The Sacrifice of the Peasants

The monarchy answered Stein’s motion by appointing General Pfuel Minister-President and Minister of War. Some, but not all, of the ministerial posts were occupied by unimportant lay-figures from the Vormärz bureaucracy and diplomatic service. At the same time General Wrangel received supreme command over the troops concentrated in the Province of Brandenburg. These were preparations for a coup d’état, but not yet the coup itself. The counter-revolution had no plan of campaign. For very good reasons, it had reservations about simply breaking the Assembly up by force; the King in particular had a very lively fear of renewing his experiences of March 18-19.

The reaction’s main trick in the immediate period consisted in roaring for a constitution ‘like a seven-fold ox’. All the sentimental nostalgia of the Vormärz liberals for a constitution were child’s play compared with the holy ardour that now consumed all reactionaries for that sheet of paper to ‘thrust itself like a second providence between our Lord God in Heaven and this country’. The Assembly was buried under the most vehement accusations that it was light-mindedly neglecting its vocation to agree constitution and was wasting its time with all sorts of useless rubbish.

This ugly humbug, which has gone down in the patriotic histories of the year of revolution as the honest voice of the people, had two objectives. First of all the Assembly was to be so intimidated that it would back away from any further attacks on the Vormärz state, and concentrate exclusively on composing a sheet of paper which could anyway be torn up by the first bayonet. Secondly however there was in the constitution a paragraph in which the Junkers and their followers had a lively interest, that is the paragraph which, as is only right in a bourgeois constitution, declares that property is holy and inviolable, and that any infringement of it must be fully compensated. The faster this paragraph was proclaimed a new fundamental right the better as far as the Junkers were concerned. Armed with this, they planned to defend to the last gasp all their feudal property, however rotten it might be.

The Assembly saw through this move by the reaction, and its leaders, like Bucher and Waldeck, publicly exposed it. Their commission had prepared a constitution that was quite tolerable from the bourgeois point of view. What it lacked could be laid at the door of the government, which had in particular failed to complete the draft District and Regional Statutes, whether out of malice or out of mere incapacity. Whatever wastage of time and energy the Assembly can really be accused of should also be charged to the government. A new parliament that from the start gets nothing but hindrance from the government must perforce often stumble. Despite all its difficulties, the Berlin Assembly proved that an organ of popular representation, elected under the fresh impact of a revolution by general suffrage, is far superior in practical insight and clarity to the best-trained bureaucracy. It produced incomparably more than the Prussian bureaucracy in its best periods, and Gneist, who was by no means one of its admirers, said in its favour that materially it achieved more in five months than the English Parliament did in any year in the current century. Many objections to the Assembly can be raised from the revolutionary point of view, but against the reactionary slanders that have paraded under the guise of ‘objective historiography’ in the fifty years since, it is without reproach.

What it lacked was precisely the revolutionary power to act. On the one hand, the Pfuel ministry showed it the palpable danger, on the other hand, it offered a stay of execution. Pfuel himself was a cultured officer of the school of Gneisenau and Scharnhorst, in old age a friend of Lassalle, just as in his youth he had been a friend of Heinrich Kleist. If the counter-revolution thought it had found in him a willing tool for its secret plans, it was mistaken. Possibly, however, they saw him as a man who would lazily let events take their course until the coup d’état could be sprung. In no event could the Assembly afford the delusion that the Pfuel ministry was anything more than a temporary measure. If it wanted to make up to any lost ground at all, it had to continue along the path opened up by Stein’s motion.

This motion itself had lost its significance with the fall of Hansemann’s ministry. Secretly Unruh secured on behalf of the new ministry a decree to the army that more or less corresponded with Stein’s motion and was immediately issued by Pfuel. Nobody was under any illusion about the practical effect of this watery stuff. Orders of the day issued by General Wrangel as supreme commander in the Mark, and by Count Brandenburg as commanding General in Silesia, destroyed any doubt whether feudal absolutist reaction would allow well-meaning exhortations to force it to to abandon the bastion of support that the army was. The Berlin Assembly had missed the most favourable moment to tackle the army, but there still remained one more excellent opportunity of success from their own bourgeois point of view; that is to say by binding the interests of the peasant class to their fate. That would have checkmated the monarchy and the Junkers politically, socially and, in the end, militarily.

The ferment of the rural masses had increased rather than diminished during the summer. It tore like a vulture at the heart of the King and his Junkers. Force and kindness were used to try to persuade the peasants of the friendly intentions of their former oppressors, but they remained obstinate and continued to batter away at all the fees, services and burdens of feudalism. They simply laughed at a decree of the Arnim ministry on March 27 which declared null and void all concessions forced from landlords by threats and violence.

