EUROPEAN WARS OF INSURRECTION 1830-50

Hungarian Revolution 1848-49 - Overview

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Battle at Tápióbicske (4 April1849) by Mór Than

In 1848 revolution broke out in Paris. As the news fromParis reached Hungary, Kossuth went on the political offensive at the PozsonyDiet with his liberal-radical program, which was soon relayed to Pest. TheOpposition Circle drafted the ‘demands ofthe Hungarian nation,’ the famous Twelve Pointsconstituting the essence of Kossuth’s programand reflecting the ideas of the Pest radicals. The twenty-five-year-old poet SándorPetőfi, drafted the fiery ‘National Song,’ and thenext day the young revolutionaries had the poem and the Twelve Points printedwithout the censor’s approval.

The Twelve Points expressed what the nation demanded:freedom of the press, abolition of censorship, a cabinet of responsibleministers and a National Assembly in Buda-Pest, equality of civic and religiousrights, equal and universal contribution to public expenses, abolition of taxprivileges, a national bank and national armed forces, freeing of politicalprisoners, legal reforms, and union with Transylvania. The revolution wanted toabolish restrictive and discriminatory laws, indeed, the entire political andeconomic system. At the Pozsony Diet, conservatives in both chambers were sweptaside by Kossuth’s party, a victory due partiallyat least to the rumor that a peasant army led by Petőfi was set to march on thecity.

At the imperial capital, the March revolution succeededbecause the government was weak and psychologically destabilized. AfterMetternich’s dismissal, the feeble KingFerdinand and his court ratified the key laws of the Hungarian Diet, the ‘Aprillaws.’ The promulgation of these laws meantthat the revolutionary achievements became legalized. A government accountableto the assembly was to be installed, serfdom abolished, and the road touniversal suffrage opened. The main national demands had been granted. The newHungarian council of ministers, presided over by Count Lajos Batthyany,included Kossuth as minister of finance and Szechenyi as minister of publicworks and transport.

On 11 April, the ancient diet was dissolved and replaced bythe National Assembly, elected by direct suffrage constituted by the nobles,the bourgeoisie, and wealthy peasants. Hungary was now a constitutionalparliamentary monarchy, governed by an accountable ministry. The Habsburg emperor,however, remained king of Hungary; Hungarian sovereignty was notinternationally recognized, and there was no foreign office in Pest. A nationalcurrency, the forint, was soon in circulation, and a Hungarian National Guardand army were established. Finally, following a general election, the firstNational Assembly of 415 deputies, mainly from the provincial nobility, openedon 5 July, with few radicals elected.

Transylvania proclaimed reunification with Hungary, and theissue of military frontiers under Austrian rule was also resolved. The demandsof ethnic minorities were listened to, placated, but basically refused.Hungarian liberals of 1848 were not ready to renounce the concept of a unitarystate and to concede autonomous territories to the different nationalities.They felt that liberating the serfs and ensuring equal civic rights to all citizens,regardless of ethnicity or creed, would solve the minority problem.

Croatia constituted a special case. It was part of theHungarian Crownlands, but enjoyed considerable autonomy and its own diet, whilealso dependent on the authority of the civil governor designated by the king ofHungary. Neither the ban, General Josip Jelačić, a strong national figure, northe more powerful section of the Croatian political class wanted to marchalongside the Magyars. Vienna initially approved Hungary’s position with regardto the national minorities and went as far as recalling Jelačić, but quicklyrestored him. The intention was to put an end to the Hungarian revolution. Victoriesagainst the rebels in Italy and in Bohemia, and news that the Paris barricadeshad fallen, had restored Austria’s confidence.

The Habsburg government tried to reverse the politicalconcessions it had made in its moment of weakness and set about encouragingethnic separatism within Hungary. In the face of danger, the Buda-Pestgovernment hastened its own preparations for war. A national army—calledHonvédség, “defender of the Homeland”—was set up, armament and equipmentfactories bought, political and social rights broadened, and patrioticpropaganda increased. “The fatherland is in danger,” a slogan launched byKossuth, reverberated throughout the land. His speech to the assembly led thedeputies to vote for recruiting 200,000 men and extending a sizable militarycredit.

On 11 September, 1848, Jelačić’s army entered Hungary.Austria was still negotiating, but clearly Jelačić’s war was Vienna’s. AfterBatthyány’s resignation, Hungary came to be governed by a Defense Committee,which the assembly vested with all powers. It was Kossuth’s moment—his speechesfanned the fires of patriotism and mobilized the population.

On 29 September, the Honvéd army stopped Jelačićat Pákozd. After this, the monarchy dissolved parliament and replacedBatthyány; the Hungarian Assembly declared these decisions null and void. On 6October, the people of Vienna rebelled, forcing the court to escape to Olmütz(Olomouc) in Moravia. Two days later, the assembly in Pest nominated Kossuth tobe president of the Defense Committee, with almost dictatorial powers.

By December, Austria had a new emperor, Franz Joseph. Theeighteen-year-old emperor-king soon demonstrated his ambition to reestablishabsolute authority at all costs and without compromise. Meanwhile, thelegendary Polish general, Józef Bem, had offered his services to Hungary andtaken command of the Transylvanian army. Having won several battles, theAustrian commander, General Windischgrätz, told the emperor that Hungarianresistance was over. Vienna, encouraged by the news, issued a manifesto thatnullified the 1848 laws and subjected Hungary to the government in Vienna. Thiscaused serious dissent within Kossuth’s army and unrest in the Hungarian PeaceParty, which was opposed to the pursuit of war. Kossuth’s eloquence and hispolicies won over the peasantry, inspired the army, and rallied the moderatesand the undecided—but not the entire political class.

Vienna’s absolutist circles wanted to drown Hungarianambitions once and for all. There was little room for negotiations. Kossuth sawonly two courses of action: either to fight until victory had been achieved,which he still thought possible, or to capitulate unconditionally. He chose theformer. On 13 April 1849, despite opposition from members of the legislature,Kossuth proposed a Declaration of Independence of the Hungarian state and thedethroning of the House of Habsburg-Lorraine before the National Assembly. Thebill was unanimously approved the following day at a public meeting of anenlarged Assembly. Kossuth now had behind him not only the majority ofparliament, but also, he claimed, the loyalty of the army and popular support.The break with Vienna and the king was now complete.

Hungary was not proclaimed a republic. The constitutionalshape the Hungarian state was to take would be decided later. For the moment, Kossuthwas elected president-governor, but, contrary to the wishes of a small radicalleft, the assembly did not confer full powers on him. Kossuth was morerepresentative of the dominant middle nobility in the assembly than of the Leftor, indeed, the opposition, which favored accommodation with Vienna. Hisprincipal objective had been achieved. Hungary had become independent.

Despite initial optimism and success, Hungary’s days ofindependence were numbered. Responding to his imperial cousin’s call, Russia’sTsar Nicholas decided to deploy his army against the Hungarians. In June theRussians invaded Hungary, and the Hungarians found themselves caught in a stranglehold.Austrian and Russian superiority of forces was overwhelming.

Kossuth’s government concentrated on its military effort,while pursuing its liberal democratic policymaking. On 28 July, it emancipatedthe country’s Jews, and an enlightened nationalities law was promulgated on thesame day. This legislation gave minorities the freedom to use their mothertongue at the local administrative level, at tribunals, in primary schools, incommunity life, and even within the national guard of non-Magyar councils. Itwas the first law in Europe to recognize minority rights. These actions,however, were too late to influence events in the two weeks leading up tomilitary defeat.

After the Russian invasion, hopes of saving the country wereslim. On 9 August, General Haynau beat and dispersed the main Hungarian army. Kossuthabdicated, transferred all powers to General Artur Görgey, and sought refuge inTurkey. Three days later, the War Council decided to surrender to the Russiansat Világos, near the city of Arad.

The war ended and repression began. The tsar sent his son toVienna to persuade Franz Joseph to act with clemency, but the Austriansexecuted thirteen top generals along with the former president of the Councilof Ministers, Count Lajos Batthyány, and several other military and civilindividuals. Nicholas was able to save only the life of Görgey. Many werecondemned to death by war tribunals, others were simply massacred, andthousands received long prison sentences. The poet Petőfi died two weeks beforethe end, fighting with Bem’s army. Hewas twenty-six years old. Count Szechenyi fell into a depression in September1848. His tortured soul found a degree of tranquillity in a psychiatricestablishment near Vienna, where he continued to write and to receive friends;he took his own life in 1860.

Spain 1820s

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The execution of Torrijos, by Antonio Gisbert Perez. Ferdinand VII, after his restoration as absolute monarch in 1823, took repressive measures against the liberal forces in his country.

The instruments of liberal revolution in Spain and Portugal were the secret societies (whose successful activities from 1815 to 1820 account for the obsessive concern of Iberian clericals with freemasonry) and the pronunciamiento, an officers' revolt based on the crude political theory that the general will of the nation, when vitiated by a monarch's evil counsellors or corrupt parliamentary institutions, was to be sought in the officer corps. The pronunciamiento was to develop a rigid form, with a consistent weakness: fear of discovery of elaborate negotiations meant that most pronunciamientos went off at half cock. This was balanced by the inefficiency of government detection and detention: Quiroga, the chosen leader in 1820, was allowed complete freedom to conspire from prison. A ramshackle despotism encouraged revolutionary irresponsibility. The early pronunciamientos in Spain and Portugal merely produced martyrs, Gomes Freire d'Andrade in Portugal and Lacy, the symbol of Catalan liberalism. Civilian support was limited though increasing, and the rank and file were indifferent to their officers' liberalism. If there was a vast masonic, civil conspiracy in 1817, it came to nothing. Why did the Cadiz revolution of 1820 succeed, led, as it was, by young officers and inexperienced civil hotheads after the higher officers and the notables of Cadiz masonry had been frightened by O'Donnell's betrayal of the 'respectable' conspiracy of 1819? What gave the revolution its strength was 'the repugnance of the rank and file against embarking for America', which, for the first time, gave sergeants and soldiers a direct interest in revolution. The British consul believed that revolt 'would die a natural death'; it triumphed through the feebleness of a government which could not collect a force to fight it. In March the revolution spread to the great towns of Saragossa, Corufia and Barcelona. General Ballesteros and O'Donnell deserted to the revolution; the king was forced to accept the constitution of 1812 (which Riego had adopted on the spur of the moment), not by the force of public opinion expressed in demonstrations in Madrid but because he had lost control of the army.

The revolution of 1820-3 set the programme and procedures of Iberian liberalism and that of its enemies. In Spain, 1812 had been a dress rehearsal in exceptional circumstances; in Portugal, the revolution of 1808 had failed to materialise. The new party groupings of the 1820 revolution were permanent. Liberalism both in Spain and Portugal was divided into moderate and exalted wings.

The strength of the Exaltados lay in the provincial extremism of the Juntas, which ruled Spain until June-July, and in the revolutionary army of Riego. Thus emerged the mechanism of revolution: on its military side the army coup; on its civilian side, the take-over by local Juntas whose extreme claims, particularly in Galicia and the south, constituted a federal structure where sovereign Juntas, controlling the new Urban Militia, communicated directly with each other. Though these enthusiasts had made the revolution, they did not share the definitive distribution of higher patronage. The government, composed of men of 1812, regarded the new revolutionaries as 'poor folk'. In the capital the Exaltados could produce mob pressure which may be seen less as the emergence of an underworld terror depicted by Galdos than as the ebullience of the fiesta. From the ministry's endeavour to regain control of the army and from the use of the Madrid mob by the Exaltados in defence of Riego's army dates the split in patriot unity that was to paralyse the revolution (September 1821). The Exaltados were weak in a capital of satisfied job-seekers: the government impotent in the provinces. This dualism was to define revolutionary politics until 1874.

The exiles of the ministry of 'gaol birds' (March 1820) sought to control the committee stage of the revolution, enshrined in the Juntas and the clubs, and to satisfy the king by a conservative revision of the constitution of 1812. In exile, men like Martinez de la Rosa had been converted to a belief in a limited franchise, a second chamber and a strong executive. The amnestied Afrancesados, the ablest single group in politics, would have been their natural allies but for the doubtfully patriotic past which cut them off from office, leaving them the professional critics of the regime. The moderate programme could only succeed with the loyal support of the king: instead the court plotted against any constitution to the point of allying itself with the Exaltados. The great weakness of the revolution was that the constitution could not do without a king whose sole aim was to destroy it.

Revolution in Italy 1820s Part I

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General Guglielmo Pepe

The revolution in Naples had military leadership. Although their interests had been safeguarded in 1815, many of Murat's officers felt that they were being unjustly discriminated against in promotion. The rivalry of Carbonari and Calderari had led almost to civil war in some regions and this focused the soldiers' sense of grievance. The lodges of the Carbonari formed a link between them and the middling landowners who ran most of the lodges. In so far as they were defined, the aims of the Carbonari were limited monarchy, administrative reform, the continuation of the assault on feudalism and the abandonment of mercantilism. Occasionally there were hints of a more active Carbonarist interest in land-reform. In 1820 the soldiers and Carbonari suddenly came together because of circumstance; in the long run this was a source of weakness but it produced the Neapolitan revolution.

In Naples the repressive measures of the regime reached a climax in May and June 1820. In Spain there had been a successful revolution in January and for the moment it did not look as if the powers were going to intervene there; perhaps, then, there was reason to think they would not intervene if a rising took place in Naples. Spain was also connected with Naples through Ferdinand. He had a claim to the inheritance of the Spanish throne; to maintain his rights there he had taken an oath to maintain the 1812 constitution and, if he could do this in Spain, why could he not also swear to uphold a Neapolitan constitution? On 2 July there was a mutiny in the garrison at Nola, and the local Carbonari supported it. The garrison at Capua joined in the next day and General Guglielmo Pepe assumed the leadership of the rebels. The government soon gave in and promised a constitution on the Spanish model. A new ministry, consisting of former sympathisers with Murat, was set up, but contained no members of the Carbonari; this was important, for the lodges were the only effective popular or semipopular support available to liberals. Pepe was the only real link between the ministry and the Carbonari.

It was not surprising that the Neapolitan revolution should have been followed a week later by a Sicilian separatist rising. Its disorders soon alarmed the possessing classes in the island, which was paralysed during the summer while the revolution was contained by the aristocracy and members of the corporations. The rebels were weakened by the rivalry of Palermo (where the original outbreak had taken place) with Messina, and they finally capitulated in September. When, on 1 October, the new parliament met at Naples it contained no Sicilian deputies. It supported a Carbonarist ministry deluded by the belief that Great Britain would, if necessary, intervene to protect Neapolitan constitutionalism and by confidence in Ferdinand's word.

Unfortunately the attitude of Great Britain towards intervention was that it was not objectionable if Austria acted alone. After the preliminary protocol of Troppau, Ferdinand lied himself into being allowed to present the Neapolitan case to the allies and, as soon as he was safely at Genoa on a British cruiser, disavowed all his concessions. He asked formally for assistance at Laibach. The Neapolitan government had been much weakened militarily by the absence of many of their soldiers in Sicily, and morally by the split which now divided the Muratist officers from the Carbonarist politicians. General Pepe was defeated by an Austrian army which on 23 March entered the capital. The restoration had been accomplished quickly and not very bloodily. Afterwards only two liberals were executed although many went into exile. In May an amnesty was offered to all except the original mutineers. The revolution had failed because of the divisions among the revolutionaries themselves, because of the distraction of the Sicilian revolt (which gave its last kick at Messina in March 1821), because of its lack of agreed aims, because of Ferdinand's duplicity, but above all because the powers acquiesced in the use of the Austrian army against it. Had the revolution succeeded, it might have blocked the way to unification by creating a constitutional state with a particular interest in survival. By failing, it contributed powerfully to the mythology of the risorgimento and to the growing number of exiles. Above all, it clearly associated Austria with the preservation not merely of a divided Italy but of anti-liberal governments. The Austrian army remained at Naples until 1827.

1848 in Austro-Hungary

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Capitulation of Hungarian Army at Világos 1849

In 1848, when a series of revolutions broke out across Europe, Pest, Vienna, and Prague were among the cities at the forefront of experiments with political reform. In Hungary, under the leadership of Lajos Kossuth (1802.1894), the diet rapidly proclaimed a new constitutional regime in April (the April Laws). This arrangement confirmed Hungary’s existence independent of other Habsburg territories, promised liberal rights of citizenship and enfranchisement to many more inhabitants (although not to Jews or to small property owners), and maintained full enfranchisement for any noble, no matter how poor. The Hungarian reformers postponed any significant transformation of the manorial system, a tack that pleased the broad gentry class and nobility but did little to satisfy the peasantry. Furthermore, the April Laws imposed the Magyar language on state and society, and this tended to diminish revolutionary unity, provoking opposition among leaders in Croatia and Transylvania who rejected Magyar predominance and insisted on using Latin in their communications with the government. In fact the question of defining the nation and the privileged role of the Magyar language helped to alienate many who spoke other languages and who might otherwise have sympathized with the new liberal constitutional regime. Later in 1848 and 1849 the Habsburg military carefully exploited this alienation as the dynasty struggled to reimpose control over Hungary. The dynasty’s strategy of divide and conquer ultimately provoked the Hungarian revolutionaries in turn to depose the Habsburgs and to declare full independence in April 1849.

In Vienna the government collapsed in March 1848, Metternich fled, and the emperor;s advisors promised a constitutional regime with liberal franchise laws, civil rights, the abolition of censorship, and, eventually, an end to the remaining vestiges of serfdom and the manorial system (which in Galicia were considerable). Occasional outbursts of popular violence in Vienna throughout the spring continued to drive the revolution further to the left, until the court found it expedient to remove itself to the safer, more conservative city of Innsbruck. In July an Austrian parliament elected by means of an extremely generous suffrage set about writing a constitution, and it too was eventually removed to the sleepy town of Kremsier/Kroměříž. in Moravia in order to avoid the political pressures exerted by the radical crowd in the streets of Vienna. At the same time, the issue of political nationalism came to the fore in several different and often contradictory contexts. Austria sent a large delegation to the Frankfurt National Assembly, which struggled in 1848 and 1849 to forge a new united Germany. Liberal Austrians who sat in the Frankfurt National Assembly tended to share an idealistic vision of a future united Germany that would include the non-German-speaking Habsburg territories. The inhabitants of these territories, it was imagined, would receive linguistic rights where necessary from the fraternal German people, and they would reap considerable benefits from their participation in the high cultural and economic development of the German nation. In fact, using a universal language of inclusion, many Austro-German liberals imagined their nation to be defined by its very commitment to the values of liberal humanism, values available to any struggling people in east-central Europe.

At the same time, and in reaction to the events at Frankfurt, Czech national liberal leaders proclaimed their own adherence to an Austria separate from Germany and defined by Slav interests. The (bilingual) Bohemian historian František Palacký(1798–1876), who had been invited to participate in the planning process for the Frankfurt National Assembly, used the occasion of his reply to articulate this Austro-Slav position most effectively. Calling for an Austria organized around a principle of Slav solidarity, since this would protect the so-called smaller nations of central Europe from German and Russian hegemony, Palacký argued that had Austria not existed, it would have had to be invented for this very purpose. In June an informal Slav Congress even met in Prague, although its activities tended to demonstrate the difficulties of forging a common program that would unite the political interests of Czech, Polish, Ukrainian, Slovak, Serbian, and Slovene speakers across the Monarchy.

Many historians have since judged nationalism rather than liberalism to have been the major source of discontent in 1848. Such a judgment accepts the nationalist rhetoric of 1848 at face value, and views it in the context of modern nationalist sensibilities, rather than in terms of the specific and limited meanings that attached to such language over 150 years ago. The fact that Austro- Slav declarations by Czech nationalist leaders caught their German-speaking counterparts in Bohemia by surprise should alert the observer to the relative novelty and insignificance of the national issue to most Austrians in 1848. Nationalist discourse became a critical vehicle for conveying regional demands that year, but the nations it invoked were largely figments of the nationalists’ own imagination. More often than not, regional and class loyalties far outweighed their nationalist counterparts. German and Czech-identified deputies to the Austrian parliament from Bohemia (many of whom were bilingual) agreed more often with each other, for example, than they did with German-speaking delegates from Lower Austria or Styria. And unlike their Polish noble counterparts, Polish-speaking peasant deputies to the parliament sought an immediate end to all forms of manorialism. Many historians of 1848 have also argued that the work of the constitutional committee at the parliament in Kremsier constituted the last possibility for a friendly constitutional understanding among the various ‘‘nations’’ of Austria. Indeed the work of the committee provided a notable model for later Austrian constitutions, but the compromises achieved by the committee emerged from its members’ powerful conviction that their common liberal sympathies far outweighed nationalist differences. Whether they held centralist or federalist views, German national or Slav national orientations, the men at Kremsier largely put aside their differences over the latter issues to produce a bill of rights and state structure that would have transformed dynastic Austria into a genuinely constitutional regime.

Their efforts, however, would not pay off for another twenty years. Already in the summer of 1848 the regime had begun to reassert its dominance against the revolution, even against its more moderate proponents. In June, Field Marshal Prince Alfred Windischgrätz successfully laid siege to Prague, ending both the Slav Congress and a radical student uprising there. In October the military besieged revolutionary Vienna, long since abandoned by the court and most moderates. In early December the regime replaced the faltering Emperor Ferdinand with the eighteen-year-old Francis Joseph I (r. 1848–1916), and in the spring of 1849 the new emperor and his prime minister, Felix Schwarzenberg, sent the Austrian parliament home, imposing a constitution of their own devising on Austria. Later in 1849, with the help of the Russian military, the Austrians finally managed to defeat the armies of the Hungarian rebels, and in 1851 the emperor decided to rule openly as an absolute monarch by abrogating the constitution he had issued a year before.

1846 in Galicia

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"Rzeź galicyjska" by Jan Lewicki (1795-1871)

Some critical observers such as Count István Széchenyi (1791–1860) in Hungary blamed Hungary’s political weakness and economic poverty precisely on a shortsighted nobility that gave little thought to the economic welfare of the larger society and fought only to maintain its class privilege. Nobles in Galicia learned the hard way that if a Polish nation did in fact exist, its membership was limited to the uppermost classes, who were often hated by the rest of society. In another sign of the limited extent of national self-identification in these regions, peasants often mythologized their Habsburg rulers for having attempted to intervene on their behalf over the years against their noble masters. Such peasants did not see themselves as part of an imagined Hungarian or Polish nation. When in 1846 Polish nobles in Galicia rebelled against the Habsburgs, Polish- and Ukrainian-speaking peasants famously turned on their rebellious landlords in large numbers and massacred them, claiming to oppose the oppressive Polish nation in whose name the nobles had rebelled.

Link

Armies of the 1848-49 Hungarian Rising

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THE REVOLUTIONS OF 1848-49

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The unrest in Hungary in 1848 and 1849 was largely an expression of Magyar nationalism, and as such was opposed by those from minority ethnic groups, in particular the Croats. In 1849, with Louis Kossuth appointed president of an independent republic of Hungary, the Austrians accepted Russian assistance, offered in the spirit of the Holy Alliance, and the rebels were eventually crushed at the Battle of Timisoara.

Austria was by this time largely under the control of Foreign Minister Metternich, who used his influence to persuade the other major European powers to assist Austria in crushing revolts in Spain, Naples and Piedmont. His own methods involved the limited use of secret police and the partial censorship of universities and freemasons. The years 1848 and 1849 saw a succession of largely unsuccessful uprisings against the absolutist rule of the Habsburg monarchy. Although reforms of the legal and administrative systems (known as the "April Laws") were set to take effect in Hungary later that year, they did not apply to the rest of the Habsburg territories. The unrest started in Vienna in March 1848 (as a result of which Metternich was dismissed) and spread to Prague, Venice and Milan. A Constituent Assembly was summoned to revise the constitution, but its only lasting action was to abolish serfdom. By the autumn the unrest had reached Hungary as a number of ethnic groups within the empire made bids for greater national rights and freedoms. In December the ineffectual Ferdinand I abdicated in favour of his nephew, Francis Joseph. Not feeling bound by the April Laws, Francis Joseph annulled the Hungarian constitution, causing the Hungarian leader Louis Kossuth to declare a republic. With the help of the Russians (who feared the spread of revolutionary fervour), and the Serbs, Croats and Romanians (who all feared Hungarian domination), the Austrian army succeeded in crushing the revolt in 1849.

