had managed to exploit Kotzebue’s murder to the full. ‘I am now, thanks to God, delivered of my task,’ he announced to his wife from Karlsbad on 1 September. ‘The confinement passed off successfully, and the child will be presented to the world.’ At a final meeting on 31 August, the delegates of the leading states of the German Confederation had agreed to all the repressive measures he had put forward. It was, Gentz noted approvingly, ‘the greatest retrograde step since 1789’. The official closing conference on 1 September was but a formality. The same could be said of the vote by the Bundestag in Frankfurt on 20 September, which endorsed what would come to be known as the Karlsbad Decrees.31
These imposed strict limits on the press, the censorship of books and restrictions on the import of printed matter. Public addresses, including lectures and church sermons, were to be invigilated, with police agents sitting in on them so as to note down exactly what was said. Each of the German states was to appoint a commissioner to supervise teachers and what they taught, as well as those whom they taught. Student associations were banned, and any student who had belonged to one was barred from holding public office. The universities were to be gradually transformed from places of inquisitive study to training schools for civil servants.32
In order to get to the bottom of the ‘vast association’ with its ‘numerous ramifications’, working ‘without pause not only to spread fanatical, subversive and unashamedly revolutionary doctrines, but also to encourage and prepare the most criminal enterprises’, a Central Commission of Investigation, the Zentral Untersuchungs Kommission, was established in Mainz. It was to coordinate and complement investigations being conducted by the various German states, to research and analyse the character of ‘the revolutionary machination and assess its nature, roots and extent’. Metternich wanted it to act ‘like a thunderbolt’, and it tried its best.33
Without waiting for the Karlsbad meeting or the subsequent legislation, he had initiated a clampdown on all educational establishments in Habsburg dominions. Other German rulers had followed suit. In Prussia, Wittgenstein and Kamptz had swung into action with a vengeance, launching an all-out war on ‘demagogues’, the Demagogenverfolgung: the wearing of the Altdeutsch Tracht was forbidden, along with the outfits of Jahn’s gymnastics societies, which were closed down.34
In July, the Prussian government set up a commission of inquiry with powers to seize documents and interrogate at will. Jahn was arrested, sent in chains to Spandau prison and sentenced to a long term in the fortresses of Küstrin and Kolberg (the most serious charge against him was that one of his gymnasts had expressed the desire to assassinate Kamptz). The home of the professor of history at the University of Berlin, Ernst Moritz Arndt, was raided by police who carried off armfuls of papers. ‘Regicides and sans culottes do not suddenly appear,’ argued Kamptz. ‘In France there were first Encyclopaedists, then Constitutionalists, next Republicans, and finally regicides and high traitors. In order not to have the last types one must prevent Encyclopaedists and Constitutionalists from appearing and becoming established.’ This logic placed every educated person under suspicion. Among those charged with having ‘even unintentionally’ ‘caused, encouraged or promoted revolutionary efforts’ were most of Prussia’s leading intellectuals, including Stein, Schleiermacher and Fichte, and the military elite, with Generals Yorck and Gneisenau to the fore.35
Wittgenstein complained that the investigations were conducted ‘under the most difficult conditions’ due to ‘the very high level of opposition and a universal outcry from highly respected people’. This did not deter him or the commission’s chief interrogator, Regierungsassessor Tzschoppe, who turned the hunting down of demagogues into a private passion, and was known to plant forged evidence among the papers of suspects (he would later develop a persecution mania, believing himself to be the object of a witch-hunt by his victims). The police hauled in whomever they chose. They encouraged denunciations and blackmailed people to implicate others. Lodgings were searched, papers removed by the bundle, correspondence intercepted. Words were taken out of context and woven into a different sense. Making wild allegations that he had discovered a vast movement dedicated to the unification of Germany even at the cost of provoking civil war, Kamptz leaned heavily on judges to rule that treason could be extended to embrace hypothetical action, and used the criminal courts to judge people on their attitude to the state, effectively turning the Prussian legal system from an organ upholding the law to one dedicated to the conduct of political war on behalf of the state. People could be convicted for lack of deference and an impudent attitude to civil authority.36
Draconian sentences were the order of the day. In Prussia, seventeen students were sentenced to twelve years’ imprisonment in a fortress for belonging to an unauthorised club. Another eight who were deemed sympathetic received sentences totalling sixty-one years. In Bavaria, forty-two doctors, professors, clergymen and students would be tried and given long terms of imprisonment. At Wiesbaden, the high court sentenced a teacher, C.R. Hildebrandt, to nineteen years’ confinement in a fortress.37
In its relentless pursuit of ‘revolutionary intrigues and demagogic connections’, neither of which was defined, the Mainz commission interrogated hundreds of people and pored over mountains of papers. It did not need to justify its intrusions, and picked up people on the slimmest of evidence, or even on a whim. Kaspar David Friedrich was interrogated about the significance of those of his paintings which showed young men in Altdeutsch Tracht lost in contemplation in a landscape – the inference being that they must be plotting.
