Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4
by
Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks

Part 6 out of 8




The great political drama enacting in Europe excited at this time the
deepest attention throughout Germany. In almost every country a
struggle commenced between liberalism and the measures introduced on
the fall of Napoleon. In France more particularly it systematically
and gradually undermined the government of the Bourbons, and the cry
of liberty that resounded throughout France once more found an echo in
Germany.

The terrible war was forgotten. The French again became the objects of
the admiration and sympathy of the radical party in Germany, and the
spirit of opposition, here and there demonstrated in the German
chambers, gave rise, notwithstanding its impotence, to precautionary
measures on the part of the federative governments. In the winter of
1819, a German federative congress, of which Prince Metternich was the
grand motor, assembled at Vienna for the purpose, after the utter
annihilation of the patriots, of finally checking the future movements
of the liberals, principally in the provincial diets. The Viennese Act
of 1820 contains closer definitions of the Federative Act, of which
the more essential object was the exclusion of the various provincial
diets from all positive interference in the general affairs of
Germany, and the increase of the power of the different princes
vis-a-vis to their provincial diets by a guarantee of aid on the part
of the confederates.

During the sitting of this congress, on New Year's Day, 1820, the
liberal party in Spain revolted against their ungrateful sovereign,
Ferdinand VII., who exercised the most fearful tyranny over the nation
that had so unhesitatingly shed its blood in defence of his throne.
This example was shortly afterward followed by the Neapolitans, who
were also dissatisfied with the conduct of their sovereign. Prince
Metternich instantly brought about a congress at Troppau. The czar,
Alexander, who had views upon the East and was no stranger to the
heterarchical party which, under the guidance of Prince Ypsilanti,
prepared a revolution in Greece (which actually broke out) against the
Turks, was at first unwilling to give his assent unconditionally to
the interference of Austria, but on being, in 1821, to his great
surprise, informed by Prince Metternich of the existence of a
revolutionary spirit in one of the regiments of the Russian guard,
freely assented to all the measures proposed by that minister.[1] The
new congress held at Laibach, in 1821, was followed by the entrance of
the Austrians under Frimont into Italy. The cowardly Neapolitans fled
without firing a shot, and the Piedmontese, who unexpectedly revolted
to Frimont's rear, were, after a short encounter with the Austrians
under Bubna at Novara, defeated and reduced to submission. The Greeks,
whom Russia now no longer ventured openly to uphold, had, in the
meantime, also risen in open insurrection. The affairs of Spain were
still in an unsettled state. The new congress held at Verona, in 1822,
however, decided the fate of both these countries. Prince Hardenberg,
the Prussian minister, expired at Genoa on his return home, and Lord
Castlereagh, the English ambassador, cut his throat with his penknife,
in a fit of frenzy, supposed to have been induced by the sense of his
heavy responsibility. At this congress the principle of legitimacy was
maintained with such strictness that even the revolt of the Greeks
against the long and cruel tyranny of the Turks was, notwithstanding
the _Christian spirit of the Holy Alliance_ and the political
advantage secured to Russia and Austria by the subversion of the
Turkish empire, treated as rebellion against the legitimate authority
of the Porte and strongly discouraged. A French army was, on the same
grounds, despatched with the consent of the Bourbon into Spain, and
Ferdinand was reinstated in his legitimate tyranny in 1823. Russia, in
a note addressed to the whole of the confederated states of Germany,
demanded at the same time a declaration on their parts to the effect
that the late proceedings of the great European powers at Verona "were
in accordance with the well-understood interests of the people." Every
member of the federative assembly at Frankfort gave his assent, with
the exception of the Freiherr von Wangenheim, the envoy from
Wurtemberg, who declaring that his instructions did not warrant his
voting upon the question, the ambassadors from the two Hesses made a
similar declaration. This occasioned the dismissal of the Freiherr von
Wangenheim; and the illegal publication of a Wurtemberg despatch, in
which the non-participation of the German confederation in the
resolutions passed by the congresses, to which their assent was
afterward demanded, was treated of, occasioned a second dismissal,
that of Count Winzingerode, the Wurtemberg minister. In the July of
1824, the federal diet resolved to give its support to the monarchical
principle in the constitutional states, and to maintain the Carlsbad
resolutions referring to censorship and to the universities. The
Mayence committee remained sitting until 1828.

On the sudden decease of Alexander, the czar of all the Russias, amid
the southern steppes, a revolution induced by the nobility broke out
at Petersburg, but was suppressed by Alexander's brother and
successor, the emperor Nicholas I. Nicholas had wedded Charlotte, the
eldest daughter of the king of Prussia. This energetic sovereign
instantly invaded Persia and rendered that country dependent upon his
empire without any attempt being made by the Tory party in England and
Austria to hinder the aggrandizement of Russia, every attack directed
against her being regarded as an encouragement to liberalism. Russia
consequently seized this opportunity to turn her arms against Turkey,
and, in the ensuing year, a Russian force under Count Diebitsch, a
Silesian, crossed the Balkan (Haemus) and penetrated as far as
Adrianople; while another corps d'armee under Count Paskiewicz,
advanced from the Caucasus into Asia Minor and took Erzerum. The fall
of Constantinople seemed near at hand, when Austria and England for
the first time intervened and declared that, notwithstanding their
sympathy with the absolute principles on which Russia rested, they
would not permit the seizure of Constantinople. France expressed her
readiness to unite with Russia and to fall upon the Austrian rear in
case troops were sent against the Russians.[2] Prussia, however,
intervened, and General Muffling was dispatched to Adrianople, where,
in 1829, a treaty was concluded, by which Russia, although for the
time compelled to restore the booty already accumulated, gained
several considerable advantages, being granted possession of the most
important mountain strongholds and passes of Asia Minor, a right to
occupy and fortify the mouths of the Danube so important to Austria,
and to extend her aegis over Moldavia and Wallachia.

In the midst of this wretched period, which brought fame to Russia and
deep dishonor upon Germany, there still gleamed one ray of hope; the
Customs' Union was proposed by some of the German princes for the more
intimate union of German interests.

Maximilian of Bavaria, a prince whose amiable manners and character
rendered him universally beloved, expired in 1825. His son, Louis, the
foe to French despotism, a German patriot and a zealous patron of the
arts, declared himself, on his coronation, the warm and sincere
upholder of the constitutional principle and excited general
enthusiasm. His first measures on assuming the government were the
reduction of the royal household and of the army with a view to the
relief of the country from the heavy imposts, the removal of the
university of Landshut to Munich, and the enrichment on an extensive
scale of the institutions of art. The union of the galleries of
Duesseldorf and Mannheim with that of Munich, the collection of
valuable antiques and pictures, for instance, that of the old German
paintings collected by the brothers Boisseree in Cologne during the
French usurpation, the academy of painting under the direction of the
celebrated Cornelius, the new public buildings raised by Klenze, among
which the Glyptothek, the Pinakothek, the great Koenigsbau or royal
residence, the Ludwigschurch, the Auerchurch, the Arcades, etc., may
be more particularly designated, rendered Munich the centre of German
art. This sovereign also founded at Ratisbon the Walhalla, a building
destined for the reception of the busts of all the celebrated men to
whom Germany has given birth. The predilection of this royal amateur
for classic antiquity excited within his bosom the warmest sympathy
with the fate of the modern Greeks, then in open insurrection against
their Turkish oppressors, and whom he alone, among all the princes of
Germany, aided in the hour of their extremest need.--With the same
spirit that dictated his poems, in which he so repeatedly lamented the
want of unity in Germany, he was the first to propose the union of her
material interests. Germany unhappily resembled, and indeed
immediately after the war of liberation, as De Pradt, the French
writer, maliciously observed, even in a mercantile point of view, a
menagerie whose inhabitants watched each other through a grating.
Vainly had the commercial class of Frankfort on the Maine presented a
petition, in 1819, to the confederation, praying for free trade, for
the fulfilment of the nineteenth article of the federal act. Their
well-grounded complaint remained unheard. The non-fulfilment of the
treaty relating to the free navigation of the Rhine to the sea was
most deeply felt. In the first treaty concluded at Paris, the royal
dignity and the extension of the Dutch territory had been generously
granted to the king of the Netherlands under the express proviso of
the free navigation of the Rhine to the sea. The papers relating to
this transaction had been drawn up in French, and the ungrateful Dutch
perfidiously gave the words "jusqu' a la mer" their most literal
construction, merely "as far as the sea," and as the French, moreover,
possessed a voice in the matter on account of the Upper Rhine, and the
German federal states were unable to give a unanimous verdict,
innumerable committees were held and acts were drawn up without
producing any result favorable to the trade of Germany.

Affairs stood thus, when, shortly after Louis's accession to the
throne of Bavaria, negotiations having for object the settlement of a
commercial treaty took place between him and William, king of
Wurtemberg. This example was imitated by Prussia, which at first
merely formed a union with Darmstadt; afterward by Hesse, Hanover,
Saxony, etc., by which a central German union was projected. This
union was, however, unable to stand between that of Wurtemberg and
Bavaria, and that of Prussia and Darmstadt. The German Customs' Union
was carried into effect in 1888. An annual meeting of German
naturalists had at that time been arranged under the auspices of Oken,
the great naturalist, and at the meeting held at Berlin, in 1888, the
Freiherr von Cotta, by whom the moral and material interests of
Germany have been greatly promoted, drew up the first plan for a
junction of the commercial union of Southern Germany with that of the
North, as the first step to the future liberation of Germany from all
internal commercial restrictions. The zeal with which he carried this
great plan into effect gained the confidence of the different
governments, and he not only succeeded in combining the two older
unions, but also in gradually embodying with them the rest of the
German states.

The attachment of King Louis to ancient Catholicism was extremely
remarkable. He began to restore some of the monasteries, and several
professors inclined to Ultramontanism and to Catholic mysticism, the
most distinguished among whom was Goerres, the Prussian exile,
assembled at the new university at Munich. Here and there appeared a
pious enthusiast. Shortly after the restoration, a peasant from the
Pfalz named Adam Mueller began to prophesy, and Madame von Krudener, a
Hanoverian, to preach the necessity of public penance; both these
persons gained the ear of exalted personages, and Madame von Krudener
more particularly is said not a little to have conduced to the piety
displayed by the emperor Alexander during the latter years of his
life. At Bamberg, Prince Alexander von Hohenlohe, then a young man,
had the folly to attempt the performance of miracles, until the police
interfered, and he received a high ecclesiastical office in Hungary.
In Austria, the Ligorians, followers in the footsteps of the Jesuits,
haunted the vicinity of the throne. The conversion of Count Stolberg
and of the Swiss, Von Haller, to the Catholic church, created the
greatest sensation. The former, a celebrated poet, simple and amiable,
in no way merited the shameless outbursts of rage of his old friend,
Voss; Haller, on the other hand, brought forward in his "Restoration
of Political Science" such a decided theory in favor of secession as
to inspire a sentiment of dread at his consistency. The conversion of
Ferdinand, prince of Anhalt-Koethen, to the Catholic church, in 1825,
excited far less attention.

In France, where the Bourbons were completely guided by the Jesuits,
by whose aid they could alone hope to suppress the revolutionary
spirit of their subjects, the reaction in favor of Catholicism had
assumed a more decided character than in Germany. Louis XVIII. was
succeeded by his brother, the Count d'Artois, under the name of
Charles X., a venerable man seventy years of age, who, notwithstanding
his great reverses, had "neither learned nor forgotten anything."
Polignac, his incapable and imperious minister, the tool of the
Jesuits, had, since 1829, impugned every national right, and, at
length, ventured by the ordinances of the 25th July, 1830, to subvert
the constitution. During three days, from the 27th to the 30th of
July, the greatest confusion reigned in Paris; the people rose in
thousands; murderous conflicts took place in the streets between them
and the royal troops, who were driven from every quarter, and the king
was expelled. The chambers met, declared the elder branch of the house
of Bourbon (Charles X., his son, the Dauphin, Duke d'Angouleme, and
his grandson, the youthful Duke de Bordeaux, the son of the murdered
Duke de Berri) to have forfeited the throne, but at the same time
allowed them unopposed to seek an asylum in England, and elected Louis
Philippe, Duke of Orleans, the son of the notorious Jacobin, the head
of the younger line of the house of Bourbon and the grand-master of
the society of Freemasons, king of the French. The rights of the
chambers and of the people were also extended by an appendix to the
charta signed by Louis XVIII.

The revolution of July was the signal for all discontented subjects
throughout Europe to gain, either by force or by legal opposition,
their lost or sighed-for rights. In October, the constitutional party
in Spain attempted to overturn the despotic rule of Ferdinand VII. In
November, the prime minister of England, the renowned Duke of
Wellington, was compelled by the people to yield his seat to Earl
Grey, a man of more liberal principles, who commenced the great work
of reform in the constitution and administration of Great Britain.
During this month, a general insurrection took place in Poland: the
grandduke, Constantine, was driven out of Warsaw, and Poland declared
herself independent. A great part of Germany was also convulsed: and a
part of the ill-raised fabric, erected by the statesmen of 1815, fell
tottering to the ground.


