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Autocracy, despotism and democracy
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6. THE SECOND REICH
After the North German Confederation led by Prussia had defeated France at the battle of Sedan, the new German empire was born on January 18, 1871 in the Hall of Mirrors, Versailles. There the 23 German princes offered the title of emperor to the most powerful amongst them, King William I of Prussia. Richard Evans writes: "Built by Louis XIV, the 'Sun King', at the height of his power nearly two hundred years before, the palace was now turned into a humiliating symbol of French impotence and defeat. This was a key moment in modern German and indeed European history. To liberals, it seemed the fulfilment of their dreams. But there was a heavy price to pay. Several features of Bismarck's creation had ominous consequences for the future. First of all, the decision to call the new state 'the German Reich' inevitably conjured up memories of its thousand-year predecessor, the dominant power in Europe for so many centuries. Some, indeed, referred to Bismarck's creation as the 'Second Reich'. The use of the word implied, too, that where the First Reich had failed, in the face of French aggression, the Second had succeeded. Among the many aspects of his creation that survived the fall of Bismarck's German Reich in 1918, the continued use of the term 'German Empire', Deutsches Reich, by the Weimar Republic and all its institutions was far from being the least significant. The word 'Reich' conjured up an image among educated Germans that resonated far beyond the institutional structures Bismarck created: the successor to the Roman Empire; the vision of God's Empire here on earth; the universality of its claim to suzerainty; in a more prosaic but no less powerful sense, the concept of a German state that would include all German speakers in Central Europe - 'one People, one Reich, one Leader', as the Nazi slogan was to put it. There always remained those in Germany who thought Bismarck's creation only a partial realization of the idea of a true German Reich. Initially, their voices were drowned by the euphoria of victory. But with time, their number was to grow.
"The constitution which Bismarck devised for the new German Reich in 1871 in many ways fell short of the ideals dreamed of by the liberals in 1848. Alone of all modern German constitutions, it lacked any declaration of principle about human rights and civic freedoms. Formally speaking, the new Reich was a loose confederation of independent states, much like its predecessor had been. Its titular head was the Emperor or Kaiser, the title taken over from the old head of the Holy Roman Reich and ultimately deriving from the Latin name 'Caesar'. He had wide-ranging powers including the declaration of war and peace. The Reich's institutions were stronger than those of the old, with a nationally elected parliament, the Reichstag - the name, deriving from the Holy Roman Reich, was another survival across the revolutionary divide of 1918 - and a number of central administrative institutions, most notably the Foreign Office, to which more were added as time went on. But the constitution did not accord to the national parliament the power to elect or dismiss governments and their ministers, and key aspects of political decision-making, above all on matters of war and peace, and on the administration of the army, were reserved to the monarch and his immediate entourage. Government ministers, including the head of the civilian administration, the Reich Chancellor - an office created by Bismarck and held by him for some twenty years - were civil servants, not party politicians, and they were beholden to the Kaiser, and not to the people or to their parliamentary representatives. With time, the influence of the Reichstag grew, though not by very much. With only mild exaggeration, the great revolutionary thinker Karl Marx described the Bismarckian Reich, in a convoluted phrase that captured many of its internal contradictions, as a 'bureaucratically constructed military despotism, dressed up with parliamentary forms, mixed in with an element of feudalism yet at the same time already influenced by the bourgeoisie'."50
It has been pointed out that Germany's victory over France in 1870 served to calm the passion of wounded pride elicited by the defeats inflicted by Napoleon. However, the victory also had the opposite effect, stoking up national pride in the new, united nation-state and a new belief in its rights in relation to its neighbours. Thus while Germany's problem in 1806 had been defeat in war, the temptation after 1870 was victory and the hubris that came from it. War had humbled the old enemy and united the nation (almost): why should it not continue to cure the nation's ills?
