Fichte suspended his class at the University of Berlin, exhorting his students to fight until they attained liberty or death. Themes of martyrdom resonated through the campaign; the poet Theodor K?rner wrote before his own martyrdom of death in the cause of Germany as a ‘nuptials’ with the fatherland. ‘It is not,’ he clarified, ‘a war of the kind the kings know about, ’tis a crusade, ’tis a holy war.’ This ‘holy war’ – the first in post-Christian Europe – preceded by many decades the jihad against military and cultural imperialism credited to Islamic fanatics.
Jahn exhorted Germans to ‘know again with manly pride the value of your own noble living language’ and leave alone the ‘cesspool’ of Paris. The exponent of patriotic calisthenics was surpassed by the poet Ernst Moritz Arndt: ‘Only a bloody hatred of the French,’ Arndt asserted, ‘can unify German power, restore German glory, bring out all the noble instincts of the people and submerge the base ones.’ ‘I will my hatred of the French,’ Arndt wrote, ‘not just for this war, I will it for a long time, I will it forever … Let this hatred smoulder as the religion of the German folk, as a holy mantra in all hearts, and let it preserve us in our fidelity, our honesty and courage.’
No one, however, hated as eloquently as Heinrich von Kleist. Germany’s greatest dramatist went beyond political grievance in his luridly precise description of swinging a small French boy around and smashing his head against a church pillar. The scion of a distinguished military family in Prussia, von Kleist abandoned his family tradition and military career, committing himself to a programme of intellectual and aesthetic growth. Arrested by the French police in 1807 on suspicion of being a spy and detained for a year, he then embarked on a literary career in Francophobia.
He brought out a patriotic journal called Germania in time for the anti-French uprising. In his ode ‘Germania to Her Children’ von Kleist spelled out what he required of his German peers:
With the Kaiser preceding you
Leave your huts and homes
Sweep over the Franks
Like the boundless foamy sea.
Von Kleist wanted Germania’s children to dam up the Rhine with French corpses. Sneering at ‘prattlers’ and ‘writers’ who speak abstractly about freedom, he called for the baptism of Germany with blood. In ‘War Song of the Germans’, he argued that the French must be made extinct, like the beasts that had once roamed the forests of Europe.
Impatient for Progress
Patriotic rhetoric became increasingly commonplace among educated Germans, especially after the explicitly anti-nationalist post-Napoleonic settlement sealed at the Congress of Vienna in 1815. It left Germany as a Confederation of thirty-nine states, and those Germans hoping for unity even more frustrated than before. In 1817 hundreds of students, members of a student fraternity inspired by Jahn, gathered near the Wartburg castle on the 300th anniversary of Martin Luther’s nailing up of his theses. This castle had been a refuge for Luther, where he had translated the Bible; it now became a symbol of German nationalism as disciples of Jahn recited prayers for Germany’s salvation and threw ‘un-German’ books, including the Code Napoléon, into a bonfire.
Metternich, the keeper of Europe’s peace, cracked down on universities; Jahn was imprisoned for six years. But the student unrest signalled a far wider discontent than one that the Austrian chancellor’s secret police could stem. The American and French Revolutions had left many young men around the world fretting that they had been left out or had fallen behind in the march of progress. A brilliant military marauder like Napoleon brought, often in person, thrilling new ideas of liberation to many of them. A series of constitutionalist revolts, led by intellectuals and army officers, and often modelled on Napoleon’s own coup, erupted across southern Europe – in Spain, Italy and Greece – in 1820 and 1821.
In 1825 military heroes of Russia’s ‘wars of liberation’ against Napoleon in 1812–14 challenged the Russian autocracy. These ‘Decembrists’, as they came to be called after the month of their abortive uprising, were brutally crushed, though they were representatives of Russia’s aristocratic elite. Five of them were hanged and hundreds exiled to Siberia for life.
The failure of the uprising seeded a Romantic cult of sacrifice and martyrdom (and originally inspired the greatest piece of prose fiction of the nineteenth century, War and Peace). The youthful Herzen, who was fourteen at the time of the uprising, inaugurated Russia’s distinctive revolutionary tradition when on the hills overlooking Moscow he swore a ‘Hannibalic oath’ to sacrifice his entire life to the struggle begun by the Decembrists. Such ideas of resistance and protest, which eventually expanded into revolutionary socialism, were made more urgent and appealing by a repressive state in Russia. In Europe, too, all aspirations for freedom had to reckon with strong and canny forces of conservatism: the supranational dynastic states, dubbed the ‘Holy Alliance’ by the Russian Tsar.
Waterloo and the Congress of Vienna may have brought peace to Europe, and relief to its monarchical ruling classes, embodied best by the stern and paranoid figure of Metternich. But the mood across post-Napoleonic Europe and Russia was febrile, registered in the growing popularity of soul-stirring opera and lyric poetry, the cult of Byron, and Stendhal’s novels about the maladie du siècle. Young men everywhere waited for a new revelation on the same scale as the French Revolution, or at least some replacements for obsolete religious beliefs.
The fascination with the mysterious, the esoteric and the irrational that characterizes the entire epoch would pave the way for the revolutions of 1848. After their failure, accumulated frustration would generate intransigent movements of socialism as well as nationalism, and desire for a genuine, thoroughgoing revolution that would bring freedom and equality to all, not just a few.
Alternative Gods
‘What is exploding today was prepared before 1848 … the fire that burns today was lit then.’ The German jurist Carl Schmitt wrote these words in the mid-twentieth century; they ring even truer today. In the years before 1848, thwarted idealism went into forging new religions and ideologies, and revolts and uprisings kept young men gainfully employed as professional conspirators and insurgents. The Italian Carboneria, which became the first secret organization to lead a large-scale uprising in modern Europe, offered a model for many subsequent small revolutionary cells.