A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P R S T U V W X Z

Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4

W >> Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks >> Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4




In Nassau, the duke, William, fell into a violent dispute with the
Estates. The second chamber, after vainly soliciting the restitution
of the rich demesnes, appropriated by the duke as private property, on
the ground of their being state property, and the application of their
revenue to the payment of the state debts, refused, in the autumn of
1831, to vote the taxes. The first chamber, in which the duke had the
power of raising at will a majority in his favor by the creation of
fresh members, protested against the conduct of the second, which in
return protested against that of the first and suspended its
proceedings until their constitutional rights should have received
full recognition; five of the deputies, however, again protested
against the suspension of the proceedings of the chamber and voted the
taxes during the absence of the majority. The majority again
protested, but became entangled in a political lawsuit, and Herber,
the gray-headed president, was confined in the fortress of Marxburg.

In Brunswick, a good understanding prevailed between William the new
duke, and the Estates, which were, however, accused of having an
aristocratic tendency by the democratic party. Their sittings
continued to be held in secret.

In Saxony, the long-wished-for reforms, above all, the grant of a new
constitution, were realized, owing to the influence of the popular
co-regent, added to that of Lindenau, the highly-esteemed minister,
and of the newly-elected Estates, in 1831. The law of censorship,
nevertheless, continued to be enforced with extreme severity, which
also marked the treatment of the political prisoners. Count Hohenthal
and Baron Watzdorf, who seized every opportunity to put in
protestations, even against the resolutions of the confederation,
evinced the most liberal spirit. On the demise of the aged king,
Antony, in 1835, and the accession of the co-regent, Frederick, to the
throne, the political movements totally ceased.

Holstein and Schleswig had also, as early as 1823, solicited the
restitution of their ancient constitutional rights, which the king,
Frederick IV., delayed to grant. Lornsen, the councillor of chancery,
was arrested in 1830, for attempting to agitate the people. Separate
provincial diets were, notwithstanding, decreed, in 1831, for Holstein
and Schleswig, although both provinces urgently demanded their union.
Frederick IV. expired in 1839 and was succeeded by his cousin,
Christian.

Immediately after the revolution of July, the princes of Oldenburg,
Altenburg, Coburg, Meiningen, and Schwarzburg-Sondershausen made a
public appeal to the confidence of their subjects, whom they called
upon to lay before them their grievances, etc. Augustus, duke of
Oldenburg, who had assumed the title of grandduke, proclaimed a
constitution, but shortly afterward withdrew his promise and strictly
forbade his subjects to annoy him by recalling it to his remembrance.
The prince von Sondershausen also refused the hoped-for constitution.
In Sigmaringen, Altenburg, and Meiningen the constitutional movement
was, on the contrary, countenanced and encouraged by the princes.
Pauline, the liberal-minded princess of Lippe-Detmold, had already
drawn up a constitution for her petty territory with her own hand,
when the nobility rose against it, and, aided by the federal assembly,
compelled her to withdraw it.

In the autumn of 1833, the emperor of Russia held a conference with
the king of Prussia at Munchen-Gratz, whither the emperor of Austria
also repaired. A German ministerial congress assembled immediately
afterward at Vienna, and the first of its resolutions was made public
late in the autumn of 1834. It announced the establishment of a court
of arbitration, empowered, as the highest court of appeal, to decide
all disputes between the governments and their provincial Estates. The
whole of the members of this court were to be nominated by the
governments, but the disputing parties were free to select their
arbitrators from among the number.