The roots of war-worship were to be found in Germany's not-so-distant past. Gradually, from the time of Clausewitz, the idea became entrenched that war is a cleansing process sweeping away the decadence that comes from too much peace. And then there was Hegel's idea that "the German spirit is the spirit of the new world. Its aim is the realization of absolute Truth as the unlimited self-determination of freedom." Clearly war could not be taboo to the advocates of "unlimited self-determination". As Barbara Ehrenreich writes: "In the opinion of Hegel and the later theorists of nationalism, nations need war - that is, the sacrifice of their citizens - even when they are not being menaced by other nations. The reason is simple: The nation, as a kind of 'organism', exists only through the emotional unity of its citizens, and nothing cements this unity more decisively than war. As Hegel explained, peace saps the strength of nations by allowing citizens to drift back into their individual concerns: 'In times of peace civil life expands more and more, all the different spheres settle down, and in the long run men sink into corruption, their particularities become more and more fixed and ossified. But health depends upon the unity of the body and if the parts harden, death occurs.' Meaning, of course, the death of the nation, which depends for its life on the willingness of the citizens to face their own deaths. War thus becomes a kind of tonic for nations, reviving that passion for collective defence that alone brings the nation to life in the minds of its citizens. Heinrich von Treitschke, the late-nineteenth-century German nationalist, put it excitedly: 'One must say in the most decided manner: "War is the only remedy for ailing nations!" The moment the State calls, "Myself and my existence are at stake!" social self-seeking must fall back and every party hate be silent. The individual must forget his own ego and feel himself a member of the whole. In that very point lies the loftiness of war, that the small man disappears entirely before the great thought of the State.'"51
Such theories were not confined to Germany. Lord Wolseley saw a "military spirit" as "the purifier of civilisation, its defence against enemies from without and degeneracy from within".52
We have seen how Bismarck achieved a very large part of his programme in the next decade, and even encroached on French territory in Alsace-Lorraine after the battle of Sedan. Moreover, the fact that the Second Reich, unlike the First, had come into being as a result of a victorious war, a fact that laid a fatal militarist imprint on it, magnification of eighteenth-century Prussian militarism on a much large scale. Indeed, as Richard Evans reminds us, “it was above all in order to protect the autonomy of the Prussian officer corps from liberal interference that Bismarck was appointed in 1862. He immediately announced that 'the great questions of the day are not decided by speeches and majority resolutions - that was the great mistake of 1848 and 1849 - but by iron and blood'. He was as good as his word. The war of 1866 destroyed the Kingdom of Hanover, incorporating it into Prussia, and expelled Austria and Bohemia from Germany after centuries in which they had played a major part in shaping its destinies, while the war of 1870-71 took away Alsace-Lorraine from France and placed it under the direct suzerainty of the German Empire. It is with some justification that Bismarck has been described as a 'white revolutionary'. Military force and military action created the Reich; and in so doing they swept aside legitimate institutions, redrew state boundaries and overthrew long-established traditions, with a radicalism and a ruthlessness that cast a long shadow over the subsequent development of Germany. They also thereby legitimized the use of force for political ends to a degree well beyond what was common in most other countries except when they contemplated imperial conquests in other parts of the world. Militarism in state and society was to play an important part in undermining German democracy in the 1920s and in the coming of the Third Reich.
"Bismarck saw to it that the army was virtually a state within a state, with its own immediate access to the Kaiser and its own system of self-government. The Reichstag only had the right to approve its budget every seven years, and the Minister of War was responsible to the army rather than to the legislature. Officers enjoyed many social and other privileges and expected the deference of civilians when they met on the street. Not surprisingly, it was the ambition of many a bourgeois professional to be admitted as an officer in the army reserves; while, for the masses, compulsory military service produced familiarity with military codes of conduct and military ideals and values. In times of emergency, the army was entitled to establish martial law and suspend civil liberties, a move considered so frequently during the Wilhelmine period that some historians have with pardonable exaggeration described the politicians and legislators of the time as living under the permanent threat of a coup d'état from above.