[Footnote 1: Vide Binder's Prince Metternich.]

[Footnote 2: Official report of the Russian ambassador, Count Pozzo di
Borgo, from Paris, of the 14th of December, 1828.]



CCLXVII. The Belgian Revolution


A nation's self-forgetfulness is ever productive of national disgrace.
The Netherlands were torn from the empire and placed partly beneath
the tyranny of Spain, partly beneath the aegis of France; the dominion
of Austria, at a later period, merely served to rouse their provincial
spirit, and, during their subsequent annexation to France, the French
element decidedly gained the ascendency among the population. When, in
1815, these provinces fell under the rule of Holland, it was hoped
that the German element would again rise. But Holland is not Germany.
Estranged provinces are alone to be regained by means of their
incorporation with an empire imbued with one distinct national spirit;
the subordination of one province to another but increases national
antipathy and estrangement. Holland, by an ungrateful, inimical
policy, unfortunately strove to separate herself from Germany.[1] And
yet Holland owes her whole prosperity to Germany. There is her market;
thence does she draw her immense wealth; the loss of that market for
her colonial productions would prove her irredeemable ruin. Her
sovereign, driven into distant exile, was restored to her by the arms
of Germany and generously endowed with royalty. Holland, in return for
all these benefits, deceitfully deprived Germany of the free
navigation of the Rhine to the sea guaranteed to her by the federal
act and assumed the right of fixing the price of all goods, whether
imported to or exported from Germany. The whole of Germany was, in
this unprecedented manner, rendered doubly tributary to the petty
state of Holland.

Belgium, annexed to this secondary state instead of being incorporated
with great and liberal Germany, necessarily remained a stranger to any
influence calculated to excite her sympathy with the general interests
of Germany. Cut off, as heretofore, from German influence, she
retained, in opposition to the Dutch, a preponderance of the old
Spanish and modern French element in her population. Priests and
liberals, belonging to the French school, formed an opposition party
against the king, who, on his side, rested his sole support upon the
Dutch, whom he favored in every respect. Count Broglio, archbishop of
Ghent, first began the contest by refusing to take the oath on the
constitution. Violence was resorted to and he fled the country. The
impolicy of the government in affixing his name to the pillory merely
served to increase the exasperation of the Catholics. Hence their
acquiescence with the designs of the Jesuits, their opposition to the
foundation of a philosophical academy, independent of the clergy, at
Louvain. The fact of the population of Belgium being to that of
Holland as three to two and the number of its representatives in the
states-general being as four to seven, of few, if any, Belgians being
allowed to enter the service of the state, the army, or the navy,
still further added to the popular discontent. The gross manners of
the minister, Van Maanen, also increased the evil. As early as
January, 1830, eight liberal Belgian deputies were deprived of their
offices, and De Potter, with some others, who had ventured to defend
them by means of the press, were banished the kingdom under a charge
of high treason.

The Dutch majority in the states-general, notwithstanding its devotion
to the king, rejected the ten years' budget on the ground of its
affording too long a respite to ministerial responsibility, and
protested against the levy of Swiss troops. Slave-trade in the
colonies was also abolished in 1818.

The position of the Netherlands, which, Luxemburg excepted, did not
appertain to the German confederation, continually exposed her, on
account of Belgium, to be attacked on the land side by France, on that
of the sea by her ancient commercial foe, England, and had induced the
king to form a close alliance with Russia. His son, William of Orange,
married a sister of the emperor Alexander.

The colonies did not regain their former prosperity. The Dutch
settlement at Batavia with difficulty defended itself against the
rebellious natives of Sumatra and Java.

The revolution in Paris had an electric effect upon the irritated
Belgians. On the 25th of August, 1830, Auber's opera, "The Dumb Girl
of Portici," the revolt of Masaniello in Naples, was performed at the
Brussels theatre and inflamed the passions of the audience to such a
degree, that, on quitting the theatre, they proceeded to the house of
Libry, the servile newspaper editor, and entirely destroyed it: the
palace of the minister, Van Maanen, shared the same fate. The citizens
placed themselves under arms, and sent a deputation to The Hague to
lay their grievances before the king. The entire population meanwhile
rose in open insurrection, and the whole of the fortresses, Maestricht
and the citadel of Antwerp alone excepted, fell into their hands.
William of Orange, the crown prince, ventured unattended among the
insurgents at Brussels and proposed, as a medium of peace, the
separation of Belgium from Holland in a legislative and administrative
sense. The king also made an apparent concession to the wishes of the
people by the dismissal of Van Maanen, but shortly afterward declared
his intention not to yield, disavowed the step taken by his son, and
allowed some Belgian deputies to be insulted at The Hague. A fanatical
commotion instantly took place at Brussels; the moderate party in the
civic guard was disarmed, and the populace made preparations for
desperate resistance. On the 25th of September, Prince Frederick,
second son to the king of Holland, entered Brussels with a large body
of troops, but encountered barricades and a heavy fire in the Park,
the Place Royal, and along the Boulevards. An immense crowd, chiefly
composed of the people of Liege and of peasants dressed in the blue
smock of the country, had assembled for the purpose of aiding in the
defence of the city. The contest, accompanied by destruction of the
dwelling-houses and by pillage, lasted five days. The Dutch were
accused of practicing the most horrid cruelties upon the defenceless
inhabitants and of thereby heightening the popular exasperation. At
length, on the 27th of September, the prince was compelled to abandon
the city. On the 5th of October, Belgium declared herself independent.
De Potter returned and placed himself at the head of the provisional
government. The Prince of Orange recognized the absolute separation of
Belgium from Holland in a proclamation published at Antwerp, but was,
nevertheless, constrained to quit the country. Antwerp fell into the
hands of the insurgents; the citadel, however, refused to surrender,
and Chasse, the Dutch commandant, caused the magnificent city to be
bombarded, and the well-stored entrepot, the arsenal, and about sixty
or seventy houses, to be set on fire, during the night of the 27th of
October, 1830.[2] The cruelties perpetrated by the Dutch were bitterly
retaliated upon them by the Belgian populace. On the 10th of November,
however, a national Belgian congress met, in which the moderate party
gained the upper hand, principally owing to the influence of the
clergy. De Potter's plan for the formation of a Belgian commonwealth
fell to the ground. The congress decided in favor of the maintenance
of the kingdom, drew up a new constitution, and offered the crown to
the Prince de Nemours, second son of the king of the French. It was,
however, refused by Louis Philippe in the name of his son, in order to
avoid war with the other great European powers. Surlet de Chokier, the
leader of the liberal party, hereupon undertook the provisional
government of the country, and negotiations were entered into with
Prince Leopold of Coburg.

On the 4th of November, a congress, composed of the ministers of
England, Russia, Austria, and Prussia, met at London for the purpose
of settling the Belgian question without disturbing the peace of
Europe, and it was decided that Prince Leopold of Coburg, the widower
of the princess royal of England, a man entirely under British
influence, and who had refused the throne of Greece, should accept
that of Belgium. Eighteen articles favorable to Belgium were granted
to him by the London congress. Scarcely, however, had he reached
Brussels, on the 31st July, 1831, than the fetes given upon that
occasion were disturbed by the unexpected invasion of Belgium by a
numerous and powerful Dutch force. At Hasselt, the Prince of Orange
defeated the Belgians under General Daine, and, immediately advancing
against Leopold, utterly routed him at Tirlemont, on the 12th August.
The threats of France and England, and the appearance of a French army
in Belgium, saved Brussels and compelled the Dutch to withdraw. The
eighteen articles in favor of Belgium were, on the other hand,
replaced by twenty-four others, more favorable to the Dutch, which
Leopold was compelled to accept. The king of Holland, however,
refusing to accept these twenty-four articles, with which,
notwithstanding the concessions therein contained, he was
dissatisfied, the Belgian government took advantage of the undecided
state of the question not to undertake, for the time being, half of
the public debt of Holland, which, by the twenty-four articles, was
laid upon Belgium.

Negotiations dragged on their weary length, and protocol after
protocol followed in endless succession from London. In 1832, Leopold
espoused Louisa, one of the daughters of the king of the French, and
was not only finally recognized by the northern powers, but, by means
of the intervention of England, being backed by a fleet, and by means
of that of France, being backed by an army, compelled Holland to
accept of terms of peace. The French troops under Gerard, unassisted
by the Belgians and watched by a Prussian army stationed on the Meuse,
regularly besieged and took the citadel of Antwerp, on Christmas eve,
1832, gave it up to the Belgians as pertaining to their territory, and
evacuated the country. King William, however, again rejecting the
twenty-four articles, all the other points, the division of the public
debt, the navigation of the Scheldt, and, more than all, the future
destiny of the province of Luxemburg, which formed part of the
confederated states of Germany, had been declared hereditary in the
house of Nassau-Orange, and which, by its geographical position and
the character of its inhabitants, was more nearly connected with
Belgium, remained for the present unsettled. In 1839, Holland was
induced by a fresh demonstration on the part of the great powers to
accept the twenty-four articles, against which Belgium in her turn
protested on the ground of the procrastination on the part of Holland
having rendered her earlier accession to these terms null and void.
Belgium was, however, also compelled to yield. By this fresh agreement
it was settled that the western part of Luxemburg, which had in the
interim fallen away from the German confederation, should be annexed
to Belgium, and that Holland (and the German confederation) should
receive the eastern part of Limburg in indemnity; and that Belgium,
instead of taking upon herself one-half of the public debt of the
Netherlands, should annually pay the sum of five million Dutch guldens
toward defraying the interest of that debt.

The period of the independence of Belgium, brief as it was, was made
use of, particularly under the Nothomb ministry, for the development
of great industrial activity, and, more especially, for the creation
of a system of railroads, until now without its parallel on the
continent. Unfortunately but little was done in favor of the interests
of Germany. The French language had already become so prevalent
throughout Belgium that, in 1840, the provincial councillors of Ghent
were constrained to pass a resolution to the effect that the offices
dependent upon them should, at all events, solely be intrusted to
persons acquainted with the Flemish dialect, and that their rescripts
should be drawn up in that language.--Holland immensely increased her
public debt in consequence of her extraordinary exertions. In 1841,
the king, William I., voluntarily abdicated the throne and retired
into private life, in the enjoyment of an enormous revenue, with a
Catholic countess whom he had wedded. He was succeeded by his son,
William II.


[Footnote 1: "The Netherlands formed, nevertheless, but a weak bulwark
to Germany. Internal disunion, superfluous fortresses, a weak army. On
the one side, a witless, wealthy, haughty aristocracy, an influential
and ignorant clergy; on the other, civic pride, capelocratic
pettiness, Calvinistic _brusquerie_. The policy pursued by the king
was inimical to Germany."--_Stein's Letters._]

[Footnote 2: So bitter was the enmity existing between the Belgians
and the Dutch that the Dutch lieutenant, Van Speyk, when driven by a
storm before Antwerp, blew up his gunboat in the middle of the Scheldt
rather than allow it to fall into the hands of the Belgians.]



CCLXVIII. The Swiss Revolution


The restoration of 1814 had replaced the ancient aristocracy more or
less on their former footing throughout Switzerland. In this country
the greatest tranquillity prevailed; the oppression of the aristocracy
was felt, but not so heavily as to be insupportable. Many benefits,
as, for instance, the draining of the swampy Linththal by Escher of
Zurich, were, moreover, conferred upon the country. Mercenaries were
also continually furnished to the king of France, to the pope, and,
for some time, to the king of the Netherlands. France, nevertheless,
imposed such heavy commercial duties that several of the cantons
leagued together for the purpose of taking reprisals. This
misunderstanding between Switzerland and France unfortunately did not
teach wisdom to the states belonging to the German confederation, and
the Rhine was also barricaded with custom-houses, those graves of
commerce. The Jesuits settled at Freiburg in the Uechtland, where they
founded a large seminary and whence they finally succeeded in
expelling Peter Girard, a man of high merit, noted for the liberality
of his views on education.[1]

The Paris revolution of July also gave rise to a democratic reaction
throughout Switzerland. Berne, by a circular, published September 22,
1830, called upon the other Swiss governments to suppress the
revolutionary spirit by force, and, by so doing, fired the train. The
government of Zurich wisely opposed the circular and made a voluntary
reform. In all the other cantons popular societies sprang up, and,
either by violence or by threats, subverted the ancient governments.
New constitutions were everywhere granted. The immense majority of the
people was in favor of reform, and the aristocracy offered but faint
resistance. Little towns or villages became the centre of the
movements against the capitals. Fischer, an innkeeper from
Merischwanden, seized the city of Aarau; the village of Burgdorf
revolutionized the canton of Berne, the village of Murten the canton
of Freiburg, the village of Weinfelden the canton of Constance; this
example was followed by the peasantry of Solothurn and Vaud; the
government of St. Gall imitated that of Zurich.

