Thande
Donor
Part #197: Ausbruch
“During my brief time of service in the South Seas,[1] I came across a sport practiced by the natives of Gavaji and many other islands, commonly known to outside visitors as surf-bathing, in which they stand atop flattened canoe hulls and ride the incoming waves. Doubtless it will one day spread across the globe as a suitable pastime (not least for young men to show off to young women, if my own experience is any guide) but any would-be practitioners should hear my word of caution. There are those who boldly insist that they can ride the biggest of waves, turning their power to their own direction, daring the undertow to take them: and too many of them wash ashore as lifeless as the hull they rode...”
*
From: “Europe and the Global Focus” by Robert Noakes (1989)—
It is easy with the benefit of hindsight to argue that the Isolationsgebiet was doomed from the start, that it was always a paper construction held together with wishful thinking and the hope that something would turn up. And indeed there is some justice to this view. The mistakes that led to the Isolationsgebiet’s failure were ultimately made early on, a function of the men at its head and how they led their nations.
The organisation was originally formed in 1840 as a counter to the Deutsche Bundesliga, the Federal League of Germany. It was provocatively named the Isolationsgebiet or ‘quarantine barrier’[2] by the signatories of the original Treaty of Flensburg as its explicit aim to prevent the formation of a unified Germany, especially one under Saxon leadership. In the beginning it was therefore primarily a counter to the foreign policy that the Saxon monarchs had embarked on almost a century before with the downfall of Frederick II of Prussia, at first quietly and subtly and then more openly : to gradually supplant Austrian power in northern Germany and eventually to lead a united German state that would be a worthy successor to the old Holy Roman Empire. Or perhaps a rival to it—for from an early stage the Saxons desired not to dominate the Hapsburg lands but to exclude them. This was therefore not the truly comprehensive union of German-speaking lands that Pascal Schmidt would go on to call for, but a more limited conception of a Germany where the chief qualification for being a province was looking like a place that the Saxons could successfully dominate. The name Kleindeutschland or ‘Lesser Germany’, initially a disparaging term later adopted by the movement’s proponents, was used to describe this goal.
Events tended to favour the Saxons’ aims, in particular in the Jacobin Wars which demolished the Holy Roman Empire—meaning that Electors became Kings—and weakened the Austrians while allowing the spoils to go to the last man standing: Saxony was only one such nation among others such as Denmark, Flanders and the Dutch Republic, but it was the only one with an indubitably German pedigree and which would therefore bring less of a taint of ‘foreign rule’ with it as it expanded.[3] The interbellum Conc ert of Germany was a rather dissolute body but one in which the Saxons unquestionably held the most coherent voice. In the Popular Wars, it was once again the Saxons whose government remained most stable and who benefited from the outcome of the war by being the last man standing: the transformation of the Mittelbund and the Alliance of Hildesheim into Grand Hesse and Low Saxony respectively, under Wettin or otherwise Saxon-friendly kings, was matched by the humiliation of Austria and the creation of an independent Bohemian kingdom, also under a Wettin king. The Concert of Germany collapsed in favour of the Bundesliga, an explicitly Saxon-led body from which other German-speaking nations (or nations including German-speaking territory) were excluded. Economic cooperation and the demolition of the remaining tariff barriers followed, provoking the alarm that prompted the formation of the Isolationsgebiet.
Having said that, the situation was not quite as it seemed. From the point of view of the Saxon monarchy and establishment, their plan had struck a hitch and they found the force they had unleashed increasingly hard to control, like a runaway locomotive that leaps to the wrong track. The stated goal of the Saxons in the Popular Wars had been to separate rebellious Bavaria from Austria and make it an independent kingdom under a Wettin king. They had succeeded in the separation, but partly thanks to Bavarian Kleinkriegers who attacked the Saxons as much as the Austrians, and had failed to achieve any influence in the resulting rather ungovernable mess that was the Kingdom of Bavaria. (Ungovernable until the arrival of Victor Felix, at least). It should not be forgotten that the ‘flag of Germany’ that the Saxons had unveiled for their Young German movement to march into battle under, the flag which is still used to this day, represented a combination of the colours of (High) Saxony and Bavaria—white, green and light blue. It is thus a tremendous irony that Bavaria has never been part of any state to use that flag. The Saxons ended the Popular Wars leading a large new German alliance, but not the one they had intended to lead. The result of the wars, as their name implies, was more due to the actions of ordinary Germans than the grand foreign policy aims of the Saxon leadership.
