At the congress of Aix-la-Chapelle, Stourdza, the Russian councillor of state, a Wallachian by birth, presented a memorial in which the spirit of the German universities was described as revolutionary. The Burschenschaft of Jena sent him a challenge. Kotzebue, the Russian councillor of state and celebrated dramatist, at length published a weekly paper in which he turned every indication of German patriotism to ridicule, and exercised his wit upon the individual eccentricities of the students affecting the old German costume, of precocious boys and doting professors. The rage of the galled universities rose to a still higher pitch on the discovery, made and incontestably proved by Luden, that Kotzebue sent secret bulletins, filled with invective and suspicion, to St. Petersburg. To execrate Kotzebue had become so habitual at the universities that a young man, Sand from Wunsiedel, a theological student of Jena, noted for piety and industry, took the fanatical resolution to free, or at least to wipe off a blot from his country, by the assassination of an enemy whose importance he, in the delusion of hatred, vastly overrated; and he accordingly went, in 1819, to Mannheim, plunged his dagger into Kotzebue's heart, and then attempted his own life, but only succeeded in inflicting a slight wound. He was beheaded in the ensuing year. Loning, the apothecary, probably excited by Sand's example, also attempted the life of the president of Nassau, Ibell, who, however, seized him, and he committed suicide in prison. These events occasioned a congress at Carlsbad in 1819, which took the state of Germany into deliberation, placed each of the universities under the supervision of a government officer, suppressed the Burschenschaft, prohibited their colors, and fixed a central board of scrutiny at Mayence,[13] which acted on the presupposition of the existence of a secret and general conspiracy for the purposes of assassination and revolution, and of Sand's having acted not from personal fanaticism and religious aberration, but as the agent of some unknown superiors in some new and mysterious tribunal. This inquisition was carried on for years and a crowd of students peopled the prisons; conspiracies perilous to the state were, however, nowhere discovered, but simply a great deal of ideal enthusiasm. The elder men in the universities, who, either in their capacity as tutors or authors, had fed the enthusiasm of the youthful students, were also removed from their situations. Jahn was arrested, Arndt was suspended at Bonn and Fries at Jena; Gorres, who had perseveringly published the most violent pamphlets, was compelled to take refuge in Switzerland, which also offered an asylum to Dewette, the Berlin professor of theology, who had been deprived of his chair on account of a letter addressed by him to Sand's mother. Oken, the great naturalist, who refused to give up "Isis," a periodical publication, also withdrew to Switzerland. Numbers of the younger professors went to America.[14] The solemnization of the October festival was also prohibited, and the triumphal monument on the field of Leipzig was demolished.
[Footnote 1: William V., the expelled hereditary stadtholder, died in obscurity at Brunswick in 1806. His son, William, had, in 1802, received Fulda in compensation, but afterward served Prussia, was, in 1806, taken prisoner with Möllendorf at Erfurt and afterward set at liberty, served again, in 1809, under Austria, and then retired to England, whence he returned on the expulsion of the French to receive a crown, which he accepted with a good deal of assurance, complaining, at the same time, of the loss of his former possession, Fulda, a circumstance strongly commented upon by Stein in his letters to Gagern. William, in return for his elevation to a throne by the arms of Germany, closed the mouths of the Rhine against her.]
[Footnote 2: Zurich, Berne, Lucerne, Uri, Schwyz, Unterwalden, Glarus, Zug, Freiburg, Solothurn, Basel, Schaffhausen, Appenzell, St. Gall, the Grisons, Aargau, Constance, Tessin, the Vaud, Valais, Neuenburg (Neufchatel), Geneva. The nineteen cantons of 1805 remained in statu quo, only those of Valais, Neufchatel, and Geneva were confederated with them, and Pruntrut with the ancient bishopric of Basel were restored to Berne.]
[Footnote 3: The deed of possession of the 26th June, 1814, runs as follows: "Not by an arbitrary, despotic encroachment upon the order of things, but by the hands of the Providence that blessed the arms of your emperor and of the allied princes and by a holy alliance are you restored to the house of Austria.">[
[Footnote 4: Tuscany fell to Ferdinand, the former grandduke of
Wurzburg; Modena to Francis, son of the deceased duke, Ferdinand;
Parms and Placantia to Maria Louisa, the wife and widow of Napoleon.]
[Footnote 5: Not long before, in the treaty of Kiel, there had been question of bestowing Swedish-Pomerania upon Denmark; to this Prussia refused to accede and Denmark agreed to take 2,600,000 dollars in compensation. Prussia was also compelled to pay 3,500,500 dollars to Sweden.]
[Footnote 6: Rehfues, the director of the circle, a Wurtemberg
Protestant, published a circular at Bonn, in which he promised full
religious security to the Catholic inhabitants, whom he reminded of
Prussia's having been "the last supporter of the order of
Jesus."—Allgemeine Zeitung of 1814, No. 234.]
[Footnote 7: Holstein alone, not Schleswig, was enumerated as belonging to the German confederation, although both duchies were long ago closely united by the nexus socialis, more particularly in the representation at the diet.]
[Footnote 8: The Reusses, formerly imperial governors of Plauen, diverged into so many branches that, as early as 1664, they agreed to distinguish themselves by numbers, which at first amounted to thirty, but at a later period to a hundred, afterward recommencing at number one. The family took the name of Reuss from the Russian wife of its founder, in the beginning of the fourteenth century.]
[Footnote 9: Hamburg had vainly petitioned for the restitution of her bank, of which she had been deprived by Davoust. She received merely a small portion of the general war tax levied upon France.]