A fresh and violent constitutional battle was, notwithstanding these
precautions, fought in Hanover, where Adolphus Frederick, duke of
Cambridge, had, in the name of his brother, William IV., king of
England, established a new constitution, which had received many
ameliorations notwithstanding the inefficiency of the liberals,
Christiani, Luntzel, etc., to counteract the overpowering influence of
the monarchical and aristocratic party. William IV., king of England
and Hanover, expired in 1837, and was succeeded on the throne of Great
Britain by Victoria Alexandrina, the daughter of his younger and
deceased brother, Edward, duke of Kent, and of the Princess Victoria
of Saxe-Coburg; and on that of Hanover, which was solely heritable in
the male line, by his second brother, Ernest, duke of Cumberland, the
leader of the Tory party in England. No sooner had this new sovereign
set his foot on German soil[2] than he repealed the constitution
granted to Hanover in 1833 and ordained the restoration of the former
one of 1819, drawn up in a less liberal but more monarchical and
aristocratic spirit. Among the protestations made against this _coup
d'état_, that of the seven Göttingen professors, the two brothers,
Grimm, to whom the German language and antiquarian research are so
deeply indebted, Dahlmann, Gervinus, Ewald, Weber, and Albrecht, is
most worthy of record. Their instant dismission produced an
insurrection among the students, which was, after a good deal of
bloodshed, quelled by the military. In the beginning of 1838, the
Estates were convoked according to the articles of the constitution of
1819 for the purpose of taking a constitution, drawn up under the
dictation of the king, under deliberation. Many of the towns refused
to elect deputies, and some of those elected were not permitted to
take their seats. The city of Osnabruck protested in the federal
assembly. Notwithstanding this, the Estates meanwhile assembled, but
declared themselves incompetent, regarding themselves simply in the
light of an arbitrative committee, and, as such, threw out the
constitution presented by the king, June, 1838. The federal assembly
remained passive.[3] In 1839, Schele, the minister, finally succeeded,
by means of menaces and bribery, and by arbitrarily calling into the
chamber the ministerial candidates who had received the minority of
votes during the elections, in collecting so many deputies devoted to
his party as were requisite in order to form the chamber and to pass
resolutions. The city of Hanover hereupon brought before the federal
assembly a petition for redress and a list of grievances in which
Schele's chamber was described as "unworthy of the name of a
constitutional representative assembly, void of confidence,
unpossessed of the public esteem, and unrecognized by the country."
The king instantly divested Rumann, the city director, of his office,
but so far yielded to the magistrate, to whom he gave audience in the
palace and who was followed by crowds of the populace, as to revoke
the nomination, already declared illegal, of Rumann's successor, and
to promise that the matter at issue should be brought before the
common tribunal instead of the council of state, July 17th. Numerous
other cities, corporations of landed proprietors, etc., also followed
the example set by Hanover and laid their complaints before the
federal assembly, which hereupon declared that, according to the laws
of the confederation, it found no cause for interference, but at the
same time advised the king to come to an understanding consistent with
the rights of the crown and of the Estates, with the "present" Estates
(unrecognized by the democratic party), concerning the form of the
constitution. In the federal assembly, Wurtemberg and Bavaria, most
particularly, voted in favor of the Hanoverians. Professor Ewald was
appointed to the university of Tubingen; Albrecht, at a later period,
to that of Leipzig; the brothers Grimm, to that of Berlin; Dahlmann,
to that of Bonn. Among the assembled Estates, those of Baden,
Wurtemberg, and Saxony most warmly espoused the cause of the people of
Hanover, but, as was natural, without result.[4]

In 1840, the king convoked a fresh diet. The people refused to elect
members, and it was solely by means of intrigue that a small number of
deputies (not half the number fixed by law) were assembled, creatures
of the minister, Schele, who were disowned by the people in addresses
couched in the most energetic terms (the address presented by the
citizens of Osnabruck was the most remarkable) and their proceedings
were protested against. This petty assembly, nevertheless, took under
deliberation and passed a new constitution, against which the cities
and the country again protested. The king also declared his only son,
George, who was afflicted with blindness, capable of governing and of
succeeding to the throne.


[Footnote 1: Thiersch, the Bavarian court-councillor, one of the most
distinguished connoisseurs of Grecian antiquity, who visited Greece
shortly after Heideck and before the arrival of the king, was received
by the modern Greeks with touching demonstrations of delight. No
nation has so deeply studied, so deeply become imbued with Grecian
lore, as that of Germany, and the close connection formed, on the
accession of the Bavarian Otto to the throne of Greece, between her
sons and the children of that classic land, justifies the proudest
expectations.]

[Footnote 2: He did not restore the whole of the crown property that
had, at an earlier period, been carried away to England. A
considerable portion of the crown jewels had been taken away by George
I., and when, in 1802, the French occupied Hanover, the whole of the
movable crown property, even the great stud, was sent to England. On
the demise of George III., the crown jewels were divided among the
princes of the English house.--_Copied from the Courier of August,
1838._]

[Footnote 3: The Darmstadt government declared to the second chamber,
on its bringing forward a motion for the intercession of Darmstadt
with the federal assembly in favor of the legality of the ancient
constitution then in force in Hanover, that the grandduke would never
tolerate any cooperation on the part of the Estates with his vote in
the federal assembly.]