"The army impacted on society in a variety of ways, most intensively of all in Prussia, then after 1871 more indirectly, through the Prussian example, in other German states as well. Its prestige, gained in the stunning victories of the wars of unification, was enormous. Non-commissioned officers, that is, those men, who stayed on after their term of compulsory military service was over and served in the army for a number of years, had an automatic right to a job in state employment when they finally left the army. This meant that the vast majority of policemen, postmen, railwaymen and other lower servants of the state were ex-soldiers, who had been socialized in the army and behaved in the military fashion to which they had become accustomed. The rule-book of an institution like the police force concentrated on enforcing military models of behaviour, insisted that the public be kept at arm's length and ensured that, in street marches and mass demonstrations, the crowd would be more likely to be treated like an enemy than an assembly of citizens. Military concepts of honour were pervasive enough to ensure the continued vitality of duelling among civilian men, even amongst the middle classes, though it was also common in Russia and France as well.
"Over time, the identification of the officer corps with the Prussian aristocracy weakened, and aristocratic military codes were augmented by new forms of popular militarism, including in the early 1900s the Navy League and the veterans' clubs. By the time of the First World War, most of the key positions in the officer corps were held by professionals, and the aristocracy was dominant mainly in traditional areas of social prestige and snobbery such as the cavalry and the guards, much as it was in other countries. But the professionalization of the officer corps, hastened by the advent of new military technology from the machine gun and barbed wire to the aeroplane and the tank, did not make it any more democratic. On the contrary, military arrogance was strengthened by the colonial experience, when German armed forces ruthlessly put down rebellion of indigenous peoples such as the Hereros in German South-West Africa (now Namibia). In 1904-07, in an act of deliberate genocide, the German army massacred thousands of Herero men, women and children and drove many more of them into the desert, where they starved. From a population of some 80,000 before the war, the Hereros declined to a mere 15,000 by 1911 as a result of these actions. In an occupied part of the German Empire such as Alsace-Lorraine, annexed from France in 1871, the army frequently behaved like conquerors facing a hostile and refractory population. Some of the most flagrant examples of such behaviour had given rise in 1913 to a heated debate in the Reichstag, in which the deputies passed a vote of no-confidence in the government. This did not of course force the government to resign, but it illustrated none the less the growing polarization of opinion over the role of the army in German society."53
It was Germany more than any other country that used the recent major changes in military strategy and technology to increase her power vastly. Indeed, according to Bobbitt, "the Prussian solution to the requirement of vast numbers of soldiers to exploit the opportunities of decisive battle was to militarize the entire society. After the 1873 depression, the German state nationalized the railroads, introduced compulsory social insurance, and increased its intervention in the economy - in order to maximise the welfare of the nation. Throughout the nineteenth century Britain refused to adopt a mass conscript army; it was Prussia that militarized as it industrialized. The railways, telegraph, and standardization of mechanical tools that industrialization made possible allowed for dizzying increases in the speed and mobility of military dispositions. The use of the telegraph, in concert with the railroad, allowed generals to mass widely dispersed forces quickly and to coordinate their operations over a vast theatre... An entire society could be mobilized for war, replenishing the front when necessary as the conflict progressed. But this was only possible if that entire society could be made a party to the war..."54
The new Reich soon had more than military prowess to boast of. Michael Stürmer writes: "Within the lifetime of one generation Germany was able to become the foremost industrial and trading power in Europe. Bismarck's revolution from above unleashed vast energies through the nation state, not entirely unlike events in France eighty years before. Industrial performance was second to none and was accomplished by the birth of the welfare state and democratic institutions and aspirations; of a socialist subculture and an ambitious liberal bourgeoisie unsure of itself but driven by nervous energy and creative unrest. At the turn of the century the language of the sciences was, in many parts of the world, German. A vast number of Nobel prizes went to German scholars, many of them Jews. German big business and banks were probably organised more efficiently than most competitors except for the United States. German universities became the model for many establishments of higher education from Turkey to North America. If the French Impressionists dominated the art world in the nineteenth century, after the turn of the century German art movements became equally important. In literature it was probably the Germany of Gerhard Hauptmann, Thomas Mann or Theodor Mommsen, all of them Nobel-prize winners, that most sensitively expressed the drama and contradictions of industrial society. A letter which appeared in The Times in August, 1914 under the heading 'Scholars' Protest Against War' summed up a widely held view: 'We regard Germany as a nation leading the way in the arts and sciences, and we have all learnt and are learning from German scholars.'"55
Thus, as Disraeli rightly pointed out in February, 1871, the Franco-German war amounted to "a German revolution, a greater political event than the French revolution of the last century. I don't say a greater, or as great a social event... The balance of power has been entirely destroyed... Not a single principle on the management of our foreign affairs, accepted by all statesmen for guidance up to six months ago, any longer exists. You have a new world..."56There had been a revolution in the sense that the balance of power in Europe had been upset, and in that the principles underlying the nation-state, of which Germany was now the leading example, were indeed revolutionary.
