One who might have been expected to go the same way was Metternich’s closest collaborator and alter ego, Friedrich von Gentz, who had wanted to see ‘revolution and counter-revolution drawn up against each other in battle array’ and the spirit of the age ‘vanquished with cannon’. He had called for the reintroduction of religion into everyday life, the shutting down of schools and the imposition of ‘any feudalism’, however inefficient, ‘if only it delivers us from the power of the mob, of counterfeit scholars, of students, and of journalists especially’. Yet the events of 1830 had made him reconsider.1
None of the risings had in fact been about toppling thrones or overthrowing the social order; they had all been reactions against oppression, injustice, corruption and hypocrisy. Gentz urged Metternich to recognise Louis-Philippe, supported the Poles against Russia, and in a letter to James de Rothschild expressed the conviction that a contest between legitimism and the sovereignty of the people was a nonsense, since the sovereignty of the people was fast becoming the new legitimacy, and any war waged against it ‘would only hasten the fall of all the thrones, even those of the victors’. He argued that Austrian policy had been fundamentally flawed in its resistance to the march of history. ‘I shall stand or fall with Metternich,’ he wrote on New Year’s Day 1832, ‘but nowadays he is a fool. If I were to write the history of the past fifteen years it would be one long indictment of Metternich.’ To a friend he admitted that he now considered that the overthrow of Napoleon had proved a misfortune for Europe and the greatest blunder of Austrian policy.2
Metternich’s attitude was closer to that of the Duke of Rutland. To him, the July Days were nothing short of a ‘renewal’ of 1789. ‘The false and disastrous principle of the sovereignty of the people has declared itself triumphant,’ he lamented. This triumph had been aided and abetted by the powers, particularly Britain and Prussia, which had shown weakness by recognising the change of dynasty in France and, what was worse, by their ‘outrageous’ resolution of the Belgian crisis by creating a new independent state – to which Austria had, with the utmost reluctance, given its assent. He considered this ‘odious’ because on the one hand it sanctioned rebellion, and on the other it undermined the 1815 settlement – it was no coincidence that many in France referred to the July Days as a riposte to Waterloo.3
Yet Metternich was almost elated by the disasters taking place all around. ‘For many years those who had pointed to the existence of a comité directeur working secretly for universal revolution were met everywhere only by incredulity; today it has been shown that this infernal propaganda exists, that it has its centre in Paris, and that it is divided into as many sections as there are nations,’ he maintained. ‘Everything that refers to this great and dangerous plot cannot, therefore be observed and surveyed with too much attention.’4
He was focused on Germany, which was in a state of effervescence whipped up by the publication of hundreds of political pamphlets. A Patriotic Association was founded to support freedom of the press; liberals were calling for constitutions and cheering the Poles fighting against their Russian overlords; poems and songs hailing freedom fighters in Paris and Poland were sung in defiance of the authorities. The publication of Witt von Dörring’s sensationalist memoirs and an eight-hundred-page book on the secret societies active in Germany, supposedly based on the Mainz commission’s archives, suggested that there was more under the surface.5
Metternich warned Wittgenstein, who was by now effectively the prime minister of Prussia, that the revolution was approaching with ‘mile-long steps’, and must be confronted with ‘fire and water’. He urged Prussia to arm in self-defence, for ‘revolution leads to war as surely as a plague leads to famine’. In August 1831 he called on the major courts of Germany to delegate generals who could plan a joint armed response, and convoked a conference in Vienna in September of their foreign ministers. He dismissed Bernstorff’s opinion that there was no real revolutionary threat in Germany as ‘disgusting nonsense’. He went so far as to organise an intrigue, planting a letter from Emperor Francis to King Frederick William, with the seal broken, in Bernstorff’s office and arranging for it to be discovered. Bernstorff was dismissed. But the German states still baulked at Metternich’s exhortations to bring in a new version of the Karlsbad Decrees and to mobilise for war with France.6
The fall of Warsaw to the Russians on 8 September sparked off riots in Paris and demonstrations all over Germany. It was soon followed by the arrival of Polish soldiers fleeing Russian reprisals, who were fêted as they passed through the country. People drew them into beer houses or their own homes and plied them with food and drink. ‘It seemed to be an affair of honour with the Mayence citizens not to suffer a sober Pole in their city,’ recalled a Prussian officer stationed in Mainz. ‘I, at least, never saw one.’ The émigrés were particularly popular with the womenfolk, and the officer noted that ‘Many a rascal put on a Polish uniform and spoke broken German, as it helped him better through the country than even a passport from the chief of police himself would have done.’7
