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, had come 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 Britain 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.

Evolution of parties and ideologies

Although the critics of the established order could be defeated, they could not be silenced. The struggle between the supporters and the adversaries of the existing form of government led to the emergence of a rudimentary party system in the German Confederation. In the legislative assemblies of the secondary states, the proponents of reform began to meet, plan, organize, and propagandize. The defenders of legitimism were thereby forced in turn to concert their strategy and to publicize their program. Even in Prussia and Austria, where there were as yet no constitutions or parliaments, political criticism could be expressed obliquely through clubs, meetings, newspapers, pamphlets, and petitions. The result was the gradual development of amorphous civic associations held together by common convictions regarding politics and society. These primitive groupings were only the raw material out of which disciplined political parties slowly developed in the course of the century. They still lacked the cohesive ideologies and the institutional means to disseminate them that characterize a fully mature system of parliamentary politics. Yet they became the means by which disaffected groups in the community could express their opposition to the established order. They also reflected the transformation in civic attitudes that had occurred since the age of enlightened despotism. There were now men in the German states who refused to submit without question to princely authority and to seek freedom only in the inner recesses of the soul. The social and economic changes resulting from the beginnings of industrialization transformed the system and organization of politics.

The most important opponents of legitimism and particularism were the liberals, or moderates. Deriving their support primarily from industrialists, merchants, financiers, mine owners, railroad developers, civil servants, professionals, and university professors, they represented the opposition of the well-to-do and educated bourgeoisie to a form of government in which an aristocracy of birth rather than of talent predominated. Their political principles favoured a monarchical system of authority, but the crown was to share its powers with a parliament elected by the men of property. Influence in public affairs should be accessible to all male citizens who had demonstrated through the acquisition of wealth and education that they were capable of exercising the franchise intelligently. While the liberals resented the inherited privileges of the nobility, they also feared the proletariat. The man who lived in poverty and ignorance, they reasoned, was ripe for demagoguery and insurrection. The path of civic wisdom was therefore the happy medium between royal absolutism and mob rule, a medium that had been established in Britain by the Reform Bill of 1832 and in France by the regime of Louis-Philippe. In economics, most, although by no means all, liberals advocated a policy of unrestrained competition by which wealth would become the reward of business acumen rather than the perquisite of corporative privilege. Guild monopolies, government regulations, and rules reserving landed estates for the nobility were to be abolished as violations of the freedom of enterprise that alone could ensure the well-being of all society. The liberals favoured the transformation of the German Confederation into a national monarchy in which the states’ rights would be curtailed but not destroyed by a central government and a federal parliament.

To the liberals’ left stood the democrats, or radicals, whose following was made up largely of small businesspeople, petty shopkeepers, skilled workers, independent farmers, teachers, journalists, lawyers, and physicians. While the divisions between liberals and democrats were often indistinct and the two groups often worked together, democrats looked with scorn on the golden mean between autocracy and anarchy that the liberals sought. They preferred an egalitarian form of authority in which not parliamentary plutocracy but popular sovereignty would be the underlying principle of government. Their supporters drew inspiration from the French Revolution rather than from British parliamentary reforms. Their ideal of democracy was the Jacobin republic of 1793, an instrument that could shape the energies and aspirations of the people into a disciplined force for political and social reform. The spokesmen for this ideal could not openly demand the overthrow of monarchical institutions without risking imprisonment. Yet, while they were forced to accept the crown as a political institution, they nevertheless sought to transfer its power to a parliament elected by universal male suffrage. The masses would thereby become the ultimate arbiter of politics. The democrats were also willing to accept government regulation of business activity as a means of improving the economic position of the lower classes, although their belief in the sanctity of private property was as firm as that of the liberals. In their advocacy of national unification, however, they were less solicitous about royal prerogatives and state rights. While not as influential as the moderates, the radicals remained an important source of opposition to the established order.

Growing criticism of the restored political order forced conservatives to define their ideological position more precisely. The old theories of monarchy by divine right or despotic benevolence offered little protection against the assaults of liberalism and democracy. The defenders of legitimism, who came mostly from the landed nobility, the court aristocracy, the officer corps, the upper bureaucracy, and the established church, therefore began to advance new arguments based on conservative assumptions about the nature of man and society. The relationship between the individual and government, so the reasoning went, cannot be determined by paper constitutions founded on a doctrinaire individualism. Human actions are motivated not solely by rational considerations but by habit, feeling, instinct, and tradition as well. The impractical theories of visionary reformers fail to take into account the historic forces of organic development by which the past and the present shape the future. To assert that all men are equal is to ignore the differences in rights and duties that result from differences in birth, class, background, education, and tradition. The dogmas of constitutional authority and parliamentary government are merely a facade behind which a self-seeking bourgeoisie seeks to disguise its lust for power. An enduring form of government can be built only on the traditional institutions of society: the throne, the church, the nobility, and the army. Only a system of authority legitimated by law and history can protect the worker against exploitation, the believer against godlessness, and the citizen against revolution. According to these tenets, the political institutions of the German Confederation were valid, because they represented fundamental ideals deeply embedded in the spirit of the nation.