“After 1871,” writes Bobbitt, “a new society of nation-states gradually emerged. Its mood was one of easily inflamed nationalism and ethnic truculence. This reflected the public mood, excited by the press on a scale impossible before the spread of free compulsory public education and vastly increased literacy. Three new ideas vied in the public mind for attention and allegiance: Darwinism, which had been easily admitted into a social credo of competitiveness and national survivalism; Marxism, with its hostility to the capitalist relationships of the industrial age; and bourgeois parliamentarianism, which promoted the rule of law in a national and an international society that was becoming increasingly credulous about the role that law could play. It was thus an age of faith in law even if the bases for legal consensus were at the time being quickly eroded, an age of anxiety in class relationships, an age of ethnomania within states. The contrast with the world it replaced could not have been greater. One can scarcely imagine a leader of a state-nation speaking as Bismarck did in explaining the new spirit of the age: 'Who rules in France or Sardinia is as matter of indifference to me once the government is recognised and only a question of fact, not of right. [F]or me France will remain France, whether it is governed by Napoleon or St. Louis. I know that you will reply that a properly conceived Prussian policy requires chastity in foreign affairs even from the point of view of utility. I am prepared to discuss the point of utility with you; but if you posit antinomies between right and revolution; Christianity and infidelity; God and the devil; I can argue no longer and can merely say, 'I am not of your opinion and you judge in me what is not yours to judge.'
"This is the authentic voice of the nation-state. Regimes may come and go, but the nation endures. International law conformed itself to this new society; how a government came to power was of no relevance so long as the fact of its control over a nation could be established. Self-determination - the right of nations to have states of their own - became the only principle recognized in international law that detracted from the axiomatic legality of the government that was in control.
"It was obvious at the time that the nation-state bore certain strategic risks that were inherent in the kind of political society on which such a state depends. In his last public statement, in 1890, Moltke issued an ominous and melancholy warning. With such states, the old warrior said, which depended upon and at the same time inflamed popular passions, future wars could last 'seven and perhaps thirty years’.”57
Bobbitt claims that Germany after 1871 was not only the first nation-state, as opposed to state-nation, but also a proto-fascist state. Bismarck’s victories over Austria and France “allowed him to place at the apex of the German state a radically conservative, militarist class whose only claim to pan-German legitimacy was that it alone was able to realize the ambitions of national unity. German nationalism - a program that held that a state was legitimated by its service to a pre-eminent ethnic nation - was the prototype for fascism, as its expression in the Constitution of 1871 confirms.
"Bismarck did not so much unify as conquer the other German states and then proceed to transform their politics by delivering German unity under a popular doctrine of militarism and ethnic nationalism. This put fascism on the table as a competitor to the parliamentary systems…” 58
7. THE RISORGIMENTO AND THE FALL OF THE PAPACY
Among the monarchies of Europe there was a unique one that was so absolutist as to give all monarchies a bad name – the Papacy. Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh write: "Writing in the 1850s, an historian and Catholic apologist described the Papal States of the immediate post-Napoleonic period as 'a benevolent autocracy'. Between 1823 and 1846, some 200,000 people in this 'benevolent autocracy' were consigned to the galleys, banished into exile, sentenced to life imprisonment or to death. Torture by the Inquisitors of the Holy Office was routinely practised. Every community, whether small rural village or major city, maintained a permanent gallows in its central square. Repression was rampant and surveillance constant, with Papal spies lurking everywhere. Meetings of more than three people were officially banned. Railways were banned because Pope Gregory XVI believed they might 'work harm to religion'. Newspapers were also banned. According to a decree of Pope Pius VIII, anyone possessing a book written by a heretic was to be considered a heretic himself. Anyone overhearing criticism of the Holy Office and not reporting it to the authorities was deemed as guilty as the critic. For reading a book on the Index, or for eating meat on Friday, one could be imprisoned."59
However, with the arrival of a still more absolutist Pope, Pius IX, in 1846, the forces of nationalism and revolution were to prove more than a match for him.
