Orientation

Currently I am working on what will be the second chapter of my dissertation.
It deals with politics during the long stretch of time between the fall
of Napoleon (1815) and the German Civil War (1866). By 1815 the Great Power
(Austria, Britain, Prussia, and Russia) had beaten Napoleon twice and had
put him into exile. These powers worked together to restore the old balance
of power between the states and the supremacy of noble inheritance in politics.

In the Rhenish cities, Restoration caused suspicion and opposition. The
government and the administration that Napoleon put into place gave the
urban elites the ability to take more control over the government and to
make the state more of a reflection of their interests. The urban mentality
of commerce and republicanism based on competition between patricians was
released from the confines of the city walls. They profited economically
as trade barriers fell. They gloried in the influence that they had over
bureaucrats. They became politicians and administrators themselves. Finally,
the Rhenish urban elites represented a type of liberalism that was a reflection
of their ideas of politics and economics as they existed in the city and
as they were able to write large on the region.

Restoration meant that the advantages that the urban elites had gained
would be withdrawn. Nobles from Berlin and Paris were sent to take over
administrative posts. The right to form associations would be abridged.
The press would be strictly censored. In Alsace, the Restoration was associated
with humiliation: the Great Powers occupied eastern France, and Austria threatened
to annex it. These caused uncertainty and economic hardship. There was
no love for the returning Bourbon king, and a good memory of the emperor
was always on the mind. Mayors and ex-officers were under surveillance for
political agitation. In the Lower Rhine, the Prussian government promised
to create a representative assembly and to respect the institutions that
were in place. These words reassured at first, but quickly became a bone
of contention as the government reneged, handing over the bureaucracy to
trained Prussians who were suspicious of the Catholics. Whereas the people
of the Lower Rhine had no love for Napoleon, they wanted to keep the laws
and structures that he introduced.

During the first fifteen years the Rhine featured the great centers of
liberal agitation against Restoration governments. They desired constitutions
and representation (in the sense that these would recognize the talents
of bourgeoisie). They desired nationalism, but not the central government.
The question that concerns me is the extent to which their own ideas of
nationalism were informed by their urban political experiences--did they
see the nation as the city writ large?

Benzenberg and the desire for a German constitutional monarchy

I have been slaving over this one document by Johann Benzenberg: a pamphlet
that he wrote in Paris in 1815 called The Wishes and Hopes of a Rhinelander
. It comes months after the lower Rhine was made the direct territory
of Prussia by the Congress of Vienna. Benznerberg's text makes an argument
for the incorporation of the Rhineland within some sort of constitutional
monarchy that would allow participation by Rhinelanders.

Benzenberg approaches nationalism with an eye to the problems that were
caused by the French occupation. He does little to credit the institutions
that the French brought with them (it appears that he found the same ideals
in expressed in the Enlightenment and refused to credit the French Revolution
for realizing them). Ultimately, the French occupation was a corrupt and
foreign actor in regional affairs. The connection between the people of
the Rhine and the government was broken. The prefect was a foreign appointment
who catered to the personal interests and those of this supporters. The
institutions that were introduced were problematic in that they were not
used for the benefit of natives­indeed he claims that the natives were "outside
the unified legal code nine times out of ten." Socially, the French caused
chaos by abridging traditional freedoms and rights (things like the ability
to place duties on commerce and the abolishing of cloisters and the confiscation
of their property). The freedom of religion that was introduced, while
preferable, was exploited by the Protestants who sought to profit from their
association with the French administration. Furthermore, the Napoleonic
state subjected Rhinelanders to the hardships of continuous warfare in Europe.

France failed to bind the Rhineland to it. Instead, it caused a yearning
among Rhinelanders to join with a German state­any German state. This hope
was so overwhelming among some Rhinelanders that others speculated whether
or not it was foolishness to find salvation, even as the Great Powers confronted
Napoleon. They desires a prince who would rule "with honesty and sincerity."

However, the desire to attach themselves to a "German tribe"
was not their only goal. Rhinelanders wanted that state, under the direction
of the Prince, to be a space in which the will of the could grow and find
expression. Benzenberg states that the Rhinelanders did not want to replace
the distant (geographically and emotionally) government of Paris with one
of Berlin (or anywhere else). He states that "It is the will of [the Rhenish]
Volk that the government of the province is not delivered, that
the province does not become a posting for bureaucrats and officials." The
sort of professional administrators that Berlin would send were just the
types that the Rhinelanders had already rejected from Paris. Furthermore,
Benzenberg posits that governance on a grand scale would fail to be an adequate
representation of popular will. He specifically preferences small states
approach rather than a grand unification of Germans.

He posited a more organic view in which representatives of the people
(formed from the estates as they were locally constituted) formed one arm
of society, the monarch and his government the other. Benzenberg drew his
inspiration from pre-Enlightenment government: the different estates contributed
to assemblies. While this may sound like the three-estate system that the
French used (and ignored), it was actually much richer. Each territory had
its own definitions for estates­they could be based on ownership, wealth,
heredity­cities and communes could be represented by estates, and in some
territories the peasants constituted an estate on their own. (Michael Rowe,
From Reich to State) The Rhenish estates would be formed from the
(urban) middle class, from which the vitality of the region comes. Benzenberg
offers a plan that would base voting on a low tax bar (10 Thaler) that would
allow greater participation than in other countries at the time. On top of
that, voters would donate 1 Thaler to an account that would support the representatives
for whom they would vote. The representative assembly that would emerge
therefrom (Landtag) would be independent of the government­it would have
its own legitimacy and its own income. The assembly would work with the
government in order to realize the will of the people (Volk).

The essential problem that Benzenberg continually underlines is that of
government from without. The French imposed their institutions without
care for local freedoms and interests. They appointed foreigners as administrators.
Benzenberg warns that the same problems could still arise as Prussia embarks
on the process of integrating the Rhineland provinces into the kingdom.
Because they are German does not mean that the Prussians could not impose
a regime that would not be foreign.

Implications

Already questions were being raised about the prospects of nationalism
under a centralizing state. It was not sufficient for a nation to have
an ethnic or cultural unity. What Benzenberg strove for was a nation that
was an expression of popular participation, the form of which would be determined
by social and historical precedents. The people and the government would
be two organisms that would work toward one another--nationalism from both
the top and the bottom.