Committees sprang up to provide assistance for the destitute exiles, and Metternich leapt to the conclusion that they were ‘branches of the French Propagande’. ‘It is absolutely clear that Germany is permanently being worked upon by the Comité directeur in Paris,’ he assured the Bavarian minister Prince Wrede. The presence of the Poles emboldened young Germans to flaunt their nationalist and liberal feelings openly. ‘The Polish enthusiasm was followed by the black-red-gold fever,’ recalled the Prussian officer, who received orders to arrest anyone wearing a cockade in those colours, a measure which ‘did much to increase the excitement instead of quelling it, as was intended’.8
By the spring of 1832, Metternich was feeling isolated and beleaguered by ‘pedantic sans-culottes’ in Germany who were arguing that there was no revolutionary threat. Abroad, he had become involved in confrontation with France over Italy. Austrian troops had evacuated Bologna, leaving the task of peacekeeping to the pope. But the papal troops behaved so badly that revolution broke out once again, and in January 1832 Metternich was obliged to send his own back in. At this point, France protested and landed a force at Ancona, supposedly to defend the pope against Austrian aggression. Metternich was furious, and declared the French action ‘a political crime’. (The standoff would last until 1838, when both forces were withdrawn.)9
He could not count on Nicholas or Frederick William and the other rulers of Germany. Britain seemed on the brink of giving way to reform: on 22 March 1832 the Reform Bill was brought before the Commons for a third reading, and was passed in the early hours of the following day. It was defeated in the Lords by nine votes, so Grey asked the king to create a number of new peers in order to give the Whigs a majority there. The king agreed, but subsequently changed his mind. When Grey was informed of this, on 9 May, he resigned. ‘As things now stand in England,’ Metternich wrote to Wrede, ‘all roads towards the good are barred, and a mad revolution is in the offing.’ The mood in the country was ugly, and references to Charles I abounded in political discussions.10
As Wellington attempted to form a new ministry, he was warned of plans to assassinate him. Mass meetings were held up and down the land, plans were made for resisting taxes, for barricading towns to turn them into fortresses, for mass demonstrations, and for outright armed resistance. In the City of London, men of trade and business confabulated on how to apply pressure, and came up with the threat of starting a run on the Bank of England, summed up in the slogan ‘To Stop the Duke, Go for Gold’.11
There was by now greater coordination between the Radicals and the working classes. These had become more organised, and there were arms in considerable quantities available to them. Perhaps most important, large sections of the middle class were no longer prepared to accept the dominance of the landed aristocracy, resting on a system that was patently absurd as well as unjust. There was a growing feeling that if force was needed, it would have to be used, and even some regular army officers made it clear that they would side against the authorities if things were to come to that.12
At the same time, the middle classes and all but a handful of the most radical reformers were as fearful of social revolution as they were keen on carrying through reform. While they threatened violence, and in the case of the Birmingham Political Union actually laid plans for insurrection, they used the working classes as a dog on a lead, ready to be let loose but kept firmly in hand. There was an element of bluff in this brinkmanship, but the threat of revolution was nevertheless real. On 15 May Wellington came to the conclusion that he would not be able to form a government, and abandoned the struggle to hold back the tide. Metternich was appalled when he heard the news. ‘England is facing disaster,’ he wrote. A few days later he was faced by what he immediately recognised as a challenge closer to home, to which he must rise.13
On Sunday, 27 May 1832 people began to gather at Hambach, a village in the Rhenish Palatinate nestling beneath the picturesque ruins of the castle of Kästenburg. They were the first wave of a crowd which would grow to some 20,000. The original idea had been to hold a folkloric festival of a kind that had become popular, underpinned by the need to stimulate the local economy by staging what was sure to be a tourist attraction. As the crowds gathered it became clear that all sorts were keen to contribute. Cartloads of young men wearing ribbons in the black-red-gold colours of the national movement jostled with processions of maidens dressed in white with oak-leaf garlands in their hair singing folk songs. German exiles turned up from France singing the ‘Marseillaise’ and airs from Rossini operas. There were also Polish émigrés in uniform, and the procession to the castle was led by women bearing the German tricolour and the Polish flag. The festival, which lasted until 1 June, included fairground attractions and the atmosphere was convivial, although there was some drunkenness and even criminality. Bombastic speeches were given on subjects ranging from the overthrow of tyrants and the liberation of nations to medieval customs and Old German morality. Slogans such as ‘United States of Germany’, ‘Common German Fatherland’ and ‘Confederated Republic of European States’ were liberally bandied about.