And that deviation from the plan continued to build throughout the Democratic Experiment era. Schmidtism, if foiled in terms of its goals for a truly united greater Germany, was not silenced when it came to the growth of liberal democracy. Grand Hesse formed a model pattern for the future, with King Frederick Christian (the youngest brother of Augustus II of High Saxony) adapting well to a model in which he was more the mediator for a powerful and popularly elected Diet than a traditional ruling monarch. He reinvented the role of a European monarch by remaining ‘above politics’ and refusing to get involved in the nitty-gritty of decision-making; as a consequence, he became popular with the Grand Hessian people, who not so many years before would have laughed at the idea that they would ever again welcome a king. He remained a patron of the arts and oversaw the construction of galleries, concert halls and theatres which helped persuade foreign investors that Grand Hesse was not merely a den of Jacobins who would phlogisticate everyone at the drop of a hat.
If Frederick Christian saw which way the wind was blowing, Augustus II remained more defiant, merely allowing a three-class electoral system for High Saxony’s own Diet. The middle brother between the two, Albert II of Bohemia (Xavier Albert) was able to play off the German- and Czech-speaking interests in Bohemia to help secure his own power. But what of the odd one out of the Bundesliga, the only state to be ruled by a non-Wettin monarch? Charles II, formerly Duke of Brunswick, had acquired the new kingdom of Low Saxony due to an odd game of ‘musical thrones’ (as Tressino put it) during the reign of terror of Blandford in England,[4] and though somewhat popular in the 1820s with the middle classes of the Alliance of Hildesheim, he remained even more steadfast against the rise of Schmidtism than Augustus II was. In the end he was forced to allow a portion of his Diet in Hanover to be popularly elected, but tried to ignore and overrule it at all times, as well as attempting to build his own power through independent means. It was the failure of the latter that would be the ultimate trigger for the Unification War.
Against this Bundesliga, in which there was at least some cautious and limited expression of Schmidtist principles, stood the Isolationsgebiet. The two chief powers in the organisation were the Kingdom of Belgium and the Nordic Empire: both the ultimate vastly expanded result of two nations (Flanders and Denmark) which had benefited the most in the beginning, just as Saxony had, from the upheavals of the Jacobin Wars. Both represented a situation where ruling classes and centres of power which did not identify as German dominated swathes of valuable territory inhabited by those who did. The idea of German unification, whether the self-interested Kleindeutschland of the Wettin monarchs or the enormous and terrifyingly radical Grossdeutschland of the Schmidtists, was an obvious and immediate threat that much be stopped, contained like an infection. Hence, the Isolationsgebiet.
The third and lesser member of the Isolationsgebiet was Swabia. Initially born from rather radical roots and enjoying a liberal constitution in the Watchful Peace era, there was a reaction against this at the Swabian court after it failed to prevent the Swiss War and the breakaway of the Bernese Republic (as it was eventually called). Frederick IV and chief minister Michael Elchingener lost a great part of the industrial power that had made Swabia great: during that period it had led the way in Europe in terms of Optel technology and to a lesser extent railways. Both men died in the wake of the Popular Wars and Frederick’s successor, Frederick V, charted a new and more authoritarian course. He argued that Swabia’s sheer diversity—German, French and Swiss, Catholic and Protestant—meant that democratic representation would be doomed to petty infighting and that a strong and even-handed centralised approach to government was required to ensure prosperity and peace. Surprisingly, most biographers agree that Frederick V was not the sort to desire such power for himself, and even expressed the wish several times that he could hand off his power to others, but genuinely believed what he had said rather than merely using it as an excuse to seize power. This did not stop it from being seen otherwise by many other people both small and great across Europe, of course.
The very diversity of Swabia rendered it vulnerable to being torn apart by the idea of German unification, and so Frederick V backed the Isolationsgebiet, albeit reluctantly: he always had a low opinion of his counterparts, King Maximilian III of Belgium and Emperor Frederick I of Norden (who succeeded to the throne after the death of his father Valdemar I in 1847). Frederick V regarded them as unashamed brigands merely desirous of further wealth and power, but saw them as the lesser of two evils.