The King and the Junkers now tried a trick worthy of Till Eulenspiegel. Like countless Silesian Junkers, Count Schaffgotsch had been forced by his tenants to renounce seizin , and all services of every kind, expense-money and the gabelle , the honour tax, spinning dues and the corn-tax. Somehow the commune of Warmbrunn was persuaded to return the ‘deed of renunciation’ to the Count on May 5, his birthday, with the request that he would bury it in eternal oblivion. The King made this ‘noble deed’ known in a solemn Order in Council On May 25. He revealed his ‘high pleasure’ at this ‘shining example of loyalty and of feeling for right, for law and for a true return to the paths of good and necessary order’, and called on the Silesian peasants to make their way as calves to the Junker slaughter in a ‘similarly heartwarming manner’. The peasants again laughed themselves silly at his expense.

There was no help for it; the old feudal system was finished. The bourgeoisified part of the landed aristocracy realized it of their own accord and the more blockheaded Junkers had to realise it willy nilly. If the peasants were to be cheated in future, it would have to be done in a bourgeois, not a feudal manner. In other words the feudal burdens would have to be perpetuated by being discharged in the form of money or land. But for the time being this could not be done in the brutal and ruthless way it had been done in the decades after Waterloo. The October Edict and the Regulatory Edict had made the minority of the peasants rebellious, and the undiminished continuation of their feudal burdens had made the majority equally rebellious. But laws that could clip the peasants as thoroughly as previously without them noticing could not be made at the drop of a hat, while the chronic rebellion of the rural masses demanded rapid measures. The Camphausen ministry extricated itself from this dilemma with a Memorandum on the regulation of relations between landlords and peasants. It was signed by the Minister of Trade, von Patow, a bourgeoisified aristocrat in the mould of Schwerin and Auerswald.

Patow’s Memorandum rested on the following principles: no changes were to be made in the discharges from feudal services already regulated by a judge’s verdict or contract; in principle, moreover, the situation was to remain where ‘all restraints limiting free disposition of persons or property’ were to be abolished on payment of compensation, although they could in future be discharged on a much cheaper basis than formerly. Exceptions to the above were such limitations as could be regarded as emanating from serfdom, the previous taxation system or seigneurial juridical privileges, or which seemed to be merely partially out-dated burdens upon landed property without any true lasting value to the recipient and did not affect economic relations. Among such exceptions to the rule the Memorandum mentioned homage, death-duties, services in hunting and in travelling, stock tithe, protection money, Walpurgis tax, shepherd tax, bee-fees and wax-rent, watercourse-fees, pasturage rights and more of the same.

This list looked good but meant nothing, or very little. The ‘best administered state in the world’ had preserved such masses of feudal rubbish that it could be carted away by the wagon-load without visibly diminishing the mountain that remained. The fees and services that were remitted free had either fallen into complete disuse, or existed only in individual areas or, as the Memorandum itself indicated with gratifying honesty, brought no benefit worth mentioning to the Junkers. It was the purest legerdemain, and for that very reason this was the only part of Patow’s Memorandum that the Hansemann ministry enacted into law.

The most serious of all the mistakes the Berlin Assembly made, and the blackest blot on its memory, is that it did not grasp its historical task in this field. Even if all it had for the industrial proletariat was cheap phrases and the occasional little palliatives, nevertheless it was a bourgeois Parliament. As such it should have been able to liberate the peasants from the feudal yoke. In the shape of the fifty or sixty peasant deputies, it possessed a general staff that could have built it an invincible army. Certainly only a part of this delegation had developed so far as to join the faction to which it really belonged, the extreme Left. Another part had still not found its bearings and let itself be snared as voting fodder by the cunning Hansemann, who paid them with positions in the Finance Ministry. Here, in the words of one English correspondent, they looked like a party of Ojibbeway Indians in the salon of the Duke of Devonshire. All the more reason why the bourgeois opposition should have enlightened these poor fellows as to their real interests. Instead, one member of the Left Centre even handed the Right a cheap victory by demanding the exclusion of the peasant deputy Kiolbassa for his alleged ignorance of German. The member in question was given a severe dressing down by the right-wing President of the Assembly for this dishonourable proposal. The Kreuzzeitung was completely in character when it printed the canarde that Kiolbassa took his boots off during sessions because he was used to going barefoot, and that, overcome by emotion, he had kissed the coat-tails of the cashier who had paid him out his expenses. But what can one say about bourgeois Liberals who gladly joined in these bad jokes, men like Gustav Freytag who, in his Grenzbote , outrivalled the Kreuzzeitung in mocking his Silesian compatriots, Mros and Kiolbassa, as ‘quaint devils’?