News of these revels was greeted by Metternich with a horror that barely masked his glee. He pointed out that on the same day, 27 May, German exiles in Paris had held a banquet with Lafayette as guest of honour, which proved that ‘the scandals of Hambach’ had been orchestrated from the French capital. ‘Everything is connected and can be identified as the attempt at a European revolution,’ he wrote to Wrede at the beginning of July. To Wittgenstein, he wrote that he did not actually care about what had happened, but welcomed the fact that they had something tangible with which they could frighten the rulers of Germany. Wittgenstein replied with even greater cynicism, complaining that the event had not been ‘great enough’, and wishing that the organisers of the festival had gone the whole way and deposed the King of Bavaria.14
‘Western Germany has recently been the theatre of scandalous scenes hardly less shocking than those which England and France have for so long offered to the world,’ Metternich wrote to his ambassador in Rome. ‘These scenes do not yet amount to revolution, but they are its immediate precursors, and they contain all the elements.’ Unity and firmness of action on the part of all the rulers of Germany were called for. ‘The dangers menacing the States today are not limited to one or other of them; the risk is equal for all,’ he asserted. The Illuminati were alive and well, in the guise of the Burschenschaften, he assured Neumann in London.15
The Hambach festival had the desired effect of sowing panic in governing circles in Berlin, and Frederick William was easily persuaded to back Metternich’s proposal to put before the Bundestag for approval a document he had drawn up containing six articles restating the sovereignty of the monarch and reinforcing his rights to raise taxes at will and to rule without the assent of his estates. There was some opposition in the assembly, and outside. The British foreign secretary Lord Palmerston, who disliked Metternich as much as Metternich despised him, taunted him with a sarcastically ingenuous public note expressing the hope that he would use his wisdom and influence to curb the repressive zeal of the assembly.16
Metternich duly bullied it into passing the six articles on 28 June 1832, followed on 5 July by ten more articles, also drafted by himself, essentially reasserting the Karlsbad Decrees: forbidding the circulation of political material published outside Germany; banning all associations, assemblies and festivals; forbidding the wearing of ribbons, cockades or other insignia, the flying of flags and the planting of liberty trees; placing the universities under strict surveillance, along with foreigners; and providing for the extradition of fugitives and for mutual military assistance. The assembly then went on to decree that all protests and petitions addressed to it would be treated as acts of rebellion.
This touched off a wave of protest and passive resistance. Patriots and liberals sang the ‘Marseillaise’ and the pro-Polish ‘Varsovienne’, and when the authorities banned these, they took to singing traditional German songs laced with subversive messages. Popular folk songs were amended to vilify hate figures such as the Prussian police chief and minister of justice Kamptz and to praise Karl Sand, the Poles or the Greek freedom fighters. A subliminal contest was carried on through symbols. Instead of the banned black-red-gold ribbons and cockades, they would wear blue ones, and when the police caught on that this was a sly reference to the banned colours, and forbade the wearing of the blue ones, they would adopt green, then pink, and so on; the police would lumber on, one step behind, led into more and more absurd prohibitions, of certain styles of tie, hat or waistcoat, until the Bavarian authorities outlawed the wearing of any kind of moustache.17
Bavaria had set up a special department to deal with ‘political machinations’ under councillor Anton von Braunmühl, which, in cooperation with the Mainz commission, produced dossiers on every university lecturer and professor in the kingdom. Professor Behr of the University of Wurzburg was sentenced to fifteen years in gaol, Professor Jordan of Marburg to five, and then another five, for high treason, to be served in a fortress. Pastor Weidig, a schoolmaster, committed suicide after five years in detention without charge; his suicide note to his wife was not passed on, for political security reasons.18
On 3 April 1833, at about 9.30 in the evening, a group of young men, some of them armed, stormed the principal guardhouse in Frankfurt shouting revolutionary slogans and calling to arms the citizens, who stopped and stared in amazement. It was the climax of a conspiracy of astonishing silliness involving a motley assortment of students and young artisans, with a sprinkling of Polish émigrés. The would-be revolutionaries roamed the city for about an hour, trying to elicit a reaction from the citizens, before fleeing at the sight of the civic guard and regular troops, who succeeded in rounding up just over fifty of them.19