Basel was also attempted to be revolutionized by Liestal, but the
wealthy and haughty citizens, principally at the instigation of the
family of Wieland, made head against the peasantry, who were led by
one Gutzwyler. The contest that had taken place in Belgium was here
reacted on a smaller scale. A dispute concerning privileges commencing
between the citizens and the peasantry, bloody excesses ensued and a
complete separation was the result. The peasantry, superior in number,
asserted their right to send a greater number of deputies to the great
council than the cities, and the latter, dreading the danger to which
their civic interests would be thereby exposed, obstinately refused to
comply. Party rage ran high; the Baselese insulted some of the
deputies sent by the peasantry, and the latter, in retaliation, began
to blockade the town. Colonel Wieland made some sallies; the federal
diet interfered, and the peasantry, being dispersed by the federal
troops, revenged themselves during their retreat by plundering the
vale of Reigoldswyler, which had remained true to Basel. In Schwyz,
the Old-Schwyzers and the inhabitants of the outer circles, who,
although for centuries in possession of the rights of citizenship,
were still regarded by the former as their vassals, also fell at
variance, and the latter demanded equal rights or complete separation.
In Neufchatel, Bourguin attempted a revolution against the Prussian
party and took the city, but succumbed to the vigorous measures
adopted by General Pfuel, 1831.

The conduct of the federal diet, which followed in the footsteps of
European policy, and which, by winking at the opposing party and
checking that in favor of progression, sought to preserve the balance,
but served to increase party spirit. In September, 1831, the Radicals
founded at Langenthal, the _Schutzverein_ or protective union, which
embraced all the liberal clubs throughout Switzerland and was intended
to counteract the impending aristocratic counterrevolution. Men like
Schnell of Berne, Troxler the philosopher, etc., stood at its head.
They demanded the abolition of the constitution of 1815 as too
aristocratic and federal, and the foundation of a new one in a
democratic and independent sense for the increase of the external
power and unity of Switzerland, and for her internal security from
petty aristocratic and local views and intrigues. In March, 1832,
Lucerne, Zurich, Berne, Solothurn, St. Gall, Aargau, and Constance
formed a _Concordat_ for the mutual maintenance of their democratic
constitutions until the completion of the revisal of the
confederation. The aristocratic party, Schwyz, Uri, Unterwalden
(actuated by ancient pride and led by the clergy), Basel, and
Neufchatel meanwhile formed the Sarner confederation. In August, the
deposed Bernese aristocracy, headed by Major Fischer, made a futile
attempt to produce a counter-revolution. In the federal diet, the
envoys of the _Concordat_ and the threatening language of the clubs
compelled the members to bring a new federal constitution under
deliberation, but opinions were too divided, and the constitution
projected in 1833 fell to the ground for want of sufficient support.
At the moment of this defeat of the liberal party, Alt-Schwyz, led by
Abyberg, took up arms, took possession of Kuessnacht, and threatened
the _Concordat_, the Baselese at the same time taking the field with
one thousand two hundred men and fourteen pieces of ordnance. The
people were, however, inimical to their cause; Abyberg fled; the
Baselese were encountered by the peasantry in the Hartwald and
repulsed with considerable loss. The federal diet demonstrated the
greatest energy in order to prevent the _Concordat_ and the
_Schutzverein_ from acting in its stead. Schwyz and Basel were
occupied with soldiery; the former was compelled to accept a new
constitution drawn up with a view of pacifying both parties, the
latter to accede to a complete separation between the town and
country. The Sarner confederation was dissolved, and all discontented
cantons were compelled, under pain of the infliction of martial law,
to send envoys to the federal diet. Intrigues, having for object the
alienation of the city of Basel, of Neufchatel, and Valais from the
confederation, were discovered and frustrated by the diet, not without
the approbation of France, the Valais and the road over the Simplon
being thereby prevented from falling beneath the influence of Austria.

In 1833, five hundred Polish refugees, suspected of supporting the
Frankfort attempt in Germany, quitted France for Switzerland, and soon
afterward unsuccessfully invaded Savoy in conjunction with some
Italian refugees. Crowds of refugees from every quarter joined them
and formed a central association, Young Europe, whence branched
others, Young France, Young Poland, Young Germany, and Young Italy.
The principal object of this association was to draw the German
journeymen apprentices (_Handwerks-bursche_) into its interests, and
for this purpose a banquet was given by it to these apprentices in the
Steinbroelzle near Berne. These intrigues produced serious threats on
the side of the great powers, and Switzerland yielded. The greater
part of the refugees were compelled to emigrate through France to
England and America. Napoleon's nephew was, at a later period, also
expelled Switzerland. His mother, Queen Hortense, consort to Louis,
ex-king of Holland, daughter to Josephine Beauharnais, consequently
both stepdaughter and sister-in-law to Napoleon, possessed the
beautiful estate of Arenenberg on the Lake of Constance. On her death
it was inherited by her son, Louis, who, during his residence there,
occupied himself with intrigues directed against the throne of Louis
Philippe. In concert with a couple of military madmen, he introduced
himself into Strasburg, where, with a little hat, in imitation of that
worn by Napoleon, on his head, he proclaimed himself emperor in the
open streets. He was easily arrested. This act was generously viewed
by Louis Philippe as that of a senseless boy, and he was restored to
liberty upon condition of emigrating to America. No sooner, however,
was he once more free, than, returning to Switzerland, he set fresh
intrigues on foot. Louis Philippe, upon this, demanded his expulsion.
Constance would willingly have extended to him the protection due to
one of her citizens, but how were the claims of a Swiss citizen to be
rendered compatible with those of a pretender to the throne of France?
French troops already threatened the frontiers of Switzerland, where,
as in 1793, the people, instead of making preparations for defence,
were at strife among themselves. Louis at length voluntarily abandoned
the country in 1838.

In the beginning of 1839, Dr. Strauss, who, in 1835, had, in his work
entitled "The Life of Jesus," declared the Gospels a cleverly devised
fable, and had, at great pains, sought to refute the historical proofs
of the truth of Christianity, was, on that account, appointed, by the
council of education and of government at Zurich, professor of
divinity to the new Zurich academy. Burgomaster Hirzel (nicknamed "the
tree of liberty" on account of his uncommon height) stood at the head
of the enthusiastic government party by which this extraordinary
appointment had been effected; the people, however, rose _en masse_,
the great council was compelled to meet, and the anti-Christian party
suffered a most disgraceful defeat. Strauss, who had not ventured to
appear in person on the scene of action, was offered and accepted a
pension. The Christian party, concentrated into a committee of faith,
under the presidency of Hurliman, behaved with extreme moderation,
although greatly superior in number to their opponents. The radical
government, ashamed and perplexed, committed blunder after blunder,
and at length threatened violence. Upon this, Hirzel, the youthful
priest of Pfaeffikon, rang the alarm from his parish church, and, on
the 6th of September, 1839, led his parishioners into the city of
Zurich. This example was imitated by another crowd of peasantry,
headed by a physician named Rahn. The government troops attacked the
people and killed nine men. On the fall of the tenth, Hegetschwiler,
the councillor of state, a distinguished savant and physician, while
attempting to restore harmony between the contending parties, the
civic guard turned against the troops and dispersed them. The radical
government and the Strauss faction also fled. Immense masses of
peasantry from around the lake entered the city. A provisional
government, headed by Hiesz and Muralt, and a fresh election, insured
tranquillity.

In the canton of Schwyz, a lengthy dispute, similar to that between
the Vettkoper and Schieringer in Friesland, was carried on between the
Horn and Hoof-men (the wealthy in possession of cattle and the poor
who only possessed a cow or two) concerning their privileges. In 1839,
a violent opposition, similar in nature, was made by the people of
Vaud against the oligarchical power assumed by a few families.

The closing of the monasteries in the Aargau in 1840 gave rise to a
dispute of such importance as to disturb the whole of the
confederation. In the Aargau the church and state had long and
strenuously battled, when the monastery of Muri was suddenly invested
as the seat of a conspiracy, and, on symptoms of uneasiness becoming
perceptible among the Catholic population, the whole country was
flooded with twenty thousand militia raised on the spur of the moment,
and the closing of the monastery of Muri and of all the monasteries in
the Aargau was proclaimed and carried into execution. The rest of the
Catholic cantons and Rome vehemently protested against this measure,
and even some of the Reformed cantons, for the sake of peace, voted at
the diet for the maintenance of the monasteries: the Aargau,
nevertheless, steadily refused compliance.


[Footnote 1: In Lucerne, the disorderly trial of a numerous band of
robbers, which had been headed by an extremely beautiful and talented
girl, named Clara Wendel, made the more noise on account of its
bringing the bandit-like murder of Keller, the aged mayor, and
intrigues, in which the name of the nuncio was mixed up, before the
public. 1825.]



CCLXIX. The Revolution in Brunswick, Saxony, Hesse, Etc.


The Belgian revolution spread into Germany. Liege infected her
neighbor, Aix-la-Chapelle, where, on the 30th of August, 1830, the
workmen belonging to the manufactories raised a senseless tumult which
was a few days afterward repeated by their fellow-workmen at
Elberfeld, Wetzlar, and even by the populace of Berlin and Breslau,
but which solely took a serious character in Brunswick, Saxony,
Hanover, and Hesse.

Charles, duke of Brunswick, was at Paris, squandering the revenue
derived from his territories, on the outburst of the July revolution,
which drove him back to his native country, where he behaved with
increased insolence. His obstinate refusal to abolish the heavy taxes,
to refrain from disgraceful sales, to recommence the erection of
public buildings, and to recognize the provincial Estates, added to
his threat to fire upon the people and his boast that he knew how to
defend his throne better than Charles X. of France, so maddened the
excitable blood of his subjects that, after throwing stones at the
duke's carriage and at an actress on whom he publicly bestowed his
favors, they stormed his palace and set fire to it over his head,
September 7, 1830. Charles escaped through the garden. His brother,
William, supported by Hanover and Prussia, replaced him, recognized
the provincial Estates, granted a new constitution, built a new
palace, and re-established tranquillity. The conduct of the expelled
duke, who, from his asylum in the Harzgebirge, made a futile attempt
to regain possession of Brunswick by means of popular agitation and by
the proclamation of democratical opinions, added to the contempt with
which he treated the admonitions of his superiors, induced the federal
diet to recognize his brother's authority. The ex-duke has, since this
period, wandered over England, France, and Spain, sometimes engaged in
intrigues with Carlists, at others with republicans. In 1836, he
accompanied a celebrated female aeronaut in one of her excursions from
London. The balloon accidentally upset and the duke and his companion
fell to the ground. He was, however, as in his other adventures, more
frightened than hurt.

In Saxony, the progress of enlightenment had long rendered the people
sensible of the errors committed by the old and etiquettish
aristocracy of the court and diet. As early as 1829, all the
grievances had been recapitulated in an anonymous printed address,
and, in the beginning of 1830, on the venerable king, Antony (brother
to Frederick Augustus, deceased 1827), declaring invalid the
settlement of his affairs by the Estates, which evinced a more liberal
spirit than they had hitherto done, and on the prohibition of the
festivities on the 25th of June, the anniversary of the Augsburg
Confession, by the town council of Dresden and by the government
commissioner of the university of Leipzig from devotion to the
Catholic court, a popular tumult ensued in both cities, which was
quelled but to be, a few weeks later, after the revolution of July,
more disastrously renewed. The tumult commenced at Leipzig on the 2d
of September and lasted several days, and, during the night of the
9th, Dresden was stormed from without by two immense crowds of
populace, by whom the police buildings and the town-house were
ransacked and set on fire. Disturbances of a similar nature broke out
at Chemnitz and Bautzen. The king, upon this, nominated his nephew,
Prince Frederick, who was greatly beloved by the people, co-regent;
the civic guard restored tranquillity, the most crying abuses,
particularly those in the city administration, were abolished, and the
constitution was revised. The popular minister, Lindenan, replaced
Einsiedel, who had excited universal detestation.

