By the end of the 1830s, Nicholas saw the Russian empire as an embattled state let down by its allies as it prepared to face the forces of evil. ‘The bulwark constituted by Austria and Prussia will fall,’ ran a note composed in 1838 by one of his diplomats, Baron Brunnow. ‘The battle of ideas taking place on the banks of the Rhine will move to our own frontiers. In a word, Russia will once more, as in 1812, be obliged to take on France; but this struggle, one can safely say, will be more dangerous than the other one. We will not be fighting the enemy out in the open, but defending ourselves against a more terrible foe. We will come face to face with the spirit of revolution, undermining with determination the most powerful kingdoms.’1
The primary source of concern to Nicholas was Prussia. The less than reliable Frederick William III died in June 1840, and was succeeded by his son Frederick William IV, who presented, from the Russian point of view, an even greater problem. The new king, who was the brother of Nicholas’s wife, was a complicated personality in which contradictory instincts vied with each other. Fat, balding and short-sighted, a poor horseman, he lacked all the attributes of the kind of monarch he wished to be. Inspired by the chivalric romances of the writer Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué, he had embraced a sentimental vision of the Prussian monarchy based on an emotional and ideological bond between throne and people. He loved the ‘German’ music of composers such as Weber, was thrown into raptures at the sight of the Rhine, and enthusiastically took upon himself the task of completing that great symbol of High German culture, Cologne Cathedral. He believed in the regeneration of Germany not just in political, but also in spiritual terms, and was affected by the current religious awakening sweeping the country.
He opened his reign by decreeing a wide-ranging amnesty and restoring to grace people such as the military reformer Hermann von Boyen, the Turnvater Ludwig Jahn, the historian Ernst Moritz Arndt and the liberal statesman Wilhelm von Humboldt, and welcomed the brothers Grimm, who had been persecuted for their nationalist leanings. He dismissed the hated Kamptz, who had had to admit in 1839 that there was no revolutionary threat, and that those young men who did commit subversive acts were simply lost souls inspired by nefarious literature who should be regarded as victims. The Zentral Untersuchungs Kommission, which had become redundant, was abolished in 1842. But the new king was no liberal, and he had no intention of granting the long-promised constitution. His vision of the future may have been able to accommodate the unification of Germany (under Prussian rule), but it assumed a spiritual bond between king and people to the exclusion of the middle class, and was bathed in the light of an archaic patriarchy. His close friend and political adviser Joseph von Radowitz would be described by Bismarck as ‘a skilful keeper of the medieval wardrobe in which the king dressed up his fancies’.2
Nicholas’s imagination did not stretch to grasping his brother-in-law’s Romantic ideal, and all he could see was that he was dangerously liberal, far too close to the nationalists, weak and generally unsound. In the summer of 1842, in Cologne to celebrate the commencement of work on the cathedral, Frederick William tried to impart to Metternich, who was also present, his view of how the Prussian monarchy should be recast. He explained that he was laying the foundations of a new, counter-revolutionary political religion that would inspire and save Prussia. Metternich’s world view could not accommodate this any more than could Nicholas’s; he was appalled, describing the king’s ideas as far too ‘artistic’.3
As he was childless, Frederick William nominated his younger brother William ‘Prince of Prussia’ in anticipation of his succession to the throne. The two did not see eye to eye on fundamentals, and the prince would consistently undermine the king’s programme of reform. In this he was supported by the next brother, Karl, who, as Frederick William admitted to his sister, Nicholas’s wife, considered him ‘a silly instrument in the hands of revolutionaries’. Nicholas wholeheartedly agreed, while Nesselrode and the Russian ambassador in Berlin, Baron Meyendorff, believed that the new king’s intended reforms were the greatest threat since 1830.4
What particularly worried the Russians was the Prussian king’s laxity with regard to the Poles. After putting down the Polish insurrection, Nicholas abolished the kingdom of Poland in 1832 and turned its territory into an integral part of the Russian empire. There followed confiscations of property of all those who had participated in the insurrection and of the Catholic Church, the closing down of institutions of higher education, the imposition of a Russian administration, and various sanctions against Polish language and culture. A number of activists had taken refuge in the less repressive Prussian part of Poland, the grand duchy of Posen (Posnań). They were joined every year by hundreds of Polish deserters from the Russian army, with the result that, in the words of Meyendorff, who visited Posen to assess the situation, ‘the revolutionary spirit is spreading like an oil-stain’. In September 1840 he wrote to Benckendorff urging him to send a senior Russian agent to set up Russian police networks in cities such as Posen and Danzig, as the Prussians could not be relied upon to keep an eye on the doings of the Polish revolutionaries. In 1843 a shot was fired at Nicholas’s carriage as he travelled through Posen, apparently confirming this – though it was widely thought in Berlin that the incident had been arranged by the Russian police.5