From 1849 onwards an even more strongly centralized system of government was established. Trade and commerce were encouraged by fiscal reforms, and the railway network expanded. Coupled with peasant emancipation - for which landowners had been partially compensated by the government - these measures led to a trebling of the national debt over ten years. Higher taxes and a national loan raised from wealthier citizens led to discontent among the Hungarian nobles, who wished to see the restoration of the April Laws. In 1859 war in the Italian provinces forced the Austrians to cede Lombardy.

CARBONARI

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Filippo Giuseppe Maria Ludovico Buonarroti

The Carbonari were one of the many secret societies that proliferated in the years after the French Revolution, and especially after the Bourbon Restoration. Indeed, the secret societies and the fears of secret conspiracies were skillfully exploited by legitimist governments after 1814 to justify often extreme measures of political repression and the curtailment of individual liberties.

ORIGINS

Since the numbers of the secret societies and the often impossible actions attributed to them were deliberately exaggerated as much by their supporters as by opponents, it is often still difficult to distinguish fact from fiction. But the secret societies existed, among them the Carbonari, which were prominent and especially prolific in southern Italy. Like nearly all the other secret societies, the Carbonarist lodges were modeled on the freemasonic lodges that had spread widely in Europe in the late eighteenth century and were officially promoted throughout Napoleon’s empire (1804–1814/15). As opposition to French imperialism grew, however, the secret societies offered the emperor’s opponents a less visible alternative to freemasonry.

The first references to the Carbonari in southern Italy came at precisely the moment when relations between Napoleon I and his brother-in-law Joachim Murat (1767–1815), were breaking down. Murat had ruled Napoleon’s satellite Kingdom of Naples since 1808, but relations with Paris deteriorated to the point that in 1811 he nearly lost his throne. As Murat’s position in the imperial enterprise weakened, he became more dependent on his Neapolitan supporters, who in turn pressed for a constitution.

This became the principal political platform of the Carbonarist lodges, whose name was adopted from the Charbonnerie, an informal secret association among the charcoal burners (charbonniers) of the Jura Mountains between France and Switzerland. The name seems to have been taken at random by a group of French officers, hostile to Napoleon, whose regiment took part in the conquest of southern Italy in 1806. One of the first Carbonarist lodges was founded in Calabria by Pierre-Joseph Briot, a senior French official who was also an unreconstructed Jacobin and a longtime opponent of Bonaparte’s dictatorship.

The Carbonarists had adopted two alternative political projects. One was the constitution conceded by the king of Spain to the Cortes (legislative assembly) of Cadiz in 1812, and the other was the very different constitution that the British had imposed on Sicily in the same year. Support for these demands spread quickly, and an insurrection in the Abruzzi in 1813 revealed strong support in the army as well. The government immediately banned the Carbonarist lodges, and in Milan, Napoleon’s viceroy Euge`ne Beauharnais did the same. But when in 1814 Murat defected from the empire, on three separate occasions his generals demanded a constitution as the condition for their support.

RESTORATION

In southern Italy the Carbonarist lodges played an important role in the transition of power after the fall of Napoleon and Murat and the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy in 1815. Their great hope was that the Bourbons would extend the Sicilian constitution to the whole kingdom, but instead it was abolished. As a result, the lodges began to spread both on the mainland and now also in Sicily much to the alarm of the authorities.

Those fears were shared more widely as numerous new and old secret societies began to appear all over Europe. They had a bewildering panoply of names and projects: the Adelfi, the Decisi, the Perfect Sublime Masters, the Calderai, to name only a few. Some supported the legitimist restorations, others opposed them, and others had their own projects, like the Russian Decembrists, the Polish Patriotic Society, and the Greek Hetaira Philike´. A growing source of public alarm, the presence of these conspiracies, real or imagined, provided the authorities with pretexts for draconian public security measures, whereas for an inveterate conspirator like Filippo Michele Buonarroti (1761– 1837), a conspirator in the 1796 ‘‘Conspiracy of Equals’’ in Paris and now in the safety of Geneva, these fears gave substance to a revolutionary threat that he knew did not exist but dearly wanted to create.

In southern Italy the Bourbon government was paralyzed by its fear of the Carbonari. The fears grew when an insurrection at Macerata in the Papal State in 1817 was attributed to the Carbonari, but in Naples the generals reported that the lodges were too many and too powerful for a frontal attack. When the Spanish revolution took place in January 1820, southern Italy at first seemed calm. But when a protest began in the cavalry barracks at Nola at the beginning of July, within days the protest spread to other regiments. Faced with a general mutiny the monarchy was forced to concede the Spanish constitution.

The revolutions in Naples and Sicily in 1820 succeeded because the constitutional program had overwhelming support in the army, but there is strong evidence to suggest that they were planned in the Carbonarist lodges, where the constitutional project was prepared and which during the nine months of constitutional government played an important role in maintaining order. But it was hardly surprising that the Carbonarist revolution in Naples and Sicily rang fresh alarms through Restoration Europe and many now claimed that the secret societies were the invisible hand that linked the revolutions in Spain, Naples, and Sicily to the Cato Street conspiracy in London, the murder of the duc de Berri in France and of the journalist August von Kotzebue in Germany in 1819, which was the immediate pretext for the draconian Carlsbad Decrees.

In November, Prince Clemens von Metternich (1773–1859) summoned the European rulers to meet at Troppau in October to coordinate action against the forces of revolution. During the meeting, when the tsar, Alexander I, was informed of a mutiny in one of the St. Petersburg regiments, he immediately detected the work of the secret societies. With the willing complicity of the king of Naples, an Austrian army was dispatched to southern Italy in March 1821, and the revolutions were crushed. The Carbonarist lodges were closed, and their members arrested or placed under police surveillance, dismissed from public office, and banned from the professions.

According to Metternich, the Carbonari were ‘‘prelates, priests and citizens of distinguished rank.’’ In fact, they also included many artisans and lesser landowners, but overwhelmingly the Carbonarist lodges gave political voices for the first time to the provincial gentry, of which they were now deprived. However, the police records also show that their numbers were much smaller than the authorities liked to believe, and their suppression served primarily to justify political purges that extended to the entire army, public officials, and the clergy.

Despite the defeat of the revolutions in Naples and Sicily, elsewhere in Europe fear of the secret societies now reached a peak. In December 1821 the Carbonari were banned by the pope, but the discovery of plans by a French Charbonnerie to stage revolts in Belfort and Saumur in December 1821 caused new alarms that were exacerbated when four sergeants who were put on trial at La Rochelle for complicity refused to divulge any information.

DECLINE OF SECRET SOCIETIES

By 1824 the panic was subsiding, Europe was not in flames, and Metternich decided that the threat had been grossly exaggerated all along. By now the revolutionaries were also losing patience, and the failed insurrections that took place in the Papal State in 1831 were the last strike of the Carbonari. A year later Giuseppe Mazzini (1805–1872) founded Young Italy, the revolutionary society that explicitly rejected the tradition of secret conspiracy. Mazzini had begun his career as a member of the Carbonari in Genoa, but now he called on Italian revolutionaries to declare themselves openly and to proselytize the young to the national cause, accusing the Carbonari of adhering to the revolutionary strategies of the French Jacobins that he believed to be outdated and unworkable.

The Carbonari now disappeared as quickly as they had materialized. Under attack from the revolutionaries and under growing pressure from the police, the secret societies came to be seen as anachronistic. Former Carbonarists found new berths in a variety of political movements, some more some less militant, while others reverted to mainstream freemasonry. In France, for example, the Charbonnerie made a brief reappearance during the July Revolution in 1830 but were subsequently absorbed into the republican movement. However, while the political threat they posed was certainly exaggerated, the Carbonari and other secret societies enabled European governments to impose even tighter controls—over the press and public associations but also on army officers, public servants, the clergy, and the independent professions—that remained in force down to 1848, and in many cases well beyond.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Davis, J. A. Naples and Napoleon: Reform, Revolution, and Empire in Southern Italy, 1750–1820. Oxford, U.K., forthcoming. Roberts, John Morris. The Mythology of the Secret Societies. New York, 1972. Spitzer, Alan B. Old Hatreds and Young Hopes: The French Carbonari against the Bourbon Restoration. Cambridge, Mass., 1971.

CARLSBAD DECREES

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The Carlsbad Decrees were a series of measures adopted by the German Confederation in 1819 that established severe limitations on academic and press freedoms and set up a federal commission to investigate all signs of political unrest in the German states.

The Napoleonic Wars had spurred the growth of a small but influential nationalist movement in Germany, which garnered some of its most fervent supporters from among students and professors. After the anti-Napoleonic campaigns of 1813– 1815, student veterans returned to their universities and founded a series of nationalist fraternities or Burschenschaften, which were intended to promote the values of ‘‘Germanness, militancy, honor, and chastity.’’ While the Burschenschaften were active throughout Germany’s Protestant universities, the radical hub of the movement was Jena. There students and like-minded professors took advantage of the new press freedoms granted in Saxony-Weimar’s 1816 constitution to promote liberal and nationalist positions and critique the slow pace of reform in Germany since the Congress of Vienna. Saxony-Weimar was also the site of the Wartburg Festival (October 1817), in which students gathered to sing nationalist hymns, issue vague demands for freedom and unity, and burn a list of books they deemed reactionary or anti- German. These developments were viewed with alarm by the Austrian chancellor Clemens von Metternich, who saw the student movement as a serious threat to the Restoration order established at Vienna. Metternich maintained that such radicalism was encouraged by an overly lenient attitude among government officials in Prussia and by the broader push toward constitutional government in Baden, Bavaria, Württemberg, and Saxony- Weimar.

Metternich was already seeking to clamp down on the Burschenschaften and their supporters when they provided him with a perfect pretext. On 23 March 1819 the student Karl Sand assassinated the conservative playwright August von Kotzebue in his apartment in Mannheim. Kotzebue had been a vociferous critic of the radical nationalist movement (one of his books was on the list burned at the Wartburg Festival); moreover, as a prolific and highly successful author of light comedies he was widely seen as the embodiment of Old Regime frivolity and lasciviousness. Recently it had become known that Kotzebue was sending reports on German cultural affairs to the Russian tsar. Sand, a student of theology at Jena and a member of the local Burschenschaft, resolved to take matters into his own hands, striking down this ‘‘traitor’’ to the German nation. With Kotzebue dead, Sand attempted to kill himself but was instead arrested, tried, and eventually executed. Meanwhile, a deranged student had made an attempt on the life of a district official in Nassau, adding to the sense of unrest and imminent revolution.

Sand’s act represented a substantial reversal for the reform party in Prussia, as moderates like Karl August von Hardenberg and Karl von Altenstein lost influence with Frederick William III (r. 1797–1840) to more reactionary members of his cabinet. At a meeting in Teplitz on 1 August, Metternich and the Prussian king agreed that their states would take a common hardline policy against the ‘‘revolutionary party’’ in Germany. The outlines of that policy were hammered out two weeks later at a conference of ministers from ten leading German states, which took place in the resort locale of Carlsbad. The conference drafted a series of decrees, which were then approved unanimously at a meeting of the Federal Diet on 20 September 1819.

The Carlsbad Decrees consisted of four laws. The University Law established a state plenipotentiary for each university, who was responsible for maintaining proper discipline and morality. The state governments were obligated to remove any teacher who taught subversive doctrines or otherwise abused his authority and to enforce existing laws against secret student organizations (that is, the Burschenschaften). Professors fired by one university could not be hired by another, and students found guilty of involvement with the Burschenschaften were banned from future employment in public office. The Press Law required that all books and periodicals shorter than 320 pages be approved by a censorship board before they could be published. Periodicals that harmed the interests of a German state could be shut down and their editors banned from publishing for as long as five years. An Investigative Law set up a federal investigative body that was charged with examining and reporting on all evidence of political unrest in Germany (though prosecution of suspects was left to the individual states). Finally, the Provisional Execution Order granted the Confederation the authority to take action against states that failed to suppress revolutionary activities within their borders.

The immediate effect of the Carlsbad Decrees was a stifling of liberal political expression in Germany. The Burschenschaften were banned, liberal professors were fired, and students suspected of illegal activities found the path to government office blocked. Thus Prussia and Austria were able to impose an effective conservative hegemony within the Confederation, hampering efforts toward liberal or constitutional reform. Once the decrees attained permanent status in 1824, government spying and censorship became a way of life in Germany, often lamented in the writings of Heinrich Heine and Ludwig Börne. Yet the impact of the Carlsbad Decrees should not be overstated. Application of these laws was always uneven, and opposition figures became quite skillful in skirting the censors. Moreover, the Revolution of 1830 in France would unleash a new wave of political unrest in Germany, which led to new constitutions in Hannover and Saxony and liberal reforms in a number of other states. Still, it required another revolution (that of 1848) before the Carlsbad Decrees were finally repealed by the Federal Diet in April 1848.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Büssem, Eberhard. Die Karlsbader Beschlu¨ sse von 1819: Die endgültige Stabiliserung der restaurativen Politik im Deutschen Bund nach dem Wiener Kongress 1814/15. Hildesheim, Germany, 1974. Huber, Ernst Rudolf. Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte seit 1789. Vol. 1: Reform und Restauration 1789 bis 1830. Stuttgart, Germany, 1957. Sheehan, James J. German History, 1770–1866. Oxford, U.K., 1989. Williamson, George S. ‘‘What Killed August von Kotzebue?: The Temptations of Virtue and the Political Theology of German Nationalism, 1789–1819.’’ Journal of Modern History 72, no. 4 (2000): 890–943.

Radetzky in Italy

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Johann Josef Wenzel Graf Radetzky von Radetz

Liberal Hungary’s nemesis was certainly gathering strength. A week after the chain bridge accident, the reaction triumphed again, this time in Italy. In June Field Marshal Radetzky had at last convinced the Austrian government that the war was winnable. The cabinet had been rather stung by the old fox’s recent sharp remarks, such as, in a letter to Latour on 21 June, ‘I only wish . . . that the Minister [Pillersdorf ] could have as much success in battle against the intelligentsia of our time . . . as I am now having, despite being in the minority, in battles and skirmishes with the King of Sardinia.’ Six days later, Latour gave Radetzky the order he sought: to gamble Austrian power in Italy on one decisive battle.The omens were good. Charles Albert had divided his forces, with 28,000 in front of Verona and 42,000 laying siege to Mantua. Radetzky now had 74,000 troops. He planned to ram a wedge between the Piedmontese by driving those in front of Verona back on to Peschiera.

The attack began on 22 July, and on the following day Radetzky smashed his way through the very centre of the Piedmontese line, which defended a series of hill-top villages north of the settlement that gave this epic encounter its name: Custozza. Charles Albert tried to counter-attack in the broiling heat of 24 July – and, at one stage, the King saw Italian tricolours being waved triumphantly on the heights – but in the small hours of the next day, Radetzky brought the full weight of his forces to bear on the parched, exhausted Italian units and swept them back off the slopes.

Charles Albert’s forces fell back on Milan, which turned out to be a mere staging-post in a general Piedmontese withdrawal from the war. In the Lombard capital power now slipped out of the hands of discredited monarchists and into those of the republicans, who, advised by Mazzini, prepared to resist the Austrians by throwing up earthworks, building barricades and collecting what money, ammunition and provisions could be had at such short notice. Food and ammunition were scarce and most of the available artillery was in Piacenza. While Charles Albert assured the populace on 5 August that he intended to fight, he was already negotiating terms with Radetzky. It was agreed that the Piedmontese would march out of Milan on 6 August and then have a day in which to withdraw altogether from Lombardy, taking with them all those who had ‘compromised’ themselves in the revolution. Radetzky would enter the city the following day. When word of this deal leaked out in the night of 5–6 August, an enraged crowd surged around the Greppi Palace, where Charles Albert was staying. The King had to be extricated by his troops, who were already beginning their evacuation. ‘The city of Milan is ours’, wrote a triumphant Radetzky twenty-four hours later: ‘no enemy remains on Lombard soil’. On 9 August, the Piedmontese General Salasco signed an armistice.

Radetzky’s grit – he had, after all, bullishly refused to follow earlier government orders to negotiate – and his military skills had retrieved Austrian power in Italy. By significantly easing the pressure on the Viennese government, he also contributed immensely to the survival of the Habsburg Empire itself in 1848.

Venice and Custozza

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Venice was now completely isolated in an Austrian sea. The news of Custozza and the armistice ‘fell on Venice like a thunderbolt from a serene sky’, as the American consul, Edmund Flagg, put it. The Venetian vote for ‘fusion’ was now redundant, and Daniele Manin emerged from the crisis with great credit. The small, bespectacled republican had refused to be part of the monarchist provisional government that had been appointed on 5 July: ‘I am and will remain a republican. In a monarchist state I can be nothing.’ As if to ram the point home, Manin put on his civic guard uniform and, with the rank of private, took his turns doing sentry duty – a simple citizen doing his best for his city. The monarchist ‘July government’ certainly had its work cut out, for the Austrians, commanded by Marshal Franz von Welden, had isolated the city from the terra firma. His forces, numbering some nine thousand, were now extended in a cordon around the lagoon. Yet many of these troops were shivering with malaria, and there was no immediately obvious way of striking at the city itself, which was defended by no fewer than fifty-four forts, only three of which were on terra firma. Command of the 22,000-strong Venetian forces (of whom 12,000 were Italian volunteers and regular troops who had converged on the city from all over Italy) had been given on 15 June to General Pepe, who had reached the city on a steamer from Chiogga with the remnants of his Neapolitan regiments.

The population’s hostility towards the monarchists was palpable: the provinces of the mainland had voted for fusion, not the great city itself. With news of Custozza, the anger in Venice boiled over. On 3 August, some 150 people, fired up with Mazzinian ideas, gathered in the Casino dei Cento and established the Italian Club, ostensibly to discuss the problems of the day, but in reality as an alternative, republican, centre of power. When the Piedmontese commissioners, who had been sent to Venice to assume authority in Charles Albert’s name, arrived four days later, they were greeted with a storm of hostility. On 10 August, the leading republicans, including Manin and Tommaseo, signed a protest and demanded a meeting of the Venetian assembly. The government made itself remarkably unpopular when it tactlessly cited the old Austrian laws to try to silence its critics in the press and in the Italian Club. The following day, it yielded, agreeing to the creation of a committee of defence to be elected by the assembly. The Piedmontese commissioners resigned their powers, but they were still hounded on Saint Mark’s Square, by a Venetian crowd baying for their blood.

At this dangerous moment, Daniele Manin was busy browsing in a bookshop. This pleasant activity was interrupted when he was summoned to meet with the government and the commissioners. His very appearance on the balcony above the Piazza stilled the turbulence below. Manin promised them that the Venetian assembly would meet on 13 August and that, in the meantime, he would assume power. He called on all Venetians to defend their city. His audience, which moments before had been intent on murder, erupted into ecstatic cheering: ‘Viva Manin! To the forts!’ The mood of the city changed from one of anger and bewilderment to one of hope: the son of a leading republican later recalled ‘with what confidence in saving the motherland we stayed up to watch the dawn breaking over the railway bridge and the battered vessels of our fleet!’ Manin had carried off a coup, and not just against the monarchists: he had also stolen a march on the Mazzinians, who had hoped to seize power themselves. Manin had always feared the dangers of mob rule. To him, Mazzini’s ideas of revolution seemed to pose just such a threat, and one of his tasks, as he saw it, was to prevent ‘anarchy’. He viewed the June days in Paris as precisely the kind of bloody social chaos into which Venice could easily sink unless its leaders made law and order their priority.

Nevertheless, the more urgent problem was the war against Austria, which Venice was now bearing virtually alone. When the assembly met on 13 August, Manin agreed to share power with two military commanders, one from the army, Colonel Giovanni Cavedalis, the other from the navy, Admiral Leone Graziani. In order to ensure that the greatest possible unity would prevail, Manin went so far as to declare that Venice would not, once again, be proclaimed a republic. The government, he said, was provisional ‘in every meaning of the term’. This was another slap in Mazzinian faces, who were capable of mounting a serious challenge to the new triumvirate, since they had a great deal of support among the non- Venetian volunteers and troops. But Manin’s popularity with the wider population was greater still, and he had the backing of the commander-in-chief, Pepe. So it was that, until the autumn, Manin successfully resisted the pressure from the Italian Club (and from Mazzini himself ) to transform Venice into the hard kernel of Italian republicanism, from which the rest of the country could be revolutionised.

The European Political System – 1830 & 1848

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The revolutions of 1830 showed the flexibility of the system. The new French regime was accepted, with Palmerston leading the way. The British doctrine that the territorial status quo, and not the domestic regime, mattered was accepted by the other powers. But the revolt in Belgium in the same year against William I, king of the Netherlands, showed that even the territorial status quo could alter. His appeals to the sanctity of the 1815 treaties went unheeded, an illustration of the primacy of power over law in international relations, and the vulnerability of small states in nineteenth century diplomacy. Belgium’s creation in 1831, bolstered by a guarantee of its neutrality by the great powers, was the destruction of one state (the Netherlands), as much as the formation of a new one. Belgian security was only important to the great powers because they feared that the Belgian revolutionaries might unite with France, damaging the territorial buffers of 1815. If the Concert of Europe was sufficiently flexible to accommodate Belgian independence, the new state proved a model of restraint, eschewing any aspirations towards union with France which would have meant war. Belgian independence was preserved by the constellations of great power politics, rather than the flimsy treaty guarantees of 1831 to which no great power felt bound.

Security concerns rather than ideological principles had dictated the policy of the three eastern and conservative great powers. Austria’s and Russia’s repression of revolts in Italy in 1830 and Poland in 1831 respectively showed that the spheres of influence marked out in 1815 were broadly respected. Prussia also fulfilled its role as guardian of the Rhineland against any possible French invasion in 1830, underlining the geopolitical shift of its priorities towards western Germany, which had taken place in 1815. The German Confederation could not play the defensive role assigned to it by the 1815 settlement. Military mobilization was dependent on the initiative of individual states, most notably Prussia. That state confirmed itself as the leading German power, while Austria had non-German commitments in Italy. The Third Germany looked to Prussia for protection against the potential French menace – the rights enshrined in treaties still depended on military force. It remained a balance of power system, not an equilibrium of rights and interests. Restraint was induced by calculations of power, spheres of influence, and grouping rather than an automatic respect for international treaties.

The 1830 revolutions appeared at first glance to have opened an ideological rift within Europe with three conservative eastern great powers facing liberal France and Britain. In 1833 Austria, Prussia, and Russia concluded a treaty allowing intervention in aid of any legitimate ruler against revolution. In 1834 France, Britain, Spain, and Portugal concluded the Quadruple Alliance.

The 1848 revolutions represented a massive challenge to the territorial settlement of 1815, particularly in Central Europe where the formation of German, Hungarian, and Italian states became possible. The Concert of Europe demonstrated its continued strength in preventing any territorial change and averting a war between the great powers. This was partly due to the monarchical solidarity of the three eastern powers, though calculations of power relations played the decisive role. For the most part, the habits of grouping and restraint informed the foreign policies of the great powers, despite nationalist pressures. Small states, such as Piedmont-Sardinia in Italy, which challenged the territorial order were left to pay the price, while those, like Belgium and Denmark, which sought the maintenance of the status quo were supported. The incentives during the international crisis were for restraint. Yet there was also evidence of flexibility. Statesmen were willing to countenance change – such as the unification of Germany under Prussia – as long as it did not disrupt the balance of power. To this extent, the Concert system survived 1848 in terms of the principles of the behavior of the great powers.

Britain and Russia played a particularly important role in controlling the international consequences of the revolutions in their particular spheres of influence. Britain recognized another new French regime which signaled its conservative foreign policy by assuring Spain and Belgium of its peaceful intentions. Russia played a much more dramatic role in Central Europe where it suppressed a Hungarian revolt which threatened the Habsburg Empire. Austria was active in Italy, defeating Piedmont- Sardinia in 1848 and 1849.

Polish Insurrection 1830

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The most dramatic surge of resistance to the conservative order came in Poland, where in November 1830 the patience of the patriotic Polish nobility within the Russian partition snapped when the Tsar mobilised the Polish army in response to the revolutions in Western Europe. The insurrection lasted ten months and was crushed – after some bloody and intense fighting – by a 120,000- strong Russian army under General Ivan Paskevich (who would help repress another revolution in 1849). In the retribution that followed, a staggering eighty-thousand Poles were dragged off in chains to Siberia.