In the electorate of Hesse, the period of terror occasioned by the
threatening letters addressed to the elector was succeeded by the
agitation characteristic of the times. On the 6th of September, 1830,
a tumultuous rising took place at Cassel; on the 24th, the people of
Hanau destroyed every custom-house stationed on the frontier. The
public was so unanimous and decided in opinion that the elector not
only agreed to abolish the abuses, to convoke the Estates, and to
grant a new constitution, but even placed the reins of government
provisionally in the hands of his son, Prince William, in order to
follow the Countess Reichenbach, who had been driven from Cassel by
the insults of the populace. Prince William was, however, as little as
his father inclined to make concessions; and violent collisions
speedily ensued. He wedded Madame Lehmann, the wife of a Prussian
officer, under the name of the Countess von Schaumburg, and closed the
theatre against his mother, the electress, for refusing to place
herself at her side in public. The citizens sided with the electress,
and when, after some time had elapsed, she again ventured to visit the
theatre, the doors were no longer closed against her, and, on her
entrance, she found the house completely filled. On the close of the
evening's entertainment, however, while the audience were peaceably
dispersing, they were charged by a troop of cavalry, who cut down the
defenceless multitude without distinction of age or sex, December 7,
1830. The Estates, headed by Professor Jordan, vainly demanded
redress; Giesler, the head of the police, was alone designated as the
criminal; the scrutiny was drawn to an interminable length and
produced no other result than Giesler's decoration with an order by
the prince.

In Hesse-Darmstadt, where the poll-tax amounted to 6_fls_. 12_krs_.
(10_s_. 4_d_.) a head, the Estates ventured, even prior to the
revolution of July, to refuse to vote 2,000,000_fls_. (L166,666 13_s_.
4_d_.) to the new grandduke, Louis II. (who had just succeeded his
aged father, the patron of the arts), for the defrayment of debts
contracted by him before his accession to the ducal chair. In
September, the peasantry of Upper Hesse rose _en masse_ on account of
the imposition of the sum of 100,000_fls_. (L8,333 6_s_. 8_d_.) upon
the poverty-stricken communes in order to meet the outlay occasioned
by the festivities given in the grandduke's honor on his route through
the country; the burdens laid upon the peasantry in the mediatized
principalities, more particularly in that of Ysenburg, had also become
unbearable. The insurgents took Budingen by storm and were guilty of
some excesses toward the public officers and the foresters, but
deprived no one of life. Ere long convinced of their utter impotence,
they dispersed before the arrival of Prince Emilius at the head of a
body of military, who, blinded by rage, unfortunately killed a number
of persons in the village of Soedel, whom they mistook for insurgents
owing to the circumstance of their being armed, but who had in reality
been assembled by a forester for the purpose of keeping the insurgents
in check.

In this month, September, 1830, popular disturbances, but of minor
import, broke out also at Jena and Kahla, Altenburg, and Gera.

In Hanover, the first symptoms of revolution appeared in January,
1831. Dr. Koenig was at that time at the head of the university of
Osterode, Dr. Rauschenplatt of that of Goettingen.[1] The abolition of
the glaring ancient abuses and the removal of the minister, Count
Munster, the sole object of whose policy appeared to be the
eternalization of every administrative and juridical antiquity in the
state, were demanded. The petty insurrections were quelled by the
military. Koenig was taken prisoner; most of the other demagogues
escaped to France. The Duke of Cambridge, the king's brother,
mediated. Count Munster was dismissed, and Hanover received a new and
more liberal constitution.

While these events were passing in Germany, the Poles carried on a
contest against the whole power of Russia as glorious and as
unfortunate as their former one under their leader, Kosciuszko. Louis
Philippe, king of the French, in the hope of gaining favor with the
northern powers by the abandonment of the Polish cause, dealt not a
stroke in their aid. Austria, notwithstanding her natural rivalry to
Russia, beheld the Polish revolution merely through the veil of
legitimacy and refused her aid to rebels. A Hungarian address in favor
of Poland produced no result. Prussia was closely united by family
ties to Russia. The Poles were consequently left without external aid,
and their spirit was internally damped by diplomatic arts. Aid was
promised by France, if they would wait. They accordingly waited: and
in the interim, after the failure of Diebitsch's attempt upon Warsaw
and his sudden death, Paskewitch, the Russian general, unexpectedly
crossed the Vistula close to the Prussian fortress of Thorn and seized
the city of Warsaw while each party was still in a state of
indecision. Immense masses of fugitive Polish soldiery sought shelter
in Austria and Prussia. The officers and a few thousand private
soldiers were permitted to pass onward to France: they found a warm
welcome in Southern Germany, whence they had during the campaign been
supplied with surgeons and every necessary for the supply of the
hospitals. The rest were compelled to return to Russia.

The Russian troops drawn from the distant provinces, the same that had
been employed in the war with Persia, overran Poland as far as the
Prussian frontier, bringing with them a fearful pestilence, Asiatic
cholera. This dire malady, which had, since 1817, crept steadily
onward from the banks of the Ganges, reached Russia in 1830, and, in
the autumn of 1831, spread across the frontiers of Germany. It chiefly
visited populous cities and generally spared districts less densely
populated, passing from one great city to another whither infection
could not have been communicated. _Cordons de sante_ and quarantine
regulations were of no avail. The pestilence appeared to spread like
miasma through the air and to kindle like gas wherever the assemblage
of numbers disposed the atmosphere to its reception. The patients were
seized with vomiting and diarrhoea, accompanied with violent
convulsions, and often expired instantaneously or after an agony of a
few hours' duration. Medicinal art was powerless against this disease,
and, as in the 14th century, the ignorant populace ascribed its
prevalence to poison. Suspicion fell this time upon the physicians and
the public authorities and spread in the most incredible manner from
St. Petersburg to Paris. The idea that the physicians had been charged
to poison the people _en masse_ occasioned dreadful tumults, in which
numbers of physicians fell victims and every drug used in medicine was
destroyed as poisonous. Similar scenes occurred in Russia and in
Hungary. In the latter country a great insurrection of the peasants
took place, in August, 1831, in which not only the physicians, but
also numbers of the nobility and public officers who had provided
themselves with drugs fell victims, and the most inhuman atrocities
were perpetrated. In Vienna, where the cholera raged with extreme
virulence, the people behaved more reasonably.

In Prussia, the cholera occasioned several disturbances at
Koenigsberg, Stettin, and Breslau. At Koenigsberg the movement was not
occasioned by the disease being attributed to poison. The strict
quarantine regulations enforced by the government had produced a
complete commercial stagnation, notwithstanding which permission had
been given to the Russian troops, when hard pushed by the insurgent
Poles, to provide themselves with provisions and ammunition from
Prussia, so that not only Russian agents and commissaries, but whole
convoys from Russia crossed the Prussian frontier. The appearance of
cholera was ascribed to this circumstance, and the public discontent
was evinced both by a popular outbreak and in an address from the
chief magistrate of Koenigsberg to the throne. The Prussian army,
under the command of Field-Marshal Gneisenau, stationed in Posen for
the purpose of watching the movements of the Poles, was also attacked
by the cholera, to which the field-marshal fell victim. It speedily
reached Berlin, spread through the north of Germany to France,
England, and North America, returned thence to the south of Europe,
and, in 1836, crept steadily on from Italy through the Tyrol to
Bavaria.

The veil had been torn from many an old and deep-rooted evil by the
disturbances of 1830. The press now emulated the provincial diets and
some of the governments that sought to meet the demands of the age in
exposing to public view all the political wants of Germany. Party
spirit, however, still ran too high, and the moderate
constitutionalists, who aimed at the gradual introduction of reforms
by legal means, found themselves ere long outflanked by two extreme
parties. While Gentz at Vienna, Jarcke at Berlin, etc., refused to
make the slightest concession and in that spirit conducted the press,
Rotteck's petty constitutional reforms in Baden were treated with
contempt by Wirth and Siebenpfeiffer, by whom a German republic was
with tolerable publicity proclaimed in Rhenish Bavaria. Nor were
attempts at mediation wanting. In Darmstadt, Schulz proposed the
retention of the present distribution of the states of Germany and the
association of a second chamber, composed of deputies elected by the
people from every part of the German confederation, with the federal
assembly at Frankfort.

The Tribune, edited by Dr. Wirth, and the Westboten, edited by Dr.
Siebenpfeiffer, were prohibited by the federal diet, March 2, 1832.
Schuler, Savoie, and Geib opposed this measure by the foundation of a
club in Rhenish Bavaria for the promotion of liberty of the press,
ramifications of which were intended by the founders to be extended
throughout Germany. The approaching celebration of the festival in
commemoration of the Bavarian constitution afforded the malcontents a
long-wished-for opportunity for the convocation of a monster meeting
at the ancient castle of Hambach, on the 27th of May. Although the
black, red and gold flag waved on this occasion high above the rest,
the tendency to French liberalism predominated over that to German
patriotism. Numbers of French being also present, Dr. Wirth deemed
himself called upon to observe that the festival they had met to
celebrate was intrinsically German, that he despised liberty as a
French boon, and that the patriot's first thoughts were for his
country, his second for liberty. These observations greatly displeased
the numerous advocates for French republicanism among his audience,
and one Rey, a Strasburg citizen, read him a severe lecture in the
Mayence style of 1793.[2] There were also a number of Poles present,
toward whom no demonstrations of jealousy were evinced. This meeting
peaceably dissolved, but no means were for the future neglected for
the purpose of crushing the spirit manifested by it. Marshal Wrede
occupied Spires, Landau, Neustadt, etc., with Bavarian troops; the
clubs for the promotion of liberty of the press were strictly
prohibited, their original founders, as well as the orators of Hambach
and the boldest of the newspaper editors, were either arrested or
compelled to quit the country. Siebenpfeiffer took refuge in
Switzerland; Wirth might have effected his escape, but refused. Some
provocations in Neustadt, on the anniversary of the Hambach festival
in 1833, were brought by the military to a tragical close. Some
newspaper editors, printers, etc., were also arrested at Munich,
Wurzburg, Augsburg, etc. The most celebrated among the accused was
Professor Behr, court-councillor of Wurzburg, the burgomaster and
former deputy of that city, who at the time of the meeting at Hambach
made a public speech at Gaibach. On account of the revolutionary
tendency manifested in it he was arrested, and, in 1886, sentenced to
ask pardon on his knees before the king's portrait and to
imprisonment, a punishment to which the greater part of the political
offenders were condemned.

The federal diet had for some time been occupied with measures for the
internal tranquillity of Germany. The Hambach festival both brought
them to a conclusion and increased their severity. Under the date of
the 28th of June, 1832, the resolutions of the federal assembly, by
which first of all the provincial Estates, then the popular clubs, and
finally the press, were to be deprived of every means of opposing in
any the slightest degree the joint will of the princes, were
published. The governments were bound not to tolerate within their
jurisdiction aught contrary to the resolutions passed by the federal
assembly, and to call the whole power of the confederation to their
aid if unable to enforce obedience; nay, in cases of urgency, the
confederation reserved to itself the right of armed intervention,
undemanded by the governments. Taxes, to meet the expenses of the
confederation, were to be voted submissively by the provincial
Estates. Finally, all popular associations and assemblies were also
prohibited, and all newspapers, still remaining, of a liberal
tendency, were suppressed.

The youthful revolutionists, principally students, assembled secretly
at Frankfort on the Maine, during the night of the 3d of April, 1833,
attacked the town-watch for the purpose of liberating some political
prisoners, and possibly intended to have carried the federal assembly
by a _coup-de-main_ had they not been dispersed. These excesses had
merely the effect of increasing the severity of the scrutiny and of
crowding the prisons with suspected persons.


[Footnote 1: Also the unfortunate Dr. Plath, to whom science is
indebted for an excellent historical work upon China. He became
implicated in this affair and remained in confinement until 1836, when
he was sentenced to fifteen years' further imprisonment.]

[Footnote 2: All national distinctions must cease and be fused in
universal liberty and equality; this was the sole aim of the noble
French people, and for this cause should we meet them with a fraternal
embrace, etc. Paul Pfizer well observed in a pamphlet on German
liberalism, published at that period, "What epithet would the majority
of the French people bestow upon a liberty which a part of their
nation would purchase by placing themselves beneath the protection of
a foreign and superior power, called to their aid against their
fellow-citizens? If the cause of German liberalism is to remain pure
and unspotted, we must not, like Coriolanus, arm the foreign foe
against our country. The egotistical tendency of the age is,
unhappily, too much inclined (by a coalition with France) to prefer
personal liberty and independence to the liberty and independence
(thereby infallibly forfeited) of the whole community. The supposed
fellowship with France would be subjection to her. France will support
the German liberals as Richelien did the German Protestants."]



CCLXX. The Struggles of the Provincial Diets


The Estates of the different constitutional states sought for
constitutional reform by legal means and separated themselves from the
revolutionists. But, during periods of great political agitation, it
is difficult to draw a distinctive line, and any opposition, however
moderate, appears as dangerous as the most intemperate rebellion. It
was, consequently, impossible for the governments and the Estates to
come to an understanding during these stormy times. The result of the
deliberations, whenever the opposition was in the majority, was
protestations on both sides in defence of right; and, whenever the
opposition was or fell in the minority, the chambers were the mere
echo of the minister.

