Liberty Leads the People...

Some [day a] new Napoleon might arise,

To shame the world again
But who would soar the solar height,

To set in such a starless night?

Byron: Ode to Napoleon Bonaparte

In 1848, a pro-democratic revolution broke out in Germany and the revolutionary side flew the tricolour flag:

Even to wear the revolutionary colours of the republican union flag was considered an expression of support for the revolution.

Richard Wagner, alongside his friend Michael Bakunin was to take part in the pro-democracy movement. This was originally intended as a humorous take on Eugene Delacroix's famous painting on the French Revolution entitled Liberty Leading the People, but in fact, it says more than a thousand words about Richard Wagner:

"All who have hearts, all who have the blood and spirit of their
forefathers, and love their country follow me, and death to the tyrant.”
Richard Wagner, 1849

"I value Delacroix as the closest relation of Wagner"
Friedrich Nietzsche (251-256 Werke Vol 2, 725)

Richard Wagner
(1813 – 1883)

In that same year as the revolution broke out, Karl Marx and Ludwig Engels issued their Communist Party Manifesto in which they spoke of the Red Spectre that loomed over Europe. Revolution was in the air. In Frankfurt a provisional democratic parliament was set up (the Frankfurt Parliament), where a painting of Germania hung:

The Frankfurt parliament, 1848

Veit's painting, Germania, carries the sword of justice entwined with
the olive branch of peace in one hand and a revolutionary tricolour flag in the other.
The shackles of oppression lay broken at her feet as a new dawn breaks

The following year, Richard Wagner joined his friend, Michael Bakunin—the father of Socialist Anarchism—by actively taking part in the 1849 Dresden pro-democratic uprising. Wagner demanded democracy out of patriotism to country in his Fatherland Union Paper:

The sun of German freedom and German gentleness shall alike warm and elevate Cossack, Frenchmen, Bushmen, and Chinese.   

Let us be children of one Father, brothers of one family. 

We further insist upon the unconditional right of every natural-born subject, when of age, to a vote . . .   

Therefore let us abolish monarchy altogether as autocracy, i.e. sole-reigning, becomes impossible by the strong opposition of democracy, — the reign of the many . . .

Richard Wagner: The Fatherland Union Paper

With musket in hand behind the barricades, Wagner fought and stood behind the principles in which he believed—socialist democracy:

. . . the barricade at which Wagner and Hainberger were stationed was about to receive such morning meal as had been prepared, the outposts being kept by a few men and women. Amongst the latter was a young girl of eighteen, the daughter of a baker belonging to this particular barricade. She stood in sight of all, when to their amazement a shot was suddenly heard, a piercing shriek, followed by the fall of the girlish patriot. The miscreant Prussian soldier, one of a detachment in the neighbourhood, was caught redhanded and hurried to the barricade. Wagner seized a musket and mounting a cart called out aloud to all: 

“Men, will you see your wives and daughters fall in the cause of our beloved country, and not avenge their cowardly murder? All who have hearts, all who have the blood and spirit of their forefathers, and love their country follow me, and death to the tyrant.”  

Praeger: Wagner as I Knew Him (my emphasis)

The revolution ended in failure. Bakunin ended up in prison with a death sentence over his head. As a direct result of his Fatherland Union paper, Wagner fled, only narrowly escaping capture, to an eleven year exile in Switzerland with a warrant out for his arrest facing a similar death sentence.

Later he was to tell Cosima Wagner (her diary entry for the second of May, 1874), about the profound impact this chapter in his life had on him:

I think that I would have never conceived The Ring if it weren't for this movement.

Ich selbst, ich hätte glaube ich, den Ring nicht konzipiert ohne diese Bewegung. 

Cosima Diaries 

 A one time intimate, Friedrich Nietzsche, writes that:

Wagner had believed in the Revolution all his life, as only a Frenchman could ever have believed in it. So he searched through all the mythic runes, and believed that in Siegfried he had found his perfect revolutionary.  

