The Revolutionary Movement of 1848-9 in Italy, Austria-Hungary, and Germany / With Some Examination of the Previous Thirty-three Years

by C. Edmund Maurice

On the following day the students of Leipzig gathered to hear an address from Robert Blum. He urged them to abstain from violence, but to put into form their demand for legal remedies; and for this purpose a committee was chosen. The following demands were laid before the Town Council—viz., that the preservation of order should be entrusted to the civic guard; that the soldiers should be removed from the town; that inquiries should be made into the circumstances of the riot, and a solemn burial given to those who had been shot. The Town Council yielded, and though the soldiers were soon sent back into Leipzig, a beginning had been made which might lead to a larger reform. Blum then founded a debating society; and, at the end of 1845, he was chosen representative of Leipzig in the Lower House of Saxony.

But while the national feeling of Germany was gathering round the intellectual leaders of that country, the feeling for national peculiarities and national language was producing widely different results in those countries where the unfortunate policy of Joseph II. had made the German language a symbol of division rather than of unity. The movement for substituting the Magyar language for the Latin (which had previously been customary in the Diet at Presburg) was the revival of a struggle which had begun in the very time of Joseph II.; and, had Hungary been a homogeneous country, the movement might have passed as naturally into a struggle for freedom as the enthusiasm for German poetry and German learning had chimed in with the desire for German political unity. But Hungary had never been a country of one race or of common aspirations. Several waves of conquest and colonization had passed over different parts of it, without ending, in any case, in that amalgamation between the different races which alone could secure national unity.

Yet it is just possible that, had the leadership of the Magyars fallen into the hands of a man of wider sympathies and more delicate feeling than Kossuth, an understanding might have been effected between the different peoples of Hungary. During the struggle against Joseph II., the other races seem to have submitted to the leadership of the Magyars, and to a great extent to have adopted the Magyar language, because it was not then thrust on them by force. But when, after the Diet of 1830, Hungary began to reawaken to the desire for liberty, signs of national feeling soon showed themselves among other races than the Magyars.

The first race who felt the new impulse were the Croats. They, more than any of the other peoples who had been annexed to the Kingdom of Hungary, had preserved their separate government and traditions of independence. In 1527 they offered the throne of Croatia to the Hapsburgs, without waiting for any decision by the Magyars; and when Charles VI. was submitting to the Powers of Europe and to the inhabitants of his different dominions the question of the Pragmatic Sanction, Croatia gave her decision quite independently of the Diet at Presburg.

But apart from her actual legal rights to independence, there remained a tradition of the old period when the Kingdom of Croatia had been an important Power in Europe, and had extended over Slavonia and Dalmatia. But these claims were not undisputed. The hold which Venice had gained over Dalmatia and Istria had introduced into those provinces an Italian element; and when, in the sixteenth century, the Serbs were called into Hungary in large numbers, Slavonia had developed a variety of the Slavonic tongue which must have weakened the absolute supremacy of the Croats. The sense, however, of a connection between the dialects of the different Slavonic States was a bond of union between those States which might at any time be drawn closer.

When, then, Szechenyi began to stir up the Magyars to develop their language and literature, it occurred to a Croatian poet to link together the different dialects of the Southern Slavs into one language. The Croatians had been so far in advance of their neighbours the Serbs that they had abandoned the Cyrillic alphabet, which had been introduced at the time of their first conversion to Christianity, and had adopted the ordinary Latin alphabet. But the Croatian dialect, by itself, would not have been accepted by the other Slavs; and the softer language and higher culture of the old Republic of Ragusa supplied a better basis for the development of the new language. Louis Gaj, the Croatian poet, had studied at the University of Leipzig, which seems to have been the centre of a good deal of Slavonic feeling; and he hoped to link together, not merely the three provinces of Croatia, Slavonia, and Dalmatia, but several, also, of the south-west provinces of Austria; and, on the other hand, he wished to draw into this bond of sympathy those Slavonic countries which still groaned under the Turkish yoke. It was necessary, however, to find a new name for a language which was a new combination of dialects. To call it the Croatian language would have implied a claim to superiority for Croatia which it was most desirable to avoid; and as none other of the Slavonic provinces could well be treated as the godmother of the new language, Gaj went back to the seventeenth century for a name.

