AT THE OPENING OF THE nineteenth century the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation still existed, after a thousand years of chequered life. Long decadent, it was now moribund, however, and perpetuated only in name an august sovereignty which at one time extended over a large part of the European Continent. Diverse in race, language, religion, and political forms, having no common bond in administration, law, justice, or military organization, the many parts of the imperial dominion were kept together in firm union only so long as they were subject to a strong rule, and when once the centre of authority had become weakened, decline and disintegration ran their certain course.
The first powerful impetus to this process was given by the Peace of Westphalia, which secured to the German Princes a large degree of territorial sovereignty. Now for a century and a half these Sovereigns had steadily encroached upon the imperial jurisdiction and disputed its claims, local autonomy had spread and strengthened, until the might and majesty of Charlemagne’s and Barbarossa’s sway had come at last to be represented by a loose and incoherent political system, composed of States which had little in common save a desire to magnify themselves at the expense of the Emperor and of each other. Of these States there were three hundred, for the most part petty and as political organizations contemptible, each with its Court and Government, army and bureaucracy, customs and taxes, coinage, weights, and measures. Giants amongst pigmies, Austria and Prussia overshadowed all the rest.
For over five hundred years the Austrian reigning house had borne the imperial title, yet for a long time it had been Prussia and not Austria which had been gaining in power at home and repute abroad. As a member of the old Empire, Prussia had long gone her own way; never had the Emperors succeeded in asserting an effectual authority over her masterful rulers. More and more the northern kingdom had disputed the superiority claimed, in virtue of a sovereignty that had become little more than titular, by its older but less vigorous rival on the Danube. From the time when Frederick the Great established the Prussian military State, whose foundations had been laid by his father, and challenged the power of the house of Habsburg in its citadel by the rape of Silesia, an act of aggression which he had to defend by seven years of continuous warfare, the precedence of Austria in the Empire had been definitely threatened.
Frederick the Great had almost doubled his territory; he had increased the population under his sway from two and a half to six millions and his army from 82,000 to 200,000. As his master-thought in life had been conquest, so his supreme concern at the last – he died in 1786 – was that the gains which he had won, some by fair, others by unfair means, should be consolidated and preserved. “My last wishes when my breath expires,” he wrote in his will, “will be for the happiness of my country. May it ever be ruled with justice, wisdom, and decision; may it be the happiest of States because of the clemency of its laws, the best managed financially, and the most bravely defended, because of the honourable and worthy fame of its army.”
The immediate successors of the greatest of the Hohenzollerns failed to live up to his reputation, or to improve or even rightly value the inheritance which he had committed to their keeping. Frederick William II, known as William the Fat, was, with all his amiability, a man of small intelligence and weak character. He neither ruled well himself nor had he the wit to choose men able to do his work well for him, and he became the creature of scheming flatterers. A frank libidinist, his notorious amours were only made more vulgar by the bouts of religious extravagance which alternated with them. More than once be made a feeble show of challenging Austria’s reviving pretensions, but when it came to supporting words by acts, his courage failed him. The administration of his country, energetic and efficient at his accession, he left weak and corrupt: the army had diminished in numbers and in spirit; debt had accumulated though taxation had increased: in civil life, public spirit and private virtue had decayed. It was due to this King even more than to his successor, Frederick William III, a weakling likewise, though free from his coarseness and private vices, that twelve years after the death of Frederick the Great the fame of that ruler’s martial triumphs had been sacrificed and Prussia’s prestige in Europe for a time suffered eclipse. Even in Germany the once powerful northern kingdom had ceased to be either feared or respected. The Alliance of Princes (Fürstenbund) which Frederick had concluded, with himself as its centre, had been dissolved, and States which, like Saxony, had been accustomed to look to Prussia for support had gravitated instead to Austria.
The German household, divided against itself, its chief members indifferent custodians of the common interest of security, was unable to stand the shock of Napoleon’s onslaught. After Austria, already vanquished in Italy, had been compelled to conclude on behalf of the Empire the Peace of Lunéville in 1801, the subjugation of all Germany followed swiftly. Meanwhile, Bavaria, Würtemberg, and Baden had sought safety by joining the enemy of the larger fatherland. State after State fell beneath the hammer-blows of the mighty Thor, and soon from the Rhine to the Elbe ancient sovereignties lay in ruins, heap on heap. The climax came in 1806, when at the battle of Jena (October 14th) the kingdom of Prussia, which Frederick had raised to such a dizzy height of power, was shattered and overthrown; while by the succeeding Peace of Tilsit (July 7, 1807) its area was reduced to the four eastern provinces of Brandenburg, Silesia, West Prussia, and East Prussia, and its population from ten to five millions. Two months before Jena, Napoleon had declared the Holy Roman Empire dissolved, in order that he might himself claim succession to Charlemagne, and on August 6th, at his bidding, Francis II not unwillingly laid down the imperial office. So it was that a dominion which had been created by warlike emprise, and many acts of masterly if cunning statecraft, succumbed in helpless impotence, unhonoured and unregretted.
