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1819.

CHAP. afterwards occurred. Though severely, and to all appearance, mortally wounded, Sand did not die, and by the care of the surgeons sent to attend him, he was recovered. He was brought to trial and convicted, but his execution. did not take place for fourteen months, in consequence of the German custom not to execute a criminal till he has confessed his guilt. It took place at length on the 20th May 1820, at six in the morning, on the road between Manheim and Heidelberg. Notwithstanding the earliness of the hour and the distance from Manheim, an immense crowd, deeply moved, assembled to witness the execution. Though attenuated by his long confinement and illness, Sand gazed calmly on the scaffold, and ascended it with a firm step. He declined the assistance of a Protestant minister which was offered him, and wished to address the people; but being reminded he had promised not to do so, he contented himself with exclaiming with a loud voice, that he died for his country. Seated in the fatal chair, he received the stroke without shrinking. head was severed from his body with one blow, and numbers of students who had come up from Heidelberg dipped their handkerchiefs in his blood. Such was the interest excited in Germany by his fate, that, within a few weeks after, his mother had received above four thousand letters Ann. Reg. of condolence from all parts of the country. The chair in which he sat at his execution was purchased by a society for six louis.1

1 Ann. Hist. iii. 269;

1820, 211, Chron.

26. Consequences of this event highly injurious to freedom.

His

No good cause was ever yet advanced by crime; on the contrary, many have been retarded, some ruined by it. The assassination of Kotzebue was as detrimental to the cause of freedom as that of Marat had been; the dagger of Sand was not more an instrument of good than that of Charlotte Corday. The open sympathy evinced for the assassin, and the multitudes who gave proof of having embraced his principles, justly awakened the alarm of all the sovereigns of Europe. It was known that Kotzebue's death had been the work of the secret societies, and

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their number was very great in Northern and Central CHAP. Germany. Along the Rhine, the Elbe, and the Maine, for hundreds of miles, nearly all the young men appeared in the ancient German costume, the chosen symbol of the confederates, and which at once revealed their numbers, and suggested "an ancient ideal system of Teutonic freedom." Meetings of enthusiastic students were held in various parts of Switzerland, particularly the field Rutli and the chapel of Tell, with long beards, and in the old costume, where secret signs were adopted, and the most fervent spirit awakened. In the streets of Jena and Heidelberg, and under the walls of the palace of Darmstadt, the celebrated song was nightly heard," Princes, arise ye people, rise!" the author of which, though universally sought after, was never discovered. These symptoms, coexisting with the overthrow of the governments of the Spanish and Italian peninsulas at the same time, excited the utmost alarm in all the courts of the Confederacy; and to this cause, more than any other, is 1820, 211; to be ascribed the decisive measures soon after adopted, len, i. 52, which checked for a long period the progress of German 290. freedom.1

1 Ann. Reg.

Life of Fol

58; Mart. i.

the cabinet

Oct. 19,

1819.

The views entertained at this period on the consti- 27. tutional question by the German governments, are well Circular of expressed in a circular addressed by the cabinet of Berlin of Berlin. to the allied powers, on October 19, 1819. "For long the fermentation of ideas that prevails in Germany has awakened the most serious alarm in all who are attached to social order or public tranquillity. How sound soever the feelings of the great body of the people may be, and howsoever attached to their sovereigns, it is in vain to disguise that there exists in society a sourde fermentation, which is sedulously kept alive by the unbridled licence of writings and speeches. That mental fermentation is in part natural, and may be explained by the extraordinary events which, during the war of liberation, drew all classes from their natural sphere, by the sacrifices which the deliverance

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CHAP. of Germany cost all its inhabitants, and which they felt the more keenly in the calm which succeeded the storm; by the exaggerated hopes, which expected to see an age of gold arise out of that age of iron; and by the violent monetary and commercial crises which arose out of the great efforts of the preceding period, and could not be at once restored to their natural level. But in addition to these natural sources of discontent, there has of late years acted upon society an artificial discontent, springing from the erroneous principles, chimerical and ambitious. theories, base and interested passions, engendered and set afloat by the revolutionary spirit, and by the writings and speeches of the democratic party. No one can have for long surveyed the state of Germany, especially in the north and west, without recognising the existence of a party extending its ramifications over all that vast country, drawing its origin from secret societies, and fortified by extensive associations, the object of which is to overturn Germany, and substitute for its actual divisions and governments a republic, one and indivisible.