The Russians’ lack of faith in the Prussian administration’s ability to police the country was hardly justified. The reforms initiated in 1808 had by the mid-1820s created a professional state-wide bureaucracy dedicated to the preservation of ‘the common good’, which in the first instance meant order. ‘All who were not in government employment or in the army, were submitted to the strictest surveillance, and to endless vexations by the police,’ in the words of one Prussian officer, according to whom ‘the passport nuisance’ involved ‘such varied and complicated regulations, that it required quite a study to avoid difficulties’. The police had a particular dislike for unattached individuals, be they vagrants, seasonal workers or pilgrims, and made life difficult for them. All overnight stays, even by close relatives, had to be reported to the authorities by the householder.6
It was accepted among Prussian officials that any protest, be it a demonstration over guild rights or a student disturbance, was a challenge to the established order, and that any degree of force was justifiable in dealing with it. As a class these officials were educated and propertied, and had a stake in the status quo. They were backed up by a police force which was not highly efficient but was omnipresent, a gendarmerie mainly recruited from the non-commissioned ranks in the army, and by the army itself. The army had been democratised and integrated with society between 1808 and 1815, but over the next years the old aristocratic officer class had reasserted its influence, and its contempt for the civilian. The commanding officer of the Prussian Guard Corps, General Duke Karl of Mecklemburg, argued that only brute force was capable of dealing with the wrong-headed ‘theories’ put forward by would-be reformers, who were ‘like a predatory animal which having once tasted blood can never be tamed, only subdued’.7
Most fair-sized towns were garrisoned, with guardhouses or ‘watches’ at street corners whose bored but officious soldiers would stop passers-by to check their papers and admonish them on whatever might strike them as relevant. In citadel towns, of which there were twenty-six in Prussia, the watches were even thicker on the ground, and their occupants correspondingly more tiresome, particularly as the governor of a citadel was the ultimate authority and could imprison people or throw them out of town at will. There was a soldier to every five or six inhabitants, so these were in no position to confront the military.8
This predominantly bureaucratic approach to law and order did not eclipse the search for subversion, and even after the abolition of the Zentral Untersuchungs Kommission eyes and ears remained alert. The police were particularly concerned by a group of young wits who wrote in the Berlin press and published caricatures making such oblique references to the political realities of the day that they were never quite sure whether an article or a drawing was subversive or not. Arguing that it was better to be on the safe side, the minister of the interior, Count Adolf Heinrich von Arnim-Boitzenburg, assured the king in 1842 that supposedly humorous drawings ‘corrupt general opinion on moral, religious, and political [matters] and prepare the way for the destructive influence of negative philosophies and democratic spokesmen and authors’.9
Neither Nicholas nor his ministers were reassured. By 1845 his ambassadors all over Germany were reporting alarming developments, such as the resurgence of Pietism and other religious movements, ‘communist’ activity among workers in Silesia and ‘terror’ in Posen, suggesting that the Prussian army could not be counted on; that the Prussian police were out of their depth; that the royal court was going through a religious phase, along with the king, who was intending to bring in a constitution; and that Prussia was on the brink of revolution.10
Frederick William’s hopes of grounding his throne on the love of the people failed to be realised. In July 1844 a paranoid individual with no discernible political motive had fired shots at the king and queen as they sat in their carriage in the courtyard of the royal palace in Berlin. He was duly condemned to death, and although Frederick William had wanted to commute the sentence, he had been persuaded by his ministers that this would set a bad precedent, and the man was executed, which went down poorly with public opinion. An increasingly assertive middle class was calling for reform and liberalisation. Frederick William was by then prepared to go along with this, but his brother the Prince of Prussia strongly disapproved and opposed him, with the support of Nicholas and Metternich. By the mid-1840s the two brothers were in open conflict, and the king’s programme of reform soon ran into the buffers.