If Napoleon found delight in putting down the mighty from their seats, he was no less fond of exalting the humble and meek. As far as was consistent with his political designs, he lightened the sorrows of many of his German victims, for in his rare deeds of magnanimity, as well as in those of heartless cruelty, there was always a deep, calculated purpose. To some he gave new territories for those taken away, to others he gave titles; to two reigning houses he deigned to give his relatives in marriage. There was a systematic readjustment of princely rank amongst the rulers who passed into his service or under his protection. The duke, for reward or consolation, was made a grand duke, the grand duke an elector, the elector a king. Three of the four kingdoms comprised within the present German Empire, Bavaria, Würtemberg, and Saxony, owed their higher status to the favour of Napoleon.
The fall of the Empire and the consequent re-arrangement of the map of Germany seemed to mark the occultation of the German national idea. Even in its moribund condition, the Empire had to the last, in some sort, symbolized the substantial unity of the German peoples. Now not only the substance but almost the shadow of unity appeared to have passed away.
In place of the dissolved Empire Napoleon created (July 17, 1806), the Confederation of the Rhine, composed at first of sixteen of the southern and western States, which he had allowed to retain their independence, and which acknowledged him as protector and overlord. The most important of these vassal States were Bavaria, Würtemberg, Baden, Hesse-Darmstadt, and Nassau. To the original members of the union others were added after the battle of Jena, and chiefly Saxony, the Mecklenburgs, Anhalt, and Oldenburg. The Confederation was to have had a representative assembly, meeting at Frankfort, but this was never convened. At that time, therefore, old Germany consisted in the main of Austria, Prussia, and the Rhenish Confederation; of the petty octavo and duodecimo States, some had been absorbed by France, others thrown together with larger ones, and others again merged in a brand-new kingdom of Westphalia, formed for the purpose of supplying Napoleon’s brother Jerome with a crown.
The fate which Germany suffered at Napoleon’s hands was a bitter one, but it was hardly worse than she deserved. Had the States at the outset coalesced loyally and met the invader with united and unselfish will, disaster might conceivably have been averted; and even had military defeat still befallen them, honour would have been saved though all else had been lost. So disunited was Germany, however, that Napoleon was able to deal with the States one by one and apportion to each its fate in turn. Thus Prussia, instead of going to Austria’s assistance betimes, dallied and prevaricated until it was too late either to help Austria or to save herself. So little conscious was her King of the duty of the German States to one another, that he concluded a bargain with the usurper by which he received Hanover in return for Prussian territory (December 15, 1805). Frederick William III hated the idea of war, and clung to the hope of staving it off by concessions and capitulations, only to find too late that the more he surrendered the greater were Napoleon’s demands. By 1806 Prussia had fallen to such a depth of impotence that further decline seemed impossible.
It had been the chief boast of Prussia’s later rulers that theirs was a military State, yet in the hour of need the army itself proved incapable. It was not the standing army organized by Frederick the Great but a militia, a voluntary levée en masse of the people, that later saved both State and Crown. The aristocracy, as a class, failed no less ignominiously to rise to its responsibilities. There were many brilliant exceptions, but on the whole the crisis found most of the men who had claimed to be the natural leaders of the nation lacking in public spirit, and content to accept with weak resignation whatever fate might have in store for their country. It is a significant fact that of the six most eminent soldiers and statesmen who at the beginning of last century devoted themselves to Prussia’s renewal, Blücher, Scharnhorst, Gneisenau, Stein, Hardenberg, and Wilhelm von Humboldt, only the last was a Prussian. Of the spiritual harbingers of Germany’s rebirth, Prussia could claim Arndt, Schenkendorf, and Schleiermacher, but most of them – Fichte, Körner, Niebuhr, the younger Eichhorn, and the rest – were likewise sons of another soil.
