Part 6

Though Frederick William II marched into France in 1792, to support the French monarchy, neither his army nor his people were prepared or fit for this enterprise, and he soon retired. In 1793, Prussia joined Russia in a second partition of Poland, but in 1795, angry with what was considered the double dealing of Austria and Russia, Prussia concluded a peace with France, the treaty of Basle was signed in 1795, and for ten years Prussia practically took no part in the Napoleonic wars.

Napoleon took over the lands on the left bank of the Rhine, took away the freedom of forty-eight towns, leaving only Hamburg, Bremen, Frankfort, Augsburg, and Nuremberg, and in 1803 he took Hanover. Later, in 1805, Bavaria, Wuertemberg, and Baden aided Napoleon to fight the alliance against him of Austria, England, Russia, and Sweden. In that same year the Electors of Wuertemberg and Bavaria were made kings by Napoleon. In 1806 Bavaria, Baden, Wuertemberg, and Hessen seceded from the German Empire, formed themselves into the Confederation of the Rhine, and acknowledged Napoleon as their protector. In 1806 Francis II, Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, resigned, and there was neither an empire nor an emperor of Germany, nor was there a Germany of united interests.

In 1806 Frederick William III, driven by the grossest insults to his country and to his wife, finally declared war against France; there followed the battle of Jena, in which the Germans were routed, and in that same year Napoleon marched into Berlin unopposed. In 1807 the Russian Emperor was persuaded to make peace, and Prussia without her ally was helpless. The Peace of Tilsit, in July, 1807, deprived Prussia of the whole of the territory between the Elbe and the Rhine, and this with Brunswick, Hessen-Cassel, and part of Hanover was dubbed the Kingdom of Westphalia, and Napoleon's youngest brother Jerome was made king. The Polish territory of Prussia was given to the Elector of Saxony, who was also rewarded for having deserted Prussia after the battle of Jena by being made a king. Prussia was further required to reduce her army to forty-two thousand men.

It is neither a pretty nor an inspiriting story, this of the mangling of Germany by Napoleon; of the German princes bribed by kingly crowns from the hands of an ancestorless Corsican; but it all goes to show how far from any sense of common aims and duties, how far from the united Vaterland of to-day, was the Germany of a hundred years ago. It adds, too, immeasurably to the laurels of the man who produced the present German Empire out of his own pocket, and stood as chief sponsor at its christening at Versailles in 1871.

This Prussia that sent twenty thousand troops to aid Napoleon against Russia, and which during the retreat from Moscow went over bodily to the enemy; this Prussia whose vacillating king simpered with delight at a kind word from Napoleon, and shivered with dismay at a harsh one; this army with its officers as haughty as they were incapable, and its men only prevented from wholesale desertion by severe punishment, an army rotten at the core, with a coat of varnish over its worm-eaten fabric; this Prussia humiliated and disgraced after the battle of Jena, in 1806, in seven years' time came into its own again. Vom Stein, Scharnhorst, the son of a Hanoverian peasant, and Hardenberg put new life into the state. At Waterloo the pummelled squares of red-coats were relieved by these Prussians, and Bluecher, or "Old Marschall Vorwaerts" as he was called, redeemed his countrymen's years of effeminate lassitude and vacillation.

"Such was Vorwaerts, such a fighter, Such a lunging, plunging smiter, Always stanch and always straight, Strong as death for love or hate, Always first in foulest weather, Neck or nothing, hell for leather, Through or over, sink or swim, Such was Vorwaerts--here's to him!"

Napoleon goes to Saint Helena and dies in 1821. What he did for Germany was to prove to her how impossible was a cluster of jealous, malicious provincial little state governments in the heart of Europe, protecting themselves from falling apart by the ancient legislative scaffolding of the Holy Roman Empire. He squeezed three hundred states into thirty-eight, and the very year of Waterloo, on April the 1st, a German Napoleon was born who was to further squeeze these states into what is known to-day as the German Empire.

The Congress of Vienna was a meeting of the European powers to redistribute the possessions, that Napoleon had scattered as bribes and rewards among his friends, relatives, and enemies, so far as possible, among their rightful owners.