Stein thought this ‘inquisitorial apparatus’ absurd and unnecessary as well as outrageous. Gneisenau agreed. ‘Neither an actual conspiracy nor a society with oaths and mysteries has been discovered so far, merely a lot of silly twaddle in letters and articles, all sorts of opinions about various forms of government, a desire for a constitution and for a common Germany,’ he wrote to a friend that summer. An impartial observer, the English traveller William Jacob, also saw those calling for a united Germany as harmless. ‘No two that I converse with, could agree even on the preliminary step to what they all clamoured to obtain,’ he remarked. Plenty of others were astonished at the exaggerated reactions of the authorities. ‘The disorders which have taken place in the universities have almost always been the result of inept, arbitrary and completely unnecessary interventions of ministers who, without motive and without restraint, have taken pleasure in humiliating studious youth accustomed to respect,’ La Harpe wrote to the tsar. As far as he could see, the supposed revolutionary movement in Germany was little more than a ‘ministerial conjuring trick’.38
Others began to view what was going on in a more sinister light, as a calculated counter-revolution cynically fabricating evidence and exploiting people’s fears in order to put back the clock and curtail such civil rights as the inhabitants of Germany enjoyed. The increasingly hysterical declarations by Metternich and Gentz to the effect that Germany was in the throes of ‘one of the most horrible of European revolutions’, and that only ‘heroic means’ could stave off catastrophe, would seem to support this. Many believed that Metternich and Wittgenstein were bent not so much on crushing actual revolutionaries as on denying the middle classes and the liberals any say in public affairs. Their efforts were to be crowned with success, as the clampdown was accompanied by an exodus of educated professionals to Switzerland, France, Britain and America. But it also nurtured real revolutionary instincts, for, as Heinrich von Gagern, observing the events from the safety of Switzerland, pointed out, revolution was ‘the only recourse of nations against the violation of the law by their sovereigns’.39
The Karlsbad Decrees earned Metternich the approval of many in Europe, including Castlereagh and his colleagues in the British cabinet. ‘No one is more anti-revolutionist than [the prince regent],’ reported the secretary of the Austrian embassy in London, Philipp von Neumann, adding that recent events in Britain ‘have not been such as to inspire any liking for such ideas’. But he was disappointed by the British cabinet’s ‘feebleness’ in not making a public statement endorsing the decrees. ‘The proclamation of principles in the midst of the storm is a strong measure,’ Metternich wrote to Decazes on 7 October. Decazes seems to have taken the point.40
A couple of weeks earlier, as Metternich was preparing the Bundestag to endorse his decrees, Abbé Grégoire, an erstwhile deputy to the revolutionary Convention who had voted for the death of Louis XVI, was elected to the French Chamber. The news sent waves of horror through conservative society. The Dessolles ministry fell, and in November Decazes became prime minister. He promptly introduced changes to the electoral law, and managed to have Grégoire excluded from the Chamber. He had also, to the great relief of Wellington and others, replaced Gouvion Saint-Cyr with General de Latour-Maubourg.
Metternich was indeed bent on more than just the repression of revolutionary students, and intended to close all avenues to the liberals and the middle classes. In his view, the existence of constitutions in some of the states of Germany, and the stipulation of the Congress of Vienna that the others should also introduce them, was bound to lead eventually to the triumph of those Gentz referred to as ‘the innovators and partisans of revolution, numerous in all classes of society and even in the vicinity of thrones’. This would, in his view, spell disaster for the Austrian monarchy. He therefore set out to stop and, if possible, reverse the trend.41
He had managed to persuade the German states to send delegates to a conference in Vienna at which he hoped to repeat his triumph of Karlsbad with regard to the question of constitutions. Most of the rulers and their chief ministers were so rattled by the events of that year, and so terrified of being assassinated by some suicidal terrorist, that they could be expected to rubber-stamp anything he proposed. But the King of Württemberg did not take the threat as seriously as Metternich, and, being closely related to the tsar, was not as easily swayed as some of the other rulers, and Alexander himself was proving a problem.
Following a conversation with the tsar in October, Lebzeltern reported that Alexander understood the gravity of the situation in Germany, and had expressed himself in violent terms on the necessity of taking repressive measures against ‘the spirit of corruption and immorality which menaced public order’. He had been incensed that young Germans in ‘their absurd costume’ had entered the kingdom of Poland to fraternise with Polish students. They had been expelled, after having had their long Altdeutsch locks snipped off and their heads shaved in the manner of Russian footsoldiers. The tsar now saw that much of Germany, and particularly Prussia, was ‘gangrened’, and he had fallen out of love with the Poles, who were not showing due gratitude for the benefits he had bestowed on them. He was nevertheless proving less than dependable. He put paid to Metternich’s plan to revoke all the constitutions in Germany by encouraging Württemberg to protest, a move motivated, according to Lebzeltern, entirely by a wish for revenge for not getting his way at Aix-la-Chapelle over the Spanish colonies. He covertly backed the southern German states at the Vienna conference in resisting all Metternich’s proposals for changes to the Federal Act.42
The conference, which opened on 25 November 1819, did not close until the following May. In its Final Act, which passed into law at the Frankfurt Bundestag on 8 June 1820, it stopped short of abolishing constitutions or forbidding the introduction of new ones. But it did stipulate that any constitution that was brought in must be founded on the sovereignty of the monarch, and not that of the people. It also regulated relations between the various states of the confederation in ways that severely circumscribed the freedom of action of individual states, thus closing the door to creeping liberalisation. But by then Metternich and everyone else had far weightier matters on their minds.