"Strangely enough, given his subsequent career, Pius IX began his reign with the reputation of a reformer. He was sympathetic to at least some form of Italian unification and nationalism. He envisioned himself, in his capacity of pontiff, serving as a divinely ordained conduit and instrument for Italy's rebirth. He dreamed of presiding over a confederation of Italian states. He even elicited hopeful appeals for support from Mazzini and Garibaldi, who in their naivety fancied they might find a new ally in the Church.
"Whatever illusions Pius may initially have fostered, they quickly evaporated, along with his popularity. It soon became apparent that the Italy the Pope had in mind bore little relation to any constitutional state. In 1848, he doggedly refused to lend his support to a rebellious military campaign against Austrian domination of the north. His studied neutrality was perceived as a craven betrayal, and the resulting violent backlash obliged him to flee Rome in ignominious disguise, as a priest in the carriage of the Bavarian ambassador. In 1850, Papal rule was restored by the arrival of French troops [sent by Louis Napoleon, the future emperor] and Pius returned to his throne. His political position, however, now made no concessions of any kind to liberalism or reform; and the regime he established in his own domains was to become increasingly hated."60
In December, 1851 Louis Napoleon staged a coup d'état in Paris, and, somewhat surprisingly, the leadership of the Grand Orient (in spite of resistance by some radical Freemasons, such as Ledru-Rollin) decided to support him in the plebiscite that elected him President of the Republic. Napoleon was now indebted to the Masons, and therefore, bowing to their pressure, began to turn against the Pope.61 In particular, he began to support King Victor Emmanuel of Sardinia-Piedmont, a Freemason, in his struggle to expel the Austrians from Italy and unify the peninsula - a movement that eventually led to the stripping of the Papacy of all its secular dominions with the exception of the Vatican City itself.
The Franco-Sardinian alliance was successful: after the victories of Magenta and Solferino in 1859-60, the Austrians retained only Venetia (the Italians acquired that in 1866). Meanwhile, Garibaldi's red-shirts had conquered Sicily and Naples. Only the Papal States in the centre of Italy withstood the Masonic-led onslaught. They, paradoxically, were protected by a French garrison - Napoleon was not yet ready to throw the Papacy to the nationalist wolves. But for how long?...
As his political power crumbled during the course of the revolution, Pius IX sought to compensate for it by asserting his spiritual power in a shriller and more maniacal manner than ever, by increased repression within his kingdom, and by inventing new dogmas that the Catholics were now compelled to believe.
The process had begun in 1854, when, with the support of five hundred Italian, Spanish and Portuguese bishops, many of whom he had appointed to newly created dioceses, he proclaimed the doctrine of the immaculate conception of the Virgin - that is, her freedom from original sin - while in exile in Gaeta. His personal secretary, Monsignor Talbot, said at that time: "You see, the most important thing is not the new dogma but the way it is proclaimed." In other words, the important thing was not whether the dogma was true or not, but the fact that the Pope was asserting his power.
In 1864 Pius issued Quanta Cura, which condemned a whole "Syllabus" of Errors, including modern heresies such as liberalism and socialism62, and reasserted the papacy's supremacy over all secular powers.
Then, in December, 1869 he convened the First Vatican Council. Two and a half months into the Council, the question of papal infallibility was raised.
In his constitution Pastor Aeternus, the Pope declared his own infallibility on matters of faith and morals when speaking ex cathedra thus:-
“1. If anyone will say that the blessed Apostle Peter was not placed by Christ the Lord as prince of all the apostles and the visible head of the whole of the Church militant, or that he did not receive, directly and without mediation, from our same Lord Jesus Christ only the pre-eminence of honour, and not the true and genuine pre-eminence of power, let him be
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