Economic changes and the Zollverein

The struggle of parties and ideologies during the restoration of the old order reflected the beginning of important changes in the structure of the economy and the community. In the long run, the most significant of these changes was the gradual emergence of large-scale industry in Germany. Mechanization, introduced in textile mills and coal mines, spread to other branches of manufacture and influenced the entire economic life of the nation. The transportation network improved with the construction of railroads, steamships, and better roads and canals. Banking institutions and private investors began to transfer their funds from government bonds and commercial ventures to manufacturing enterprises. Factory and railroad owners, financiers, and stockbrokers gradually formed a new upper middle class whose wealth derived primarily from industrial activity and whose growing economic importance encouraged its members to demand greater political influence. Skilled handicraftspeople, who had constituted the bulk of the urban working class, could not compete successfully with the factories. Because rural population grew faster than rural employment following the Congress of Vienna, population began to shift from country to city, although a majority of the inhabitants of the German Confederation continued to live in rural communities. Many of the migrants from the countryside took jobs as factory labourers in the cities.

Agriculture went through as difficult a period of reorganization and rationalization as industry. Peasant emancipation in Prussia allowed the Junkers east of the Elbe River to enlarge their lands by absorbing the holdings of small farmers. The former serfs now formed a propertyless rural proletariat who cultivated the aristocratic landowners’ large estates. The result was the continuing economic, social, and political domination of the village by the nobility in the eastern provinces of Prussia. The squirearchy entrenched in Pomerania, Brandenburg, Silesia, and East Prussia controlled agriculture, commanded the army, directed the bureaucracy, and influenced the court. It constituted a powerful force for conservatism and particularism.

West of the Elbe the basic problem was not landlessness but overpopulation. The aristocracy along the Rhine and the Danube was often willing to give the peasantry possession of the soil in return for a substantial payment. The farmer was thereby saddled with heavy financial obligations. Many small farmers tried to escape poverty by emigrating to the New World; those who remained faced rapid population growth and often had to subdivide small holdings among their children until they yielded no profit. Civil discontent mounted among impoverished villagers who lacked employment in industry.

The system of authority in the German Confederation was thus being undermined by the struggle of artisans against industrial mechanization, by the disaffection of peasants hungry for land, and above all by the criticism of businesspeople constrained by the policies of unresponsive governments. Industrialists and financiers had to overcome the barriers created by a variety of monetary systems, commercial regulations, excise taxes, and state boundaries. It is little wonder that the bourgeoisie of Germany turned increasingly to the teachings of liberalism and nationalism. Yet the established order did make a major attempt to meet the needs of the business community. Before long, several of the more important secondary governments concluded agreements with Prussia by which a sizable free trade area was established in the heart of Germany.

In 1834 the Zollverein, or Customs Union, including most of the states of the German Confederation, came into existence. With the accession of several more states by 1842, only Austria and the northwest coastland remained aloof. The industrialists of the Habsburg empire, who wanted their products protected against outside competition, felt that the tariffs of the new association were too low for their needs, whereas the merchants and bankers of the coastal region, who depended on foreign trade, thought they were too high. Yet for some 25 million Germans the Zollverein meant in effect the achievement of commercial unification without the aid of political unification. Prussia, meanwhile, acquired a powerful new weapon in the struggle against Austria for the dominant position in Germany. Still, although the Zollverein helped meet the demands of some businesspeople for economic consolidation, it could not surmount all the material disadvantages of a particularistic form of government. People of means and education continued to grumble about the confederal system under which they lived, while the masses became increasingly restless under the pressure of social and economic dislocation.

The revolutions of 1848–49

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 centre 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 labours. 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, had been completely crushed.