By then there were graver problems facing Prussia. The first three decades following the coming of peace in 1815 had seen an improvement in living standards for all classes throughout Germany, with increased prosperity experienced even by workers. This had come at the cost of profound dislocation as the population, which grew in the same period by 38 per cent, from twenty-five to nearly thirty-five million, adapted to an entirely new set of economic patterns, resulting in part from the early stages of industrialisation and in part from the removal of guild and other restrictions and protections, and from the introduction of the Zollverein. The disruption of the pre-capitalistic organisation of labour and production, and of society itself, resulted in a drift to the cities by the poorest classes, who could not accommodate themselves to the new realities. By the beginning of the 1840s between half and two-thirds of the population of Berlin were classed as indigent.11
Economic growth in the industrial sector came to an abrupt end in 1845. Agricultural crises in 1842 and 1844–46 caused widespread misery and hunger riots, and emigration to America rose dramatically. The repeal of the Corn Laws in England in 1846 started an international bidding war for a dwindling supply of grain as poor harvests and potato blight began to affect one area of Europe after another. The average rise in the price of food throughout Germany between 1844 and 1847 was around 50 per cent, but that of the basic foodstuffs on which the lower classes depended was much sharper: the price of some grains and potatoes more than doubled. By the summer of 1847 the whole of Germany was undergoing a catastrophic crisis. In Berlin, troops had to be called out against crowds of women attacking potato-sellers, and cavalry clashed with hungry workers.12
Austria was also affected by the economic crisis, which, in its case, was aggravated by national grievances of one kind or another. The Italians, Poles, Hungarians, Czechs and now even the Germans saw the Habsburg monarchy as an obstacle to realising their various dreams of a national existence. Metternich had consistently blocked all the initiatives of the liberal aristocrats such as Count Sźechényi to create a cultural national space in Hungary, only with the utmost reluctance agreeing to allow Latin to be replaced by Hungarian as the official language in 1844. ‘Hungary is on the verge of the abyss of Revolution,’ he declared as he gave way. By opposing moderates such as Sźechényi he was only encouraging the more radical nationalists such as Lajos Kossuth, but neither here nor in Italy, where the Austrian police chief of Venice himself was advising him to make concessions, would he differentiate between the national and the revolutionary.13
Metternich was exasperated by the failure of the other powers to see, as he did, that ‘the revolutionary propaganda is working without cease, with an ardour worthy of a better cause, to undermine by all the means at its disposal the present bases of the social and political order, and to prepare everywhere the ground for a universal upheaval’. The general acceptance by the other powers of the July monarchy in France and the growing popularity of Louis-Philippe represented ‘an enormous danger for the preservation of the present state of affairs in Europe’, he argued, as, if one accepted that a constitutional monarchy brought in by a revolution was a good thing, the logical next step was democratic elections of kings and, as far as he was concerned, anarchy. When Louis-Philippe sought to marry his eldest son, the duc d’Orléans, to an Austrian archduchess, Metternich persuaded the father of the girl in question, who was delighted with the proposal, to reject it, reminding him of what had happened to Marie- Antoinette.14
Next to France, the principal brazier of revolution was Switzerland, whose authorities were far too lenient. ‘Switzerland has now turned into a fortified sewer,’ Metternich wrote to Apponyi in Paris in March 1845. ‘All that Europe contains in terms of lost souls, adventurers and engineers of social upheaval has found a refuge in that wretched country. All those men practise their craft there with impunity.’ To make matters worse, a struggle had broken out between the liberal cantons, which were mostly Protestant, and the Catholic cantons of the Sonderbund. Metternich supported the latter, which put him at odds with France and most of public opinion in Germany, and found himself backing the losing side. ‘In Switzerland, one has to expect to see the revolutionary lava overflow imminently,’ he warned the King of Württemberg in June 1847.15
Switzerland’s geographical position made it an uncomfortable neighbour for the Austrian provinces in Italy, and although Mazzini had moved from there to London, Metternich still saw it as a key strategic stepping-stone for subversion in the peninsula. The British government waved aside his repeated requests for the expulsion of Mazzini, or at least the curtailment of his activities. Metternich railed at the fact that the Italians were able to plot and fund-raise openly in London. He did have some success in 1844, when, following a particularly shambolic attempt by some of Mazzini’s followers to start a rising in Calabria, he managed to persuade the British cabinet to intercept Mazzini’s correspondence. But this victory blew up in his face.