The police files on the investigation of these and others implicated provide little evidence of any coherent, let alone unified, motivation. Most of them come across as muddle-headed (in at least one case the police were convinced that the boy was mad), and seem to have been inspired by a morally rather than politically based revulsion at what they saw as the corruption of public life in Germany. They mostly hoped that by standing up and demonstrating their determination to do something, they could bring about change for the better, although they gave no idea of how this better world was supposed to look. The investigations dragged on, and it was not until 1836 that sentence was passed on 204 students, thirty-nine of whom received the death penalty. One of them, the poet Fritz Reuter, was sentenced to death by beheading for having attended meetings and offended the majesty of the King of Prussia. The sentence was commuted to thirty years of confinement in a fortress.20
Two months after the Frankfurt guardhouse incident, in June 1833, a pan-German police information exchange, the Bundeszentralbehörde, was set up, along with a ministerial commission headed by Prussia’s notorious police chief and minister of justice Karl Albert von Kamptz, a man described by a colleague as being ‘addicted to hunting down demagogues’. This organisation would sit until 1842, and would investigate alleged plots all over Germany, involving some 1,800 individuals. Its great achievement was to draw up the Gesamtinkulpatentabelle, popularly known as the Black Book, a meticulously documented list of everyone who had ever been involved in or interrogated in connection with subversive activity, which added up to 2,140 names.21
Metternich exploited the guardhouse incident to the full, urging the other German states to take action against ‘the sickness of the times’. ‘The enemy stands with his forces concentrated, ready to strike, and he has his headquarters, his army corps, his vanguard and his reserves,’ he warned. He admitted to Wrede that he was not seriously worried by street revolts, which were easy to put down, more by what he called ‘revolution ex-cathedra’, the progress of liberalisation through courts of law. This chimes nicely with the frustration of the Russian minister at the court of the King of Württemberg, Baron Peter von Meyendorff, who in April 1833 complained to Nesselrode that almost all government employees in Germany, in the administration, the courts, the police and the post office, ‘belong to the faction’. ‘The police knows how to move on vagabonds and uncover burglaries, but it is rare for it to try to recognise the French and Polish agents who are carrying the orders from the propaganda,’ he complained, adding that judges were letting dangerous subversives walk free. He was outraged by the attitude of the postal service. ‘When, in order to find out more about the plots of a Pole who was living here in hiding and corresponding with Nakwasky in Carlsrouhe [sic], I asked for his correspondence to be watched, I received the reply that all postal employees had on the accession of the present King taken an oath to respect the secret of letters, and despite all my efforts, it has been impossible to have this correspondence impounded or examined.’22
Meyendorff saw conspiracy everywhere. On 8 June he reported to Nesselrode on a riot at Tübingen, where a group of students broke the windows of the university chancellor, a conservative deputy to the Württemberg assembly. Order had been restored by sixteen gendarmes, who arrested eight of the students. But in his view the riot revealed ‘new symptoms of the revolutionary fever from which German youth is suffering so gravely’, proved ‘the existence of a vast revolutionary ramification throughout the German universities, particularly those in which the Burschenschaften have never ceased to exist’, and clearly demonstrated that ‘this youth has become fanaticised to the point of stopping at nothing’.23
Annoyingly for Metternich, not everyone thought like Meyendorff. The Austrian minister of the interior, Count Franz Anton von Kolowrat, was a particularly irritating dissenter. ‘Your method is a forest of bayonets and the inflexible maintenance of everything that exists,’ he wrote to Metternich in June. ‘To my mind, that is the best way of bringing about revolution.’ He went on to explain that this method was ruining the state financially and obliging it to impose onerous taxes, which turned people against the government, that his refusal to allow the middle classes to share in the running of the country filled them with hatred for the aristocracy, and that this would, sooner or later, inspire them to make use of the disgruntled masses to topple it. He suggested that they make concessions which would contribute to the well-being of the masses and allow the middle classes some influence. ‘That is the only path which can save us; yours will lead us, perhaps not tomorrow or next year, but certainly soon enough, to total disaster.’24
Metternich ignored him. In August 1833 he met Frederick William at Töplitz, and persuaded him that it was time to muzzle the press more tightly, and to abolish all the constitutions brought in since 1815. This meeting was a prelude to a more important one, between the two emperors and their ministers, to take place at Munchengrätz (Mnichovo Hradiště) in Bohemia in September, with the object of agreeing an offensive–defensive alliance between Russia and Austria. If Metternich is to be believed, on arrival at the picturesque town the tsar greeted him with the words: ‘I have come here to place myself at the disposal of my leader; I am counting on you to correct any errors I have made.’ Metternich responded by calling Nicholas the guardian angel of Austria. If Nicholas’s consort is to be believed, the tsar regarded the Austrian chancellor with the deepest suspicion. ‘Every time I see Metternich, I involuntarily make the sign of the Cross,’ she recalls him saying. Be that as it may, on 3 September 1833 Russia and Austria signed a joint convention providing not only for close cooperation on tracking down and extraditing people suspected of subversive activity in either country, but also for the surveillance of suspects on request. Two weeks later the two emperors signed a convention which condemned, among other things, the ‘false doctrine of non-intervention’, as though it were an impious heresy.25