‘Whence comes all evils in the world?’ Wagner asked himself. From ‘ancient oaths,’ he answered, like all ideologues of Revolution. Put plainly: from conventions, laws, moralities, institutions — everything that the old world, the old society is supported by. ‘How can one rid the world of its evils? How can one do away with the old society?’ Only by declaring war against ‘oaths’ (traditions, morals).   

Nietzsche: The Case of Wagner

Siegfried is the anarchistic revolutionary destroyer, par excellence, of l'ancien regime, the hero who shatters the old society with his sword. The sword of victory (Nothung) that Siegfried brandishes in Germania's hour of greatest need (Not) is the sword borrowed from Germania herself. When Siegfried shatters Wotan's spear, he shatters the symbol of the power that the Gods (i.e. religion) have over man. George Bernard Shaw was to call him Siegfried Bakunin:

Siegfried: revolutionary slayer of autocratic dragons

Wagner's nationalism was the patriotic nationalism of an idealistic Young Germany (the Germany of Heine and Börne mentioned in Judaism in Music) that belonged with the allies—one that together with Wellington defeated Napoleonic despotism at Waterloo.  

None other than Byron wrote a sarcastic Ode to Napoleon after the hope of liberal Europe crowned himself Emperor. It was a text that would later be set to music during the rise of the Dritte Reich by Arnold Schoenberg—a new refugee from the Reich to an idealistic Young America—as a heartfelt protest against Hitler's fascist despotism. Some day—wrote the prophetic Byron—a "new Napoleon might arise, to shame the world again".

"Death to the tyrant" indeed.

Lord Byron's Ode to Napoleon Bonaparte

'Tis done—but yesterday a King!

And armed with Kings to strive—

And now thou art a nameless thing:

So abject—yet alive!

Is this the man of thousand thrones,

Who strewed our earth with hostile bones,

And can he thus survive?

Since he, miscalled the Morning Star [i.e. Lucifer],

Nor man nor fiend hath fallen so far.

Ill-minded man! why scourge thy kind

Who bowed so low the knee?

By gazing on thyself grown blind,

Thou taught'st the rest to see.

With might unquestioned,—power to save,—

Thine only gift hath been the grave

To those that worshipped thee;

Nor till thy fall could mortals guess

Ambition's less than littleness!

Thanks for that lesson—it will teach

To after-warriors more

Than high Philosophy can preach,

And vainly preached before.

That spell upon the minds of men

Breaks never to unite again,

That led them to adore

Those Pagod things of sabre-sway,

With fronts of brass, and feet of clay.

The triumph, and the vanity,

The rapture of the strife—

The earthquake-voice of Victory,

To thee the breath of life;

The sword, the sceptre, and that sway

Which man seemed made but to obey,

Wherewith renown was rife–

All quelled!—

Dark Spirit! what must be

The madness of thy memory!

The Desolator desolate!

The Victor overthrown!

The Arbiter of others' fate

A Suppliant for his own!

Is it some yet imperial hope

That with such change can calmly cope?

Or dread of death alone ?

To die a Prince—or live a slave—

Thy choice is most ignobly brave!

He who of old [Milo] would rend the oak,

Dreamed not of the rebound;

Chained by the trunk he vainly broke—

Alone—how looked he round?

Thou, in the sternness of thy strength,

An equal deed hast done at length,

And darker fate hast found:

He fell, the forest prowlers' prey;

But thou must eat thy heart away!

The Roman [Sylla], when his burning heart

Was slaked with blood of Rome,

Threw down the dagger—dared depart,

In savage grandeur, home.—

He dared depart in utter scorn

Of men that such a yoke had borne,

Yet left him such a doom!

His only glory was that hour

Of self-upheld abandoned power.

The Spaniard [Charles V], when the lust of sway

Had lost its quickening spell,

Cast crowns for rosaries away,

An empire for a cell;

A strict accountant of his beads,

A subtle disputant on creeds,

His dotage trifled well:

Yet better had he neither known

A bigot's shrine, nor despot's throne.

