The age of Metternich and the era of unification, 1815–71

Reform and reaction

In place of the Holy Roman Empire the peacemakers of the Congress of Vienna had established a new organization of German states, the German Confederation. This was a loose political association in which most of the rights of sovereignty remained in the hands of the member governments. There was no central executive or judiciary, only a federal Diet meeting in Frankfurt am Main to consider common legislation. The delegates who participated in its deliberations were representatives appointed by and responsible to the rulers whom they served. The confederation was in theory empowered to adopt measures strengthening the political and economic bonds of the nation. In fact it remained a stronghold of particularism, unwilling to sacrifice local autonomy in order to establish centralized authority. It was designed essentially to defend the interests of the secondary states and the Habsburgs. The former, jealously guarding the independence and importance they had gained during the period of French hegemony, were opposed to any reform that might limit their sovereignty. The latter believed that only a decentralized form of political union in Germany would give them enough freedom of action to pursue their non-German objectives. The confederation was thus from the outset an ally of localism and traditionalism. To the nationalists, whose hopes had risen so high during the Wars of Liberation, it seemed to be an instrument of blind reaction. Yet the truth is that the confederal system established in 1815 accurately reflected the slow development of civic consciousness and economic integration in Germany. The militant reformers who demanded the centralization of government were a vocal but small minority. The lower classes accepted the territorial and constitutional decisions of the Congress of Vienna without a murmur of protest. The weakness of the peace settlement was not its failure to embody present realities but its inability to adjust to future changes. What had been a reasonable adaptation to the political needs of an agrarian and rural society became a hopeless anachronism 50 years later in the age of factories and railroads. This was the fatal flaw in the German Confederation.

Yet the reform movement that had begun under the impact of the French hegemony did not end with the downfall of Napoleon. It continued to exert influence over affairs of state for another few years, before the forces of authoritarianism and particularism crushed it. That influence was strongest in southern Germany, where the political example of western Europe had made the deepest impression. There many civil servants, court officials, army officers, and even aristocratic landowners came to believe that the future of the state depended on its readiness to reform civic institutions in accordance with liberal theories. In the years following Waterloo, one government in the south after another promulgated a constitution: Bavaria and Baden in 1818, Württemberg in 1819, and Hesse-Darmstadt in 1820. These constitutions established representative assemblies, elected by the propertied citizens, whose assent was required for the enactment of legislation. Their purpose was not only to win for the crown the support of the educated classes of society but also to engender a sense of unity in a heterogeneous population that still had diverse allegiances and traditions.

To the north there were also persistent echoes of the reform movement. The followers of the baron vom Stein were still influential in the councils of state, and Frederick William III of Prussia at first seriously considered ways of fulfilling the promise he had made in 1815 to establish constitutional government. Economic reformers succeeded in enacting the Prussian Customs Law of 1818, which united all the Prussian territories into a customs union free of internal economic barriers; this later formed the nucleus of a national customs union. The agitation for political reorganization, however, was loudest among university students, who formed patriotic groups known as Burschenschaften. They demanded the abandonment of the confederal system, the establishment of greater unity, and the achievement of national power. Gathering in 1817 at the Wartburg, the castle near Eisenach where Luther had once taken refuge, they listened to veiled denunciations of the existing order and consigned to flames various symbols of traditional authority. The rulers of Germany began to stir uneasily at this bold display of defiance of the established order.

The chief strategist of the forces hostile to reform was Metternich. Not only did he reject the teachings of liberalism and nationalism in principle, but also, as the leading statesman of the Habsburg empire, he recognized that the establishment of centralized authority in Germany (which still included Austria) would seriously impede the policies his government was pursuing in Hungary, Italy, and the Balkans. When on March 23, 1819, an unbalanced student, Karl Ludwig Sand, assassinated the conservative playwright and publicist August von Kotzebue, Vienna persuaded the princes of the German Confederation that they were facing a dangerous attempt to overthrow the established order in the German states. The result was a series of repressive measures called the Carlsbad Decrees, which the federal Diet adopted on September 20, 1819. General censorship was introduced, and the Burschenschaften were outlawed. This first major success of the conservative counteroffensive had an important effect on the struggle within the state governments between the advocates and the opponents of reform. In Prussia the liberal members of the ministry were forced to resign, and the plan to promulgate a constitution for the kingdom was rejected. This shift to the right by Berlin encouraged authoritarian tendencies among the secondary states of the north, which soon abandoned their own constitutional projects. By the end of 1820 the reform movement, which had begun some 15 years before, came to a complete halt. It had succeeded in altering the political and economic structure of society, but it had been unable to establish a tradition of liberal government and national loyalty in Germany. The forces of particularism and legitimism, deriving their chief support from the landowning nobility and the conservative peasantry, remained strong. The foundation of bourgeois civic consciousness and material prosperity on which England and France had built their representative institutions was still relatively weak beyond the Rhine. The ideas of political reform had arisen in Germany not from the experience of revolution and social transformation but rather as imitations of foreign examples and in reaction against foreign oppression.

The established order was once again threatened briefly in the wake of the July Revolution of 1830 in France. The news that there had been a successful insurrection against the Bourbons in Paris had an electrifying effect throughout the Continent. In Germany there were sympathetic uprisings in some of the secondary states of the north. The rulers of Brunswick, Saxony, Hanover, and Hesse-Kassel, seeking to forestall more extreme demands, agreed to promulgate liberal constitutions. A mass meeting of southern radicals at Hambach Castle in the Palatinate (May 1832), moreover, called for national unification, republican government, and popular sovereignty. A group of militant students even launched a foolhardy attempt to seize the city of Frankfurt am Main, dissolve the federal Diet, and proclaim a German republic. The effect of such harebrained schemes was predictable. As the princes of the German Confederation gradually recovered from their initial fear of the revolutionary movement, they opposed with increasing vigour plans to alter the existing system of government. Again Metternich led the effort to crush liberalism and nationalism. Under his direction the federal Diet adopted additional repressive measures reinforcing the position of the crown in state politics, limiting the power of the legislature, restricting the right of assembly, enlarging the authority of the police, and intensifying censorship. Within a few years the opposition had been subdued, and the German Confederation could continue to vegetate in its cozy provincialism. Not until the middle years of the century did a new and more violent outburst of civil disaffection shake the foundations of the political structure that the Congress of Vienna had erected.