This once more raised the spectre of intervention in the Iberian peninsula, where, following the death of King Ferdinand VII in September 1833, civil war had broken out. The issue divided the powers, as the instinct of the conservatives was to back Ferdinand’s younger brother, the Infante Don Carlos, against the legitimate heir, Ferdinand’s daughter Isabella, since she was less than three years old, and her mother Queen Maria Christina governed in her name with the liberal minister Zea Bermudez. To complicate matters, a contest broke out in Portugal between the two pretenders Dom Pedro and Dom Miguel. Nicholas lent tacit support to Don Carlos, but could not afford to intervene against the principle of legitimacy.
At the beginning of 1834 Metternich held a conference in Vienna bringing together the ministers of the major German states with the aim of coordinating security policy. Once again he found them reluctant to follow his lead, and he was particularly irritated by the Bavarian foreign minister Baron August von Gise, whom he called an ‘empty pumpkin’. His own side were not being supportive, with the Austrian state councillor Karl Friedrich von Kubeck echoing Kolowrat’s line that reliance on bayonets was dangerous and that his policy would eventually push the middle classes into the path of revolution. Gentz too was by now openly critical, accusing Metternich of ‘standing athwart the times’. Metternich and Austria were losing influence in Germany on two counts. One was that the monarchs and ministers of the various German states were growing tired of being bullied, even if they agreed with his policy. The other was that most were beginning to see Prussia as a more reliable champion than Austria in the event of war with France. The establishment of a customs union, the Zollverein, between Prussia and the other German states paved the way for closer cooperation. At the same time, Metternich’s attention was being increasingly drawn to other areas as he pursued the phantom of revolution.26
In the previous year, while he was trying to rally the German ministers at Vienna, he had had to deal with a conspiracy in his own back yard. A couple of hundred Polish émigrés had left Paris, travelling in twos and threes to allay suspicion, aiming to start an insurrection in Austria’s Polish province of Galicia. The inhabitants of the province had no intention of rising, and the conspirators were quickly rounded up. At the end of 1833, a band of some seven hundred Italians, Poles, Germans and Swiss had begun to gather in Switzerland with the plan of entering Savoy and starting an insurrection in Piedmont. They included veterans of the Spanish and Italian risings of the 1820s and the Polish one of 1830, and a fair number of free spirits of various nationalities. Some were patently mad, some were swept along by a Romantic desire for heroic deeds, while the Polish commander of one of the units was a drunk. They were commanded by the half-Italian bastard son of the Napoleonic Marshal Lannes, who had already proved his incompetence and cowardice in Poland in 1830. At the beginning of February 1834, one group numbering four hundred crossed Lake Geneva by boat meaning to enter Savoy that way, but found the shore well guarded, and after sailing up and down until they ran out of food and water, they sailed back and dispersed. Another marched into Savoy, planted a liberty tree at Annemasse, and then limped back whence they had come. The participants in these pathetic enterprises would have been gratified to learn how much significance Metternich attached to them. They were, in his opinion, the prelude to ‘the universal explosion of a revolution which was meant to attack the very highest summits of government and inflame the lowest levels of society’, as he explained to Apponyi. ‘The universal revolution, which has been planned for a number of years in the committees of Paris, needed for its success an active and warlike force. It has found this in the Polish refugees greeted everywhere as heroes.’ He went on to assure Apponyi that he was in possession of evidence that would ‘open the eyes’ of the most incredulous as to the magnitude of the conspiracy: every minor disturbance, when examined, turned out to be part of the universal revolution.27
The invasion of Savoy had no connection with Paris, and there was nothing revolutionary about it; it was the brainchild of an Italian, Giuseppe Mazzini. Mazzini was born in 1805 in Genoa, then under French rule, the son of a university professor of Jacobin convictions and a fervently religious mother. He studied law, but his literary leanings took the upper hand and he began to write. In the late 1820s he joined the Carbonari, but was denounced and imprisoned. On his release he went into exile in Geneva, from where he watched the various Italian revolts of 1830–34 fail. He concluded that they had been doomed because they pursued the ideal of constitutional government, which was the wrong goal and would never engage popular support: in the Legations, peasants fought on the side of the government against the Carbonarists; in Bologna, the population cheered the Austrian troops when they marched in to restore order.
