Chapter 3
THE RIVALRY BETWEEN AUSTRIA AND PRUSSIA, 1848–59
Historical perceptions of the significance of the Austro-Prussian conflict of 1866 have changed quite dramatically during the last fifty years. National Liberal historians writing in the last quarter of the nineteenth century enthused about the annus mirabilis of 1866, the year in which Germany took the first major step on the road to national unification which was completed four years later with the defeat of France and the proclamation of the German Reich in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. In Johann Droysen’s words: The war of 1866 has made it finally possible for us to launch a truly national German policy. The German nation which has been politically dead since the fall of the Hohenstaufens has now the opportunity of making its national greatness politically effective.’1 Little German historians saw in the destruction of the Confederation and in the expulsion from Germany of ‘unGerman’ Austria, the ‘friend of reaction’ and a power indifferent to the cause of unification, part of an inevitable and divinely inspired historical process to advance the cause of nationalism and Protestantism.
A century later, after two world wars for which the Reich of Bismarck, William II and Hitler bore a large share of responsibility and which radically changed the map of Europe, the confident assertions of Droysen and Treitschke have a hollow ring to them. The war of 1866 was not just a clash of arms between two sovereign states but a civil war in which Germans fought Germans. And the outcome of the war was the exclusion of German Austria from the rest of Germany. ‘You think you have given birth to a Reich,’ exclaimed the Austrian poet Franz Grillparzer, ‘but all you have done is destroy a people.’ The separation was permanent apart from the unhappy interlude between 1938 and 1945. Furthermore, whatever the defects, many Germans regretted the passing of an institution which had preserved peace for fifty years. A contemporary described it as ‘the last statesmanlike concept of European diplomacy … not only did Germany live at peace with its neighbours; it acted as a brake on any other European state which desired to breach the peace of the world. The only error but an unavoidable one in its organization was that it assumed all the members possessed moral stature …. Prussia had made it clear for a long time that she would not bow to majority decisions. On the day she said that openly the Confederation was smothered to death.’2 Other distinguished contemporaries were filled with foreboding from the start. The liberal publicist Georg Gervinus declared that the destruction of the Confederation ‘had transformed two-thirds of Germany into a warlike state capable of aggression at all times and which one suspects is a permanent threat to the peace of this part of the world and to the security of its neighbours … a permanently warlike power of such fearful superiority has arisen the like of which was never known even remotely during the last few centuries among militaristic states bent on conquest and expansion’.3 Seventy-four years later Bismarck’s creation went down to total defeat at the end of the Second World War. As a result of post-war developments three sovereign states came into existence: the Federal Republic of Germany, the German Democratic Republic and the Republic of Austria. True, the tumultuous events in the Democratic Republic in the winter of 1989–90 have completely transformed the situation. The re-unification of the first two states is now a virtual certainty, difficult though the process of reintegrating divergent social systems and economies at different stages of development is bound to be. Nevertheless, the emergence of three separate German states where there had been only one between 1815 and 1866 and only two from 1871 to 1938 when Austria was annexed by Hitler led in recent years to the emergence of a revisionist school in Austria and in the United States. These historians are sharply critical of the one-sided treatment of the German Confederation and of the strong pro-Prussian bias encountered in the works of the Little German historians.4 Revisionist writing is contributing towards a more objective evaluation of the rivalry between the two German powers as well as to a more sympathetic treatment of the Third Germany, the name given to a grouping of German states which attempted in the early 1860s to contain nationalism within a reformed Confederation capable of resisting the pressure exerted on them by Austria and Prussia.
The rivalry between Austria and Prussia which ended in war in 1866 had long antecedents. Ever since Frederick the Great had seized Silesia in 1740 and fought two wars with Empress Maria Theresa to hold on to the province, a degree of tension had coloured the relationship between the parvenu and the established power. Signs of tension persisted in the pre-March period when the Prussian king and the Austrian emperor shared a common interest in preventing the spread of liberal and national sentiments. In the 1860s when national liberalism became a significant force, the power struggle between Austria and Prussia assumed a new ideological dimension. Austria, shaken by the war of 1859 and conscious of the increasing demand inside her own empire for political change, attempted to reform the Confederation as a means of maintaining her power in Germany, while Prussia tried to exploit the national liberal movement to further her Great Prussian ambitions. Thus political, ideological and also economic factors combined in the middle of the nineteenth century to confer a new intensity on the old rivalry between the two major German powers.
To understand the political factors involved in the origins of the war of 1866 we must go back eighteen years to the 1848–9 Revolution. That upheaval placed the future of Central Europe and relations between Austria and Prussia squarely in the forefront of the political arena. One of the primary objectives of the Frankfurt Parliament was the creation of a strong German Reich. But to determine the frontiers of the new state proved to be an immensely complex problem because ethnic, cultural and political frontiers have never coincided in Central Europe. Both major German powers – on whose material support the Parliament was dependent – ruled over large numbers of non-Germans. Prussia had acquired large numbers of Polish subjects in the eighteenth-century partitions. In 1816 possibly 1,500,000 of the 2,200,000 subjects in the territories outside the Confederation (i.e. West and East Prussia and Posen) were Polish-speaking. Similarly the Habsburgs ruled over a huge non-German empire; of the eleven million subjects of Emperor Francis I in the territories included in the Confederation in 1840, 5,300,000 were German and 5,700,000 non-German (Czechs, Slovaks, Slovenes and Italians).
Had frontiers been determined by counting heads, Austria and Prussia would have been drastically reduced in size and influence. In fact, the liberals of 1848 applied quite different yardsticks: past history and the language of state spoken by officials and pastors were the prime determinants of frontiers. Historically the German Confederation was the heir of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, a venerable institution which had existed for almost nine centuries before its abrupt dissolution in 1806. Liberals automatically assumed that Bohemia and Moravia and the Austrian archduchy would be an integral part of the new Reich. This was confirmed, as they saw it, by the language criterion; if the language spoken by the educated classes – officials, pastors and teachers – was German, then the territory was part of the German Reich. By the same criterion and also by virtue of historic ties with Holstein, Schleswig, never part of the Holy Roman Empire or of the Confederation, could be regarded as part of the Reich. The fact that Czech and Danish were spoken in Bohemia and Schleswig respectively by a majority of the inhabitants was a secondary consideration. These languages were looked down upon as little more than dialects and certainly culturally inferior to High German. And once the Frankfurt liberals had overcome their initial enthusiasm for Polish independence Polish, too, came into this category; as the superstructure of Prussian Posen was German, that must determine its national character and justified its inclusion in the German Reich.
The future of the Austrian empire was a make-or-break issue for the Frankfurt liberals. Nothing would be more misleading than to suppose that they divided neatly into two camps from the very beginning: Greater Germans who insisted on retaining the frontiers of the old Confederation (i.e. including Austria and Bohemia but excluding the rest of the Habsburg dominions) and Little Germans who were prepared to abandon Austria and Bohemia in order to create a united Reich under Prussian leadership, having no further ties with the Habsburgs. There was, in fact, widespread sympathy for Austria at Frankfurt, admiration for her traditions and a strong desire to maintain the closest links with the Habsburgs. Austrian delegates were listened to with respect when they advocated the inclusion of the whole of the Habsburg dominions in the new Reich, partly for geopolitical reasons – to strengthen Central Europe against the French and Russians – and partly for commercial reasons – to guarantee the markets of the Danubian basin for German merchants. Most members of the Parliament, conscious of the complexity of the problem and loath to disturb the time-honoured status quo, postponed a decision as long as humanly possible. When they finally turned their attention to it in October 1848 the tide was turning against revolution in both Berlin and Vienna and soon the authority of the Parliament itself was to be called into question.
The proposals made by the constitutional committee of the Parliament represented a victory for Greater Germanism. Article 1 of the constitution declared that the Reich consisted of the territories of the old Confederation; article 2 that if a German territory had the same ruler as a non-German territory the former must have a separate constitution, government and administration; and article 3 that where German and non-German territories had the same ruler he must either reside in the German territory or establish a regency in that territory to which only Germans would be eligible for appointment – in other words, only dynastic ties would be permissible between German and non-German territories.5 With the benefit of hindsight it is obvious that the committee acted unwisely in advancing such proposals without recognizing the necessity for negotiation with the interested party Austria. One must remember, of course, the disturbed situation in Vienna and the fact that even in October 1848 many Frankfurt deputies supposed with incredible naïveté that nationalism would triumph all over Europe and that the Austrian empire could not survive in its present form. But on 26 October, the day before the Parliament adopted the proposals by overwhelming majorities, Prince Alfred Windischgràtz had launched an attack on Vienna which forced the city to capitulate on 31 October and led to the restoration of imperial rule in the western half of the Habsburg dominions.
It was soon made crystal clear that Austria was not prepared to dismantle her empire to please the Frankfurt liberals. On 27 October when Prince Felix von Schwarzenberg, appointed chief minister a week earlier, addressed the Kremsier Constituent Assembly (a body moved from Vienna to an obscure Moravian town where it was allowed to work out a theoretically perfect solution of the nationality problems of the empire which the imperial authorities had not the slightest intention of implementing), he left no doubt that dismemberment of the empire was a complete non-starter. On the contrary; in the so-called ‘Kremsier programme’ Schwarzenberg declared that the bonds between the constituent parts of the empire would be strengthened – this was Schwarzenberg’s riposte to Greater Germanism. Secondly, Austria intended to remain in the German Confederation – a warning shot across the bows of the Little Germans who were now growing in support once it was clear that Greater Germanism was not on offer.
Whilst the Frankfurt liberals talked in grandiose terms about the future shape of Germany, assuming that Austria and Prussia would fall in with their wishes, in the corridors of power in Vienna and Berlin dualism was still the preferred solution of the German problem. Prince Schwarzenberg is often depicted as the reactionary executant of a hard-line policy designed to humiliate Prussia and compel her to submit to Austrian plans for the domination of Germany. True, he was a cynical political operator, ruthless in his choice of means and capable of using any stick with which to beat the Prussians and force them into line. Nevertheless, at bottom he was absolutely convinced that close cooperation with Prussia had to be the sheet-anchor of Austrian policy. This basically for two reasons. Firstly, because Vienna regarded Prussia as a stout bulwark against revolution which Schwarzenberg, like all conservatives, thought threatened thrones everywhere in Europe. Secondly, cooperation with Prussia was part of Austria’s overall strategy as a European Great Power. She was prepared to accord some measure of recognition to Prussian ascendancy in North Germany on condition that Prussia recognized Austria’s pre-eminence at Frankfurt. If Austria was to maintain her position in Italy and in the Balkans, she could not afford to abandon her position in Germany and the influence this gave her with the smaller states there. The European role Austria was convinced she had to play is crucial to an understanding of her – apparently – obstinate refusal to be forced out of Germany by Prussia.
Similarly the king of Prussia was predisposed to be on good terms with Austria. This was due only in part to his abhorrence of revolution. Incurably romantic in some ways, he clung all his life to his adolescent dream of a strong Christian–German Reich ruled over by the time-honoured house of Habsburg with the Prussian monarch as a second-in-command in charge of the federal army. Yet at the same time he was also a member of the house of Hohenzollern and was attracted by the prospect of enhancing the status of Prussia. At first he thought it perfectly feasible to achieve both ambitions. When Prussia took the initiative on 23 January 1849 and invited the German states to discuss the creation of a federal state (engerer Bund) with the Prussian monarch as the hereditary head, this was to be supplemented by a looser association with the Austrian dominions (weiterer Bund). Beyond that King Frederick William dreamed of an imperial alliance between the Little German Reich and the whole of the Habsburg dominions (Grosser Reichsbund). This formula, which originated with Heinrich von Gagern, a president of the Frankfurt Parliament, had much to commend it; unlike the more doctrinaire Little German and Greater German solutions it was sufficiently flexible to permit that fuller association with the Habsburg empire which most Germans wanted.
Six weeks later on 4 March 1849 Emperor Francis Joseph dissolved the Kremsier Assembly and proclaimed a unitary constitution for the Austrian empire. Shaken by the Magyar, Czech and Italian revolts, the Habsburgs were reverting to neo-absolutism, i.e. planning to run the empire from Vienna with the help of Austrian–German bureaucrats as Joseph II had done in the late eighteenth century. This had a decisive effect on German affairs as well as on Austrian. As the eastern half of the empire would now be subjected to the same regime as the western, Schwarzenberg proposed for the sake of preserving the unitary state that the former be included in a revived German Confederation. This would bring into being a Reich of seventy million people, stretching from the Balkans to the Baltic and run by Austro-German bureaucrats, which would in time have dominated Europe and made Germany a superpower without equal. It was to be run by a directory presided over by Austria in which Austria and Prussia would have two votes, Bavaria one and the other states four between them. This executive body was to be supplemented by an assembly of seventy deputies drawn from local Landtage on the basis of one deputy for every million inhabitants. In effect Austria would have thirty-eight deputies and the rest of Germany thirty-two. As a gesture to conciliate Prussia, the office of Reichstatthalter was to be held alternately by the emperor and the king of Prussia.
Faced with a stark choice between multi-national Middle Europe and nationalist Little Germany, the Frankfurt liberals opted, reluctantly, for the latter. Reluctantly, because there was little desire among the members to sever the Austrian connection nor any great wish to have a Hohenzollern ruling over them. Little Germany was an interim solution to be superseded one day by that weiterer Bund with Austria which most Germans wanted. Only by 267 votes to 263 (with eight abstentions) did the Parliament agree on 27 March 1849 to establish a hereditary emperorship for the new Reich – and that only after much horsetrading in which the support of the left was secured only when the moderates accepted much more democratic constitutional arrangements. The next day the king of Prussia – the only candidate – obtained 290 votes with 248 abstentions and twenty-nine absentees. When the king declined the ‘crown of dirt and mud’ offered him on 3 April by a deputation from Frankfurt he dealt a body blow to the Parliament from which it never recovered. What the deputation overlooked was the way the king hedged his ‘refusal’ with qualifications. As many of the diplomats from the middle states realized, the king really wanted the crown provided that two conditions were fulfilled: that he had the approval of the German princes and that the Frankfurt constitution – which was too radical for his tastes – was drastically amended. Despite Frederick William’s high-flown rhetoric about the sanctity of monarchy, the realistic streak in his make-up – which his ministers encouraged – told him not to neglect a golden opportunity of advancing Prussian interests.
Immediately after his ‘refusal’ the king tried to persuade the Frankfurt Parliament to modify the constitution. Confident that the small states would respect his wishes, he declared himself ready to assume on a provisional basis overall direction of German affairs. However, the Parliament was not keen enough on a Hohenzollern emperor to do his bidding. Twenty-eight states, led by Baden, declared their support for the unamended constitution. Frederick William, with ministerial encouragement, changed his tactics. His minister–president, Count Friedrich Wilhelm von Brandenburg, denounced the Frankfurt constitution and on 25 April the king appointed General Joseph von Radowitz, a Catholic nobleman of Magyar-Westphalian extraction, minister – president. The emphasis shifted from the Frankfurt Parliament to the German princes. On 28 April Radowitz invited them to Berlin to discuss a new constitution for Little Germany. This turned out to be a drastically amended version of the Frankfurt one; the king’s absolute veto on legislation was re-introduced; and a college of princes would now share power with a Reichstag elected not by universal male suffrage but on the restricted franchise of the three-class system introduced into Prussia in December 1848.
