On the evening of 7 September 1830 in Braunschweig, you could feel the tension everywhere in town. Assemblies of more than six people were officially banned. Artillery was set up on major streets and squares. 1,300 soldiers had been deployed to guard the ducal palace. As dusk fell, as crowd of townspeople gathered in front of the gates, calling for bread and work. The previous day, cavalry troops had dispersed them for making similar demands, but they were not here to humbly petition today. Many had brought axes and hammers to batter down the doors. All the ingredients for a bloodbath were in place. A few hours later, the duke had fled the country in disguise, the palace was ablaze, and the protesters had won. It was an outcome few had expected, least of all Duke Karl II of Braunschweig and Oels.
Karl II was certainly an interesting person. Orphaned at 10 years to inherit the dukedom after his father died in battle fighting Napoleon, he became known as the Diamantenherzog (diamond duke) for his love of luxury. Cultured, Anglophile, a grandmaster-level chess player and self-centered narcissist, he would have made perfect tabloid fodder in a later age. Unfortunately, none of this made him fit to govern a country in the midst of Europe’s last great hunger crisis. As he insisted all power should rest with him, he refused to assemble the Landtag, a kind of parliament, that had the authority to grant taxes. Instead, he opened up creative sources of revenue, starved the state and army, redirected cash to his court, and alienated senior members of his government to the point they went into exile. Between flaunting his wealth at home in lavish theatre performances and parties (his mistress was a famous opera singer), he spent a lot of his time in London or Paris where life was much more civilised and he was not constantly being bothered with talk of poor relief, taxation, or the abolition of serfdom.
The people who presented him with a humble petition to call the Landtag on 1 September were still the sort who would attend operas along with their ruler and snack on grouse and quail eggs. Those who came to his palace a week later were unlikely to ever have seen an opera house from the inside. They were the urban poor and those struggling to stay above the poverty line, people whose livelihoods were threatened by the economic upheaval of industrialisation and whose meagre incomes, already squeezed by rising prices, were taxed and fined in increasingly creative ways to fund the lavish lifestyle of their ruler. Many had purchased their release from serfdom at ridiculously inflated prices payable to the duke’s private fisc. Their daily meals, if things went well, would consist of bread and butter or cheese (never both, what a wasteful indulgence) or flour soup of the kind the Dresdner Kochbuch describes:
Roux Soup / Potage aux roux brun, ou aux pauvres gens
Twelve Loth of butter are heated, four or five tablespoons of flour added, and it is slowly cooked to light brown. Then you add a Kanne of warm water, it is dissolved and brought to a boil while stirring attentively, and two Kannen of boiling water are added. The whole is salted and a pinch of pepper and a generous tablespoon of strong caraway added, everything is boiled for half an hour and poured over thin, toasted bread slices through a sieve.
This soup can be rendered more delicious by adding an onion, two carrots, two parsley roots cut in slices, and a bunch of green parsley. In this case, the soup must boil for at least one hour. It is also served with poached eggs.
In middle-class households (bürgerlich), a few eggs are broken into the soup tureen, the soup is poured over them and the whole stirred gently.
This was still quite common well into the twentieth century. I remember the taste well, smooth, thick and salty, served with boiled potatoes. We did not think we were poor, but if you ate like this regularly, you were definitely not rich. Not even if you could afford the poached eggs.
“Not rich” described a lot of people in the early 19th century well. This was the period called Biedermeier in German, and it is becoming quite fashionable again in some quarters for its twee little houses, its plain but elegant interior design, and its charmingly human literature and art. Of course the houses were small and the furniture simple because few people could afford anything more, and people read books about charmed love, fantastic medieval adventures, and humorous anecdotes because you could go to prison for writing anything political. Germany was living in the long economic shadow of the Napoleonic wars, the tail end of the Little Ice Age, and the concerted effort of its rulers to make the years between 1789 and 1815 not have happened.
This had not meant a return to the old Reich with its fragmented, deeply traditional system of government. People lived in thoroughly modern states with standing armies, a secret police, and cross-border cooperation in press censorship, but they were governed by kings, princes, and the occasional city council who basically did as they pleased. Even without widespread poverty, this was bound to create opposition. In 1830, inspired by the July Revolution in Paris, public anger erupted into protests all over Germany. People took to the streets, confronted police and military, and badly scared the upper classes. Braunschweig with its unpopular duke, the weakened apparatus of state, and grievances to unite much of the populace, was the one place where they successfully toppled a monarch.
Duke Karl II had no intention of giving in. The artillery on the streets was not decorative, and a day before his hurried departure, he had discussed major military operations to quell the protest. If we can trust later accounts, he was talked into leaving the country to defuse tensions, expecting to return once his generals had put things to right. Having fled the palace in disguise, he must have been quite shocked when his government immediately appointed his brother Wilhelm regent and, soon after, duke.
The new government, technically a continuation of the old one, sat uneasily with its revolutionary roots. All through the German Confederation, the established rulers managed to head off revolution by a variety of remarkably modern means. In some places, naked military force intimidated protesters, but this was flanked by a press campaign designed to ridicule them as brutish, ignorant, and dangerous. Extreme or incomprehensible demands were highlighted, or possibly just invented, by the newspapers. At the same time, a growing number of xenophobic and antisemitic publications appeared. Riots targeting the homes and businesses of Jews or immigrants occurred in many towns and were often given less attention by the authorities than people throwing stones at the windows of government buildings or demanding higher wages from their employers. Where concessions were necessary, they were made cautiously – new laws, loosened restrictions, or the dismissal of some unpopular officials. In the end, little enough changed for the whole scene to replay itself in 1848 on a greater scale.
Duke Karl II never gave up his claim to being the rightful ruler of Braunschweig. After his death in Swiss exile, his estate turned out to include thousands of uniforms for an army he had hoped to lead in his triumphant return. Luckily for his duchy, even the most boneheaded legitimists among the German princes realised that putting a vengeful narcissist back in charge of a country he had done such damage to the first time around was not a good idea.