After the failure of these risings, Italian liberals on the whole abandoned secret societies and concentrated on more constructive programmes, such as trying to improve economic and social conditions. The greatest problem in Italy was poverty, itself the result of chaotic economies, corruption and misrule – in the Papal States in 1829 there were over 400,000 beggars and vagrants out of a population of two and a half million. The dedicated revolutionaries went abroad, mainly to France and England, and were gradually rallied by Mazzini, who had come up with his own solution to the ills of Italy.28
In his view, the underlying problem was that the Italian nation was being denied its natural life because it was divided up between a number of states. ‘The question of Italy is not one of more or less personal security or administrative improvement in one or another corner of our country,’ he argued; ‘it is a question of nationality; a question of independence, liberty, and unity for the whole of Italy; a question of a common bond, of a common flag, of a common life and law for the twenty-five millions of men belonging – between the Alps and the sea – to the same race, tradition, and aspiration.’29
The answer was to liberate the whole country and incorporate it into one state. Although he was no monarchist, Mazzini realised that this could only be achieved if one of the existing rulers were to gradually take over all the other states and unify the country under his rule. Some saw the pope as the obvious unifying figure, but with the accession in 1831 of the arch-reactionary Gregory XVI, whose encyclical of 1832 Mirari vos condemned the entire liberal movement, this ceased to be an option. Others favoured the liberal-minded Grand Duke of Tuscany, but his pathetic behaviour in 1831, when he encouraged the liberals only to disown them, put paid to that. Given the reactionary nature of the King of Naples, this left only the King of Sardinia, hardly an ideal choice. The man who acceded to the throne in Turin in 1831 was Charles Albert, formerly Prince of Carignano, a shifty, cowardly and unreliable individual who had let down the liberals in 1821 and had since become a convinced devotee of Metternich’s vision of the universal conspiracy. Mazzini nevertheless greeted his accession to the throne with an open letter calling on him to take up arms in the sacred cause of liberating and uniting Italy.30
From his base in Marseille, Mazzini created a network of like-minded people all over the peninsula and in various places of exile outside it. In July 1831 he founded a new movement, Giovine Italia, Young Italy. In contrast to the Carbonari and other such societies, it dispensed with rituals, initiations and oaths, along with cloaks, daggers and cups of blood. He referred to it as an apostolate. This accorded with a gradually developing dogma: suffering Italy assumed a Christ-like victimhood with its promise of resurrection. In this scenario, the Austrians, widely regarded by Italian patriots as ‘Huns’, assumed the identity of the imperial Roman persecutors. The clumsy brutality of Austrian rule worked in Mazzini’s favour, by creating martyrs for the sacred cause.
As Charles Albert had not responded to his call, Mazzini decided to prompt him by organising the invasion of Savoy, to coincide with a coup by officers in Turin and a mutiny in the Sardinian navy. The military coup in Turin misfired, the naval mutiny was a fiasco, and the invasion of Savoy a farce. Twelve people were executed in Turin, over a hundred imprisoned, and hundreds more fled abroad, adding further martyrs and fighters to the cause. In April 1834, along with seventeen representatives of other nations, Mazzini founded ‘Young Europe’. Within a year it would include eighty-six clubs of Young Italy, 260 of Young Switzerland, fifty of Young Poland, and fourteen each of Young Germany and Young France; these would be joined in time by a Young Ukraine, a Young Tyrol, a Young Argentine, a Young Austria and a Young Bohemia. It was, in effect, a nationalist international, based on the growing secular cult of the nation.