Poland sat uneasily under Russian rule. The revolutions of 1830 provided inspiration for Polish revolutionaries, and a ticking clock. Poland would soon be occupied by massive numbers of Russian troops preparing for foreign intervention, meaning revolution had to come quickly or not at all. In November 1830, Polish cadets and junior officers launched a coup in Warsaw. They occupied public buildings, Warsaw crowds seized weapons from a government arsenal, and Russian authority evaporated. Nicholas’s brother Constantine, governor of Poland, escaped capture but begged Nicholas to show restraint. Constantine’s hopes for moderation were dashed. The Polish insurgents grew increasingly radical, formally deposing Nicholas as king of Poland at the beginning of 1831. Nicholas in turn resolved to crush this by force.

As in the two preceding wars, Russia found it difficult to employ its potential strength effectively. Nicholas’s troops invaded Poland in February 1831, and the early clashes were inconclusive enough to give Poles some hope of success. The spring thaw of 1831 turned roads to mud and delayed Russian progress, along with supply problems, a cholera epidemic, and harassment by Polish partisans. Finally, at the end of May, the Poles suffered a major defeat at Ostroleka, and the cohesion of Polish resistance broke down. A Russian army reached Warsaw in September 1831, and resistance collapsed. Thousands of Poles went into exile in western Europe, boosting an already-burgeoning wave of Russophobia. Nicholas was restrained in his reimposition of order in Poland, though the separate Polish army was abolished and its troops integrated into Russian forces.

LINK

Book Review: 1848: Year of Revolution.

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Mike Rapport. 1848: Year of Revolution. New York: Basic Books, 2009. xvi + 461 pp. $29.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-465-01436-1.

Reviewed by Andreas Fahrmeir (Historisches Seminar, Universität Frankfurt)
Published on H-German (January, 2010)
Commissioned by Susan R. Boettcher

1848--Yet Again?

Mike Rapport is one of the few scholars who write European history not as the history of a few select countries, but of the entire continent. Rapport is at home in the history of the Balkans as well as France, Italy, Germany, Russia, and Scandinavia, and well versed in the historiography published in English, French, and Italian.[1] Rapport's well-rounded viewpoint is one excellent argument for anyone suffering from "1848 fatigue" after the sesquicentennial celebrations and their aftermath in conference volumes and historiographical reviews to put aside any skepticism regarding the possibility of anyone presenting a novel perspective; the book itself is another. In it, Rapport offers a narrative history of the events of 1848 in those European countries and regions affected directly by the revolution--France, Italy, the German states, Denmark, and Rumania--with some remarks on areas where the impact was more indirect (Britain, Russia, the Ottoman Empire, and Scandinavia). This book is less obviously an academic textbook than Jonathan Sperber's excellent survey of the revolutions of 1848,[2] and less encyclopedic than the survey of national events and overarching themes edited by Dieter Dowe and others for the 1998 anniversary.[3]

Rapport divides his book into an introduction and four large chapters. The introduction presents the tensions that erupted into revolution in 1848: constitutional debates and demands for broader participation in government, the "social question," and calls for national unity. Rapport distances himself from interpretations of 1848 as a "bourgeois" revolution. In line with the results of recent research, he emphasizes the limits of the social impact of industrialization even in the more economically advanced European countries. The first extensive chapter describes the collapse of the old order in the spring of 1848. The following three chapters continue the chronological account, but combine it with particular themes. "The Springtime of Peoples" is concerned with various attempts to institutionalize the gains of the revolution's first weeks, which led to various clashes between competing national agendas. "The Red Summer" takes the story forward and highlights the increasing incidence of social conflict that encouraged, if it did not bring about, the split between a radical-socialist Left and a conservative-liberal center. "The Counter-Revolutionary Autumn" focuses on the resurgence of the pillars of the old order: courts, conservative politicians, and the military, partly exemplified by the return of Louis Napoleon to France. "The Indian Summer of Revolution" is devoted to the defeat of the remaining islands of revolutionary republicanism in Germany and Italy and to the war against the Hungarian revolution in the first half of 1849. The book's conclusion describes the conversion of France's Second Republic into a Second Empire, but does not pursue the story in other European countries into 1850 (which witnessed Prussia's attempt to impose a German nation-state from above) or 1851 (when the last remnants of the Hungarian army moved into exile from Ottoman captivity).

Rapport's account is lively and eminently readable. Though it steers clear of presentism, the conclusions of each chapter discuss the legacy of 1848 for the history of Europe (and individual European countries) in the twentieth century: debates and decisions on the emancipation of religious and ethnic minorities; the trials and tribulations of parliamentary and republican government; or the paradox of attempts by parties composed of socially privileged members to ally with the lower orders against the forces of order without affecting the distribution of property.

Confusion and chaos were two of the lasting impressions the revolutions of 1848 left behind. This effect makes organizing any narrative of events difficult. While it is plausible to (re-)construct a typical revolutionary trajectory (liberal-democratic union, social and national tensions, conservative resurgence, and the revolutionaries' defeat), these phases occurred in different countries at very different times. Not all "March ministers" in German states, for example, were actually appointed in spring.[4] In Germany, the "red summer" coincided with the peak of the nation-state debate in autumn. The Indian summer of revolution in some places (notably in Rome, Venice, central Italy, and southwestern Germany) delayed the conservative resurgence until well into 1849, and given Prussia's non-conservative politics, one could argue that it was only fully in place in Germany in 1851. The decision to organize the narrative around broad themes thus involves some (inevitable) back-and-forth, thus requiring the reader to keep the chronology in the different regions in mind.

Rapport's "year of revolution" is clearly centered on France. The revolutionary events that had already begun in 1846 (the Krakow rebellion, the Lola Montez crisis in Bavaria, or the Swiss civil war), which Karl Marx took to be the beginning of the revolutions, do not seem as decisive to Rapport: Paris provided the spark that set Europe ablaze. The organization of his book highlights this implicit thesis: each phase of the revolution, the radical Indian summer excepted, begins with an event in Paris that provides a signal of change, transmitted by modern means of communication (telegraph, railway, steamer) to the rest of Europe and setting events in other countries in motion. Thus the elements of chance, chaos, and contingency, which shaped much of the year everywhere, appear most pronounced in descriptions of French scenes; once the outcome in Paris was decided, it was likely to be repeated elsewhere. This position could be debated at length--I would be inclined to highlight the variation between revolutionary demands and thus the revolutions' relative independence. The model of a central revolution in Paris with complementary revolutions elsewhere also downplays the connections between events: for example, the impact of refugees from crackdowns in Germany (on Marx's Cologne paper, for example) and Italy on developments in France.

To my mind, Rapport's account is at its best when it reconstructs the genesis of individual revolutionary events, blending lively and complex narratives with structural observations. It is somewhat less colorful in its descriptions of individuals. This result, too, stems from a narrative choice: the story begins in early 1848 and ends in the middle of 1849, thus providing little room for describing the political or intellectual experiences of most revolutionaries--or their fate after 1849. It is characteristic that most illustrations are of mass scenes, not portraits--except of conservative generals. Likewise, in contrast to some recent research on the revolutions, Rapport is inclined to treat the military outside France as a fairly homogenous, reliable tool of state power, rather than questioning whether the resurgence of the military might have something to do with the politicization of the armed forces against some of the radicals' demands.[5] This reservation should not be read as a criticism of Rapport's brilliant book, merely as a description of his narrative choices and his implicit interpretation of the revolution. Focusing more on individuals and chronology would have involved different problems, such as the need to submerge common patterns too much. Overall, I do not think a better account of the revolutions could have been written in the space available.

Rapport's account of the outcome is pessimistic. France reverted to a Bonapartist empire, though 1848 may have served as an apprenticeship in democracy. Elsewhere, liberals demonstrated that they preferred national unity to freedom and were unable to even grasp, let alone cope with, the gravity of the social question. While this account rings more true than some celebrations of the impact of 1848 in commemorations did, one could place a bit more emphasis on the introduction of parliaments and the expansion of the franchise in most German states and the further isolation of non-constitutional regimes in post-1848 politics.

Overall, Rapport has provided a standard survey of the revolution of 1848, one that should attract broad interest inside and outside of the classroom.

Notes

[1]. Michael Rapport, Nineteenth-Century Europe (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005).

[2]. Jonathan Sperber, The European Revolutions, 1848-1851 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

[3]. The English translation is Dieter Dowe, ed., Europe in 1848: Revolution and Reform (New York: Berghahn Books, 2000).

[4]. Eva Maria Werner, Die Märzministerien: Regierungen der Revolution von 1848/49 in den Staaten des Deutschen Bundes (Göttingen: V&R Unipress, 2009).

[5]. Sabrina Müller, Soldaten in der deutschen Revolution von 1848/49 (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1999).

Uniforms of the 1848 Revolutions in Europe

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In the early months of 1848 France was in a ferment over the country's franchise. Louis-Philippe ' King of the French by the Grace of God and the Will of the People', had attempted to establish a constitutional monarchy on the British pattern. But the solid basis of a sound tradition was lacking and malcontents at each end of the social scale were quick to criticize shortcomings while ignoring the good points: the 1830 barricades were, after all, still a vivid memory.

On February 24, 1848, the industrial population of the Paris faubourgs stormed into the city, and the luckless Louis-Philippe was forced to flee to Great Britain.

The spirit of revolt quickly spread to other countries, the vast and heterogeneous Austrian Empire being a predestined victim. Riots broke out in Vienna, and Metternich escaped on March 13 to commiserate with Louis Philippe in England.

The Austro-Hungarian Army at this time still wore the white short-tailed jacket, but the headdress was now a cylindrical shake .Regimental distinctions continued to be shown by the color of the collar, cuffs and turnbacks combined with the white metal or brass of the buttons.

One of the most interesting revolts. however, occurred on March I, 1848 at Neuchatel, That territory-which, incidentally, had produced de Meuron's Regimen t for the Dutch and British services, as well as Berthier's yellow-coated battalion for Napoleon - had been ceded to Prussia after the Napoleonic wars, and many of the 'Canaries' joined the newly formed Prussian Gardeschütze-Bataillon for service in Berlin. Fortunately for them, because they were then spared the agonizing duty of having to fire on their own countrymen when the latter marched down from the Jura Mountains to attack the castle at Neuchatel. The Prussians were soon overcome, the inevitable republic proclaimed, and Neuchatel became a Swiss canton.

The Prussian troops had now taken the famous spiked helmet into wear- but in a much taller version than the familiar 1914 pattern. The tunic was beg inning to replace the long-skirted coat, and long trousers were being worn in preference to breeches and gaiters.

Sándor Petőfi, (1823–1849)

2009-06-26T16:11:00.001+08:00

Hungarian lyric poet, generally regarded as the most authentic voice in native poetry and the foremost representative of the Romantic school in Hungarian literature

Of Slovak origin, his family name was Petrovich and his father, István, was a butcher and innkeeper. Petőfi called Kiskunfélegyháza his native town but his actual place of birth is still being debated. He attended schools in various locations, seldom staying longer in any one of them than a few months. It was while attending school in the town of Aszód that he began to write poetry; it was there too that he became interested in acting, an interest he never abandoned. While at still another school, he grew tired of his studies, at which point his father ceased to support him. He found temporary refuge at a distant relative’s home in a village, but when he began to write love letters to the daughter of an eminent citizen, he was forced to leave. In 1839 he enlisted in the army, fell ill while on the way to his company in the Balkans, and he was discharged. With nowhere to go, he returned to his by now impoverished parents. His father urged him to learn a trade, but he joined a group of stalking actors for a season.

In 1841, disillusioned with his rootless life, he resumed his academic studies in the town of Pápa. This was when his poems finally began to earn recognition, even acclaim. Unable to make a living, he resumed his wandering ways, but even in his footloose and always destitute condition he attracted the attention of important literary persons. It was not until 1844 that he was able to have a modest collection of his poems published. These represented a sharp departure from the formulaic, classicist style of poetry that the aristocracy, guardians of Hungarian literature, favored. Petőfi’s poems were written in the accents of plebeian democracy, with powerful native motifs, and they incurred the hostility of much of the nobility. He became the target of venomous press attacks, especially after he published his naive but deeply moving epic poem János Vitéz (Hero John). By now, 1845, wherever he went he was received with great affection by the common folk and fellow literati alike.

In an era of ever more assertive Hungarian nationalism, his interests became more political. He also began to read socialist authors, St. Simon in particular, and became convinced of the necessity of a revolution. In September 1846 he met a cultured young lady, Julia Szendrey, but it took a long and disheartening struggle for him to overcome her hesitations and her parents’ opposition. Love conquered and in the happy early months of his marriage he produced some of the great love poems in world literature.

When in March 1848, under the impact of the revolutions in Paris and then in VIENNA, BUDAPEST too rose in revolt, Petőfi was on the barricades. His Nemzeti Dal (Song of a nation), which on March 15 he read to a delirious reception from the steps of the National Museum, became the battle song of the revolution. But his politics were too radical, even to some of his admirers. He continued to write poems, pamphlets, and articles. In June 1848 he stood for election to parliament but was defeated. That same month he joined the rebel Hungarian army as a captain. His son, Zoltán, was born, on December 15 while he was stationed in the town of Debrecen. He asked for transfer to a battle unit and, in January 1849, he left his wife and newborn son and joined a revolutionary army corps under the command of Polish general Josef Bem, who was fighting with the Hungarian forces against the Habsburgs. He continued to move from place to place, had conflicts with the minister of war in the provisional capital of Debrecen, resigned his commission, and returned to Bem’s army corps as a private. After the new Habsburg emperor, FRANCIS JOSEPH appealed to Russian czar Nicholas I to help put down the Hungarian revolt, Petőfi moved his family to a safe place and, urging his nation to resist to the last, went to the front. On July 31, 1849, after a battle near the town of Segesvár, about six in the afternoon, he disappeared. What happened to him was never discovered. Legends arose and in later years many false Petőfis appeared, but the fate of the real Petőfi remains a mystery to this day.

COUNT JULIUS ANDRÁSSY, THE ELDER (1823–1890)

2009-06-18T12:15:00.002+08:00

Hungarian revolutionary, politician, and statesman, who served most of his political career in the House of Habsburg, as prime minister and defense minister of Hungary and later as joint foreign minister

During the revolution of 1848–49 he was a member of KOSSUTH’s radical reform party. He was elected to the Hungarian Diet in 1847. As a batallion commander, he participated in the armed struggle against the Habsburgs in the War of Independence of 1849. After the defeat of the uprising, he fled abroad, was sentenced to death in absentia, and was in fact hung in effigy in VIENNA’s marketplace. During his exile he visited several west European countries and thoroughly familiarized himself with the intricacies of European politics and diplomacy. Amnestied in 1857, he returned to Hungary. Working hand-in-hand with FERENC DEÁK, he was instrumental in drafting the Hungarian terms of the compromise with the Habsburgs that by painful degrees emerged after Austria’s defeat at the hands of Prussia in the summer of 1866. He was later, together with Deák, one of the participants in Vienna in the discussions that led to the conclusion of the AUSGLEICH in February 1867. From that time on he was continually active in political life, in the service first of Hungary and then of the Dual Monarchy. After the Great Compromise he was named, at the recommendation of Deák, prime minister of Hungary. It was he who placed the crown of St. Stephen on the emperor’s head when the latter was crowned king of Hungary on June 8, 1867. As prime minister he relaxed the stringent censorship of the press that since the revolution had hampered free expression; he also mitigated the repressive legislation against the Jews.

Having been born in northern Hungary (in Kassa, in the largely Slovak-populated Uplands), he feared somewhat extravagantly that the Hungarian nation would become submerged in the Slavic sea; for that reason he strongly favored dualism—that is, close links to Austria— as well as alliance or alignment with Germany as a means of keeping Russia, protector of Slavs in the empire and in the Balkans, in check. When plans were developed in Vienna for giving Bohemia with its Czech population equal status with Hungary in the monarchy, he strenuously opposed such a measure.

In 1871, when Emperor Francis Joseph abandoned his plans for revanche against Germany and sought rapprochement, he dismissed the anti-German FRIEDRICH BEUST as joint foreign minister and, on November 14, 1871, appointed Andrássy in his stead. The brunt of Andrássy’s foreign policy was resistance to Russian expansion in the Balkans and curbing Serbian ambitions to become the center of a South Slav federation. When revolt broke out in BOSNIAHERCEGOVINA against Ottoman rule in 1875, he strongly advocated the absorption of those provinces into the Dual Monarchy, as well as that of the sanjak of Novibazar, which separated Serbia from Montenegro and which in Austrian hands could serve as an Ausfalltor (springboard) for the monarchy into the Balkans toward Saloniki. He achieved these goals at the CONGRESS OF BERLIN in the summer of 1878, following a war between Russia and Turkey.

Pleading ill health, but most likely because he was discomfited by criticisms of his Balkan policy, he resigned as foreign minister on October 8, 1879. First, however, he put his signature to an Austro-Hungarian alliance with Germany, directed chiefly against Russia. He remained a member of the Hungarian upper house to the end of his life.

EUROPE DURING 1848

2009-06-11T23:24:00.001+08:00

Rebellions broke out across Europe during 1848, inspired by the success of the French in abolishing their monarchy in February. The Habsburgs faced rebellions in Hungary and in the Italian cities of Milan and Venice, which were supported by Piedmont. Although the revolutions in Italy, Germany and Hungary were all defeated, the liberal constitutions, unification and independence they were seeking did eventually come about.

THE REVOLUTIONS OF 1848

By 1848 many of the European countries were suffering from an economic crisis; the failure of the potato and grain crops in 1845-46 was reflected in the price of food. There was political discontent at different social levels: peasants demanded total abolition of the feudal system, industrial workers sought improvements in their working conditions, and middle-class professionals wanted increased political rights. In Italy and Germany there were growing movements for unification and independence. Revolutionary agitation began in Paris in February 1848, forcing the abdication of Louis Philippe and the establishment of the Second Republic. It then spread across central Europe. The Habsburg Empire, faced with demands for a separate Hungarian government, as well as demonstrations on the streets of Vienna, initially gave in to the demands of the Hungarian nationalists and granted them a separate constitution. This, however, was annulled some months later, leading to a declaration of independence by Hungary. The Austrian response was to quell the revolt in 1849 with the help of Russian forces. Discontent in Austria spilled over into the southern states of the German Confederation, and liberals in Berlin demanded a more constitutional government. As a result, the first National Parliament of the German Confederation was summoned in May 1848.

FROM REVOLUTION TO REACTION

In June 1848 struggles between the moderate and the radical republicans culminated in three days of rioting on the streets of Paris. In crushing the rioters the more conservative factions gained control, a trend that was repeated in Prussia, where royal power was reaffirmed. The second half of 1848 was marked by waves of reaction that spread from one city to another. The restoration of Austrian control over Hungary was achieved partly by playing off against each other the different ethnic groups within the empire. However, despite the suppression of the 1848 revolutionaries, most of the reforms they had proposed were carried out in the second half of the century, and at least some of the nationalist movements were successful.

Count István Széchenyi

2009-06-08T09:55:00.002+08:00

Hungarian politician and statesman, the chief reformer in the years preceding the revolution of 1848

Son of Count Ferenc Széchenyi, founder of the Hungarian National Museum. As a young soldier Széchenyi had participated in the campaigns against Napoleon I, fought in the Battle of Nations at Leipzig in 1813 and participated in the social whirl of the CONGRESS OF VIENNA in 1815. After the war he traveled widely and returned with the impression that his homeland was far behind west European states in culture and social development. He decided to devote himself to uplifting Hungary to a worthy place among European nations. He made his first public political appearance in 1825, when Emperor FRANCIS I reconvened the Hungarian Diet after an 11-year absence. The initiative for a cultural revival did not come from him; the noble estates of the Diet, in order to strengthen Hungarian national feeling and consciousness, urged the establishment of a scientific association, or, preferably, a national academy. The financial means for such an undertaking were not readily available and Széchenyi volunteered to donate a year’s income from his estates toward that end. Many others offered financial support and the academy became a reality. Széchenyi intended much more, however, than merely a cultural upswing. In a series of books (Credit, World, Stadium) he explored the reasons for Hungary’s backward state.

He sent several reform proposals to the imperial chancellor KLEMENS VON METTERNICH, but the latter, in the grip of postrevolutionary conservatism, had little interest in reformist ideas. Széchenyi then launched his own initiatives, usually on the English model; he organized horse races, wrote a popular book about horses, established in Budapest a casino in which nobles of a progressive bent congregated, and soon casinos sprang up in many provincial cities.

The 1830 revolution in Paris and the Polish uprising against Russian rule of the same year deeply affected Széchenyi and gave impetus to his hitherto tentative ideas for the necessity for reform. He became ever more outspoken in his criticism of the feudal system, but his chief interest remained the promotion of native culture. He recognized that a national revival made the development of the Hungarian language, which had been losing ground to the Latin and the German, imperative, and he became a champion of neology, the Magyarization of foreign terms, the Hungarian version of which either did not exist or had fallen into disuse.

It was in 1830 that he published his book Credit, which attracted immediate attention. In 1828, he had applied for a bank loan to modernize his estate but was refused because of a hostile reaction from many conservative nobles to whom any measure curtailing feudal privilege, a measure Széchenyi advocated, was anathema. In his book he analyzed the adverse effects of the lack of investable capital for lack of credit. More progressive-minded landowners welcomed Széchenyi’s ideas and some, especially the young Wesselényi, even proposed going beyond them, advocating, for instance, the involvement of peasants in the legislative process. Széchenyi, who above all wanted to avoid a confrontation with the government in VIENNA, turned his attention to politically less explosive activities. He planned, after sailing down the Danube as far as he could, to make Hungary the eastern end of a continuous waterway, connecting it to the west. It was at his legislative initiative that the first bridge between the cities of Buda and Pest, the Chain Bridge, was built and in the process he breached the nobility’s freedom from all taxation by providing that nobles as well as commoners pay tolls when crossing the bridge. The Vienna government, honoring Széchenyi’s moderate reforming activities, appointed him to various prestigious positions in the fields of transportation and communication. In the 1840s his political star began to sink as a much more radical reform movement, spearheaded largely by the gentry, began to gain ground and to attract to itself large numbers of the middle nobility.

The latter movement gained an exceptionally gifted and eloquent champion in the person of LOUIS KOSSUTH and for several years, until the outbreak of the revolution of 1848, the two men engaged in a spirited and not always friendly press debate over constitutional and other questions. One point of lively contention was that Széchenyi still trusted the high nobility to spearhead a gradual but persistent reform movement, whereas Kossuth regarded the aristocracy as hidebound and reactionary and put his faith in the lower nobility with whom the preservation of the old order never became an article of faith. Although it was Kossuth who dubbed Széchenyi “the greatest Hungarian,” he also took issue with the latter’s readiness to envision Hungary’s future in close alliance with and under the aegis of the Habsburg monarchy. Kossuth mapped a far more independent course, and his bold visions culminated in Hungary’s armed challenge to the Habsburgs in 1848 and 1849.

Széchenyi’s role in the tumultuous March days of 1848 was an ambiguous one; although he championed a never clearly defined national independence, he was also ready to work together with Vienna and his vision of Hungary’s future was within the imperial structure; had it not been for the presence of Kossuth and the radical elements around him, he may have had a salutary restraining influence on the headlong rush toward confrontation with the Habsburgs. In the short-lived Batthyány government of March 1848 Széchenyi was minister of finance. In September of that year he experienced an apparent mental collapse and was taken to the medical facilities at Döbling in Austria, where he remained for the next decade. In 1857 the interior minister ALEXANDER BACH, confident that imperial authority had been firmly reestablished, issued a pamphlet titled Rückblick auf die jüngste Entwicklungsperiode Ungarns (A retrospective glance at the most recent developmental phase of Hungary) Széchenyi responded to the pamphlet the next year with a pamphlet of his own, titled, Ein Blick auf den Anonymen Rückblick (A glance at the anonymous retrospective glance), assailing not only Bach but the person of the emperor as well. The writing was published in London. When it became known in Vienna, the government ordered a search of Széchenyi’s house and, in the process, a good part of his papers were impounded. This action produced a new crisis in his mental and emotional condition. On April 8, 1860, he ended his life with a pistol shot in the head. The requiem for his salvation was attended by 80,000 people and was an occasion for new demonstrations against Habsburg rule. In death Széchenyi became a symbol of national independence.