The military situation favoured Prussia. At the end of April revolution broke out again in Württemberg, Saxony, Baden and the Palatinate as well as in Silesia and Westphalia. Radowitz promptly sent in Prussian soldiers who restored order in South-West Germany in the course of the summer. Initially the small states had declined to attend the Berlin conference. Frightened by these revolutionary outbursts and feeling that discretion was the better part of valour, they changed their minds and accepted the Radowitz constitution. By the end of the summer only Bavaria stood aloof from the general trend. The Austrians, who had accepted the invitation to Berlin but had thought better of it the next day, could do no more than protest in view of their own mounting internal problems. For although their position in Northern Italy improved after the defeat of the Piedmontese at the battle of Novara in March 1849, on 14 April – the day Brandenburg denounced the Frankfurt constitution – Louis Kossuth declared Hungary an independent state. Not until mid August did the Habsburgs succeed in subduing Hungary and then only with the help of the tsar’s soldiers who poured over the Carpathians to encompass the defeat of Kossuth’s forces.
Revisionist historians have argued that some of the middle states such as Hanover, Saxony, Württemberg and Baden took a positive interest in the Erfurt Union (as this association of states became known in 1850). This because they were genuinely interested in working out a solution of the German problem which avoided what they regarded as the centralizing and democratic tendencies of the Frankfurt Parliament while at the same time safeguarding states’ rights against the attempts of Prussia to dominate the new Reich.6 If that is so, then the Interim of September 1849 came as a great disappointment to them. Prussia was perfectly willing to negotiate with Austria provided she conceded Prussian primacy in North and Central Germany. Schwarzenberg, freed of domestic worries and anxious to hold Prussia in check, approached Bernstorff, the Prussian minister in Vienna. The latter, erroneously believing that this vital concession had been made, agreed to the Interim: a commission of four (two Prussians and two Austrians) would meet under the presidency of an Austrian to exercise the central power in Germany which Archduke Johann, head of the Frankfurt Central Government, was to hand over to them. The agreement which was to last until May 1850 had as its express purpose the maintenance of the Confederation. And for the interim period the German princes were to draft yet another constitution. The Interim – by which Radowitz in his eagerness for agreement with Austria hopelessly compromised his own position – did, of course, encourage Schwarzenberg to believe that Prussia wanted to re-establish the old dualism which had served Austria so well before 1848.
Relations between Austria and Prussia did, in fact, deteriorate in the summer of 1850. This because Radowitz went ahead with the holding of elections to the Erfurt Union parliament. When this body, which was packed with men of moderate persuasions, met at Erfurt in April 1850 it quickly approved the Union constitution. But as Radowitz closed the parliament without making it clear when Prussia intended to set up the machinery of government provided for in the constitution, Schwarzenberg seized the initiative. He announced that, as it had not been possible to extend the life of the Interim, this would end on 1 May. Austria had no alternative but to reactivate the old Confederation. All states were invited to send representatives to Frankfurt on 10 May for the first session of the reconvened Federal Diet which would have on its agenda reform of the Confederation.
Support had been ebbing away from the Erfurt Union for some months. In February Saxony, Hanover and Württemberg deserted it, formed the Four Kings’ Alliance with Bavaria, drafted their own constitution and pledged support for the seventy-million Reich. After Schwarzenberg’s declaration another eight states led by Baden left the Union. Nevertheless, for some months it looked as if Prussia intended to fight to preserve her creation. The frontier garrisons in Saxony and Silesia were strengthened; in May General Edwin von Manteuffel was dispatched to Warsaw to ascertain what support Prussia could expect from the tsar in the event of war; in July Prussia signed the Treaty of Berlin freeing her from the Slesvig war; and in September the king appointed Radowitz foreign minister, an act which infuriated the Russians who detested him.
Two issues precipitated the final crisis: the affairs of Holstein and Electoral Hesse. In respect of the former the king of Denmark, encouraged by Schwarzenberg, requested the restored Diet – which Prussia refused to recognize – to order federal execution to restore his authority in the duchy. That proposal was resisted by Prussia, not out of love for the Schleswig-Holsteiner but out of an inability to retire gracefully from the affair. Electoral Hesse was a much more serious matter. The tiresome elector and his maladroit chief minister, Hans Hassenpflug, dissolved the Landtag when it refused to vote taxes. In retaliation many middle-class people refused to pay taxes. In September the elector requested the Diet to use military force to restore law and order in his dominions. The electorate occupied a vital strategic position commanding three roads between Berlin and Cologne. Prussia had by treaty the right to use them and was not prepared to see federal troops enter the electorate. Early in October the Erfurt Union agreed to support Prussia in the event of war. On 11 October Austria concluded a war alliance with Bavaria and Württemberg. It was agreed that Bavarian troops occupy the electorate; if Prussia resisted, Austria would field 150,000 men, Bavaria 50,000 and Württemberg 20,000. The crisis deepened on 16 October when the Diet agreed to send military assistance to the elector.
As the prospect of war loomed large, Frederick William’s resolve weakened. The sober truth was that Prussia’s unreformed army would have been no match for the Austrians, as the policy-makers in Berlin realized. On 17 October Brandenburg was dispatched to Warsaw to establish precisely what the tsar intended to do in the event of war. While Nicholas made it clear that he had no wish to intervene in the quarrel between the two German powers and did not intend to force Prussia to abandon the Erfurt Union, he did regard it as Prussia’s duty to disarm the rebellious Holsteiner and allow the Diet to subdue Electoral Hesse. If Prussia resisted the Diet’s attempts to pacify Holstein, this he would regard as a casus belli. When Francis Joseph and Schwarzenberg arrived in Warsaw a few days later, Brandenburg reached agreement with them on 28 October. Austria withdrew her demand that Prussia recognize the Diet. In return Prussia agreed to postpone implementation of the Union constitution. And it was agreed that the future of Germany be discussed by all the German states. Frederick William was perfectly happy to accept these terms; for he was simply not prepared to fight conservative Austria, a bulwark against ‘red revolution’, for the sake of the Erfurt Union. Indeed if the Union was to be supplemented by agreements with Austria, war was a nonsense. Secretly he assured Francis Joseph that he wished to act jointly with Austria over the affairs of Electoral Hesse and that the Prussian troops – who entered the electorate on 2 November – would occupy only the roads and surrounding territory. In vain did Radowitz fight in the council of ministers for general mobilization. On 2 November he tendered his resignation.
There was a last flurry of activity on the Prussian side on 5 November when the king after all suddenly ordered mobilization because of Russian troop movements towards the Prussian frontier and the entry of federal troops into Electoral Hesse. This was not intended to be a prelude to war, which Prussia knew she could not win, but a response to pressure from extreme conservatives who wanted Prussia to rattle the sabre as a matter of honour. Reported Austrian troop movements added urgency to the situation. So for the first time since the eighteenth century, war between Austria and Prussia seemed – on the surface at any rate – a distinct possibility. On 8 November when the federal army (Bavarian troops supported by a battalion of Austrian chasseurs) approached Bronzell near Fulda, the Prussian outposts opened fire. Six Austrians were wounded and a Prussian horse killed. Neither commander wanted war and the soldiers quickly disengaged before the skirmish escalated. Still, the crisis continued because the presence of Prussian forces in Electoral Hesse held up the progress of the federal army. Furthermore Brunswick, a state through which it would have to pass en route for Holstein, suddenly declared that she would fight if invaded. Prussia immediately declared support for Brunswick. On 21 November Frederick William delivered a bellicose speech which so infuriated the tsar that he reactivated military measures temporarily suspended a few days earlier after receiving a conciliatory response from Prussia. Schwarzenberg determined to force the issue. On 25 November he demanded that Prussia notify Austria within forty-eight hours of her willingness to allow federal forces to pass through the electorate. Frederick William, failing to obtain British support against Russia, decided to settle the quarrel at once on the basis of the agreement of 28 October. On 28 November Baron Otto von Manteuffel, now minister–president since the sudden death of Brandenburg, hurried off to meet Schwarzenberg in the hotel Zur Krone in Olmütz. Next day they signed the celebrated Olmütz Punctation. On 1 December Frederick William accepted the terms and the crisis ended.
Little German historians condemned the Olmütz Punctation as a total and unmitigated humiliation for Prussia. She had to agree to help Austria restore law and order in Holstein and Electoral Hesse. She allowed federal forces in Hesse the use of the vital military roads. And she agreed to join with Austria in demanding that the Schleswig-Holsteiner cease all hostilities, withdraw all troops north of the Eider and reduce their army by one-third. On the other hand, the fundamental issue underlying the clash between Austria and Prussia – the future of Germany – remained unresolved and was to be turned over to a conference of all the German states meeting at Dresden. And by coming to terms with Prussia without reference to the Federal Diet, Austria had contrived to offend many states who felt betrayed by her summit diplomacy and cavalier disregard of them.
In fact the confrontation between the major German powers really ended in a draw. Much depends upon the interpretation one places on Schwarzenberg’s policy. Historians have too readily assumed that he was deeply committed to the seventy-million Reich; that this break with past policy heralded a more aggressive Austrian stance; and that this in turn justified Prussia’s stand over the Erfurt Union. Hence Schwarzenberg’s failure to persuade the Dresden Conference to opt for Middle Europe dealt a serious blow to Austrian policy. More recently it has been pointed out that Schwarzenberg, like Buol and Rechberg after him, were all disciples of Metternich. They all kept in touch with the master and, far from pursuing a more aggressive policy after 1848, simply continued his policy of cooperation with Prussia to keep the forces of revolution at bay. Although Schwarzenberg had admittedly made up his policy as he went along with cynical disregard for consistency, seizing – foolishly – on Bruck’s scheme as a weapon against Prussia, at the end of the day he believed in Austro-Prussian dualism as much as Metternich had done.7 Certainly there is little hard evidence that Schwarzenberg – a pragmatist, not a dogmatist, by inclination – considered the seventy-million Reich a make-or-break issue.8 If this is the correct interpretation, then Olmütz was a reassuring sign that Prussia preferred negotiation to war and was ready to restore the dualistic relationship.
Here, perhaps, one perceives the basic weakness in Austrian policy between 1848 and 1866. It was not that Austrian statesmen lacked ability or did not suspect Prussia of aggressive designs, as has been sometimes suggested. The real malaise in Vienna was a propensity to believe, despite ominous signs to the contrary, that Prussia would agree in the final resort that dualism was the only salvation for conservative monarchy. The Austrians avoided facing up to the simple fact that the ruling élite in Prussia, while as determined as the Austrians to fight liberalism all the way, did not have a vested interest in the status quo. And, in an age when Realpolitik was superseding the old anti-revolutionary solidarity of the Great Powers, Prussia might well be tempted to use force to overturn the established order of things, confident that she could still keep the revolutionary wolf from the door. The Austrian tragedy was that any alternative policy – even if Francis Joseph had agreed to it – would have been fraught with greater perils.
At the Dresden Conference held between December 1850 and May 1851 Schwarzenberg quickly discovered that while the middle states were prepared to preserve the association with Austria, they had no wish to escape from Prussia’s Erfurt Union only to be swallowed up in Middle Europe, to which Schwarzenberg was still nominally committed. Furthermore, the Great Powers were hostile to Middle Europe. Britain and France, both of whom regarded changes in the German balance of power as matters which concerned them directly as signatories of the Vienna settlement of 1815, did not care for Middle Europe. The decisive factor was Russia. From being a sympathetic supporter of this solution she changed in April 1851 to an oppositional stance, largely because France was making acceptance of it dependent upon compensation elsewhere. If the Erfurt Union had to be abandoned at Dresden, so did Middle Europe. This left a restoration of the Confederation as the only alternative. Here, too, Schwarzenberg suffered a reverse. To enable the Diet to act promptly in the event of fresh revolutionary outbursts, he wanted to strengthen the executive. To this end he proposed to replace the engerer Rat with a streamlined directory of seven states: Austria and Prussia with two votes each, Saxony, Hanover, Württemberg and Bavaria with one each and the two Hessian states with one between them. But Prussia, bent on parity of esteem at all costs, opposed the scheme for she shrewdly surmised that the smaller states would vote more often with Austria than with Prussia. A Prussian proposal that the presidency of the Diet alternate between the two powers was equally unacceptable to Austria. Thus the Confederation was restored in 1851 in its old unreformed state, much to Schwarzenberg’s disappointment.
There were consolation prizes for Austria. Prussia cooperated fully with Austria in implementing the Olmütz Punctation in respect of Holstein and Electoral Hesse. And in May 1851, just after the end of the Dresden Conference, she concluded a three-year alliance with Austria in which she guaranteed the Austrian dominions against attack. While the alliance reflected the king’s genuine belief that conservative powers must stand together against the ‘radicals and the reds’, it in no way signified the abandonment of Prussian territorial objectives, as some perceptive Austrians realized.9 On this uncertain note the first major confrontation between the German powers since Frederick the Great’s attack on Silesia came to an end.
The conflict between Austria and Prussia for mastery in Germany rumbled on throughout the 1850s, peaking in 1855 and again in 1859. When hostilities broke out between Russia and Turkey in October 1853 the tsar quickly discovered that he could not expect active support from Austria and Prussia in the spirit of the old Holy Alliance. And on that support he had relied to render British and French intervention on Turkey’s side a hazardous business.
Austria pursued a complex policy during the Crimean War. Deeply disturbed by the prospect of the Ottoman Empire collapsing with far-reaching consequences for the stability of her own empire and for the European balance of power on which her survival depended, Foreign Minister Count Karl von Buol-Schauenstein did his best to check Russian advances and uphold the integrity of the Ottoman Empire. At the same time he was concerned to protect Austrian interests in the Danubian Principalities Wallachia and Moldavia, an area of vital strategic and economic importance to Austria which the tsar occupied in July 1853 in the hope of forcing Turkey to comply with his demands. Austrian threats of military action, which forced Russia out of the Principalities and allowed Austria to occupy them, were deeply resented in St Petersburg. Only in the 1860s did the full effects of the breakdown of the old friendship between Austria and Russia become fully apparent.
If Prussian policy wavered during the war, this was a reflection of the influence competing cliques could exert over the impressionable king. At times the pro-western, anti-Russian and anti-Austrian Wochenblattpartei, and at other times the pro-Russian and pro-Austrian court camarilla, was in the ascendancy. The latest research, however, suggests that the king was very much in charge of policy; policy-making was, as Leopold von Gerlach remarked, ‘a state of anarchy moderated by good will’.10 In February 1854, just before Britain and France declared war on Russia, the pro-westerners tried to make the running. As Prussian interests were not directly at stake in the Balkans, narrow self-interest dictated that she avoid involvement and extricate maximum advantage out of the situation. Accordingly – without the king’s knowledge – a Wochenblattpartei emissary went to London where he offered Prussian assistance against Russia in return for help in promoting Prussian hegemony in North and Central Germany.
It was the king who put a stop to this intrigue which cost the war minister his post. For already Frederick William had embarked on a pro-Austrian policy. He offered Austria not only renewal of the 1851 alliance but a defensive – offensive alliance for the duration of the war. This treaty, signed in April 1854 and eventually endorsed by the Diet, provided for partial mobilization of the federal army to protect Austria and Prussia. Only if Russia attacked in the Balkans or refused to evacuate the Principalities would the offensive element in the alliance become operative, in which case Prussia would put 200,000 men into the field. There was more than a touch of self-interest in this arrangement. The treaty kept Austria away from the western powers who might otherwise drag Prussia into the war. And if that happened Napoleon would be tempted to attack in the Rhineland, the area which gave Prussia greatest cause for concern.