Mazzini had begun to suspect something, and asked those writing to him to place poppy-seeds in the envelopes of their letters. When these reached him without the seeds, he made his suspicions public. They were taken up by the press, and the House of Commons was forced to set up a Secret Committee on the Post Office, which duly reported that the home secretary had indeed issued a warrant to the Post Office commanding it to pass Mazzini’s correspondence to him. It also revealed that at the request of the Russian government, warrants had been issued with regard to two Polish émigrés in London, though nothing had been found in the correspondence ‘to criminate the gentlemen’.16
The Italians and the Poles were by the mid-1840s the only ones still actively plotting insurrection. The Polish Democratic Society, based in Paris, had at last managed to foster activists on the ground in Poland, and in 1845 one group in Posen, with another in the independent city-republic of Kraków set up by the Congress of Vienna, began to plot a revolt to break out simultaneously in the Prussian grand duchy of Posen and the Austrian province of Galicia. Having taken these over, they would then raise the standard of revolt in Russia’s Polish provinces. Their associates in London urged Mazzini to organise diversionary risings in Italy to pin down Austrian troops there. The leaders of the planned risings, the thirty-one-year-old Ludwik Mierosławski and the twenty-three-year-old Edward Dembowski, were as benighted as their plans were fantastic and ill-starred.
The rising was to begin on 21 February 1846, but long before that the Prussian police arrested Mierosławski and the entire leadership of the Posen rising. As a result, some of the conspirators wanted to cancel the revolt, others to hasten it, and the ensuing rash of uncoordinated disturbances was quickly contained by police and troops. The Kraków conspirators decided to go ahead, and issued a proclamation to the peoples of Europe calling for solidarity and affirming the inevitability of their victory. Dembowski, dressed in peasant costume and clutching a crucifix, led a march through the countryside in an attempt to rally the population to the cause, but it was set upon by Austrian troops assisted by scythe-waving peasants professing loyalty to the emperor, and he was bludgeoned to death. Bands of peasants all over western Galicia attacked manor houses and any travellers they could lay their hands on, massacring some 2,000 Polish gentry, most of whom had no connection with the plotters, before the Austrian authorities got round to restoring order.
