Metternich, who married the granddaughter of a famous Austrian statesman,
Kaunitz, entered the Austrian state service as ambassador in 1801. He became
minister of Austrian foreign affairs in 1809, well before Napoleons demise,
to which he dedicated himself with unrelenting zeal. He was, to say the
least, a political conservative, judging revolution by its excesses. He
announced early that those who fought Napoleon, would have to fight revolution,
which did not die with the French emperor.
Metternich had unbounded confidence in his own powers and foreknowledge,
proclaiming infallible diagnoses for every ill in Europe. He put little
store in popularity, because he claimed to see the fickleness of the masses
and their simple loyalties. But he had trouble in dominating two of his
contemporaries, Alexander the I of Russia, and the English minister, Castlereagh.
So he resorted to befriending a young lady, the princess Lieven, who knew
both of these men well. It was typical of Metternich to put his trust in
congenial social spies.
He found consolation in his responsibility to the Austrian emperor and to
the people of the empire, but most diplomats and so-called statesmen of
his time bored him to death--possibly because he felt himself superior to
all of them. There was a kind of immovable certainty about his own intentions,
but he was never so foolish as to think that his acts were infallible. Nor
did he display any sort of vindictiveness for his enemies and opponents--he
was too much the politician for that. It does not pay to carry grudges in
politics. He believed there should be vigorous action to achieve a given
end, but at the same time one should display clemency where conditions permitted.
This does not mean, however, that he shrank from strong measures of repression,
when his ideas and projects were in danger.
Such a case was the issuance of the famous Carlsbad Decrees, which clamped
tight control over liberal propaganda in Germany, particularly over students
in the schools. He thought that sentimentality in politics was a sign of
weakness, since people were essentially good but their ignorance was great.
Because he faced facts squarely in an age of delusions and romanticism,
he knew that sooner or later he would fail. So there was a certain fatalism
about him. "I have come into the world too soon or too late,'' he once
said. He was not above a desire for applause, since he felt he must justify
his line of action. Generally he showed little understanding for the new
emerging Europe. His own conceit prevented him from seeing his own great
weakness, the love for the tortuous and the mystifying. He loved science
and architecture, but on the whole there was more polish than steel to his
character.
His political principles were those of a typical 19th century conservative.
His ideas were based on the experiences of early life. "If principles
of revolution remain the same, then why should the principles of the counterrevolution
alter?'' Without ever reading Aristotle he believed in the Aristotelian
doctrine of the mean. Disturbance of the equilibrium would mean civil war
within the state, external war among nations, just as it would mean calamities
in the physical world or moral anarchy in the nature of man. Metternich
believed that there was no lasting alterative between chaos and stagnation.
Hence there must be a continual effort on the part of those in power to
secure a redress of the balance in the direction of repose.
Revolution was a kind of disease, and measures of public health demanded
international cooperation to cure this disease. In practical terms this
meant that revolutions and revolts must be suppressed everywhere, not only
in ones own country. Cooperation implied intervention, even if the particular
monarch were not worth intervening for, as in the case of the Spanish Bourbons
in Naples or Dom Miguel in Portugal. The principle of legitimacy was involved!
Popular sovereignty was unfavorably compared by Metternich with the principle
of monarchy. Popular sovereignty as set forth by its supporters ultimately
would lead to attack on all forms of property. This could not be tolerated.
Those who believed in popular sovereignty justified it on the basis of the
equality of man, but Metternich held that man were equal only before god
and the law. Socially, economically and politically there could be no equality.
He agreed with Burke that a constitution was organic and hence much more
than a mere document. Once the idea of the sovereignty of the people was
accepted, the life of the state, the working of the institutions, would
be hampered by talk, corruption and disputes. This would lead to chaos,
anarchy and despotism, since the revolution always devoured its own children.
Such were the basic principles of the man who made a new constitution for
Germany at the Congress of Vienna in 1815. That constitution created the
German Confederation, composed of 39 states and four remaining free cities.
Several of the smaller states were joined together and each new state received
its own separate assembly.
The imperial, independent princes retained their noble status and the feudal
rights of the ancient nobility in general were maintained. Among them were
such things as jurisdiction over peasant families and public forests, local
police and courts. The clergy received government pensions and the Teutonic
Order of Knights was quarantined. Civil and political rights, particularly
civil rights for Jews was put on paper for the first time. The subjects
of these confederate states could posses their own property without additional
taxes; they could emigrate or enter the civil and military service in other
states, although they still were liable to military service in their own
states.
A Diet, or loosely-framed parliament for the whole Confederation, was to
be formed. This Diet would in due course form laws on liberty of the press
and the prevention of literary piracy, as well as regulate interstate commerce
and navigation. The confederate Diet did not have much power, since the
individual states retained their independence and inviolability, although
there was to be some kind of equality of rights. This was largely meaningless
since Austria always presided over the Diet and had a total of 17 votes,
whereas Prussia, Saxony, Bavaria, Hanover and Württemberg all had only
four votes a piece. The other, smaller states had even fewer votes and the
free cities had only one vote out of a total of 69. Those free cities by
the way were Lübeck, Frankfurt, Bremen and Hamburg.
The Diet was supposed to frame fundamental laws with regard to exterior
relations, interior relations and military matters, although there was no
German army as such only the separate armies of the individual states. There
was to be no war among the several states except by direct consent of the
Diet and no separate negotiations were to be carried out with foreign powers.