Having achieved her objective in the Principalities and being anxious to bring the war to an end, Austria concluded an alliance with Britain and France in December 1854. She turned to Prussia and demanded that she mobilize in an exercise designed to force the Anglo-French peace terms on Russia. Prussian policy changed abruptly. She refused the request, earning a sharp rebuke from Austria who accused her of breach of treaty. Though Buol argued that the Austrian aim was the altruistic one of trying to contain the war before it spread to Germany, most German states were alarmed by the thought of mobilization and involvement in Balkan affairs. Prussia succeeded in February 1855 in persuading the Diet to reject an Austrian motion for mobilization of the federal army against Russia. Instead the Diet opted for armed neutrality against threats ‘from any direction’, i.e. against both east and west. So Buol’s policy was thwarted, while for once Prussia ended up on good terms with the smaller states and with Britain, France and Russia too. Shortly afterwards the tension between Austria and Prussia died away. Nicholas I died and his successor Alexander II wanted peace. During the complex negotiations leading to the Peace of Paris in 1856, Prussia veered back to the pro-Austrian line and helped her persuade Russia to accept the Anglo-French peace plan.
Three years later when war broke out in Northern Italy, the conflict of interest between Austria and Prussia surfaced once more. In the summer of 1859 many Germans feared that France was about to launch an attack in the west. Most states began to mobilize and by June the Diet had 250,000 men under arms. Austria enjoyed a burst of popularity because, while liberals conceded that Italian national aspirations were as legitimate as German, nevertheless many thought that the presence of predatory France behind Piedmont justified Austrian resistance in Northern Italy. It was widely felt that Prussia, who had mobilized three army corps, should come to the aid of Austria at once. A new wave of Rheinlieder swept through West Germany; Ludwig Bauer’s ‘O Deutschland hoch in Ehren’, a firm favourite during the First World War, was written in these months.
The new regent William was prepared to stand by Austria. But a majority of the crown council insisted on extracting a pound of flesh. So Prussia argued that, strictly speaking, the French attack on Austria had not endangered the territory of the Confederation and she would not, therefore, activate article 47 of the federal constitution which would have authorized member states to help Austria. The price of consent was Austrian agreement that Prussia command the armies on the Rhine in the event of a French attack in the west – a not unreasonable request once Austria was fully committed in Italy. To Prussia’s surprise, Rechberg would not agree. So Austria fought on unaided. Only after the Austrian defeat at the battle of Magenta on 4 June did the regent decide in a fit of conscience to mobilize another three army corps, talked of ‘armed mediation’ and declared that Austria must not lose her Italian possessions. Foreign Minister Count Alexander von Schleinitz delayed action in the hope of involving Russia and Britain in this operation. By the time it was evident that neither would oblige Prussia, Napoleon had played upon the Prussian ‘menace’ to persuade Francis Joseph to agree to the Villafrancha armistice early in July. The emperor was concerned about the situation at home; the Viennese press was attacking not only the system of absolutism but the emperor himself, and his worried ministers urged him to end the war at all costs before worse befell them. Austria’s reputation was badly shaken by the loss of Lombardy. But Prussia, too, had come out of it badly. By her reluctance to aid Austria the reputation she was beginning to acquire during the New Era was tarnished in the eyes of many (though not all) liberals.
THE ECONOMIC DIMENSION
The conflict between Austria and Prussia for mastery in Germany had an important economic dimension, to which we now turn.
To trace the economic roots of their rivalry we must go back beyond the 1848–9 Revolution to the 1830s and the formation of the German Customs Union (Deutscher Zollverein). Its economic significance can easily be exaggerated. It was by no means the only or even the principal factor which eventually turned Germany from an agrarian into an industrial society. The origins of industrialization lie back in the eighteenth century and especially in the Napoleonic era. By 1815 there were already the beginnings of industrialization in the Rhineland, Westphalia, Saxony and Silesia. And before 1850 the Customs Union does not appear to have done a great deal to promote industrialization. Of course, the removal of some 1800 customs barriers criss-crossing the Confederation from end to end did stimulate trade and increase the demand for agrarian produce. But customs barriers were only one of the obstacles causing economic stagnation; poor communications, a scarcity of credit, the low purchasing power of the population and social immobility were just as important. Only when all the variables had changed could industrialization take root in Germany. In fact, the significance of the Customs Union lies less in the economic than in the political field. It was not so much what it actually achieved in economic terms during the first two decades of its existence but what German nationalists thought it was achieving – i.e. promoting the economic unification of Germany – which convinced them that the Customs Union represented a giant step forward on the road to political unification. It was indicative of this belief that when moderate liberals from South and West Germany met at Heppenheim in 1847 to formulate a programme they declared that political unification would most easily be promoted by establishing a customs parliament to regulate tariff policy.
As the Federal Diet made little progress towards the rationalization of the customs systems, the larger states took their own initiatives. For some time in the 1830s three regional customs unions competed with each other: a Prussian, a South German and a Central Customs Union. The primary motive behind them all was not, however, a desire to stimulate economic growth but simply to obtain new sources of revenue to pay for the expensive wars Napoleon involved them in, as well as for the extensive reforms some states had embarked upon.
Prussia was first in the field in 1818. She abolished all internal duties and introduced a uniform low tariff for the whole of the kingdom. Her pressing need was to raise revenue to meet the substantial state deficit as well as to unify her scattered possessions. At first she had no thought of creating a united Germany. All the same, the history of the German Customs Union illustrates the impossibility of disentangling economic from political strands in any historical situation. When the forceful Friedrich von Motz became Prussian finance minister in 1825 he embarked upon a determined campaign to extend the Prussian Union. As he remarked in 1829:
If it is true as every statesman knows that import export and transit duties are only the consequence of the political division between various states … then the contrary is also true that the unification of these states in a customs or commercial union will lead to one and the same political system. And the more natural the attachment to a customs and commercial system is … the more intimate and deep will be the attachment of these states to one political system.’11
Count Christian von Bernstorff, the foreign minister, entirely agreed. When Prussia concluded her first major extra-territorial treaty with Hesse-Darmstadt in 1828 he commented that, however one-sided the agreement (which favoured that state much more than Prussia), it was well worthwhile for it would ‘place Prussia in a position to exert its influence over the [smaller states] in the most equitable manner’.12
Metternich, with his usual short-range perception, recognized in the forward policies of Motz and Bernstorff a new threat to Austrian influence in Germany. Accordingly he encouraged the formation of the Central Customs Union headed by Saxony and Hanover. In vain. The Prussian Union swallowed up its rivals and founded the German Customs Union in 1834. Actually, after Motz’s death in 1830 and Bernstorff’s resignation in 1832 their conservative successors eschewed power politics and treated the Customs Union as a purely commercial undertaking – which probably helped to reassure other states about Prussian intentions at a crucial stage in the union’s history. However, in the 1840s middle-ranging officials in the ministry of commerce resurrected the aggressive power-oriented tactics of Motz and Bernstorff. As the Customs Union blossomed in this decade, Prussian power increased correspondingly. Prussia controlled vital lines of communication between north and south; she had become the mediator in all commercial disputes between members; and she constituted a large and attractive market for other states. All the same, it was still the assurance of financial independence from their local estates rather than commercial advantage which attracted many rulers to the Customs Union.
Metternich did attempt to persuade Emperor Francis Joseph to pursue a more aggressive commercial policy in Germany. But having little say in domestic affairs, he had no success either in the early 1830s or between 1841 and 1843 (at the time of the renewal of the Customs Union treaties) when he proposed a lowering of Austrian tariffs. The hard fact was that Austrian economic interests pointed her away from Germany. Trade between Austria and Hungary in the first half of the nineteenth century was twice as large as that with Germany, and growing faster. Austrian industrialists had established markets in the eastern half of the empire and a particularly lucrative one in Lombardy and Venetia. Nor had they any wish to be exposed to foreign competition, which they feared changes in the prohibitive (i.e. 100 per cent) tariff system would lead to. In the last resort foreign policy mattered more than economics to Metternich; if he had to, he was prepared to avert his gaze from the growing threat of the Customs Union and rely on dualism to see Austria through troubled times.
In the autumn of 1849 Austria’s attititude changed quite abruptly. This was due as much if not more to political rather than economic considerations. Just before the emperor’s soldiers restored order in Vienna, an article in the semi-official Wiener Zeitung outlined the shape of things to come. The article proposed the creation in easy stages of a new customs union but one embracing the whole of the Habsburg monarchy as well as the Confederation. This would bring into being a potential market of seventy million certain to dominate the economic life of Central Europe. It would be surrounded by high though not prohibitive tariffs on manufactured goods, but foodstuffs and raw materials would enter free. The article, intended to test the water temperature, reflected the views of Karl Ludwig von Bruck, one-time director of the Trieste chamber of commerce and a former member of the economic committee of the Frankfurt Parliament. In November he became minister of commerce.
This grandiose scheme was not without considerable attraction for the smaller states, who felt that Middle Europe might be a means of protecting themselves against the vaulting ambitions of Prussia. Schwarzenberg, a power politician of the old school, was not greatly interested in its economic possibilities but pounced on the scheme as a stick to use in the campaign to make Prussia see reason and return to the old dualistic policy. Bruck met his match in Rudolf von Delbrück, a leading official in the Prussian ministry of commerce. He took the scheme seriously (as did Bruck), seeing in it a threat to the German Customs Union. While readily conceding that cooperation with Austria might be possible on a whole range of issues such as monetary reform and railway development, he threw cold water on the main proposal. The economic needs of the Customs Union and those of the Habsburg dominions were so incompatible that a common tariff was beyond the bounds of possibility. Secondly, he sharply rejected Bruck’s proposal for one central authority with extensive powers to regulate tariffs and negotiate commercial treaties. Delbrück preferred a federation between the Habsburg dominions, the German Customs Union, the Tax Union and North German coastal towns.13
Despite the interest shown by some South German states, nothing came of Middle Europe. At loggerheads with colleagues over financial matters and disheartened by the lack of progress towards an Austro-German customs union, Bruck resigned in May 1851. Delbrück promptly seized the initiative and strengthened Prussia’s position enormously through the conclusion of a commercial treaty with Hanover in September – Bismarck, incidentally, playing a major role at the negotiating table. In exchange for extremely favourable terms Prussia gained control of the finances of a key state controlling the north-west coastline of Germany and linking up Prussia’s western provinces with her eastern possessions. This treaty gave Prussia virtually complete control over the commercial life of North Germany. Many southern states protested about both the lack of consultation by Prussia and the generous concessions made to Hanover. But they were now too dependent on the Customs Union to do anything about it.
The same applies to the negotiations Bavaria, Württemberg and Saxony conducted with Austria in January 1852 and again in the spring at their Darmstadt conference. As always in economic matters, the Third Germany was impaled on the horns of a cruel dilemma. These states agreed that the entry of Austria into the Customs Union would afford them much-needed political protection against Prussia, even though there was some suspicion that Austria was using them to prop up her empire. But at bottom there was too much at stake economically for them to insist on Austrian inclusion as a pre-condition of their continued membership of the Customs Union. Public opinion in the South German states made it abundantly clear to their governments that withdrawal would be little short of disastrous for their economies and certainly for their finances.
They were rescued from their dilemma by the sudden death of Schwarzenberg. His successor Buol, after one last attempt to play off the German states against Prussia, decided on negotiation with her. Being much more preoccupied by the rising tension with Russia in South-Eastern Europe, he was only too relieved to wash his hands of the customs issue. Left in the lurch by Austria, the smaller states had no alternative to agreement with Prussia. So Delbrück was able to renew the Customs Union treaties (which lapsed in 1853) for a further twelve years, largely on Prussian terms.
Prussia did not have it all her own way. Under pressure from the other members Prussia did negotiate a commercial treaty with Austria on generous terms. No import duties would be charged on Austrian raw materials and on certain semi-manufactured goods. Preferential treatment varying from 25 to 50 per cent would be given to many manufactured goods on a reciprocal basis – an important departure from Customs Union policy which gave preferences only in exceptional circumstances. Austria also enjoyed most-favoured-nation treatment in respect of new tariff concessions given by the Customs Union to other states. Finally, Prussia promised to enter into negotiations for a Mid-European customs union no later than 1860. As Bruck was prepared to reduce Austrian duties on industrial goods, he assumed that industrialists in the German Customs Union would become more favourably disposed to a Mid-European Union. As a result of this treaty Austrian imports from the Customs Union increased from 17 per cent in 1856 to 34 per cent by 1864. But Austrian exports rose only from 29 to 32 per cent. And despite Prussia’s promise, Delbrück was quite determined to sabotage future negotiations with Austria by proposing tariffs so low that her industries would be endangered by outside competition.
Economic development in the next decade favoured Prussia rather than Austria. The story has been told in detail elsewhere. Suffice to say that Prussia enjoyed several natural advantages which put her decisively ahead of Austria. By an accident of geography the major industrial areas were in Prussian territory: the Ruhr, the Saar, Saxony and Upper Silesia. Heavy industry developed rapidly in these areas because of a plentiful supply of key raw materials: coal, iron and zinc. In the area covered by the Customs Union 80 per cent of total coal and iron production was Prussian. She had an abundant reservoir of labour for the new industrial regions as the handicraft system declined and peasants drifted to the towns. The foundation of credit banks in the 1850s supplied an abundance of risk capital for industrial development. In the countryside the abolition of the remnants of feudalism facilitated the emergence in the east of efficient estates which became major grain exporters. State intervention was also a major factor through its direct involvement in the running of certain industries such as coal-mining, and also by removing restrictive legislation impeding the growth of capitalism.
It would be quite wrong to suppose that Austria stagnated in the 1850s. Very real progress was made in modernizing the Habsburg lands. Flourishing iron, woollen and cotton industries sprang up in Lower Austria, Bohemia and Lombardy. In 1850 the customs barriers between Austria and Hungary were removed. In 1851 prohibitive tariffs on foreign imports were abolished and replaced by high tariffs; and the number of tariffs was reduced from 614 to 338. In 1853 tariffs were further reduced. Trade both internally with Hungary, which supplied food and raw materials for the industrial areas, and externally was greatly increased. A significant expansion of the railway system improved north-south (but not east-west) communications. In 1859 access to trades and professions was freed of all restrictions. In the countryside the process of abolishing the robot was completed and the peasants, freed of feudal relics, provided a new labour force for industry. Also the fiscal unification of the Habsburg dominions was carried out in this decade.
But industrialization still lagged behind Prussia. In 1865–6 70 per cent of all Austrians still worked on the land compared with 45 per cent in Prussia. Whereas Prussian officials actively encouraged rapid industrial development, in Austria the top-heavy bureaucratic machine, a feature of the neo-absolutist era, impeded changes and slowed down economic expansion. The power of the guilds and the resistance offered by deep-rooted feudal traditions were further obstacles. Thus, although tariff reductions in the early 1850s gave an impetus to development, the pace of change slackened after the depression of 1857 which affected Austria severely. Coal and textile manufacturers strongly opposed to tariff reductions were able to veto further changes. It has to be remembered here that as key raw materials – iron and coal – were widely separated in Austria (unlike the situation in Prussia), costs were much higher in comparison with those of Prussia. But the greatest single handicap was chronic insolvency, which plagued Austria from 1811 onwards. Between 1848 and 1866 the national debt trebled, amounting on the eve of the Austro-Prussian war to 1,670 million florins compared with 290 million talers in Prussia. Armed mediation during the Crimean War gravely strained Austrian finances. But the war of 1859 brought them virtually to the point of complete collapse. Only through massive loans – absorbing capital which would in part at least have been attracted to industrial development – did Austria keep going financially, with over 40 per cent of total expenditure being spent on armaments.