Mazzini was obliged to move from Switzerland to Paris, and thence to London, from where he spun his plots like a spider at the centre of some enormous web. Over the next decade there would be eight attempts to raise a revolt either planned or inspired by him – two in 1837, one in 1841, three in 1843, one in 1844 and one in 1845 – all of them ending in fiasco. Four took place in the kingdom of the Two Sicilies, where the would-be liberators met with fierce resistance from the local peasantry, three in the Papal States, where they were greeted with hostility by the natives, and one in Tuscany. This did not deter Mazzini. Those hacked to pieces by loyalist Italian peasants as well as those shot by Austrian or Royal Neapolitan troops swelled the ranks of martyrs, to be revered in verse and cheap prints. But the numbers of the faithful remained pathetically small.
They sufficed for Metternich, who did not differentiate between Mazzini’s movement and the Carbonari, and was concerned that the appeal of national sentiment might lead to the demoralisation of the Austrian army. Soldiers serving in Italy were instructed to be on the alert for this ‘seduction’, and warned that if they allowed themselves to fall for it, they would be tried by the revolutionaries’ ‘secret courts’ and murdered. He created a special department within the police, consisting of eighty people, to monitor the activities of the Italian conspirators, and dedicated even more of the Austrian empire’s revenues to the purpose.31
The failure of the various revolutions had produced a growing pool of political émigrés, who gathered principally in England and France, where there would be some 13,000 by 1837. The most numerous were the Poles, who posed a particular problem, as, having nothing to lose, they were ready to make common cause with any enemy of the status quo. ‘The Poles play a major role in all conspiracies, because they have filled a gap which was not easy to fill – namely that of strong men who are always ready,’ Metternich wrote to Wrede in April 1834. ‘The activities of the Parisian Propagande have taken a very different and very much stronger character since the appearance of the Polish refugees.’ It was nevertheless the Germans whom he feared most at this stage. Their number in Paris doubled every five years after 1831. They were mainly artisans, printers and professionals, and they were politically active. The most eminent was the poet Heinrich Heine, whom Metternich designated as part of a German ‘comité’. He detailed a bespoke spy, Professor Doktor Wilhelm Binder, to infiltrate himself into Heine’s circle and befriend him, in order to ‘discover the connection through which the German Party of Revolution was connected to the French propaganda’. The mission was not a success, as Heine saw through Binder at their first meeting, and fed him irrelevant gossip. Both Metternich and the Prussian minister Johann Peter Ancillon repeatedly demanded the extradition of Heine and other émigrés, but their demands were rejected by the French ministry. While the presence of the émigrés was a continuous irritant to the French authorities, as they were implicated in much subversive activity in France itself, they stood by the traditional practice of granting asylum. This had long been observed by France, various Swiss cantons and to a lesser degree Britain and other countries, out of a Christian tradition of hospitality, but after 1830 the concept of political asylum became entrenched in states like Britain, France and Belgium. The idea that demands for extradition should be resisted followed on logically. In Belgium legislation was passed to prevent any government extraditing a political refugee.32
In 1835 the Bundestag condemned the entire oeuvre of Heine, and along with it that of the liberal poet Ludwig Börne, the novelist Heinrich Laube and the journalist Karl Gutzkow. On 13 December that year Meyendorff explained to Nesselrode that Gutzkow had published an ‘irreligious and immoral’ novel. ‘Having gathered about him a few young authors lacking conscience but not without talent, most of them Jews, Gutzkow had created the group Young Germany, whose name itself is not without significance,’ he explained. Gutzkow was dangerous because he disseminated foreign literature, argued that ‘all the nations should combine their enlightened views and desire for civilisation’, and attacked ‘as a superannuated nonsense the German hatred of France’. Meyendorff stressed ‘the danger of these doctrines’, which could ‘most efficaciously pave the way for revolution’.33