But the Isolationsgebiet’s great problem was that no more members were forthcoming. Its existing ones had some power, especially Belgium in the wake of its annexation of the former Dutch Republic, but not enough to stand against the whole Bundesliga alone. It was obvious both then and now that there were other great powers that could be called upon to support the Isolationsgebiet, nations that also wanted to stop a united Germany and especially a Saxon-led united Germany. Once upon a time, indeed, the crowned heads of Europe would have united to prevent this destabilisation of the European diplomatic system. But the eighteenth century was gone and, despite the desires of men like William Wyndham, would never come again. There was, truly, no European diplomatic system to destabilise anymore. Britain and Russia had both cashed in their chips and retreated from the game, beset by internal difficulties or separated from the action by too many buffer states, and as a result there were no ‘outsiders’ to intervene unexpectedly anymore. Germany (and Italy) were no more the battlefield of Europe on which powerful national and dynastic factions would clash. Despite this, though, there were still two great European powers with a lot to lose from German unification: France and Austria (now becoming Danubia). The failure of the Isolationsgebiet to secure the alignment of either is what signed its death warrant long before the first shot of the Unification War was fired.
Austria’s eventual neutrality, along with that of Bavaria, is perhaps predictable if one knew something of the character of their rulers. Rudolf III and his advisors were adamant that their new system had to be put into place before Austria could even think about participating in wider European affairs again, and there was no stomach for another war, even one which might see the recovery of Bohemia. Bavaria was gradually coming out of its long national nightmare under Victor Felix, a dynamic ruler who matured from his youthful spite on Sardinia to a man determined to make his new kingdom see a new dawn after decades of night.[5] He achieved this through a combination of personal incorruptibility, excellent bodyguards, being a quick study when it came to learning German, and an effective system of spies. It was the latter which gave him insight that neither Bavaria’s former colonial occupier (Austria) or its would-be liberator (Saxony) had ever possessed during the Popular Wars. It was Victor Felix who discovered—though he kept it a secret for as long as he could—that Michael Hiedler, the Kleinkrieger chief whom both the Austrians and Saxons had fruitlessly sought out for negotiation during the Popular Wars, had in fact died before the war even broke out.[6] Indeed, he uncovered that it was Hiedler’s death and the ensuing power struggle between the Kleinkrieger factions, the desire of angry young killers to prove themselves over their rivals, which had led to the successful assassination of Francis II of Austria in Vienna on March 13th 1830.[7] Small wonder that attempts to bring peace to Bavaria had failed: rather than negotiating with a leader who could not be found, the right approach was to unite the more approachable and reasonable Kleinkriegers under a new banner, while taking a ruthless hand in crushing the rest. This was exactly what Victor Felix did, and though it was a long hard fight and he had to overcome the stigma of being a foreign ruler, by the late 1840s he had achieved a lasting peace in Bavaria, with the terror in the night of the years of Austrian rule safely consigned either to police uniform or six feet under. Part of the notion behind making Victor Felix King of Bavaria at the Congress of Brussels had been that he would make Bavaria into a neutral buffer state, but even without this pre-existing diplomacy, Victor Felix would probably have taken such a tack anyway: he had no desire to endanger Bavaria’s long slow recovery with yet another war. He would be remembered not for glory in battle but as a peacemaker, a builder of roads and grand new buildings for both himself and the people, of Optel towers and railways. When he died in 1854 he bequeathed a prosperous budding nation to his son Amadeus, who began the work of attracting international organisations to place their headquarters in neutral Regensburg.
It was the failure of the Isolationsgebiet to engage France that was the real disaster, and a disaster entirely down to the arrogance of Maximilian III. He refused to pursue rapproachment with the French over the Route des Larmes and the Malraux Doctrine in support of the Walloons, and he paid for it...