Meanwhile in Germany at the close of the 1850s, middle-class pressure for far-reaching economic and social change was becoming increasingly vocal. The Congress of German Economists founded in 1858 articulated the exuberant laissez-faire beliefs of the business world. This body attracted the support of prominent figures in the world of economics and politics, had extensive connections with business and commerce and exerted considerable influence in government circles. It demanded the removal of all barriers to completely free trade and the destruction of state controls which restricted the development of individual entrepreneurship. One of its demands was for a drastic reduction of Customs Union tariffs, a demand which the Prussian government was very willing to take up both for economic reasons and because lower tariffs would widen the gulf between Austria and Prussia. But the unanimity rule in the general congress of the Customs Union stopped Prussia in her tracks; the protectionist-minded South German states steadfastly opposed further tariff reductions.
Frustrated by constant opposition in the general congress – which met every two years to consider tariff changes – Prussia launched out on a new forward policy in the early 1860s. The occasion was the Cobden Treaty negotiated by Britain and France in 1860. In this treaty Napoleon abandoned the traditional protectionism of the French and reduced tariffs over a wide range of British manufactured goods. Napoleon’s dream of a low-tariff zone covering the whole of Western Europe gave the Prussian ministry of commerce an opening to negotiate a similar treaty and so outmanoeuvre the obstructionist middle states. In the Franco-Prussian Commercial Treaty signed in August 1862 Prussian duties were generally lowered to the same level as French duties on British goods, much to the satisfaction of German manufacturers who would otherwise have been disadvantaged by the Cobden Treaty. Both partners agreed to a most-favoured-nation clause by which concessions made to third countries were automatically extended to the other partner. Political considerations were paramount on both sides. Napoleon was paving the way for better relations with Prussia, hoping to use her as a lever against Austria, while the Prussian negotiating team led by Delbrück wanted the treaty because it would make it virtually impossible to negotiate another Austro-Prussian commercial treaty when the 1853 treaty lapsed.14 The Prussians were ‘willing to give France more than they received in order to give Austria less than they promised’.15
Austria was well aware of the political implications of the 1862 treaty. By the late spring of 1861 Rechberg concluded that he could not obtain an alliance with Prussia. Therefore he began to object vigorously to the Franco-Prussian commercial negotiations and did all he could to stiffen the resistance of the middle states to tariff changes. With Austrian support Bavaria, Württemberg, Hesse-Darmstadt and Nassau at first rejected the treaty and talked bravely of defying Prussia. But when Rechberg offered them a customs union with Austria the schizophrenic nature of their position was quickly apparent.
All Prussia had to do was stand firm and insist that the renewal of the Customs Union (the treaty lapsed in December 1865) would depend on acceptance of the Franco-Prussian Treaty by all members. She held all the aces. A reduction of tariff levels corresponded with the general trend in Europe towards free trade in the midnineteenth century. Secondly, middle-class opinion articulated through bodies such as the Congress of German Economists and the National Society was strongly in favour of the treaty. Thirdly, much as many middle states and small states, too, disliked Prussia, the economic life of Germany was becoming far too interdependent to permit them the luxury of repudiating the Customs Union. Fourthly, the alternative of some form of Mid-European Union was no longer practical politics and was now opposed by many Austrian manufacturers. As public opinion began to count in both states, Austria and Prussia were driven further apart. In Prussia middle-class opinion favoured more free trade; in Austria after the 1857 crisis opinion was increasingly favourable to the introduction of higher tariffs to protect the iron and textile industries. Left with no realistic alternative, all the member states had by October 1864 accepted the substantial tariff reductions incorporated in the Franco-Prussian Treaty. In May 1865 the Customs Union was formally renewed for a further twelve years commencing on 1 January 1866. However, thanks to the continued resistance of the middle states Prussia was still unable to replace the unanimity rule with a majority voting system.
Austria was unable to negotiate a renewal of the 1853 treaty. Bismarck, curiously enough, was willing to renew the promise of future negotiations for Austrian entry into the Customs Union. But the ministry of commerce refused to make this harmless gesture. All hopes of entering the Customs Union came to an abrupt end and the tariff walls round Austria took on an air of finality. The maximum concession Prussia was willing to make was a trade treaty signed in April 1865 which offered Austria only most-favoured-nation treatment so that she forfeited her privileged position in the German market. Prussia had, in effect, inflicted a serious defeat on Austria, a ‘commercial Villafrancha’, a year before she was expelled from Germany for ever.
Clinical separation of the political-strategic factors from the economic ones is a purely hermeneutic exercise. Their interdependence emerges clearly enough from the above. Nevertheless, it is arguable that the economic issues at stake in the confrontation between Austria and Prussia foreshadowed the Reich of 1871 much more clearly than the political development. When reform of the Confederation was being debated in the early 1860s many Germans still hoped to associate Austria in some form or other with the new Reich. On paper (though not in practice) the pro-Prussian National Society was committed to the creation of a wider association (weiterer Bund) with Austria as well as to the formation of an engerer Bund – Little Germany. The economic issues were much clearer cut. The German Customs Union, which coincided more or less with Little Germany, was a growing concern tied into international markets and quite capable of existing without Austria, a fact which could not but strengthen the growing conviction that a wider association with Austria was superfluous. As the most recent writer on the Customs Union has remarked: ‘the growing economic ties [between the states] were in no sense destined to lead to political unification but they did at least impede any step backwards in a federalist direction’.16 One might go further: Little Germany was, as Marx observed, essentially an expression of the development of German capitalism though, of course, the creation of this state depended on the coincidence of economic and politico-strategic factors. For Austria the economic writing was on the wall. Trade within the empire was bound to remain more important than trade with Germany, this because of the growing pressure exerted on governments by key sectors of Austrian industry whose high production costs made them uncompetitive in world markets.
THE IDEOLOGICAL CONFLICT
Finally, we turn to the ideological element in the struggle between the two German powers. National liberalism enjoyed a new lease of life after the war of 1859 and emerged as a significant ideological force attracting wide support from the articulate middle class organized in professional bodies and in the National Society. The desire for a strong Reich to defend Germany against her foes – especially the French – was shared, albeit in only a rudimentary and intermittent fashion, by an even wider cross-section of the population participating in the general revival of popular festivals in the 1860s. The resurgence of German National Liberalism was no isolated phenomenon. The national idea triumphed in Italy in 1860–1 (or perhaps more accurately, Italian nationalism was exploited by Cavour to advance Piedmontese interests). In Britain, Belgium and the Netherlands constitutional liberalism underpinned by industrialization was ushering in a period of unparalleled material progress. Even in Napoleonic France autocracy was beginning to crumble in the early 1860s. These national and international pressures forced Austria and Prussia to take account of the spirit of a new age.
Individual members of ruling classes all over Germany were as capable of being moved by genuine sympathy for the claims of the new ideology as anyone else. On the other hand, conservatives who controlled the governments of the larger states tended to regard nationalism as a force which could be exploited in the interest of the state, as the Piedmontese had done so successfully. Nor must it be forgotten – a point made earlier – that even those rulers who sympathized with the Zeitgeist were haunted by memories of the frightening experiences of 1848–9. Objectively speaking, it was highly unlikely that barricades would be erected in the streets in the 1860s. That did not prevent rulers seeing in the demands nationalists were making for constitutional government a serious threat to their established power which might be rendered innocuous more effectively by coming to terms with the new ideology than fighting it.
In 1858 Prussia had embarked on the New Era. And although her conduct during the Italian war had done nothing to enhance her standing with German liberals, she remained committed to the policy of ‘moral conquests’ in Germany; in other words, aware at last that physical force alone would not do, she knew that she had to try to win the minds and hearts of articulate Germans if she was to succeed where Radowitz had failed a decade earlier. But although the fiasco of the Italian war had – by highlighting the military weakness of the Confederation – placed reform fairly and squarely on the political agenda, neither Austria nor Prussia took the initiative. Both of them were at first engaged in negotiations for a new alliance, for when Francis Joseph met William I at Teplitz in July 1860 a French attack seemed imminent. Prussia offered to conclude a defensive alliance against French aggression on the Rhine and in Venetia provided that she was given military command of the federal armies and that the presidency of the Diet alternated with Austria. The latter power, however, was still not prepared to compromise her primacy in Germany on which she supposed the stability of the whole empire depended. But while Rechberg, a sincere believer in dualism, continued to hope for an alliance, Prussia changed course. The cabinet lost interest in an Austrian alliance and in January 1861 commenced negotiations with France for the commercial treaty which was designed to keep Austria out of the Customs Union. Only when it was clear by July 1861 that an alliance could not be concluded did the negotiations lapse, and both powers began to pay more attention to the mounting pressure for federal reform.
By this time the Third Germany was making the running on the reform issue. During the Crimean War a group of states led by Baden, Württemberg, Bavaria and Saxony began to emerge as a third force in German politics. Alarmed at the prospect of being driven into war through Austrian policy, they attempted to act as an independent force for the first time. On the initiative of Count Friedrich von Beust, chief minister in Saxony, and Baron Ludwig von der Pfordten, chief minister in Bavaria, eight states met at Bamberg in 1854 to coordinate policy. When Austria and Prussia asked the Diet to endorse their new alliance the Bamberg states tried to impose conditions on them, though without success. After the war the Third Germany continued its efforts to act independently of Berlin and Vienna. When Grand Duke Friedrich I of Baden was alarmed by the possible implications of the meeting between Tsar Alexander II and Napoleon at Stuttgart in 1857 and by the failure of the Diet to reinforce the federal fortress of Rastatt in his territory, he turned not to Austria and Prussia but to King William I of Württemberg and Grand Duke Ludwig III of Hesse-Darmstadt in the hope of creating a united front against French aggression in South-West Germany. During the Italian war Beust took a more ambitious initiative, touring the major German capitals to drum up support for a meeting of the middle states which took place in Württemberg in November 1859. At this conference they discussed measures to strengthen the legislative power of the Confederation and attempted to coordinate their own policies in the hope of forcing Austria and Prussia to negotiate with them collectively in the Diet.
Schemes for reform were thick on the ground in the early 1860s. The proposals from Baden and Saxony call for special mention. In 1861 Baron Franz von Roggenbach, newly appointed foreign minister of Baden, a state whose ruler was supportive of Prussia, proposed the creation of a Little German state led by Prussia but with a liberal face; there would be ministerial responsibility, a directly elected national parliament and – to maintain the connection with Austria – a guarantee covering the Habsburg dominions. As the grand duke of Baden was the king of Prussia’s son-in-law, the latter forwarded the plan to Berlin. In September the king, supported by the new foreign minister, Count Albrecht von Bernstorff, endorsed it as a basis for reform of the Confederation – but only after the grand duke had jettisoned the liberal provisions. Shortly afterwards Beust, no lover of a Little German state, proposed a far-reaching reorganization of the Confederation. The revamped Diet would have a supreme court; the executive power would be strengthened; the federal military machine would be overhauled; and legislative power would be conferred on a chamber of deputies chosen by the various states.
The hope that measures such as these would save the Confederation was certainly entertained by several rulers. To evaluate their mixed motives is not easy. Some, such as the king of Hanover, were moved by the kind of woolly Christian–German patriotism exemplified by King Frederick William IV, while others, such as the king of Württemberg, were calculating Realpolitiker with an eye for the main chance. All were frightened by the ‘democratic’ overtones of National Liberalism and hoped to contain the nationalist ferment within a conservative framework. They opposed directly elected assemblies and even where they did not forbid National Society activities – as was the case in Mecklenburg and Electoral Hesse – they imposed restrictions on them. And above all, they believed they could best preserve their sovereign independence in a reformed Confederation which, unlike a Prussian-dominated Little Germany or an Austrian-dominated Middle Europe, would enable them to play the two major states off against each other. It is only fair to add that some leading ministers, especially von der Pfordten, took a loftier view of the role a reformed Confederation might play in European politics as a bulwark against the growing power of Russia in the east and Napoleonic France in the west.
No doubt, as revisionist historians maintain, the history of Germany and of Europe would have been very different had the Confederation survived in an updated form as a moderating influence in Central Europe. Yet the hard fact remains that co-ordination of policy between the middle states, the backbone of the Third Germany, was virtually impossible because of divergent interests and rivalries. Economically Saxony, the leading industrial power among these states, was drawn irresistibly towards the Customs Union, as was Württemberg, whereas Bavaria looked much more towards the Danubian basin. Politically the pretensions of Bavaria to become the dominant power in South Germany were resented by Württemberg and Baden. And in the case of the grand duchy, further tension was caused by Bavarian claims for compensation arising out of territorial adjustments made in 1815.
At first Austria stood aloof from the agitation for reform, being perfectly satisfied with her position in the Confederation. But in December 1861 Foreign Minister Bernstorff, a man much less well-disposed towards Austria than his predecessor Schleinitz, rejected the Beust plan out of hand. In an attempt to divert attention from Prussia’s internal difficulties, he took the initiative, declaring bluntly that the only acceptable solution of the German problem was a Little Germany led by Prussia though associated with Austria in a weiterer Bund. The bluntness of Bernstorff’s language, arousing memories of Radowitz and the Erfurt Union, set the alarm bells ringing in Vienna.
By this time Austria had, in any case, become a reluctant convert to the cause of reform. The 1859 war had shaken the empire to its foundations. Not only were her finances plunged into disarray. Trouble was brewing among the Magyars and the Czechs, while the liberal middle class in Vienna – whose money was committed to state loans – was becoming restive. The neo-absolutist policy pursued since 1849 had to be abandoned. The leading exponents of this policy, Baron Alexander Bach and Baron Johann Kempen, were summarily dismissed. The emperor, still surrounded by conservative aristocrats, appointed one of them, Count Agenor Goluchowski, minister of the interior, entrusting him with the task of drawing up a new constitution. The October Diploma of 1860 did little more than modify the centralized system which had just failed the empire. The old estates were revived and given local powers of decision-making. But a Reichsrat composed in part of delegates from these estates and in part of imperial nominees would still run the empire. The Magyars, who still wanted the 1848 constitution, were dissatisfied with these minimal changes, while the Germans resented their own demotion in favour of the aristocracy. In December 1860 Goluchowski was abruptly dismissed and replaced by Baron Anton von Schmerling.
Schmerling’s appointment was the price Francis Joseph had to pay to escape from the financial crisis. Schmerling, a representative of the influential Austrian middle class, had been a member of the Frankfurt Central Government and was an enthusiastic supporter of Greater Germany until Schwarzenberg’s Kremsier declaration had put paid to that solution of the German problem. In the February Patent of 1861, a modified version of the Diploma, Schmerling shifted the balance of power back to Vienna. The Reichsrat became a bicameral chamber: the upper house was in the hands of the landed aristocracy while the lower house was elected by the estates. As the dissatisfied Magyars and Poles withdrew from the Reichsrat, the Germans effectively controlled that body. But by the autumn of 1861 it was apparent that the Patent was not likely to reconcile the peoples of empire to the regime, with the sole exception of the Ruthenes who welcomed an arrangement affording them protection against the Polish aristocracy. The failure of the Patent was probably another reason why Schmerling turned to Germany in the hope of making ‘moral conquests’.
The situation looked very hopeful for Austria in the summer of 1862. There was widespread disillusionment with Prussia in liberal circles as the constitutional crisis mounted in intensity. Austria’s image was much brighter. She had abandoned the repressive policy of the 1850s and had proved her willingness to introduce constitutional changes at home. Schmerling and Baron Ludwig von Biegeleben, secretary of state for German affairs in the foreign office, concocted a plan to reform the Confederation. Rechberg, having failed to obtain a Prussian alliance, reluctantly agreed to the alternative strategy of outbidding Prussia over the reform issue.