The officials of the higher bureaucracy had long been taught to regard themselves as the King’s meek creatures, and as such they had been treated; hence in that time of appeal to manly virtue it was inevitable that there could be no response where every trace of manliness had been extinguished. “Like the soulless machine it was,” writes a German historian, “the administration quietly went on its way, caring little under which Sovereign it lived, whether Frederick William or Napoleon; and, accustomed to look above for remedies, the high officials even repressed the aspirations of the healthy, energetic spirit which still lived on in the so-called common people.” A district governor in Silesia pressed upon Napoleon’s troops supplies which they neither sought nor wanted, and introduced the Emperor’s decrees with “We Napoleon by the grace of God,” until Napoleon himself rebuked his foolery. In Berlin a general refused to obey the King’s orders to convey to the fortresses the ammunition then lying in the city. When Napoleon arrived in that capital, seven Ministers of the Crown and a crowd of officials promptly took the oath of allegiance to him. Writing of the demoralization prevalent in Prussia at the time, the same German historian says: “Not only did the Junkers, who had hitherto boasted that they were the chief pillars of the State, break like dried reeds in the wind; the other ‘pillars’ – the bureaucracy, the learned classes, and the higher society down to the burgher class, covered themselves with shame in those days.” In every rank of society faithlessness and cowardice were shown in their unloveliest forms. Jews sold themselves into Napoleon’s pay, and in servile newspapers proclaimed his fame and denounced everything Prussian, yet when the usurper had been overthrown the same men arrogantly claimed that they had saved the country. One Hebrew writer asserted that at Waterloo fifty-five officers of his race had fallen, though the number of officers lost in the entire Prussian army was only twenty-four.
But Prussia had no monopoly of sycophancy and treachery in those days. The rulers of Bavaria, Saxony, Würtemberg, and Baden all danced attendance upon the conqueror, enrolled themselves in his retinue, and seemed happy in their new service. What was right in the ruler was more than pardonable in the ruled. The professors of Leipzig effusively greeted Napoleon as the hero of his age. Even Goethe, the honoured leader of the nation’s intellectual life, could watch from his Weimar home the fall and rise of Germany at that time without emotion; he philosophised and wondered, but was unperturbed. His admirers excused this apparent apathy by his age, yet when Napoleon partitioned a large part of Germany amongst his favourites the author of Faust was only fifty-six. Nowhere was the old rule thrown off more lightly and the new rule accepted more readily than in the Rhineland, whose populations had already changed sovereignty and form of government so often. It is difficult for men to be patriotic who are not certain to what country they belong to-day or to what country they will belong to-morrow, and though the Rhenish peoples have been reproached for the facility with which they changed their allegiance, their indifference may be excused, at least in part, by the tragedy of their position. No greater shame ever fell upon countries or nations than that which the German Princes brought upon their own lands and peoples over a hundred years ago.
The facts thus briefly stated will help the reader to visualize the German question as it presented itself at the beginning of the nineteenth century. There remained no longer a Germany, but only the disjointed members of a Germany that had been. To bring these members together, to kindle a new national consciousness, to weld the many races into a political unity, was a task to be achieved by efforts long continued and means the most diverse – by statecraft and diplomacy, by parliaments, universities, and schools, by commerce and railways, by customs unions and military conventions, by revolution and war, above all by a stern political discipline which should subordinate the individual State and citizen to the needs and interests of a larger commonwealth and a new nation. Hardly might it have seemed possible that a German Empire could be recreated out of elements so unpromising, yet it was in that time of national abasement and humiliation that the spirit of unity originated. Periods of progress were to alternate with periods of stagnation, periods of buoyant confidence with those of depression and disillusionment, before the ideal, passing through all the gradations of doubt, hope, and probability, could reach the firm ground of certitude; yet if the way was to be long, so much surer was the goal.
In 1813-14 a supreme effort was made, under Prussia’s leadership, to throw off the French yoke, and it succeeded. Yet in the campaign which sealed Napoleon’s fate the King of Saxony fought in the Corsican’s army and King Frederick of Würtemberg wrote to wish him “a happy return” to Germany. All Europe, Princes and people alike, breathed again freely after 1814, and most relieved of all were those German Sovereigns who had bartered themselves into Napoleon’s service, had taken their orders from him, marched under his banners, fought his battles against their own countrymen, and had been proud to receive their crowns at his hand. Now began the work of internal reconstruction. The old States were restored, but not in every case the old frontiers. On November 1, 1814, the Congress of Vienna assembled in order to decide on the future constitution of Germany. Prince Metternich, the Austrian Chancellor, who was destined to exert a baneful influence on the development of German political life for over a generation, was the President and almost the dictator of the assembly. The Princes marked their patriotism by indulging in a greedy scramble for territory, bartering souls like chattels, and rectifying boundaries like the fences of their forests and parks. Every German State strong enough to press its claims wished to be enlarged at the expense of its weaker neighbours. Prussia wanted the whole of Saxony, while Austria, England, and France, supported by Bavaria and other States of the dissolved Rhenish Federation, opposed the demand. Nevertheless, Prussia did well for herself, for she obtained a large slice of the Saxon kingdom – the present province of that name – most of Westphalia, some territory on the left bank of the Rhine, and Swedish Pomerania, while the territory of which Napoleon had robbed her was restored. Bavaria received Ansbach and Bayreuth, and Hanover received East Friesland.