The Left and the Left Centre did, it is true, launch some attacks against feudal burdens, against the Statute of Servants, against feudal hunting rights over others’ land, and against much else of the sort, but there was no real emphasis behind it, and the only thing to pass into law was a motion of Bucher’s removing the right of the local feudal Estates to fix expenditure. Even on September 1 the Assembly lacked the urgency to pass a motion abolishing labour service. Indeed, even a motion proposed in June by the Left Centre to halt negotiations underway between landlords and peasants until cheaper laws on discharge and regulation were decreed had still not been approved by the Assembly at the end of September. Even six months after March 18, it could not bring itself to take this simple provisional measure, whereas the French National Assembly of 1789 had cleared away the whole feudal rubbish three weeks after the storming of the Bastille.

Nevertheless a lot of lost ground could have been made up when the decisive life-and-death crisis of the Assembly began with the accession of the Pfuel ministry. The peasants were still as bold as ever, sending in thousands of petitions demanding protection by the organ of popular representation. The opening of the hunting season on September 1 led to murderous encounters between the peasants and the Junkers, since the peasants, with good reason, considered that feudal hunting rights had been extinguished by the March revolution, while the Junkers did not want to desist from the noble passion of hunting on peasant land. In fact the Assembly intervened at this point, and with a success, moreover, that could well have given it courage. It decided on its own initiative to abolish without compensation the material right to hunt over others’ land. It even proceeded more radically here than is justifiable from the bourgeois point of view, and still the monarchy did not dare to refuse its assent. All the Assembly needed to do now was change the law on the abolition without compensation of various fees and services from legerdemain to something real by including in it all the oppressive, or only the most oppressive burdens placed on the peasant class, and it could well have been in a position to take up the political fight with the monarchy and the Junkers.

Unfortunately its energy was already exhausted by its first rush. It did, it is true, finally accept after long delay the law postponing negotiations between landlords and peasants, but only after rejecting all amendments favourable to the peasants. The monarchy assented to this law also. Hopeless confusion broke out, however, over the law on feudal burdens. The Right Centre, which had brought about the victory of the Left factions on September 7, once more fell off to the right. Unruh was such a fanatical supporter of property that even Patow’s Memorandum went too far for him. His fellow faction member, Pilet, declared, in his report on the new law, that it was neither just nor clever to abolish feudal burdens without compensation – apart from a few exceptions that were insignificant or of very slight importance: unjust, because by virtue of centuries of legally-protected possession they had become the object of proper entitlement; not clever, because abolition would alienate from the state a numerous class of regular landlords who were influential by virtue of their great material means. The right wing factions did not wish simply to brush aside the peasants, who were only waiting to give the Assembly new power, but they were all the less willing to spoil their chances with the Junkers, who were solely waiting for a chance to give the Assembly a death-blow. They whispered to the peasants: a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, and you should be glad we can abolish a thirtieth or a twentieth part of your burdens. And they whispered to the Junkers: you can afford a little down payment if it will help you to transform your threatened possessions from feudal property into bourgeois property.

Bucher threw himself into the attack on this wheeling and dealing in a series of brilliant speeches. He did not see justice and wisdom from the same angle as Pilet. Either the landowner was justified in demanding compensation, in which case he should have it, or the legislation was justified in abolition without compensation, in which case it had no right to make presents to the Junkers at the expense of the peasants. The legal basis on which the question was to be decided was not the rotten basis of the historical school, but the basis of the revolution. ‘The revolution is the emergency defence of the people whose holiest rights have been injured. But defence in emergencies is a right that is recognized not only morally but in the laws of all nations at all times. If a people have made a revolution, a true revolution in this sense, that means as their defence in an emergency, and their representatives place themselves upon this basis and carry out their legislation in this sense, embodying the concept of the revolution, they stand on the basis of law.’ To abandon this basis would be as stupid as it was unjust. As he had on September 7, Bucher once again warned of the dangers of hair-splitting legalistic formalism. ‘The legalists will have to acquaint themselves with the social sciences before the social question devours them ... If we discuss the draft point for point with legalistic precision and add countless amendments, we will be like Archimedes sitting over his circles.’ For all that, Bucher was entirely conscious that the revolution which he was adopting as a legal basis was a bourgeois revolution. He consequently demanded that the Assembly should act in the same way as the Assemblies of the great French Revolution, according to the principle that the landowners’ rights are immediately abolished without compensation insofar as they are feudal and seigneurial in nature and rest on the domination of one person over another, while they are to be discharged against compensation insofar as they are based on the legal entitlement of contract, which continues in bourgeois society, on the principle of the mutual performance of duties.