ARTÚR GÖRGEY

2009-06-05T12:03:00.001+08:00

Artúr Görgey painted by Miklós Barabás

Görgey, Artur (1818–1916) Hungarian military officer, commanding general of the Hungarian Honvéd army during the revolution of 1848–49

Son of an impoverished noble, he began his military studies in the sapper school at age 14; at age 21 he was promoted to lieutenant in the bodyguard; in 1842 he became first lieutenant in the cavalry. After his discharge in 1845 he studied chemistry at Prague University. When revolutionary events in March 1848 took a sudden turn toward Hungarian independence from Habsburg rule, he offered his services to the new government. On June 13 he was promoted to captain, and a month later to major. In November the National Defense Committee of the Hungarian parliament, at the recommendation of LÁJOS KOSSUTH, promoted him to general. That winter he made his mark by employing quick maneuvers against the invading Habsburg army and with his skill he succeeded in demolishing the enemy line with concentrated artillery fire. Politically, however, he promoted compromise with the Habsburgs, a course that favored the interests of the middle nobility to which he belonged against the high aristocracy that owned immense estates and wielded dominant political influence. He defied Kossuth’s order to engage the enemy in open battle and, in a pronouncement at Vác in January 1849, announced his readiness for compromise. By doing so he isolated himself from the National Defense Committee and that winter he acted independently. By spring military realities compelled him to join up with an army on the Upper Tisza, which acted in concert with the Defense Committee. After spectacular military successes that spring, he made common cause with the peace party and placed himself in open opposition to Kossuth and the radicals who strove for a complete break with the Habsburgs. His position gained enough support for him to be named minister of defense from May 7 to July 14. He entered the field again after the Russian army, which the new emperor FRANCIS JOSEPH had invited to help put down the Hungarian rising, invaded the country. Realizing the overwhelming odds against his forces, on August 13, at the town of Világos, he unconditionally surrendered to the Russian army. During the heavy reprisals that followed, he was a prime candidate for being tried for treason but, at the intercession of Czar Nicholas I, he was spared and exiled to Klagenfurt in Austria.

LAJOS KOSSUTH, (1802–1894)

2009-06-05T11:56:00.001+08:00

Hungarian politician, statesman, reformer, finance minister the head of government during Hungarian uprising against the Habsburgs in 1848–49

His father, László, of Slovakian stock, was Lutheran, a lawyer by profession, representing landowners in his county of Zemplén. His mother, Karolina Weber, was German. An older sister died in childhood. Lajos had four younger sisters. In 1841 he married Terezia Meszlényi who bore him three sons and a daughter. He attended the Protestant academy Sárospatak and also studied law there, but it was only in 1824 that he obtained his law degree from University of Budapest. Unable to find a government position, he began to work for one of his father’s clients, Etelka Andrássy, with whom he was reported to have had a close relationship. He first attracted public attention with a major speech he made in the summer of 1831 on behalf of the Poles, who were then fighting a heroic battle against the Russians for their independent nationhood. In 1832 Mme. Andrássy arranged for him to serve as a deputy delegate in the national Diet at Pozsony, an assignment that somewhat relieved his narrow, confining existence. In Pozsony he established contact with various reform-minded politicians. Noting that no minutes were kept of the proceedings of the Diet, he began to write informal reports, in colorful, arresting prose. Some of his colleagues copied his reports and distributed them. His political philosophy had no clear focus, but he was oppositionist in temperament and found much to oppose in the Habsburg Empire, whose policies were still directed by the heavy-handed and stubbornly conservative KLEMENS VON METTERNICH. Kossuth’s term of service in Pozsony ended in 1836; by then his reports had attracted so much attention that the Pest County Assembly invited him to cover its proceedings as well. He published these accounts under the title Törvényhatósági Tudositások (Municipal board reports), but whereas in Pozsony he had been protected by his parliamentary immunity, in Pest he was a freelancer, responsible for what he wrote, and in 1837, after a long investigative detainment, he was sentenced to four years in prison. His “crime” was to attack feudal privilege and to speak in favor of Hungary’s constitutional independence and in defense of civil liberties. For all his liberal posturing, he was an elitist, firmly believing that his contemplated reforms could be accomplished only under the leadership of the nobility.

Amnestied in 1840, he already had a wide following. But his views also provoked criticism from conservatives and he became involved in a sharp exchange with them in articles and pamphlets. The owner of a biweekly publication Pesti Hirlap (Budapest courier) hired him as an editor. He remained a controversial figure. Apart from antagonizing the landed magnates whose prosperity depended on serf labor, he also angered Croats and other subject nationalities by advertising and defending the superiority of the Hungarian nation over them. His most notable debate was with another reformer of much more conservative bent, ISTVÁN SZÉCHENYI, who attacked Kossuth in a book, Kelet Népe (People of the East) and in articles, accusing him of carrying his people to the grave with his immoderate demands, especially for a complete break with the Habsburgs, who were too powerful to be challenged in their imperial rights. Although, as publicists and historians noted, Széchenyi spoke to the mind and Kossuth to the heart, it was the latter who commanded wider support. But as his language became more fiery, he was dismissed from the Pesti Hirlap for inciting too much controversy. He had an offer from VIENNA to put his journalistic gifts in the service of the government but that offer he refused. He became briefly fascinated with the possibilities of industrial development and sought to promote them in Hungary, with little success.

It was the revolution of 1848 that catapulted him to national, and eventually international, recognition. Elected to the national Diet in 1847, he was a leading figure in the so-called national opposition that sponsored a number of reforms, all with the ultimate goal of securing Hungary’s independence from the Habsburg Empire. The program, seemingly stillborn when it was first introduced, gained impetus when the news of the revolution in Paris reached BUDAPEST early in March 1848. Kossuth then demanded that his reform program be enacted without delay. Not only did he succeed, but he was chosen as a member of the delegation that carried the set of demands passed by the Diet to Vienna, where a terrified court fearing for its very survival accepted them. When LAJOS BATTHYÁNY formed a cabinet in April 1848 with the reformist program, he made Kossuth his finance minister. Used to controversy and glorying in it, Kossuth soon antagonized many of his fellow ministers who were not inclined to go as far as he and wanted to avoid a complete break with Vienna. However, such a break could no longer be avoided. The imperial government, facing an armed uprising in its Italian provinces, readied a force to defeat it and proposed to include Hungarians in it as well. Kossuth countenanced such inclusion only on condition that promises were made for the recognition of a measure of Hungarian independence. When the royal court refused to make such a promise, he prevailed on the Diet to reject the request for troops and at the same time to raise a national Hungarian force, on the argument, not without foundation, that the subject nationality of Croats were making ready to invade Hungary. He had a measure passed to call up 200,000 recruits and to provide for a defense fund of 2 million forints. In September 1848 he ordered the issue of Hungarian bank notes (Kossuth bankók). He also called for a national defense commission to organize the country’s defense. In that same month, during a highly successful recruitment campaign, he called the people of the Great Plains to arms to protect the achievements of the revolution. After the resignation of the Batthyány government following a Croat invasion, Kossuth was named head of the national defense commission and became the virtual dictator of the country. From this time on he devoted all his energies to the solution of the complicated political, economic, and social problems that beset his nation. Firmly opposed to the “peace party” that sought conciliation with the Habsburgs, he succeeded in rendering them ineffectual. Imperial armies were invading Hungary and the government moved to the east-central city of Debrecen. There Kossuth’s volcanic energies and his unbridled temperament determined the course taken by his government. When on December 2, 1848, the emperor “Benevolent Ferdinand” (so called because he was weak-minded and could be cited only for his good intentions) was removed and replaced by his nephew FRANCIS JOSEPH, Kossuth prevailed on the Diet to reject both the removal and the replacement. When Vienna defied him, the Diet, now called National Assembly, on April 14, 1849, announced the removal of the Hungarian crown from the House of Hapsburg. At the same time Kossuth was nominated governor president of Hungary. However, the rapid deterioration of the military situation, Russian intervention on behalf of the beleaguered Habsburgs, and conflicts within his own leadership, forced Kossuth on August 11 to resign. He transferred his powers to the military commander, Artur Görgey. Knowing that defeat was unavoidable and that the Vienna court would be unforgiving of his treason, Kossuth fled to Turkey. Both the Austrians and the Russians asked for his extradition, but the sultan, under western pressure, refused. Kossuth first lived in Vidin and Sumen, in European Turkey, but he was later exiled to Asia Minor. The American government invited him to visit and he responded, in 1851, stopping on the way in Britain. He was accorded an enthusiastic reception in both countries. From 1852 on he lived in London. He judged the conflicts among the great powers as the best way to restore Hungary’s independence. In emigration he worked out several plans toward that end. In 1859, as war between France and Austria loomed, French Emperor Napoleon III approached him with the commission to organize a Hungarian national uprising against the Habsburgs. This commission Kossuth accepted, but the plan failed when Napoleon III made a premature peace with Austria and lost interest in the Hungarian cause. From 1861 Kossuth lived in Italy and in his so-called Cassandra letter he sharply criticized the AUSGLEICH of 1867. He lived out his remaining years in Torino, Italy, in poverty, abandoned by friends and onetime supporters. When he died in 1894, at age 92, his body was returned to Hungary and interred amid national mourning.

TSARIST INTERVENTION IN HUNGARY

2009-06-02T23:51:00.002+08:00

Equestrian portrait of Nicholas I by Alexander Petrovich Schwabe

In July 1848 the Hungarians, led by Lajos Kossuth, fought for liberation from Austria. However, upon the Austrians’ request in 1849, Tsar Nicholas I sent Russian troops to crush the rebellion. Nevertheless, Kossuth’s initiative paved the way for the compromise in March 1867 (known in German as the Ausgleich), which granted both the Austrian and Hungarian kingdoms separate parliaments with which to govern their respective internal affairs. It also established a dual monarchy, whereby a single emperor (Francis Joseph I) conducted the financial, foreign, and military affairs of the two kingdoms.

Nicholas I defined himself and his system as a militaristic one, and the first few years of his rule also witnessed his consolidation of power through force. He continued the wars in the Caucasus begun by Alexander I, and consolidated Russian power in Transcaucasia by defeating the Persians in 1828. Russia also fought the Ottoman Empire in 1828–1829 over the rights of Christian subjects in Turkey and disagreements over territories between the two empires. Although the fighting produced mixed results, Russia considered itself a victor and gained concessions. One year later, in 1830, a revolt broke out in Poland, an autonomous part of the Russian Empire. The revolt spread from Warsaw to the western provinces of Russia, and Nicholas sent in troops to crush it in 1831. With the rebellion over, Nicholas announced the Organic Statute of 1832, which increased Russian control over Polish affairs. The Polish revolt brought back memories of 1825 for Nicholas, who responded by pushing further Russification programs throughout his empire. Order reigned, but nationalist reactions in Poland, Ukraine, and elsewhere would ensure problems for future Russian rulers.

Nicholas also presided over increasingly oppressive measures directed at any forms of perceived opposition to his rule. Russian culture began to flourish in the decade between 1838 and 1848, as writers from Mikhail Lermontov to Nikolai Gogol and critics such as Vissarion Belinsky and Alexander Herzen burst onto the Russian cultural scene. Eventually, as their writings increasingly criticized the Nicholaevan system, the tsar cracked down, and his Third Section arrested numerous intellectuals. Nicholas’s reputation as the quintessential autocrat developed from these policies, which reached an apex in 1848. When revolutions broke out across Europe, Nicholas was convinced that they were a threat to the existence of his system. He sent Russian troops to crush rebellions in Moldavia and Wallachia in 1848 and to support Austrian rights in Lombardy and Hungary in 1849. At home, Nicholas oversaw further censorship and repressions of universities. By 1850, he had earned his reputation as the Gendarme of Europe.

At the end of 1848, after the successful suppression of a revolt in Vienna in October, a new Austrian government led by Schwarzenberg took office and the Emperor Ferdinand abdicated in favour of his young nephew, Francis Joseph. The Austrians were now able to turn their attention to the restoration of Habsburg rule in Hungary. In Prussia Frederick William IV, encouraged by the Austrian example, dissolved the Prussian constituent assembly and promulgated a new constitution. As 1848 drew to a close, it seemed as if order was being restored. However, in January 1849, the effects in Europe of Kossuth's decision to make use of the Poles in the Hungarian forces brought an unpleasant surprise in the shape of the victories of the Hungarian army in Transylvania led by General Bern. At the request of the local Austrian military commander and in the face of opposition from Schwarzenberg, Nicholas reluctantly agreed to a limited intervention by some of the Russian troops based in the Danubian Principalities in support of the Austrians. The intervention was not successful and by the end of March the Russian troops were forced to withdraw along with the defeated Austrian forces. Nicholas was dismayed and determined that any further military intervention he might be called upon to make would be on a suitably massive scale.

Bern's success in Transylvania was followed by further Hungarian victories elsewhere on Hungary under the leadership of General Görgey and by the middle of April the situation had become critical. The replacement of Windischgraetz by Weiden as Austrian Commander-in-Chief in Hungary brought no improvement. Despite Radetzky's victory against Piedmont at Novara on 23rd March, continuing Austrian difficulties in Italy made it impossible to transfer troops from there for use against Hungary.

As a result, a reluctant Schwarzenberg and Austrian Council of Ministers were compelled to yield to military necessity and appeal to Nicholas for Russian assistance in suppressing the revolt in Hungary. Austria's first request was for aid in restoring the situation in Transylvania which was rejected by Nicholas as being impractical. This was followed by an urgent personal appeal to Paskevich in Warsaw for the dispatch of Russian troops to assist the Austrians in dealing with the threat of a Hungarian attack on Vienna and renewed outbreak of revolution in the city. Much to Nicholas' displeasure Paskevich sent a composite Russian division by rail from Cracow to Moravia without seeking the Tsar's approval.

Nicholas had made it clear from the outset of the revolutions in Europe which began in 1848 that he would not intervene unless Russia's interests were directly threatened. He could hardly refuse a request from the Austrians for aid especially as he had given a solemn promise to the Emperor Francis before his death that he would come to the assistance of his "idiot son" or successor if misfortune should occur. Nicholas was not the man to break his promise and in any case, he was being asked to defend the cause of order in the struggle against revolution which had begun in France in 1789. Nevertheless, just as be had been reluctant to intervene in the Danubian Principalities the previous year, he wished to be certain that Russia's own interests were directly threatened.

The increasing involvement of the Poles in Hungarian affairs provided Nicholas with the answer to any doubts which he may have had. Bern's successes in Transylvania were followed by reports of a threatened invasion of Galicia, possibly led by General Dembinski, another of the Poles who had joined the Hungarian cause. A Polish general was active in the Sardinian army and Nicholas had not forgotten the part played by the Poles in causing disturbances in the Danubian Principalities. It seemed to him that Hungary was about to become the centre of a general conspiracy led by Russia's eternal enemies, the Poles, against all that was sacred. The Hungarian military successes were beginning to have a disturbing effect on the population of Russian Poland and accordingly Austria's request for aid must be granted for Russia's own safety. In early 1848 Nicholas had spoken to an Austrian diplomat of his concern about the threat from Galica to Russian Poland and he was to use the same phrase "une insurrection à mes portes" t o the French Ambassador who arrived in Warsaw as the campaign in Hungary was drawing to a close. In a conversation about the reasons for his intervention Nesselrode was to compare the role of the Russian intervention force to that of a fire brigade sent to prevent the spread of a fire which had broken out in a neighbour's house.

The Austrians were, of course, well aware of Nicholas' concern about the Poles and it seems quite probable that they deliberately played on his feelings by exaggerating the number of Poles who had enlisted in the Hungarian army. The official commentary which accompanied the Russian manifesto of 8th May 1849 announcing the intervention in Hungary referred to 20,000 Poles serving in the Hungarian army, whereas the true number was much less, possibly 3,000 or 4,000.

In short, Nicholas' reasons for intervening in Hungary were a combination of a commitment to the cause of absolutism and monarchical solidarity, combined with a desire to prevent the spread of Polish inspired subversion to Russian Poland and Western Russia. There seems little doubt that it was fear of the Poles which tipped the scales in favour of Austria's request. Indeed, when the news of Görgey's surrender to the Russians on 13th August reached Warsaw Nicholas fell on his knees and thanked God that he no longer had to sacrifice Russian blood for a cause which was not directly the cause of Russia. As Bismarck was to remark in his memoirs, Nicholas was an idealist with a chivalrous nature who never lost this characteristic throughout his reign. But Austria's refusal to come to Russia's aid during the Crimean War was to show Nicholas that there is no such thing as gratitude in politics and that he had been right to have doubts about the wisdom of intervention.

Conclusion

The Russian intervention in Hungary was one of the most significant events that took place during the revolutionary years of 1848 and 1849. Its success had an unfortunate effect on Nicholas who became even more convinced of his own omnipotence and even less willing to listen to argument. This judgement by one of the Tsar's closest adviers, A. S. Menshikov, the Minister of the Navy, is echoed by Lord Bloomfield, the British Ambassador to Russia, who had his first audience with Nicholas on 17th December 1849 after his return from leave in mid-October. (The delay was caused by the refugee crisis in Turkey.) In a private letter to Palmerston sent two days afterwards, the ambassador wrote that the "trial of 1849" had succeeded beyond the Tsar's expectations and that he now believed he could "dictate the law to a great portion of Europe." Nicholas seemed to be completely unaffected by the political changes which had taken place and appeared to be more convinced than ever of the "superiority of absolute government and the irresistibilty of his vast power". Despite these words, even Lord Bloomfield seemed over-awed by the sheer size of the Russian army and after receiving a report on it from his French colleague, General de La Moricière, wrote to Palmerston of its great efficiency. The Crimean War was to prove to be a greater test for the Russian army than the eight week campaign in Hungary.

Besides over-estimating his military power, Nicholas also over-estimated his political influence. It was Nicholas' misfortune that he became the ruler of Russia in an age of change, just as Philip II became ruler of Spain in an age of dissolving faith. Nicholas completely failed to understand that ideas could not be kept out of Russia in the age of the railway and the steamship. Nor could he comprehend the nature of a constitutional monarchy and that in the Europe which had emerged after the Napoleonic Wars relations between states could no longer be conducted on the basis of personal relationships between sovereigns, as had been possible in the previous century. The point was made to him by Queen Victoria in a reply she sent to one of the Tsar's personal appeals shortly before the outbreak of the Crimean War;

"Whatever the purity of the motives which direct the actions of a sovereign of even the most elevated character, Your Majesty knows that personal qualities are not sufficient in international transactions by which a state binds itself towards another in solemn engagements."

Thus it came about that four years after his intervention in Hungary Nicholas found himself, as Nesselrode had warned him, fighting a war against Great Britain, France, Turkey and Sardinia while his erstwhile allies Austria and Prussia remained neutral. Even more ironically he found himself wondering how he could best exploit any disturbances that might break out in Hungary in the course of the war in order to make Austria carry out his wishes. It was an outcome to his intervention in Hungary which must have seemed utterly remote on the evening of 21st April 1849, as he sat in his study on the first floor of the Grand Palace in the Kremlin, looking out on the river.

Featured Website: Austro-Hungarian Land Forces 1848-1918

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Feldmarschall Joseph Graf Radetzky de Radetz

By Glenn Jewison & Jörg C. Steiner

The aim of this site is to document the organisational history of the land forces of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy from just prior to the outbreak of the Great War until the collapse of the monarchy in 1918. The subject is complex and large. Very little is available in the English language and what is available tends to be of the allied forces intelligence type information and books derived from those sources. These were of necessity produced during wartime in difficult conditions and are not to be considered as fully reliable or accurate. In compiling the tables of units on this site we have therefore consulted the original "Schematismus" (army lists) and the official Austrian history of the Great War - "Österreich-Ungarns letzter Krieg". These are not only primary sources but also have the advantage of also providing accurate German language terminology and spelling. As previously stated, the subject is huge and therefore the site will be a continually evolving project. We intend to produce as time goes on not only the organisation of the land forces, but also biographies of senior commanders, individual regimental histories and details of particular engagements and battles in the not too well documented Italian, Galician, Carpathian, Rumanian and Serbian theatres of operations. The primary motive for producing a site of this type was to document the largely unknown subject of the Austro-Hungarian forces and to provide a mirror to Mick O'Shea's Pocket German Army site. In this way we can hopefully provide information on both of the major players which made up the central powers in the Great War. We have additionally decided to also expand the scope of the site to encompass the period from 1848 up to the collapse of the Monarchy and the post-war Bundesheer. We welcome comments and suggestions and can be reached via email. Finally a word of thanks to Klemen Lužar for his fine contributions on the Isonzo front, to Christian Frech for his expertise on organisational and MMThO themes, to Enzo Calabresi for providing photographs from his superb collection and to Christian Ortner for his excellent knowledge on the Austro-Hungarian Assault Troops and their insignia.

AUSTRIA 1848

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Of the year 1848 the British historian Trevelyan remarked that it was the great turning point at which history failed to turn. Given the accumulation of tensions and conflicts since the Congress of Vienna, nationalistic passions, the miserable condition of the peasantry, entrepreneurs chafing under restrictions placed on them, intellectuals stifled by censorship and other restrictions on freedom of expression, it was nearly a miracle that a dynasty that was known for its mediocrity more than for anything else was able to survive the upheavals of 1848–49 and reestablish itself with its powers undiminished. The lack of creative leadership among revolutionary forces, except in Hungary, was no doubt a factor in the failure but there was also the almost mystical staying power of the Habsburgs in face of all adversity, it gave them reason to trust divine providence to which, more than to their subjects, they felt responsible.

The first reaction to the news from Paris erupted in Hungary, where Lajos Kossuth early in March demanded a democratic constitution providing for popular representation. Vienna liberals quickly took their cue; ad hoc assemblies composed mainly of staid bourgeois began drafting petitions to the throne almost identical to the one issued by Kossuth. On March 13, demonstrations, heretofore peaceful, erupted into armed clashes in the Austrian capital when a crowd of students surrounded the parliament building in the Herrengasse and police fired on them; a number of demonstrators died. Soon violence spread to other parts of the city. The two ranking archdukes on the state conference decided to offer up to the crowd the aged Metternich, the most resented figure in the empire. That evening Metternich, after a feeble attempt to display his steadfastness, resigned and took the long road into exile. As had happened in France, the disorders were largely confined to the capital; apart from some minor outbreaks in Graz, the countryside remained quiet. But outside the German lands, in Hungary, Italy, Bohemia, Galicia, even in Croatia, the ferment was unmistakable. The Vienna court hesitated between making concessions and applying force. The latter was the customary course of action but tempers were too explosive to employ it without grave risk. Mere personnel changes in the government after the flight of Metternich were not likely to satisfy the demonstrators. The mention of a constitution, on the other hand, even if insincerely meant, still carried magic. Accordingly, on April 25 the new interior minister, Baron Pillersdorf, proclaimed one, though only for the hereditary lands. It provided for a bicameral legislature, the lower house elected by adult male taxpayers, the upper named by the emperor from among landed magnates and trusted aristocrats. The emperor, according to this forlorn document, had an absolute veto over measures passed by either house.

The draft did not calm revolutionary passions; crowds invaded the royal palace, demanding the withdrawal of Pillersdorf’s proposed constitution. Ferdinand and his court, insofar as they had any policy at all, geared their reaction to the disorders to the degree of danger they represented. By May passions seemed to have cooled and the emperor attempted to dissolve the national guard, which had made itself responsible for maintaining order in the capital. This occasioned another uprising and, reluctantly, the royal court decided that Vienna was no longer a safe city in which to reside. Ferdinand fled to the town of Innsbruck in the loyal Tyrol, where he was received with thunderous enthusiasm. However, Vienna was still the functional nerve center of a sprawling empire, and the streets there were ruled by a bourgeois national guard, well-to-do men of progressive views, whose aspirations did not go further than royal assurances for the protection of, first and foremost, private property. They were joined by “academic legions,” composed largely of university youth. In June the government at last convoked the parliament provided for in Pillersdorf’s draft, the Reichstag as it was called, but that body, made up of a majority of Slavs, rejected the very constitution on which its authority rested. Discussions of proposed reforms continued but the only one of import that emerged, on September 5, was one calling for the emancipation of the serfs.

In August the emperor and his entourage, satisfied that responsible elements were once again in charge in Vienna, returned to the capital from Innsbruck. By now, however, events in Hungary rather than developments in Austria determined the course of events. Kossuth asked the help of first the court and then the newly elected Reichstag in curbing Croatian ambitions, but he met with refusal. There was no single political will left in Vienna. The court, stubbornly conservative, granted only such concessions as it could not avoid if it wanted to maintain itself, always in the hope that once order was reestablished it could withdraw them. The popular mood in Vienna, however, was still revolutionary and favored any action that defied the Habsburgs; in the matter of Jelačić’s defiance, it sided with the brave Hungarians. When an Austrian artillery company under orders to march against Hungary crossed the city, crowds prevented its passage and bloody street battles erupted. Vienna once again became unsafe for the royal house, and Ferdinand and his court moved, this time to the Moravian city of Olmütz. A few days later the Reichstag too left Vienna and reconvened in another Moravian town, Kremsier. Obviously though, these were temporary expedients. The displaced court made preparations to reconquer Vienna by military means. On October 31 Marshal Windischgrätz, having reduced to rubble the Bohemian capital of Prague, where a disorderly pan-Slavic conference was meeting, took his artillery to the walls of Vienna and inflicted a similar fate on the capital. Royal authority was finally reestablished, and even though the price was high, the court was willing to pay it. The time for concessions had passed. They had led to nothing but demands for further reforms, and terror became the order of the day. Active and suspected revolutionaries in the Austrian capital, among them lawmakers and respectable citizens, including a number of journalists, were rounded up, summarily tried, and often shot. Military force and military justice accomplished what months of political maneuvering could not; Vienna was secure as the Habsburg capital and reform was off the agenda.

