488 Chapter 25Armies ended most of the revolutions. A cheery
German prince summarized the situation in late 1848:
“It takes soldiers to put democrats in their place.” Eu-
rope had briefly been led by revolutionaries: Ledru-
Rollin in Paris, Mazzini and Garibaldi in Rome, Manin
in Milan, and Kossuth in Buda. At the end of the day,
the true victors were generals such as Cavaignac in
France and Radetzky in Austria. By 1850 Kossuth
would be in prison and his radical colleagues in exile.
Manin spent the rest of his life in Paris; Ledru-Rollin
and Mazzini found exile in London; Garibaldi became a
citizen of the United States and spent the early 1850s
as a candle maker on Staten Island. Radetzky, mean-
while, ended his days as the governor-general of Lom-
bardy and Venetia.
The military conquest of the revolution began in
Prague in June 1848. The enraged army commander of
Bohemia, Prince Alfred zu Windischgrätz, whose wife
had been killed in riots there, ignored his orders and
bombarded the city. Windischgrätz subdued Prague,
then turned his armies on the Hungarians and took
Buda and Pest a few weeks later. One month after
the shelling of Prague, Radetzky (also resisting
imperial instructions) defeated the Piedmontese at
Custozza.Windischgrätz led a polyglot imperial army
against Vienna in late October 1848 and shelled his
third capital into submission. The army then perempto-
rily executed the leaders of the government, including
Robert Blum, the leader of the Saxon revolution who
was visiting Vienna as the vice president of the Frank-
furt Parliament. The generals entrusted the Austrian
Empire to a reactionary aristocrat, Prince Felix
Schwarzenberg, the brother-in-law of Windischgrätz
and a member of Radetzky’s staff. Schwarzenberg and
the generals arranged for the mentally deficient em-
peror Ferdinand to abdicate and for his son to renounce
the throne. This brought the emperor’s eighteen-year-
old grandson, Franz Joseph, to the throne. The new
emperor reigned for an exceptionally long time (from
1848 to 1916) and became the sentimental symbol of
the twilight of an empire. In 1848 he was simply the
pawn of counterrevolutionaries who asserted that he
was not bound by concessions that he had not person-
ally made.
The military counterrevolution in Austria stiffened
the will of King Frederick William IV of Prussia. A few
days after the bombardment of Vienna, he again sent
the army into Berlin. Under the shrewd leadership of a
conservative minister of the interior, Baron Otto von
Manteuffel, the Prussian counterrevolution took a more
moderate form than the Austrian reaction. The revolu-
tionary Parliament was dismissed, but Manteuffel ap-
peased liberals by persuading the king to grant his
promised constitution with a bicameral legislature.
Manteuffel understood that constitutions could be con-
servative weapons, too. Thus, the Prussian Constitution
of 1850 restated the principle of divine right and pro-
tected the Hohenzollern family by reserving crown do-
mains that produced a huge income. The Prussian army
remained an unrestricted state within the state. The
government depended upon the support of the king,
not the Parliament. The lower house of that Parliament
(the Landtag) was elected by a broad manhood suffrage,
but the electorate was subdivided (by taxes paid) into
three classes, each of which elected one-third of the
deputies.
The defeat of the revolution in Vienna and Berlin
doomed the national revolution at Frankfurt. In March
1849 the desperate delegates offered the crown of a
unified Germany to Frederick William. Under pressure
from conservatives, he rejected “a crown from the gut-
ter,” which would make him “the serf of the revolution.”
Austria and Prussia recalled their delegates, and the city
of Frankfurt refused to host the assembly any longer. A
rump Parliament briefly met in Stuttgart, but the Würt-
temberg army disbanded it. Prince Schwarzenberg
seized the opportunity to block all manifestations of
nationalism. He particularly tried to kill the kleindeutsch
vision of Germany, which elevated Prussia at the ex-
pense of Austria. His greatest victory came at the ex-
pense of the Prussians who were obliged in 1850 to
disavow a kleindeutschunion and to accept the recreation
of the Austrian-dominated German Confederation, in
an agreement known to Austrians as the Olmütz Con-
vention and to Prussians as the “humiliation of
Olmütz.”
None of these counterrevolutionary victories was
as startling as the events in France. General Cavaignac
had demonstrated the limits of the French revolution in
June 1848 by using the army against protesting work-
ers. In December 1848 he sought the presidency of the
republic against Ledru-Rollin. French voters, however,
spurned both men in favor of an aspirant monarch.
Prince Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, the nephew of
Napoleon Bonaparte, won more than 70 percent of the
votes; he had far greater name-recognition in provincial
France (where most voters were still illiterate), and his
name stood for order after revolutionary chaos and it
evoked the glorious triumphs of his uncle.
Louis-Napoleon proceeded to create an authoritar-
ian regime. In short order, Louis-Napoleon reintroduced
censorship, restricted universal suffrage, outlawed politi-