Kingdom of Saxony

The fourth German kingdom, and the one that industrialised first, voted socialist earliest and paid most for backing the wrong side twice. Napoleon raised the Electorate of Saxony to a kingdom in December 1806, weeks after Jena, as the price of Frederick Augustus joining the Confederation of the Rhine, and the new king repaid him with a loyalty no other German prince matched: he took the Duchy of Warsaw in 1807 and was still in the French line at Leipzig in October 1813, where his own troops changed sides in the middle of the battle. The Congress of Vienna nearly went to war over what to do with him. Prussia wanted the whole kingdom; Talleyrand and Castlereagh would not allow it; the settlement cut Saxony by about three fifths of its land and two fifths of its people, and left a state of fifteen thousand square kilometres that turned out to be the most densely populated and most industrial in Germany. Chemnitz became the Saxon Manchester, Leipzig kept its book trade and its fairs, Meissen its porcelain, and the Leipzig to Dresden line of 1839 was the first long-distance railway in the German lands. Dresden rose in May 1849, with Wagner on the barricades and Bakunin directing the defence, and Prussian troops put it down. Saxony chose Austria in 1866, was occupied within days, and entered the North German Confederation and then the Empire on Prussian terms while keeping its king, its own army corps and its own court. Its factory towns made it the reddest state in the Reich: by 1903 the Social Democrats held twenty-two of its twenty-three Reichstag seats. Frederick Augustus III abdicated on 13 November 1918, reportedly telling the republic to do its own dirty work, and the Free State of Saxony kept the borders the kingdom had been left with in 1815. Seven kings reigned in a hundred and twelve years. John, who ruled from 1854 to 1873, published a translation of Dante under a pseudonym. The kingdom's white-and-green colours are still the Land's flag today.

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