revolution was wrecked on the rivalry of German and Czech; and when the Hungarians drew the sword against Austria, the imperial government was reinforced by the hatred of the southern Slavs for their Magyar task-masters.
Thus, from the chaos of warring races, the old order began slowly to reappear. So early as the 15th of June 1848 Prince Windischgrätz had restored order in Prague and received the thanks of the Frankfort parliament; on the 25th of July Radetzky’s victory at Custozza set Victory of the conservative forces. free the imperialist army in Italy; on the 4th of September Jellachich, ban of Croatia, invaded Hungary in the name of the united empire; on the 1st of November Windischgrätz entered democratic Vienna. The alliance of the army and the Slav races had won the victory over German democracy. The combating of Hungarian nationalism proved a longer and a harder task; but the Austrian victory of Kapolna (February 26–27, 1849) encouraged Schwarzenberg to dissolve the rump of the Reichsrath at Kremsier and proclaim a new constitution for the whole empire, including Hungary. The Magyar victories that followed issued in the proclamation, on the 14th of April, of the independence of Hungary. But though the Austrian arms had not been strong enough to crush the Hungarian revolt, they had proved at least the vitality of the conservative principle. The emperor Nicholas I. of Russia had watched in disgusted silence the weak spirit of concession with which the revolutions had been everywhere met; so long as the sovereigns seemed to forget their divine mission he had held rigorously aloof, and had only broken silence to congratulate Windischgrätz on his capture of Vienna and Schwarzenberg on his reassertion of vigorous principles. Now, however, that Divine Right was in arms against the forces of disorder, he was prepared to listen to the prayer of the emperor Francis Joseph for assistance against the Hungarian rebels. The engagements of 1833 were remembered; and in the brotherly spirit of the Holy Alliance, Hungary was subdued by Russian armies and handed over, without quid pro quo, to her legitimate king.
Görgei’s capitulation of Világos (August 14, 1849) cleared the ground for the complete restoration of the system destroyed by the March revolutions of the year before. The refusal of Frederick William IV. of Prussia to accept the imperial crown (April 21,1849) had already advertised Prussia and Austria. Convention of Olmütz, 1850. the failure of the constitutional and unionist movement in Germany; and Prussia, her military prestige restored, stood once more face to face with Austria in rivalry for the hegemony of Germany. In the diplomatic contest that followed Prussia was worsted, her claims to an independent supremacy in the north were defeated, and the convention of Olmütz (November 29, 1850) restored the status quo of the Confederation as established in 1815.
Within three years of the great upheaval of 1848 the forces of
revolution seemed everywhere to have been subdued, the states
system of Europe to have been re-established on the
basis of the treaties of Vienna. In reality, however,
this restoration was only on the surface; the cracks in
Napoleon III.
and Europe.
the structure of the European system had—to use
Bismarck’s phrase applied to another occasion—only been
“papered over”; and soon ominous rents revealed the fact
that the forces that had threatened it with sudden ruin were
still at work. One fateful breach in the treaties had, indeed,
been accepted as beyond repair; when the dust of the revolutionary
turmoil was at length laid a Bonaparte was once more
firmly seated on the throne of France. The emperor Nicholas,
watching from the calm of Russia, had realized all that the
recognition of this fact would involve; he had proposed to set in
motion the somewhat rusty machinery of the Grand Alliance,
but the other autocratic powers were in no case to support a
legitimist crusade, and when Napoleon in 1852 assumed the title
of emperor, all Europe recognized his right to do so, even
Nicholas being fain to content himself with refusing to treat the
parvenu monarch as his “brother,” and to admit his style of
“third” Napoleon, which seemed to imply a dynastic claim.
Napoleon, indeed, was accepted by the powers, as he was welcomed
by the French people, as the “saviour of society” from
the newly revealed perils of the social revolution. For new
and ominous forces had made their appearance since the revolution
of 1830 had established the middle classes in power. The
industrial development had proceeded in the west of Europe
Rise of socialism.
with astonishing rapidity, with its resulting concentration
of vast populations in factories and factory cities;
and this “proletariat,” excluded from any voice in the
government, and exposed in accordance with the prevailing
economic theories of doctrinaire Liberalism to the horrors of
unrestricted competition, had begun to organize itself in a
movement, of which the catchword was “the right to work”
and the banner the red flag of the socialist commune. The
reign of Charles X. had been the reductio ad absurdum of the
principle of legitimacy; that of Louis Philippe had discredited
for ever government based solely on the bourgeoisie; the socialistic
experiments of 1848 in Paris had collapsed amid the anarchy
and bloodshed of the June days. At this opportune moment
“The Napoleonic Idea.”
Louis Napoleon Bonaparte proclaimed to the French
people the “Napoleonic Idea” as conceived by
himself. The great Napoleon had been the incarnation
of the Revolution, had “sprung armed from the
Revolution, like Minerva from the head of Jupiter”; he had
ruled because to him the people, by whom the Revolution had
been made, had delegated the duty of representing, protecting
and guiding it. Of this idea Louis Napoleon conceived himself
to be the heir; and when by a double plebiscite the French
nation had established him in supreme power, first as president
for life (1851), then as emperor (1852), he was able to claim
that he represented the people in a far more immediate sense
than could be asserted of the chance majority of any representative
assembly.
It was clear that, sooner or later, Napoleon III. would prove a disturbing force in Europe. His title to rule was that he represented France; it followed therefore that he must be hostile to “the treaties,” by which the traditional aspirations of France, e.g. for her “natural boundaries” Economic revolution in Europe. of Rhine, Alps and Pyrenees, were restrained. He reigned as “emperor of the French”; it followed that he represented that principle of nationality which the treaties ignored. He could not afford—as Metternich had said of Ferdinand of Naples—“to treat his throne as an arm-chair”; and any activity he might display would be almost certainly at the expense of the established order. At the outset, indeed, it was his policy to pose as its custodian. To conciliate the French clericals he supported the pope against the Italian Liberals; but otherwise he proclaimed aloud his devotion to the arts of peace. A period of rapid material expansion succeeded the unrest of the revolutionary years; engineers and men of science were quickly producing a change in all the material conditions of life, greater than could have been effected by any political revolution; especially the face of Europe was gradually being covered with a network of railways, which it was hoped would draw the European nations not only materially but morally closer together. The first universal exhibition, opened under the auspices of the prince consort at London in 1851, was intended to advertise and consecrate the dawn of a new era of international peace and goodwill. The Crystal Palace at Sydenham, once hailed as the “bright Koh-i-nur of the West,” remains the dismal monument of a hope so soon to be belied by the hard logic of events. For no period since 1815 has been so occupied with wars and the rumours of war as the twenty years that followed the opening of this great temple of peace.
One question, that of the ultimate destination of the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein, which threatened the tranquillity of the West, was temporarily settled by the conference of London in 1852 (see Schleswig-Holstein Question). But about the same time anxious watchers noticed The Crimean War. on the political horizon in the East a cloud, no bigger than a man’s hand, that threatened a serious storm. At first this was no more than a quarrel between Greek and Latin monks about the custody of certain holy places and things in Palestine.