JULIUS JAKOB VON HAYNAU

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(1768–1853) commander of Austrian forces against Hungarians in 1849

Illegitimate son of the elector of the German state of Hesse, Baron von Haynau entered Austrian military service in 1801 and fought in the wars against Napoleon. He remained in service after the war and saw action during the Italian uprising against Austrian rule in 1848. In April 1849, under orders as military governor to suppress the revolt in the Lombard city of Brescia, he acted with such severity that he earned the nickname “Hyena of Brescia.” In short order his services were required on another front: the Hungarian uprising against Austria was still in full force. In April 1849 FRANCIS JOSEPH, emperor for only four months, was compelled to seek military help against the Hungarians from the Russian czar, Nicholas I. Pending the arrival of Russian forces, at the recommendation of Marshal Radetzky, who had conquered the Italian revolt, he appointed Haynau commander in chief of the Austrian forces engaged against the Hungarian rebel army. True, Haynau’s personnel file contained items that might have given the emperor pause, but then, the chief job of the general was to liquidate a stubborn revolt. A previous commander of his had this to say: “Haynau is 61 years old, but he looks in his seventies, is of ill health. He thoroughly knows the rules of military service but seeks glory in sharpening those rules so that he could proceed against men he doesn’t like. These men he torments with calculating hatred. He is well versed in strategic studies but is possessed of an avarice that offends his military honor. Because of his moral failings everybody in contact with him wishes to see him go, for no one likes to be in his company in military service. It would be best to pension him off.” Possibly though these were just the qualities the young emperor deemed useful in dealing with rebels.

On August 16, 1849, when the Hungarian forces had already surrendered to the Russians, though the news had not yet reached the capital, a council of ministers in Vienna instructed Haynau to deal with the rebels leniently, to allow political and military officers to go abroad within a fixed time period, and enlisted men to return home. But four days later, with Hungarian surrender an accomplished fact, the emperor, under the influence of his mother Sophie and his premier FELIX SCHWARZENBERG, who declared that “We must not shrink from a little blood bath,” decided to deal with the former insurgents harshly and gave Haynau full powers to carry out the retributions. Haynau prepared to have some hangings as early as August 24, days after the Hungarian army had laid down its arms, but the Russians intervened. They did not want to be witness to the retributions they themselves had helped to bring about. Also, there still were pockets of Hungarian resistance, and they might become more determined if the rebels knew what fate awaited them. But once all military action ceased and the Russians had retreated, nothing stood in the way of reprisals. The first victims were 13 military officers hanged in ARAD, and the former Hungarian minister president BATTHYÁNY, executed in Budapest. Under Haynau’s dispositions, the summary trials and condemnations continued. Just how many fell victim to them has never been established. According to Austrian statistics, during the fall and winter of 1849, 120 persons were executed following court procedures. Many more were shot “trying to escape.” About 1,200 were sentenced to prison. Thousands emigrated while 40,000 to 50,000 men were conscripted into the imperial army.

These actions occasioned vocal protests from abroad. British foreign secretary Palmerston was quoted as saying, “The Austrians are the worst beasts among those who ever called themselves cultured people; their atrocities in Galicia, Italy, Hungary and Transylvania can only be compared to the outrages of African and Haitian negroes.” Under the influence of foreign protests, and because most of the political criminals had already been dealt with, the Austrian Council of Ministers on October 26 banned further executions. But Haynau remained unimpressed and ordered further condemnations and hangings. It placed the emperor in an embarrassing position. If he dismissed Haynau he in effect impeached his own judgment. After a decent interval he bestowed on the general the dignity of baron (Freiherr) and then, largely at the instance of his new minister of the interior ALEXANDER BACH, he dismissed him in July 1850. Haynau then made several trips abroad, but his reception was so hostile, at times, as in London in 1850 and Brussels in 1852, leading to mob violence, that he had to return home. In 1853, with troubles again brewing in Italy, the emperor recalled him to active service; only his death on March 14, 1853, prevented another grimly memorable tenure as military governor.

Ferdinand I of Austria

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Ferdinand
Emperor of Austria King of Hungary, Lombardy and Venetia, and Bohemia

Reign	2 March, 1835 - 2 December, 1848
Predecessor	Francis I
Successor	Francis Joseph I
Spouse	Maria Anna of Sardinia
Full name
Ferdinand Charles Leopold Joseph Francis Marcelin
Father	Francis II, Holy Roman Emperor
Mother	Maria Theresa of the Two Sicilies
Born	April 19, 1793
Died	June 29, 1875 (aged 82)

Ferdinand (April 19, 1793 - June 29, 1875) was Emperor of Austria, King of Hungary, King of Lombardy-Venetia, King of Bohemia. He chose to abdicate, after a series of revolts in 1848.

Ferdinand has been depicted as feeble-minded and incapable of ruling, but although he was epileptic and certainly not intelligent, he kept a coherent and legible diary and has even been said to have a sharp wit. The up to twenty seizures he had per day, though, severely restricted his ability to rule with any effectiveness.

Though he was not declared incapacitated, a regent's council (Archduke Luis, Count Kolowrat and Prince Metternich) steered the government. His marriage to Princess Maria Anna of Sardinia (1803-1884) was probably never consummated, nor is he believed to have had any other liaisons. He is famous for his one coherent command: when his cook told him he could not have apricot dumplings because they were out of season, he said “I'm the Emperor, and I want dumplings!” (German: Ich bin der Kaiser und ich will Knödel.)

As the revolutionaries of 1848 were marching on the palace, he is supposed to have asked Metternich for an explanation. When Metternich answered that they were making a revolution, Ferdinand is supposed to have said “But are they allowed to do that?” (Viennese German: Ja, dürfen's denn des?) He was convinced by Felix zu Schwarzenberg to abdicate in favour of his nephew, Franz Joseph (the next in line was Ferdinand's younger brother Franz Karl, but he was persuaded to waive his succession rights in favour of his son) who would occupy the Austrian throne for the next sixty-eight years.

Ferdinand recorded the events in his diary : "The affair ended with the new Emperor kneeling before his old Emperor and Lord, that is to say, me, and asking for a blessing, which I gave him, laying both hands on his head and making the sign of the Holy Cross ... then I embraced him and kissed our new master, and then we went to our room. Afterward I and my dear wife heard Holy Mass ... After that I and my dear wife packed our bags"

Ferdinand was the last King of Bohemia to be crowned as such. Due to his sympathy with Bohemia (where he spent the rest of his life in Prague Castle) he was given the Czech nickname “Ferdinand V, the Good” (Ferdinand Dobrotivý). In Austria, Ferdinand was similarly nicknamed “Ferdinand der Gütige” (Ferdinand the Benign), but also ridiculed as "Gütinand der Fertige" (Goodinand the Finished).

He is interred in tomb number 62 in the Imperial Crypt in Vienna.

TSARIST RUSSIA

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Petr Yakovlevich Chaadaev

The repression was particularly tough in Russia, the second of Europe’s pre-eminent absolutist regimes. If Metternich cast Austria in the role of Central Europe’s policeman, then Tsar Nicholas I saw himself as gendarme for the entire continent. The Russian empire had been in his iron, autocratic grip since the death of Alexander I in 1825. He had founded the notorious Third Section, the secret police, an organisation which had a tiny number of officials, but which worked through the gendarmerie and a larger number of informants, who made as many as five thousand denunciations a year. The very existence of police spies created an atmosphere in which it took a brave soul to express dissent openly. One widely believed myth held that in one office of the Third Section headquarters in Saint Petersburg there was a trap door: during a seemingly innocuous conversation, a perfectly innocent individual summoned before the police officials could be lured into saying a minor indiscretion, whereupon a lever would be pulled and the victim would fall into a dungeon below to be subjected to all sorts of unspeakable horrors.

The real oppression was bad enough for those who dared to voice their thoughts too loudly. In 1836, when the liberal intellectual Petr Chaadaev lambasted Russia for its backwardness, he met the fate that would be shared by some twentieth-century Soviet dissidents: the government declared him insane and confined him to an asylum. Even (or perhaps, given his quick temper, especially) the great poet Pushkin had to tread carefully: he was tolerated because the Tsar liked his work, but even he was subjected to the occasional rap on the knuckles. Intellectuals and writers cautiously circulated their writings in manuscript among friends first, and only later approached publishers – if they approached them at all. The Tsarist regime did not only fear dissent from among Russia’s intellectuals, it was anxious – perhaps more justifiably – of the possibility of a mass uprising by the peasantry, twenty million of whom were serfs and who had risen up with startling vengeance in the past, most recently under the renegade Cossack Emilian Pugachev in the early 1770s. It also worried about opposition from the downtrodden subject nationalities of the Empire, especially the Poles, who bore their subjugation only between fits of rebelliousness.

Since 1795 the old Polish kingdom (except for the Napoleonic interlude of the Grand Duchy of Warsaw, established in 1807), had been wiped off the map, partitioned between Russia, Prussia and Austria – and this was confirmed at the peace congress. The three ‘eastern monarchies’ therefore tried (in vain) to asphyxiate Polish nationalism under their combined weight.

TOWARDS NATIONAL REVOLT IN AUSTRIA-HUNGARY

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The Habsburg regime, in fact, was not especially oppressive – at least not by the standards of modern dictatorships. Its bureaucracy was generally honest and efficient. Moreover, Metternich used his considerable diplomatic influence to press mild reforms on the more benighted absolute rulers whose intransigence threatened to provoke violent opposition: in 1821 he promised military aid to King Ferdinand I of Naples against the monarch’s rebellious subjects, on the condition that Ferdinand made some minor concessions. Despite all the talk of the rule of law and of the benevolence of the monarchy, Metternich and other conservatives feared that, should constitutional or revolutionary movements have arisen among the diverse peoples of the Habsburg monarchy, then the very integrity of the empire would be endangered. In theory, it was held together by the subjects’ loyalty to the dynasty, the common institutions of the monarchy (including the administration and the imperial army) and, although there were religious minorities such as Jews and Protestants, the Catholicism of most Austrian subjects. In 1815 perhaps only the Germans, the Magyars, the Poles and the Italians had a deep sense of their own national identity. The first three, in particular, also dominated the other subject-nationalities of the empire, politically and socially. In Hungary the Magyar gentry lorded over the peasants who in the north were Slovaks, in the east were Transylvanian Romanians and in the south were Serbs or Croats. In Galicia the Poles tended to be the landlords holding the Ukrainian peasantry in such a state of servitude that they were practically beasts of burden. The Czechs, at least, with their high standards of education and (by 1848) the most advanced manufacturing base in the Habsburg monarchy, were beginning to challenge German hegemony in Bohemia, but one of the seething resentments among the non-Germans was that since the machinery of the state was centred in Vienna, it was dominated by German officials, whose language was usually the official medium in the law, education and administration. Even so, a developed sense of national identity was primarily shared by the aristocratic elites and the urban, middle classes, who were of course precisely the people most frustrated that opportunities in the bureaucracy, the law and in higher education were closed off unless one spoke German. This had not yet trickled down to the mass of peasants, many of whom saw the Emperor as their guardian against the depredations of their landlords, but the very fact that social difference coincided with ethnic divisions would aggravate the frequently bloody conflicts among the nationalities of Central Europe.

The resentment of the Magyars against what they saw as German dominance and overbearing Habsburg authority was potentially very dangerous to the empire. Unlike most of the other nationalities, the Magyars had a constitutional voice: the Hungarians had a diet, or parliament, which was dominated by the Magyar nobility, the clergy and the burghers of the free royal towns. Thus the ‘Hungarian nation’ – meaning in contemporary parlance those who were represented in the diet – made up a small proportion of the total population. The rest were legally defined, with graphic aptness, as the misera plebs contribuens – the poor tax-paying plebians (Latin was still, to the chagrin of patriotic Magyars, the official language of Hungarian politics and administration). The Magyar nobility none the less consisted of a fairly sizeable proportion of the Hungarian population – some 5 per cent compared to an estimated 1 per cent in pre-revolutionary France – and some of them were poor enough to be dubbed the ‘sandalled nobles’, since, it was said, they were so penniless that they could not afford boots. Yet, since these men only had their privileges and titles to distinguish them from the rest of the toiling masses, they were often the most resistant to any reform that endangered their status. Although the Habsburg Emperor, who also held the title of King of Hungary, could summon and dismiss the diet at will (and Emperor Francis sulkily refused to call the troublesome parliament between 1812 and 1825), it was difficult to raise taxation without consulting it, so it met in 1825, 1832–6, 1839–40, 1843–4 and, most dramatically, in 1847–8. Moreover, even when the parliament was not in session, the Hungarian gentry entrenched their opposition to the Habsburg monarchy in the fifty-five counties, where they elected and salaried the local officials, and where their assemblies (or ‘congregations’), which often met annually, were sometimes so bold as to claim the right to reject royal legislation.

In 1815 the Italians of Lombardy and Venetia fell under Habsburg rule. They, too, had an institutional outlet because they both had congregations, chosen from among local landowners and the towns, as well as the united ‘Congregations General’, which drew together delegates from the two provinces. These assemblies had the right to decide how to implement laws handed down by the government, represented by a viceroy living in Milan, but not to make legislation of their own. The Habsburgs had to tread carefully, for northern Italy was one of the jewels in their crown: Lombardy’s fertile, irrigated plains were a bright patchwork of wheat, of well-kept vines and of mulberry bushes, upon which silk worms produced their precious fibres. The duchy’s capital and, to the irritation of the proud Venetians, of the two provinces together, was Milan, which was culturally one of the most vibrant cities in Europe, thanks in part to the lighter touch of the censor, as compared with elsewhere in the Habsburg Empire. Lombardy-Venetia accounted for a sixth of the monarchy’s population, but contributed close to a third of its tax revenue – a fact that was not lost on Italian patriots. The Austrians worked hard to ensure that northern Italy was well and fairly governed, but the inevitable tensions arose. Educated Lombards and Venetians grumbled that Austrians occupied some 36,000 government posts, preventing Italians from enjoying their fair share of state patronage.

Outside Hungary and Lombardy-Venetia, there were no representative institutions worthy of the name in the Habsburg Empire. Since 1835 the Emperor had been the mentally disabled Ferdinand (in one famous outburst, he yelled at his courtiers, ‘I am the Emperor and I want dumplings!’). He was loved by his subjects, who affectionately referred to him as ‘Ferdy the Loony’, but of necessity the task of government was left to a council (or Staatskonferenz), dominated by Metternich. The rejection of constitutional government made repression almost unavoidable, since Metternich’s political vision would not admit the legitimacy of any opposition. There was a secret police, which operated out of offices on the Herrengasse in Vienna, but the number of officers was small – some twenty-five, including thirteen censors – so in the imperial capital they relied upon the regular police (which also handled a plethora of other tasks), while in the provinces local bureaux had to deal with both regular and secret policing. This was not a particularly intense system of surveillance, but it is also true that the activities of printers, publishers and writers were hemmed in with a range of petty, irritating regulations.10 Since only one of four categories of books was fully permitted, this fostered a climate that assumed a publication would be forbidden unless it was explicitly allowed.

POLISH REBELLION OF 1863

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Russian troops in Warsaw after the January insurrection of 1863–1864.

After decades of harsh limits on Polish autonomy, many Poles were hopeful that the situation would improve after the 1855 coronation of Alexander II. There were indeed concessions: Martial law was lifted, an amnesty was declared for all political prisoners, a new Archbishop of Warsaw was named (the position had been vacant since 1830), and censorship was made somewhat less restrictive. In 1862 a Pole named Aleksander Wielopolski was made governor of the Polish Kingdom, in an attempt to cooperate with the aristocratic elite and marginalize more radical national separatists and democratic revolutionaries. All these attempts at conciliation failed, as patriotic demonstrations broke out in late 1861 and intensified throughout 1862. The Russians tried to suppress these protests with deadly force, but that only generated more anger among the Poles, and the unrest spread.

Wielopolski tried to quash the disturbances on the night of January 23 by organizing an emergency draft into the army targeted at the young men who had been leading the demonstrations. This, too, failed, as it prompted the national movement leaders to proclaim an uprising (which was being planned in any case). The rebels proclaimed the existence of the “Temporary National Government,” which would lead the revolt and (they hoped) pave the way for a true independent Polish government afterwards.

The “January Uprising” (as it is known in Poland) was fought primarily as a guerrilla war, with small-scale assaults against individual Russian units rather than large pitched battles (which the Poles lacked the forces to win). Over the next one and one-half years, 200,000 Poles took part in the fighting, with about 30,000 in the field at any one moment. After the revolt was crushed, thousands of Poles were sent to Siberia, hundreds were executed, and towns and villages throughout Poland were devastated by the violence. All traces of Polish autonomy were lost, and the most oppressive period of Russification began.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Leslie, R. F. (1963). Reform and Insurrection in Russian Poland, 1856–1865. London: University of London, Athlone Press.

Wandycz, Piotr. (1974). The Lands of Partitioned Poland, 1795–1918. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

SLAVS AND MAGYARS IN THE HUNGARIAN INDEPENDENCE WAR

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Louis (Lajos) Kossuth . August Prinzhofer (1817–1885)

In spite of the failure of the various revolutionary movements in Austria in the spring of 1848, the Metternich regime could not be maintained. A constituent assembly or preliminary parliament had to be convoked by Emperor Ferdinand I even before he abdicated, on December 2, in favor of his nephew, Francis Joseph I. That assembly, meeting first in Vienna and later in Kromeriz (Kremsier) in Moravia, had to prepare a constitution for the Habsburg monarchy which would not only establish a parliamentary government and introduce social reforms but also give satisfaction to the claims of the various nationalities. Under a Polish speaker, Francis Smolka, both German and Slav deputies made a serious effort to solve these two problems. The latter, particularly the Czechs, wanted a real federalization of the empire which Palacky, in his plan of January 13, 1849, proposed to divide into eight entirely new provinces corresponding to the main ethnic groups. In order to avoid too drastic changes of the existing boundaries and the breaking up of the various historic units, the final draft of the new constitution, of March 1, attempted a compromise. Self-government was provided for each of the historic lands of the monarchy, but those which had a mixed population were to be subdivided into autonomous districts (Kreise) for each nationality. This constructive idea was never to materialize, however, and the whole “Kremsier Constitution” was abandoned when the new prime minister, Prince Felix Schwarzenberg, dissolved the assembly and returned to an absolute and centralistic form of government under German leadership.

One of the reasons for that final defeat of the Austrian revolution, even in its moderate expression, was indeed the military strength of the imperial regime. The Austrian army under Field Marshal Radetzky twice defeated the only foreign power which interfered with the internal troubles of the monarchy. This was the kingdom of Sardinia which, aiming at the unification of Italy, tried in vain to liberate the Italian populations still under Habsburg rule. But for the history of East Central Europe the second reason for the temporary victory of imperialism and absolutism is even more significant. It was not only difficult in general to reconcile the frequently conflicting claims of the various nationalities for instance, the claims of Italians and “Illyrians” (Slovenes and Croats in the maritime provinces or the claims of Poles and Ruthenians in Galicia) but any federal transformation of the empire, following ethnic lines, found an almost insurmountable obstacle in the basic opposition between the historic conception of the kingdom of Hungary and the aspirations of the non-Magyar nationalities of that kingdom which Vienna was able to play off against Budapest.

In that respect failure to arrive at an agreement was the more regrettable because the Magyars represented by far the strongest force of opposition against the central regime. Realizing this, Ferdinand I, the fourth as king of Hungary, accepted the demands of the bloodless revolution which also broke out in Hungary’s capital in the middle of March, 1848. Count Louis Batthyány became the first Hungarian prime minister and the liberal bills voted by the Hungarian Diet were approved. But the delicate issue of the relations between the new democratic kingdom and Austria, which was left in suspense, alarmed both the reactionaries in Vienna and the non-Magyar peoples of Hungary. The latter were afraid of the nationalism of the most influential Magyar leader, Louis Kossuth, a man who was favorable to social reforms but who was unprepared to recognize the equal rights of all nationalities.

Most of these were Slavs, including the Slovaks of northern Hungary—close kin of the Czechs in the Austrian part of the empire—and the Serb minority in southern Hungary looking toward the autonomous principality of Serbia on the other side of the border. But more than any other Slavs and more than the Rumanians of Transylvania, who at once protested against the incorporation of that province with Hungary and who were influenced by the rising Rumanian nationalism in the Danubian principalities, the Croats were to prove the most dangerous opponents of the Hungarian revolution. Fearing for the traditional autonomy of their kingdom if the ties with a free Hungary were to be made closer, they hoped to best serve their own national interests by siding with the imperial government in Vienna. It was therefore the Croat army, under Baron Joseph Jellachich, appointed ban of Croatia by the emperor and also ready to cooperate with the Orthodox Serbs, which was used by Austria to crush the Magyars.

Jellachich’s army was defeated when it entered Hungary in September, 1848. Even the occupation of Pest, early in 1849, by the same Prince Windisch-Graetz who had stopped the Slavic movement in Prague, and in October, 1848, another uprising in Vienna which was favorable to the Hungarians, did not put an end to the fierce resistance of the Magyars. On the contrary, equally opposed to the projects of the Kromeriz Assembly and to the centralized empire which was supposed to replace them, the Magyars, fearing that their kingdom would be made a mere province of Austria, with Transylvania and even the Serb territory (Voivodina) being separated, decided to dethrone the Habsburg dynasty, and on April 14,1849, at Debrecen, they approved a declaration of independence which was partly drafted on the American model. At the same time the parliament named Kossuth “Governing President.”

He also had to conduct the war in defense of the new republic whose establishment seemed to be a turning point in the history of East Central Europe, a first step in the direction of the complete liberation of all nations placed under foreign rule. As such it was particularly welcomed by the Poles whose friendship with the Hungarians was traditional. But in spite of that friendship the Polish leaders were fully aware of the fateful mistake which the defenders of Hungarian nationalism were making by disregarding the nationalism of the non-Magyar peoples. A reconciliation between Magyars on the one hand and Slavs and Rumanians on the other, was strongly encouraged both by Prince Czartoryski, who continued to conduct Polish diplomacy from Paris and who established relations even with Sardinia and Serbia, and by the Polish generals who participated in the Hungarian independence war.

One of them, Henryk Dembinski, was for a certain time even commander in chief of the Hungarian forces. Another, Josef Bem, a better strategist and more popular in Hungary, particularly distinguished himself in the defense of Transylvania where he tried in vain to better the relations between Magyars and Rumanians. He had to fight not only against the Austrians but also against the Russians, because after the defeat of Windisch-Graetz the emperor had asked for aid from Czar Nicholas I who had been able to prevent any revolutionary outbreak in his own realm and had stopped a liberal revolt in Rumania. The czar now was ready to offer his assistance in crushing the last and most alarming insurrection in East Central Europe.

The Polish participation in that revolution was for him a special reason for interfering since he was afraid that a Hungarian victory would also encourage the Poles to resume their struggle for independence, possibly under the same generals, and with the revolutionary movement eventually spreading from Austrian to Russian Poland. On his way to Hungary the Russian field marshal Paskevich, the same who had crushed the Polish insurrection in 1831 and now governed the former “kingdom,” took his auxiliary army through Galicia which was still restless after the troubles of 1848. The first Hungarian territory which he entered was the Ruthenian region south of the Carpathians, where among close kin of the czar’s “Little Russians” or Ukrainians—another national minority rather neglected by the Magyars—a feeling of solidarity with Russia was created on that occasion.