But thou—from thy reluctant hand

The thunderbolt is wrung—

Too late thou leav'st the high command

To which thy weakness clung;

All Evil Spirit as thou art,

It is enough to grieve the heart

To see thine own unstrung;

To think that God's fair world hath been

The footstool of a thing so mean;

And Earth hath spilt her blood for him,

Who thus can hoard his own!

And Monarchs bowed the trembling limb,

And thanked him for a throne!

Fair Freedom! we may hold thee dear,

When thus thy mightiest foes their fear

In humblest guise have shown.

Oh! ne'er may tyrant leave behind

A brighter name to lure mankind!

Thine evil deeds are writ in gore,

Nor written thus in vain—

Thy triumphs tell of fame no more,

Or deepen every stain:

If thou hadst died as Honour dies.

Some new Napoleon might arise,

To shame the world again—

But who would soar the solar height,

To set in such a starless night?

Weigh'd in the balance, hero dust

Is vile as vulgar clay;

Thy scales, Mortality! are just

To all that pass away:

But yet methought the living great

Some higher sparks should animate,

To dazzle and dismay:

Nor deem'd Contempt could thus make mirth

Of these, the Conquerors of the earth.

And she, proud Austria's mournful flower,

Thy still imperial bride;

How bears her breast the torturing hour?

Still clings she to thy side ?

Must she too bend, must she too share

Thy late repentance, long despair,

Thou throneless Homicide?

If still she loves thee, hoard that gem,—

'Tis worth thy vanished diadem!

Then haste thee to thy sullen Isle,

And gaze upon the sea;

That element may meet thy smile—

It ne'er was ruled by thee!

Or trace with thine all idle hand

In loitering mood upon the sand

That Earth is now as free!

That Corinth's pedagogue hath now

Transferred his by-word to thy brow.

Thou Timour! in his captive's cage

What thoughts will there be thine,

While brooding in thy prisoned rage?

But one—Ó The world was mine! Ó

Unless, like he of Babylon,

All sense is with thy sceptre gone,

Life will not long confine

That spirit poured so widely forth—

So long obeyed—so little worth!

Or, like the thief of fire [Prometheus] from heaven,

Wilt thou withstand the shock?

And share with him, the unforgiven,

His vulture and his rock!

Foredoomed by God–by man accurst,

And that last act, though not thy worst,

The very Fiend's arch mock;

He in his fall preserved his pride,

And, if a mortal, had as proudly died!

There was a day—there was an hour,

While earth was Gaul's—Gaul thine—

When that immeasurable power

Unsated to resign

Had been an act of purer fame

Than gathers round Marengo's name

And gilded thy decline,

Through the long twilight of all time,

Despite some passing clouds of crime.

But thou forsooth must be a King

And don the purple vest,

As if that foolish robe could wring

Remembrance from thy breast

Where is that faded garment? where

The gewgaws thou wert fond to wear,

The star, the string, the crest?

Vain froward child of Empire! say,

Are all thy playthings snatched away?

Where may the wearied eye repose

When gazing on the Great;

Where neither guilty glory glows,

Nor despicable state?

Yes—One—the first—the last—the best—

The Cincinnatus of the West,

Whom Envy dared not hate,

Bequeathed the name of Washington,

To make man blush there was but one!

Yes! better to have stood the storm,

A Monarch to the last!

Although that heartless fireless form

Had crumbled in the blast:

Than stoop to drag out Life's last years,

The nights of terror, days of tears

For all the splendour past;

Then,—after ages would have read

Thy awful death with more than dread.

A lion in the conquering hour!

In wild defeat a hare!

Thy mind hath vanished with thy power,

For Danger brought despair.

The dreams of sceptres now depart,

And leave thy desolated heart

The Capitol of care!

Dark Corsican, 'tis strange to trace

Thy long deceit and last disgrace.