All these things were difficult to achieve since an absolute majority was
necessary in the Ordinary Assembly which proposed laws and a 2/3 majority
was needed to pass them in the General Assembly. A plurality in either Assembly
was not sufficient to bring about a fundamental change in the existing laws.
These restrictions. plus the fact that the Austrian president of the Diet
could caste a deciding vote in case of a tie, allowed Austria and Metternich
to dominate the German confederation.
This rather cumbersome and irrational system of government lasted for a
generation, because the populace of central Europe was deeply attached to
order, authority, tradition and patriarchal rule. A generation of revolutions
and wars had made them conservative and submissive. Only a few dared to
propose and agitate for popular sovereignty, talk about the natural rights
of man, and proclaim the new ideology of democracy. Princely absolutism
and social supremacy of the aristocracy was accepted by the majority of
peoples. So political legitimacy and social regression reigned supreme.
But there was a new social order emerging in central Europe which could
not be halted even by Metternich and his conservative followers. In the
face of economic forces and their social effects politics is usually helpless.
Particularly one class of people was affected by new economic forces: the
artisan class. In fact the advance of industrialism meant ruin for the artisan
class and its corporate guild, a hangover from the Middle Ages. Guilds renounced
the advantages inherent in mechanical efficiency and competitive individualism
for the sake of security and order. The guilds had declined in France by
1789, but in the Holy Roman Empire they still held free possession of ancient
rights. Guilds and obstacles to free exercise of trade were abolished in
the German states directly controlled by the French. Other states followed
the trend and revised guild statutes after 1815.
The most far-reaching economic changes took place in Prussia after the collapse
of 1807: the abolition of serfdom, the establishment of municipal self-government,
the adoption of general conscription and the relaxation of industrial regulations.
Stein wanted to retain the guilds, because he believed in the importance
of their ethical principle. But Hardenberg wanted to eliminate them and
did so in the 1820's. Other measures allowed citizens to engage in several
occupations simultaneously and eliminated police control over the practice
of a calling. So membership in the guilds became voluntary and conveyed
no special privileges any more.
Prussia thus destroyed the system of corporate direction of industrial production
which had come into conflict with the principle of the free development
of individual capacity. But with the defeat of Napoleon a reaction set in
against economic liberalism. The Northern part of Germany especially remained
a stronghold of guild authority until the eve of the Revolution of 1848.
In the West and south the onrush of the industrial revolution forced the
guilds once more to retreat. In the decade preceding the Revolution industrial
freedom invaded central Germany and even spread northward to the citadels
of corporate privilege. The Prussian statute of 1845 extended liberal economic
principles to the whole domain acquired in 1815. Hanover was the last state
prior to the Revolution to abolish the guild system.
For the artisan of Germany these were years of crisis, years when government,
technology, and fate all seemed to conspire to encompass his ruin. The guilds
protested to the governments about rising prices exorbitant rents, declining
standards of workmanship and the general impoverishment of the artisans.
Yet all attacks on the factory were repelled and the artisan stood alone
to face ruin through industrialization. Nothing helped him, pleading, remonstrances,
or even occasional outbursts of violence.
Open conflict broke out in Hanau in 1831-1832, when Hesse-Kassel joined
the Zollverein, that famous customs union started and promoted by Prussia.
The Zollverein gradually moved south to incorporate the smaller states in
one customs-free economic union. This customs union was a great boon to
industrialization and had far-reaching implication for future political
unification. But the artisans resisted it, since they smelled their own
economic demise in this development.
Unrest also swept the Palatinate, stimulated in part by the Hambach Festival
of 1832. This celebration was a kind of demonstration mostly by students
and young people for democracy, popular sovereignty and national unity.
Most tragic of all was the uprising of the Silesian villages, made famous
by Gerhard Hauptmann's renowned play, The Weavers. Economic depression,
aggravated by exploitation, brought the Silesian weavers to revolt in 1844.
But it was more of a mass hunger riot than a political movement or protest.
Riots like this were obvious symptoms of the decay of the handicraft system.
At the same time that industrial liberation was facilitating admission to
artisan occupations, those able to profit from the new economic freedom
were becoming fewer. A fundamental source of the crisis which the artisan
faced was the factory, the factory which took away his markets, reduced
his income, threw him out of work. In Berlin in 1840 of 2,812 shoemakers
only 407 had incomes high enough to be liable for the trade tax and among
master joiners no more than 640 out of l,088 were subject to it. Conditions
among factory workers on the other hand were good. In a textile mill a skilled
hand could earn 10 marks a week; a weaver toiling at home barely made 2
marks. Industrial workers had become the aristocracy of labor, while the
once proud handicraftsman was sinking to the level of a propertyless, rootless
proletarian. Yet artisans still had superiority of numbers.
The growth of industrialism, therefore, presented serious threats to the
social equilibrium of Central Europe, despite Metternich's political machinations
to maintain it. Industrialization undermined the way of life of millions
of people and destroyed their sense of well-being. The governments completely
ignored the problem. So artisans broke with the established order and sought
salvation in a new political order through revolution.
Let me conclude by reading you a quotation from the great Goethe:
Wealth and speed are the things the world admires and for which all men strive. Railways, express mails, steamboats, are all possible means of communication are what the educated world seeks. . .Actually this is the century of clever minds, of practical men who grasp things easily, who are endowed with a certain facility, and who feel their own superiority to the multitude, but who lack talent for the most exalted tasks. Let us as far as possible retain the ideals in which we were raised. We and perhaps a few others will be the last representatives of an era which will not soon return.
Send comments and questions to Professor
Gerhard Rempel, Western New England College.