The balance of votes was at that time so distributed in the Assembly that the factions of the Left and those of the Right were more or less in equilibrium. Towards the end of October, when Grabow retired from the Presidium, Unruh was elected by 177 votes from the right-wing factions while the Left on that occasion mustered 170 votes. This distribution of the votes was already enough to make it difficult to carry out the principle put forward by Bucher and his friends. It had a last chance precisely because it was a clear and pure principle, and thus could serve, like Ariadne’s thread, as a guide through the labyrinth of feudalism, but the Left themselves destroyed this chance. Feeling ashamed of their earlier omissions, this faction wanted to abolish at a stroke without compensation as many seigneurial rights as possible, without concerning itself whether they rested on a feudal or a bourgeois entitlement. Not only did the Left, who by no means intended to abandon the bourgeois legal basis, act inconsistently in this, but they also fell into a trap treacherously set by the Right. As far as it could, this bold party opposed the abolition of feudal burdens without compensation, and applied all its strength to making the law worthless to the peasants. Where it could not achieve that noble purpose, it supported the blind impetuosity of the Left in order to give the Assembly the reputation – among the propertied classes – of being communist and respecting neither feudal nor bourgeois property.

This disloyal game had its first success when the hunting law was discussed. Immediately after the passage of the abolition without compensation of feudal hunting rights, the Right, in unity with the Left, rejected an amendment introduced from the Left Centre by Schulze- Delitzsch, which provided for compensation to be paid for the ending of hunting rights over other people’s property if the owner or his predecessors had already sold their hunting rights over the land within the previous thirty years. But it was over the law on feudal burdens that the perfidious tactics of the Right and the uncanny short-sightedness of the Left really ran riot. An example is the struggle over seizin. So-called seizin, market-pence, confirmation charges, census-money, depreciation-money, copy-money, mortgage-charges, access money; seigneurial perquisites and other fees and services entailed in feudal landholding were among the worst scourges the peasants suffered. They were charged every time the land in question changed hands, whether it was the lord or the vassal who changed, and amounted to as much as ten per cent of the value. It was pure theft, the simplest form of the confiscation of property. If the peasant died, his heirs had to pay as much as one tenth of the value of the farm, irrespective of whether or not it was entailed, to the Junker. If a peasant farm worth ten thousand talers, but burdened with mortgages of six thousand talers and personal debts of three thousand, was inherited by the widow as a result of the death of the proprietor, the state would only calculate the inheritance tax at ten talers, based on the value of one thousand talers actually inherited, but the Junker pocketed one tenth of the whole value, that is to say of the whole inheritance of ten thousand, as seizin. He could immediately have the farm auctioned off. If the holding was then sold for, say, seven thousand talers, the personal debts were disregarded and remained a millstone round the widow’s neck, but the Junker was not only covered against the mortgage, but was entitled to demand a new seizin of seven hundred talers from the new proprietor.

Bucher and Schulze-Delitzsch now introduced, from the Left Centre, the motion that seizin should be abolished without compensation ‘unless the obligation could be proved to be founded on a covenant in the contract concluded between the party enjoying and the party under the obligation or their predecessors in possession’. As had been the case with the proposal for a hunting law, this limitation was as insignificant in fact as it was important in principle. Above all else, seizin payments were of a purely feudal origin, and rested on the basis of custom and practice. The motion was carried by 178 votes to 160, and now two members of the Right, Justizrat Gellern and Oberlandesgerichtrat Tüshaus , who had both voted against the motion, introduced the amendment that in the cases subject to the reservation, the rate of seizin should never exceed two per cent. The intention was obvious: the Assembly was to be tempted into an attack on a property right that it itself had just recognized as bourgeois. Nevertheless the Left fell into the crude trap. Scarcely had the amendment been adopted, without particular opposition, when other members of the Right, led by the Landgerichurat Reichensperger and the Geheime Obertribunalsrat Rintelen, insisted that a formal protest against the alteration proposed by their own members should be entered in the minutes because it attacked the law of contract and thus undermined all law.

This was just one scene of a tragic-comedy, for whose production the Right daily divided itself into two choruses. Its best achievement was never completed. The Assembly brought off the remarkable trick of botching together a law that offended the propertied classes, and particularly the bourgeoisified aristocracy, in its holiest possessive feelings, while at the same time making the peasants more and more distrustful and suspicious. How could they have found their way through that chaos of often forty amendments amplifying or limiting for each clause, where even the most skilful legal hair-splitter would have lost his way? How were they supposed to drag their bones to market for an Assembly that could not liberate them but only sacrifice them?

At the same time as they discussed the law on the feudal burdens, the Assembly did little to improve its position in the discussion of the first sections of the new constitution. They crossed out ‘By the Grace of God’ in the King’s title, abolished the nobility, and removed all ceremonial orders and titles. None of this helped them. On the contrary! A policy that demobilises its own troops with one hand while vehemently challenging the enemy with the other only hastens its own defeat.