From the island of Elba, off the coast of Tuscany, Napoleon looked on while the allies quarrelled at this Congress of Vienna. Prussia claimed the right to annex Saxony; Russia demanded Poland, and against them were leagued England, Austria, and France, France represented by the Mephistophelian Talleyrand, who strove merely to stir the discord into another war. In the midst of their deliberations word came that the wolf was in the fold again. Napoleon was riding to Paris, through hysterical crowds of French men and women, eager for another throw against the world, if their Little Corporal were there to shake the dice for them. He had another throw and lost. The French Revolution in 1789, followed by the insurrection of all Europe against that strange gypsy child of the Revolution, Napoleon, from 1807-1815, ended at last at Waterloo. This lover, who won whole nations as other men win a maid or two; this ruler, who had popes for handmaidens and gave kingdoms as tips, who dictated to kings preferably from the palaces of their own capitals; this fortunate demon of a man, who had escaped even Mlle. Montausier, was safely disposed of at Saint Helena, and the ordinary ways of mortals had their place in the world again.

The Congress of Vienna reassembled, and the readjustment of the map of Europe began over again. Prussia is given back what had been taken away from her. A German confederation was formed in 1815 to resist encroachments, but with no definite political idea, and its diet, to which Prussia, Austria, and the other smaller states sent representatives, became the laughing-stock of Europe. Jealous bickerings and insistence upon silly formalities paralyzed legislation. Lawyers and others who presented their claims before this assembly from 1806-1816 were paid in 1843! The liquidation of the debts of the Thirty Years' War was made after two hundred years, in 1850! The laws for the military forces were finally agreed upon in 1821, and put in force in 1840!

There were three principal forms of government among these states: first, Absolutist, where the ruler and his officials governed without reference to the people, as in Prussia and Austria; second, those who organized assemblies (Landslaende), where no promises were made to the people, but where the nobles and notables were called together for consultation; and third, a sort of constitutional monarchy with a written constitution and elected representatives, but with the ruler none the less supreme. One of the first rulers to grant such a constitution to his people was the Grand Duke who presided over the little court at Weimar.

The mass of the people were wholly indifferent. The intellectuals were divided among themselves. The schools and universities after 1818 form associations and societies, the Burschenschaft, for example, and in a hazy professorial fashion talk and shout of freedom. They were of those passionate lovers of liberty, more intent on the dower than on the bride; willing to talk and sing and to tell the world of their own deserts, but with little iron in their blood.

When a real man wants to be free he fights, he does not talk; he takes what he wants and asks for it afterward; he spends himself first and affords it afterward. These dreamy gentlemen could never make the connection between their assertions and their actions. They were as inconsistent, as a man who sees nothing unreasonable in circulating ascetic opinions and a perambulator at the same time. They were dreary and technical advocates of liberty.

At a great festival at the Wartburg, in 1817, the students got out of hand, burned the works of those conservatives, Haller and Kotzebue, and the Code Napoleon. This youthful folly was purposely exaggerated throughout Germany, and was used by the party of autocracy to frighten the people, and also as a reason for passing even severer laws against the ebullitions of liberty. At a conference at Carlsbad in 1819 the representatives of the states there assembled passed severe laws against the student societies, the press, the universities, and the liberal professors.

From 1815-1830 the opinions of the more enlightened changed. The fear of Napoleon was gradually forgotten, and the hatred of the absolutism of Prussia and Austria grew.

In 1830 constitutions were demanded and were guardedly granted in Brunswick, Saxony, Hanover, and Hesse-Cassel. In 1832 things had gone so far that at a great student festival the black, red, and gold flag of the Burschenschaft was hoisted, toasts were drunk to the sovereignty of the people, to the United States of Germany, and to Europe Republican! This was followed by further prosecutions. Prussia condemned thirty-nine students to death, but confined them in a fortress. The prison-cell of the famous Fritz Reuter may be seen in Berlin to-day. In Hesse, the chief of the liberal party, Jordan, was condemned to six years in prison; in Bavaria a journalist was imprisoned for four years, and other like punishments followed elsewhere. It was in 1857, when Queen Victoria came to the throne, that Hanover was cut off from the succession, as Hanover could not descend to a woman. The Duke of Cumberland became the ruler of Hanover, and England ceased to hold any territory in Europe.

From 1839-1847 there was comparative quiet in the political world. The rulers of the various states succeeded in keeping the liberal professorial rhetoric too damp to be valuable as an explosive.

