The German Empire 1867-1914

And the Unity Movement (Volume One)

William Harbutt Dawson

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351059411
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Storia
• Categoría: Storia mondiale

The German Empire, 1867-1914, first published in 1919, represents the most important and comprehensive of William Dawson's contributions to German history and the understanding of German politics and affairs. This title will be of great interest to students of German and Imperial history.

THE GERMAN EMPIRE

CHAPTER I

(1806–1848)

THE GERMANIC FEDERATION

AT the opening of the nineteenth century the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation still existed, after a thousand years of chequered life. Long decadent, it was now moribund, however, and perpetuated only in name an august sovereignty which at one time extended over a large part of the European Continent. Diverse in race, language, religion, and political forms, having no common bond in administration, law, justice, or military organization, the many parts of the imperial dominion were kept together in firm union only so long as they were subject to a strong rule, and when once the centre of authority had become weakened, decline and disintegration ran their certain course.

The first powerful impetus to this process was given by the Peace of Westphalia, which secured to the German Princes a large degree of territorial sovereignty. Now for a century and a half these Sovereigns had steadily encroached upon the imperial jurisdiction and disputed its claims, local autonomy had spread and strengthened, until the might and majesty of Charlemagne’s and Barbarossa’s sway had come at last to be represented by a loose and incoherent political system, composed of States which had little in common save a desire to magnify themselves at the expense of the Emperor and of each other. Of these States there were three hundred, for the most part petty and as political organizations contemptible, each with its Court and Government, army and bureaucracy, customs and taxes, coinage, weights, and measures. Giants amongst pigmies, Austria and Prussia overshadowed all the rest.

For over five hundred years the Austrian reigning house had borne the imperial title, yet for a long time it had been Prussia and not Austria which had been gaining in power at home and repute abroad. As a member of the old Empire, Prussia had long gone her own way; never had the Emperors succeeded in asserting an effectual authority over her masterful rulers. More and more the northern kingdom had disputed the superiority claimed, in virtue of a sovereignty that had become little more than titular, by its older but less vigorous rival on the Danube. From the time when Frederick the Great established the Prussian military State, whose foundations had been laid by his father, and challenged the power of the house of Habsburg in its citadel by the rape of Silesia, an act of aggression which he had to defend by seven years of continuous warfare, the precedence of Austria in the Empire had been definitely threatened.

Frederick the Great had almost doubled his territory; he had increased the population under his sway from two and a half to six millions and his army from 82,000 to 200,000. As his master-thought in life had been conquest, so his supreme concern at the last—he died in 1788—was that the gains which he had won, some by fair, others by unfair means, should be consolidated and preserved. “My last wishes when my breath expires,” he wrote in his will, “will be for the happiness of my country. May it ever be ruled with justice, wisdom, and decision; may it be the happiest of States because of the clemency of its laws, the best managed financially, and the most bravely defended, because of the honourable and worthy fame of its army.”

The immediate successors of the greatest of the Hohenzollerns failed to live up to his reputation, or to improve or even rightly value the inheritance which he had committed to their keeping. Frederick William II, known as William the Fat, was, with all his amiability, a man of small intelligence and weak character. He neither ruled well himself nor had he the wit to choose men able to do his work well for him, and he became the creature of scheming flatterers. A frank libidinist, his notorious amours were only made more vulgar by the bouts of religious extravagance which alternated with them. More than once he made a feeble show of challenging Austria’s reviving pretensions, but when it came to supporting words by acts, his courage failed him. The administration of his country, energetic and efficient at his accession, he left weak and corrupt; the army had diminished in numbers and in spirit; debt had accumulated though taxation had increased; in civil life, public spirit and private virtue had decayed.

It was due to this King even more, than to his successor, Frederick William III, a weakling likewise, though free from his coarseness and private vices, that twelve years after the death of Frederick the Great the fame of that ruler’s martial triumphs had been sacrificed and Prussia’s prestige in Europe for a time suffered eclipse. Even in Germany the once powerful northern kingdom had ceased to be either feared or respected. The Alliance of Princes (Fürstenbund) which Frederick had concluded, with himself as its centre, had been dissolved, and States which, like Saxony, had been accustomed to look to Prussia for support had gravitated instead to Austria.