*
From: “Almanac of European History Volume IX: The Nineteenth Century” by Heinrich Eisenberg and Anne-Chloë Chenier (1974, authorised English translation 1986)—
As is often the case, the ultimate trigger for a wider conflict was something fairly minor. The ageing King Charles II of Low Saxony had long felt increasingly threatened by Populist and Schmidtist sentiment among his subjects and feared he would be relegated to a figurehead like Frederick Christian of Grand Hesse. As a consequence, he attempted to build up his own personal power through other means such as financial ones. Using not only his own personal wealth but also that creamed off the state coffers through ‘creative accounting’, he made large investments in several ventures under assumed names. Some of these were successful and profitable, notably a railway company in the UPSA, but the majority messily failed, and the largest of these was his (borderline treasonous to some) purchase of shares in the United Belgian Company (the former Ostend Company), as well as the Portuguese East India Company. The stock price of both companies crashed in the late 1840s over colonial defeats: the loss of Timor to the Batavian Dutch in the case of the Portuguese (which more famously led to the Pânico de '46 in Portugal) and the burning of Fort Luik in southern Africa by Vordermanite Boertrekkers in the service of the Cape Dutch for the Belgians. This happened shortly before Charles II’s death from old age in 1847 and the accession of his son as Charles III. The latter is rumoured to have fainted when he saw the state of his father’s accounts. Scandal was unavoidable, though the extent of the debt was concealed for as long as possible. Charles III sought to ameliorate the catastrophe by splitting the pain as much as possible: military cuts, tax rises on both the poor and the nobility, the sell-off of much of the royal estates, and extensive borrowing from both the Bank of New York and the Russian-backed Bank of Vilnius, both of which had risen to promise in the wake of the Popular Wars when it came to bailing out small bankrupt states.
Charles III’s response is generally considered by analysts to be about as competent a reaction as one could expect, but ultimately it was too little, too late. All he succeeded in was uniting the Low Saxon people against him. There were murmurs of both palace coups and Schmidtist revolution. But the trigger for the Unification War came from neither of these. Instead it was the fact that Charles was forced by treaty requirement to continue funding the joint Bundesliga part of the military budget even while dismissing entire regiments of his own troops with reduced pensions. Resentment against the Saxons rose, the people regarding Charles as merely their puppet, and no-one was angrier than the soldiers. It was only a matter of time before this anger expressed itself in a clash, and it was in the garrison city of Celle, on February 3rd 1849, that the soldiers of Low Saxony finally decided that enough was enough.
The Celle Mutiny—a newspaper headline which allegedly inspired Dr James Freeman of Cambridge’s theory of the origins of cancer published two years later[8]—was the ignition for the Unification War. Yet things could have gone very differently. If the Isolationsgebiet had sat back and remained aloof, it has been argued, the Mutiny would have been a crisis for the High Saxons. It was the Bundesliga levy that had been the last straw for the people of Low Saxony and now Charles III was begging for Bundesliga troops to put down the revolt. Could they do so and destroy all the goodwill that the Bundesliga possessed from the masses with moderate Schmidtist sympathies? Would it not lead to a revolt in turn in radical Grand Hesse? Or should the High Saxons cave by reducing the levy, either weakening the Bundesliga or letting the weight fall on its other members and only stoking further resentment there? And in the background the Isolationsgebiet could have offered to help write off Charles’ debts in exchange for Low Saxony leaving the Bundesliga, something the Low Saxon people would probably have backed.
Such suggestions are not mere idle speculation, for many of them were actual arguments of Frederick V and the fears of the High Saxon Chancellor Emil von Stephanitz.[9] But he was decidedly the junior partner of the Isolationsgebiet. It was the brash Maximilian III and Frederick I who took the lead, and they did so the only way they knew how: direct action in response to a perceived opportunity to weaken the enemy. The Isolationsgebiet issued a resolution recognising the Celle mutineers as the overthrowers of an illegitimate government and announced that troops would be sent over the border into Low Saxony to support them. This, naturally, could only be met by a declaration of war in turn from High Saxony and the rest of the Bundesliga. Though it would not be given that name until after its end, the Unification War had begun...
[1] In the late 1820s (see part #121).
[2] A better comparison would probably be the French cordon sanitaire.
[3] Note that this account glosses over the Prusso-Saxon War of the Polish Succession which took place as part of the Jacobin Wars and left the Saxon king on the throne of Poland, perhaps indicating an overly western European perspective.
[4] See Part #124.
[5] This is stretching a metaphor a bit, as Victor Felix was already in his forties when he became King of Bavaria.
[6] As hinted in Parts #127 and #134.
[7] See Part #127.
[8] In OTL first argued by the Prussian/German ‘Pope of Medicine’ Rudolf Carl Virchow in the mid-1850s.
[9] Grandson of the former Saxon foreign minister Gerhard von Stephanitz who served under John George V (mentioned in part #63).
