¶ It is a fact that with all their political ambitions, and their solemn belief that Germany’s political future was an open book, the Radicals in Prussia never guessed the way events were to turn out; nor for that matter the Radicals never desired the conquest of Germany by Prussia; therefore the subsequent astonishing rise of German Imperialism through Prussian domination, would have proved a most surprising revelation had the patriots of 1806 to 1848 returned from the other world, say in 1870, to view Prussia’s rise to glory.
¶ The political uprisings of 1848 had parallels in Italy, France, Spain, and Germany; and the excesses cleared the way for wiser action, in years to come.
¶ “The frenzy was a sort of tottering bridge between the French 1789-93 idea of democracy (that has to do with bloodshed and violence) and the purified conception expressed in modern constitutional democracy.”
¶ The German democratic uprisings of 1820, ’30 and ’48 were planned to win a certain type of civil liberty. They failed. The question was “equality,” as well as popular “machinery” of representation. How was it to be brought about? Modern “parliamentarism” had not as yet been involved.
¶ The patriots of ’48 had their Jacobin clubs in mild imitation of the French Revolution. Baden alone had 400, with a membership of 20,000. “Every tavern and brewery, (Dahlinger, German Revolution of ’49, p. 33), became a seat of democratic propaganda.”
See, there stands the mighty Hecker,
A feather in his hat,
There stands the friend of the people,
Yearning for the tyrants’ blood;
Big boots with thick soles,
Sword and pistol by his side.
¶ Copied from French models was the word “Citizen.” We hear of Citizen Brentano, Citizen Franz Sigel, Citizen Ostenhaus, Citizen Schimmelpfennig; some of these leaders were extremely radical; but Brentano endeavored to keep the Revolution from becoming a record of lawlessness after the French Revolution type. (Dahlinger, p. 100).
We cannot go into the various battles fought and lost. Many of the leaders were exiled, others shot. The patriots were as a rule young collegians, ambitious to rise in life, but sincerely holding to modified conceptions of French Constitutionalism. There were a large number of journalists in the thick of the struggle, also professors in high schools. These chosen leaders, by various oratorical tricks, drew political and social malcontents from every walk of life.