In Bavaria, in 1831, the second chamber raised a violent storm against
the minister, von Schenk, principally on account of the restoration of
some monasteries and of the enormous expense attending the erection of
the splendid public buildings at Munich. A law of censorship had,
moreover, been published, and a number of civil officers elected by
the people been refused permission to take their seats in the chamber.
Schwindel, von Closen, Cullmann, Seyffert, etc., were the leaders of
the opposition. Schenk resigned office; the law of censorship was
repealed, and the Estates struck two millions from the civil list. The
first chamber, however, refused its assent to these resolutions, the
law of censorship was retained, and the saving in the expenditure of
the crown was reduced to an extremely insignificant amount. In the
autumn of 1832, Prince Otto, the king's second son, was, with the
consent of the sultan, elected king of Greece by the great maritime
powers intrusted with the decision of the Greek question, and Count
Armansperg, formerly minister of Bavaria, was placed at the head of
the regency during the minority of the youthful monarch. Steps having
to be taken for the levy of troops for the Greek service, some
regiments were sent into Greece in order to carry the new regulations
into effect. The Bavarian chambers were at a later period almost
entirely purged from the opposition and granted every demand made by
the government. The appearance of the Bavarians in ancient Greece
forms one of the most interesting episodes in modern history. The
jealousy of the great powers explains the election of a sovereign
independent of them all: the noble sympathy displayed for the Grecian
cause by King Louis, who, shortly after the congress of Verona, sent
considerable sums of money and Colonel von Heideck to the aid of the
Greeks, and, it may be, also the wish to bring the first among the
second-rate powers of Germany into closer connection with the common
interests of the first-rate powers, more particularly explains that of
the youthful Otto.[1] The task of organizing a nation, noble, indeed,
but debased by long slavery and still reeking with the blood of late
rebellion, under the influence of a powerful and mutually jealous
diplomacy, on a European and German footing, was, however, extremely
difficult. Hence the opposite views entertained by the regency, the
resignation of the councillors of state, von Maurer and von Abel, who
were more inclined to administrate, and the retention of office by
Count Armansperg, who was more inclined to diplomatize. Hence the
ceaseless intrigues of party, the daily increasing contumacy, and the
revolts, sometimes quenched in blood, of the wild mountain tribes and
ancient robber-chiefs, to whom European institutions were still an
insupportable yoke. King Otto received, on his accession to the
throne, in 1835, a visit from his royal parent; and, in the ensuing
year, conducted the Princess of Oldenburg to Athens as his bride.

In Wurtemberg, the chambers first met in 1833, and were, two months
later, again dissolved on account of the refusal of the second chamber
to reject "with indignation" Pfizer's protestation against the
resolutions of the confederation. In the newly-elected second chamber,
the opposition, at whose head stood the celebrated poet, Uhland,
brought forward numerous propositions for reform, but remained in the
minority, and it was not until the new diet, held in 1836, that the
aristocratic first chamber was induced to diminish socage service and
other feudal dues twenty-two and one-half per cent in amount. The
literary piracy that had hitherto continued to exist solely in
Wurtemberg was also provisionally abolished, the system of national
education was improved, and several other useful projects were carried
into execution or prepared. A new criminal code, published in 1838,
again bore traces of political caution. The old opposition lost power.

In Baden, the venerable grandduke, Louis, expired in 1830, and was
succeeded by Leopold, a descendant of the collateral branch of the
counts of Hochberg. Bavaria had, at an earlier period, stipulated, in
case of the extinction of the elder and legitimate line, for the
restoration of the Pfalz (Heidelberg and Mannheim), which had, in
1816, been secured to her by a treaty with Austria. The grandduke,
Louis, had protested against this measure and had, in 1817, declared
Baden indivisible. Bavaria finally relinquished her claims on the
payment of two million florins (L166,666 13_s_. 4_d_.) and the cession
of the bailiwick of Steinfeld, to which Austria moreover added the
county of Geroldseck. The new grandduke, who was surnamed "the
citizen's friend," behaved with extreme liberality and consequently
went hand in hand with the first chamber, of which Wessenberg and
Prince von Furstenberg were active members, and with the second, at
the head of which stood Professors Rotteck, Welcker, and von Itzstein.
Rotteck proposed and carried through the abolition of capital
punishment as alone worthy of feudal times, and, on Welcker's motion,
censorship was abolished and a law for the press was passed. The
federal assembly, however, speedily checked these reforms. The
grandduke was compelled to repeal the law for the press, the Freiburg
university was for some time closed, Professors Rotteck and Welcker
were suspended, and their newspaper, the "Freisinnige" or liberal, was
suppressed in 1832. Rotteck was, notwithstanding, at feud with the
Hambachers, and had raised the Baden flag above that of Germany at a
national fete at Badenweiler. This extremely popular deputy, who had
been presented with thirteen silver cups in testimony of the affection
with which he was regarded by the people, afterward protested against
the resolutions of the confederation, but his motion was violently
suppressed by the minister, Winter. The Baden chamber, nevertheless,
still retained a good deal of energy, and, after the death of Rotteck,
in 1841, a violent contest was carried on concerning the rights of
election.

In Hesse-Darmstadt, the Estates again met in 1832; the liberal
majority in the second chamber, led by von Gagern, E. E. Hoffmann,
Hallwachs, etc., protested against the resolutions of the
confederation, and the chamber was dissolved. A fresh election took
place, notwithstanding which the chamber was again dissolved in 1834,
on account of the government being charged with party spirit by von
Gagern and the refusal of the chamber to call him to order. The people
afterward elected a majority of submissive members.

In Hesse-Cassel the popular demonstrations were instantly followed by
the convocation of the Estates and the proposal of a new and
stipulated constitution, which received the sanction of the chambers
as early as January, 1831; but, amid the continual disturbances, and
on account of the disinclination of the prince co-regent to the
liberal reforms, the chamber, of which the talented professor, Jordan
of Marburg, was the most distinguished member, yielded,
notwithstanding its perseverance, after two rapidly successive
dissolutions, in 1832 and 1833, to the influence of the (once liberal)
minister, Hassenpflug, and Jordan quitted the scene of contest.
Hassenpflug's tyrannical behavior and the lapse of Hesse-Rotenburg
(the mediatized collateral line, which became extinct with the
Landgrave Victor in 1834), the revenues of which were appropriated as
personal property by the prince elector instead of being declared
state property, fed the opposition in the chambers, which was,
notwithstanding the menaces of the prince elector, carried on until
1838. Hassenpflug threw up office.

In Nassau, the duke, William, fell into a violent dispute with the
Estates. The second chamber, after vainly soliciting the restitution
of the rich demesnes, appropriated by the duke as private property, on
the ground of their being state property, and the application of their
revenue to the payment of the state debts, refused, in the autumn of
1831, to vote the taxes. The first chamber, in which the duke had the
power of raising at will a majority in his favor by the creation of
fresh members, protested against the conduct of the second, which in
return protested against that of the first and suspended its
proceedings until their constitutional rights should have received
full recognition; five of the deputies, however, again protested
against the suspension of the proceedings of the chamber and voted the
taxes during the absence of the majority. The majority again
protested, but became entangled in a political lawsuit, and Herber,
the gray-headed president, was confined in the fortress of Marxburg.

In Brunswick, a good understanding prevailed between William the new
duke, and the Estates, which were, however, accused of having an
aristocratic tendency by the democratic party. Their sittings
continued to be held in secret.

In Saxony, the long-wished-for reforms, above all, the grant of a new
constitution, were realized, owing to the influence of the popular
co-regent, added to that of Lindenau, the highly-esteemed minister,
and of the newly-elected Estates, in 1831. The law of censorship,
nevertheless, continued to be enforced with extreme severity, which
also marked the treatment of the political prisoners. Count Hohenthal
and Baron Watzdorf, who seized every opportunity to put in
protestations, even against the resolutions of the confederation,
evinced the most liberal spirit. On the demise of the aged king,
Antony, in 1835, and the accession of the co-regent, Frederick, to the
throne, the political movements totally ceased.

Holstein and Schleswig had also, as early as 1823, solicited the
restitution of their ancient constitutional rights, which the king,
Frederick IV., delayed to grant. Lornsen, the councillor of chancery,
was arrested in 1830, for attempting to agitate the people. Separate
provincial diets were, notwithstanding, decreed, in 1831, for Holstein
and Schleswig, although both provinces urgently demanded their union.
Frederick IV. expired in 1839 and was succeeded by his cousin,
Christian.

Immediately after the revolution of July, the princes of Oldenburg,
Altenburg, Coburg, Meiningen, and Schwarzburg-Sondershausen made a
public appeal to the confidence of their subjects, whom they called
upon to lay before them their grievances, etc. Augustus, duke of
Oldenburg, who had assumed the title of grandduke, proclaimed a
constitution, but shortly afterward withdrew his promise and strictly
forbade his subjects to annoy him by recalling it to his remembrance.
The prince von Sondershausen also refused the hoped-for constitution.
In Sigmaringen, Altenburg, and Meiningen the constitutional movement
was, on the contrary, countenanced and encouraged by the princes.
Pauline, the liberal-minded princess of Lippe-Detmold, had already
drawn up a constitution for her petty territory with her own hand,
when the nobility rose against it, and, aided by the federal assembly,
compelled her to withdraw it.

In the autumn of 1833, the emperor of Russia held a conference with
the king of Prussia at Munchen-Gratz, whither the emperor of Austria
also repaired. A German ministerial congress assembled immediately
afterward at Vienna, and the first of its resolutions was made public
late in the autumn of 1834. It announced the establishment of a court
of arbitration, empowered, as the highest court of appeal, to decide
all disputes between the governments and their provincial Estates. The
whole of the members of this court were to be nominated by the
governments, but the disputing parties were free to select their
arbitrators from among the number.

A fresh and violent constitutional battle was, notwithstanding these
precautions, fought in Hanover, where Adolphus Frederick, duke of
Cambridge, had, in the name of his brother, William IV., king of
England, established a new constitution, which had received many
ameliorations notwithstanding the inefficiency of the liberals,
Christiani, Luntzel, etc., to counteract the overpowering influence of
the monarchical and aristocratic party. William IV., king of England
and Hanover, expired in 1837, and was succeeded on the throne of Great
Britain by Victoria Alexandrina, the daughter of his younger and
deceased brother, Edward, duke of Kent, and of the Princess Victoria
of Saxe-Coburg; and on that of Hanover, which was solely heritable in
the male line, by his second brother, Ernest, duke of Cumberland, the
leader of the Tory party in England. No sooner had this new sovereign
set his foot on German soil[2] than he repealed the constitution
granted to Hanover in 1833 and ordained the restoration of the former
one of 1819, drawn up in a less liberal but more monarchical and
aristocratic spirit. Among the protestations made against this _coup
d'etat_, that of the seven Goettingen professors, the two brothers,
Grimm, to whom the German language and antiquarian research are so
deeply indebted, Dahlmann, Gervinus, Ewald, Weber, and Albrecht, is
most worthy of record. Their instant dismission produced an
insurrection among the students, which was, after a good deal of
bloodshed, quelled by the military. In the beginning of 1838, the
Estates were convoked according to the articles of the constitution of
1819 for the purpose of taking a constitution, drawn up under the
dictation of the king, under deliberation. Many of the towns refused
to elect deputies, and some of those elected were not permitted to
take their seats. The city of Osnabruck protested in the federal
assembly. Notwithstanding this, the Estates meanwhile assembled, but
declared themselves incompetent, regarding themselves simply in the
light of an arbitrative committee, and, as such, threw out the
constitution presented by the king, June, 1838. The federal assembly
remained passive.[3] In 1839, Schele, the minister, finally succeeded,
by means of menaces and bribery, and by arbitrarily calling into the
chamber the ministerial candidates who had received the minority of
votes during the elections, in collecting so many deputies devoted to
his party as were requisite in order to form the chamber and to pass
resolutions. The city of Hanover hereupon brought before the federal
assembly a petition for redress and a list of grievances in which
Schele's chamber was described as "unworthy of the name of a
constitutional representative assembly, void of confidence,
unpossessed of the public esteem, and unrecognized by the country."
The king instantly divested Rumann, the city director, of his office,
but so far yielded to the magistrate, to whom he gave audience in the
palace and who was followed by crowds of the populace, as to revoke
the nomination, already declared illegal, of Rumann's successor, and
to promise that the matter at issue should be brought before the
common tribunal instead of the council of state, July 17th. Numerous
other cities, corporations of landed proprietors, etc., also followed
the example set by Hanover and laid their complaints before the
federal assembly, which hereupon declared that, according to the laws
of the confederation, it found no cause for interference, but at the
same time advised the king to come to an understanding consistent with
the rights of the crown and of the Estates, with the "present" Estates
(unrecognized by the democratic party), concerning the form of the
constitution. In the federal assembly, Wurtemberg and Bavaria, most
particularly, voted in favor of the Hanoverians. Professor Ewald was
appointed to the university of Tubingen; Albrecht, at a later period,
to that of Leipzig; the brothers Grimm, to that of Berlin; Dahlmann,
to that of Bonn. Among the assembled Estates, those of Baden,
Wurtemberg, and Saxony most warmly espoused the cause of the people of
Hanover, but, as was natural, without result.[4]

In 1840, the king convoked a fresh diet. The people refused to elect
members, and it was solely by means of intrigue that a small number of
deputies (not half the number fixed by law) were assembled, creatures
of the minister, Schele, who were disowned by the people in addresses
couched in the most energetic terms (the address presented by the
citizens of Osnabruck was the most remarkable) and their proceedings
were protested against. This petty assembly, nevertheless, took under
deliberation and passed a new constitution, against which the cities
and the country again protested. The king also declared his only son,
George, who was afflicted with blindness, capable of governing and of
succeeding to the throne.


