The second circumstance which tended to coerce, more rapidly than could have been hoped for, the progress of the revolution of 1848, was the firmness and loyalty of the soldiers. It is historically known that it was the defection of the troops which brought on, and rendered irresistible the march of the first Revolution: which induced, in rapid succession, the Reign of Terror, the assignats, the conscription, the capture of Paris, the subjugation of the kingdom. But here, too, experience and suffering came to the aid of deluded and wandering humanity. It was seen that what is unjust and dishonourable is never expedient: that the violation of their oaths by the sworn defenders of order is not the commencement of the regeneration, but the first step in the decline of society: and that to fear God and honour the king is the only way to insure, not only the preservation of order, but the ultimate ascendancy of freedom. On the foundation of the revolt of the Gardes Françaises in 1789, were successively built the despotism of the Committee of Public Salvation, the blood of Robespierre, the carnage of Napoleon. The awful example was not lost on the next generation. The throne of Charles X. was overthrown by the defection of the troops of the line; but it was again found that the glorious fabric of civil liberty was not to be erected on the basis of treachery and treason. None of the troops revolted on the crisis of February 1848. The Guards and the line were alike steady. Marshal Bugeaud, when he received the command, speedily passed the whole barricades, and in six hours would have extinguished the revolt. The throne was lost not by the defection of the troops, but by the pusillanimity of the princes of the blood; and accordingly, when the next contest occurred – as occur it ever will in such cases – the troops were resolutely led, the revolution was put down under circumstances ten times more formidable, though not without a frightful loss of human life.
We are so accustomed to the loyalty and steadiness of the English army, that the possibility of their wavering never enters into our imagination. But still all must admit that we too, with all our boasted safeguards of popular representation, general information, a free press, and centuries of freedom, stood on the edge of an abyss; and that, not less than Austria or Prussia, our salvation had come to depend chiefly, if not entirely, on the fidelity of the soldiers. If the six thousand men who garrisoned London on the 10th April 1848 had wavered, and one-half of them had joined the insurgents, where would now have been the British constitution? Had a hundred thousand men from Kennington Common crossed Waterloo Bridge, headed by a regiment of the Guards, and three regiments of the line, where would now have been the British liberties? Where would have been all the safeguards formed, all the hopes expressed, all the prophecies hazarded, as to its being perpetual? But in that dread hour, perhaps the most eventful that England ever knew, we were saved by the courage of the Queen, the firmness of the government, the admirable arrangements of the Duke of Wellington, and the universal steadiness and loyalty of our soldiers. We are quite aware of the special constables, and the immense moral influence of the noble display which the aristocracy and middle classes of England made on that occasion. But moral influence, often all-powerful in the end, is not alone sufficient at the beginning; physical force is then required to withstand the first assault of the enemy: and, highly as we respect the civic force with batons in their hands; and fully as we admit the immense importance of that citizen-demonstration in its ultimate effects, we ascribe our deliverance from the instant peril which threatened, entirely to the steadiness of the British army, and the incomparable arrangements of their chief.
In the Continental states, order succeeded in regaining the ascendency over anarchy entirely in consequence of the fidelity of the soldiers. On that memorable day, when the Prussian army marched into Berlin playing the old airs of the monarchy, and formed in a circle around, distant only twenty-five paces from the insurgent host, and there tranquilly loaded their pieces, the opposing forces were directly brought into collision; it was seen that, in a few seconds, law or rebellion would be victorious. Law prevailed, as it generally does where its defenders are steady and resolutely led – and what has been the result? Is it that freedom has been extinguished in Prussia, that liberty has sunk under the pressure of tyrannic power, and that a long period of servitude and degradation is to close the bright meridian of her national splendour? Quite the reverse: anarchy has been extinguished in Prussia only to make room for the fair forms of order and liberty, which cannot exist but side by side; the revolutionists are overawed, but the lovers of real freedom are only the better confirmed in their hopes of the ultimate establishment of a constitutional monarchy, such as Prussia has been sighing for for thirty years. It is ever to be recollected that the prospects of freedom are never so bright as when they are in the inverse ratio to those of revolution; liberty is never so safe as where anarchy is most thoroughly repressed; despotism is never so near at hand as immediately after the greatest triumphs of insurrection.
In Austria a different and more melancholy prospect has been exhibited. That great and noble country has been the victim, not merely of the passions of revolution, but of those of race. It has been torn asunder, not only by the ambition of the revolutionists, and the ardent zeal of a people yet inexperienced in social dissensions sighing after freedom, but by the force and inextinguishable rivalry of different and discordant races. The Lombard has risen up against the German, the Bohemian against the Austrian; the Magyars have buckled on their armour against both, and, animated alike by revolutionary zeal and national jealousy, have striven to obtain what they deem the first of blessings – national independence – by revolting against the government of Austria, in the moment of its utmost need. That strange compound of races and nations, the Austrian monarchy, in which it is hard to say whether the Slave, the Magyar, the Teuton, the Lombard, or the old Roman had the preponderance, and the union of which, for so long a period, had been a subject of astonishment to all observers, at length revealed its inherent weakness. Worse than the war of opinion, the war of races began. Like the Lacedemonian confederacy, after the defeat of Leuctra, or the Athenian after the catastrophe of Aigos Potamos, or the Roman republic after the disaster of Cannæ, the Austrian aggregate of kingdoms threatened to fall to pieces on the dreadful shock of opinion which resulted from the success of the French revolution. The contest of nations did not now intervene, to bar the spread of democratic ideas; the military passions were not arrayed in opposition to the civic. Lamartine was perfectly right in his prognostic: the pacific French revolution of 1848 achieved greater conquests, in three months, than the warlike republic of 1793 had gained in ten years. Prussia was apparently revolutionised; Austria was all but won to the democratic side; Vienna, Prague, and Milan were in the hands of the insurgents. Never, in the darkest periods of the revolutionary war, was Austria in such desperate straits, as when Radetsky retreated behind the Mincio, and the treacherous assault of Charles Albert was aided by the whole strength of revolutionary Italy, and the tacit support or lukewarm indifference of France and England.
But in that awful hour, by far the most perilous which Austria ever knew, and which threatened with immediate and irrevocable destruction the whole balance of power in Europe, she was saved by the fidelity of her native soldiers, and the incomparable spirit of her German nobility. Then appeared in its highest lustre what is the principle of life and the tenacity of purpose which exist in an aristocratic society, not yet wholly debilitated by the pleasures and the selfishness of a court. Although the Hungarian nobles, for the most part, sided with the Magyar insurgents; although the whole Lombard troops had passed over from the standards of Radetsky to those of Charles Albert, and all the Hungarians in his service sullenly wended their way back to their native places; although Prague was wrested from the crown by the Bohemian insurgents, and Vienna by a vehement urban tumult in the capital; although Hungary was not only lost, but arrayed in fierce hostility against the monarchy – the noble Austrian leaders never lost heart – they realised the dream of the Roman poet —
"Si fractus illabatur orbis,
Impavidum ferient ruinæ."
Windischgratz in Bohemia, Radetsky in Italy, Jellachich in Austria, stood forth as the saviours of the monarchy, and, with it, of the cause of European freedom. Though deserted by their sovereign, who had bent before the revolutionary tempest, they fronted, sometimes, it is believed, in opposition to constrained orders, the dangers with which they were assailed – they acted in conformity with the maxim of a noble people not yet debased by democratic selfishness: Vive le Roi quand-meme! Slowly, but steadily,