Austria approached the exercise with sophistication. To avoid a Prussian veto the Austrians proposed the setting up of a national chamber of deputies drawn from local estates together with an executive committee as purely ad hoc bodies to tackle matters of general concern, namely the reform of the civil and criminal codes on which agreement could be reached by majority vote. Once in being, the Austrians hoped the arrangements would become permanent. In August 1862, despite strong Prussian opposition, the Diet sent the proposals to committee. The opponents of Little Germany took heart. In October the German Reform Society (Deutscher Reformverein) was founded in Munich by South German radicals and at once gave enthusiastic endorsement to the Austrian proposals. However, now that Bismarck was at the helm Prussian policy hardened; massive pressure was exerted on Hanover and especially on Electoral Hesse to reject the proposals. In January 1863 the Diet rejected them formally by nine votes to seven. What shocked supporters of the motion was the bluntness of Bismarck’s declaration that the only acceptable basis for reform was the creation of a directly elected assembly chosen by the people in each state according to population.
Having failed to persuade the Diet to support reform, Schmerling turned, as Radowitz had done thirteen years earlier, to the German princes. The situation was still favourable for Austria. Bismarck’s intervention on the side of Russia during the Polish uprising had displeased both Britain and France, while in May he had issued draconian press ordinances virtually destroying freedom of the press in Prussia. Even the crown prince joined in the chorus of protest against Bismarck. On 3 August Francis Joseph invited King William to attend a congress of princes to be held at Frankfurt to discuss reform of the Confederation. Under pressure from Bismarck the king reluctantly gave an evasive reply, playing for time by suggesting that a conference of ministers of the leading states discuss the proposals before binding decisions were taken. On 16 August, the day before the congress met, Schmerling revealed details of the Austrian plan to create a German federal state. A congress of princes – in whom sovereignty resided – would meet periodically; a parliament of 302 delegates drawn from local estates would decide the federal budget; a directorate of five (Austria, Prussia, Bavaria and two alternates from the other twenty-two states) would act as the federal executive; and a federal court (with an eye to common legislation on commerce and tariffs) would be set up.
When the congress met on 17 August it at once dispatched King Johann of Saxony to invite King William to attend. Only after a dramatic interview with Bismarck did the monarch reluctantly refuse. Ironically enough the King’s (i.e. Bismarck’s) reason for refusing was that decisions about reform must be made after consultation with his ministers, not by the king acting in his capacity as a German prince – this breathtaking subterfuge from a ruler at loggerheads with his Landtag. In September Bismarck made known the only conditions on which Prussia would accept the Frankfurt proposals; Prussia and Austria must have a right of veto before war was declared (unless a confederate territory was the victim of a direct attack); Prussia must have absolute parity with Austria in running the new state; and instead of a delegate assembly there must be a directly elected parliament.
So Prussia effectively sabotaged the last attempt to solve the German problem by agreement round the conference table. By the early autumn on the eve of the Schleswig-Holstein crisis the battle lines were clearly visible. Austria, shaken by defeat in Northern Italy, could not afford to abandon her primacy in Germany without serious repercussions on her position in the rest of her empire and on her standing as a European Great Power. Prussia, in the other corner of the ring, was determined to upset the status quo whenever circumstances permitted it. Ideally, as Bismarck revealed in brutally frank conversations in December 1862 with Count Alois Károlyi, the Austrian ambassador in Berlin, Austria should abandon her pretensions to be a German power, concentrate her efforts on her dominions and allow Prussia to establish Little Germany. If Austria did so, Prussia would be prepared to underwrite Venetia and support Austria in the Balkans. Given his grasp of power realities, it is hardly likely that Bismarck intended to come to Austria’s support in areas of no direct concern to Prussia. One thing was made crystal clear to Károlyi: if Austria persisted in her present policy, war could be the only outcome. The school bully, having unjustly accused the headmaster of tyrannous conduct, was offering him protection against the other boys on condition that he countenanced the bully boy’s behaviour. But while Bismarck believed that the force of economic development as well as the pressure of National Liberalism made the creation of Little Germany virtually inevitable, he recognized that this might well lie in the distant future. Therefore, he constantly dangled before the Austrians a minimum programme: the recognition of Prussian predominance in North Germany. This would leave the future of Germany unresolved and South Germany would act as a useful buffer zone between the two of them. On that basis the old dualism could continue and Bismarck would refrain from manipulating Little German opinion against Austria in the battle for the minds and hearts of the Germans.
THE DEEPENING CRISIS: OCTOBER 1864–JUNE 1866
The twenty months between October 1864, when Denmark surrendered the duchies of Schleswig, Holstein and Lauenburg to Austria and Prussia, and June 1866, when the Diet mobilized its forces against Prussia, was a period of mounting tension in Germany. Crisis followed crisis over the disposal of Schleswig-Holstein, each edging the German powers nearer the brink of a war which when it came in the summer of 1866 utterly transformed the German scene.
After the conclusion of hostilities against Denmark, Austrian policy reached a crossroads. The duchies were the joint possession of the two powers. Would Austria now press for the installation of the duke of Augustenburg as she had done – albeit reluctantly and without success – during the London Conference? In the Ballplatz some officials led by Schmerling and Biegeleben favoured a forward policy in Germany. The time had come in their estimation to support the Augustenburgs, seek a close association with the middle and small states and, if an understanding with Prussia eluded them, conclude an alliance with France as a certain way of containing Prussian ambitions. Such a policy spelt conflict with Prussia. Moreover, despite considerable apprehension about the general thrust of Prussian policy, Rechberg clung to dualism to the bitter end. The alliance he had tried in vain to obtain in 1860–1 had come to pass in 1864 and must be maintained at all costs. This was not just the instinctive reaction of a conservative fearful of the effects of revolution on the empire, but a matter of sober calculation. Peace was mandatory for Austria. Her financial situation in 1864 made war unthinkable. And why look for trouble in Germany when complications in Italy were likely in the not-too-distant future? The Italians, aided and abetted by the French, would surely seize the next favourable opportunity to acquire Venetia. When that happened Austria did not relish the prospect of a repeat performance of 1859; the Prussian alliance was absolutely essential if Austria was to maintain her watch on the Adriatic. At the end of the day the decisive voice in the corridors of power in Vienna was not that of Rechberg, Schmerling or Biegeleben but that of Francis Joseph. And he came down unequivocally on the side of dualism.
In Prussia by this time opinion was strongly in favour of the annexation of the duchies. Bismarck decided on this early in 1864, defending it to the king on the grounds that every Hohenzollern worth his salt had acquired territory for the kingdom. In May the minister-president began to whip up public opinion in Prussia, persuading a friendly landowner Count Adolf von Arnim-Boitzenburg to launch a petition in favour of annexation. Towards Austria, however, he remained conciliatory and seemed anxious to play down any differences between them. Writing to the Prussian ambassador in Vienna he commented that: ‘we regard the Danish war as essentially an episode in the struggle between monarchical principle and the revolution and our yardstick for handling the question of the duchies is based upon our view of how they impinge on the larger issue.’17 The larger issue, as he put it to Austria, was to consolidate and extend the understanding between the three conservative powers so that if France started a war, probably in Italy, the lines of battle would be clearly drawn along ideological lines. This tongue-in-cheek talk greatly encouraged Francis Joseph and Rechberg to feel that they could still arrive at some broader agreement with the Prussians. Of course, this did not exclude other diplomatic manoeuvres to hold Prussia in check; Rechberg did, in fact, make strenuous efforts to improve relations with Britain, Russia and France. But the Prussian alliance offered a lifeline in Germany which the policy-makers in Vienna felt they could not dispense with.
This atmosphere of entente led to the Schönbrunn convention in August 1864. During the state visit of King William to Vienna, Bismarck and Rechberg worked out a comprehensive package deal. Rechberg agreed to Prussian annexation of the duchies and was prepared to recognize Prussian predominance in Germany down to the line of the river Main provided that Prussia support Austria not only to hold on to Venetia but to re-conquer Lombardy. This type of agreement cutting across the claims of nationality would have gladdened the heart of Metternich, who in his day had cheerfully moved peoples across the European chess board to maintain a favourable balance of power for Austria. In 1864 it was all illusion. For one thing the king of Prussia, not yet committed to annexation, rejected the convention out of hand, as did the emperor. For another Bismarck, the Realpolitiker, would never have fought for Austria in Italy. Come to that, neither would Russia for the days of anti-revolutionary crusades were over – at least until after the First World War. It simply suited Bismarck’s book to pretend to put the clock back when all the tides of history were moving in the opposite direction.
Nor was Rechberg taken in for long about the motives behind Prussian policy. During the negotiations for the renewal of the customs treaties in the autumn of 1864 it was quickly brought home to Austria that, despite the fine promises at Schönbrunn, Prussia would make no economic concessions to Vienna. As mentioned earlier, Bismarck would have been more accommodating or at least have left the question of a future customs union with Austria shrouded in ambiguity. But the economic experts in the ministry of commerce persuaded the king that this was a make-or-break issue permitting of no dubiety. During Bismarck’s absence from Berlin in October 1864 they persuaded King William against a future customs union with Austria, i.e. not to renew the promise of 1853. Even before Austria was informed of this decision at the end of October, Rechberg had lost faith in Prussia. The last straw was Bismarck’s letter on 29 September. While careful to play down the significance of the commercial negotiations for their future cooperation, Bismarck declared that this depended solely on the convergence of their power–political interests. He went on to say that: ‘… we could be more certain of making progress in our common course if we both based our positions on the practical foundation of cabinet policies without allowing ourselves to be disturbed by the mist arising out of the doctrinaire and emotional policies of [some] German politicians’ – a clear reference to the anti-Prussian policies of Schmerling and Biegeleben.18 Presenting this letter to the emperor Rechberg commented bitterly: ‘The conduct of business is rendered difficult to an unusual degree if one has to deal with a man who so openly confesses his political cynicism … such language is worthy of a Cavour. Holding on to legal rights is a misty and emotional policy! The task of restraining this gentleman and making him give up his utilitarian policy of expansion at all costs … surpasses all human efforts.’19
The resignation of Rechberg at the end of October did not signify the abandonment of dualism. On the contrary: his successor, Count Alexander von Mensdorff-Pouilly, an aristocratic soldier and ex-governor of Galicia, was just as committed to that policy. The only difference was that, being inexperienced in the world of diplomacy, Mensdorff was much more vulnerable to the openly anti-Prussian policy of Biegeleben. Consequently under Mensdorff Austrian policy oscillated uneasily between the poles of cooperation with and opposition to Prussia.
At first Mensdorff attempted to strike a bargain with Prussia over Schleswig-Holstein. The Austrian put two alternative scenarios to Bismarck. The duchies could either become an independent state under the duke of Augustenburg or they could be annexed by Prussia, in which event Austria must receive compensation elsewhere – perhaps part of Silesia? Bismarck stonewalled throughout the winter of 1864–5, partly because he was nursing along the renewal of the Customs Union on Prussian terms but perhaps also because he sensed that confrontation with Austria was more likely after Rechberg’s resignation. He made it clear to Mensdorff that territorial compensation was not a possibility because no Hohenzollern ruler would agree to such a cession. Turning to the other alternative, he argued that it did not follow that the duke of Augustenburg was the legitimate heir; the claims of the grand duke of Oldenburg and even those of the king of Prussia must be seriously examined. In any event if Prussia was to forgo annexation, she must have special rights in the duchies. Only in February 1865 after constant pressure from Vienna did he reveal that these ‘rights’ would make Schleswig-Holstein a Prussian satellite: the army and navy of the duchies would become part of the Prussian forces; Prussia would establish a naval base at Kiel and garrison troops in the duchies; and Schleswig-Holstein would enter the Customs Union.
Incensed by the February conditions which made it perfectly plain that Prussia would neither allow the duchies to be independent nor pay any compensation to Austria, Francis Joseph changed course. First, Austria threw her weight behind the Augustenburg cause in the duchies where hitherto Prussia had been making the running drumming up support for annexation. Second, Austria persuaded Bavaria, Saxony and Hesse-Darmstadt to move in the Diet that Austria and Prussia hand over Holstein and Lauenburg to the duke of Augustenburg. They demanded a vote on this motion in seven days’ time. Austria supported the motion, arguing that the Diet was not exceeding its powers but merely asking the two major German powers to reach a decision. Prussia then demanded that the motion be referred to the Holstein-Lauenburg committee (so that a vote on the issue would not be taken in the near future) because the legitimacy of the Augustenburg claims could not be taken for granted but had to be investigated alongside claims from other princely houses. But the Diet decided by nine votes to six to proceed to a vote on 6 April. On that day the motion was carried, again by nine votes to six.20 The Austrian representative immediately declared that just after the ratification of the peace treaty with Denmark, Austria had been willing to cede her rights to the duke of Augustenburg and was still willing to negotiate with Prussia to this end. The Prussian representative, while expressing his country’s willingness to negotiate, insisted that the claims of all pretenders to the ducal throne must be considered.
As the tension between the two powers mounted in April and May, the king of Prussia called a council of ministers on 29 May. Although William was now converted to annexation largely because of the sacrifices Prussian soldiers had made during the war, he was worried about the hostile attitude of Austria and the middle states and bared his conscience to his ministers. Should Prussia annex the duchies or be content with a satellite Schleswig-Holstein? Furthermore, should Prussia shrink from war if either solution led to complications? Bismarck replied that as the population of Schleswig-Holstein wanted annexation – having been subjected to a barrage of Prussian propaganda, he might have added – the only relevant question was how best to attain this objective. He sketched in three scenarios: an ‘independent’ Schleswig-Holstein subject to minimum conditions and loaded with a heavy war debt which would create such discontent that the inhabitants would prefer outright annexation; the duke of Augustenburg might be bought off and then Austria might agree to outright annexation; or, thirdly, Prussia might stick to the February conditions which amounted to the annexation of the duchies. If that led to war, ‘… the present moment offers more favourable chances for a warlike confrontation with Austria which, given the traditional policy of the Vienna cabinet, can scarcely be avoided sooner or later’.21 Most of those present agreed with Bismarck that annexation was the preferred solution. Nevertheless, they wished to avoid war with Austria fearing that France and Italy would intervene on the Austrian side – a fear Bismarck discounted. The crown prince, though confident enough that once Schleswig-Holstein was under Prussian control Prussia would be able to assume the leadership in Germany, wanted to preserve the peace and denounced all talk of conflict with Austria as ‘civil war’. To which Bismarck retorted that if annexation resulted in war the prize would not just be Schleswig-Holstein but ‘the creation of a constitutional relationship between the middle and small states and Prussia such as His Royal Highness the Crown Prince has described as desirable’.22 All the same, Bismarck advised the king to commence with the least provocative solution; if he wanted outright annexation then the monarch alone must make that decision. On that somewhat uncertain note the king closed the meeting. Shortly aferwards he decided to uphold the February conditions although Bismarck favoured some modifications, being prepared to drop the requirement that the Schleswig-Holstein army and navy be integrated with the Prussian forces.
The note of caution noticeable in Bismarck persisted as the war clouds gathered in June and July 1865. For example, while Bismarck was quite determined to put an end to Austrian-inspired agitation in the duchies in support of Duke Friedrich and on 11 July threatened to act independently in Schleswig-Holstein in the event of Austrian non-cooperation, nevertheless he let Mensdorff know that he was ready to negotiate about this matter.