[Footnote 1: Thiersch, the Bavarian court-councillor, one of the most
distinguished connoisseurs of Grecian antiquity, who visited Greece
shortly after Heideck and before the arrival of the king, was received
by the modern Greeks with touching demonstrations of delight. No
nation has so deeply studied, so deeply become imbued with Grecian
lore, as that of Germany, and the close connection formed, on the
accession of the Bavarian Otto to the throne of Greece, between her
sons and the children of that classic land, justifies the proudest
expectations.]

[Footnote 2: He did not restore the whole of the crown property that
had, at an earlier period, been carried away to England. A
considerable portion of the crown jewels had been taken away by George
I., and when, in 1802, the French occupied Hanover, the whole of the
movable crown property, even the great stud, was sent to England. On
the demise of George III., the crown jewels were divided among the
princes of the English house.--_Copied from the Courier of August,
1838._]

[Footnote 3: The Darmstadt government declared to the second chamber,
on its bringing forward a motion for the intercession of Darmstadt
with the federal assembly in favor of the legality of the ancient
constitution then in force in Hanover, that the grandduke would never
tolerate any cooperation on the part of the Estates with his vote in
the federal assembly.]

[Footnote 4: "This defeat is, however, not to be lamented: the battle
for the separate constitutions has not been fought in vain if German
nationality spring from the wreck of German separatism, if we are
taught that without a liberal federal constitution liberal provincial
constitutions are impossible in Germany."--_Pfizer._]



CCLXXI. Austria and Prince Mettenich


Austria might, on the fall of Napoleon, have maintained Alsace,
Lorraine, the Breisgau, and the whole of the territory of the Upper
Rhine in the same manner in which Prussia had maintained that of the
Lower Rhine, had she not preferred the preservation of her rule in
Italy and rendered her position in Germany subordinate to her station
as a European power. This policy is explained by the peculiar
circumstances of the Austrian state, which had for centuries comprised
within itself nations of the most distinct character, and the
population of whose provinces were by far the greater part Slavonian,
Hungarian, and Italian, the great minority German. By this policy she
lost, as the Prussian Customs' Union has also again proved, much of
her influence over Germany, while, on the other hand, she secured it
the more firmly in Southern and Eastern Europe. Austria has long made
a gradual and almost unperceived advance from the northwest in a
southeasterly direction. In Germany she has continually lost ground.
Switzerland, the Netherlands, Alsace, Lorraine, the Swabian counties,
Lusatia, Silesia, have one by one been severed from her, while her
non-German possessions have as continually been increased, by the
addition of Hungary, Transylvania, Galicia, Dalmatia, and Upper Italy.

The contest carried on between Austria, the French Revolution, and
Napoleon, has at all events left deep and still visible traces; the
characters of the emperor Francis and of his chancellor of state,
Prince Metternich, that perfect representative of the aristocracy of
Europe, sympathize also as closely with the Austrian system as the
character of the emperor Joseph was antipathetical to it. This system
dates, however, earlier than those revolutionary struggles, and has
already outlived at least one of its supporters.

Austria is the only great state in Europe that comprises so many
diverse but well-poised nationalities within its bosom; in all the
other great states, one nation bears the preponderance. To this
circumstance may be ascribed her peaceful policy, every great war
threatening her with the revolt of some one of the foreign nations
subordinate to her sceptre. To this may, moreover, be ascribed the
tenacity with which she upholds the principle of legitimacy. The
historical hereditary right of the reigning dynasty forms the sole but
ideal tie by which the diverse and naturally inimical nations beneath
her rule are linked together. For the same reason, the concentration
of talent in the government contrasts, in Austria, more violently with
the obscurantism of the provinces than in any other state. Not only
does the overpowering intelligence of the chancery of state awe the
nations beneath its rule, but the proverbial good nature and
patriarchal cordiality of the imperial family win every heart. The
army is a mere machine in the hands of the government; a standing
army, in which the soldier serves for life or for the period of twenty
years, during which he necessarily loses all sympathy with his
fellow-citizens, and which is solely reintegrated from militia whom
this privilege renders still more devoted to the government. The
pretorian spirit usually prevalent in standing armies has been guarded
against in Austria by there being no guards, and all sympathy between
the military and the citizens of the various provinces whence they
were drawn is at once prevented by the Hungarian troops being sent
into Italy, the Italian troops into Galicia, etc., etc. The
nationality of the private soldier is checked by the Germanism of the
subalterns and by the Austrianism of the staff. Besides the power thus
everywhere visible, there exists another partially invisible, that of
the police, in connection with a censorship of the severest
description, which keeps a guard over the inadvertencies of the tongue
as well as over those of the press. The people are, on the other hand,
closely bound up with the government and interested in the maintenance
of the existing state of affairs by the paper currency, on the value
of which the welfare of every subject in the state depends.

To a government thus strong in concentrated power and intelligence
stands opposed the mass of nations subject to the Austrian sceptre
whose natural antipathies have been artfully fostered and
strengthened. In Austria the distinctions of class, characteristic of
the Middle Ages, are still preserved. The aristocracy and the clergy
possess an influence almost unknown in Germany, but solely over the
people, not over the government. As corporative bodies they still are,
as in the days of Charles VI., convoked for the purpose of holding
postulate diets, whose power, with the exception of that of the
Hungarian diet, is merely nominal. The nobility, even in Hungary, as
everywhere else throughout the Austrian states (more particularly
since the Spanish system adopted by Ferdinand II.), is split into two
inimical classes, those of the higher and lower aristocracy. Even in
Galicia, where the Polish nobility formed, at an earlier period and
according to earlier usage, but one body, the distinction of a higher
and lower class has been introduced since the occupation of that
country by Austria. The high aristocracy are either bound by favors,
coincident with their origin, to the court, the great majority among
them consisting of families on whom nobility was conferred by
Ferdinand II., or they are, if families belonging to the more powerful
and more ancient national aristocracy, as, for instance, that of
Esterhazy in Hungary, brought by the bestowal of fresh favors into
closer affinity with the court and drawn within its sphere. The
greater proportion of the aristocracy consequently reside at Vienna.
The lower nobility make their way chiefly by talent and perseverance
in the army and the civil offices, and are therefore naturally devoted
to the government, on which all their hopes in life depend. The
clergy, although permitted to retain the whole of their ancient pomp
and their influence over the minds of the people, have been rendered
dependent upon the government, a point easily gained, the pope being
principally protected by Austria.

The care of the government for the material welfare of the people
cannot be denied; it is, however, frustrated by two obstacles raised
by its own system. The maintenance of the high aristocracy is, for
instance, antipathetic to the welfare of the subject, and, although
comfort and plenty abound in the immediate vicinity of Vienna, the
population on the enormous estates of the magnates in the provinces
often present a lamentable contrast. The Austrian government moreover
prohibits all free intercourse with foreign parts, and the old-
fashioned system of taxation, senseless as many other existing
regulations, entirely puts a stop to all free trade between Hungary
and Austria. Consequently, the new and grand modes of communication,
the Franzen Canal, that unites the Danube and the Thiess, the
Louisenstrasse, between Carlstadt and Fiume, the magnificent road to
Trieste, the admirable road across the rocks of the Stilfser Jock,
and, more than all, the steam navigation as far as the mouths of the
Danube and the railroads, will be unavailing to scatter the blessings
of commerce and industry so long as these wretched prohibitions
continue to be enforced.

Austria has, in regard to her foreign policy, left the increasing
influence of Russia in Poland, Persia, and Turkey unopposed, and even
allowed the mouths of the Danube to be guarded by Russian fortresses,
while she has, on the other hand, energetically repelled the
interference of France in the affairs of Italy. The July revolution
induced a popular insurrection in the dominions of the Church, and the
French threw a garrison into the citadel of Ancona; the Austrians,
however, instantly entered the country and enforced the restoration of
the _ancien regime_. In Lombardy, many ameliorations were introduced
and the prosperity of the country promoted by the Austrian
administration, notwithstanding the national jealousy of the
inhabitants. Venice, with her choked-up harbor, could, it is true, no
longer compete with Trieste. The German element has gained ground in
Galicia by means of the public authorities and the immigration of
agriculturists and artificers. The Hungarians endeavored to render
their language the common medium throughout Hungary, and to expel the
German element, but their apprehension of the numerous Slavonian
population of Hungary, whom religious sympathy renders subject to
Russian influence, has speedily reconciled them with the Germans.
Slavonism has, on the other hand, also gained ground in Bohemia.

The emperor, Francis I., expired in 1835, and was succeeded by his
son, Ferdinand I., without a change taking place in the system of the
government, of which Prince Metternich continued to be the directing
principle.

The decease of some of the heads of foreign royal families and the
marriages of their successors again placed several German princes on
foreign thrones. The last of the Guelphs on the throne of Great
Britain expired with William IV., whose niece and successor, Victoria
Alexandrina, wedded, 1840, Albert of Saxe-Coburg, second son of
Ernest, the reigning duke. That the descendant of the steadfast
elector should, after such adverse fortune, be thus destined to occupy
the highest position in the reformed world, is of itself remarkable.
One of this prince's uncles, Leopold, is seated on the throne of
Belgium, and one of his cousins, Ferdinand, on that of Portugal, in
right of his consort, Donna Maria da Gloria, the daughter of Dom
Pedro, king of Portugal and emperor of the Brazils, to whom, on the
expulsion of the usurper, Dom Miguel, he was wedded in 1835. These
princes of Coburg are remarkable for manly beauty.

The antipathy with which the new dynasty on the throne of France was
generally viewed rendered Ferdinand, Duke of Orleans, Louis Philippe's
eldest son, for some time an unsuccessful suitor for the hand of a
German princess; he at length conducted Helena, princess of
Mecklenburg-Schwerin, although against the consent of her stepfather,
Paul Frederick, the reigning duke, to Paris in 1837, as future queen
of the French. He was killed in 1842, by a fall from his carriage, and
left two infant sons, the Count of Paris and the Duke of Chartres. The
Czarowitz, Alexander, espoused Maria, Princess of Darmstadt.

The French chambers and journals have reassumed toward Germany the
tone formerly affected by Napoleon, and, with incessant cries for war,
in which, in 1840, the voice of the prime minister Thiers joined,
demand the restoration of the left bank of the Rhine. Thiers was,
however, compelled to resign office, and the close alliance between
Austria, Prussia, and the whole of the confederated princes, as well
as the feeling universally displayed throughout Germany, demonstrated
the energy with which an attack on the side of France would be
repelled. The erection of the long-forgotten federal fortresses on the
Upper Rhine was also taken at length under consideration, and it was
resolved to fortify both Rastadt and Ulm without further delay.

Nor have the statesmen of France failed to threaten Germany with a
Russo-Gallic alliance in the spirit of the Erfurt congress of 1808;
while Russia perseveres in the prohibitory system so prejudicial to
German commerce, attempts to suppress every spark of German
nationality in Livonia, Courland, and Esthonia, and fosters
Panslavism, or the union of all the Slavonic nations for the
subjection of the world, among the Slavonian subjects of Austria in
Hungaria and Bohemia. The extension of the Greek church is also
connected with this idea. "The European Pentarchy," a work that
attracted much attention in 1839, insolently boasts how Russia, in
defiance of Austria, has seized the mouths of the Danube, has wedged
herself, as it were, by means of Poland, between Austria and Prussia,
in a position equally threatening to both, recommends the minor states
of Germany to seek the protection of Russia, and darkly hints at the
alliance between that power and France.