[Footnote 4: "This defeat is, however, not to be lamented: the battle
for the separate constitutions has not been fought in vain if German
nationality spring from the wreck of German separatism, if we are
taught that without a liberal federal constitution liberal provincial
constitutions are impossible in Germany."--_Pfizer._]



CCLXXI. Austria and Prince Mettenich


Austria might, on the fall of Napoleon, have maintained Alsace,
Lorraine, the Breisgau, and the whole of the territory of the Upper
Rhine in the same manner in which Prussia had maintained that of the
Lower Rhine, had she not preferred the preservation of her rule in
Italy and rendered her position in Germany subordinate to her station
as a European power. This policy is explained by the peculiar
circumstances of the Austrian state, which had for centuries comprised
within itself nations of the most distinct character, and the
population of whose provinces were by far the greater part Slavonian,
Hungarian, and Italian, the great minority German. By this policy she
lost, as the Prussian Customs' Union has also again proved, much of
her influence over Germany, while, on the other hand, she secured it
the more firmly in Southern and Eastern Europe. Austria has long made
a gradual and almost unperceived advance from the northwest in a
southeasterly direction. In Germany she has continually lost ground.
Switzerland, the Netherlands, Alsace, Lorraine, the Swabian counties,
Lusatia, Silesia, have one by one been severed from her, while her
non-German possessions have as continually been increased, by the
addition of Hungary, Transylvania, Galicia, Dalmatia, and Upper Italy.

The contest carried on between Austria, the French Revolution, and
Napoleon, has at all events left deep and still visible traces; the
characters of the emperor Francis and of his chancellor of state,
Prince Metternich, that perfect representative of the aristocracy of
Europe, sympathize also as closely with the Austrian system as the
character of the emperor Joseph was antipathetical to it. This system
dates, however, earlier than those revolutionary struggles, and has
already outlived at least one of its supporters.

Austria is the only great state in Europe that comprises so many
diverse but well-poised nationalities within its bosom; in all the
other great states, one nation bears the preponderance. To this
circumstance may be ascribed her peaceful policy, every great war
threatening her with the revolt of some one of the foreign nations
subordinate to her sceptre. To this may, moreover, be ascribed the
tenacity with which she upholds the principle of legitimacy. The
historical hereditary right of the reigning dynasty forms the sole but
ideal tie by which the diverse and naturally inimical nations beneath
her rule are linked together. For the same reason, the concentration
of talent in the government contrasts, in Austria, more violently with
the obscurantism of the provinces than in any other state. Not only
does the overpowering intelligence of the chancery of state awe the
nations beneath its rule, but the proverbial good nature and
patriarchal cordiality of the imperial family win every heart. The
army is a mere machine in the hands of the government; a standing
army, in which the soldier serves for life or for the period of twenty
years, during which he necessarily loses all sympathy with his
fellow-citizens, and which is solely reintegrated from militia whom
this privilege renders still more devoted to the government. The
pretorian spirit usually prevalent in standing armies has been guarded
against in Austria by there being no guards, and all sympathy between
the military and the citizens of the various provinces whence they
were drawn is at once prevented by the Hungarian troops being sent
into Italy, the Italian troops into Galicia, etc., etc. The
nationality of the private soldier is checked by the Germanism of the
subalterns and by the Austrianism of the staff. Besides the power thus
everywhere visible, there exists another partially invisible, that of
the police, in connection with a censorship of the severest
description, which keeps a guard over the inadvertencies of the tongue
as well as over those of the press. The people are, on the other hand,
closely bound up with the government and interested in the maintenance
of the existing state of affairs by the paper currency, on the value
of which the welfare of every subject in the state depends.