There has been a good deal of speculation about Bismarck’s motives in negotiating the Gastein Convention with Austria in August. The suggestion that he was really an old-style conservative who yearned for a lasting settlement with Austria as a bulwark against the revolution can be dismissed out of hand. Everything he said at this time indicated a firm determination to force Austria out of Germany sooner or later. But this was not the moment for war. In the first place, despite his confident assertion in the crown council that Prussia could rely on French and Italian neutrality, he may well have had last-minute doubts. Secondly, the fact that the king was taking the waters at Bad Gastein on Austrian soil did rule out war at least for the next few weeks. Thirdly, it has been suggested with some justification that financial considerations militated against war.23 As the government was locked in conflict with the Landtag – which the king prorogued in June – war preparations had to be financed by other means. But complex plans to sell the state-owned Cologne to Minden railway, or to persuade a consortium of bankers to loan money to the Prussian merchant navy to enable it in turn to buy from the government the right to Danish war indemnities, came to nothing. An angry Bismarck blamed failure on the tender consciences of the finance and commerce ministers who had scruples about the constitutional propriety of such manoeuvres. But it did mean that Prussia would have had difficulty in financing a war in the summer of 1865.
Nor had the Austrians any desire for war. As usual their finances were in a parlous state; by now the national debt was five times Austria’s annual income. Secondly, Francis Joseph’s attempts to solve the constitutional problems of his dominions were entering a crucial stage. For some time it had been apparent that the February Patent had failed. Both the Germans and the Magyars were becoming restive. The former were threatening in the Reichsrat to curtail military expenditure to force the emperor to restore their traditional power monopoly in the Austrian lands. The Magyars, observing that the conservatives led by Count Moritz Esterhazy, a close friend of the emperor and a former chargé d’affaires at the papal court, were gaining the upper hand in the corridors of power in Vienna at the expense of the liberal ministers led by Schmerling, made overtures to Francis Joseph. In a series of articles in April and May 1865 Francis Deak offered to share power with the Habsburgs on condition that the Hungarian constitution of 1848 was restored. Francis Joseph grasped eagerly at this opportunity of coming to terms with the Magyars and paid a state visit to Budapest. On 30 July Schmerling resigned and a new ministry was formed under Count Richard Belcredi, a conservative prepared to rule without the Reichsrat (which remained dissolved) and do a deal with the Magyars. At such a delicate moment in the history of the monarchy, war was highly undesirable. And, as always, the international perspective could not be ignored. While Francis Joseph and his ministers had no illusions about Prussia’s aggressive intentions, war without allies would be an act of imbecility and one which would play into the hands of France, a power with a vested interest in the disruption of the status quo. So the emperor dispatched Count Gustav von Blome, the Austrian ambassador in Munich, to Bad Gastein to confer with Bismarck who had arrived there to attend on his monarch.
Bismarck made not the slightest attempt to meet Blome half-way. By making ostentatious inquiries in Paris and Florence about the French and Italian attitudes should war come, he deliberately increased the pressure on Austria to give way. ‘I am very friendly to him [Blome],’ he wrote on 30 July. ‘I reject nothing completely for at all costs we must win time.’ In other words, only when the king left Bad Gastein and when Prussia had the funds for war would Bismarck be ready to fight Austria.24 But out of his meetings with Blome emerged a compromise. While Austria dare not relinquish joint sovereignty over the duchies for fear of public reaction in Vienna, she was prepared to work out an interim agreement. She offered to allow Prussia to administer Schleswig while Austria administered Holstein. Furthermore, she was willing to sell Lauenburg to Prussia for two and a half million Danish talers. It was agreed that Schleswig-Holstein enter the Customs Union; Kiel would become a federal port and base for a future German navy (but under Prussian administration); and Rendsburg would become a federal fortress. Prussia would be allowed the use of two military roads through Holstein and postal and telegraphic communications, and agreed to build a railway from Lübeck to Kiel. Finally, Prussia would be allowed to build a canal through Holstein linking the North Sea with the Baltic. Bismarck was well satisfied with the ‘papering over of the cracks in the edifice’. However provisional Austria intended the Gastein Convention to be, in practice Prussia could not now be dislodged from Schleswig. And as Austria could not bring herself to abandon Holstein, Bismarck had a convenient means of exerting pressure on her when he was ready for action. On 5 August the Austrian council of ministers accepted the package deal. Most, including Belcredi, believed this was no more than a breathing-space before the inevitable conflict. As the Viennese Allgemeine Zeitung mordantly observed: ‘Peace and friendship – until further notice’.25 Austria paid a heavy price in the eyes of the middle states, who denounced conservative Austria rather than predatory Prussia for this ‘shameful horsetrading’. On the other hand, Austria gained valuable time in which Belcredi suspended the February Patent and restored the Hungarian constitution of 1848, shifting the balance of power to Budapest where the court took up residence.
The fragility of the convention – ratified on 20 August by king and emperor – was quickly apparent. In the autumn Bismarck began to angle for French neutrality in the event of war by informing the French ambassador that he would not object to French expansion ‘wherever French was spoken in the world’.26 In October he hurried off to Biarritz to talk face to face with Napoleon. His objective was two-fold: first, he had to reassure the emperor that the Gastein Convention, like the Schönbrunn agreement, had no permanent significance. For Napoleon’s constant fear was that any agreement between the two major German powers would contain a Prussian guarantee of Venetia which would put paid to the emperor’s hopes of securing the province for the new kingdom of Italy. Once reassured on this point, Napoleon was ready to discount the idea of an alliance with Austria, a policy which was, as Bismarck knew, favoured by Edouard Drouyn de Lhuys, the French foreign minister. Secondly, Bismarck sought assurances of French neutrality when war came. At this stage he was not seeking binding commitments. Talk of compensation in return for French neutrality was, therefore, limited to generalities and hints that if Prussia became master of North Germany France might seek compensation in Belgium and Luxemburg. But that was sufficient to enable Bismarck to reassure William that Napoleon had forgiven Gastein and would ‘dance the cotillon with us without knowing in advance when it will begin or what figures it will include’.27
Relations with Austria began to deteriorate early in October, in the first instance over Frankfurt. On 1 October that city was the venue for a meeting of delegates from several Landtage which had roundly condemned the Gastein Convention. A meeting of the National Society later in the month would very likely be equally critical. Bismarck succeeded in persuading Austria to join with Prussia in protesting to the Frankfurt senate about their tolertion of ‘revolutionary’ demonstrations The senate rejected interference in its internal affairs. But when Bismarck proposed that Austria and Prussia demand action by the Diet and threaten independent action against the city in the event of refusal, Austria demurred. All Mensdorff would agree to was a joint motion in the Diet asking for stricter enforcement of federal rules governing the meeting of ‘revolutionary’ assemblies. Austria’s refusal convinced Bismarck that the usefulness of the alliance was virtually at an end.
Throughout the autumn Prussia had been hard at work suppressing the Augustenburg movement in Schleswig and consolidating her hold over the duchy. In November Bismarck launched a vitriolic campaign against the Augustenburg agitation in Holstein. The new governor of Schleswig, General Edwin von Manteuffel – whom Bismarck and Roon had successfully moved from Berlin on account of his inflexible conservatism – had begun to interfere in Holstein’s administration. Much to Bismarck’s annoyance, this boosted the Augustenburg movement. On 23 January 1866 a mass demonstration in Altona expressed enthusiastic support for Duke Friedrich and demanded the calling together of the Schleswig-Holstein estates. The Austrian governor, Baron Anton von Gablenz, quickly regretted his decision to allow the meeting to take place, while Francis Joseph was greatly upset by its radicalism. Bismarck pressed home his advantage, demanding joint action to repress ‘revolutionary’ movements in the duchies. If Austria refused, Prussia would be forced to consider the 1864 alliance at an end. Prussia would then be completely free to pursue a policy more in accordance with her interests.
Austria was now at the parting of the ways. If she could not and would not abandon Holstein – which she thought would be tantamount to surrendering her claims to primacy in Germany – she had to stand firm against Prussian encroachments. On 7 February in her reply to the Prussian note, Austria, though apologetic enough about the Altona incident, defended her right to act as she pleased in Holstein. On 21 February the council of ministers endorsed a tougher policy. No one wanted war or thought there was any cause for war. But in view of Prussia’s provocative policy the ministers agreed with the emperor that precautionary military measures were in order. Orders to this effect were at once sent to the war ministry. Meanwhile, Austria would continue her diplomatic efforts to avoid war but would, if need be, ‘show her teeth’.28
Seven days later the Prussian crown council moved on to a collision course. Though the king and some ministers paid lip service to the desirability of a peaceful outcome, all were well aware that, as Austria would not change her policy, war was the almost certain outcome. By now the king was converted to Bismarck’s line: Schleswig-Holstein was not the real issue – Prussia, he said, could negotiate with Austria on that; what was at stake was the right of Prussia to a ‘decisive political preponderance in North Germany’. Bismarck spelt it out with characteristic bluntness: ‘the whole historical development in Germany and the hostile attitude of Austria is driving us to war. It would be a mistake to try and avoid it’. Indeed, ‘it would be cleverer to bring about [a war] when the situation is favourable to us than to wait until Austria starts it in conditions advantageous to herself’. The council agreed to approach France and Italy as a matter of urgency. Moltke believed that active Italian participation in the war was of crucial importance; Austria could put 240,000 men in the field in Bohemia which Prussia could match without relying on the Landwehr, but only if Austria was obliged to station 52,000 men in South Germany to protect her southern flank against the Italians. The hope that war could deflect attention from the constitutional crisis occurred to some ministers; Count Fritz zu Eulenburg, the interior minister, thought a war fought for the honour of Prussia would result in a more amenable Landtag being elected. Significantly Bismarck rejected this as a primary reason for war: ‘domestic considerations do not make war a necessity though they are indeed additional reasons to make it look opportune’. So the council resolved on 28 February to persevere with the present policy on Schleswig-Holstein and the larger German question ‘without regard for the danger of a break and a war with Austria’.29 The crown prince’s strictures on conflict with Austria as ‘civil war’ were listened to in stony silence.
As the crisis deepened in the spring of 1866, inevitably Francis Joseph’s military advisers began to get the upper hand in Vienna. Acutely aware that Prussia could mobilize her forces in four weeks compared with Austria’s seven to eight weeks, they urged that further precautionary measures be taken without delay. Rumours of Prussian plans to occupy Saxony when war broke out and reports of practice mobilization in Berlin strengthened their entreaties. On 14 March on Francis Joseph’s orders twenty infantry battalions and several cavalry regiments were dispatched to reinforce the Austrian army in Bohemia. Predictably King William signed orders on 27 and 29 March placing the five divisions guarding the Austrian and Saxon frontiers on a war footing and arming the frontier fortresses in Silesia. Mensdorff struggled on manfully to avoid disaster. On 31 March in an attempt to win international support he assured the Great Powers that Austrian intentions were peaceful and that troop movements in Bohemia were solely for the purpose of putting down anti-semitic outbursts, and challenged Prussia to explain her warlike measures.
Secondly, knowing – as did all Europe – that Bismarck exerted enormous influence over King William, ‘winding him up every morning’, Mensdorff tried to outflank the minister–president by appealing personally to court circles in Berlin who viewed the prospect of war with conservative Austria with sheer horror. The influential group included: Queen Augusta, the king’s wife; the crown prince and his wife ‘Vicky’; Dowager Queen Elisabeth; Grand Duchess Alexandrine of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, the king’s sister; and the duke of Coburg, the king’s son-in-law. The so-called ‘Coburg intrigue’ worked up to a point. King William was ready enough to fight Austria but had not yet overcome residual moral scruples.30 Consequently he ordered Bismarck to moderate his belligerent language. But even so the Prussian note of 6 April was still sufficiently sharp in tone to provoke an acrimonious reply on 8 April drafted by Biegeleben which rejected the accusation of warlike intentions and demanded of Prussia that she stand down her forces.
The circle of mutual mistrust was now complete and the descent to war gathered pace. On 8 April Prussia concluded an alliance with Italy. Bismarck had persuaded the crown council on 28 February to send a mission headed by General Count Helmuth von Moltke to Florence. In fact the Italians took the initiative. Conscious of their military inferiority vis-à-vis Austria, they hoped that negotiations with Prussia would frighten the Austrians into surrendering Venetia. This dodge – instigated by Napoleon – did not work. But out of the conversations in Berlin emerged an alliance. In the event of Prussia declaring war on Austria within the next three months, Italy would declare war on her as well. The prize was Venetia. While this treaty left the initiative with Bismarck it should be noted that it set a July limit by which time he had to begin the war. The Prusso-Italian alliance was a flagrant violation of article eleven of the federal constitution which forbade members to enter into binding commitments directed against other member states, a moral lapse which weighed heavily on the king’s conscience.
In his dealings with France Bismarck was much less successful. Quite correctly he calculated that Napoleon hoped to be tertius gaudens when war came and would try to keep his hands as free as possible. Nevertheless, at the crown council Bismarck emphasized the need for specific assurances of neutrality from France. At his request King William wrote to Napoleon early in March proposing an entente plus intime between the two countries. Napoleon replied evasively that while he would remain neutral, he would seek agreement with Prussia only if the European balance of power was disturbed, which put the ball back in the Prussian court. Hints of compensation dropped by Bismarck did not alter the French stance. In June Austria, frightened by the possibility of a Franco-Prussian alliance, came to terms with Napoleon. It was agreed that if Austria won the war she would surrender Venetia to France – this, incidentally, made a complete nonsense of the Prusso-Italian treaty for whoever won in Germany Venetia was certain to become Italian. Napoleon agreed to Habsburg expansion in Germany but carefully qualified this by stipulating that this must not upset the balance of power. Verbally Austria promised to strengthen the middle states – Bavaria, Saxony and Wurttemberg – at the expense of the smaller brethren and indicated her willingness to accept an independent Rhineland state. It has been quite rightly pointed out that, because Bismarck could not obtain the specific assurances from Napoleon, the war was a high-risk operation and not the inevitable victory which the German chancellor later pretended it had been. The betting odds were heavily in favour of an Austrian victory. Unless Prussia could win quickly, a long drawn-out war with Great Power intervention was a likely outcome. That would lead in all probability to a compromise settlement and the dismissal of Bismarck from office.
Another danger threatened Bismarck’s war plans. Throughout April Mensdorff was working for peace. On 15 April Prussia replied to the Austrian note of 8 April. Predictably Prussia rejected the Austrian demand for unilateral disarmament. But – thanks to the tender conscience of the king – Prussia offered to stand her forces down provided Austria did so first, as she had been the first to take military measures. The council of ministers in Vienna, still favouring a peaceful solution if at all possible, authorized Mensdorff on 18 April to withdraw Austrian forces from the Bohemian frontier when Prussia acted in like manner, either on the same or even on the next day. At King William’s insistence and much to Bismarck’s chagrin, Prussia accepted the Austrian proposal on 21 April. Prussia was to stand down her forces when she received confirmation that Francis Joseph had issued similar orders.
Whatever slim possibility there had been of a de-escalation of the crisis at the twelfth hour vanished on the same day, much to Bismarck’s relief. For on 20 April news arrived in Vienna of threatening Italian troop movements. On 21 April, on the insistence of his generals, Francis Joseph ordered the mobilization of the southern army. In retaliation King Victor Emmanuel ordered general mobilization on 26 April. The knowledge that Italy had an agreement with Prussia obliged Francis Joseph on 27 April to order mobilization against Prussia. On 1 May the emperor ordered a further strengthening of his armies in the north. When this news reached Berlin the king, though still resisting the advice of Roon and Moltke that he at once order general mobilization, did authorize them to put five army corps on a war footing on 4 May. On 7 May mobilization orders were issued for the rest of Prussia’s forces.