Nor are the prospects of Germany alone threatened by France and
Russia; disturbances, like a fantastic renewal of the horrors of the
Middle Age, are ready to burst forth on the other side of the Alps, as
though, according to the ancient saga of Germany, the dead were about
to rise in order to mingle in the last great contest between the gods
and mankind.



CCLXXII. Prussia and Rome


While Austria remains stationary, Prussia progresses. While Austria
relies for support upon the aristocracy of the Estates, Prussia relies
for hers upon the people, that is to say, upon the public officers
taken from the mass of the population, upon the citizens emancipated
by the city regulation, upon the peasantry emancipated by the
abolition of servitude, of all the other agricultural imposts, and by
the division of property, and upon the enrolment of both classes in
the Landwehr. While Austria, in fine, renders her German policy
subordinate to her European diplomacy, the influence exercised by
Prussia upon Europe depends, on the contrary, solely upon that
possessed by her in Germany.

Prussia's leading principle appears to be, "All for the people,
nothing through the people!" Hence the greatest solicitude for the
instruction of the people, whether in the meanest schools or the
universities, but under strict political control, under the severest
censorship; hence the emancipation of the peasantry, civic self-
administration, freedom of trade, the general arming of the people,
and, with all these, mere nameless provincial diets, the most complete
popular liberty on the widest basis without a representation worthy of
the name; hence, finally, the greatest solicitude for the promotion of
trade on a grand scale, for the revival of the commerce of Germany,
which has lain prostrate since the great wars of the Reformation, for
the mercantile unity of Germany, while it is exactly in Prussia that
political Unitarians are the most severely punished.

The great measures were commenced in Prussia immediately after the
disaster of 1806: first, the reorganization of the army and the
abolition of the privileges of the aristocracy in respect to
appointments and the possession of landed property; these were, in
1808, succeeded by the celebrated civic regulation which placed the
civic administration in the hands of the city deputies freely elected
by the citizens; in 1810, by freedom of trade and by the foundation of
the new universities of Berlin (instead of Halle), of Breslau (instead
of Frankfort on the Oder), and, in 1819, of Bonn, by which means the
libraries, museums, and scientific institutions of every description
were centralized; in 1814, by the common duty imposed upon every
individual of every class, without exception, to bear arms and to do
service in the Landwehr up to his thirty-ninth year; in 1821, by the
regulation for the division of communes; and, in 1822, by the extra
post.

In respect to the popular representation guaranteed by the federal
act, Prussia announced, on the 22d of May, 1815, her intention to form
provincial diets, from among whose members the general representation
or imperial diet, which was to be held at Berlin, was to be elected.
When the Rhenish provinces urged the fulfilment of this promise in the
Coblentz address of 1817, the reply was, "Those who admonish the king
are guilty of doubting the inviolability of his word." Prussia
afterward declared that the new regulations would be in readiness by
the February of 1819. On the 20th of January, 1820, an edict was
published by the government, the first paragraph of which fixed the
public debt at $180,091,720,[1] and the second one rendered the
contraction of every fresh debt dependent upon the will of the future
imperial diet.[2] The definitive regulations in respect to the
provincial Estates were finally published on the 5th of June, 1823,
but the convocation of a general diet was passed over in silence.

The prosperity of the nations of Germany, wrecked by the great wars of
the Reformation, must and will gradually return. Prussia has inherited
all the claims upon, and consequently all the duties owing to Germany.
Still the general position of Germany is not sufficiently favorable to
render the renovation of her ancient Hanseatic commerce possible.[3]
It is to be deplored that the attachment of the Prussian cabinet to
Russian policy has not at all events modified the commercial
restrictions along the whole of the eastern frontier of Prussia,[4]
and that Prussia has not been able to effect more with Holland in
regard to the question concerning the free navigation of the Rhine.[5]
Prussia has, on the other hand, deserved the gratitude of Germany for
the zeal with which she promoted the settlement of the Customs' Union,
which has, at least in the interior of Germany, removed the greater
part of the restrictions upon commercial intercourse, and has a
tendency to spread still further. Throughout the last transactions,
partly of the Customs' Union, partly of Prussia alone, with England
and Holland, a vain struggle against those maritime powers is
perceptible. England trades with Germany from every harbor and in
every kind of commodity, while German vessels are restricted to home
produce and are only free to trade with England from their own ports.
Holland finds a market for her colonial wares in Germany, and, instead
of taking German manufactured goods in exchange, provides herself from
England, throws English goods into Germany, and, in lieu of being, as
she ought to be, the great emporium of Germany, is content to remain a
mere huge English factory. The Hanse towns have also been converted
into mercantile depots for English goods on German soil.

The misery consequent on the great wars, and the powerful reaction
against Gallicism throughout Germany, once more caused despised
religion to be reverenced in the age of philosophy. Prussia deemed
herself called upon, as the inheritor of the Reformation brought about
by Luther, as the principal Protestant power of Germany, to assume a
prominent position in the religious movement of the time. Frederick
William III., a sovereign distinguished for piety, appears,
immediately after the great wars, to have deemed the conciliation of
the various sects of Christians within his kingdom feasible. He,
nevertheless, merely succeeded in effecting a union between the
Lutherans and Calvinists. He also bestowed a new liturgy upon this
united church, which was censured as partial, as proceeding too
directly from the cabinet without being sanctioned by the concurrence
of the assembled clergy and of the people. Some Lutherans, who refused
compliance, were treated with extreme severity and compelled to
emigrate; the utility of a union which, two centuries earlier, would
have saved Germany from ruin, was, however, generally acknowledged. It
nevertheless was not productive of unity in the Protestant world. In
the universities and among the clergy, two parties, the Rationalists
and the Supernaturalists, stood opposed to one another. The former,
the disciples of the old Neologians, still followed the philosophy of
Kant, merely regarded Christianity as a code of moral philosophy,
denominated Christ a wise teacher, and explained away his miracles by
means of physics. The latter, the followers of the old orthodox
Lutherans, sought to confirm the truths of the gospel also by
philosophical means, and were denominated Supernaturalists, as
believers in a mystery surpassing the reasoning powers of man. The
celebrated Schleiermacher of Berlin mediated for some time between
both parties. But it was in Prussia more particularly that both
parties stood more rigidly opposed to one another and fell into the
greatest extremes.

The Rationalists were supplanted by the Pantheists, the disciples of
Hegel, the Berlin philosopher, who at length formally declared war
against Christianity; the Supernaturalists were here and there outdone
by the Pietists, whose enthusiasm degenerated into licentiousness.[6]
The king had, notwithstanding his piety, been led to believe that
Hegel merely taught the students unconditional obedience to the state,
and that Pantheist was consequently permitted to spread, under the
protection of Prussia, his senseless doctrine of deified humanity, the
same formerly proclaimed by Anacharsis Cloote in the French
Convention. When too late, the gross deception practiced by this
sophist was perceived: his disciples threw off their troublesome mask,
with Dr. Strauss, who had been implicated in the Zurich disturbances,
at their head, openly renounced Christianity, and, at Halle, led by
Ruge, the journalist, embraced the social revolutionary ideas of
"Young France," to which almost the whole of the younger journalists
of literary "Young Germany" acceded; nor was this Gallic reaction,
this retrogression toward the philosophical ideas of the foregoing
century, without its cause, German patriotism, which, from 1815 to
1819, had predominated in every university throughout Prussia, having
been forcibly suppressed. Hegel, on his appearance in Berlin, was
generally regarded as the man on whom the task of diverting the
enthusiasm of the rising generation for Germany into another channel
devolved.[7] Everything German had been treated with ridicule.[8]
French fashions and French ideas had once more come into vogue.

While Protestant Germany was thus torn, weakened, and degraded by
schism, the religious movement throughout Catholic Germany insensibly
increased in strength and unity. The adverse fate of the pope had, on
his deliverance from the hands of Napoleon, excited a feeling of
sympathy and reverence so universal as to be participated in by even
the Protestant powers of Europe. He had, as early as 1814, reinstated
the Jesuits without a remonstrance on the part of the sovereigns by
whom they had formerly been condemned. The ancient spirit of the
Romish church had revived. A new edifice was to be raised on the
thick-strewn ruins of the past. In 1817, Bavaria concluded a concordat
with the pope for the foundation of the archbishopric of Munich with
the three bishoprics of Augsburg, Passau, and Ratisbon, and of the
archbishopric of Bamberg with the three bishoprics of Wurzburg,
Eichstadt, and Spires. The king retained the right of presentation. In
1821, Prussia concluded a treaty by which the archbishopric of Cologne
with the three bishoprics of Treves, Munster, and Paderborn, the
archbishopric of Posen with Culm, and two independent bishoprics in
Breslau and Ermeland were established. The bishoprics of Hildesheim
and Osnabruck were re-established in 1824 by the concordat with
Hanover. In southwestern Germany, the archbishopric of Freiburg in the
Breisgau with the bishoprics of Rotenburg on the Neckar, Limburg on
the Lahn, Mayence, and Fulda arose. In Switzerland there remained four
bishoprics, Freiburg in the Uechtland, Solothurn, Coire, and St. Gall;
in Alsace, Strasburg and Colmar. In the Netherlands, the archbishopric
of Malines with the bishoprics of Ghent, Liege, and Namur. In Holland,
three Jansenist bishoprics, Utrecht, Deventer, and Haarlem, are
remarkable for having retained their independence of Rome.

The renovated body of the church was inspired with fresh energy. On
the fall of the Jesuits, the other extreme, Illuminatism, had raised
its head, but had been compelled to yield before a higher power and
before the moral force of Germany. The majority of the German
Catholics now clung to the idea that the regeneration of the abused
and despised church was best to be attained by the practice of
evangelical simplicity and morality, that Jesuitism and Illuminatism
were, consequently, to be equally avoided, and the better disposed
among the Protestants to be imitated. Sailer, the great teacher of the
German clergy, and Wessenberg, whom Rome on this account refused to
raise to the bishopric of Constance, acted upon this idea. In Silesia,
a number of youthful priests, headed by Theimer, impatient for the
realization of the union, apparently approaching, of this moderate
party with the equally moderately disposed party among the Protestants
into one great German church, took, in 1825, the bold step of
renouncing celibacy. This party was however instantly suppressed by
force by the king of Prussia. Theimer, in revenge, turned Jesuit and
wrote against Prussia. Professors inclined to Ultramontanism were,
meanwhile, installed in the universities, more particularly at Bonn,
Munster and Tubingen, by the Protestant as well as the Catholic
governments; by them the clerical students were industriously taught
that they were not Germans but subjects of Rome, and were flattered
with the hope of one day participating in the supremacy about to be
regained by the pontiff. Every priest inspired with patriotic
sentiments, or evincing any degree of tolerance toward his Protestant
fellow citizens, was regarded as guilty of betraying the interests of
the church to the state and the tenets of the only true church to
heretics. Gorres, once Germany's most spirited champion against
France, now appeared as the champion of Rome in Germany. The
scandalous schisms in the Protestant church and the no less scandalous
controversies carried on in the Protestant literary world rendered
both contemptible, and, as in the commencement of the seventeenth
century, appeared to offer a favorable opportunity for an attack on
the part of the Catholics.

A long-forgotten point in dispute was suddenly revived. Marriages
between Catholics and Protestants had hitherto been unhesitatingly
sanctioned by the Catholic priesthood. The Prussian ordinance of 1803,
by which the father was empowered to decide the faith in which the
children were to be brought up, had, on account of its conformity with
nature and reason, never been disputed. Numberless mixed marriages had
taken place among all classes from the highest to the lowest without
the slightest suspicion of wrong attaching thereto. A papal brief of
1830 now called to mind that the church tolerated, it was true,
although she disapproved of mixed marriages, which she permitted to
take place solely on condition of the children being brought up in the
Catholic faith. Prussia had acted with little foresight. Instead of,
in 1814, on taking possession of the Rhenish provinces and of
Westphalia, concluding a treaty with the then newly-restored pope,
Hardenberg had, as late as 1820, during a visit to Borne, merely
entered upon a transient agreement, by which Rome was bound to no
concessions. The war openly declared by Rome was now attempted to be
turned aside by means of petty and secret artifices. Several bishops,
in imitation of the precedent given by Count von Spiegel, the
peace-loving archbishop of Cologne, secretly bound themselves to
interpret the brief in the sense of the government and to adhere to
the ordinance of 1803. On Spiegel's decease in 1835, his successor,
the Baron Clement Augustus Droste, promised at Vischering, prior to
his presentation, strictly to adhere to this secret compact; but,
scarcely had he mounted the archiepiscopal seat, than his conscience
forbade the fulfilment of his oath; God was to be obeyed rather than
man! He prohibited the solemnization of mixed marriages within his
diocese without the primary assurance of the education of the children
in the Catholic faith, compelled his clergy strictly to obey the
commands of Rome in points under dispute, and suppressed the Hermesian
doctrine in the university of Bonn. The warnings secretly given by the
government proved unavailing, and he was, in consequence, unexpectedly
deprived of his office in the November of 1837, arrested, and
imprisoned in the fortress of Minden. This arbitrary measure caused
great excitement among the Catholic population; and the ancient
dislike of the Rhenish provinces to the rule of Prussia, and the
discontent of the Westphalian nobility on account of the emancipation
of the peasantry, again broke forth on this occasion. Gorres, in
Munich, industriously fed the flame by means of his pamphlet,
"Athanasius." Dunin, archbishop of Gnesen and bishop of Thorn,
followed the example of his brother of Cologne, was openly upheld by
Prussian Poland, was cited to Berlin, fled thence, was recaptured and
detained for some time within the fortress of Colberg, in 1839.--The
pope, Gregory XVI., solemnly declared his approbation of the conduct
of these archbishops and rejected every offer of negotiation until
their reinstallation in their dioceses. A crowd of hastily established
journals, more especially in Bavaria, maintained their cause, and were
opposed by numberless Protestant publications, which generally proved
injurious to the cause they strove to uphold, being chiefly remarkable
for base servility, frivolity, and infidelity.