Though the Confederation of the Rhine and the kingdom of Westphalia had disappeared, they left behind them traces and traditions important for the future development of German political life. Westphalia had been given a constitutional system of government, and in the States united in the Rhenish Confederation the principles of the French Revolution, in their good as in their less attractive aspects, had been applied, though in most of them the earlier constitutional arrangements, such as they were, were for the time suspended. Hence, during the time that the seal of France rested upon it, Western Germany received political impressions which were never wholly removed; a break with the Empire was made in political thought and life; and when the detached territories went back to the old allegiance their populations retained much French influence, and Paris for a time interested them more than Berlin or capitals nearer home. Above all, they gained a fixed bias towards Liberalism and all appreciation of free institutions which have never ceased to single them out from the rest of the country; without being denationalised, they had become singularly open to progressive influences from the outside.
“When a man like Napoleon falls he falls altogether,” wrote the Russian diplomat Count Nesselrode, after the battle of Leipzig (October 18, 1813). So good an apothegm deserved to be true, but for a time it miscarried. At that great “battle of the peoples” the conqueror’s dream of world dominion was, indeed, shattered, yet though Napoleon was sent a captive to Elba six months later, the end was not yet. Before the Congress of Vienna had completed its work, the dethroned Emperor returned to France (March 1, 1815), and the war was resumed. It is characteristic of the selfish particularism which ruled even in that time of danger that the Prussian general Gneisenau, than whom no soldier was more a politician or fonder of committing his immature political ideas to paper, drew up a memorial proposing that unless the Allies granted Prussia’s territorial demands beforehand she should withdraw and enter into an alliance with Napoleon. Gneisenau gave this document to the Chancellor Hardenberg, and asked that it might be offered for the King’s consideration. The discreet Minister, however, returned it to its author with the comment that what it proposed was a “moral enormity” which could not be even whispered in the royal ear.
After Waterloo had been fought (June 18, 1815), and the disturber of Europe had been sent to his “sullen isle,” St. Helena, there to gaze upon the sea which he had vainly hoped to conquer, the Congress of Vienna faced the larger problem of the future of Germany. Here opinions were hopelessly divided. Baron von Stein, believing that the surest pledge of national unity and of the continuity of the German name lay in the intimate association of the small with the two major States, was ready to welcome the revival of the Empire, still under the house of Habsburg, as the best means of securing this end. Hanover favoured this course, and in so doing almost stood alone. The King of Prussia, usually slow to make up his mind upon political questions, was quick to recognize the danger and fatuity of Stein’s view, and in rejecting it he was supported by Hardenberg and Humboldt, the former opposing the idea of restoration from Prussia’s standpoint and the latter holding it to be contrary to the interests of Germany as a whole. Public opinion in the monarchy was urgent upon one point, viz. that the undisputed primacy in Germany which Austria had held in the past should no longer be conceded.
Nor were the rest of the States, even the small ones, more willing than Prussia to resume the old position of subordination in the Empire, for at its dissolution they had gained complete sovereignty, and this sovereignty neither Princes nor peoples were now willing to renounce. Of the secondary States, none was more jealous of its new independence and higher political status than Bavaria, whose unfortunate position it was to be too small to rank with Austria and Prussia as a Great Power, but too large in area, population, and still more in self-esteem, to be willing to associate with the petty principalities on equal terms.
Yet the prospect of the Empire’s revival was never a hopeful one, for Austria herself was opposed to any such futile attempt to call back the past. Remembering how she had for so long a time shone as the one star of the first magnitude in the German constellation, she was determined that, whatever form German union might take, the leadership should fall to her in the future as in the past. Nevertheless, the Emperor Francis had no desire to hold again the imperial office. Not only was he doubtful whether the German Princes would be willing in general to return to the imperial fold, but he was conscious that the office had lost in dignity and would no longer carry authority. In this prudent attitude he was unreservedly supported by his Chancellor, Prince Metternich. It was from Prussia that the solution of the problem of Germany’s future organization came in the proposal of a loose union of States. It was a solution defective and inadequate, a makeshift in every sense of the word, yet in the circumstances the only one that seemed practicable. As early as November, 1813, there had been conferences at Frankfort at which the Princes agreed to surrender so much of their independence as might be necessary to the creation of a constitution for all Germany, but no details were arranged. The choice was between a federal State (Bundesstaat) and a federation of States (Staatenbund), and it was soon seen that the latter represented the utmost concession to national unity that was to be hoped for. In order to bring matters to a practical issue, Hardenberg in the following year laid before Metternich a draft constitution, under which all the States were to be united in œternum in an association to be called the Deutscher Bund, or Germanic Federation, whose purpose was to be the maintenance of Germany’s security within and without and of the independence and inviolability of the federated States. There was to be a directory of Sovereigns at the head, with an upper and a lower house, the former composed of delegates of the Princes and the latter of delegates of the Princes and estates jointly. For Austria the scheme went too far, and at Metternich’s suggestion it was modified, and thereafter was discussed by the Governments of the six kingdoms preparatory to its submission to the whole of the States.