Meanwhile the struggle to capture the support of public opinion – or at least the articulate sections of it – for the coming conflagration was well under way. Bismarck’s determination to turn the dispute about the duchies into the broader issue of reform of the Confederation and the establishment of a Little German state was plain enough at the crown council in February. In fact, throughout the winter of 1865–6 he had been toying with the idea of harnessing national liberal opinion to the chariot wheels of Prussian expansionism. And in view of his failure to obtain definite assurances from France it became all the more necessary to play the national card to hold Napoleon in check should the war be long drawn-out and the emperor intervene in the struggle. The claim that Prussia was unifying Germany would, so Bismarck calculated, make it more difficult for Napoleon, the supporter of nationalism in Italy, to oppose Prussia. Prussia fired the first shot in a circular note to all German governments on 24 March. She protested that the military measures she had taken in Silesia were a necessary response to provocative Austrian moves. And as the Confederation in its present form clearly could not afford security to the members, Prussia had to rely on the goodwill of individual states. The purpose of the note was to ascertain the members’ attitude vis-à-vis the dispute with Austria. To prove her bona fides, Prussia went on to raise the question of reform but without entering into specific detail. The response was not encouraging. The states simply drew Prussia’s attention to article eleven of the constitution which obliged disputants to submit their case to mediation and arbitration by the Diet. On 9 April Karl von Savigny, the Prussian representative at Frankfurt, rejected this procedure as far too dilatory. Neither the Frankfurt Parliament nor the Congress of Princes had succeeded in overcoming the disunity of Germany. The only way forward – and this was the sensational feature of the speech – was to call an assembly chosen by direct election on the basis of universal manhood suffrage to discuss reform of the Confederation on the basis of proposals which would be drawn up in advance by member governments.
The response was no better. Conservatives everywhere were horrified by Bismarck’s readiness to resort to the revolutionary weapon of universal suffrage. Predictably the tsar and his chief minister, Prince Alexander Gortschakov, denounced the proposal as a grave violation of monarchical principle, while King William was thoroughly shocked by Bismarck’s bold tactics – but nevertheless clung to the man who had kept the Landtag at bay for three years. All shades of liberal opinion dismissed the proposal as a meaningless threat, the last gasp of a desperate and isolated gambler still locked in bitter conflict with the Prussian Landtag. Liberals simply did not believe that universal suffrage – for which they had no liking – would produce majorities supportive of reactionaries such as Bismarck. And in any case his recent attempts to remove the immunity of Landtag deputies and so enable the government to prosecute their leaders for allegedly seditious remarks had thoroughly enraged liberal opinion and extinguished any hopes – which Bismarck still cherished – of diverting attention away from illiberality at home by holding out the prospect of a ‘national’ war against Austria.
The response to the Prussian note of 24 March made it abundantly clear that the middle and small states would not support Prussia in the coming conflict. However, while universal suffrage aroused grave misgivings among the middle states and in Vienna, to reject the Prussian proposals of 9 April when public opinion was beginning to count in German politics would have been a blunder. Accordingly they were referred to committee on 21 April in what was clearly a delaying manoeuvre. Baron Aloys von Kübeck remarked that while Austria repudiated the insinuation that her armaments presented a threat to Prussia, she was willing to discuss reform of the Confederation – provided Prussia put some concrete proposals before the Diet, which she had not done so far.31 A few days later war loomed much nearer with Austrian and Prussian mobilization. Saxony, whose frontiers would certainly be violated in the event of war, began to take military measures at the end of April. This led to Prussian threats against Saxony. Anxious to avoid a conflict if at all possible, Bavaria and Württemberg, supported by Hesse, Saxe-Weimar, Saxe-Coburg-Gotha and Nassau, moved a motion to this effect which the Diet adopted on 24 May:all states which had armed above peace-time levels were asked to inform the next session of the Diet whether and under what conditions they were prepared to stand down their forces simultaneously and on a day to be determined by the Diet.
On 1 June Austria replied to the resolution in a manner which made it clear that the days of shadow-boxing with Prussia were over. Kübeck declared that Austria’s military measures were thoroughly justified by Prussia’s determination to resolve the Schleswig-Holstein issue by force and by her deplorable decision to seek the assistance of the enemy of Austria (Italy). Austria could demobilise her forces only when ‘law and treaty rights, not the politics of violence, reign in Germany’ and when Prussia complied with the lawful decisions of the Diet. Her attempts to resolve the Schleswig-Holstein question by negotiation with Prussia had been frustrated so that she now passed the issue over to the Diet whose decisions Austria would respect. Meanwhile, the Austrian governor of Holstein had been ordered to summon the Holstein estates to express their views on the future of the duchies.
As Austria was now in breach of the Gastein Convention, Bismarck easily persuaded King William to take action ostensibly to restore joint rule over Holstein. On 8 June Manteuffel sent his forces into the duchy. The Holstein estates were prevented from meeting by posting guards with fixed bayonets at the door of the assembly hall. However, the anticipated clash did not occur. On the contrary, much to the surprise of Berlin and Vienna Gablenz withdrew his forces into Hamburg and from there to Bohemia. The chivalrous behaviour of both commanders was such that the Austrian brigade left its headquarters in Kiel to the strains of the Austrian national anthem played by the band of the Prussian marines.
On 9 June Savigny replied to Austria. She had acted illegally, he declared, in asking the Diet to resolve the question of the duchies. The exclusive rights of Austria and Prussia in this matter had been stated clearly enough in the Austro-Prussian alliance in January 1864, in the Peace of Vienna and in the Gastein Convention. In a last desperate attempt to rally liberal opinion, he concluded his speech by assuring the Diet that Prussia would welcome a settlement of the Schleswig-Holstein question in a nationally elected body which would be a counterweight to ‘particularist interests’ and which would guarantee that the ‘whole fatherland’ and not ‘dynastic avariciousness’ would benefit from Prussian sacrifices in the war against Denmark.
Kübeck rejected the charge of breach of treaty, pointing out that Austria had repeatedly assured the Diet that she was seeking a resolution of the Schleswig-Holstein question which took full account of the rights and interests of the Confederation. In sending troops into Holstein Prussia had breached the Gastein Convention which – Kübeck was careful to point out – was a purely provisional arrangement which Austria had been upholding only until such time as the Diet resolved the contentious issue. Furthermore, by assuming powers of government in Holstein Manteuffel had violated the terms of the Peace of Vienna. Because of these misdemeanours, and also to protect the threatened rights of member states, Austria moved the mobilization of all non-Prussian federal forces on 11 June. The motion was carried on 14 June by eight votes to five. Voting with Austria were Bavaria, Saxony, Hanover, Württemberg, Electoral Hesse, Hesse-Darmstadt and curia 16 (Liechtenstein etc.).32 Prussia, whose representative did not vote, was supported by the Saxon princedoms, Luxemburg/Limburg, the Mecklenburgs, curia 15 (Oldenburg) and curia 17 (Hamburg, Bremen and Lübeck). Baden abstained, Holstein/Lauenburg had no vote and the votes of Brunswick and Nassau in curia 13 being cast on opposite sides cancelled each other out.
The last scene in the drama took place immediately after the vote was taken. Savigny stood up and declared that the resolution clearly conflicted with the federal constitution; admittedly this guaranteed the territory of each member, but that could not possibly apply to Prussia’s position in Holstein which was regulated by the Peace of Vienna – an agreement to which the Diet was not a party. Furthermore, despite the steady build-up of Austrian armaments against Prussia, all the Diet had done in response to the Prussian appeal for assistance was to allow several members to arm themselves without good cause. Prussia regarded these military measures as a threat depriving her of that security which article two of the constitution guaranteed to all members. This feeling of insecurity was deepened still further by the Diet’s action in carrying the Austrian motion despite Prussian protests. Prussia held this resolution to be in breach of the constitution and consequently Savigny declared the Confederation dissolved in Prussian eyes. However, that did not mean that the national foundations of the Confederation were null and void. On the contrary, Prussia regarded it as the bounden duty of all states to give appropriate expression to the unity of the German nation. Prussia for her part was ready to form a new confederation based on detailed proposals which Savigny now laid before them. The new state would exclude Austria from Germany but made provision for a weiterer Bund to be negotiated later. As Savigny walked ostentatiously out of the hall, the Württemberg delegate was speaking in support of the Austrian president’s protest that the Confederation was an indissoluble union from which Prussia had no right to contract out. After several members spoke in like manner the president adjourned the proceedings with the comment that responsibility for the serious situation which now arose lay solely at Prussia’s door. The members loyal to the Confederation would know how to do their duty to each other and to the German nation by standing on the firm ground of federal law.
On 15 June Prussia sent ultimatums to the neighbouring states of Saxony, Hanover and Electoral Hesse demanding that they stand down their forces and join the new state Prussia intended to construct on the ruins of the old Confederation. If they agreed within twelve hours, their sovereign rights would be respected; otherwise Prussia would declare war on them. When they failed to reply Prussia carried out her threat. At midnight on 15 June Prussian troops invaded these three states. On 18 June at the request of Electoral Hesse the Diet asked all members to give military assistance to states under attack from Prussia. Prussia did not formally declare war on Austria. But when Austria declared her willingness to assist any state invaded by Prussia this was interpreted in Berlin as equivalent to a declaration of war. That this was what Austria intended was clear from the war manifesto issued by Francis Joseph on 17 June. In this roundabout way the Austro-Prussian War began. The Italians declared war on Austria on 20 June and hostilities commenced three days later.
Looking back over the century since the dramatic defeat of Austria in 1866, it is easy to fall into the trap of supposing that the three wars of 1864, 1866 and 1870–1 were inevitable steps on the road to the creation of a German Reich excluding Austria from Germany. The implication of this interpretation is that Little Germany was the only ‘national’ solution on offer and, therefore, historically ‘inevitable’. This is said with hindsight, the great enemy of the historian. Contemporaries did not share this view. The most important German states were ranged against Prussia. Many spoke of the clash of arms as a dishonourable ‘civil war’, not as a struggle for national unification. Bismarck remained a thoroughly unpopular figure; the failure of an attempt on his life in May did not evoke a wave of sympathy but expressions of regret in several quarters that the assassin had missed his target. And, finally, he had failed in his bid to mobilize middle-class support because his conflict with the Prussian Landtag alienated liberal opinion from a man whose Great Prussian objectives did, in fact, coincide with the Little Germany so many North German liberals were working for. Small wonder that when Bismarck, walking in the garden of the foreign office at midnight on 15 June, informed his companion Lord Augustus Loftus, the British ambassador, that the Prussian attack had begun he added: ‘If we are beaten, I shall not return here. I shall fall in the last charge. One can but die once: and if we are beaten it is better to die.’33 It has rightly been said of Bismarck that ‘when a situation reached crisis point [he had] a tendency for va banque play bordering on the self-destructive’.34
Further proof that the war was a high-risk operation in which he was perfectly prepared to use unorthodox methods can be seen in Bismarck’s efforts to stir up national resentment against the Habsburgs. In the spring of 1866 reports from Count Karl Georg von Usedom, Prussian ambassador in Florence, that Hungarian émigrés in Italy with the support of King Victor Emmanuel would stage a diversion in the event of war were sufficient for Bismarck to instruct Usedom to keep in touch with these circles. Early in June Hungarian general Stefan Türr, adjutant to King Victor, and General Georg Klapka, a veteran of the 1848 uprising, were summoned to Berlin for conversations about the formation of a Magyar legion. Recruitment for this began in Prussia under Klapka’s direction. Similarly, when Bismarck was informed of plans to found a Serbian legion to invade Austria he telegraphed approval and sent a Prussian envoy to Belgrade. Nothing came of these plans simply because of the decisive defeat of Austria at Königgrätz. The argument that Bismarck intended to threaten Austria only with this bogey-man and never intended to release the nationalist genie from the bottle does not convince. Had the war dragged on, the legions would have marched, and national passions would have been aroused in the Habsburg dominions and would soon have spread to Prussian Poland.
If the origins of the war of 1866 are separated out from the consequences, one must conclude that it was a power struggle for mastery in Germany, an eighteenth-century war fought with nineteenth-century weapons. Austria was seeking to maintain a particular balance of power which would enable her to continue to play a European role despite her woefully inadequate resources, while Prussia, her territorial ambitions underpinned by industrial power and the Customs Union, was equally determined to destroy the status quo and acquire control of at least North and Central Germany. Both powers had endeavoured to exploit the new forces of liberalism and nationalism with varying degrees of success. On the eve of the war public opinion favoured Austria rather than Prussia. Certainly there was an outburst of national feeling in North Germany after the defeat of Austria. But there was little sign of this in June 1866; to contemporaries it seemed much more a clash between rival particularisms than a struggle to unite Germany. Whether post-Königgrätz nationalism extended to the broad mass of the population in the countryside remains an open question. Bismarck’s own comments – admittedly written twenty-five years later – are instructive.
In practice a German needs a dynasty to which he is devoted or a stimulus which arouses him to anger and drives him to action. The last-mentioned phenomenon is not a permanent institution in the nature of things. He is much more ready to demonstrate his patriotism as a Prussian, a Hanoverian, a Württemberger, a Bavarian or a Hessian than as a German. And in the lower classes and in parliamentary parties it will be a long time before it is any different … the Germans’ love of fatherland requires a prince on whom they can focus their devotion. If one assumes circumstances in which all the German dynasties were suddenly removed it is unlikely that German national feeling would hold all Germans together according to international law …. The Germans would fall victim to tighter-knit nations once the bonding agent which lies in the princely houses was lost.35
THE WAR, THE PEACE OF PRAGUE AND ITS SIGNIFICANCE
Hostilities in the Austro-Prussian War commenced on 16 June with the invasion of Saxony, Hanover and Electoral Hesse. Apart from the initial setback Prussian forces suffered at the hands of the Hanoverians at the battle of Langensalza, Prussia successfully overran the three states within a few days. She encountered little serious resistance from the other states which had sided with Austria. In general they were slow off the mark in mobilizing their forces. By mid June only the troops of Hesse-Darmstadt and Nassau – a total of 12,000 men organized in three infantry brigades and one cavalry brigade – were ready to march. The Bavarians, who could have put 50,000 infantrymen and 7000 cavalry in the field, dragged their feet partly because of the indifference of the people who were neither pro-Austrian nor pro-Prussian. Secondly, little attempt was made to coordinate the strategies of these states with that of Austria. Bavaria, for example, refused point-blank to strengthen Austrian defences in Bohemia. On 4 and 10 July the Prussians repelled Bavarian attempts to advance into Thuringia; on 19 July the Prussians occupied Frankfurt; and on 27 July they finally broke the resistance of the federal army corps near Würzburg.
The battle of Königgrätz, or Sadowa as the French preferred to call it, was the turning-point of the war. The Austrians had been forced on to the defensive by the rapid defeat of Saxony. It was no longer possible to invade Prussian territory now that the mountain passes were under Prussian control. General Ludwig von Benedek, the Austrian commander, concentrated the army of the north around the fortress of Königgrätz. The aim of the Prussian strategy, based on the teachings of Karl von Clausewitz, was to strike an annihilating blow at the enemy. The tactics were those of Moltke, chief of the general staff. Three armies – the second commanded by the crown prince on the left flank, the first army commanded by Prince Friedrich Karl in the centre and the army of the Elbe commanded by General Herwath von Bittenfeld on the right flank – advanced separately into Bohemia. They met only on the field of battle – a tactic tried out for the first time in 1866 and sharply criticized in the war council before its adoption.
