Remnants of Feudalism and of the Guild System

In England and France, the year 1830 called the bourgeoisie to political power, but in Germany it merely woke them from political hibernation. It was the renown, and the undoing, of this class that it could win its revolution gloriously enough in the cloudy heights of literature and philosophy, but never on level ground with bare fists and cold steel. Its wings were not aired in the storming of any of the countless Bastilles of despotism and feudalism that covered German soil: only the sword of the French conqueror opened the way for it.

Thus it owed the beginning of its emancipation to a foreign domination that destroyed its national existence. It had to fight its liberator, and could only do so in the service of its oppressor: it helped to win the victory of European reaction, but had no share in its fruits. Germany remained torn into some thirty despotisms, the smallest of which was as sovereign as the greatest. The German Confederation was a mockery of German unity. The Federal Diet (Bundestag) in Frankfurt-am-Main, the object of universal contempt, performed the one national function of being the people’s jailor on behalf of the princes.

The terrible disappointment roused the German bourgeoisie to one more attempt at manly resistance. Its vigorous youth, inspired by classical literature and just returning from a victorious war, raised a banner of rebellion in the universities in the Students’ Association (Burschenschaft). But no army gathered around this vanguard, which itself lacked any clear class-consciousness. In the Students’ Association, medieval dreams of Emperor and Empire were crossed with a Jacobin wrath to draw an avenging dagger against the treacherous princes and their abettors. Both elements combined in Sand, the member of the Students’ Association who, in 1819, murdered the Russian spy, Kotzebue. Inspired by high-minded motives, the deed was politically senseless, but was therefore all the more welcome to the despotic feudal reaction, which had already long been lying in wait. The Karlsbad Decrees launched that infamous persecution of ‘demagogues’ that destroyed all the budding political life within Germany.

The surfeit of political reaction on which the German bourgeoisie choked was possible because of its lack of economic development. French rule had cleared Germany only of the coarser rubbish of feudalism. It was totally destroyed on the left bank of the Rhine. Here the nobility no longer had any privileges, feudal and Church property had been transferred into peasant hands and the peasant was a free proprietor as in France. Elsewhere however, and most strongly in the North and East, a mighty remnant of feudal garbage had been preserved.