What had he been, that Schiller whose writings had been put into their hands when they were children? What but a revolutionary, the motto of whose first book was the famous saying that what medicines cannot cure, cold steel cures, and what cold steel cannot cure, fire cures. Did the spirit of his works in any single point harmonise with the royal Prussian or the Austrian imperial spirit? What had Goethe's youthful attitude been but one of Titanic defiance? Did not even the work of his old age, the second part of Faust, end with the wish that he could see a free people on free soil? He had loathed the Berlin of Frederick II., would not his detestation of the Berlin of Frederick William IV. be greater still? From the writings of Hegel, who had begun life as a revolutionary and ended it as an ultra-conservative, they drew all the conclusions which he himself had left undrawn. Feuerbach had declared that he would have nothing to do with politics, nevertheless they transposed his philosophic decapitation of the historical state into the region of practical politics.
Yes, the clouds were gathering. In place of the swallows, the heraldic eagles of Prussia and Austria were flying low. The monarchs attempted in vain to exorcise the tempest. Frederick William IV. convened a general Landtag (Parliament) in April 1847. With his convictions he could not do otherwise than open it with a speech in which, in spite of all concessions, real and apparent, he made it clear that he was not prepared to take the decisive step which his people demanded of him.
"No power on earth," he cried, "will make me consent to the exchange of the natural relation between a king and his people for a conventional, constitutional relation; never with my will shall a written paper interfere between Almighty God and this country, rule us with its paragraphs, and supercede ancient, sacred loyalty."[7]
The time had come. The assembly demanded annual Parliaments and complete fulfilment of the promises made in 1815 and 1829. Jacoby, Heinrich Simon, Gervinus, and others criticised the king's proposals and rejected them.
Then the storm broke—first in Switzerland, where in November 1847 the Liberal cantons armed and suppressed the Jesuitical Sonderbund (league of the Catholic cantons), then with overpowering force in Paris, then in all the German and many of the other European capitals. As thunder in a mountainous country echoes from hill to hill, so the thunder of the revolution echoed from one European country to another in the mad and holy year, 1848.
[1] Ye knights who have made ready to take part in the great battle of the day, lift your visors and speak clearly: On which side are you fighting? Either—or!
Is it for the power of the sovereign or the rights of the people? For spiritual light or priestly superstition? Are you republicans or thralls? No evasion! Answer plainly! Either—or!
[2] Cf. Moritz Hartmann: Reimchronik des Pfaffen Mauritius. Chap. v. "Apostel und Apostaten."
[3] I, who am of the land of the Hussites, believe that I have drunk the blood of God; love has been poured into my heart; love is God's blood, my heart his chalice.