28.

"An atrocious crime, recently committed, gives the Continued. measure of the frenzy and the audacity of the revolutionary party. That assassination, committed by a single individual, who possibly had no accomplices, was not the less the fruit of a general train of thought, the unmistakable symptom of a diseased state of mind, extended, general, which thus revealed itself to terrified Germany. To be convinced of this, it is only necessary to collect the opinions of the most enlightened classes, of professors and students in universities, and of nearly all the writers subjected to their influence, who have all striven to justify or extenuate a deed which has shocked the moral feelings of all the unsophisticated part of mankind: while it inspired horror in some, it awakened only admiration in others. The inquiries which this event has occasioned in Prussia, have led to similar ones in other parts of Germany, and the result has been everywhere the same; universally

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have been discovered the existence and activity of a party, CHAP. which sowed in the shade, for a future more or less remote, the seeds of a revolution. The leaders communicate by letter, but more frequently by personal intercourse or missionaries; linked together by identity of sentiments, they understand each other without being introduced, or having even met. Their object is to remould society, to efface all the political divisions of Germany, to substitute a real unity of that vast country for the union of its members, and to arrive, over the ruins of the existing order, at a new order of things.

66

29.

Their mode of action is to apply themselves sedulously to the rising generation, by giving them in all the Concluded. establishments of education, from the schools to the universities, the same spirit, the same sentiments, the same habits. That spirit is one of independence and pride, of subversive principles, based on an abstruse system of metaphysics, and on a mystical theology, in order to strengthen political by religious fanaticism. Those sentiments are, the contempt for all that exists, a hatred against kings and governments, an enthusiasm for the phantom which they call liberty, and a love for all extraordinary things. Those habits are such as increase physical strength, and, above all, a taste for secret and mysterious associations, to be used as so many arms against society. The "Zurnwesen" and "Burschenschaft," tending to make of the whole youth of Germany a state within the state, have no other object. It is intended that in a few years hence these young men, formed in this manner, entirely docile to the precepts of their masters, placed in the government, should make use of their power to overturn it. The doctrine of these sectarians, as the crime committed at Manheim, and the numerous apologies made for it, have revealed, is based upon two measures, equally perverse. The first is, that the end justifies the means; the second, that the merit of actions depends entirely on the ideas which have

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CHAP. suggested them, and that those ideas are always praiseworthy when they have the independence of Germany for their object. Such is the nature of the evil which the inquiries that have been set on foot have revealed. It is evident that they do not point to conspiracies, but to revolution, and that not in Prussia alone, but in iv. 299, 301. entire Germany; not at the present, but some future time." 1

1 Circulaire

du Roi de

Prusse, Oct.

19, 1819;

Arch. Dip.

30.

ture of Ger

many.

Such was the chief part of this celebrated maniReflections festo, which subsequent events have rendered prophetic. on this pic- Amidst some exaggerations usual in such state papers, it is evident that the able memoir of M. Bernstorff faithfully depicted the condition of the youth of Germany at the period when it was written; and if any one doubts the fidelity of the portrait, he has only to turn to the annals of 1848, for there he will find its realisation. In one particular only it exhibited a fallacious, or rather a one-sided view. It told truly and without exaggeration the existing principles and views of the combined youth of Germany, and the dangers to be apprehended from them; but it did not tell what was equally true, the strength of the conservative feelings in the great bulk of the rural population, and the power of government in every state, arising from the knowledge that it would be supported, if matters came to a crisis, by the whole military strength of the Confederacy. This circumstance rendered any general convulsion at that period impossible, or rather hopeless of success; but it postponed the danger rather than removed it, and it was easy to foresee that if a crisis was to arise, so agitating the minds of men as to shake the great military monarchies of Austria and Prussia, Germany would become the theatre of a convulsion more widespread and violent than any which had yet devastated the world.

But these were remote and future effects; in the mean time the reaction against the revolutionary spirit evoked by the Spanish and Italian revolutions was

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