Interwoven with this party in Germany, demanding for the people something more of representation in the government, was a movement for the binding together of the various states in a closer union. In 1842 when the first stone was laid for the completion of the Cologne Cathedral, at a banquet of the German princes presided over by the King of Prussia, the King of Wuertemberg proposed a toast to "Our common country!" That toast probably marks the first tangible proof of the existence of any important feeling upon the subject of German unity.

At a congress of Germanists at Frankfort, in 1846, professors and students, jurists and historians, talked and discussed the questions of a German parliament and of national unity more perhaps than matters of scholarship.

In 1847 Professor Gervinus founded at Heidelberg the Deutsche Zeitung, which was to be liberal, national, and for all Germany.

I should be sorry to give the impression that I have not given proper value to the work of the German professor and student in bringing about a more liberal constitution for the states of Germany. Liebig of Munich, Ranke of Berlin, Sybel of Bonn, Ewald of Goettingen, Mommsen in Berlin, Doellinger in Munich, and such men as Schiemann in Berlin to-day, were and are, not only scholars, but they have been and are political teachers; some of them violently reactionary, if you please, but all of them stirring men to think.

No such feeling existed then, or exists now, in Germany, as animated Oxford some fifty years ago when the greatest Sanscrit scholar then living was rejected by a vote of that body, one voter declaring: "I have always voted against damned intellect, and I trust I always may!" A state of mind that has not altogether disappeared in England even now. Indeed I am not sure, that the most notable feature of political life in England to-day, is not a growing revolt against legislation by tired lawyers, and an increasing demand for common-sense governing again, even if the governing be done by those with small respect for "damned intellect."

The third French revolution of 1848 set fire to all this, not only in Germany but in Austria, Hungary, Roumania, and elsewhere. We must go rapidly through this period of seething and of political teething. The parliament at Frankfort with nothing but moral authority discussed and declaimed, and finally elected Archduke John of Austria as "administrator" of the empire. There followed discussions as to whether Austria should even become a member of the new confederation. Two parties, the "Little Germanists" and the "Pan Germanists," those in favor of including, and those opposed to the inclusion of Austria, fought one another, with Prussia leading the one and Austria, with the prestige of having been head of the former Holy Roman Empire, the other.

In 1849 Austria withdrew altogether and the King of Prussia was elected Emperor of Germany, but refused the honor on the ground that he could not accept the title from the people, but only from his equals. There followed riots and uprisings of the people in Prussia, Saxony, Baden, and elsewhere throughout Germany. The Prussian guards were sent to Dresden to quell the rioting there and took the city after two days' fighting. The parliament itself was dispersed and moved to Stuttgart, but there again they were dispersed, and the end was a flight of the liberals to Switzerland, France, and the United States. We in America profited by the coming of such valuable citizens as Carl Schurz and many others. There were driven from Germany, they and their descendants, many among our most valuable citizens. The descendant of one of the worthiest of them, Admiral Osterhaus, is one of the most respected officers in our navy, and will one day command it, and we could not be in safer hands. In 1849 the German Federal fleet was sold at auction as useless; Austria was again in the ascendant and German subjects in Schleswig were handed over to the Danes.

In 1850 both the King of Prussia and the Emperor of Austria called congresses, but Prussia finally gave up hers, and the ancient confederation as of before 1848 met as a diet at Frankfort and from 1851-1858 Bismarck was the Prussian delegate and Austria presided over the deliberations.

A factor that made for unity among the German states was the Zollverein. From 1818-1853 under the leadership of Prussia the various states were persuaded to join in equalizing their tariffs. Between 1834-5 Prussia, Bavaria, Wuertemberg, Saxony, Baden, Hesse-Nassau, Thuringia, and Frankfort agreed upon a common standard for customs duties, and a few years later they were joined by Brunswick, Hanover, and the Mecklenburgs. German industry and commerce had their beginnings in these agreements. The hundreds of different customs duties became so exasperating that even jealous little governments agreed to conform to simpler laws, and probably this commercial necessity did more to bring about the unity of Germany than the King, or politics, or the army.

With the struggles of the various states to obtain constitutions we cannot deal, nor would it add to the understanding of the present political condition of the German Empire.

Prussia, after riots in Berlin, after promises and delays from the vacillating King, who one day orders his own troops out of the capital and his brother, later William I, to England to appease the anger of the mob, and parades the streets with the colors of the citizens in revolt wrapped about him; and the next day, surly, obstinate, but ever orating, holds back from his pledges, finally accepts a constitution which is probably as little democratic as any in the world.