Attacked from two sides by superior forces, the exhausted Hungarian army, in spite of the courageous efforts of its last commander, General Arthur Görgey, had to capitulate. This took place at Világos near Arad on August 13, 1849, and all fighting ended in October when General George Klapka had to surrender the fortress of Komárom. This was at the same time the end of the whole revolutionary movement in the Habsburg Empire, and although even the Russians suggested an amnesty, the long resistance of the Hungarians was now ruthlessly punished. The victorious Austrian commander, General Julius Haynau, instituted a regime of terror which culminated in the execution of the former prime minister, Batthyány, and thirteen high officers. Kossuth had to go into exile and it was in America that he was received with special enthusiasm in 1851. But in general the Hungarian emigration was no more successful than the Polish in getting Western support for the oppressed peoples of East Central Europe.

Moreover, it was not only the Magyars who had to suffer from the new era of reaction. This was similar to the Metternich regime in its twofold trend of centralization and Germanization, which after the end of the military operations lasted for about ten years in the whole Habsburg monarchy under prime minister Alexander von Bach. After fighting on the Austrian side, even Croatia lost her former autonomy and separate diet, and the non-Magyar nationalities of Hungary proper, including the Saxons of Transylvania, were equally disappointed, the new Serb voivodina being placed under military administration.

In the Austrian part of the monarchy, all administrative and judicial reforms which had to be undertaken under pressure of the barely suppressed revolution were also aimed at a complete unification of the empire through a German bureaucracy. Contrary to the promises which had been made in March, 1849, the Bach administration, instead of a parliament, merely created a “council of state” which was composed of officials and which proved hostile to any kind of provincial self-government and particularly to the claims of all non-German nationalities. Only in Galicia was some progress made by the Poles, when after General Hammerstein’s military regime, one of them, Count Agenor Goluchowski, was made governor or viceroy of the undivided province. But even that prominent statesman was to find greater possibilities of action only in the reform period ten years later.

Immediately after the revolutionary crisis of 1848, which in East Central Europe began two years earlier and lasted one year longer than in the West, that whole region returned to a condition similar to that which prevailed after the Congress of Vienna. In the case of the Poles, that situation was even worse as far as Russian Poland and Cracow were concerned, and all stateless nationalities resented their oppression much more than ever before because of the continuous progress of their national consciousness and the high hopes which the various revolutions had raised. These revolutions having failed, it seemed that only a European war could improve their lot, especially if Western Europe would show a real interest in the freedom of all nations in opposition to the autocratic empires in the eastern part of the Continent. Nobody expressed that idea better than the Polish poet, Adam Mickiewicz, who, turning from literature to political action, had tried in 1848 to create a Polish legion in Italy, as in the days of Bonaparte. He was now ready to welcome another Napoleon as a liberator and the Crimean War as an occasion for reorganizing Europe on a basis of national rights.

ALFRED I, PRINCE OF WINDISCH-GRÄTZ

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Prince Windisch-Graetz in an 1852 lithograph.

Prague, Barricades during the revolution of 1848, June 1848

Alfred Candidus Ferdinand, Prince of Windisch-Graetz (German: Alfred Candidus Ferdinand Fürst zu Windisch-Graetz) (May 11, 1787, Brussels — March 21, 1862, Vienna) was an Austrian army officer who distinguished himself throughout the wars fought by the Habsburg Monarchy in the 19th century.

Windisch-Graetz came from a Styrian noble family and started service in the Habsburg imperial army in 1804. He participated in all the wars against Napoleon and fought with distinction at Leipzig and in the campaign of 1814. In 1833, he was named Feldmarschall.

In the following years of peace he held successive commands in Prague, being appointed head of the army in Bohemia in 1840. Having gained a reputation as a champion of energetic measures against revolution, during the Revolutions of 1848 in Habsburg areas he was called upon to suppress the insurrection of March 1848 in Vienna, but finding himself ill-supported by the ministers he speedily threw up his post.

Having returned to Prague, his wife was killed by by a stray bullet during the popular uprising. He then showed firmness in quelling an armed outbreak of the Czech separatists (June 1848), declaring martial law throughout Bohemia. Upon the recrudescence of revolt in Vienna he was summoned at the head of a large army and reduced the city by a formal siege (October 1848).

Appointed to the chief command against the Hungarian revolutionaries under Lajos Kossuth, he gained some early successes and reoccupied Buda and Pest (Jan. 1849), but by his slowness in pursuit he allowed the enemy to rally in superior numbers and to prevent an effective concentration of the Austrian forces.

In April 1849 he was relieved of his command and henceforth rarely appeared again in public life.

FROM THE CRISIS OF 1846 TO THE REVOLUTIONS OF 1848

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Karl Wilhelm von Willisen

The revolutionary crisis of the middle of the nineteenth century which shattered most of the European countries in protest against the political system established by the Congress of Vienna is usually associated with the memorable year of 1848, with the so-called “spring of the peoples.” It was indeed in the spring of that year that the movement started in Western Europe and in the western, German part of Central Europe. In East Central Europe, however, where the tension was deepest and the claims for national freedom even stronger than those for constitutional reforms, the crisis started exactly two years earlier, in the spring of 1846.

It started with the utopian project of a Polish insurrection which would be directed against all three partitioning powers at the same time. From the outset it proved impossible to include any direct action against Russia, which dominated by far the largest part of Polish lands and where the oppression was most violent. For Nicholas I who in the thirties had already crushed all conspiratorial activities of the Poles, now succeeded, and even in the decisive year of 1848, in stopping all revolutionary movements at the border of his empire. It was therefore Prussian Poland which was selected as a basis for the new struggle for freedom. Here the prospective leader, Ludwik Mieroslawski, had already appeared in 1845. The reasons for such a decision must be explained against the background of the general situation in Prussia.

As far as her policy toward the Polish population was concerned, earlier attempts at reconciliation, in agreement with the promises of 1815, had been followed by the systematic repressions of Edward Flottwell who in 1830 replaced the Polish prince, Anton Radziwill, as governor of the grand duchy of Poznan. On the other hand, not only in that purely Polish province but also in West Prussia and Silesia all government efforts toward Germanization met with strong resistance. This was not at all limited to the Catholic clergy and to the nobility, who were considered the main representatives of Polish nationalism, but it was also organized by a Polish middle class which had been formed in these western lands earlier than in any other part of Poland. It was there that the most advanced cultural, social, and economic progress had been made by the Polish people, while such progress was entirely impossible under the regimes of Metternich and Nicholas I. Even under Frederick William IV, new King of Prussia since 1840, who recalled Flottwell, only the methods of anti-Polish policy were changed. But the apparently anti-Russian attitude of the government, and some sympathy displayed by Prussian liberals, created the illusion that eventually the planned Polish action would find Prussian support.

What really happened was, on the contrary, the arrest of Mieroslawski and his collaborators in February, 1846, when their conspiracy was discovered and all attempts to liberate Prussian Poland failed completely. At the same time, however, a real tragedy took place in Austrian Galicia. Alarmed by preparations for a Polish insurrection which had also started there, the Austrian administration incited the peasants to rise against the noble landowners in some districts of western Galicia, promising rewards for the killing or capturing of any of them. The peasants were told by the Austrian bureaucracy that the nobles wanted to restore old Poland only to enslave them, while the emperor was ready to abolish serfdom completely. As a matter of fact it was precisely the leaders of the insurrection who, though of noble origin, like the eminently prominent Edward Dembowski, had the most advanced ideas of social reform. Their radicalism was best evidenced when at the end of February they seized power in the free city of Cracow, where Jan Tyssowski, later an exile in the United States, was proclaimed dictator. But his inadequate forces were defeated by the Austrians, Dembowski was killed, and after a brief Russian occupation the republic of Cracow was annexed by the Austrian Empire.

Even that obvious violation of the treaties of 1815 was accepted by the Western powers which in spite of the aroused public opinion in France and England limited themselves to weak diplomatic protests. And a new wave of violent repressions set in, both in Galicia where the new governor, Count Stadion, tried to play off the Ruthenians against the Poles, and in Prussia, where in December, 1847, Mieroslawski and seven of his associates, after a long imprisonment, were sentenced to death. But before they could be executed, the outbreak of the 1848 revolution opened entirely new prospects not only for the Poles but for all the submerged nationalities of East Central Europe.

As a matter of fact there were several revolutions in 1848, not only in different countries but with different objectives. In the French February Revolution, the issues were exclusively constitutional and social, but just as in the case of the great Revolution of 1789, the general ideas of liberty which were spreading from Paris all over Europe had a special appeal for those peoples who were deprived not only of constitutional freedom—and this in a degree much greater than under Louis Philippe’s French monarchy—but also of their national rights. Hence the growing excitement in various foreign-dominated parts of Italy and particularly in the non-German parts of Prussia and Austria. Not later than in March there appeared in both monarchies a rather confusing combination of nationalist movements and general revolts against autocratic regimes.

In Prussia, in spite of the disappointments of 1846, the situation of that year seemed to repeat itself so far as the Polish question was concerned. The liberation of Mieroslawski and his friends by German crowds in Berlin was very significant in that respect. Returning to Poznan, the Polish leader also returned to the plan of a war against czarist Russia with the support of a liberalized Prussia, whose new minister of foreign affairs, Baron H. von Arnim, was in favor of such a conception. The latter was also supported by Prince Adam Czartoryski who came from Paris to Berlin. But all these plans were doomed to failure for two different reasons.

First of all, a war against Russia was seriously considered in Prussia only so long as there was fear of Russian armed intervention in the German revolution and a prospect of the active cooperation of other powers. But Nicholas I, well advised by his ambassador in Berlin, remained passive, while the ambassadors of Britain and even of revolutionary France made it quite clear that the Western powers did not desire a conflict with the czar any more than Austria, who was involved in her own troubles. On the other hand, the impossibility of Polish-Prussian cooperation became obvious as soon as the “national reorganization” of at least the province of Poznan was considered. Contrary to the initial promises of the government, any administrative reform in favor of the Poles who hoped for complete separation from Prussia was opposed by the German minority. A compromise negotiated by General Willisen, as royal commissioner, was rejected by both sides, and after a decree which announced the division of the grand duchy into a Polish and a German part, open fighting started with the result that on May 9, 1848, the insurrectionary Polish forces had to capitulate.

There followed a violent anti-Polish reaction under the new commissioner, General Pfuel, who was even ready to cede to Russia a part of the Poznan province. Finally such drastic changes were abandoned, but even the Frankfurt Parliament, where a few liberals had spoken in favor of the Poles and the reconstruction of their country, fully approved Prussia’s policy in the name of a “healthy national egoism.” Such an attitude was in agreement with the general program of German nationalism which in 1848 claimed the unification of all German states in one empire, whether under Prussian or Austrian leadership, but which also wanted to include many non-German populations that were under the control of both these powers.

In the case of the Habsburg monarchy, such an approach had implications of a much larger scope, affecting at least all those possessions of the dynasty which in the past had belonged to the Holy Roman Empire and which since 1815 had been included in the German Confederation. For that very reason the Bohemian lands were invited to send representatives to the Frankfurt Parliament, a claim which was rejected in the name of the Czechs by the historian Palacky, who now became the political leader of the nation. Nevertheless, when in March, 1848, almost simultaneously with the revolution in Berlin, a similar movement broke out in Vienna, here too at the beginning there seemed to be a possibility of cooperation among all those who, irrespective of nationality, had suffered under the Metternich regime. This cooperation was to include Austrian Germans, who were chiefly interested in constitutional reforms and other peoples who hoped that under a liberal constitution their national rights would also receive consideration.

In Austria, too, the Polish question, which had received such a harsh blow two years before, was immediately reopened, and in Galicia, as in Prussian Poland, concessions were made at the beginning of the revolution. These included the creation of national committees in Cracow and Lwow, and the raising of hopes for a reconstruction of Poland in connection with the Habsburg monarchy. But there was even less chance of cooperation against the Russian Czardom—the main obstacle to such a reconstruction—than in Prussia. On the contrary, on April 26 Cracow had already been bombarded by the Austrian commander, and when Polish activity was transferred to the eastern part of Galicia, the Austrian government favored the claim of the Ruthenians. This was to cut off that part of Galicia as a separate province with a Ruthenian majority. In November drastic anti-Polish measures also set in there. Lwow, too, was bombarded. The first Pole, Waclaw Zaleski, who had been made governor of Galicia, was recalled, and although the partition of Galicia did not materialize, the whole province was again subject to efforts of Germanization and to strict control by the central authorities.

Here, however, the analogy with the fate of Prussian Poland ends. In the multinational Austrian Empire the Poles did not limit themselves to another abortive uprising in their section of the monarchy, but took an active and sometimes a leading part in all other revolutionary movements, including even that of the Viennese population. A first important step was the Polish participation in the Slavic congress which was opened in Prague on June 2. Like the whole earlier purely cultural phase of Pan-Slavism, that congress, naturally under Czech leadership, had nothing in common with the later development of that trend which was sponsored by Russia. Except for the isolated extremist Bakunin, who hoped in vain to use Bohemia as a basis for a communist revolution, the Russians were conspicuously absent from the congress. There was indeed in Prague a difference between conservative partly aristocratic leaders who were defending traditional regionalism, and a liberal, even radical, majority. There were also individual delegates from outside the Habsburg monarchy. But all of them represented those Slavic peoples who, crushed between German and Russian imperialism, hoped that a reorganization of that monarchy on democratic principles would give them a chance for free development.

In spite of such a positive attitude toward Austria, whose existence even Palacky considered indispensable in that phase of his activity, the imperial authorities were suspicious. In Prague, as in the two Polish cities, the end was a bombardment, the congress being dispersed. In addition to that hostility of the military and bureaucratic elements in the central government, however, there was another difficulty which made the Slavic congress and its whole program end in failure. It had already appeared during the deliberations that the Slavs, though a majority in the Habsburg monarchy, were not the only non-German group which had to be taken into consideration in any reform project. Besides the Italian and Rumanian question of a rather special character, there was the big issue of Hungary with her Magyar leaders and her own nationalities problems.

METTERNICH’S SYSTEM

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The same scale, from purely cultural to distinctly political nationalism, can be found among the nationalities of the Austrian Empire. Metternich, more than the emperors themselves, Francis I and after his death in 1835, Ferdinand I, who were rather weak and insignificant rulers, represented the idea of absolute government. He was hardly afraid of the cultural revival of the Czechs in spite of its steady progress. The foundation of the Museum of the Bohemian Kingdom in 1818 was indeed rather an expression of interest in regional studies. But when in 1830 the Matice ceska (literally “Czech mother”) was attached to it, that society also started encouraging the use of the Czech language. And it was obvious that the publication of Frantisek Palacky’s History of Bohemia (though first in German), covering the period of independence before Habsburg rule, would revive a national tradition in complete opposition to all that Metternich was standing for.

Some of the most prominent Czech writers, like the poet Jan Kollár and the historian P. J. Safarik, were of Slovak origin and interested in the past and the culture of all Slavic peoples. They contributed on the one hand to a feeling of Slavic solidarity in the Habsburg Empire, long before that movement was exploited by Russian imperialism, and on the other hand to a national revival even of those Slavs who never had created independent states, like the Slovenes and the Slovaks themselves. Though very close to the Czechs, the Slovaks under the leadership of Ludovit Stur decided to use their own language in literature, thus reacting against the backward conditions in which they were left under Hungarian rule.

Trying to play off the various nationalities against one another, the Metternich regime, for instance, would use officials of Czech origin as tools of Germanization in Polish Galicia, and would welcome the growing antagonism between the Magyars and the other groups in Hungary. In that kingdom, whose state rights even Metternich could not completely disregard, Hungarian nationalism was making rapid progress, particularly in the cultural and economic field, thanks chiefly to Count Széchenyi, called “the greatest Hungarian,” who in 1825 founded the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. The Diet, which continued to function though with greatly reduced power, was slow to carry out the democratic reforms advocated by Széchenyi, but in its session of 1843 - 1844 it at last decided to replace Latin by Magyar as the official language.

At the same time the Hungarian Diet also decided to prescribe instruction in the Magyar language in the schools of Croatia where, therefore, Croat nationalism was more alarmed by the inconsiderate pressure coming from Budapest than by the centralization of the whole empire being promoted in Vienna. Furthermore, under these conditions, the idea of Yugoslav unity, in spite of the old antagonism between Serbs and Croats, was also becoming popular among the latter where the gifted writer and politician Ljudevit Gaj (1809—1872) propagated the “Illyrian” movement and also influenced the Slovenes in a similar sense.

Even in its rather modest beginnings, that movement was dangerous for the unity of the monarchy because it could not find full satisfaction within its existing boundaries. And such was also the case of Polish and Italian nationalism, as well as of the Ruthenian and Rumanian aspirations. The former clashed in eastern Galicia with Polish supremacy, and the latter in Transylvania with Magyar supremacy, while cultural ties were at least established with the Ruthenians or Ukrainians of the Russian Empire, and with the Rumanians in the Danubian principalities. But even more than these international implications, the two big national problems which affected the Austrian Empire alone, the Czech and the Magyar, were a growing source of tension because in these cases modern nationalism found strong support in the historic tradition of two medieval kingdoms. The Pan-Slavic trend among the Czechs was ready to use the Habsburg monarchy as a basis of action, and the Hungarian program did not exclude a dynastic union with Austria. But even so they were directed against the very foundations of Metternich’s system and could not be represented by the chancellor’s police measures.

THE ORIGIN AND BACKGROUND OF THE NOVEMBER INSURRECTION IN POLAND

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Clash between Polish insurgents and Russian cuirassiers on bridge in Warsaw's Łazienki Park. In background, an equestrian statue of King John III Sobieski. Painting byWojciech Kossak, 1898.

Taking of the Warsaw Arsenal. Painting by Marcin Zaleski.

This 1836 map of Eastern Europe shows Poland.

The Polish insurrection which broke out in Warsaw on November 29, 1830, is sometimes called a Polish-Russian war. It was indeed a conflict between the kingdom of Poland, which was supposed to exist again after the Congress of Vienna, and the Russian Empire, to which that separated body politic was attached by a personal union only. But long before the Polish army rebelled against the czar’s brother, Grand Duke Constantine, who had been made its commander in chief, and before the Polish Diet on January 25, 1831, formally dethroned the Romanov dynasty, the whole conception of 1815 proved a fiction which could not possibly endure.

During the fifteen years between the Congress and the Revolution, no little progress had been made in the kingdom, particularly in the cultural and economic fields. A Polish university was opened in Warsaw in 1817, and the most prominent member of the Polish government, Prince Xavier Lubecki, achieved a great deal as minister of finance. But already under Czar Alexander, solemnly crowned in Warsaw as king of Poland, even those Poles who had accepted the Vienna decisions as a basis for constructive activities were deeply disappointed. Alexander's vague promises that the eastern provinces of the former commonwealth would be reunited with the kingdom proved impossible of fulfilment, even if they were sincere. Although under Russian rule Polish culture continued to flourish there, particularly in the former grand duchy of Lithuania where the University of Wilno was a more brilliant center of Polish learning and literature than ever before, the Russians considered those “West-Russian” lands an integral part of the empire which the czar had no right to alienate. Already in 1823 Prince Adam Czartoryski was removed from his position as “curator” of the University of Wilno, where severe repressions against the Polish youth organizations started at once. The Russian senator N. N. Novosiltsov, chiefly responsible for these measures, was at the same time interfering with the administration of the kingdom where instead of Czartoryski the insignificant General Zajaczek was appointed viceroy. Novosiltsov’s role was of course contrary to the apparently liberal constitution which Czartoryski had helped to draft. The leading patriots in the Diet tried in vain to defend Poland's constitutional rights on legal grounds, while those who realized the futility of such loyal opposition engaged in conspiracies which even the most severe police control proved unable to check.

The tension rapidly increased when Alexander I died in 1825. After the abortive December revolution in St. Petersburg, whose leaders seemed to favor the Polish claims, he was succeeded by his brother Nicholas I. He too was crowned as king of Poland a few years later. But without even the appearance of liberalism which had been shown by Alexander, he considered the parliamentary regime of the kingdom as being completely incompatible with the autocratic form of government which he so fully developed in Russia. Hence the Polish radicals, under the leadership of young infantry cadets, rose in defense of their constitution. Public opinion was alarmed by the news that the Polish army would be used by the czar as a vanguard for crushing the revolutionary movements which in 1830 had broken out in France and Belgium and which received Polish sympathy.

Even the moderate leaders who were surprised by the plot of the cadets and who considered the insurrection as having been insufficiently prepared, joined it in a spirit of national unity, though much time was lost through the hesitation of those who still hoped to appease the czar and to arrive at some compromise. Among these was General Chlopicki, who was entrusted with practically dictatorial powers. Even later, the changing leadership of the Polish army, which for nine months opposed the overwhelming Russian forces, proved rather undecided and inadequate so that even initial successes and bold strategic conceptions of the general staff were not sufficiently utilized. Therefore the struggle ended in a victory of the Russian Field Marshal Paskevich, a veteran of the war against Turkey, and on September 7, 1831, after a siege of three weeks, Warsaw was taken by storm.

Two aspects of that greatest Polish insurrection of the nineteenth century are of general interest, one with regard to the problem of nationalities in East Central Europe, the other from the point of view of international relations in Europe as a whole. The uprising which had started in Warsaw as an action of the so-called “Congress Kingdom,” had immediate repercussions east of the Bug River, in the Lithuanian and Ruthenian provinces of the historic commonwealth. Particularly in the former grand duchy of Lithuania there was a strong participation in the revolutionary movement against Russian rule, not only among the Polonized nobility but also among the gentry and the peasants of purely Lithuanian stock. And though there were social controversies in connection with the promised abolition of serfdom, there was no Lithuanian separatism on ethnic grounds but a common desire to restore the traditional Polish-Lithuanian Union in full independence from Russia. Regular Polish forces came from the territory of the kingdom, and the movement spread as far as the Livonian border but was unable to liberate the main cities and broke down with the doom of the insurrection in Poland proper.

The leaders of the revolution also hoped to obtain the support of the Ukrainian lands. Here, too, they appealed not only to the Polish and Polonized nobles and to the idea of Polish-Lithuanian-Ruthenian cooperation in some tripartite federation of the future, but also to the peasant masses which, however, remained distrustful and passive. The young Taras Shevchenko, who was soon to become the first great Ukrainian poet, had contacts with some of the Polish leaders. But he was not won over, and later he made the significant statement that “Poland fell and crushed us too.” For the czarist government, after the defeat of the Poles, started a ruthless Russification not only in the Congress kingdom but also in all Lithuanian and Ruthenian lands where not only the Poles and the supporters of the Polish cause, but all non-Russian elements, were also the victims—a situation which greatly contributed to the rise of Lithuanian and Ukrainian nationalism.

While these indirect consequences of the November insurrection appeared only later, the diplomatic repercussions in general European politics were simultaneous. All Poles realized that their fight for freedom could have notable chances for success only if supported by other powers. Therefore, turning exclusively against Russia, which controlled by far the largest part of Poland's historic territory in one form or another, they hoped for the complacence of Austria and even for some sympathy among the liberals in Germany. Decisive, however, seemed the attitude of the Western powers, France and Britain. Well realized by Polish public opinion in general, the necessity to find outside assistance was the main concern of Prince Adam Czartoryski, Poland’s greatest statesman of the nineteenth century. After years of endeavor toward a reconciliation with Russia he now recognized the hopelessness of such a policy and for the remaining thirty years of his life was to be Russia's most persistent opponent.

Although Czartoryski never was popular among the leftists led by the famous historian Joachim Lelewel, his authority was so great that he was placed at the head of the national government. As such he made every effort to make the revolution an international issue, and he sent diplomatic representatives abroad, particularly to Paris and London. After the dethronement of Nicholas I as king of Poland, even the election of another king was considered. In order to interest Vienna in the Polish cause, the candidature of an Austrian archduke or of the Duke of Reichstadt, Napoleon’s son who was kept at the Austrian court, was put forward, as well as that of the Prince of Orange or of a member of the British royal family. More realistic was the conviction that all signatories of the 1815 treaties ought to be interested in the violation of the promises then made to the Poles, and that they would therefore intercede in their behalf.

But all the diplomatic skill of Czartoryski and his collaborators proved to be of no avail. Even statesmen who seemed favorable to the Poles, such as Talleyrand and Sebastiani in France or Palmerston in England, wanted them first to gain substantial victories through their own forces. Prospects of a joint French-British mediation, with the possible participation of Austria, vanished when the Belgian problem created a tension between the two western powers, while Austria showed some interest in Poland’s fate only at the last moment when the defeated Polish regiments had already crossed over into Galicia, only to be disarmed there like those who crossed the Prussian border.