Accepted as a basis of negotiation, and subjected to repeated revision, the outcome of this scheme was the Federal Act of the Congress, dated June 8, 1815. By this Act or treaty the sovereign Princes and Free Cities of Germany united in a permanent federation of States, which came into existence in November of the following year, Austria and Prussia joining for all their territories which belonged to the dissolved Empire, the King of Denmark for the duchies of Holstein and Lauenburg, the King of the Netherlands for the grand duchy of Luxemburg and for Limburg, and the King of England for Hanover. The dissolved Holy Roman Empire had contained more than three hundred separate sovereignties, but, to the benefit of Germany, the great majority of these had disappeared. The original number of States now federated was forty-one, though the number fell eventually to thirty-three, owing to the extinction or absorption of certain of the smaller principalities. Austria was given the presidency in virtue of her headship of the old Empire. Within the union the States retained independent sovereignty. Such powers as they devolved to the Bund were vested in and exercised by the Federal Diet or Assembly, a standing council composed of plenipotentiaries of the Sovereigns and Free Cities, whose meeting-place was the old imperial city of Frankfort. The jurisdiction of the Diet was very limited. Strictly speaking, the Diet was an executive council. It made no binding laws; it could vote ordinances, but they were only valid when adopted by each State independently; and it had no power to conclude treaties, for the Governments reserved this right to themselves. In contrast to the narrowness and jealousy of the faint-hearted rulers of those days, fearful lest one whit of their sovereignty should be threatened by concessions to liberal ideas, a statesmanlike utterance of the Hanoverian plenipotentiary at the Congress of Vienna (October 21, 1814) stands out, conspicuous for its sobriety and sanity. “As for all this clinging to the word ‘sovereignty,’” he said, “the King of Great Britain is just as indisputably a Sovereign as any other Prince in Europe, and yet his throne is not undermined but rather strengthened by the liberty of his people.” Such a sentiment was hopelessly untimely, even if it was understood.
The Diet transacted most of its business as a council of seventeen, the eleven larger States having one vote each and the other States being grouped in six curiœ, each with one vote. Before any resolution could be voted on, each member had to take the instructions of his Government, and in the case of the curial votes the States concerned had first to agree amongst themselves. For the determination of certain fundamental or organic questions, such as the modification of the basis and organization of the Federation, the admission of new members, the amendment of the constitution, or the cession of federal territory, except to federals, the Diet sat as a plenary body (im Plenum), i.e. the States had individual though unequal representation. In this event the six kingdoms, Austria, Prussia, Bavaria, Saxony, Würtemberg, and Hanover, had four votes each, Baden, Electoral Hesse, Hesse-Darmstadt, Holstein, and Luxemburg three each, Brunswick, Mecklenburg-Schwerin, and Nassau two each, and the rest of the States one vote each, giving a total of seventy.
In the inner council most questions were decided by absolute majority of votes, but in the plenary body a two-thirds majority was needed in the case of questions relating to peace and war, and for the rest no resolution was valid unless adopted unanimously. In practice, therefore, the principle of liberum veto applied in the Plenum, so that the smallest State or Free City in the Federation was able, theoretically, to obstruct the will of all the rest. Apart from this right of veto, the small States had it in their power at all times, by acting together, to determine the policy of the Federation altogether according to their will, and the only effective restraint was the danger of arousing the resentment of their powerful allies.
In one respect the power of the Diet was far-reaching and even ominous. As the main concern of the Federation was peace and tranquillity at home, it was given the right to interfere in constitutional disputes occurring in the federal States. Disputes between members of the Federation might also be referred for settlement to the Diet, which was able to enforce its decisions, like its resolutions generally, by means of a federal execution. This consisted of the military occupation of the contumelious State by troops of one or more of the Governments commissioned to execute the Diet’s will.
For the treaty contained provision for a federal army, to which each State was to be required to contribute a “contingent” or quota proportionate to its population. With a short-sightedness which half a century later was to bring about a severe retribution, Austria, concerned far more to exercise imperial power than to recognize imperial responsibilities, opposed Prussia’s proposal to place the federal army on a strong and efficient foundation. Had Prussia had her way, the army would have been equal to 1 per cent. of the population, a ratio which would have given a force of 300,000 men, and the obligation of the federal States in relation thereto would have been real instead of nominal. Austria, however, was lukewarm in the matter, and the other States, particularly those of the South, were suspicious of an arrangement which, if faithfully carried out, would have placed at the disposal of the two major Powers so preponderant an armed force. The contingents were never forthcoming in the allotted numbers, with the consequence that the duty of providing for Germany’s safety was left primarily to Prussia.