Metternich was in triumphant mood. According to him, the émigré Poles in Paris had distributed ‘hundreds of thousands of catechisms and instructions on the organisation of free corps’, and were ‘preaching the division of property and forming in bands in order to attack landowners’ as part of ‘a vast communist conspiracy covering all the Polish territories’. But ‘the people’ had put down the revolution out of love for their emperor. ‘It is the peasants who are acting as the police today,’ he crowed. The Polish émigré plotters had been revealed as being ‘like a general staff going to war without an army’, and ‘demagoguery itself was wrecked on the very element of democracy, that is to say the people’. It was not long, however, before he realised that the massacre had gone down rather differently with the overwhelming majority of European public opinion, which was horrified at the slaughter of landowners by bands of peasants out for blood. He suddenly became aware that he was celebrating something very like the grande peur of 1790.17
To make matters worse, stories began to circulate to the effect that the Galician peasants had been paid or otherwise incited by the Austrian authorities. There is some evidence that this may have been the case, but it is not conclusive. Some police officials had spread rumours that the Polish gentry had summoned French colonial troops and black cannibals were about to swarm into Galicia to murder and then eat the peasants. In the prevailing conditions, it did not take much to arouse class hatred among the most abject, and all the police needed to do was to tip a wink for violence to break out. The Austrian authorities had never been squeamish when it came to using the instruments of divide and rule, and in 1837 Metternich had considered bringing the Hungarian nobility to heel by giving their peasants just such a signal. Either way, Austria was gravely damaged by the events.18
Metternich set about repairing the damage, but only tied himself in knots. On the one hand, he concocted a version of events in which the Polish nobles had called on their peasants to join them in a massacre of all non-Poles, which the peasants had refused to do. The nobles had then tried to force them through ‘harsh treatment’, and when this had no effect, by shooting some of them, at which point the peasants had resisted and some nobles had been killed in the ensuing fighting. ‘If fortune had not turned against the conspirators, thousands of innocent victims [Austrian soldiers, police and officials] would have been felled by the daggers and the murderous weapons that these self-proclaimed patriots had placed in the hands of the people.’ On the other hand, he insisted that it had all been planned in Paris. ‘It is from there that the emissaries of upheaval go forth, and thither they return, only to issue forth once again.’ These democratic emissaries were particularly dangerous when they operated in Poland, he argued. ‘As democratic ideas are not applicable to a Slav population like that of Poland, these ideas, put forward by one faction of the emigration, they necessarily turn into communism, that is to say to the pillage of landed estates and the murder of the landowners.’ In his eagerness to demonstrate that there was no such thing as legitimate Polish patriotism, he had turned his argument on its head.19
‘The seat of the Revolution is not in Poland, but in France,’ he argued in a memorandum on the Galician affair. ‘Poland is only a staging post, a subsidiary of the great revolutionary society of which the Polish émigrés like those of other countries are no more than the instruments of French radicalism … Polonism [a word invented by him] is only a label, a word behind which lurks revolution under its most brutal form; it is the Revolution itself, and not merely a part of it; that is clear from the demonstrations of the Polish emigration. Polonism does not declare war on the three powers which are in possession of the former Polish territories; it declares war on all existing institutions, it preaches the overthrow of all the bases on which society rests; to combat it is therefore not just the duty of the three powers, it is the duty of all.’ This was why it was so reprehensible of countries such as Britain, France and Belgium to give shelter to émigrés and allow them to operate freely: these countries had become little better than ‘base camps’ of the revolution.20
It was clear that the republic of Kraków could not be allowed to remain as a potential outpost of revolution, and Nicholas urged Metternich to incorporate it into Austria. Metternich hesitated, as this would constitute an open breach of the arrangements made at Vienna in 1815. Nicholas made it clear that if Austria did not annex the republic, Russia would, and on 6 November 1846 Metternich went ahead. The republic, he argued in a justificatory memorandum, had consciously thrown itself into the revolution and turned itself into ‘the provisional capital of the revolutionary government’. Palmerston remarked that if the Treaty of Vienna no longer obtained on the banks of the Vistula, it no longer had any validity on the banks of the Po or the Rhine.21