“During my brief time of service in the South Seas,[1] I came across a sport practiced by the natives of Gavaji and many other islands, commonly known to outside visitors as surf-bathing, in which they stand atop flattened canoe hulls and ride the incoming waves. Doubtless it will one day spread across the globe as a suitable pastime (not least for young men to show off to young women, if my own experience is any guide) but any would-be practitioners should hear my word of caution. There are those who boldly insist that they can ride the biggest of waves, turning their power to their own direction, daring the undertow to take them: and too many of them wash ashore as lifeless as the hull they rode...”
– Pablo Sanchez, 1843 speech
*
From: “Europe and the Global Focus” by Robert Noakes (1989)—
It is easy with the benefit of hindsight to argue that the Isolationsgebiet was doomed from the start, that it was always a paper construction held together with wishful thinking and the hope that something would turn up. And indeed there is some justice to this view. The mistakes that led to the Isolationsgebiet’s failure were ultimately made early on, a function of the men at its head and how they led their nations.
The organisation was originally formed in 1840 as a counter to the Deutsche Bundesliga, the Federal League of Germany. It was provocatively named the Isolationsgebiet or ‘quarantine barrier’[2] by the signatories of the original Treaty of Flensburg as its explicit aim to prevent the formation of a unified Germany, especially one under Saxon leadership. In the beginning it was therefore primarily a counter to the foreign policy that the Saxon monarchs had embarked on almost a century before with the downfall of Frederick II of Prussia, at first quietly and subtly and then more openly : to gradually supplant Austrian power in northern Germany and eventually to lead a united German state that would be a worthy successor to the old Holy Roman Empire. Or perhaps a rival to it—for from an early stage the Saxons desired not to dominate the Hapsburg lands but to exclude them. This was therefore not the truly comprehensive union of German-speaking lands that Pascal Schmidt would go on to call for, but a more limited conception of a Germany where the chief qualification for being a province was looking like a place that the Saxons could successfully dominate. The name Kleindeutschland or ‘Lesser Germany’, initially a disparaging term later adopted by the movement’s proponents, was used to describe this goal.
Events tended to favour the Saxons’ aims, in particular in the Jacobin Wars which demolished the Holy Roman Empire—meaning that Electors became Kings—and weakened the Austrians while allowing the spoils to go to the last man standing: Saxony was only one such nation among others such as Denmark, Flanders and the Dutch Republic, but it was the only one with an indubitably German pedigree and which would therefore bring less of a taint of ‘foreign rule’ with it as it expanded.[3] The interbellum Conc ert of Germany was a rather dissolute body but one in which the Saxons unquestionably held the most coherent voice. In the Popular Wars, it was once again the Saxons whose government remained most stable and who benefited from the outcome of the war by being the last man standing: the transformation of the Mittelbund and the Alliance of Hildesheim into Grand Hesse and Low Saxony respectively, under Wettin or otherwise Saxon-friendly kings, was matched by the humiliation of Austria and the creation of an independent Bohemian kingdom, also under a Wettin king. The Concert of Germany collapsed in favour of the Bundesliga, an explicitly Saxon-led body from which other German-speaking nations (or nations including German-speaking territory) were excluded. Economic cooperation and the demolition of the remaining tariff barriers followed, provoking the alarm that prompted the formation of the Isolationsgebiet.
Having said that, the situation was not quite as it seemed. From the point of view of the Saxon monarchy and establishment, their plan had struck a hitch and they found the force they had unleashed increasingly hard to control, like a runaway locomotive that leaps to the wrong track. The stated goal of the Saxons in the Popular Wars had been to separate rebellious Bavaria from Austria and make it an independent kingdom under a Wettin king. They had succeeded in the separation, but partly thanks to Bavarian Kleinkriegers who attacked the Saxons as much as the Austrians, and had failed to achieve any influence in the resulting rather ungovernable mess that was the Kingdom of Bavaria. (Ungovernable until the arrival of Victor Felix, at least). It should not be forgotten that the ‘flag of Germany’ that the Saxons had unveiled for their Young German movement to march into battle under, the flag which is still used to this day, represented a combination of the colours of (High) Saxony and Bavaria—white, green and light blue. It is thus a tremendous irony that Bavaria has never been part of any state to use that flag. The Saxons ended the Popular Wars leading a large new German alliance, but not the one they had intended to lead. The result of the wars, as their name implies, was more due to the actions of ordinary Germans than the grand foreign policy aims of the Saxon leadership.