Such as it was, however, the federal army proved a singularly heterogeneous formation, devised on no common plan, clad in uniforms of as many colours as Joseph’s coat – an army without uniformity of system, training, equipment, or administration, or even a commander-in-chief, for this officer, who should have been the symbol of unity and efficiency, was only to be chosen in the event of war, and then by the Diet and subject to the orders of the Committee on Military Affairs. Five towns were created federal fortresses – Luxemburg, Mayence, Landau, Ulm, and Rastatt. Equally impotent was the Diet in the matter of taxation: the power to levy taxes was denied to it, and its necessary expenditure was met by “matricular contributions,” or levies upon the States proportionately to population, a principle of assessment taken over from the old Empire.
With the constitution as thus devised the rulers were on the whole well pleased, for it left Germany as divided as before, but the peoples at large received it with disappointment and disgust. While the Congress of Vienna was sitting, writes Friedrich von Gentz, its secretary, “deputies from every part of Germany “were in the Austrian capital, “agitating day and night for a federal constitution.” For the nation had hoped to see its liberation confirmed and assured by political unity. In the proclamation of Kalisch, dated March 25, 1813, following the treaty of alliance concluded there between the King of Prussia and the Czar on February 28th, the German nation had been called to the struggle on behalf of a reconstituted Empire, in which its “ancient and native spirit” was to be revived, an Empire in which Germany should be rejuvenated, vigorous, and free. So in the darkest hours of humiliation it had been cheered, and its heaviest sacrifices had been lightened, by the thought that it was fighting not only to free Germany from foreign oppression, but to win for itself unity, by the creation of ties stronger and more intimate than those which held the old Empire together. It had been cherishing an illusion. Germany was not yet ready to become either an Empire or a federal State, and even if it had been ready the Sovereigns were not willing to forgo any substantial part of their independence. Austria, above all, was bent on maintaining the old divisions under new sanctions, as the surest guarantee of her continued domination.
“Poor, faithful German nation,” wrote the patriot-poet Ernst Moritz Arndt in bitterness of soul, “thou art to have no Emperor! Thy Princes wish themselves to play the Emperor. Instead of one lord, thou art to have two dozen [in point of fact, there were over three dozen] who will never be able to agree upon German questions.” But what else could have been expected? The Congress of Vienna was exclusively an affair of the Princes and Governments. They alone decreed, appointed, and composed it, and only their interests and wishes had voice or hearing in its deliberations. It was a typical creation and expression of the old diplomacy. In this august areopagus, in which the elect of the diplomatic world of Europe was assembled – Blücher, fresh from the battlefield, where niceties of language are disregarded, called it a “council of thrice-accursed constables and lazy-bones” – the German nation had no part or lot whatever, though its political destinies were being determined for an indefinite period; it had no share in its deliberations; its opinion was not once given, because it was never sought; nowhere was the nation as such mentioned in the Act under which the new union was constituted.
The Germanic Federation began its career handicapped by distrust and odium, and it lived up to its first reputation. For practical purposes it proved a replica of the Holy Alliance which was created in 1815 under the influence of Czar Alexander I, and its purpose was to do for Germany what the Alliance was intended to do for the Continent – to counteract all democratic movements and to preserve the existing political order unchanged, if need be, by forcible measures. For just fifty years it maintained an undistinguished existence, its Diet chiefly useful as a coward’s castle from which the liberties of the people could be safely assailed, and as affording an arena in which Austria and Prussia were able to contend for the hegemony of Germany.
From the standpoint of national unity in particular it was a cruel mockery. Designed to renew the earlier union of the States, in effect it emphasized only their dissensions and discords. The Empire, at the time of its extinction, had indeed become the pale reflection of a reality majestic and imposing in the days of its full vigour and vitality; yet almost to the last, even when fallen into impotence and decay, it was impressive, and conveyed, to the imagination at least, ideas at once grandiose and inspiring. For the Bund no such distinction could be claimed. The creation of artifice, compromise, and expediency, it never possessed inherent strength or outward dignity; to the smaller Princes it afforded a city of refuge, in which they were immune against arbitrary treatment by their powerful neighbours, since the security of each was the concern of all; but because it was unable to commend itself to the German peoples by public utility or any recognition of common national interests, it failed entirely to win either their enthusiasm or their attachment. If the Empire had represented a condition of disorganized union, the new Bund represented one of organized disunion.