At that period Leopold I. of Austria had granted special privileges to the Illyrian nation, and it was only in the eighteenth century that the Illyrian Chancellery at Vienna had been abolished. Here, then, was a name, recognized by Imperial authority in legal documents, and giving no superiority to any one of the Slavonic provinces over the others. To carry out his purposes, Gaj started a journal in 1835 to which at first he gave the name of the "Gazette of Croatia," but which he soon renamed the "National Gazette of Illyria." This newspaper was written in the new language, and the Hungarian authorities refused to sanction it. Nor were they the only opponents of the new movement. The Turkish Pasha in Bosnia was alarmed at the attempt to draw the subjects of the Sultan into closer alliance with the Slavs in Hungary; and he tried to persuade Francis that Gaj was attempting to shake the Imperial authority and found a separate kingdom. At the same time the Bishop of Agram warned the Pope of the evident tendency of this movement to give the upper hand to the members of the Greek Church, who formed the majority of the Southern Slavs, over the Roman Catholics of Croatia. But these efforts failed. Metternich saw in Gaj's movement an opportunity of weakening the Magyars; Francis sent a ring to Gaj, as a sign of his approval; and Gregory XVI. was so far from being influenced by the Bishop of Agram's appeal that he removed him from his see for having made it.

The fact that Francis had encouraged, and Metternich at all events not disapproved, this movement was enough to alarm the sensibilities of the Magyars; and when Gaj appeared in the Hungarian Diet of 1840, Deak rebuked him for his work. Gaj answered in words which became afterwards only too memorable. "The Magyars," he said, "are an island in the Slavonic ocean. I did not make the ocean, nor did I stir up its waves; but take care that they do not go over your heads and drown you." The words were certainly not conciliatory; but they had been provoked by the evident signs of hostility on the part of the Magyars. If the latter had been content to ignore the movement, it might have remained, for their time at least, a purely literary effort; or, if it had taken a political form, it might have drifted into union with the Bohemian struggle against German supremacy, or even into a crusade against the Turks. It is, however, more than probable that the attempt to found this new language would have been earlier abandoned had it not been for the opposition which it called forth. For Gaj, however zealous as a patriot, and however ingenious as a philologer, seems to have been deficient in the power of producing such a great work of imagination as that which enabled Dante to unite the not less diverse elements of the Italian language.

But the Magyar cry of alarm at the demands of the Slavs was now echoed by a fiercer voice than that of Deak. In 1841, the year after the dissolution of that Presburg Diet by which Metternich had been so signally defeated, Kossuth started a paper called the "Pesti Hirlap" (the Gazette of Pesth), which soon became at once the most determined champion of those liberties which Kossuth desired for his countrymen, and the bitterest opponent of those liberties which he grudged to the other races of Hungary. For it was not merely in provinces marked off from the Magyar world like Croatia, Slavonia, and Dalmatia, that a movement like Gaj's would produce effect. The Slavs were scattered about in nearly all the districts of Hungary, and though they might not all desire separate political organizations like those which the Croats demanded, the question of the preservation of their language concerned even those who had no separate political existence; and they too resented any attempt on the part of the Magyars to substitute for it the language of the ruling race. Kossuth was as indignant at this hindrance to his schemes of national unity as Joseph II. had been at the hindrances which had been thrown in the way of the Germanizing of the Empire. The same year, 1841, which saw the starting of the journal in which Kossuth was to vindicate the liberties of Hungary against Metternich, was also the year in which he dealt his first decided blow against the liberties of the Slavonic races of Hungary. At a general convention of the Hungarian Protestants, he proposed that certain of the schools in which the Slavonic clergy studied physical science, and other branches of knowledge, should be deprived of these teachings, and that mere practice in writing sermons should be substituted. This proposal was defended on the ground that Slavonic gatherings, unless carefully limited, must be a source of danger to the country. Any one who ventured to defend the Slavonic cause at this meeting was howled down, and Kossuth's motion was carried.