Crush The Universities (1818)

The problem of academia serving as a fifth column for the training of dedicated politically subversive cadres is quite old. The crackdown on university professors and revolutionary student fraternities in the Vormärz era of the German Confederation was known under the very colorful name of the “Demagogenverfolgung.” The universally agreed hotbed of this problem was at Jena. The arch-reactionary civil servant and Oldenburg loyalist Laurenz Hannibal Fischer (1784-1868) referred to Jena as “a central point of the Red Democracy” in his 1855 memoirs entitled Politisches Martyrthum. So too did the Catholic conservative from Baden, Heinrich Bernhard, Freiherr von Andlaw, in his recollections of the Baden revolution of 1848 recount that a “student union was formed in Heidelberg with the task of propaganda for the republic; this association was dissolved in accordance with the law of Oct. 26, 1833.”

A history of Jena student life published in 1858 by Richard and Robert Keil features a vivid retelling of the events of the Wartburg Festival of 1817, one of the most emblematic events of the revolutionary student movement and German unificationist efforts at the height of Metternich’s influence, involving most infamously as it did the burning of numerous “reactionary” books. The Keils paraphrase the rousing speech of one Friedrich Wilhelm Carove, an anti-Catholic professor of philosophy and later deputy of the Frankfurt Parliament. Carove flatters the basest egos of the students, saying that “not only did the German people wrestle with every glory of their ancestors, but their own glory had also been given to them; the consciousness of the unity of the people, the pursuit of true freedom, and the most earnest longing for pure reasonableness had arisen in him; but the honor of the German men was identical with the special profession of German student youths.” True manliness is represented by an undergrad! The speech continues: “…the honor of the high school students could now consist only in being of the highest degree in the honor of the people, since they were especially called upon to preserve the national honor and, if possible, to raise it from a higher stage ; they would have their honor to be found in the love and unity of all German brothers, and only then would they let gravity and severity prevail, if mildness and kindness had been tried in vain; if the folk-honor had become the all-determining spirit to them, if they had lived in the universal and found in them their true being and their salvation, then every work would become easy and joyful for them, because they had expanded their power for the fatherland; then the endeavor to become a capable German citizen and military man would displace all unnecessary activity…”

Such agitation did not go unnoticed outside of Germany, either. It was regarded as an emerging threat all across the continent during the Concert of Europe. Specifically during the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle (1818) summoned to deal with the remaining displacement of the Napoleonic Wars, there came an intense rejoinder from the Russian side. Alexandre Stourdza, a Russian diplomat of Moldavian origin and a devout Orthodox Christian, presented the Mémoire sur l’état actuel de l’Allemagne, a scathing attack on the German university system and its complicity in revolutionary sedition.

Stourdza begins with a summary of events preceding the Congress of Vienna and the establishment of the German Confederation, after which he ruminates on the providential aspects of the post-Napoleonic world order and of German federalism:

Calm succeeds so many storms; but this calm, produced by the agreement of wills, by the union of the great sovereigns that protects an all-powerful will, this calmness is not yet at rest. The recognition of the right, the sanction of the respective possessions , the forgetting of the past, the promise of a more prosperous future, all these conservative principles, guaranteed by the most solemn stipulations, form the bases of the new political system of the Europe. It is under the auspices of this tutelary system that Germany has received its new federal pact.

It is with this fundamental law as with all human laws. It combines pre-existing elements, but it can not change their nature; it represents in short form the great political pact which associates among them the various members of the European family. This law, the imperfections of which are palpable , is only the expression of a federal form , which had to be restrained in order not to undermine the independence of the Germanic states. To regulate, modify their relations, their dimensions, their analogies, in the most favorable manner to the federative link, was not an expedient to the power of the law.

The imperial power, as a moderating force, could no longer be appreciated for its true value, because the universal crisis, which had just changed the face of Europe, had occasioned a sudden displacement of individuals, classes, and human authorities. As a result of which every man, every corporation, every government wished, for the price of its disasters, to be placed at a higher level on the scale of society. In the absence of this moderating power, entrusted to one alone, it was necessary to create a collective authority, which would have a long time to bear on the soil of Germany, without being able to take root of it, so long as great measures of national education would not have vivified this federal form and rallied all the parties [against it]…

But, alas, Germany remained in turmoil. The Wartburg festival, the gatherings of students in Goettingen, the episode known as the Breslauer Turnfehde where Friedrich Ludwig Jahn’s gymnastics clubs become embroiled in controversy between those who saw them as the vanguard of a new revolutionary German youth and those who wanted no such political radicalization — ending in hundreds of arrests and gym closures by 1820 after a royal cabinet order; these are but a few of the episodes gripping the 1810s.

Stourdza identifies three primary causes of unrest: “the universal displacement of individuals and classes, the immediate fruit of the revolution; the wave and the disorganization of religious ideas; the ever-growing vices of public education, which have become enormous, and such that the most perfect system of legislation and administration can not serve as a corrective.”