The outcome of the passage of arms on 3 July was decisive for the course of the war. Benedek, with 245,000 men and 600 guns under his command supplemented by 25,000 Saxons and sixty guns, was defeated by 280,000 Prussians with 900 guns. The Prussian victory was due to several factors. First, the role of the general staff. At that time general staffs were little more than collections of clerks and adjutants assisting the commander-in-chief. Moltke, chief of the Prussian general staff since 1857, turned it into a most efficient planning body which coordinated all aspects of mobilization and ensured that the railway and road systems were used effectively to move Prussian forces with great rapidity to key strategic points where it would be costly for the enemy to attack. Secondly, the Prussian infantry was fully equipped with the breech-loading needle gun which guaranteed more effective fire-power over the Austrians who were still using muzzle-loading rifles; a Prussian infantryman at Königgrätz could loose off six shots to every Austrian one. Thirdly, Austrian planning, like that of other armies, was much less methodical than that of the Prussians. And fourthly, Benedek, appointed commander of the army of the north only in May and against his will, failed to exploit the advantages of his defensive position. The second Prussian army was advancing so slowly that had Benedek attacked the exposed lines of communication of the first army on his right flank, the outcome might have been very different, But, as always on the battlefield, the victory goes to the side making the fewest mistakes. Moltke’s meticulously worked-out plan was not completely successful. The Austrians were not annihilated. Thanks to superior artillery – reorganized after the 1859 campaign – and to the cavalry, the Austrians held up the Prussian advance so that only 22,000 Austrians were taken prisoner. Though by 18 July the Prussian armies were only nineteen kilometres from Vienna, the bulk of Benedek’s army had crossed the Danube where it hoped to join up with the victorious army of the south which under Archduke Albrecht had defeated the Italians at Custozza on 24 June. But lengthening lines of communication and an outbreak of cholera – which affected the Austrians too – slowed down the Prussians. More decisive, however, was Napoleon Ill’s intervention. Although King William’s belligerent instincts were now fully aroused and he, like his generals, wished to march in triumph through Vienna, Bismarck was able to persuade him after arduous interviews to agree to an armistice which came into force on 22 July. On 26 July preliminary peace terms were signed at Nikolsburg. And the definitive peace settlement, the Peace of Prague, was signed on 23 August.
This peace treaty encapsulated the essence of the ‘German Revolution’. This was how friends and enemies of Prussia regarded the outcome of the Seven Weeks’ War. ‘The present war,’ wrote the moderate liberal Johann Bluntschli, ‘is the German Revolution taking the form of war directed from above instead of from below in accordance with the nature of the [Prussian] monarchy.’36 The most important consequence of the war was, of course, the exclusion of Austria from Germany; she acquiesced in the dissolution of the old Confederation and recognized the creation of a new association of states north of the river Main – the North German Confederation as it became in 1867. South of the river a new association of states would be formed which would have ‘independent existence’ internationally but would have ‘national connections’ with the North German Confederation to be arranged later by both parties. For the rest Austria surrendered Venetia to the kingdom of Italy and agreed to pay a war indemnity of forty million Prussian talers. It was also stated in the peace treaty that a plebiscite would be held in North Schleswig to allow the Danish-speaking population to decide their own future – article five was, in fact, repudiated by Prussia in 1879.
Prussia seized the opportunity to round off her territories in North and Central Germany at the expense of the defeated states – further proof that the aggrandisement of Prussia, not the unification of Germany, had been the primary objective of the war. As well as Schleswig-Holstein, Hanover, Electoral Hesse, Hesse-Homburg, Nassau and the city of Frankfurt were annexed by Prussia. This increased her population from 17.2 to 24.6 million and at last linked up her western and eastern territories. The violation of the principle of legitimacy – a king, an electoral prince and two dukes were deposed – shocked many conservatives. The conservative philosopher Ludwig von Gerlach expressed his horror in forceful language.
That Hanover, Nassau and Frankfurt were eaten up by Bismarck quite in accordance with the laws of natural history, I do not have the least doubt. My pain is not sentimental pain that Hanover, Nassau and Frankfurt do not exist any more but the pain that a Prussian German Christian feels that my party and my fatherland Prussia has violated the ten commandments of God in this terrible manner and through a depraved pseudo–patriotism had done damage to her soul and stained her conscience.37
King William, too, had moral scruples about the annexations; initially he had been willing to settle for a change of ruler in these territories and some adjustment of frontiers at their expense. But, as usual, he gave way without too much opposition before Bismarck’s arguments. This was a proleptic hint of what was to come when bills for the annexation of Hanover and Electoral Hesse were debated in both houses of parliament. Gerlach’s scruples were brushed aside by the overwhelming majority of conservatives who rejoiced to see Prussia dominant in North and Central Germany.
The victory over Austria led to an impassioned outburst of national feeling which gripped wide sections of the German people. As we have seen already, when war broke out it was essentially a conflict between Prussian and Austrian particularism. Government propaganda and Bismarck’s determined attempts to harness national liberalism to Prussia’s expansionist policy had singularly failed. But as news came in of the progress of the Prussian armies, the popular mood changed. Through conscription nearly every Prussian family had some members on active service which ensured that Prussian victories – won virtually unaided against Austria and her allies – sparked off a wave of patriotic feeling which merged into and was sustained by the solid block of middle-class opinion supporting a Little German solution of the German problem. Middle-class liberals in South Germany who also favoured Little Germany were caught up in this new mood in part because the real possibility of French intervention reawakened anti-French feelings south of the Main. The conversion experience of Rudolf von Ihering, professor of law at Göttingen University, was typical of many liberals in the summer of 1866. On the eve of war he confided to a friend that ‘a war has perhaps never been advertised with such shamelessness and with such ghastly frivolity as the one Bismarck is currently seeking to launch against Austria. One’s innermost being is revolted by such a crime against all moral and legal principles.’ In August, writing to another friend, his attitude had changed dramatically.
I bow before the genius of Bismarck who has accomplished with great energy a master stroke of political teamwork. I have forgiven this man all that he has done in the past, yes more than that I have convinced myself that what we uninitiated thought was criminal arrogance was necessary; it has since then become evident that it was an indispensable means to the goal … for such a man of action I would give a hundred men of liberal opinions [but of] impotent honesty. Could I have believed nine weeks ago that I would be writing a dithyramb to Bismarck?38
Finally, the victory over Austria had significant repercussions upon the political situation in Prussia. Even before news of Königgrätz reached Berlin, elections to the Landtag had resulted in dramatic changes. The Conservatives captured 142 seats where previously they had held 28, while the left liberals fell from 110 to 65 seats and the Progressives from 143 to 83. With the support of nine Old Liberals, the Conservatives controlled the lower house. Although liberals and conservatives alike expected that Bismarck would revise the constitution in the conservative interest, in fact he placed an indemnity bill before the Landtag. While the government refused to apologize for collecting taxes since 1862 but justified its actions on the grounds of national emergency, nevertheless the right of the Landtag to consent to future legislation was conceded. The passage of the bill by 230 votes to 75 marked a turning-point in the history of German liberalism. It is too facile an interpretation to say that most liberals preferred unification to freedom. They wanted both. As Karl Twesten, one of their leaders, put it: ‘no one may be criticized for giving precedence to the issue of power at this time and maintaining that the issues of freedom can wait provided that nothing happens which can permanently prejudice them’.39 Many moderates now left the Progressive Party and after the elections to the Reichstag of the North German Confederation joined with like-minded deputies from other states to form the National Liberal Party, a grouping whose main objective was the completion of unification.
NOTES AND REFERENCES
1. Quoted in Hans Kohn, The Mind of Germany: The Education of a Nation (London, 1961) p. 160.
2. Quoted in Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Das deutsche Kaiserreich 1871–1918 (Göttingen, 1980), p. 39.
3. Ibid.
4. Leading American revisionists include Paul W. Schroeder, Roy A. Austensen and Richard Elrod. An overview of their arguments in Roy A. Austensen, ‘Austria and the Struggle for Supremacy in Germany 1848–1864’, JMH 52, 1980. Representative of Austrian revisionism is Michael Derndarsky, ‘Österreich und die deutsche Frage zwischen 1848 und 1866/71: Konzeptionelles Dilemma und situative Probleme der Donaumonarchie gegenüber Deutschland,’ in Josef Becker/Andreas Hillgruber (eds), Die deutsche Frage im 19 und 20 Jahrhundert (München, 1983). Cf. H. Bleiber, ‘Der deutsche Bund in der Geschichtsschreibung der DDR’, HZ 248, Heft 1, 1989.
5. Article one was carried by 340 votes to 76, article three by 316 to 90.
6. The argument is advanced by two Austrians: Helmut Rumpler, Die deutsche Politik des Freiherrn Beust 1848–1850 (Vienna, Cologne, Graz, 1972), and Hubert Glaser, ‘Zwischen Grossmächte und Mittelstaaten: Über einige Konstanten der deutschen Politik Bayerns in der Ara von der Pfordten’, in Heinrich Lutz and H. Rumpler, Osterreich und die deutsche Frage im 19 und 20 Jahrhundert: Probleme der politisch-staatlichen und sozial-kulturellen Differenzierung von deutschem Mitteleüropa (Vienna, 1982). But cf. review by Eberhard Kolb, HZ 1973, which suggests that Rumpler greatly exaggerates the ‘clash of principle’ between the middle states’ concern for states’ rights and the power politics of Prussia – more likely the middle states, like the others, were simply protecting their interests.
7. To Prokesch-Osten he wrote on 15 November 1850: ‘Therefore, I see salvation for both of us, indeed for all humanity, only in Prussia’s open break with her recent past; with her self-seeking treasonous friends; and in her intimate alliance with Austria for a common struggle against the revolution, in whatever guise it appears.’ Quoted in Roy A. Austensen, op. cit., p. 213. It is interesting, too, that he conducted a private correspondence with Manteuffel from February to April 1851 in the course of which he offered to share the functions of the Confederation with Prussia if she would concede the presidency to Austria: Hans Julius Schoeps, Von Ölmutz nach Dresden 1850–1851. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Reformen am deutschen Bund (Cologne and Berlin, 1972), pp. 178–213.
8. He referred to it on one occasion as a ‘bugbear’: Friedrich Walter (ed.) Aus dem Nachlass Carl Friedrich Kübeck von Kübau: Tagebücher Briefe Aktenstücke 1841–1855, Veröffentlichungen der Kommission für neuere Geschichte Osterreichs, vol. 55 (Graz, and Cologne, 1960), p. 79.
9. Writing to Metternich on 3 May 1850 Anton von Prokesch-Osten commented: ‘My faith in Prussia is pretty well ended. The conservatives as well as the swindlers put Prussian vanity and expansionist interests above all else; and the struggle against revolution is at best in second place, which is as good as none at all.’ Quoted in Roy A. Austensen, op. cit., p. 214.
10. Winfried Baumgarten, ‘Zur Aussenpolitik Friedrich Wilhelms IV 1840–1858’, in Otto Büsch and Klaus Zernack (eds), Jahrbuch für die Geschichte Mittel und Ost-Deutschlands (Berlin, 1987), vol. 36, p. 146.
11. Quoted in Hans-Werther Hahn, Geschichte des deutschen Zollvereins (Göttingen, 1984), p. 56.
12. Quoted in Lawrence J. Baack, Christian Bernstorff and Prussia: Diplomacy and Reform Conservatism 1818–1832 (New Brunswick, 1980), p. 125.
13. The Tax Union formed in 1834 consisted of Hanover, Brunswick, Oldenburg, Schaumburg-Lippe. Brunswick joined the Customs Union in 1841, Hanover and Schaumburg-Lippe in 1851 and Oldenburg in 1852. Lübeck joined in 1868, Hamburg in 1881 and Bremen in 1884.
14. Delbrück admitted in his memoirs that this was his objective throughout: … we wanted no German-Austrian customs union; we wanted no [equalization] of the tariff schedules: we wanted, at least as far as I was concerned, only a limited development of the February treaty.’ Quoted in Theodore S. Hamerow, The Social Foundations of German Unification: Struggles and Achievements (Princeton, 1972), pp. 129–30.
15. Ibid. p. 129.
16. Hans-Werther Hahn, op. cit., p. 187.
17. APP 5 no. 147, Bismarck to Karl von Werther, 14 June 1864.
18. GW 4 no. 149, Bismarck to Rechberg, 29 September 1864.
19. DPO 4 no. 1825, Rechberg to the emperor.
20. Voting with Prussia were Hanover, Electoral Hesse, Mecklenburg, curia 15 and the curia of the Hansa towns.
21. APP 6 no. 100, Preussischer Kronrat, 29 May 1865.
22. Ibid.
23. John C.G. Röhl, ‘Kriegsgefahr und Gasteiner Konvention. Bismarck, Eulenburg und die Vertagung des preussisch–österreichischen Krieges im Sommer 1865’, in I. Geiss and Bernd Jürgen Wendt (eds), Deutschland in der Weltpolitik des 19 und 20 Jahrhunderts (Düsseldorf, 1974); cf. Fritz Stern, Gold and Iron: Bismarck Bleichröder and the Building of the German Empire (London, 1977), pp. 64–5.
24. Q voted in John C.G. Röhl, op. cit., p. 101.
25. C.W.Clark, Francis Joseph and Bismarck before the War of 1866: The Diplomacy of Austria before the War of 1866 (Cambridge, Mass., 1934), p. 294.
26. OD VII no. 1590, Lefebvre de Béhaine to Drouyn de Lhuys, 27 September 1865.
27. GW 14/2 no. 1129, Bismarck to Hermann von Thile, 23 October 1865.
28. DPO 5 no. 2325.
29. APP 6 no. 449, Crown Council minutes, 28 February 1866, and no. 500, Moltke’s notes on the Crown Council. Cf. Heinrich-Otto Meisner (ed), Kaiser Friedrich III Tagebücher von 1848–1866 (Leipzig, 1929), pp. 541–4 for a more outspoken version.
30. The British ambassador in Berlin summed up the king aptly as ‘a hesitating sovereign with an intermittent conscience acting under mixed and shifting influences’. APP 6 no. 325, Napier to Russell, 14 October 1865.
31. Equally tongue-in-cheek Berlin informed the committee on 11 May of the changes Prussia envisaged. The powers of the Diet over members would be greatly strengthened; all restrictions on trade and commerce must be removed; and a German navy would be founded while Germany’s land forces would be made more efficient.
32. Bavaria, Saxony and Electoral Hesse, while supporting the motion, pointed out that as the condominium in Schleswig-Holstein had not been recognized by the Diet, breach of it could not be used as the reason for mobilization.
33. Lord Augustus Loftus, Diplomatic Reminiscences (London, 1894), vol. I, p. 60. Cf. J. von Gerlach, Ernst Ludwig von Gerlach. Aufzeichnungen aus seinem Leben und Wirken 1795–1877 (Schwerin, 1903), vol. 2, p. 292: ‘There was something disturbed and desperate in his attitude’. 18 May.
34. Hagen Schulze, Der Weg zum Nationalstaat, Die deutsche Nationalbewegung vom 18 Jahrhundert bis zur Reichsgründung (Munich, 1985), p. 114.
35. GW 15, p. 198. The whole discussion (pp. 197–203) is highly interesting.
36. Quoted in Lothar Gall, Bismarck: Der weisse Revolutionär p. 381.
37. Quoted in Ernst Engelberg, Bismarck Urpreusse und Reichsgründer, p. 620.
38. Karl-Georg Faber, ‘Realpolitik als Ideologie’, in HZ (203), 1966, pp. 15–6.
39. Quoted in Otto Pflanze, Bismarck and the Development of Germany: The Period of Unification 1815–1871 (Princeton, 1963), p. 330.