Germany had now fairly entered a period which, although it did not last very long, was, in some respects, as humiliating as any in her history. The popular movement, from which great things had been hoped, had on some Political reaction. occasions almost touched its goal; and, as might have been expected, a reaction set in, which the princes knew how to turn to the fullest advantage. The Austrian government, after the subjection of Hungary, withdrew every concession it had made under pressure, and established a thorough despotism, trampling upon the rights of the individual nationalities, and forcing all its subjects into a common political mould. In Prussia the parliament, summoned by the king on the 5th of December 1848, met early in the following year. Although the democrats had declined to vote, it was not conservative enough for the court, and not till the 31st of January 1850 was an understanding arrived at respecting the constitution. The system thus established was repeatedly revised, and always with the same object—to reduce to a minimum the power of the national representatives, and to exalt and extend that of the government. At the same time the ministry persecuted the press, and allowed hardly a whisper of discontent to pass unpunished. The smaller states followed with alacrity in the steps of the two leading powers. The Liberal ministries of 1848 were dismissed, the constitutions were changed or abolished, and new chambers were elected under a severely restricted suffrage. Had the battle been fairly fought out between the governments and the people, the latter would still have triumphed; but the former had now, in the Frankfort diet, a mightier instrument than ever against freedom. What it could do was seen too clearly from the case of Hesse-Cassel. After the settlement of Olmütz, federal troops occupied that country, and federal execution was carried out with shameful harshness. Martial law was everywhere proclaimed; officers, and all classes of officials who had incurred the displeasure of the government, were subjected to arbitrary penalties; and such was the misery of the people that multitudes of them were compelled to emigrate. The constitution having been destroyed by the Bund, the elector proclaimed one of his own making; but even the chamber elected under the provisions of this despotic scheme could not tolerate his hateful tyranny, and there were incessant disputes between it and the government. The Bund interfered in a like spirit in Hanover, although with less disastrous results, after the accession of George V. in 1851. For the whole of Germany this was emphatically the period of petty despotism; and not only from Hesse, but from all parts of the country there was a vast stream of emigration, mainly to the New World.
The outbreak of the Crimean War profoundly moved the German nation. The sympathies of Austria were necessarily with the Western powers, and in Prussia the majority of the people took the same side; but the Prussian Crimean War. government, which was at this time completely under the control of Russia, gave its moral support to the tsar. It did, indeed, assent to a treaty—afterwards signed on behalf of the confederation—by which Prussia and Austria guaranteed each other, but it resolutely opposed the mobilization of the confederate army. The Prussian people were keenly irritated by the cordial relations between their court and the most despotic power in Europe. They felt that they were thus most unjustly separated from the main stream of Western progress.
During the Crimean War the political reaction continued with unabated force. In Prussia the government appeared resolved to make up for its temporary submission to the popular will by the utmost violence on which it could venture. A general election took place in the autumn of 1855, and so harshly was the expression of opinion restrained that a chamber was returned with scarcely a single liberal element of serious importance. The feudalists called for a still further revision of the constitution, and urged that even the reforms effected by Stein should be undone. In Bavaria a chamber elected about the same time as that of Prussia was rather less docile; but the government shared to the full the absolutist tendencies of the day, and energetically combated the party which stood up for law and the constitution. The Hanoverian government, backed by the Frankfort diet, was still more successful in its warfare with the moderate reformers whom it was pleased to treat as revolutionists; and in Austria the feudalists so completely gained the upper hand that on the 18th of August 1855 the government signed a concordat, by which the state virtually submitted itself to the control of the church.
The German people seemed to have lost both the power and the will to assert their rights; but in reality they were deeply dissatisfied. And it was clear to impartial observers that, in the event of any great strain upon the power Prussia and Switzerland. of the governments, the absolutist system would break down. The first symptom that the reaction had attained its utmost development displayed itself in Prussia, whose attention was for a time distracted from home politics by a quarrel with Switzerland. The Swiss authorities had imprisoned some foolish royalists of Neuchâtel, in which the house of Hohenzollern had never resigned its rights. War was threatened by Prussia, but when the prisoners were set free, the two states entered upon negotiations, and in the summer of 1857 King Frederick William withdrew all claims to the principality.
Soon after this, the mental condition of the king made it necessary that his duties should be undertaken by a substitute, and his brother William, the prince of Prussia, took his place for three months. In October 1858 the prince Regency of William of Prussia. became regent. The accession to power of the new regent was universally recognized as involving a change of system. The temper of William, in contradistinction to that of his brother, was pre-eminently practical; and he had the reputation of a brave, piously orthodox Prussian soldier. The nickname “cartridge-prince” (Kartätschenprinz) bestowed upon him during the troubles of ’48 was undeserved; but he was notoriously opposed to Liberalism and, had he followed his own instincts, he would have modified the constitution in a reactionary sense. Fortunately, however, he was singularly open to conviction, and Otto von Bismarck, though not yet in office, was already in his confidence. Bismarck realized that, in the struggle with Austria which he foresaw, Prussia could only be weakened were she to take up an attitude of opposition to the prevailing Liberal sentiment, and that to tamper with the constitution would not only be inexpedient, but useless, since special measures could always be resorted to, to meet special circumstances. The interests of Prussia, he urged, had been too often sacrificed to abstract ideas. William listened and was convinced. He not only left the constitution intact, but he dismissed Manteuffel’s “feudal” ministry and replaced it with moderate Liberals.
