The hard times that swept over the Continent in the late 1840s transformed widespread popular discontent in the German Confederation into a full-blown revolution. After the middle of the decade, a severe economic depression halted industrial expansion and aggravated urban unemployment. At the same time, serious crop failures led to a major famine in the area from Ireland to Russian Poland. In the German states, the hungry 1840s drove the lower classes, which had long been suffering from the economic effects of industrial and agricultural rationalization, to the point of open rebellion. There were sporadic hunger riots and violent disturbances in several of the states, but the signal for a concerted uprising did not come until early in 1848 with the exciting news that the regime of the bourgeois king Louis-Philippe had been overthrown by an insurrection in Paris (February 22–24). The result was a series of sympathetic revolutions against the governments of the German Confederation, most of them mild but a few, as in the case of the fighting in Berlin, bitter and bloody.

When on March 13 Metternich, the proud symbol of the established order, was forced to resign his position in the Austrian cabinet, the princes hastened to make peace with the opposition in order to forestall republican and socialist experiments like those in France. Prominent liberals were appointed to the state ministries, and civic reforms were introduced to safeguard the rights of the citizens and the powers of the legislature. But even more important was the attempt to achieve political unification through a national assembly representing all of Germany. Elections were held soon after the spring uprising had subsided, and on May 18 the Frankfurt National Assembly met in Frankfurt am Main to prepare the constitution for a free and united fatherland. Its convocation represented the realization of the hopes that nationalists had cherished for more than a generation. Within the space of a few weeks, those who had fought against the particularistic system of the restoration for so long suddenly found themselves empowered with a popular mandate to rebuild the foundations of political and social life in Germany. It was an intoxicating moment.

Once the spring uprising was over, the parties and classes that had participated in it began to quarrel about the nature of the new order that was to take the place of the old. There were, first of all, sharp differences between the liberals and the democrats. While the former had comfortable majorities in most of the state legislatures as well as in the Frankfurt parliament, the latter continued to plead, agitate, and conspire for a more radical course of action. There were also bitter disputes over the form that national unification should assume. The Grossdeutsch (“great German”) movement maintained that Austria, the state whose rulers had worn the crown of the Holy Roman Empire for 400 years, should play a leading role in the united fatherland. The Kleindeutsch (“little German”) party, on the other hand, argued that the Habsburgs had too many Slavic, Magyar, and Italian interests to work single-mindedly for the greatness of Germany, that Austria should therefore be excluded from a unified Germany, and that the natural leader of the nation was Prussia, whose political vigour and geographic position would provide efficient government and military security for Germany. Finally, there was a basic conflict between poor and marginalized social groups, many of whom wanted protection against mechanized production and rural impoverishment, and the business interests who sought to use their new political influence to promote economic growth and freedom of enterprise. Popular support for the revolution, which had made the defeat of legitimism during the March days possible, began to dwindle with the realization that the liberals would do no more to solve the problems of the masses than the conservatives had done. While the Frankfurt parliament was debating the constitution under which Germany would be governed, its following diminished and its authority declined. The forces of the right, recovering from the demoralization of their initial defeat, began to regain confidence in their own power and legitimacy.

Their first major conservative victory came in Austria, where the young emperor Francis Joseph found an able successor to Metternich in his prime minister, Felix, Fürst (prince) zu Schwarzenberg. In the summer of 1848 the Habsburg armies crushed the uprising in Bohemia and checked the insurrection in Italy. By the end of October they had subjugated Vienna itself, the center of the revolutionary movement, and now only Hungary was still in arms against the imperial government. At the same time, in Prussia the irresolute Frederick William IV had been gradually persuaded by the conservatives to embark on a course of piecemeal reaction. Early in December he dissolved the constituent assembly that had been meeting in Berlin, unilaterally promulgated his own constitution for the kingdom—which combined conservative and liberal elements—and proceeded little by little to reassert the prerogatives of the crown. Among the secondary states there was also a noticeable shift to the right, as particularist princes and legitimist aristocrats began to recover their courage.

By the time the Frankfurt parliament completed its deliberations in the spring of 1849, the revolution was everywhere at ebb tide. The constitution that the National Assembly had drafted called for a federal union headed by a hereditary emperor with powers limited by a popularly elected legislature. Since the Austrian government had already indicated that it would oppose the establishment of a federal government in Germany, the imperial crown was offered to the king of Prussia. Frederick William IV refused a crown whose source he deplored and whose authority seemed too restricted. This rejection of political consolidation under a liberal constitution destroyed the last chance of the revolutionary movement for success. The moderates, admitting failure, went home to mourn the defeat of their hopes and labors. The radicals, on the other hand, sought to attain their objectives by inciting a new wave of insurrections. Their appeals for a mass uprising, however, were answered mostly by visionary intellectuals, enthusiastic students, radical politicians, and professional revolutionaries. The lower classes remained by and large indifferent. There was sporadic violence, especially in the southwest, but troops loyal to princely authority had little difficulty in defeating the insurrection. By the summer of 1849 the revolution, which had begun a year earlier amid such extravagant expectations, was completely crushed.