The leading European Governments accredited ambassadors to the pompous Frankfort Diet, but the compliment was not returned; only seldom did the Diet appoint envoys for special purposes. On the other hand, the federal States themselves had their own envoys at foreign Courts, and exercised their power to conclude treaties and alliances, so long as these were not directed against the Federation. As the Diet inevitably served as a cockpit in which the two rival Powers disputed for position and influence, the secondary and petty States constantly ranged themselves on one side or the other. If Austria and Prussia were in agreement its proceedings went smoothly; if not, bickering, discord, and intrigue ran riot.
It was not the Bund and the Princes but the nation which kept alive the desire and the hope for a more real unity during the succeeding half century. Throughout this period the political life of Germany was dominated by two great parallel movements. One had as its object national unity, the other aimed at constitutional liberty. It is impossible to separate the history of these movements, so closely were they related; though not identical, they proceeded from the same source, and derived their strength from the same spiritual impulses.
Article 13 of the Federal Act of June 8, 1815, declared that each federal State should receive an assembly or representation of the estates (landständische Verfassung). It was a pious affirmation, intended to mean much or little or nothing at all, according to the will of the Sovereigns concerned. There was no suggestion of parliaments or legislatures as understood in constitutional countries. Interpreted literally, the most shadowy concession to the representative principle would have enabled an unwilling Prince to plead that he had duly honoured his bond. But more sinister was the fact that the Act allowed each of the signatories to decide at his discretion when this shadowy representation should take effect. In the original draft, Article 13 stipulated that constitutions “shall be” introduced within a year. The word “shall” was later altered to “will,” and the time-limit was expunged. The omission of a date was not accidental; on the contrary, it was a plain intimation that in a matter upon which they were greatly divided in opinion the rulers did not intend to be unduly hurried. As the provision ran, they would have been within their rights had they delayed the issue of constitutions until the eve of doomsday. Taken literally, therefore, this provision of the Act did not imply a formal pledge or promise; it was at the most the voluntary assertion of a vague and indeterminate principle, and an admission that this principle ought at some convenient season – to be chosen by each ruler for himself – to be applied. There is no need, and perhaps no justification, to assume that the provision was given an illusory form in bad faith; the fact remains, however, that it afforded a convenient loophole for the evasion of a disagreeable surrender to popular expectations and that many of the Princes made a perfidious use of it.
For more than a decade the German peoples had been engaged in repelling an arbitrary dictatorship imposed from without. Henceforth they were to contend against the despotisms which still lingered at home. Nowhere was this struggle so severe as in Prussia. War, besides being a great leveller, is a great educator, and the War of Liberation wrought a surprising change in the political ideas of the Prussian people. Their active participation in the struggle gave to them the consciousness of a new position and stake in the country; the men who had before been subjects now felt and thought as citizens; Prussia had become their fatherland in a fuller and deeper sense than before. In country and in town a new sense of freedom had come to the people – in the former with the promulgation of Stein’s Edict of Emancipation of October, 1807, abolishing serfdom and other feudal institutions, in the latter with the introduction of his Municipal Ordinance of 1808, establishing a liberal system of self-government in the old provinces of the kingdom. Moreover, the fact that a law of September 3, 1814, imposed upon the manhood of the nation the obligatory duty of military service seemed to justify the people’s claim that with this duty should go, hand in hand, the right to share in the government of the country which they were expected to defend.
Thus it was that liberation from an outside outside yoke gave an impetus to the desire for liberation at home. Hence as soon as the tumult of war had died down there arose on every hand a call for greater political freedom, and the concession of the constitutional privileges which were enjoyed already by Western nations. The eyes of the reformers of that day were turned particularly to England. Stein, Schön, and other Prussian statesmen had carefully and admiringly studied the political institutions of that country, and while not wishing to follow them slavishly, they had English parliamentary life in view in all their proposals to supersede autocratic by constitutional government. So it was with all the popular leaders of the day. Dahlmann, the historian, who identified himself devotedly with the reform movement, saw in England, and not in revolutionary France, the ideal State. “Here,” he wrote in 1815, “are most purely developed and preserved the foundations of the constitution towards which all new European nations are striving.” The poet Rückert, in an outburst of political enthusiasm, sang –
O build we now a temple
On Albion’s example!
Not without cause did England become for the reactionaries of Prussia from that time forward the hated symbol of political progress; honest in their prejudices, they have ever seen in her only a disturber of their country’s peace and a menace to its conservative traditions.