The change was more revolutionary in appearance than in reality. Manteuffel and his policy were associated in the regent’s mind with the humiliation of Olmütz, and the dismissal of the ministry symbolized the reversal of this policy. William believed with his whole soul in the unification of Germany, and in Prussia as its instrument; and, if he doubted, it was only as to the how and when. Of one thing he was certain—that whoever aspired to rule over Germany must be prepared to seize it (letter to von Natzmer, May 20, 1849). This attitude had little in common with the Liberal appeal to the voice of the people. Such a revolutionary foundation might be good enough for the ephemeral empires of France; the appeal of Prussia should be to the God of battles alone.
The antagonism between these conflicting principles was not long in revealing itself. In Germany the relations between Austria and Prussia were becoming unpleasantly strained in the question of the admission of the Habsburg Prussia and the Austro-Italian War. monarchy to the Zollverein, in that of the elector of Hesse and his parliament, in that of the relation of the Elbe duchies to the crown of Denmark. But for the outbreak of the Italian war of 1859 the struggle of 1866 might have been anticipated. The outcome of the war increased the prestige of Prussia. She had armed, not with the idea of going to the aid of a German power in difficulties, but in order, at the right moment, to cast her sword into the scale wherein her own interests might for the time lie. At the menace of her armaments, concentrated on the Rhine, Napoleon had stopped dead in the full career of victory; Austria, in the eyes of German men, had been placed under an obligation to her rival; and Italy realized the emergence of a new military power, whose interests in antagonism to Austria were identical with her own.
So striking an object lesson was not lost on the Prussian regent, and he entered on a vigorous policy of reforming and strengthening the army, General von Roon being appointed minister of war for this purpose. To the Liberal Military reforms and constitutional crisis in Prussia. ministers, however, and to the Liberal majority in the Prussian diet, this was wholly objectionable. Schemes were under discussion for reforming the constitution of the Confederation and drawing the German states closer together on a Liberal basis; the moment seemed singularly inopportune for Prussia, which had not shown herself particularly zealous for the common interests, to menace the other German governments by increasing her separate armaments. When, therefore, on the 10th of February 1860, the bills necessary for carrying out the reform of the army were introduced into the diet, they met with so strenuous an opposition that they had to be withdrawn. Supplies were, however, granted for fourteen months, and the regent took this as justifying him in proceeding with his plans. On the 1st of January 1861 the standards of the new regiments were solemnly blessed; on the next day Frederick William IV. died, and the new king was face to face with a constitutional crisis.
Austria, meanwhile, had been making the first tentative essays in constitutional concession, which culminated, in May 1861, in the establishment at Vienna of a Reichsrat for the whole empire, including Hungary. The popularity she thus gained among German Liberals and Nationalists was helped by the course of events at Berlin. The Prussian diet of 1862 was no whit more tractable than its predecessor, but fell to attacking the professional army and advocating the extension of the militia (Landwehr) system; on the 11th of March the king dissolved it in disgust, whereupon the Liberal ministry resigned, and was succeeded by the Conservative cabinet of Prince Hohenlohe. Public opinion was now violently excited against the government; the new elections resulted (May 6) in the return of a yet larger Liberal majority; on the 22nd of August the army estimates were thrown out. Hohenlohe now declared himself incapable of carrying on the government, and King William entrusted it to Otto von Bismarck.
In choosing this man of iron will as his instrument during the actual crisis the king’s instinct had not betrayed him. For nine years Prussian delegate at the diet of Frankfort, Bismarck was intimately acquainted with all the issues Bismarck. of the German problem; with his accustomed calculated bluntness he had more than once openly asserted that this problem could only be settled by Austria ceasing to influence the German courts and transferring “her centre of gravity towards Budapest”; with equal bluntness he told the committee on the budget, on the 30th of September 1862, that the problem could not be solve “by parliamentary decrees,” but only “by blood and iron.” For the supreme moment of this solution he was determined that Prussia should be fully prepared; and this meant that he must defy the majority within the diet and public opinion without. Some sort of constitutional pretence was given to the decision of the government to persevere with the military reforms by the support of the Upper House, and of this Bismarck availed himself to raise the necessary taxes without the consent of the popular assembly. He regretted the necessity for flouting public opinion, which he would have preferred to carry with him; in due course he would make his peace with Liberal sentiment, when success should have justified his defiance of it. His plans were singularly helped by international developments. The Polish rising of 1863 came just in time to prevent a threatened Franco-Russian alliance; the timid and double-faced attitude of both France and Austria during the revolt left them isolated in Europe, while Bismarck’s ready assistance to Russia assured at least the benevolent neutrality in the coming struggle with the Habsburg power.