Revolutions of 1848 in the German states

"Germany" at the time of the Revolutions of 1848 was a collection of 38 states including Austria loosely bound together in the German Confederation after the Congress of Vienna in 1815. Since then, repeated calls for freedom, democracy and international understanding were made. One such time was during the Hambacher Fest of 1832, where the colours Black-Red-Gold were established as a symbol for this republican movement.

Liberal pressure spread throughout the German states, each of which experienced the revolutions in their own way. Fearing the fate of Louis-Philippe of France, many kings capitulated to the revolutionaries at least temporarily. The revolution was triggered by events in France at the end of February and soon spread to Germany, known there as the March Revolution. In the south and the west of Germany, large popular assemblies and mass demonstrations took place. They primarily demanded freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, arming of the people, and a national German parliament.

Overview

Pro-Revolution

• Prussian Economic Success
  • Prussian Customs Union (PCU) formed, which attempted to set standards for taxes when traveling through German States.
  • The PCU was very small, and eventually evolved into the Zollverein, encompassing most of Germany. Set standards for weights and currency in Germany.
• Growth of Nationalism
  • In 1840, it seemed France would invade the Rhineland, spawning a wave of anti-French feeling.
  • Denmark's announcement that it would invade Schleswig-Holstein provoked nationwide opposition.
  • New poems and songs such as the Deutschlandlied ("Deutschland über alles", 1841) were written. The Deutschlandlied eventually became the national anthem.
  • New journals, magazines, and papers, arose, such as "Die Deutsche Zeitung" (The German Newspaper)", widening awareness of events in France and Denmark.
• Poor Living Condition
  • Cholera Epidemic. Led to widespread death and suffering in Prussia.
  • Huge population growth meant many people starved, partly due to failures of harvests in 1846 and 1847.
  • Many people moved to the cities for work, but working conditions were generally terrible, with long working days and poor or non-existent rights.
• Foreign Affairs
  • In February 1848, the King Louis-Phillipe of France abdicated the throne, triggering revolutions across the entire European continent.
  • On March 13, 1848, Metternich, Austria's brilliant foreign minister, resigned amidst mounting rebellion in his country, sparking revolutions in Italy and Germany while his country was politically weak.

Anti-Revolution

• Failure of the Frankfurt Parliament
  • Poor Leadership (Heinrich von Gagern was considered too weak to lead the group).
  • Many of the leaders, as liberals, had no violent interests. They preferred intellectual debate to violence, and this led to accusations that the Frankfurt Parliament was a 'talking shop with no teeth'.
  • There were no political parties in the Frankfurt Parliament. This meant that debates took a long time, with no official party line to bind people of similar views together.
  • No military backing. The Frankfurt Parliament managed to buy two battleships, which it never used. It had no army.
  • Major divide between the GrossDeutschland (those who wanted to include Austria in the unified Germany/KleinDeutschland (those opposed), Catholic/Protestant Austria/Prussia divide, made worse by the lack of Political Parties in the group.
• Effect of Prussia
  • In the Denmark Conflict, Prussia ignored the Frankfurt Parliament completely when Britain put pressure to end the war, and made her own armistice. Because they had no army, the Frankfurt Parlilament couldn't do anything about it.
  • King Frederick William IV was offered the crown, to become emperor of all Germany, by the FP, but he turned down, because he would not accept a crown from revolutionaries.
• Austria
  • The Frankfurt Parliament could only have happened because Metternich fell from power and was weak. After Austria had crushed the Italian revolts of 1848/1849, they were ready to turn their attention back to Germany, and with no army, and not enough support from member states, the Parliament could not resist them.

The Revolutions in Prussia

In Prussia, the revolution started with the Greater Poland Uprising of 1848, which was a military insurrection of the Polish people in the Grand Duchy of Poznań against the occupying Prussian forces, led by Ludwik Mirosławski who later led the defence of Rastatt in South Germany as well as other revolutionary acts in Europe. In Berlin, the Prussian capital, crowds of people gathered, particularly in the beer gardens and outside the gates of town (or the royal palace), their demands culminating in an "address to the king".

King Frederick William IV, overwhelmed by this pressure, yielded verbally to all the demonstrators' demands, including parliamentary elections, a constitution, and freedom of the press. He even promised that "Prussia was to be merged forthwith into Germany."

However, on March 18, a large demonstration occurred and two shots fired by soldiers led to an escalation of tensions. Barricades were erected, fighting started, and blood flowed until troops were ordered to retreat a day later, leaving hundreds dead. Afterwards, Frederick William attempted to reassure the public that the reorganization of his government would proceed, and the king also approved the idea of arming the citizens. On March 21, he paraded through the streets of Berlin to the cemetery where the civil victims were buried, accompanied by some ministers and generals, all wearing the revolutionary tricolor of black, red, and gold which form today's flag of Germany.

Backlash in Prussia

By late 1848, the Prussian aristocrats including Otto von Bismarck and generals had regained power in Berlin. They had not been defeated permanently during the incidents of March, they had only retreated temporarily. General von Wrangel led the troops who recaptured Berlin for the old powers, and King Frederick William IV of Prussia immediately rejoined the old forces. In November, the king dissolved the new Prussian parliament and put forth a constitution of his own which was based upon the work of the assembly, yet maintaining the ultimate authority of the king. Elaborated in the following years, the constitution came to provide for an upper house (Herrenhaus), and a lower house (Landtag), chosen by universal suffrage but under a three-class system of voting ("Dreiklassenwahlrecht"): representation was proportional to taxes paid, so that more than 80 % of the electorate controlled only one-third of the seats.

Saxony

In Dresden in Saxony, the people took to the streets asking their king to engage in electoral reform and social justice.