As a matter of fact the Polish insurrection had saved France and Belgium from Russian intervention, thus giving evidence that a really independent Poland would be a protection against czarist imperialism, as in the past. Therefore Czartoryski, who after participating as a volunteer in the last fights went into exile for the rest of his life, hoped that the complete conquest of Congress Poland by Russia would again raise those fears of Russian expansion which were so general in 1815 in Vienna. In Paris he tried to convince old Talleyrand that at least a restoration of the autonomous kingdom ought to be requested from the czar, but Sebastiani made the famous statement that “order reigned in Warsaw,” and in London, where the prince made many friends for Poland, he heard the objection that “unfortunately the Polish question was contrary to the interests of all other powers.

To convince the world that this was not so was Czartoryski’s main objective after his final establishment at the Hotel Lambert in Paris from 1833 on. He tried to accomplish his ends by connecting the Polish cause with that of all oppressed nations. Therefore that “uncrowned king of Poland,” with his diplomatic agents in almost all European capitals, was working for the liberation of the whole of East Central Europe. In the belief that the fate of Poland was part of a much larger problem, the whole Polish emigration, concentrated in France and inspired by great poets including Adam Mickiewicz, was united in spite of differences of method between the right and the left. The latter, eager to join revolutionary movements anywhere, was also eager to organize new conspiracies in the oppressed country at once, with another insurrection as ultimate goal, without sufficiently realizing that there was not the slightest chance of success under the regime established by the victorious czar in all his Polish possessions.

In addition to the ruthless persecution of everything that was Polish or connected with Poland in the eastern provinces where the University of Wilno and the Uniate church were the main victims, a period of reaction also started in the so-called kingdom under Paskevich as general governor. Considering that the Poles through their rebellion had forfeited all rights granted them at the Congress of Vienna, in 1832 Nicholas I replaced the constitution of the kingdom by an “Organic Statute” which liquidated its autonomy and made it practically a Russian province, subject to systematic Russification particularly in the educational field. The fiction of a restoration of Poland in union with Russia was now abandoned and the czarist empire advanced to the very boundaries of Prussian and Austrian Poland.

Under these circumstances the other two partitioning powers became convinced that close cooperation with Russia was indispensable. A secret agreement was therefore concluded in 1833 by the three monarchs, who guaranteed one another their Polish possessions and promised mutual assistance in case of a new revolution. Jointly, they also militarily occupied (without however annexing it) the Free City of Cracow where the November insurrection had found numerous partisans. The settlement made at the Congress of Vienna was thus revised in East Central Europe in favor of the imperialistic powers, and it became even more intolerable for the submerged nationalities. For the reaction directed against the Poles, whom Metternich considered the typical revolutionaries, was accompanied, both in the Habsburg Empire which he fully controlled and in the Russia of his ally Nicholas I, by oppressive measures against all other peoples who were dissatisfied with their fate.

HABSBURG MILITARY MEDIOCRITY – H-WAR

2009-04-13T12:07:00.000+08:00

Why was the Habsburg army slower and less brilliant than its European rivals between 1649 and 1918?

I am certainly no expert on this topic, having read only very generally on Austrian history, but in the interest of providing a basis of discussion, I’ll posit the following general ideas:

1) The Habsburgs were almost always broke due to shambolic administration and regional economic underdevelopment. As a result, they were more dependent upon using their soldiers to gather the harvest or to forage, most memorably in the Potato War. They were also dependent upon foreign subsidies to finance distant campaigns and were less able to modernize their equipment or to maintain large standing forces. Their chronic financial problems were accentuated by the Ausgleich of 1867, which required the military budget to pass not one but two legislatures.

2) The Habsburgs were restrained by the balance of power, internally and externally. Internally, the need to watch their subject populations absorbed large garrisons or armies (i.e. the Hungarian revolt during the War of Spanish Succession). Externally, the Austrians were often tied down by war on two fronts (typically the French and the Turks) or by the threat of war on two fronts (the French, Turks, Prussians, Russians and Piedmont-Sardinia/Italy). Further, as perennial Emperors, the frequent need to consult with independent-minded Imperial electors restrained the Habsburgs and reduced the possibility of conducting a reckless Prussian-style foreign policy along the lines of a Frederick the Great or Bismarck.

3) Poor interior lines of communication. Other countries, of course, were faced with the problem of two-front wars, but they were either more compact (Prussia) or had better roads (France). Being in control of an underdeveloped region in Europe, the Austrians were less able to conduct rapid troop movements, particularly in the impoverished areas in the south-east reclaimed from the Turks. On this note, it is worth pointing that even the lavishly equipped NATO has had difficulty moving troops into Bosnia and Kosovo.

4) Cultural passivism. A broad and problematic category, but nevertheless one worth considering. It encompasses Catholic fatalism, leadership, and a court which did not place an unduly high value on martial prowess. Whereas the Prussian military was based upon an aggressive, militaristic, barracks-hall culture, perhaps best embodied by Frederck William II’s kitchen cabinet, and by Wilhelm II’s personal involvement in field maneuvers, in contrast Vienna was a centre of culture and art, where a significant proportion of the aristocracy and court would rather attend opera, hunts, or masked balls. Here leadership played a role. Whereas France’s borders where shaped by adventurous and ambitious spirits such as Louis XIV and the two Napoleons, the final 150 years of Austrian history were dominated by leaders who were not themselves soldiers—Maria Theresa, von Kaunitz, Metternich, and Franz Josef II. Of the lot, Maria Theresa was the most warlike, but even she was more concerned about maintaining her inheritance from the depredations of that robber-baron Frederick to the north than in extensive territorial aggrandizement. Summing up, the Habsburgs preferred peace to war, diplomacy over fighting, and the status quo in lieu of imperial aggrandizement.

5) Lastly, and least importantly, one of their strengths was also a weakness. Austrian light irregular forces are generally conceded to be amongst the best in Europe in their day, but being specialists in the “small war,” these are not the types of soldiers likely to win dramatic decisive victories of the Napoleonic type.

I hope that these comments provide some food for thought.

All the best,

Rob Hanks.

Ph. Candidate

University of Toronto

Coming to that period, Monteccucoli indeed advised defensive tactics against the Turks. That changed after Vienna, and a commander like Prince Eugene of Savoy was by no means a defensive tactician, neither against the Ottomans nor on western battlefields in the war of succession. And at the end of the 18^th century, Count Kinsky, a professor of military science rated the Ottomans rather low; due to the decline of Ottoman troop quality. Cf. my account Schwendi, Monteccucoli, Kinsky: Analysen der Osmanischen Kriegsmacht vom 16. bis zum 18. Jahrhundert, in: CIEPO VII: Sempozyumu Bildirileri, Ankara 1994, pp. 201 - 214.

As for later times, the Austrians’ seemingly mediocre performance was partially due to their bad luck—their armies were put against a bunch of military geniuses like Frederick the Great or Napoleon, who made almost every opponent look rather mediocre! But one should not forget that a commander like Archduke Charles was virtually the first one who succesfully made a stand against the so far invincible Frenchman at Aspern-Essling and fought him into a draw.

Thomas Scheben

I continue to be (cheerfully) amazed at the diversity of websites/discussion groups/etc. that the Internet has enabled to be created, that can so readily bring together people who share common interests . . . so now there’s a Habsburg discussion group!!! I love it!!!

As far as this question is concerned, I believe the ultimate answer to be “culture,” although I don’t really know how to go about proving this objectively. If you look at the entire history of the Hapsburg dynasty/empire, its development was never primarily “martial,” though they certainly made use of war as an instrument of policy when convenient. They seemed always to prefer other means of acquiring territory or power, particularly dynastic marriages. This character was encapsulated in the famous proverb that went something like “Other nations make war, you, happy Austria, marry.” They never tried to build an unitary state but continued the old medieval tradition of “localism in empire.”

One of the big what-ifs of modern history is what might have happened in the early 20^th century if in the 19^th century the Hapsburgs had worked with the rising nationalist spirit and capitalized on their empire’s diversity to build a kind of United States of Central Europe . . .

Notwithstanding Austria-Hungary’s poor showing in the Balkan Wars, significant elements of the empire’s foreign ministry as well as military continued to lobby for war—a localized, successful one, of course—to shore up the dynasty in the critical years right before World War I. The decay and centrifugal forces pulling the old empire apart were quite apparent to people on the scene at the time, not just in retrospect.

Strikingly like the Russian autocracy, whose solution for recovering the prestige and authority sacrificed by its incompetent, losing war with Japan was another war.

This is a question that has been bothering me since grade school:

how did a state with such an unimpressive military get to be such a great power? I looked through the few H-Habsburg responses to this and found that they tended to minimize Habsburg ineptness, which I would challenge.

My specialty is the Thirty Years’ War, and, in my opinion, if the (Austrian) Habsburgs had been only average, they would have come out of the war much better. Almost all of their victories were won in the first half of the war, and they tended to be against outsized rebel forces. Tilly was very successful, but he wasn’t Habsburg. Nordlingen was very successful, but that had a large Spanish contingent. That leaves Wallenstein, and his greatest accomplishment was Lutzen, a draw.

That’s the good half of the war. In the second half, it was nothing but one defeat after another: Wittstock (1636), Second Breitenfeld (1642), Jankov (1645), and Zusmarshausen (1648), not to mention several other disastrous campaigns that did not include a major battle (1644 and 1646 come to mind). I’m amazed that Austria managed to escape from this war in as good shape as it did.

I’m tempted to blame the political selection of leaders, especially Leopold Wilhelm (why the Spanish ever took him on as governor-general of the Low Countries after his previous career is a mystery). However, in 1647 they gave command to Peter Melander, who was not only not a Catholic, but was actually a Calvinist. He turned things around for a while, but then lost at Zusmarshausen; and that clearly can’t be blamed on politics.

After the death of Franz von Mercy in 1645, the Bavarians also had some highly inadequate commanders. Perhaps they and the Habsurgs look so bad at this time because they were facing some of the best generals of the century, including Turenne, Conde, Torstensson, and Wrangel. But that’s only a short-term explanation—if you blame commanders for more than a few years, you have to start asking why the Habsburgs couldn’t get better ones.

In conclusion, I have no idea what the answer to the question is. I do, however, think that it is a serious question that someone should deal with. Austria’s military not only seems bad, it was bad; yet somehow, they survived and even prospered for centuries. Perhaps this is a tribute to amazingly successful statecraft.

Sincerely,

Derek

My former colleague Charles Ingrao asked the question what factor, or indeed factors, were the causes for the Habsburg army earning the respect of its opponents, but ‘rarely the kind of admiration that we associate with the military instruments of notable adversaries like Louis VIV, Frederick the Great, Napoleon Bonaparte or even the tiny Serbian kingdom of World War I’. He goes on to declare that the Habsburg military usually were less aggressive and less likely to achieve a decisive victory and that these shortcomings were contributing factors to the Monarchy’s ‘decline’ and eventual dissolution in 1918.

This statement, of course, is correct and the question is very well put. As a French historian, A. Sorel, once pointed out, ‘the Hapsburg always were one idea and one army behind, but they always had an idea and an army.’ The idea was the preservation of the dynasty and its empire and as Jaszi pointed out, the army was one of the main—I would assert—the main, pillar of the dynasty.

At the same time, however, the Habsburg rulers had few martial talents, while since the days of Wallenstein they were suspicious of military commanders and always hesitated placing too much power into the hands of any one general. Hence the famous conflict between the Emperor Francis and his brother the Archduke Charles discussed by Rauchensteiner and Craig, suspicions and misgivings which survived into the long years of the Emperor Francis Joseph. For that matter, even the most talented of the Habsburg generals, the Archduke Charles, was a cautious conservative who clearly never was prepared to risk the army to achieve the complete destruction of an opponent, with his curious inactivity in the weeks following Aspern-Essling but one example.

No other army commander, save Eugene as Professor Ingrao points out, ever achieved decisive victory, though here I would add Radetzky who in a six week campaign in 1848 destroyed his Italian opponents to the short list of Habsburg generals achieving a decisive victory. Naturally, victory placed the Monarchy in a better geopolitical position, but one needs to ask what constituted a decisive victory? Montecuccoli defeated the Turks in 1664, but they returned in 1683, and only the campaigns in Hungary after 1683 achieved a ‘decisive result’. The Turks were driven out of Hungary, though the Ottoman presence in the western Balkans remained a worry to the Habsburg authorities. Eugene’s victories in Italy, Spain, Flanders all had no decisive impact. In 1714, the Monarchy clearly had become a great power but also was beset by continuing and intensifying internal problems which sapped its strength.

To be sure, the problem of a luxurious court and an often starving army were common in the eighteenth century, except perhaps in Prussia, and in fact the question how to pay for a large, well-equipped, and well officered army was never really solved either in Austria or in Austria-Hungary. By the last decade of the 18^th century, the ‘Austrian Monarchy,’ a convenient misnomer for territories collected by an ambitious dynasty, stretched from the Lower Rhine to Galicia and from Bohemia to northern Italy, but such a collection of lands not only lacked unity and purpose but also created a geostrategic position where the Monarchy always faced the problem of war on several fronts.

This problem, recognized clearly as Ingrao has pointed out by Joseph I, became even more complicated from the second half of the century on, when proto-nationalism, with perhaps a full fledged nationalism in Hungary, began to take hold in the various lands. Given this, the only possible orientation for the army was to retain its traditional dynastic character. This had proved adequate in the wars against the Prussians and the French, but according to Wawro, by 1866 led to an army that while brave, was extremely poorly led and trained, and handled with remarkable incompetence during the decisive campaign in Bohemia.

Many historians have considered Hungarian resistance to make a proportionate contribution for military purposes of the Monarchy, and in fact to assert the right to maintain its own separate national army, as one of the major problems of the monarchy from 1790 on, becoming critical after 1867. The threat of another 1704 or 1848 was always present in the thinking of the Habsburg authorities, and by the third decade of the 19^th century the feelings of the Slavic majority in the empire had to be taken into consideration. These matters were real and were hardly resolved by the Military Compromise of 1868, which Miskolcy described as the ‘greatest liability of the Ausgleich.’ Perhaps this goes too far, but Stone asserted that in 1914 the weaknesses of the k.u.k Armee were largely due to the obstinate politicians in Budapest.

There is the possibility that defeat in 1866, according to Friedjung primarily due to sociopolitical backwardness, could have opened the way towards genuine army reform, turning the army into a people’s army, a multinational rather than a dynastic force. This point was raised some years ago by Peball, but whether this ever was a realistic option may be doubted. As it was, the army went to war in 1914 lacking national cohesion and motivation, in part lacking training and modern weapons, but still managed, to the astonishment of many, to maintain itself against a superior enemy for over four years.

Given the constraints imposed by the character of the Austrian monarchy and the cautious conservatism of its rulers, with an administrative structure that still reflected much of an old particularism, its industrial resources perhaps not equal to the demands of the Material Schlacht, the army reflected the shortcomings of the body politic that created it, and to the extent that these problems could not be resolved outside the army, they also could not be resolved within.

Gunther E Rothenberg

Professor Emeritus Purdue University

Research Associate Monash University

Actually, I’m not reading the events of the mid-19^th century back into the mid-18^th. I’m reasoning almost entirely on the basis of contemporary evidence and modern scholarship. I’ve been reading scholarship on Theresian policy for over ten years now, and I’ve never even seen it suggested that Austrian policymakers seriously considered forcing Frederick to abdicate in favor of one of his brothers, let alone an entirely different dynasty. (If you do have a citation, please let me know.) As a rule, in eighteenth-century Europe one did not depose legitimate dynasties from the outside (Poland, being an elective monarchy, didn’t quite count). One might take pieces of territory, and one might wait for a male line to die out and fight over the spoils (which is essentially what happened to Maria Theresia, whose claim was contested, albeit on rather weak grounds, by the Saxon and Bavarian electors as well as by Frederick), but one didn’t simply depose reigning dynasties because they were considered dangerous (that would be reading the Napoleonic experience back into the eighteenth century, and we should remember that the rest of Europe didn’t really consider the Bonapartes legitimate in the first place). The only possible counterexample I can think of is that of Lorraine, to which the French had laid claim as early as the seventeenth century (if not earlier), and whose ruler was compensated with Tuscany once the Medicis died out a few years later.

Furthermore, Theresian policymakers (and here I’ll include Bartenstein here as well as Kaunitz and the Empress) knew perfectly well that Austria had connived in Prussia’s rise by relying too heavily on Prussian military prowess and political reliability in Imperial conflicts with the Bourbons, and in rewarding the Hohenzollerns a little too lavishly for their assistance. Charles VI was already aware of the House of Hohenzollern’s growing ambitions, but his own attempts to keep the problem under control were too little and too late.

And thus I return to my original point—the Austrian war aim was not to depose the Hohenzollerns, or even Frederick himself, but rather to reduce Prussia’s size and resources to the point where it could no longer be a threat to its neighbors. And, having done that, MT would leave a lesson for the instruction of future Habsburgs about letting little allies become big powers in their own right.

Ken MacLennan

BOOK REVIEW: Europe's American Revolution

2009-04-13T12:02:00.001+08:00

H-NET BOOK REVIEW

Published by H-Diplo@h-net.msu.edu (February, 2008)

Simon P. Newman, ed. _Europe's American Revolution_. Houndmills: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006. xvii + 201 pp. Notes, bibliography, index. $69.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-4039-8997-0.

Reviewed for H-Diplo by Gerard Hugues, Department of English, University of Nice-Sophia Antipolis, France

Revolutionary Reverberations

The volume entitled _Europe's American Revolution_ puts together the proceedings of a workshop at the conference of the European Association for American Studies held in Prague in April 2004. Scholars from European countries confronted their views and discussed the impact of the American Revolution on Europe's political thought and experience.

The object was both ambitious and promising, since the participants refused to stick to old received values and questioned and measured the influence of the events of 1776 and 1787 on European soil. As recalled by Simon P. Newman in his introduction, Alexis de Tocqueville was among the first to celebrate the American experiment and extol the model of exceptionalism set by the newborn nation. At the outset is the apparent paradox of a groundbreaking event fought by people of European descent who chose to break with European traditions. Hence, a widely endorsed view of the Revolution is that it was a supranational event paving the way to other similar uprisings that took place on the European continent. It is precisely this construction of the Revolutionary War and its subsequent developments that this book challenges.

The Glaswegians, for instance, unexpectedly turned their backs on the social and economic turmoil in the New World, because it jeopardized their interests within a then powerful and affluent empire. Brad Jones provides a detailed and well-documented account of their reaction, against the backdrop of a thriving Atlantic trade badly hurt by the insurgents' misdemeanor. To combat this trend, the Scots developed a "patriotic imperial nationalism," fully and aptly analyzed by Jones, as a way to secure vested interests in the status quo (p. 2). This economic motive is further related to a religious concern following the French decision to enter the war alongside the Continentals. At that point, the Scots chose the side of British Protestantism against French Catholicism, thereby taking a distance with the values of the American Revolution that definitely failed to attract the sympathy of Glaswegians.

Similarly, Spaniards did not turn out to be first-hour admirers of the Revolutionary War. Spain had its own interests to defend in America that were specific to the old Catholic empire, and Anthony McFarlane's essay opens with a comparative study of New Spain and the British colonies, giving the latter a clear advantage in terms of economic and social development. Spain, under the circumstances, had several options, and it might have saved its own empire overseas had it secured an alliance with the French to capitalize on the difficulties of the British crown.

Despite solid reasons to side with the American rebels, first to protect its own possessions and then to emulate the superior model set by the British colonists, Spain missed the opportunity offered to her. This failure to seal an alliance with the French was, according to McFarlane, fatal to the Spanish presence and influence in the New World, while the values of the Enlightenment carried by the Revolution never seeped into Spanish society, so that the impact of the Revolution was virtually nonexistent.

The case of France is examined by Marie-Jeanne Rossignol, who deliberately chooses to analyze the issue from a historiographical angle. A longstanding tradition among French historians has been to analyze the French and American revolutions as two intimately connected events (e.g., Jacques Godechot, Andre Kaspi, and Claude Fohlen).

Rossignol, particularly, emphasizes the originality of Elise Marienstras's approach, which integrated the contribution of radical historians, while "the French academic world remained impervious to these new interpretations of the American Revolution" (p. 53). Rossignol, then, examines with great accuracy the historiographical trend leading from the instrumentalization of the American Revolution to its virtual exclusion. She embarks on a bold, but risky, survey of "the complex history of the French Revolution in French historiography" from 1800 until 1989, to conclude that a new perspective might be offered to researchers, within the concept of the Atlantic world lately defined by American and British historians, to renew the analysis (p. 60).

The way the British saw the American Revolution was deeply influenced by Sir Denis Brogan (1900-74), whose views are fully analyzed by Newman, who stresses the contribution of Brogan to the development of American studies in post-World War II years. The universal value of the American Revolution was then celebrated as the study of American history became "an act of faith among British academics" (p. 82). Newman depicts the disenchantment of British historians before the Bush administration's assault on American liberties, embodied by the Patriot Act and the systematic betrayal of the founding documents. His conclusion may sound overly pessimistic, but it certainly opens a fruitful debate about whether the "American Century" is over.

Csaba Levai gives a refreshing and original comparative study of Hungary within the Habsburg Empire and the colonies within the British Empire, with striking similarities between the two experiences, like the necessity of self-government or the issue of taxation. Levai convincingly demonstrates how much Hungarian patriots were influenced by American revolutionaries and how their common goals culminated with the drafting of the Hungarian declaration of independence of 1848 in a process that emulated the events of 1776. The rest of the essay is devoted to the changing perceptions of the American Revolution both in Hungary and Poland, from the nineteenth century to the fall of the Communist regimes, and it concludes that its star is now waning among the younger generations accustomed to democracy and pluralism.

In Germany, the impact of the American Revolution was also very limited, according to Thomas Clark, who develops his argument on solid evidence provided by a thorough knowledge of German constitutional thought. He argues that the events of 1776 and 1787 had little influence on German constitutionalism as the monarchical principle remained central to German liberalism. The most relevant concept, and one that deserves further analysis, is probably the distrust of the people shared by American federalists and German constitutionalists. The volume closes with Joseph Mullin's careful study of John Taylor of Caroline's "radical" options placed in the perspective of the modern debate on the European construction, followed by an essay by Andrew Pepper about the lack of interest of Hollywood for the American Revolution.

In conclusion, this is a rich volume teeming with rejuvenated views of the American Revolution and new insights into the concept of "American exceptionalism" that, by and large, seems to have lost most of its past luster.

Book Review: The Limits of Loyalty: Imperial Symbolism, Popular Allegiances, and State Patriotism in the Late Habsburg Monarchy.

2009-04-13T12:00:00.000+08:00

Laurence Cole, Daniel L. Unowsky, eds. The Limits of Loyalty: Imperial Symbolism, Popular Allegiances, and State Patriotism in the Late Habsburg Monarchy. Austrian and Habsburg Studies. New York: Berghahn Books, 2007. viii + 246 pp. ISBN 978-1-84545-202-5; $90.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-84545-202-5.

Reviewed by Ian Armour (Department of Humanities, Grant MacEwan College, Edmonton)
Published on H-German (March, 2009)
Commissioned by Susan R. Boettcher

The Case for Inertia?

One of the more welcome aspects of reviewing online is the freedom to devote appropriate space to an edited collection such as this. All too often the variety of the research on offer, and the genuine sense of a colloquium going on in what is frequently the record of an academic conference, get lost sight of in the need to summarize it all in a mere five hundred words or so. This seems particularly true of the present volume. Its nine contributions, together with the characteristically insightful afterword by R. J. W. Evans, are all excellent, thought-provoking reflections on the extent to which the Habsburg monarchy in its last half-century of existence, in particular during the reign of its last monarch but one, Francis Joseph, was capable of eliciting loyalty from its subjects. As the editors and several contributors point out, discussions of this question, and of the monarchy's general viability as a state, have been dominated ever since its 1918 collapse by the famous distinction drawn by Hungarian émigré political scientist Oscar Jászi, in The Dissolution of the Habsburg Monarchy (1929), between "centrifugal" and "centripetal" forces. In an age of rising and increasingly irreconcilable nationalisms, Jászi argued, the traditionally centripetal elements of dynasty, church, bureaucracy, and army proved too weak to counter these centrifugal tendencies. Although Jászi was too acute a student of the monarchy to ignore the crucial importance of the First World War in facilitating the triumph of the centrifugal forces, the tendency ever since has been to see the monarchy as an institution living on borrowed time, beset by near-terminal challenges both within and without.