The displacement of individuals and classes is intimately linked to the tendency of enlightened classes towards the political unity of Germany. Science continues to be held in high regard, but has become abstract and devoid of experience, whereas “religion, more than anywhere else, has become an urgent need… but has become a good as valuable as indefinable.”

However, the “inveterate disease of all,” the chief cause of unrest is to be blamed on the vices of higher education.

Overproduction of graduates, a debilitating esprit de corps by the professors, and a constant loosening of ethical standards reigns supreme:

Everyone aspires to study in Germany. Poor artisans often deprive themselves of what is absolutely necessary to succeed in losing their children in the universities. Indeed, what are these universities today? Gothic debris of the Middle Ages, incompatible with the institutions and needs of the century in which we live; Corporations without object which form a state in the bosom of the state, they are animated by a spirit of body and hereditary presumption, which serves only to mislead the youth, to distort the public spirit. Repertoires of all the errors of the century, the universities reproduce and perpetuate all the false theories, all the false doctrines , of which a fatal experience has already disenchanted most of their contemporaries. They are absolute masters of the future of an entire nation; and no government demands of them the essence, of the method of their instructions. The letters, the sciences, the bar, the altar themselves are entrusted to them, and nothing guarantees their loyalty to administering this state heritage. Left to a total indiscipline, the universities are every day on the verge of dissolving; and if anything still supports them, it is, on the one hand, the seductive attraction of a so-called academic freedom , and, on the other, the strange system of several governments of Germany, which persist in their considering a university as a financial speculation to attract cash to their country. At this price, everything is lawful in the universities. Youth, subtracted from the discipline of the law, plunges itself into all the excesses which derive from the rebellion of the mind and the corruption of the heart. It does not begin its career in life by an exercise of obedience, which alone learns to order one day; but it learns to try everything, to allow itself everything in the age of obedience, in order to respect nothing, to upset everything in old age. Incredible thing! The most democratic states of antiquity held inflexibly to the discipline of youth; yet in our day, monarchical states are emancipating man from nature…

Consequently, Stourdza proposes the following reforms:

a) suppression of all academic privileges including the tenure system;
b) strict municipal policing of the campus, particularly to suppress student unions like the Burschenschaften;
c) irrevocably fixed academic curricula for every major and vocation with no deviation in course permitted except by special dispensation;
d) the curriculum ought to vary between natives and foreign students;
e) certificates of good conduct issued by the civil authorities as a prerequisite for a diploma;
f) faculty members stripped of self-government and subordinated to a state ministry.

Additionally: “An accessory means to purify the spirit of so many scattered universities on the soil of Germany might be to found a German national institute in some free city. The federal power should be the protector of this scientific and literary institute, which would eventually have a powerful influence on other academies.”

Stourdza sees the issue of a licentious and libelous press as correlated to the problem of rowdy and impious students, hence an effective regime against the unbridled liberty of the press must go hand in hand with a reform of higher education for it to be effective. “Therefore, to return from principles to application, it is up to education alone to gradually eradicate the abuse of the freedom of the press… The works of Crebillon, de Toussaint, and La Mettrie, prelude to the impiety of Voltaire, and these paved the way for all the subversive doctrines of the social order. If bad books and bad newspapers could be removed from the knowledge of youth, both evil and irresponsibility would be less; and the question of freedom of the press would fall into the sphere of administrative propriety, more or less adapted to places and times. But it is, on the contrary, the youth who draws most abundantly from this poisoned source; and from then on, it is a question of the cause of the Lord, of the well-being of the societies which He has instituted, and of the salvation of so many fragile beings, of whom only one is already so dear to the One who gives us life, the thought and hope of a life to come…”

However, the national papers require decisive action and an iron fist in order to be dealt with:

But it is not the same with public papers : mercenaries by their nature, arrogant and hasty, they cost little to those who write them, little pecuniary costs to the reader, they circulate with a regularity so constant and so rapid, that one can consider them as drops of water which, succeeding one another without slackening, end by digging the cornerstone of the social edifice. To allow people without confession and without fortune to write periodically and with impunity? To allow all of that humor, party spirit, and venality of theirs is to place the most immoral kind of existence in the protection of the laws. It is to give a false direction to the public mind and to mislead it beyond return… Such a continuous scandal and such abusive liberty are, moreover, incompatible with the nature of a federation of states. The germs of discord are already too much multiplied on the soil of Germany, so that one must tolerate the perpetual circulation of the most incendiary writings.

The law must silence them, place them under a permanent guardianship, and determine the equitable principles of the responsibility inherent in the publication of long-term works; but, in order that this law can not be accused of partiality, for it to be as impassible as it is efficient, it is important that it emanate from the federal power. Until then, all partial attempts will remain unsuccessful; until then, the spirits will float between the excess of liberty and the excess of oppression.

Wise words.

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