And that deviation from the plan continued to build throughout the Democratic Experiment era. Schmidtism, if foiled in terms of its goals for a truly united greater Germany, was not silenced when it came to the growth of liberal democracy. Grand Hesse formed a model pattern for the future, with King Frederick Christian (the youngest brother of Augustus II of High Saxony) adapting well to a model in which he was more the mediator for a powerful and popularly elected Diet than a traditional ruling monarch. He reinvented the role of a European monarch by remaining ‘above politics’ and refusing to get involved in the nitty-gritty of decision-making; as a consequence, he became popular with the Grand Hessian people, who not so many years before would have laughed at the idea that they would ever again welcome a king. He remained a patron of the arts and oversaw the construction of galleries, concert halls and theatres which helped persuade foreign investors that Grand Hesse was not merely a den of Jacobins who would phlogisticate everyone at the drop of a hat.
If Frederick Christian saw which way the wind was blowing, Augustus II remained more defiant, merely allowing a three-class electoral system for High Saxony’s own Diet. The middle brother between the two, Albert II of Bohemia (Xavier Albert) was able to play off the German- and Czech-speaking interests in Bohemia to help secure his own power. But what of the odd one out of the Bundesliga, the only state to be ruled by a non-Wettin monarch? Charles II, formerly Duke of Brunswick, had acquired the new kingdom of Low Saxony due to an odd game of ‘musical thrones’ (as Tressino put it) during the reign of terror of Blandford in England,[4] and though somewhat popular in the 1820s with the middle classes of the Alliance of Hildesheim, he remained even more steadfast against the rise of Schmidtism than Augustus II was. In the end he was forced to allow a portion of his Diet in Hanover to be popularly elected, but tried to ignore and overrule it at all times, as well as attempting to build his own power through independent means. It was the failure of the latter that would be the ultimate trigger for the Unification War.
Against this Bundesliga, in which there was at least some cautious and limited expression of Schmidtist principles, stood the Isolationsgebiet. The two chief powers in the organisation were the Kingdom of Belgium and the Nordic Empire: both the ultimate vastly expanded result of two nations (Flanders and Denmark) which had benefited the most in the beginning, just as Saxony had, from the upheavals of the Jacobin Wars. Both represented a situation where ruling classes and centres of power which did not identify as German dominated swathes of valuable territory inhabited by those who did. The idea of German unification, whether the self-interested Kleindeutschland of the Wettin monarchs or the enormous and terrifyingly radical Grossdeutschland of the Schmidtists, was an obvious and immediate threat that much be stopped, contained like an infection. Hence, the Isolationsgebiet.
The third and lesser member of the Isolationsgebiet was Swabia. Initially born from rather radical roots and enjoying a liberal constitution in the Watchful Peace era, there was a reaction against this at the Swabian court after it failed to prevent the Swiss War and the breakaway of the Bernese Republic (as it was eventually called). Frederick IV and chief minister Michael Elchingener lost a great part of the industrial power that had made Swabia great: during that period it had led the way in Europe in terms of Optel technology and to a lesser extent railways. Both men died in the wake of the Popular Wars and Frederick’s successor, Frederick V, charted a new and more authoritarian course. He argued that Swabia’s sheer diversity—German, French and Swiss, Catholic and Protestant—meant that democratic representation would be doomed to petty infighting and that a strong and even-handed centralised approach to government was required to ensure prosperity and peace. Surprisingly, most biographers agree that Frederick V was not the sort to desire such power for himself, and even expressed the wish several times that he could hand off his power to others, but genuinely believed what he had said rather than merely using it as an excuse to seize power. This did not stop it from being seen otherwise by many other people both small and great across Europe, of course.
The very diversity of Swabia rendered it vulnerable to being torn apart by the idea of German unification, and so Frederick V backed the Isolationsgebiet, albeit reluctantly: he always had a low opinion of his counterparts, King Maximilian III of Belgium and Emperor Frederick I of Norden (who succeeded to the throne after the death of his father Valdemar I in 1847). Frederick V regarded them as unashamed brigands merely desirous of further wealth and power, but saw them as the lesser of two evils.