Of late, however, a countervailing tendency in historical scholarship has focused on the centripetal forces and highlighted how much staying power and real cohesion the monarchy had. This tendency is not so much a misplaced nostalgia for the monarchy as a more rational, humane alternative to the squabbling, internally riven successor states, let alone a sentimentalization centered on the "venerable" Francis Joseph of the sort still visible in the tackier tourist boutiques of present-day Vienna, but rather a commendable reaction to the implicit, if usually unstated, determinism in the original Jászi premise. In the hands of popularizers and, it has to be said, one's own undergraduates, Jászi's distinction between forces of dissolution and forces of cohesion tends to degenerate into an inevitabilist scenario: because the monarchy was a dynastic state, and absolutist in aspiration if not always in practice, it was bound to founder on the rocks of popular sovereignty and mass politics; because it was a multinational state, it was bound to fall apart. This travesty of historical reality, it should be stressed, was never the interpretation of the monarchy's earliest analysts and critics, such as Jászi or, before him, R. W. Seton-Watson and Henry Wickham Steed. Such pioneers of critical Habsburg studies, many of whom began their work while the monarchy was still alive and kicking, started from a position of wishing the monarchy well, and hoped that it would set its house in order for the sake of international stability as well as natural justice. The fall of the monarchy was always, to its more discerning critics and subsequent historians, contingent upon the mistakes of its leaders, the determination of its enemies, the catastrophe of the First World War, and the unprecedented strains placed upon the state by the duration and nature of that war. Yet Habsburg studies ever since, as Cole and Unowsky complain, have nevertheless been focused mainly on why the monarchy collapsed, rather than "what held it together for so long" (p. 2).

The particular focus of the present volume is the dynasty itself. How did Francis Joseph's kaleidoscopically different subjects see him and the institution he represented? How, if at all, did the monarchy project itself into the hearts and minds of individuals, from the Bukovina to Trentino, and with what results? In particular, is it possible to talk of what the late Péter Hanák called "parallel realities," of a monarchy where individuals acknowledged some sort of loyalty to the dynasty and the idea of the Gesamtmonarchie, while at the same time demonstrating their allegiance to the "imagined community" of their own nationality?

After a useful introduction by the editors, which highlights the relative paucity of scholarly work on centripetal factors, the nine main contributions do not manage to cover all geographical or national areas of the late monarchy in addressing this question, but then that was clearly never the intention. Instead, each focuses on a particular aspect of how, or whether, dynastic loyalty was generated, among a particular stratum of the population. The results represent a fascinating cross-section of opinion on the monarchy across the state.

Ernst Bruckmüller goes straight to the heart of how loyalty might literally be inculcated, by looking at the teaching of history and geography in the monarchy's school system. Following the example of Charles Jelavich, whose South Slav Nationalisms (1992) charted the same subjects for both the monarchy and Serbia in the couple of generations before 1914, Bruckmüller concentrates on primary school textbooks, while comparing them with the teaching of history at secondary level. This comparison exposes the fundamental paradox of education present in this multinational state ever since Maria Theresa's ordinances of the 1770s: in order to achieve a minimum standard of literacy, primary schooling, at least, had to start in the native language of the subject--whatever that language was. The surprising thing about Bruckmüller's findings is that, especially after the advent of constitutional rule in 1867, primary school textbooks managed to accommodate material that not only stressed the history of the dynastic state and the subject's obligation of loyalty to it, but also the national myths and history of particular peoples as well. In some cases, certain periods and topics were glossed over or entirely omitted. For instance, most of the seventeenth century was absent from Czech-language primers, and much of the nineteenth century from Italian ones. On the whole, however, "national culture and state patriotism could be simultaneously inculcated in schoolchildren" at this level (p. 21). The teaching of history in secondary textbooks, by contrast, was a thornier matter, clearly seen as more liable to politicization. The content of textbooks was more rigorously censored, and the material on offer was more consciously aimed at stressing loyalty to the state, while downplaying national and cultural consciousness.

Laurence Cole investigates the growth and role of veterans' organizations in Cisleithania after 1870. As one of the pillars of the dynastic state, the army was an ideal vehicle for teaching loyalty, even more so after the introduction of universal conscription in 1868. The army's role as an integrative institution, as Cole is at pains to stress, can still be argued, especially given the potential for controversy over the language of command; nevertheless, the military service to which the majority of the monarchy's male subjects were exposed probably did more to create a sense of commonality as subjects than any other factor. The interesting thing about veterans' organizations, however, is that they were entirely voluntary, even if the state undoubtedly encouraged their formation and monitored their activities. And as more and more men passed out of their three-year service and entered the reserves, the increasing number of such associations (some 2,250 by 1912) testified to the genuine popularity of this form of social activity. The original and abiding purpose of the associations was one of mutual insurance, to provide help for indigent or ill veterans, and to cover the cost of funerals. The associations rapidly took on a social function, however, following which veterans could don uniforms, march in parades and religious processions, and provide visible symbols of loyalty to the state on official occasions. Cole provides a striking case study of how this process worked in the largely Italian-populated Trentino, among subjects whose shared nationality with Italy, it might be thought, would make participation in veterans' associations less likely. Not a bit of it. Italian-speaking veterans, perhaps encouraged by the loyalism of the Catholic Church, proved just as capable as other Habsburg subjects of exhibiting an Austrian patriotism. Cole suggests that this might have been a class issue: the majority of veterans, after all, came from a relatively humble social stratum, whereas it was the urban middle classes of the Trentino that were most responsive to Italian nationalism and irredentism.

Nancy M. Wingfield's contribution focuses on the "after-life" of Emperor Joseph II, and the differing adaptations of his memory by various groups of the monarchy's subjects. As the symbol of would-be enlightened absolutism, and in particular the modernized, centralized, and bureaucratic state, Joseph was revered in his own time and ever after by the peasantry, who identified him as their "liberator" and well-wisher, and by Jews, who remembered his toleration edicts. In the nineteenth century this image of the "imperial humanitarian" (p. 66) was gradually (mis)appropriated, for instance in March 1848, when revolutionaries rallied around the equestrian statue of Joseph in the Hofburg in their demand for the lifting of censorship. Later that year, Joseph's will was cited as justification for completing peasant emancipation, and the young Archduke Francis adopted the title of Francis Joseph on becoming emperor in December, in a conscious attempt to portray himself as a "reforming" monarch. As Wingfield astutely comments, the neo-absolutist regime's most "Josephist" trait was its centralizing authoritarianism. Later still, in the constitutional period, Austrian German liberals appealed to the enlightened Josephist tradition in their defense of education, but they also increasingly stressed the Germanizing tendencies of Joseph's reign in their own struggles with the Czechs and other non-German nationalities. After the Liberals' fall from power in 1879, they increasingly exalted Joseph as the mascot of German culture and dominance, while clerical conservatives of all nationalities saw him as the epitome of godless secularism. By the turn of the century Joseph had become the poster child of German nationalists, who bizarrely "were able to turn an imperial figure against the dynasty" (p. 81).

Hugh LeCaine Agnew, in one of the best articles in the book, traces the problematic relationship between Francis Joseph and his Czech subjects who, throughout the emperor's reign, made repeated protestations of loyalty, but always without the desired result of some form of autonomy for the Bohemian crownlands comparable to that of Hungary's after the Ausgleich. Despite several tantalizing affirmations of his readiness to recognize Bohemian state rights by being formally crowned king of Bohemia, and despite his willingness to govern with Czech support in the Reichsrath after 1879, Francis Joseph never in the end abandoned the basic deal made with the Hungarians. The result was that Czech loyalism, as opposed to passive acceptance of the status quo, became increasingly perfunctory in the last decades of the reign, even if this fell a long way short of active disloyalty. Instead of the monarch himself, Agnew observes, the Crown of St. Wenceslas became the public symbol of Czech loyalty, and was thereby transformed into a national symbol.

Daniel L. Unowsky conducts the bold experiment of comparing Polish with Ruthenian reactions to imperial visits to Galicia between 1851 and 1880. Polish attitudes towards the monarchy were split into two, if not three, factions. The conservative noble elite appreciated that Poles in Austria's share of the partitions had a considerably better lot than their compatriots under Russian and Prussian rule, especially after the ad hoc arrangement after 1867, according to which Poles enjoyed something like autonomy, and hence dominance, within Galicia, in return for their acceptance of Habsburg rule. Polish nobles who had sympathized with and even participated in previous revolts against Russian rule and the emergent middle-class democrats of Galicia tended to evince more overtly nationalist sympathies. These factions clashed in 1880 over how enthusiastically to greet Francis Joseph on his visit, as well as whether, if at all, to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the uprising of 1830. In the same year (1880), Galicia's Ruthenian community, by contrast, was firmly shut out of the centenary commemoration of Joseph II's emancipation edicts by the Polish conservatives in charge of organizing the official ceremonies. Not daunted in the least, Ruthenes held their own celebrations, and indeed made common cause with their allies in the Austrian Reichsrath, the German Liberals, in ostentatiously honoring the emperor's memory. Public events and anniversaries, in short, could demonstrate division and friction as well as loyalty.

Alice Freifeld provides a study of the empress Elisabeth's image in Hungary, in what she terms an early example of "celebrity monarchism" (p. 138). This article is in some respects the least impressive of the collection, not because of any lack of scholarship or erudition, but because of the rather strained interpretation placed upon the sources. Certainly Freifeld makes a convincing case for Elisabeth's genuine popularity among Hungarians, as a result of her perceived humanizing influence on Francis Joseph and her explicit identification with the Hungarian noble elite and Hungarian language and culture. She is on much shakier ground, however, in claiming Elisabeth's supposedly crucial intervention in the forging of the Ausgleich of 1867, an interpretation for which Freifeld adduces no further evidence than a generalized quote from Oscar Jászi. The article is not helped by its hyperbolic language, of which the description of Elisabeth as "the mater dolorosa of liberal monarchism" (p. 153) is among the more restrained examples; and given Elisabeth's palpable indifference to public life in her later years, including the Hungarian side of it, identifying her as an icon of Hungary's own "martyrdom" in the twentieth century seems fanciful in the extreme.

Sarah A. Kent utilizes a single royal visit to Zagreb, in 1895, to draw out some of the ambiguities and cross-currents attendant upon loyalism in Croatia. Francis Joseph's presence in Zagreb became the occasion for a demonstration by Croatian nationalist students, among them the later Peasant Party leader, Stjepan Radić, against Hungarian domination, in the course of which the Hungarian flag was set alight. Although the perpetrators of this minor outrage were duly sentenced to short prison terms, their demonstration was explicitly loyalist in tone. The students marched in their uniforms as a "corporative" body to the main square, cried out "Long live the Croatian King"--that is, Francis Joseph--and evoked the name of Ban Josip Jelačić, famous for his loyalty to the Habsburgs, instead of Hungary, in 1848-49. Their protest, in their eyes, was a legalistic one against the use of the Hungarian flag on Croatian soil during the royal visit, but more generally against the inadequate autonomy granted Croatia by Hungary in the Nagodba of 1868. According to Kent, much of the Croatian public made clear that it shared these views, and the unstated implication, for the dynasty, was that Croatians' loyalty to the dynasty, in these circumstances, "had its limits" (p. 173).

In one of the most interesting pieces included, Alon Rachamimov examines the writings of the hitherto unknown (to me, at least) Hebrew writer Avigdor Hameiri (1890-1970), born Avigdor Feuerstein in the Carpatho-Rus area of Royal Hungary. Hameiri was not only one of the pioneers of modern Hebrew as a literary language, and a well-regarded journalist and poet (in Hebrew and Hungarian) of the avant-garde in pre-1914 Budapest, but the author of two autobiographical novels and a whole raft of short stories and poetry chronicling his experiences as a soldier in the First World War. The novels in particular, Ha-Shigaon ha-gadol (The Great Madness; 1929) and Be-Gehenom shel mata (Hell on Earth; 1932), sound as if they deserve a wider audience, not least because they illustrate the conflicting loyalties and dilemmas of identity so acutely. Clearly, Rachamimov concludes, Jews in the Habsburg monarchy deserved their reputation for being among its most loyal subjects, since they owed their emancipation and favorable position to the relative liberalism of the late Habsburg state. Yet Jews like Hameiri were also, despite demonstrable bravery and sacrifices at the front, deemed incapable of true patriotism, or identification with any particular nation, by their fellow subjects. The whole piece demonstrates neatly the difficulty not only of assigning a clear "identity" to someone whose experience was so varied, but also of the distinction Rachamimov seeks to make between "loyalty to the state" and the much more contingent "identification with the state" (p. 180).

In the penultimate essay, Christiane Wolf undertakes a useful comparison of the Habsburg monarchy with Britain and Germany in this period, in particular of the way in which the institution of monarchy, once subject to constitutional restraints, acted as an integrative factor. In the cases of Britain and Germany, if for very different reasons, the person of the monarch became something like a national symbol. Queen Victoria and her successors, while evolving into politically neutral figures, acquired iconic status as emblems of both the "nation" (however that was conceived in the United Kingdom of the time) and the larger empire. William II, by contrast, though retaining far greater powers constitutionally, and despite his divisive attitude towards large numbers of his subjects, such as Poles, Social Democrats, Catholics, and Jews, also became intimately associated with the national idea, through his vocal advocacy of a German navy and German Weltpolitik. For Francis Joseph, of course, this identification with any one national idea was an impossibility. Paradoxically, in Wolf's view, the concession of constitutional rule in 1867 made it easier for the emperor-king to pose as above the fray, and although this "depoliticization of the emperor" (p. 200) did not ultimately alleviate the monarchy's chronic nationality conflicts, it did, in Wolf's opinion, make the monarch "a focal point for an emotional connection to the state" (p. 201).

Finally, the afterword by Evans is not only a deft round-up of the arguments summarized above, but also an engaging piece of devil's advocacy, in that it reminds us literally of the limits of loyalty in this peculiar institution. As Evans puts it, there can be no doubt that, in much of the literature until recently, "royalism ... has been underestimated" (p. 225). The majority of virtually all the monarchy's peoples, no matter their social stratum, were not only capable of loyalty to the monarch and the idea of the monarchy, but positively displayed it, not least by dying in hundreds of thousands during the final cataclysm. Only the hammer blows of war made the previously inconceivable conceivable. So, it is certainly time that the balance between the study of centrifugal forces and that of centripetal ones was redressed in favor of the latter. On the other hand, each of the contributions to this volume shows how subjects' loyalty was often conditional as well as limited. Czechs, Poles, South Slavs, Magyars, even Germans, repeatedly made clear that they expected the dynasty to come down on their particular side of this or that dispute; without that backing, alienation and even disaffection were all the more likely. In this context, as Evans gently points out, the pretence that the monarch was somehow above the fray, belonging to no one cause, was just that--a fiction. In reality Francis Joseph was, by definition, intimately involved in the management of his empire, not just in the traditional realms of foreign policy and the armed forces, but in the affairs of every province. It could not be otherwise, since for the Habsburgs "their continued involvement in government was essential for the running of the Monarchy" (p. 228). Involvement meant taking sides, or at the very least disappointing one side or the other, so that the further the politicization and nationalization of the monarchy's peoples went, the more the monarchy was bound to disappoint everybody. To be perfectly sure of alienating no one, and committing no foreign policy disasters, the monarchy would have been better advised to have divested itself of all effective power, as in Britain, and to have opted for a policy of quieta non movere. That way, possibly, the residual inertia governing the lives of its people might have kept them "loyal," at least after a fashion.

This volume is a splendid addition to the invaluable Austrian and Habsburg Studies series. Each of its contributors has approached his or her subject in a novel way, and the result is a collection that obliges the reader to look at things with a fresh eye.

Nizza Cavalryman 1848

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One of the decisions of the Congress of Vienna (1815) was the creation of the kingdom of Sardinia (Piedmont), which also encompassed the former republic of Genoa. The House of Savoy soon lost independence and became Austrian vassals, and the desire for freedom put Piedmont at the forefront of the struggle for Italian unification. From 1848 to 1866, with short intervals of peace, there were three wars against Austria, from which the small states of northern Italy emerged free and united.

The revolution in France in 1830 gave great hopes to the Italian patriots of the Risorgimento. In Piedmont, a restructuring of the army resulted in great improvements in the quality of training, especially in the cavalry, and the organization, armament and uniforms of the cavalry were regulated by the rule-book of 1833. In 1835, six cavalry regiments were converted into two brigades: the 1st, consisting of the Nizza, Savoia and Novara Cavalleria, and the 2nd, consisting of the guard Piemonte Reale, Genoa and Aosta cavalry. The next year, the same six regiments were grouped into three brigades, and in 1841, each had six squadrons, one of which was armed with lances. The peacetime formation had 825 men and 633 horses, in wartime there were 1,128 men and 959 horses.

The beginning of the nineteenth century saw the rise of classicism in French art, which drew its inspiration from Ancient Greece, a free civil society which was also the model for the French Revolution. In the field of military equipment, classicism found distinguished expression in the cavalry helmet, which was a copy of the Ancient Greek model. In 1811, it was issued to French line lancers and carabiniers; in 1815 to the English life guards and Belgian carabiniers; soon after, it was worn by nearly all the heavy cavalry forces of Europe. The Piedmont Rules of 1833 envisaged the use of such a helmet, and it was made in 1840 according to the design of court painter Palagio Palagi, and called the Minerva helmet.

The Nizza cavallieri were armed with heavy cavalry sabre, two pistols, and a very short carbine (pistolone). The lancers had a lance with a swallow-tailed pennant, in the Italian national colour - blue.

In 1848, upon hearing of the revolution in Vienna, the inhabitants of Milan rose and ousted the Austrian garrison, and Piedmont immediately declared war on Austria. The campaign lasted a year, and ended in the defeat of the Montagnards. The Nizza cavalry played a prominent role. A certain sergeant Fiora had his horse killed under him, and was surrounded by four Austrian uhlans; he killed one with his lance, wounded another, and chased off the remaining two, running after them. A similar feat was performed by a sergeant Prato, also surrounded by four Austrians, this time hussars; he killed one and chased off the remaining three.

EUROPEAN WARS OF INSURRECTION 1830-50

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A revolution against the Austrian Netherlands produced the seceding country of Belgium in 1830, a year that also saw another revolution in France. Unrest was in the air. The 1830 Belgian Revolution led to the establishment of an independent, Catholic, and neutral Belgium under a provisional government and a national congress.

The November Uprising (1830–1831)—also known as the Cadet Revolution—was an armed rebellion against the rule of the Russian Empire in Poland and Lithuania. The uprising began on November 29, 1830 in Warsaw when a group of young non-commissioned officer conspirators from the Imperial Russian Army's military academy in Warsaw directed by Piotr Wysocki revolted. They were soon joined by large parts of Polish society. Despite several local successes, the uprising was eventually crushed by a numerically superior Russian army under Ivan Paskevich.

The European Revolutions of 1848, known in some countries as the Spring of Nations or the Year of Revolution, were a series of political upheavals throughout the European continent. Described by some historians as a revolutionary wave, the period of unrest began on 12 January 1848 in Sicily and then, further propelled by the French Revolution of 1848, soon spread to the rest of Europe.

Although most of the revolutions were quickly put down, there was a significant amount of violence in many areas, with tens of thousands of people tortured and killed. While the immediate political effects of the revolutions were reversed, the long-term reverberations of the events were far-reaching.

Direct cause of the outbreak of violence

In 1846 there had been an uprising of Polish nobility in Austrian Galicia, which was only countered when peasants, in turn, rose up against the nobles. The economic crisis of 1845-47 was marked by recession and food shortages throughout the continent. At the end of February 1848, demonstrations broke out in Paris. French King Louis-Philippe abdicated the throne prompting similar revolts throughout the continent.

France

In July 1830 when, on Sunday, July 25 Charles X signed the July Ordinances, also known as "The Ordinances of Saint-Cloud". On Monday, July 26 they were published in the leading conservative newspaper in Paris, Le Moniteur. On Tuesday, July 27 the revolution began in earnest Les trois journées de juillet, and the end of the Bourbon monarchy.

Switzerland

In 1847, a civil war broke out between the Catholic and the Protestant cantons (Sonderbundskrieg). Its immediate cause was a 'special treaty' (Sonderbund) of the Catholic cantons. It lasted for less than a month, causing fewer than 100 casualties. Apart from small riots, this was the last armed conflict on Swiss territory.
As a consequence of the civil war, Switzerland adopted a federal constitution in 1848, amending it extensively in 1874 and establishing federal responsibility for defence, trade, and legal matters, leaving all other matters to the cantonal governments. From then, and over much of the 20th century, continuous political, economic, and social improvement has characterized Swiss history.

Prussia

By late 1848, the Prussian aristocrats including Otto von Bismarck and generals had regained power in Berlin. They had not been defeated permanently during the incidents of March, they had only retreated temporarily. General von Wrangel led the troops who recaptured Berlin for the old powers, and King Frederick William IV of Prussia immediately rejoined the old forces.

Hungary

Count István Széchenyi,the most prominent statesmen of the country recognized the urgent need of modernization and their message got through. The Hungarian Parliament was reconvened in 1825 to handle financial needs. A liberal party emerged in the Diet. The party focused on providing for the peasantry in mostly symbolic ways because of their inability to understand the needs of the laborers. Louis Kossuth emerged as leader of the lower gentry in the Parliament. A remarkable upswing started as the nation concentrated its forces on the inevitable modernization, even though the reactionary Habsburgs were obstructing all important liberal reforms.

On March 15, 1848 mass demonstrations in Pest and Buda enabled Hungarian reformists to push through a list of 12 demands. Faced with revolution both at home and in Vienna, Austria first had to accept Hungarian demands. Later, under governor and president Lajos Kossuth and the first Prime minister, Lajos Batthyány, the House of Habsburg was dethroned and the form of government was changed to create the first Republic of Hungary. After the Austrian revolution was suppressed,emperor Franz Joseph replaced his epileptic uncle Ferdinand I as Emperor. The Habsburg Ruler and his advisors skillfully manipulated the Croatian, Serbian and Romanian peasantry, led by priests and officers firmly loyal to the Habsburgs, and induced them to rebel against the Hungarian government. The Hungarians were supported by the vast majority of the Slovak, German and Rusyn nationalities and by all the Jews of the kingdom, as well as by a large number of Polish, Austrian and Italian volunteers. Some members of the nationalities gained coveted positions within the Hungarian Army, like General János Damjanich, an ethnic Serb who became a Hungarian national hero through his command of the 3rd Hungarian Army Corps. Initially, the Hungarian forces (Honvédség) defeated Austrian armies. To counter the successes of the Hungarian revolutionary army, Franz Joseph asked for help from the "Gendarme of Europe," Czar Nicholas I, whose Russian armies invaded Hungary. The huge army of the Russian Empire and the Austrian forces proved too powerful for the Hungarian army, and General Artúr Görgey surrendered in August 1849. Julius Freiherr von Haynau, the leader of the Austrian army, then became governor of Hungary for a few months and on October 6, ordered the execution of 13 leaders of the Hungarian army as well as Prime Minister Batthyány. Lajos Kossuth escaped into exile.

Following the war of 1848–1849, the whole country was in "passive resistance". Archduke Albrecht von Habsburg was appointed military governor of Hungary, and this time was remembered for Germanization and oppression pursued with the help of Czech officers.

Schleswig-Holstein

The German national awakening following the Napoleonic Wars led to a strong popular movement in Holstein and Southern Schleswig for unification with a new Prussian-dominated Germany. However, this development was paralleled by an equally strong Danish national awakening in Denmark and northern Schleswig. It called for the complete reintegration of Schleswig into the Kingdom of Denmark and demanded an end to discrimination against Danes in Schleswig. The ensuing conflict is sometimes called the Schleswig-Holstein Question. In 1848 King Frederick VII of Denmark declared that he would grant Denmark a liberal constitution and the immediate goal for the Danish national movement was to ensure that this constitution would not only give rights to all Danes, i.e., not only in the Kingdom of Denmark, but also to Danes (and Germans) living in Schleswig. Furthermore, they demanded protection for the Danish language in Schleswig since the dominant language in almost a quarter of Schleswig had changed from Danish to German since the beginning of the 19th century.

A liberal constitution for Holstein was not seriously considered in Copenhagen, since it was a well-known fact that the political élite of Holstein had been far more conservative than Copenhagen's. This proved to be true, as the politicians of Holstein demanded that the Constitution of Denmark be scrapped — not only in Schleswig but also in Denmark. They also demanded that Schleswig immediately follow Holstein and become a member of the German Confederation, and eventually a part of the new united Germany. These demands were rejected and in 1848 the Germans of Holstein and Southern Schleswig rebelled. This was the beginning of the First War of Schleswig (1848–51) which ended in a Danish victory at Idstedt.