What happened on the banks of the Po was crucial to Metternich. According to him, the whole Polish affair had been merely a feint designed to tie down Austrian forces there while the real revolt was mounted in Italy. ‘This plan is no secret; although it was elaborated in the mystery of the clubs, it had not been confined there; it has been conceived on a vast scale and its first stage was put into effect, but it failed,’ he explained to his minister in Turin in May 1846. ‘One fact on which it would be impossible to have any doubt is that if the rising in the Grand Duchy of Posen and in Galicia had been successful and had spread to the kingdom of Poland, an insurrection in Italy would have been the immediate result.’ And although this attempt had been defeated, there were no grounds for complacency, as ‘the Revolution is a Protean force which can skilfully change its nature to suit the circumstances’. ‘The motto which it has inscribed on the standard around which it seeks to rally the masses is “nationality”. It is in the name of the love of the motherland, in spreading this sentiment, so elevated and so legitimate in itself, and by exalting it in a direction which removes it from the existing state, that it drives the people to forget their most fundamental duties …’22
Ironically, the best-ruled part of the Italian peninsula, and the only one where law and order was protected, was Austrian Lombardy-Venetia. It was more prosperous than any other Italian state, and industrially far in advance of the others. Austrian rule was more benevolent than the government of most of the Italian states, with lower taxes and, for instance, twice as many newspapers published as in neighbouring Piedmont. With its backward economies, the remainder of the peninsula was plagued by endemic poverty. The Papal States were bankrupt by 1832, and Metternich saved the pope by persuading the Viennese banking house of Rothschild to provide him with a loan. The various rulers’ perceived need to keep large standing armies took hands away from the land and whatever industry there was: in Piedmont, conscripts were torn from their homes for a period of eight years to man an army 30,000 strong; in Naples the period of service was six years, and the army stood at 60,000 (Sicilians were not conscripted, as their loyalty was considered doubtful). And these armies were no more effective in keeping order than were the police forces of the various states.23
The kingdom of Sardinia had been the first to set up a corps of Carabinieri on the French model of the Gendarmerie in 1814, followed by the Papal States, which after the disturbances of 1830–32 supplemented it with a band of thugs graced with the name of ‘Centurions’ and two other corps. One was a force of 4,400 Swiss mercenaries under General de Salis, whose lack of familiarity with the language and local conditions resulted in an explosion of criminal activity. The other was a force of Pontifical Volunteers recruited from among the unemployed and criminal classes by Prince Capece Minutolo di Canosa, who had carried out the purges of liberals in Naples after 1821. He created a similar force for the Duke of Modena to cow the nobility and middle classes into submission. Petty crime and outright brigandage flourished, while the police concentrated on political surveillance and the investigation of supposed liberal opposition. This only served to create an underlying sympathy between political dissidents and the criminal classes, making detection of both more difficult.24
Sardinia was also the first to introduce greater control of the people, through the introduction of the libretto di lavoro, essentially an identity card. Other states gradually followed suit, and brought in passports and travel permits. The new fashion for regulation as a means of control led to state interference in traditionally sensitive matters of property rights, and into more personal spheres with the introduction of medical policing, at first of doctors and nurses, then of midwives, then prostitutes, and so on. This extension of state control was not a success. On the one hand it provoked riots by whole villages, often led by their priest, in defence of ancient wood- or other gathering rights. On the other, it expanded the scope for corruption – regulations on the inspection of prostitutes resulted in the largest brothel in Palermo, staffed by four hundred girls, being run by the city’s chief of police.25
Just as much as Metternich, the various Italian rulers weakened their own position by their fear of all innovation. Pope Gregory XVI refused to allow the building of railways. Sardinia’s censorship, which banned the use of the words ‘nation’, ‘Italy’ and ‘liberal’, as well as ‘constitution’ and ‘revolution’, actually made it illegal to write about railways, even in scientific journals. The kingdom’s first minister, Camillo di Cavour, admitted that after a short stay in London, returning to Turin was like entering ‘a kind of intellectual hell’.26
The election of a new pope, Pius IX, in the summer of 1846 seemed to augur well. Metternich wrote to his ambassador in Rome that he was convinced it would ‘contribute fundamentally to outmanoeuvre the sinister projects of the enemies of order and to greatly revive the courage and the hopes of those who have devoted themselves to the defence of the immutable principles by which Empires live and prosper’. It would not be long before he took back those words.27
Among the new pope’s first acts was the release of political prisoners, and this was followed by a shoal of reforms. Liberals all over the peninsula cheered. King Charles-Albert of Sardinia emulated the pontiff, announcing reforms and striking attitudes which delighted liberals and nationalists. The Grand Duke of Tuscany followed his example, and both of them marked their adherence to the new order by signing a customs union with the Papal States. In order to prevent this new bloc from growing any larger, Metternich felt obliged to force treaties on Parma and Modena which stopped them from following suit.
