- Germany from 1250 to 1493
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Reform and reaction
In place of the Holy Roman Empire the peacemakers of the Congress of Vienna had established a new organization of German states, the German Confederation. This was a loose political association in which most of the rights of sovereignty remained in the hands of the member governments. There was no central executive or judiciary, only a federal Diet meeting in Frankfurt am Main to consider common legislation. The delegates who participated in its deliberations were representatives appointed by and responsible to the rulers whom they served. The confederation was in theory empowered to adopt measures strengthening the political and economic bonds of the nation. In fact it remained a stronghold of particularism, unwilling to sacrifice local autonomy in order to establish centralized authority. It was designed essentially to defend the interests of the secondary states and the Habsburgs. The former, jealously guarding the independence and importance they had gained during the period of French hegemony, were opposed to any reform that might limit their sovereignty. The latter believed that only a decentralized form of political union in Germany would give them enough freedom of action to pursue their non-German objectives. The confederation was thus from the outset an ally of localism and traditionalism. To the nationalists, whose hopes had risen so high during the Wars of Liberation, it seemed to be an instrument of blind reaction. Yet the truth is that the confederal system established in 1815 accurately reflected the slow development of civic consciousness and economic integration in Germany. The militant reformers who demanded the centralization of government were a vocal but small minority. The lower classes accepted the territorial and constitutional decisions of the Congress of Vienna without a murmur of protest. The weakness of the peace settlement was not its failure to embody present realities but its inability to adjust to future changes. What had been a reasonable adaptation to the political needs of an agrarian and rural society became a hopeless anachronism 50 years later in the age of factories and railroads. This was the fatal flaw in the German Confederation.
Yet the reform movement that had begun under the impact of the French hegemony did not end with the downfall of Napoleon. It continued to exert influence over affairs of state for another few years, before the forces of authoritarianism and particularism crushed it. That influence was strongest in southern Germany, where the political example of western Europe had made the deepest impression. There many civil servants, court officials, army officers, and even aristocratic landowners came to believe that the future of the state depended on its readiness to reform civic institutions in accordance with liberal theories. In the years following Waterloo, one government in the south after another promulgated a constitution: Bavaria and Baden in 1818, Württemberg in 1819, and Hesse-Darmstadt in 1820. These constitutions established representative assemblies, elected by the propertied citizens, whose assent was required for the enactment of legislation. Their purpose was not only to win for the crown the support of the educated classes of society but also to engender a sense of unity in a heterogeneous population that still had diverse allegiances and traditions.
To the north there were also persistent echoes of the reform movement. The followers of the baron vom Stein were still influential in the councils of state, and Frederick William III of Prussia at first seriously considered ways of fulfilling the promise he had made in 1815 to establish constitutional government. Economic reformers succeeded in enacting the Prussian Customs Law of 1818, which united all the Prussian territories into a customs union free of internal economic barriers; this later formed the nucleus of a national customs union. The agitation for political reorganization, however, was loudest among university students, who formed patriotic groups known as Burschenschaften. They demanded the abandonment of the confederal system, the establishment of greater unity, and the achievement of national power. Gathering in 1817 at the Wartburg, the castle near Eisenach where Luther had once taken refuge, they listened to veiled denunciations of the existing order and consigned to flames various symbols of traditional authority. The rulers of Germany began to stir uneasily at this bold display of defiance of the established order.
The chief strategist of the forces hostile to reform was Metternich. Not only did he reject the teachings of liberalism and nationalism in principle, but also, as the leading statesman of the Habsburg empire, he recognized that the establishment of centralized authority in Germany (which still included Austria) would seriously impede the policies his government was pursuing in Hungary, Italy, and the Balkans. When on March 23, 1819, an unbalanced student, Karl Ludwig Sand, assassinated the conservative playwright and publicist August von Kotzebue, Vienna persuaded the princes of the German Confederation that they were facing a dangerous attempt to overthrow the established order in the German states. The result was a series of repressive measures called the Carlsbad Decrees, which the federal Diet adopted on September 20, 1819. General censorship was introduced, and the Burschenschaften were outlawed. This first major success of the conservative counteroffensive had an important effect on the struggle within the state governments between the advocates and the opponents of reform. In Prussia the liberal members of the ministry were forced to resign, and the plan to promulgate a constitution for the kingdom was rejected. This shift to the right by Berlin encouraged authoritarian tendencies among the secondary states of the north, which soon abandoned their own constitutional projects. By the end of 1820 the reform movement, which had begun some 15 years before, came to a complete halt. It had succeeded in altering the political and economic structure of society, but it had been unable to establish a tradition of liberal government and national loyalty in Germany. The forces of particularism and legitimism, deriving their chief support from the landowning nobility and the conservative peasantry, remained strong. The foundation of bourgeois civic consciousness and material prosperity on which England and France had built their representative institutions was still relatively weak beyond the Rhine. The ideas of political reform had arisen in Germany not from the experience of revolution and social transformation but rather as imitations of foreign examples and in reaction against foreign oppression.
The established order was once again threatened briefly in the wake of the July Revolution of 1830 in France. The news that there had been a successful insurrection against the Bourbons in Paris had an electrifying effect throughout the Continent. In Germany there were sympathetic uprisings in some of the secondary states of the north. The rulers of Brunswick, Saxony, Hanover, and Hesse-Kassel, seeking to forestall more extreme demands, agreed to promulgate liberal constitutions. A mass meeting of southern radicals at Hambach Castle in the Palatinate (May 1832), moreover, called for national unification, republican government, and popular sovereignty. A group of militant students even launched a foolhardy attempt to seize the city of Frankfurt am Main, dissolve the federal Diet, and proclaim a German republic. The effect of such harebrained schemes was predictable. As the princes of the German Confederation gradually recovered from their initial fear of the revolutionary movement, they opposed with increasing vigour plans to alter the existing system of government. Again Metternich led the effort to crush liberalism and nationalism. Under his direction the federal Diet adopted additional repressive measures reinforcing the position of the crown in state politics, limiting the power of the legislature, restricting the right of assembly, enlarging the authority of the police, and intensifying censorship. Within a few years the opposition had been subdued, and the German Confederation could continue to vegetate in its cozy provincialism. Not until the middle years of the century did a new and more violent outburst of civil disaffection shake the foundations of the political structure that the Congress of Vienna had erected.