But the Isolationsgebiet’s great problem was that no more members were forthcoming. Its existing ones had some power, especially Belgium in the wake of its annexation of the former Dutch Republic, but not enough to stand against the whole Bundesliga alone. It was obvious both then and now that there were other great powers that could be called upon to support the Isolationsgebiet, nations that also wanted to stop a united Germany and especially a Saxon-led united Germany. Once upon a time, indeed, the crowned heads of Europe would have united to prevent this destabilisation of the European diplomatic system. But the eighteenth century was gone and, despite the desires of men like William Wyndham, would never come again. There was, truly, no European diplomatic system to destabilise anymore. Britain and Russia had both cashed in their chips and retreated from the game, beset by internal difficulties or separated from the action by too many buffer states, and as a result there were no ‘outsiders’ to intervene unexpectedly anymore. Germany (and Italy) were no more the battlefield of Europe on which powerful national and dynastic factions would clash. Despite this, though, there were still two great European powers with a lot to lose from German unification: France and Austria (now becoming Danubia). The failure of the Isolationsgebiet to secure the alignment of either is what signed its death warrant long before the first shot of the Unification War was fired.
Austria’s eventual neutrality, along with that of Bavaria, is perhaps predictable if one knew something of the character of their rulers. Rudolf III and his advisors were adamant that their new system had to be put into place before Austria could even think about participating in wider European affairs again, and there was no stomach for another war, even one which might see the recovery of Bohemia. Bavaria was gradually coming out of its long national nightmare under Victor Felix, a dynamic ruler who matured from his youthful spite on Sardinia to a man determined to make his new kingdom see a new dawn after decades of night.[5] He achieved this through a combination of personal incorruptibility, excellent bodyguards, being a quick study when it came to learning German, and an effective system of spies. It was the latter which gave him insight that neither Bavaria’s former colonial occupier (Austria) or its would-be liberator (Saxony) had ever possessed during the Popular Wars. It was Victor Felix who discovered—though he kept it a secret for as long as he could—that Michael Hiedler, the Kleinkrieger chief whom both the Austrians and Saxons had fruitlessly sought out for negotiation during the Popular Wars, had in fact died before the war even broke out.[6] Indeed, he uncovered that it was Hiedler’s death and the ensuing power struggle between the Kleinkrieger factions, the desire of angry young killers to prove themselves over their rivals, which had led to the successful assassination of Francis II of Austria in Vienna on March 13th 1830.[7] Small wonder that attempts to bring peace to Bavaria had failed: rather than negotiating with a leader who could not be found, the right approach was to unite the more approachable and reasonable Kleinkriegers under a new banner, while taking a ruthless hand in crushing the rest. This was exactly what Victor Felix did, and though it was a long hard fight and he had to overcome the stigma of being a foreign ruler, by the late 1840s he had achieved a lasting peace in Bavaria, with the terror in the night of the years of Austrian rule safely consigned either to police uniform or six feet under. Part of the notion behind making Victor Felix King of Bavaria at the Congress of Brussels had been that he would make Bavaria into a neutral buffer state, but even without this pre-existing diplomacy, Victor Felix would probably have taken such a tack anyway: he had no desire to endanger Bavaria’s long slow recovery with yet another war. He would be remembered not for glory in battle but as a peacemaker, a builder of roads and grand new buildings for both himself and the people, of Optel towers and railways. When he died in 1854 he bequeathed a prosperous budding nation to his son Amadeus, who began the work of attracting international organisations to place their headquarters in neutral Regensburg.
It was the failure of the Isolationsgebiet to engage France that was the real disaster, and a disaster entirely down to the arrogance of Maximilian III. He refused to pursue rapproachment with the French over the Route des Larmes and the Malraux Doctrine in support of the Walloons, and he paid for it...