The German household, divided against itself, its chief members indifferent custodians of the common interest of security, was unable to stand the shock of. Napoleon’s onslaught. After Austria, already vanquished in Italy, had been compelled to conclude on behalf of the Empire the Peace of Lunéville in 1801, the subjugation of all Germany followed swiftly. Meanwhile, Bavaria, Würtemberg, and Baden had sought safety by joining the enemy of the larger fatherland. State after State fell beneath the hammer-blows of the mighty Thor, and soon from the Rhine to the Elbe ancient sovereignties lay in ruins, heap on heap. The climax came in 1806, when at the battle of Jena (October 14th) the kingdom of Prussia, which Frederick had raised to such a dizzy height of power, was shattered and overthrown; while by the succeeding Peace of Tilsit (July 7, 1807) its area was reduced to the four eastern provinces of Brandenburg, Silesia, West Prussia, and East Prussia, and its population from ten to five millions. Two months before Jena, Napoleon had declared the Holy Roman Empire dissolved, in order that he might himself claim succession to Charlemagne, and on August 6th, at his bidding, Francis II not unwillingly laid down the imperial office.¹ So it was that a dominion which had been created by warlike emprise, and many acts of masterly if cunning statecraft, succumbed in helpless impotence, unhonoured and unregretted.

If Napoleon found delight in putting down the mighty from their seats, he was no less fond of exalting the humble and meek. As far as was consistent with his political designs, he lightened the sorrows of many of his German victims, for in his rare deeds of magnanimity, as well as in those of heartless cruelty, there was always a deep, calculated purpose. To some he gave new territories for those taken away, to others he gave titles; to two reigning houses he deigned to give his relatives in marriage. There was a systematic readjustment of princely rank amongst the rulers who passed into his service or under his protection. The duke, for reward or consolation, was made a grand duke, the grand duke an elector, the elector a king. Three of the four kingdoms comprised within the present German Empire, Bavaria, Würtemberg, and Saxony, owed their higher status to the favour of Napoleon.

The fall of the Empire and the consequent re-arrangement of the map of Germany seemed to mark the occultation of the German national idea. Even in its moribund condition, the Empire had to the last, in some sort, symbolized the substantial unity of the German peoples. Now not only the substance but almost the shadow of unity appeared to have passed away.

In place of the dissolved Empire Napoleon created (July 17, 1806), the Confederation of the Rhine, composed at first of sixteen of the southern and western States, which he had allowed to retain their independence, and which acknowledged him as protector and overlord. The most important of these vassal States were Bavaria, Würtemberg, Baden, Hesse-Darmstadt, and Nassau. To the original members of the union others were added after the battle of Jena, and chiefly Saxony, the Mecklenburgs, Anhalt, and Oldenburg. The Confederation was to have had a representative assembly, meeting at Frankfort, but this was never convened. At that time, therefore, old Germany consisted in the main of Austria, Prussia, and the Rhenish Confederation; of the petty octavo and duodecimo States, some had been absorbed by France, others thrown together with larger ones, and others again merged in a brand-new kingdom of Westphalia, formed for the purpose of supplying Napoleon’s brother Jerome with a crown.

The fate which Germany suffered at Napoleon’s hands was a bitter one, but it was hardly worse than she deserved. Had the States at the outset coalesced loyally and met the invader with united and unselfish will, disaster might conceivably have been averted; and even had military defeat still befallen them, honour would have been saved though all else had been lost. So disunited was Germany, however, that Napoleon was able to deal with the States one by one and apportion to each its fate in turn. Thus Prussia, instead of going to Austria’s assistance betimes, dallied and prevaricated until it was too late either to help Austria or to save herself. So little conscious was her King of the duty of the German States to one another, that he concluded a bargain with the usurper by which he received Hanover in return for Prussian territory (December 15, 1805). Frederick William III hated the idea of war, and clung to the hope of staving it off by concessions and capitulations, only to find too late that the more he surrendered the greater were Napoleon’s demands. By 1806 Prussia had fallen to such a depth of impotence that further decline seemed impossible.

It had been the chief boast of Prussia’s later rulers that theirs was a military State, yet in the hour of need the army itself proved incapable. It was not the standing army organized by Frederick the Great but a militia, a voluntary levée en masse of the people, that later saved both State and Crown. The aristocracy, as a class, failed no less ignominiously to rise to its responsibilities. There were many brilliant exceptions, but on the whole the crisis found most of the men who had claimed to be the natural leaders of the nation lacking in public spirit, and content to accept with weak resignation whatever fate might have in store for their country. It is a significant fact that of the six most eminent soldiers and statesmen who at the beginning of last century devoted themselves to Prussia’s renewal, Blücher, Scharnhorst, Gneisenau, Stein, Hardenberg, and Wilhelm von Humboldt, only the last was a Prussian.¹ Of the spiritual harbingers of Germany’s rebirth, Prussia could claim Arndt, Schenkendorf, and Schleiermacher, but most of them—Fichte, Körner, Niebuhr, the younger Eichhorn, and the rest—were likewise sons of another soil.