Evolution of parties and ideologies
Although the critics of the established order could be defeated, they could not be silenced. The struggle between the supporters and the adversaries of the existing form of government led to the emergence of a rudimentary party system in the German Confederation. In the legislative assemblies of the secondary states, the proponents of reform began to meet, plan, organize, and propagandize. The defenders of legitimism were thereby forced in turn to concert their strategy and to publicize their program. Even in Prussia and Austria, where there were as yet no constitutions or parliaments, political criticism could be expressed obliquely through clubs, meetings, newspapers, pamphlets, and petitions. The result was the gradual development of amorphous civic associations held together by common convictions regarding politics and society. These primitive groupings were only the raw material out of which disciplined political parties slowly developed in the course of the century. They still lacked the cohesive ideologies and the institutional means to disseminate them that characterize a fully mature system of parliamentary politics. Yet they became the means by which disaffected groups in the community could express their opposition to the established order. They also reflected the transformation in civic attitudes that had occurred since the age of enlightened despotism. There were now men in the German states who refused to submit without question to princely authority and to seek freedom only in the inner recesses of the soul. The social and economic changes resulting from the beginnings of industrialization transformed the system and organization of politics.
The most important opponents of legitimism and particularism were the liberals, or moderates. Deriving their support primarily from industrialists, merchants, financiers, mine owners, railroad developers, civil servants, professionals, and university professors, they represented the opposition of the well-to-do and educated bourgeoisie to a form of government in which an aristocracy of birth rather than of talent predominated. Their political principles favoured a monarchical system of authority, but the crown was to share its powers with a parliament elected by the men of property. Influence in public affairs should be accessible to all male citizens who had demonstrated through the acquisition of wealth and education that they were capable of exercising the franchise intelligently. While the liberals resented the inherited privileges of the nobility, they also feared the proletariat. The man who lived in poverty and ignorance, they reasoned, was ripe for demagoguery and insurrection. The path of civic wisdom was therefore the happy medium between royal absolutism and mob rule, a medium that had been established in Britain by the Reform Bill of 1832 and in France by the regime of Louis-Philippe. In economics, most, although by no means all, liberals advocated a policy of unrestrained competition by which wealth would become the reward of business acumen rather than the perquisite of corporative privilege. Guild monopolies, government regulations, and rules reserving landed estates for the nobility were to be abolished as violations of the freedom of enterprise that alone could ensure the well-being of all society. The liberals favoured the transformation of the German Confederation into a national monarchy in which the states’ rights would be curtailed but not destroyed by a central government and a federal parliament.
To the liberals’ left stood the democrats, or radicals, whose following was made up largely of small businessmen, petty shopkeepers, skilled workers, independent farmers, teachers, journalists, lawyers, and physicians. While the divisions between liberals and democrats were often indistinct and the two groups often worked together, democrats looked with scorn on the golden mean between autocracy and anarchy that the liberals sought. They preferred an egalitarian form of authority in which not parliamentary plutocracy but popular sovereignty would be the underlying principle of government. Their supporters drew inspiration from the French Revolution rather than from British parliamentary reforms. Their ideal of democracy was the Jacobin republic of 1793, an instrument that could shape the energies and aspirations of the people into a disciplined force for political and social reform. The spokesmen for this ideal could not openly demand the overthrow of monarchical institutions without risking imprisonment. Yet, while they were forced to accept the crown as a political institution, they nevertheless sought to transfer its power to a parliament elected by universal male suffrage. The masses would thereby become the ultimate arbiter of politics. The democrats were also willing to accept government regulation of business activity as a means of improving the economic position of the lower classes, although their belief in the sanctity of private property was as firm as that of the liberals. In their advocacy of national unification, however, they were less solicitous about royal prerogatives and state rights. While not as influential as the moderates, the radicals remained an important source of opposition to the established order.
Growing criticism of the restored political order forced conservatives to define their ideological position more precisely. The old theories of monarchy by divine right or despotic benevolence offered little protection against the assaults of liberalism and democracy. The defenders of legitimism, who came mostly from the landed nobility, the court aristocracy, the officer corps, the upper bureaucracy, and the established church, therefore began to advance new arguments based on conservative assumptions about the nature of man and society. The relationship between the individual and government, so the reasoning went, cannot be determined by paper constitutions founded on a doctrinaire individualism. Human actions are motivated not solely by rational considerations but by habit, feeling, instinct, and tradition as well. The impractical theories of visionary reformers fail to take into account the historic forces of organic development by which the past and the present shape the future. To assert that all men are equal is to ignore the differences in rights and duties that result from differences in birth, class, background, education, and tradition. The dogmas of constitutional authority and parliamentary government are merely a facade behind which a self-seeking bourgeoisie seeks to disguise its lust for power. An enduring form of government can be built only on the traditional institutions of society: the throne, the church, the nobility, and the army. Only a system of authority legitimated by law and history can protect the worker against exploitation, the believer against godlessness, and the citizen against revolution. According to these tenets, the political institutions of the German Confederation were valid, because they represented fundamental ideals deeply embedded in the spirit of the nation.