The new pope’s reforms were slow to take effect, and in 1847 the citizens of Bologna were so exasperated by the lack of effective law enforcement by the papal police that they formed a civic guard to maintain order in the city. Metternich saw this as a poorly-disguised attempt to replicate the French revolutionary model of setting up a National Guard, which not only symbolised the power of the citizens, but also effectively arrogated the powers of the legitimate government. He ordered Field Marshal Radetzky to reinforce the garrison of Ferrara, but this provoked the anger of the Bolognese and an outburst of patriotic feeling; a considerable influx of volunteers from all over Italy had the effect of turning the civic guard into a more militaristic and anti-Austrian formation than originally intended.
‘The old year ended in scarcity, the new one opens with starvation,’ the Prussian minister Count Galen wrote on 20 January 1847. ‘Misery, spiritual and physical, traverses Europe in ghastly shapes – the one without God, the other without bread. Woe if they join hands!’ The financial and agricultural depression touched bottom in Germany in the summer of 1847, and the price of food fell sharply. But while this brought an end to the food riots, it did nothing to alleviate Prussia’s problems. In June, Metternich likened its condition to that of France in 1789, and for once he was right – but for the wrong reasons. ‘The world is very sick; every day provides evidence that the moral gangrene is spreading,’ he warned Apponyi, but the real problem lay elsewhere, in Prussia’s fiscal condition. With the advent of the economic crisis in 1845 and the Europe-wide credit squeeze, the Prussian government found itself running out of cash and credit. It badly needed to raise more funds to carry on with the development of its railway network and other investments, and, just as Louis XVI had in 1788, was obliged to summon a Diet that would allow taxes to be raised. Frederick William duly called the Diet for 1847. Just as had happened in 1788–89, once convened to discuss the country’s fiscal straits, the representatives quickly moved on to other topics, and the Diet turned into a forum for the airing of liberal views, which led on to debates on the subject of German unification.28
Hitherto, the forces for change had been made up principally of the aspiring classes – doctors, lawyers, merchants and industrialists. They wanted a less restricted social environment, but they were propertied and socially ambitious, lacked any radical instincts, and had remained hostile to the hungry rioters throughout most of the 1840s. But the financial crisis, which affected them too, changed their attitude and brought them into closer contact with those lower down the social scale. Gradually, their demands grew more radical and overtly political. In September 1847 the leaders of the Baden Radicals, Gustav von Struve and Friedrich Hecker, made a declaration demanding freedom of the press, assembly and conscience, and the repeal of the Karlsbad Decrees and other repressive legislation.
Austria was in exactly the same political–fiscal deadlock as Prussia. The Habsburg monarchy was run by a large, hard-working and honest but inefficient and unimaginative bureaucracy of some 140,000. It was reigned over by the incapable Ferdinand, but ruled by a Council of State presided over by Archduke Louis assisted by Metternich and Kolowrat, who loathed each other so profoundly that at one stage they communicated only in writing. Metternich stooped to spreading rumours that his rival’s brain was affected by violent attacks of haemorrhoids. By the late 1840s, the whole machine was running on nothing but momentum. The Austrian state had been bankrupt in 1815, and over the next three decades it spent nearly a third of its revenues on servicing its debts. Throughout most of this period the military budget accounted for some 40 per cent of revenue. Every military intervention, in Italy or elsewhere, threatened the state’s credit status. It also spent a huge proportion of its revenue on police – 1,131,000 florins by 1847, compared with only 37,000 on education. The state badly needed to raise money. The Hungarian assembly had been uncooperative in agreeing to raise taxes, voicing demands for ever-greater national autonomy every time finances were mentioned. Metternich’s gloom intensified in the second half of 1847, with comparisons to 1789 cropping up in his correspondence with greater frequency.29
‘If I am not mistaken, the year 1848 will shed light on many things which the vanished year shrouded in mist, and since, despite my reputation as a great friend of obscurantism, I am a friend of light, the new year cannot but be more agreeable to me than the last, of which I cannot keep a fond memory,’ he wrote to Frederick William at the very end of 1847.30