To a government thus strong in concentrated power and intelligence
stands opposed the mass of nations subject to the Austrian sceptre
whose natural antipathies have been artfully fostered and
strengthened. In Austria the distinctions of class, characteristic of
the Middle Ages, are still preserved. The aristocracy and the clergy
possess an influence almost unknown in Germany, but solely over the
people, not over the government. As corporative bodies they still are,
as in the days of Charles VI., convoked for the purpose of holding
postulate diets, whose power, with the exception of that of the
Hungarian diet, is merely nominal. The nobility, even in Hungary, as
everywhere else throughout the Austrian states (more particularly
since the Spanish system adopted by Ferdinand II.), is split into two
inimical classes, those of the higher and lower aristocracy. Even in
Galicia, where the Polish nobility formed, at an earlier period and
according to earlier usage, but one body, the distinction of a higher
and lower class has been introduced since the occupation of that
country by Austria. The high aristocracy are either bound by favors,
coincident with their origin, to the court, the great majority among
them consisting of families on whom nobility was conferred by
Ferdinand II., or they are, if families belonging to the more powerful
and more ancient national aristocracy, as, for instance, that of
Esterhazy in Hungary, brought by the bestowal of fresh favors into
closer affinity with the court and drawn within its sphere. The
greater proportion of the aristocracy consequently reside at Vienna.
The lower nobility make their way chiefly by talent and perseverance
in the army and the civil offices, and are therefore naturally devoted
to the government, on which all their hopes in life depend. The
clergy, although permitted to retain the whole of their ancient pomp
and their influence over the minds of the people, have been rendered
dependent upon the government, a point easily gained, the pope being
principally protected by Austria.

The care of the government for the material welfare of the people
cannot be denied; it is, however, frustrated by two obstacles raised
by its own system. The maintenance of the high aristocracy is, for
instance, antipathetic to the welfare of the subject, and, although
comfort and plenty abound in the immediate vicinity of Vienna, the
population on the enormous estates of the magnates in the provinces
often present a lamentable contrast. The Austrian government moreover
prohibits all free intercourse with foreign parts, and the old-
fashioned system of taxation, senseless as many other existing
regulations, entirely puts a stop to all free trade between Hungary
and Austria. Consequently, the new and grand modes of communication,
the Franzen Canal, that unites the Danube and the Thiess, the
Louisenstrasse, between Carlstadt and Fiume, the magnificent road to
Trieste, the admirable road across the rocks of the Stilfser Jock,
and, more than all, the steam navigation as far as the mouths of the
Danube and the railroads, will be unavailing to scatter the blessings
of commerce and industry so long as these wretched prohibitions
continue to be enforced.

Austria has, in regard to her foreign policy, left the increasing
influence of Russia in Poland, Persia, and Turkey unopposed, and even
allowed the mouths of the Danube to be guarded by Russian fortresses,
while she has, on the other hand, energetically repelled the
interference of France in the affairs of Italy. The July revolution
induced a popular insurrection in the dominions of the Church, and the
French threw a garrison into the citadel of Ancona; the Austrians,
however, instantly entered the country and enforced the restoration of
the _ançien régime_. In Lombardy, many ameliorations were introduced
and the prosperity of the country promoted by the Austrian
administration, notwithstanding the national jealousy of the
inhabitants. Venice, with her choked-up harbor, could, it is true, no
longer compete with Trieste. The German element has gained ground in
Galicia by means of the public authorities and the immigration of
agriculturists and artificers. The Hungarians endeavored to render
their language the common medium throughout Hungary, and to expel the
German element, but their apprehension of the numerous Slavonian
population of Hungary, whom religious sympathy renders subject to
Russian influence, has speedily reconciled them with the Germans.
Slavonism has, on the other hand, also gained ground in Bohemia.

The emperor, Francis I., expired in 1835, and was succeeded by his
son, Ferdinand I., without a change taking place in the system of the
government, of which Prince Metternich continued to be the directing
principle.

The decease of some of the heads of foreign royal families and the
marriages of their successors again placed several German princes on
foreign thrones. The last of the Guelphs on the throne of Great
Britain expired with William IV., whose niece and successor, Victoria
Alexandrina, wedded, 1840, Albert of Saxe-Coburg, second son of
Ernest, the reigning duke. That the descendant of the steadfast
elector should, after such adverse fortune, be thus destined to occupy
the highest position in the reformed world, is of itself remarkable.
One of this prince's uncles, Leopold, is seated on the throne of
Belgium, and one of his cousins, Ferdinand, on that of Portugal, in
right of his consort, Donna Maria da Gloria, the daughter of Dom
Pedro, king of Portugal and emperor of the Brazils, to whom, on the
expulsion of the usurper, Dom Miguel, he was wedded in 1835. These
princes of Coburg are remarkable for manly beauty.