In February 1834 Austria and Russia signed a convention on extradition which allowed for greater cooperation between the police of the two states, and prevented Russian émigrés or fugitives from passing through Habsburg dominions. Metternich and Benckendorff began exchanging information – mainly tip-offs about groups of Poles supposedly on their way to Vienna or St Petersburg to assassinate Francis or Nicholas or to some part of their respective empires to start a rebellion, most of them entirely spurious. In September 1835 the two met once more at Töplitz and agreed measures of further cooperation, which resulted in a senior gendarme being sent to Vienna to acquaint himself with Austrian police methods and provide liaison. They also agreed to coordinate propaganda, and a Russian, Baron de Schwietzer, was sent to Vienna, whence he exerted his influence over the German press in conjunction with Metternich. Metternich was delighted by the Töplitz meeting. The tsar, who was also present, had called him the ‘key-stone’ of the Alliance, which had greatly flattered the Austrian chancellor. The relationship between the two powers had been sealed, and that between Metternich and Benckendorff took on an almost comradely character.34
‘I do not know, my dear Count, whether you have taken any measures for the observation of London: it has recently acquired an importance it did not have before,’ Metternich wrote to Benckendorff in December 1836. ‘Followed everywhere, even in France, the refugees of all nations have flowed towards England, and I have every reason to believe that the English propaganda is making common cause with them and that it is furnishing funds for revolutionary operations abroad.’35
Britain had, according to him, taken over as ‘the propagator of the sickness’. ‘France is an extinguished crater,’ he wrote to Apponyi in Paris on 2 December 1835. ‘France was yesterday, England will be tomorrow.’ The Reform Bill had finally been passed on 4 June 1832. In a show of bad grace that led to comparisons with Charles I and Louis XVI, King William IV would not come to Parliament to give the royal assent in person. On 18 June, the anniversary of Waterloo, Wellington had been assailed by a mob as he rode back from the City, and nearly pulled off his horse. In Holborn he was pelted with stones and muck, and had to take refuge in a solicitor’s chambers in Lincoln’s Inn. The following day, at Ascot, the king was struck by a stone thrown from the crowd.36
‘The whole question of the British monarchy now depends on the discipline and efficiency of the British army,’ Wellington commented; the country could henceforth only be governed with ‘the assistance and support of a military body’. There were plenty of other doom-sayers, and even Wordsworth considered that the Reform Act had been ‘a greater political crime than any committed in history’. By January 1833 Metternich was of the opinion that ‘the true Devil is now enthroned in England’. The conditions for revolution were certainly there.37
Britain’s cities had grown rapidly in the past decades, with Liverpool’s population rising from 82,000 in 1801 to 202,000 in 1831, Manchester’s from 75,000 to 194,000, and Leeds’ from 53,000 to 123,000. During the agitation over the Reform Bill a meeting of the Birmingham Political Union drew a crowd of 150,000, and the Bristol riot of 1831 showed that a crowd could take control of a city and rampage unchecked. The only city to have a proper police force was London, and the past three years had seen the formation of several working men’s associations, the largest of which, the National Political Union of the Working Classes, was particularly hostile to Peel’s Metropolitan Police, with which it often clashed. There was much agitation for further parliamentary reform and the repeal of the Corn Laws. The introduction of a new Poor Law in 1834 aroused discontent and disturbances as it was implemented around the country.38
The Duchess of Dino, who played hostess to Talleyrand, Louis-Philippe’s ambassador in London, noted in her diary on 19 July 1834 that ‘everything going on here takes one back to the first stages of the French Revolution’. ‘It is impossible not to feel fear as one thinks of the future of this great country, still so brilliant and proud only four years ago, when I arrived here, so tarnished today,’ she wrote a month later. When, in October, back in France, she heard of the fire which destroyed the Houses of Parliament, she felt it was not fortuitous. ‘It is a horrible catastrophe, and one whose character is altogether ominous; the physical edifice crumbling along with the political edifice!’ she wrote. ‘Those old walls did not wish to dishonour themselves by giving shelter to the profane doctrines of our times!’ In November 1834 the poet Thomas Moore, a lifelong Whig, noted in his journal that the late Whig government had done more ‘to unsettle, not merely institutions, but principles, than it will be in the power of many future generations to repair’. ‘The country is now fairly in for revolution,’ he concluded, ‘and stop it who can.’ That is certainly how it looked to Metternich.39