Earnest and insistent as was the call for a new start in political life, the call fell in most of the States upon ears deaf to the dictates either of duty or of wisdom. Directly the danger was overpast, most of the Sovereigns ignored their pledges. The only exceptions occurred amongst those of the South and West, the portions of Germany which under French influence had imbibed Liberal ideas. Thus it was not to the Great Powers but to the minor States that Germany owed the first measure of release from political despotism and the beginnings of constitutional life. The ruler of Weimar, the enlightened Karl August, led the way in 1816, and Würtemberg, Bavaria, Nassau and Baden followed soon afterwards. It was in the smaller States also that the strongest desire for national unity existed.
Nowhere was the restored autocracy more stiff-necked, nowhere were national expectations more cruelly disappointed, than in Prussia. At the close of the War of Liberation, Prussia seemed for a short time to be marked out as the hope of Germany and of the national movement. Every far-seeing friend of unity knew, however, that it was only by meeting Liberal ideas frankly and freely that Prussia would be acceptable to the other States. From Austria, sundered by conflicting races and religious differences, her politics incorporating the worst spirit of reaction, nothing good was to be expected. Thus Prussia seemed to have a golden opportunity of seizing the leadership of Germany by boldly identifying herself with the constitutional cause and national aspirations. Self-interest seemed to point to the wisdom of such a policy. The kingdom had just been extended by the addition of provinces which were not only overwhelmingly Roman Catholic, so modifying the essentially Protestant basis of the State, but which under Napoleon’s rule had learned to appreciate the freer spirit of French political institutions. A national parliament would have furnished a rallying-ground upon which internal diversities might have been reconciled for all time. Moreover, the best part of the nation was behind the popular movement, whose leaders and spokesmen were neither violent men nor doctrinaires; among them were, indeed, statesmen like Stein, Hardenberg, Humboldt, Niebuhr, and Vincke, publicists like Arndt, Sehön, and Dahlmann, and even generals like Blücher and Gneisenau. The last of these men anticipated in 1814 words which were constantly on the lips of all the most progressive of German statesmen when, over a generation later, Prussia had once more to choose which way she would go: “Prussia must henceforth, by the liberality of her principles, exercise a moral attraction upon the rest of Germany.”
States and nations, like individuals, have their opportunities and chances, to take or to leave. Fate, in offering them, has done its duty; it never reasons or compels, and seldom renews a privilege once rejected. At the beginning of last century Prussia might have chosen to become not merely the political but the spiritual leader of all Germany. The call to this high distinction was disregarded, and if Germany suffered as a result, the loss to Prussia herself was greater. It is usually profitless to speculate upon the “might have beens” of political history, yet it is justifiable to believe that if Prussia a hundred years ago, resolutely emancipating herself from Austrian influence, had decided to place herself at the head of the liberal movement in Germany, a whole crop of subsequent problems and disasters might have been avoided. Against a liberalized Prussia the Austria of Metternich could not have competed for that “moral conquest of Germany” which was awaiting the coming of the moral conqueror. But Frederick William III was at heart a despot with a weakling’s will; distrustful of his people and not less so of himself, suspecting in every liberal idea the germ of revolution, he allowed the precious opportunity to pass by, and so hardened the tradition of Prussian autocracy that not one of his successors has wholly cast it aside.
His surrender to reaction was the less creditable because it was accompanied by a flagrant breach of faith. During the war he had solemnly promised the nation, in recognition of its unparalleled sacrifices, direct participation in State affairs. Shortly before the signing of the convention of the Princes of June 8, 1815, he had renewed that promise in an explicit form. Yielding to the pressure of Hardenberg and other Liberal advisers who for the moment had influence over him, he issued an edict on May 22nd, ordering that a “representation of the nation” should be formed by the development of the provincial estates. From these was to be elected a national assembly, whose function it should be to “deliberate upon all subjects of legislation affecting the personal and property rights of the citizens, including taxation.” The edict also ordered the appointment of a commission for the purpose of organizing the intended assembly and drawing up its constitution, and this body was to meet on September 1st. Here, again, there was no definite promise of a popular legislature, nor yet of a legislature at all in the proper sense of the word, but the issue of the law seemed at least to be a sign that the King was mindful of his pledge. But the hopes thus aroused were destined to be short-lived. In June a commission, consisting of twenty- two members of the Council of State, was appointed to make a grand inquest of the nation. Instead of calling witnesses to Berlin, the King resolved that three Ministers should act as travelling commissioners, visiting the provinces and collecting evidence on the spot, just as the Elector Joachim I had done in 1525, when he was bent on reforming the system of local government. Their inquiries were confined almost exclusively to the landed nobility – in other words, to the representatives of existing conditions, and for the most part these men asked for no change; the provincial assemblies were for them both satisfactory and sufficient. Only the Polish aristocracy recognized the need of a higher form of representation, capable of reflecting the mind of the nation at large.