The antipathy with which the new dynasty on the throne of France was
generally viewed rendered Ferdinand, Duke of Orleans, Louis Philippe's
eldest son, for some time an unsuccessful suitor for the hand of a
German princess; he at length conducted Helena, princess of
Mecklenburg-Schwerin, although against the consent of her stepfather,
Paul Frederick, the reigning duke, to Paris in 1837, as future queen
of the French. He was killed in 1842, by a fall from his carriage, and
left two infant sons, the Count of Paris and the Duke of Chartres. The
Czarowitz, Alexander, espoused Maria, Princess of Darmstadt.

The French chambers and journals have reassumed toward Germany the
tone formerly affected by Napoleon, and, with incessant cries for war,
in which, in 1840, the voice of the prime minister Thiers joined,
demand the restoration of the left bank of the Rhine. Thiers was,
however, compelled to resign office, and the close alliance between
Austria, Prussia, and the whole of the confederated princes, as well
as the feeling universally displayed throughout Germany, demonstrated
the energy with which an attack on the side of France would be
repelled. The erection of the long-forgotten federal fortresses on the
Upper Rhine was also taken at length under consideration, and it was
resolved to fortify both Rastadt and Ulm without further delay.

Nor have the statesmen of France failed to threaten Germany with a
Russo-Gallic alliance in the spirit of the Erfurt congress of 1808;
while Russia perseveres in the prohibitory system so prejudicial to
German commerce, attempts to suppress every spark of German
nationality in Livonia, Courland, and Esthonia, and fosters
Panslavism, or the union of all the Slavonic nations for the
subjection of the world, among the Slavonian subjects of Austria in
Hungaria and Bohemia. The extension of the Greek church is also
connected with this idea. "The European Pentarchy," a work that
attracted much attention in 1839, insolently boasts how Russia, in
defiance of Austria, has seized the mouths of the Danube, has wedged
herself, as it were, by means of Poland, between Austria and Prussia,
in a position equally threatening to both, recommends the minor states
of Germany to seek the protection of Russia, and darkly hints at the
alliance between that power and France.

Nor are the prospects of Germany alone threatened by France and
Russia; disturbances, like a fantastic renewal of the horrors of the
Middle Age, are ready to burst forth on the other side of the Alps, as
though, according to the ancient saga of Germany, the dead were about
to rise in order to mingle in the last great contest between the gods
and mankind.



CCLXXII. Prussia and Rome


While Austria remains stationary, Prussia progresses. While Austria
relies for support upon the aristocracy of the Estates, Prussia relies
for hers upon the people, that is to say, upon the public officers
taken from the mass of the population, upon the citizens emancipated
by the city regulation, upon the peasantry emancipated by the
abolition of servitude, of all the other agricultural imposts, and by
the division of property, and upon the enrolment of both classes in
the Landwehr. While Austria, in fine, renders her German policy
subordinate to her European diplomacy, the influence exercised by
Prussia upon Europe depends, on the contrary, solely upon that
possessed by her in Germany.

Prussia's leading principle appears to be, "All for the people,
nothing through the people!" Hence the greatest solicitude for the
instruction of the people, whether in the meanest schools or the
universities, but under strict political control, under the severest
censorship; hence the emancipation of the peasantry, civic self-
administration, freedom of trade, the general arming of the people,
and, with all these, mere nameless provincial diets, the most complete
popular liberty on the widest basis without a representation worthy of
the name; hence, finally, the greatest solicitude for the promotion of
trade on a grand scale, for the revival of the commerce of Germany,
which has lain prostrate since the great wars of the Reformation, for
the mercantile unity of Germany, while it is exactly in Prussia that
political Unitarians are the most severely punished.

The great measures were commenced in Prussia immediately after the
disaster of 1806: first, the reorganization of the army and the
abolition of the privileges of the aristocracy in respect to
appointments and the possession of landed property; these were, in
1808, succeeded by the celebrated civic regulation which placed the
civic administration in the hands of the city deputies freely elected
by the citizens; in 1810, by freedom of trade and by the foundation of
the new universities of Berlin (instead of Halle), of Breslau (instead
of Frankfort on the Oder), and, in 1819, of Bonn, by which means the
libraries, museums, and scientific institutions of every description
were centralized; in 1814, by the common duty imposed upon every
individual of every class, without exception, to bear arms and to do
service in the Landwehr up to his thirty-ninth year; in 1821, by the
regulation for the division of communes; and, in 1822, by the extra
post.

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