*
From: “Almanac of European History Volume IX: The Nineteenth Century” by Heinrich Eisenberg and Anne-Chloë Chenier (1974, authorised English translation 1986)—
As is often the case, the ultimate trigger for a wider conflict was something fairly minor. The ageing King Charles II of Low Saxony had long felt increasingly threatened by Populist and Schmidtist sentiment among his subjects and feared he would be relegated to a figurehead like Frederick Christian of Grand Hesse. As a consequence, he attempted to build up his own personal power through other means such as financial ones. Using not only his own personal wealth but also that creamed off the state coffers through ‘creative accounting’, he made large investments in several ventures under assumed names. Some of these were successful and profitable, notably a railway company in the UPSA, but the majority messily failed, and the largest of these was his (borderline treasonous to some) purchase of shares in the United Belgian Company (the former Ostend Company), as well as the Portuguese East India Company. The stock price of both companies crashed in the late 1840s over colonial defeats: the loss of Timor to the Batavian Dutch in the case of the Portuguese (which more famously led to the Pânico de '46 in Portugal) and the burning of Fort Luik in southern Africa by Vordermanite Boertrekkers in the service of the Cape Dutch for the Belgians. This happened shortly before Charles II’s death from old age in 1847 and the accession of his son as Charles III. The latter is rumoured to have fainted when he saw the state of his father’s accounts. Scandal was unavoidable, though the extent of the debt was concealed for as long as possible. Charles III sought to ameliorate the catastrophe by splitting the pain as much as possible: military cuts, tax rises on both the poor and the nobility, the sell-off of much of the royal estates, and extensive borrowing from both the Bank of New York and the Russian-backed Bank of Vilnius, both of which had risen to promise in the wake of the Popular Wars when it came to bailing out small bankrupt states.
Charles III’s response is generally considered by analysts to be about as competent a reaction as one could expect, but ultimately it was too little, too late. All he succeeded in was uniting the Low Saxon people against him. There were murmurs of both palace coups and Schmidtist revolution. But the trigger for the Unification War came from neither of these. Instead it was the fact that Charles was forced by treaty requirement to continue funding the joint Bundesliga part of the military budget even while dismissing entire regiments of his own troops with reduced pensions. Resentment against the Saxons rose, the people regarding Charles as merely their puppet, and no-one was angrier than the soldiers. It was only a matter of time before this anger expressed itself in a clash, and it was in the garrison city of Celle, on February 3rd 1849, that the soldiers of Low Saxony finally decided that enough was enough.
The Celle Mutiny—a newspaper headline which allegedly inspired Dr James Freeman of Cambridge’s theory of the origins of cancer published two years later[8]—was the ignition for the Unification War. Yet things could have gone very differently. If the Isolationsgebiet had sat back and remained aloof, it has been argued, the Mutiny would have been a crisis for the High Saxons. It was the Bundesliga levy that had been the last straw for the people of Low Saxony and now Charles III was begging for Bundesliga troops to put down the revolt. Could they do so and destroy all the goodwill that the Bundesliga possessed from the masses with moderate Schmidtist sympathies? Would it not lead to a revolt in turn in radical Grand Hesse? Or should the High Saxons cave by reducing the levy, either weakening the Bundesliga or letting the weight fall on its other members and only stoking further resentment there? And in the background the Isolationsgebiet could have offered to help write off Charles’ debts in exchange for Low Saxony leaving the Bundesliga, something the Low Saxon people would probably have backed.
Such suggestions are not mere idle speculation, for many of them were actual arguments of Frederick V and the fears of the High Saxon Chancellor Emil von Stephanitz.[9] But he was decidedly the junior partner of the Isolationsgebiet. It was the brash Maximilian III and Frederick I who took the lead, and they did so the only way they knew how: direct action in response to a perceived opportunity to weaken the enemy. The Isolationsgebiet issued a resolution recognising the Celle mutineers as the overthrowers of an illegitimate government and announced that troops would be sent over the border into Low Saxony to support them. This, naturally, could only be met by a declaration of war in turn from High Saxony and the rest of the Bundesliga. Though it would not be given that name until after its end, the Unification War had begun...
[1] In the late 1820s (see part #121).
[2] A better comparison would probably be the French cordon sanitaire.
[3] Note that this account glosses over the Prusso-Saxon War of the Polish Succession which took place as part of the Jacobin Wars and left the Saxon king on the throne of Poland, perhaps indicating an overly western European perspective.
[4] See Part #124.
[5] This is stretching a metaphor a bit, as Victor Felix was already in his forties when he became King of Bavaria.
[6] As hinted in Parts #127 and #134.
[7] See Part #127.
[8] In OTL first argued by the Prussian/German ‘Pope of Medicine’ Rudolf Carl Virchow in the mid-1850s.
[9] Grandson of the former Saxon foreign minister Gerhard von Stephanitz who served under John George V (mentioned in part #63).
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