Richard Wagner passionately engaged himself in the revolution, supporting the democratic-republican movement. Later in the May Uprising in Dresden from May 3-9, 1849 he supported the provisional government. Together with the leaders of the uprising, he left Dresden on May 9 to avoid the warrant for his arrest by flight to exile in Switzerland.

Bavaria

In Bavaria, a new liberal government (the "March ministry") was installed; King Ludwig I was forced to abdicate in an attempt to pacify the public, contain the spreading of revolutionary ideas and save the monarchy by offering concessions.

Frankfurt: The National Assembly meets in St. Paul's Church

In Heidelberg, in the state of Baden (southwest Germany), on March 5, 1848, a group of German liberals began to make plans for an election to a German national assembly. This prototype Parliament met on March 31, in Frankfurt's St. Paul's Church. Its members called for free elections to an assembly for all of Germany - and the German states agreed.

Finally, on May 18, 1848 the National Assembly opened its session in St. Paul's Church. Of the 586 delegates of the first freely elected German parliament, so many were professors (94), teachers (30) or had a university education (233) that it was called a "professors' parliament" ("Professorenparlament").

There were few practical politicians. Some 400 delegates can be identified in terms of political factions - usually named after their venues:

• Café Milani - Right/Conservative (40)
• Casino - Right centre/Liberal-conservative (120)
• Landsberg - Centre/Liberal (40)
• Württemberger Hof - Left centre (100)
• Deutscher Hof - Left/Liberal democrats (60)
• Donnersberg - Far left/Democrats (40)

Under the chairmanship of the liberal politician Heinrich von Gagern, the assembly started on its ambitious plan to create a modern constitution as the foundation for a unified Germany.

From the beginning the main problems were regionalism, support of local issues over pan-German issues, and Austro-Prussian conflicts. Archduke Johann of Austria was chosen as a temporary head of state ("Reichsverweser" i.e. imperial vicar). This was an attempt to create a provisional executive power, but it did not get very far since most states failed to fully recognize the new government. Hence the weakness of the assembly became apparent right from the start. The National Assembly lost reputation in the eyes of the German public when Prussia carried through its own political intentions in the Schleswig-Holstein question without the prior consent of Parliament. A similar discredition occurred when Austria suppressed a popular uprising in Vienna by military force.

Nonetheless, discussions on the future constitution had started. The main questions to be decided were:

• Should the new united Germany include the German-speaking areas of Austria and thus separate these territories constitutionally from the remaining areas of the Habsburg Empire ("greater German solution"), or should it exclude Austria, with leadership falling to Prussia ("smaller German solution")? Finally, this question was settled when the Austrian Prime Minister introduced a centralised constitution for the entire Austrian Empire, thus delegates had to give up their hopes for a "Greater Germany".
• Should Germany become a hereditary monarchy, have an elected monarch, or even become a republic?
• Should it be a federation of relatively independent states or have a strong central government?

Soon events began to overtake discussions. Delegate Robert Blum had been sent to Vienna by his left-wing political colleagues on a fact-finding mission to see how Austria's government was rolling back liberal achievements by military force. Blum participated in the street fighting, was arrested and executed on November 9, despite his claim to immunity from prosecution as a member of the National Assembly.

Although the achievements of the March Revolution were rolled back in many German states, the discussions in Frankfurt continued, increasingly losing touch with society.

In December 1848 the "Basic Rights for the German People" proclaimed equal rights for all citizens before the law. On March 28, 1849, the draft of the constitution was finally passed. The new Germany was to be a constitutional monarchy, and the office of head of state ("Emperor of the Germans") was to be hereditary and held by the respective King of Prussia. The latter proposal was carried by a mere 290 votes in favour, with 248 abstentions. The constitution was recognized by 29 smaller states but not by Austria, Prussia, Bavaria, Hanover and Saxony.

The end of the Revolutions in the German states

On April 2, 1849, a delegation of the National Assembly met with King Frederick William IV in Berlin and offered him the crown of the Emperor under this new constitution.

Frederick William told the delegation that he felt honoured but could only accept the crown with the consent of his peers, the other sovereign monarchs and free cities. But later, in a letter to a relative in England, he wrote that he felt deeply insulted by being offered "from the gutter" a crown, "disgraced by the stink of revolution, baked of dirt and mud."

Austria and Prussia withdrew their delegates from the Assembly, and the Assembly itself slowly disintegrated afterwards. Its most radical members retired to Stuttgart, where they sat from June 6-18 as a rump parliament until it too was dispersed by Württemberg troops. Armed uprisings in support of the constitution, especially in Saxony, the Palatinate and Baden were short-lived, as the local military, aided by Prussian troops, crushed them quickly. Leaders and participants, if caught, were executed or sentenced to long prison terms.

The achievements of the revolutionaries of March 1848 were reversed in all of the German states and by 1851, the Basic Rights had also been abolished nearly everywhere. In the end, the revolution fizzled because of the overwhelming number of tasks it faced and because of lack of mass support and actual power.

Many disappointed German patriots went to the United States, among them most notably Carl Schurz. Such emigrants became known as the Forty-Eighters.

Literature

• Klaus Herdepe: Die Preußische Verfassungsfrage 1848, Deutsche Universitätsedition Bd. 22) ars et unitas : Neuried 2003, 454 p., ISBN 3-936117-22-5 (The Prussian Constitution in 1848)
• Justine D Randers-Pehrson (1999), Germans and the Revolution of 1848-1849 (ISBN 0-8204-4118-X)
• McKay, Hill and Buckler. A History of Western Society. page 758.

External links and references

• 1848: REVOLUTION AND REACTION
• German Revolution of 1848/49
• The German 1848 Revolution: A German Perspective
• Constitution of the German Empire ("Constitution of Paulskirche") of 28th March 1849, in full text

Next: The Italian states

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