The officials of the higher bureaucracy had long been taught to regard themselves as the King’s meek creatures, and as such they had been treated; hence in that time of appeal to manly virtue it was inevitable that there could be no response where every trace of manliness had been extinguished. “Like the soulless machine it was,” writes a German historian, “the administration quietly went on its way, caring little under which Sovereign it lived, whether Frederick William or Napoleon; and, accustomed to look above for remedies, the high officials even repressed the aspirations of the healthy, energetic spirit which still lived on in the so-called common people.”¹ A district governor in Silesia pressed upon Napoleon’s troops supplies which they neither sought nor wanted, and introduced the Emperor’s decrees with “We Napoleon by the grace of God,” until Napoleon himself rebuked his foolery. In Berlin a general refused to obey the King’s orders to convey to the fortresses the ammunition then lying in the city. When Napoleon arrived in that capital, seven Ministers of the Crown and a crowd of officials promptly took the oath of allegiance to him. Writing of the demoralization prevalent in Prussia at the time, the same German historian says: “Not only did the Junkers, who had hitherto boasted that they were the chief pillars of the State, break like dried reeds in the wind; the other ‘pillars’—the bureaucracy, the learned classes, and the higher society down to the burgher class, covered themselves with shame in those days.” In every rank of society faithlessness and cowardice were shown in their unloveliest forms. Jews sold themselves into Napoleon’s pay, and in servile newspapers proclaimed his fame and denounced everything Prussian, yet when the usurper had been overthrown the same men arrogantly claimed that they had saved the country. One Hebrew writer asserted that at Waterloo fifty-five officers of his race had fallen, though the number of officers lost in the entire Prussian army was only twenty-four.

But Prussia had no monopoly of sycophancy and treachery in those days. The rulers of Bavaria, Saxony, Würtemberg, and Baden all danced attendance upon the conqueror, enrolled themselves in his retinue, and seemed happy in their new service. What was right in the ruler was more than pardonable in the ruled. The professors of Leipzig effusively greeted Napoleon as the hero of his age. Even Goethe, the honoured leader of the nation’s intellectual life, could watch from his Weimar home the fall and rise of Germany at that time without emotion; he philosophized and wondered, but was unperturbed. His admirers excused this apparent apathy by his age, yet when Napoleon partitioned a large part of Germany amongst his favourites the author of Faust was only fifty-six. Nowhere was the old rule thrown off more lightly and the new rule accepted more readily than in the Rhineland, whose populations had already changed sovereignty and form of government so often. It is difficult for men to be patriotic who are not certain to what country they belong to-day or to what country they will belong to-morrow, and though the Rhenish peoples have been reproached for the facility with which they changed their allegiance, their indifference may be excused, at least in part, by the tragedy of their position. No greater shame ever fell upon countries or nations than that which the German Princes brought upon their own lands and peoples over a hundred years ago.

The facts thus briefly stated will help the reader to visualize the German question as it presented itself at the beginning of the nineteenth century. There remained no longer a Germany, but only the disjointed members of a Germany that had been. To bring these members together, to kindle a new national consciousness, to weld the many races into a political unity, was a task to be achieved by efforts long continued and means the most diverse—by statecraft and diplomacy, by parliaments, universities, and schools, by commerce and railways, by customs unions and military conventions, by revolution and war, above all by a stern political discipline which should subordinate the individual State and citizen to the needs and interests of a larger commonwealth and a new nation. Hardly might it have seemed possible that a German Empire could be recreated out of elements so unpromising, yet it was in that time of national abasement and humiliation that the spirit of unity originated. Periods of progress were to alternate with periods of stagnation, periods of buoyant confidence with those of depression and disillusionment, before the ideal, passing through all the gradations of doubt, hope, and probability, could reach the firm ground of certitude; yet if the way was to be long, so much surer was the goal.