On the demise of Frederick William III., on the 7th of June, 1840, and
the succession of his son, Frederick William IV., the church question
was momentarily cast into the shade by that relating to the
constitution. Constitutional Germany demanded from the new sovereign
the convocation of the imperial diet promised by his father. The
Catholic party, however, conscious that it would merely form the
minority in the diet, did not participate in the demand.[9] The
constitution was solely demanded by Protestant Eastern Prussia; but
the king declared, during the ceremony of fealty at Koenigsberg, that
"he would never do homage to the idea of a general popular
representation and would pursue a course based upon historical
progression, suitable to German nationality." The provincial Estates
were shortly afterward instituted, and separate diets were opened in
each of the provinces. This attracted little attention, and the
dispute with the church once more became the sole subject of interest.
It terminated in the complete triumph of the Catholic party. In
consequence of an agreement with the pope, the brief of 1820 remained
in force, Dunin was reinstated, Droste received personal satisfaction
by a public royal letter and a representative in Cologne in von
Geissel, hitherto bishop of Spires. The disputed election of the
bishop of Treves was also decided in favor of Arnoldi, the
ultramontane candidate.

Late in the autumn of 1842, the king of Prussia for the first time
convoked the deputies selected from the provincial diets to Berlin. He
had, but a short time before, laid the foundation-stone to the
completion of the Cologne cathedral, and on that occasion, moreover,
spoken words of deep import to the people, admonitory of unity to the
whole of Germany.


[Footnote 1: L26,263,375 16s. 8d.]

[Footnote 2: The Maritime Commercial Company, meanwhile, entered into
a contract.]

[Footnote 3: "We have long since lost all our maritime power. The only
guns now fired by us at sea are as signals of distress. Who now
remembers that it was the German Hansa that first made use of cannons
at sea, that it was from Germans that the English learned to build
men-of-war?"--_John's Nationality_.]

[Footnote 4: Prussia, of late, greatly contributed toward the
aggrandizement of the power of Russia by solemnly declaring in 1828,
when Russia extended her influence over Turkey, that she would not on
that account prevent Russia from asserting her "just claims," a
declaration that elicited bitter complaints from the British
government; and again in 1831, by countenancing the entry of the
Russians into Poland, at that time in a state of insurrection.]

[Footnote 5: The reason of the backwardness displayed from the
commencement by Prussia to act as the bulwark of Germany on the Lower
Rhine is explained by Stein in his letters: "Hanoverian jealousy, by
which the narrow-minded Castlereagh was guided, and, generally
speaking, jealousy of the German ministerial clauses, as if the
existence of a Mecklenburg were of greater importance to Germany than
that of a powerful warlike population, alike famous in time of peace
or war, presided over the settlement of the relation in which Belgium
was to stand to Prussia."]

[Footnote 6: At Koenigsberg, in Prussia, a secret society was
discovered which was partly composed of people of rank, who, under
pretence of meeting for the exercise of religious duties, gave way to
the most wanton license.]

[Footnote 7: The police, while attempting to lead science, was
unwittingly led by it. The students were driven in crowds into Hegel's
colleges, his pupils were preferred to all appointments, etc., and
every measure was taken to render that otherwise almost unnoted
sophist as dangerous as possible.]

[Footnote 8: In this the Jews essentially aided: Borne more in an
anti-German, Heine more in an anti-Christian, spirit, and were highly
applauded by the simple and infatuated German youth.]

[Footnote 9: Goerres even advised against it, although, in 1817, he had
acted the principal part on the presentation of the Cologne address.]



CCLXXIII. The Progress of Science, Art, and Practical Knowledge in
Germany


In the midst of the misery entailed by war and amid the passions
roused by party strife the sciences had attained to a height hitherto
unknown. The schools had never been neglected, and immense
improvements, equally affecting the lowest of the popular schools and
the colleges, had been constantly introduced. Pestalozzi chiefly
encouraged the proper education of the lower classes and improved the
method of instruction. The humanism of the learned academies (the
study of the dead languages) went hand in hand with the realism of the
professional institutions. The universities, although often subjected
to an overrigid system of surveillance and compelled to adopt a
partial, servile bias, were, nevertheless, generally free from a
political tendency and incredibly promoted the study of all the
sciences. The mass of celebrated savants and of their works is too
great to permit of more than a sketch of the principal features of
modern German science.

The study of the classics, predominant since the time of the
Reformation, has been cast into the shade by the German studies, by
the deeper investigation of the language, the law, the history of our
forefathers and of the romantic Middle Age, by the great Catholic
reaction, and, at the same time, by the immense advance made in
natural history, geography, and universal history. The human mind,
hitherto enclosed within a narrow sphere, has burst its trammels to
revel in immeasurable space. The philosophy and empty speculations of
the foregoing century have also disappeared before the mass of
practical knowledge, and arrogant man, convinced by science, once more
bends his reasoning faculties in humble adoration of their Creator.

The aristocracy of talent and learned professional pride have been
overbalanced by a democratic press. The whole nation writes, and the
individual writer is either swallowed up in the mass or gains but
ephemeral fame. Every writer, almost without exception, affects a
popular style. But, in this rich literary field, all springs up freely
without connection or guidance. No party is concentrated or
represented by any reigning journal, but each individual writes for
himself, and the immense number of journals published destroy each
other's efficiency. Many questions of paramount importance are
consequently lost in heaps of paper, and the interest they at first
excited speedily becomes weakened by endless recurrence.

Theology shared in the movement above mentioned in the church. The
Rationalists were most profuse in their publications, Paulus at
Heidelberg, and, more particularly, the Saxon authors, Tschirner,
Bretschneider, etc. Ancient Lutheran vigor degenerated to shallow
subtleties and a sort of coquettish tattling upon morality, in which
Zschokke's "Hours of Devotion" carried away the palm. Neander,
Gieseler, Gfroerer and others greatly promoted the study of the history
of the church. The propounders of the Gospels, however, snatched them,
after a lamentable fashion, out of each other's hands, now doubting
the authenticity of the whole, now that of most or of some of the
chapters, and were unable to agree upon the number that ought to be
retained. They, at the same time, outvied one another in political
servility, while the Lutherans who, true to their ancient faith,
protested against the Prussian liturgy, were too few in number for
remark. This frivolous class of theologians at length entirely
rejected the Gospels, embraced the doctrine of Hegel and Judaism, and
renounced Christianity. Still, although the Supernaturalists, the
orthodox party, and the Pietists triumphantly repelled these attacks,
and the majority of the elder Rationalists timidly seceded from the
anti-christian party, the Protestant literary world was reduced to a
state of enervation and confusion, affording but too good occasion for
an energetic demonstration on the part of the Catholics.

Philosophy also assumed the character of the age. Fichte of Berlin
still upheld, in 1814, the passion for liberty and right in their
nobler sense that had been roused by the French Revolution, but, as he
went yet further than Kant in setting limits to the sources of
perception and denied the existence of conscience, his system proved
merely of short duration. To him succeeded Schelling, with whom the
return of philosophy to religion and that of abstract studies to
nature and history commenced, and in whom the renovated spirit of the
nineteenth century became manifest. His pupils were partly natural
philosophers, who, like Oken, sought to comprehend all nature, her
breathing unity, her hidden mysteries, in religion; partly mystics,
who, like Eschenmaier, Schubert, Steffens, in a Protestant spirit, or,
like Gorres and Baader, in a Catholic one, sought also to comprehend
everything bearing reference to both nature and history in religion.
It was a revival of the ancient mysticism of Hugo de St. Victoire, of
Honorius, and of Rupert in another and a scientific age; nor was it
unopposed: in the place of the foreign scholasticism formerly so
repugnant to its doctrines, those of Schelling were opposed by a
reaction of the superficial mock-enlightenment and sophistical
scepticism predominant in the foregoing century, more particularly of
the sympathy with France, which had been rendered more than ever
powerful in Germany by the forcible suppression of patriotism.
Abstract philosophy, despising nature and history, mocking
Christianity, once more revived and set itself up as an absolute
principle in Hegel. None of the other philosophers attained the
notoriety gained by Schelling and Hegel, the representatives of the
antitheses of the age.

An incredible advance, of which we shall merely record the most
important facts, took place in the study of the physical sciences.
Three new planets were discovered, Pallas, in 1802, and Vesta, in
1807, by Gibers; Juno, in 1824, by Harding. Enke and Biela first fixed
the regular return and brief revolution of the two comets named after
them. Schroeter and Maedler minutely examined the moon and planets;
Struve, the fixed stars. Fraunhofer improved the telescope. Chladni
first investigated the nature of fiery meteors and brought the study
of acoustics to perfection. Alexander von Humboldt immensely promoted
the observation of the changes of the atmosphere and the general
knowledge of the nature of the earth. Werner and Leopold von Buch also
distinguished themselves among the investigators of the construction
of the earth and mountains. Scheele, Gmelin, Liebig, etc., were noted
chemists. Oken, upon the whole, chiefly promoted the study of natural
history, and numberless researches were made separately in mineralogy,
the study of fossils, botany, and zoology by the most celebrated
scientific men of the day. While travellers visited every quarter of
the globe in search of plants and animals as yet unknown and regulated
them by classes, other men of science were engaged at home in the
investigation of their internal construction, their uses and habits,
in which they were greatly assisted by the improved microscope, by
means of which Ehrenberg discovered a completely new class of
animalculae. The discoveries of science were also zealously applied
for practical uses. Agriculture, cattle-breeding, manufactures
received a fresh impulse and immense improvements as knowledge
advanced. Commerce by water and by land experienced a thorough
revolution on the discovery of the properties of steam, by the use of
steamers and railroads. Medical science also progressed,
notwithstanding the number of contradictory and extravagant theories.
The medical practitioners of Germany took precedence throughout
Europe. Animal magnetism was practiced by Eschenmaier, Kieser, and
Justin Kerner, by means of whose female seer, von Prevorst, the seeing
of visions and the belief in ghosts were once more brought forward.
Hahnemann excited the greatest opposition by his system of
homoeopathy, which cured diseases by the administration of homogeneous
substances in the minutest doses. He was superseded by the cold-water
cure. During the last twenty years the naturalists and medical men of
Germany have held an annual meeting in one or other of their native
cities.

The philologists and savants have for some years past also been in the
habit of holding a similar meeting. The classics no longer form the
predominant study among philologists. Even literati, whose tastes,
like that of Creuzer, are decidedly classic, have acknowledged that
the knowledge of the Oriental tongues is requisite for the attainment
of a thorough acquaintance with classic antiquity. A great school for
the study of the Eastern languages has been especially established
under the precedence of the brothers Schlegel, Bopp, and others. The
study of the ancient language of Germany and of her venerable
monuments has, finally, been promoted by Jacob Grimm and by his widely
diffused school.

The study of history became more profound and was extended over a
wider field. A mass of archives hitherto secret were rendered public
and spread new light on many of the remarkable characters and events
in the history of Germany. Historians also learned to compile with
less party spirit and on more solid grounds. History, at first
compiled in a Protestant spirit, afterward inclined as partially to
Catholicism, and the majority of the higher order of historical
writers were consequently rendered the more careful in their search
after truth. Among the universal historians, Rotteck gained the
greatest popularity on account of the extreme liberality of his
opinions, and Heeren and Schlosser acquired great note for depth of
learning. Von Hammer, who rendered us acquainted with the history of
the Mahometan East, takes precedence among the historical writers upon
foreign nations. Niebuhr's Roman History, Wilken's History of the
Crusades, Leo's History of Italy, Ranke's History of the Popes, etc.,
have attained well-merited fame.--The history of Germany as a whole,


 


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