In 1813–14 a supreme effort was made, under Prussia’s leadership, to throw off the French yoke, and it succeeded. Yet in the campaign which sealed Napoleon’s fate the King of Saxony fought in the Corsican’s army and King Frederick of Würtemberg wrote to wish him “a happy return” to Germany. All Europe, Princes and people alike, breathed again freely after 1814, and most relieved of all were those German Sovereigns who had bartered themselves into Napoleon’s service, had taken their orders from him, marched under his banners, fought his battles against their own countrymen, and had been proud to receive their crowns at his hand. Now began the work of internal reconstruction. The old States were restored, but not in every case the old frontiers. On November 1, 1814, the Congress of Vienna assembled in order to decide on the future constitution of Germany. Prince Metternich, the Austrian Chancellor, who was destined to exert a baneful influence on the development of German political life for over a generation, was the President and almost the dictator of the assembly. The Princes marked their patriotism by indulging in a greedy scramble for territory, bartering souls like chattels, and rectifying boundaries like the fences of their forests and parks. Every German State strong enough to press its claims wished to be enlarged at the expense of its weaker neighbours. Prussia wanted the whole of Saxony, while Austria, England, and France, supported by Bavaria and other States of the dissolved Rhenish Federation, opposed the demand.¹ Nevertheless, Prussia did well for herself, for she obtained a large slice of the Saxon kingdom—the present province of that name—most of Westphalia, some territory on the left bank of the Rhine, and Swedish Pomerania, while the territory of which Napoleon had robbed her was restored. Bavaria received Ansbach and Bayreuth, and Hanover received East Friesland.

Though the Confederation of the Rhine and the kingdom of Westphalia had disappeared, they left behind them traces and traditions important for the future development of German political life. Westphalia had been given a constitutional system of government, and in the States united in the Rhenish Confederation the principles of the French Revolution, in their good as in their less attractive aspects, had been applied, though in most of them the earlier constitutional arrangements, such as they were, were for the time suspended. Hence, during the time that the seal of France rested upon it, Western Germany received political impressions which were never wholly removed; a break with the Empire was made in political thought and life; and when the detached territories went back to the old allegiance their populations retained much French influence, and Paris for a time interested them more than Berlin or capitals nearer home. Above all, they gained a fixed bias towards Liberalism and an appreciation of free institutions which have never ceased to single them out from the rest of the country; without being denationalized, they had become singularly open to progressive influences from the outside.

“When a man like Napoleon falls he falls altogether,” wrote the Russian diplomat Count Nesselrode, after the battle of Leipzig (October 18, 1813). So good an apothegm deserved to be true, but it miscarried. At that great “battle of the peoples” the conqueror’s dream of world dominion was, indeed, shattered, yet though Napoleon was sent a captive to Elba six months later, the end was not yet. Before the Congress of Vienna had completed its work, the dethroned Emperor returned to France (March 1, 1815), and the war was resumed. It is characteristic of the selfish particularism which ruled even in that time of danger that the Prussian general Gneisenau, than whom no soldier was more a politician or fonder of committing his immature political ideas to paper, drew up a memorial proposing that unless the Allies granted Prussia’s territorial demands beforehand she should withdraw and enter into an alliance with Napoleon. Gneisenau gave this document to the Chancellor Hardenberg, and asked that it might be offered for the King’s consideration. The discreet Minister, however, returned it to its author with the comment that what it proposed was a “moral enormity” which could not be even whispered in the royal ear.

After Waterloo had been fought (June 18, 1815), and the disturber of Europe had been sent to his “sullen isle,” St. Helena, there to gaze upon the sea which he had vainly hoped to conquer,¹ the Congress of Vienna faced the larger problem of the future of Germany. Here opinions were hopelessly divided. Baron vom Stein, believing that the surest pledge of national unity and of the continuity of the German name lay in the intimate association of the small with the two major States, was ready to welcome the revival of the Empire, still under the house of Habsburg, as the best means of securing this end. Hanover favoured this course, and in so doing almost stood alone. The King of Prussia, usually slow to make up his mind upon political questions, was quick to recognize the danger and fatuity of Stein’s view, and in rejecting it he was supported by Hardenberg and Humboldt, the former opposi...

Índice

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• CHAPTER I: THE GERMANIC FEDERATION: (1806–1848)
• CHAPTER II: THE FRANKFORT NATIONAL ASSEMBLY: (1848–1851)
• CHAPTER III: BISMARCK—THE FIRST PHASE: (1851–1861)
• CHAPTER IV: THE PRUSSIAN CONSTITUTIONAL CONFLICT: (1858–1863)
• CHAPTER V: THE ELBE DUCHIES AND THE DANISH WAR: (1846–1865)
• CHAPTER VI: THE EXTRUSION OF AUSTRIA: (1865–1866)
• CHAPTER VII: THE NORTH GERMAN CONFEDERATION: (1866–1867)
• CHAPTER VIII: THE HOHENZOLLERN CANDIDATURE: (1867–1870)
• CHAPTER IX: THE WAR WITH FRANCE: (1870–1871)
• CHAPTER X: THE NEW EMPIRE: (1870–1874)
• CHAPTER XI: CHURCH AND STATE: (1868–1883)
• CHAPTER XII: SOCIAL DEMOCRACY: (1848–1888)
• INDEX