The 1850s: years of political reaction and economic growth

The attempt to achieve national unification through liberal reform was followed by an attempt to achieve it through conservative statesmanship. Frederick William IV had refused to accept an imperial crown vitiated by parliamentary government, but he was willing to become the head of a national federation in which the royal prerogative remained unimpaired. While the Austrian armies were still engaged in the campaign against the revolution in Hungary, Prussia began to exert diplomatic pressure on the smaller German states to join in the formation of a new federal league known as the Prussian Union. If Frederick William IV had acted with enough determination, he might have been able to reach his goal before Francis Joseph could intervene effectively in the affairs of Germany. But he allowed his opportunity to slip away. Though he succeeded through threats and promises in persuading most of the princes to accept his proposals, no irrevocable commitments had been made by the time the Hungarians were defeated in August 1849. Vienna could now proceed to woo the governments, which had in most cases submitted to Prussia only out of weakness and fear. Basically they remained opposed to sacrificing their sovereignty to Prussia. When Schwarzenberg suggested the reestablishment of the old federal Diet, he won the support of many rulers who had agreed to follow Berlin against their will. The nation was now divided into two camps, the Prussian Union on one side and the revived German Confederation on the other. It was only a question of time before they would clash. When both Austria and Prussia decided to intervene in Hesse-Kassel, where there was a conflict between the supporters and the opponents of the prince, Germany stood on the brink of civil war. But Frederick William IV decided at the last moment to back down. His fear overcame his pride, especially after Nicholas I of Russia indicated that he supported Vienna in the controversy. By the Punctation of Olmütz of November 29, 1850, the Prussians agreed to the restoration of the German Confederation, and the old order was fully reestablished in all its weakness and inadequacy.

The years that followed were a period of unmitigated reaction. Those who had dared to defy royal authority were forced to pay the penalty of harassment, exile, imprisonment, or even death. Many of the political concessions made earlier, under the pressure of popular turmoil, were now restricted or abrogated. In Austria, for example, the constitution that had been promulgated in 1849 was revoked, and legitimism, centralization, and clericalism became the guiding principles of government. In Prussia the constitution granted by the king remained in force, but its democratic potential was reduced through the introduction of a complicated electoral system by which the ballots were weighted according to the income of the voters. The consequence was that well-to-do conservatives controlled the legislature. The secondary states returned to the policies of legitimism and particularism that they had pursued before the revolution. In Frankfurt am Main, where the federal Diet now resumed its sessions, diplomats continued to guard the prerogatives of princely authority and state sovereignty. The restoration of the confederal system also served the interests of the Habsburgs, who stood at the pinnacle of their prestige as the saviours of the established order. In Berlin, on the other hand, the prevailing mood was one of confusion and discouragement. The king, increasingly gloomy and withdrawn, came under the influence of ultraconservative advisers who preached legitimism in politics and orthodoxy in religion. The government, smarting under the humiliation suffered at the hands of Austria, was as timid in foreign affairs as it was oppressive in domestic matters. The people, tired of insurrection and cowed by repression, were politically apathetic. The German Confederation as a whole, rigid and unyielding, remained during these last years of its existence blind to the need for reform that the revolution had made clear.

Yet the 1850s, so politically barren, were economically momentous, for it was during this period that the great breakthrough of industrial capitalism occurred in Germany. The national energies, frustrated in the effort to achieve civic reform, turned to the attainment of material progress. The victory of the reaction was followed by an economic expansion as the business community began to recover from its fear of mob violence and social upheaval. The influx of gold from America and Australia, moreover, generated an inflationary tendency, which in turn encouraged a speculative boom. Not only did the value of industrial production and foreign trade in the Zollverein more than double in the course of the decade, but also new investment banks based on the joint-stock principle were founded to provide venture capital for factories and railroads. The bubble burst in 1857 in a financial crash that affected the entire Continent. For many investors the price of overoptimism and speculation was misfortune and bankruptcy. Yet Germany had now crossed the dividing line between a preindustrial and an industrial economy. Although the rural population still outnumbered the urban, the tendency toward industrialization and urbanization had become irreversible. And this in turn had a profound effect on the direction of politics. As wealth continued to shift from farming to manufacturing, from the country to the city, and from the aristocracy to the bourgeoisie, the pressure for a redistribution of political power also gained strength. While the reactionaries were solemnly proclaiming the sanctity of traditional institutions, economic change was undermining the foundation of those institutions. By the end of the decade, a new struggle between the forces of liberalism and conservatism was in the making.

The 1860s: the triumphs of Bismarck

The revival of the movement for liberal reform and national unification at the end of the 1850s came to be known as the “new era.” Its coming was heralded by scattered but distinct indications that the days of the reaction were numbered. In 1859 the defeat of Austria in the war against France and Piedmont had a profound effect on the German states. For one thing, the maintenance of the authoritarian regime in Vienna depended on respect for its military strength. Now that the Habsburg armies had shown themselves to be vulnerable, popular unrest in the empire began to increase. Since autocracy was no longer an effective principle of government, Francis Joseph decided to experiment with a parliamentary form of authority. On October 20, 1860, he promulgated a constitution (the October Diploma) for his domains, setting up a bicameral legislature with an electoral system favouring the bourgeoisie, and Austria ceased to be an absolutist state. The beginnings of political unification in Italy, moreover, aroused hope and envy north of the Alps. If the Italians could overcome the obstacles of conservatism and particularism, why not the Germans? National sentiment in Germany, dormant since the revolution, suddenly awoke. Patriotic organizations like the Nationalverein (National Union) and the Reformverein (Reform Union) initiated agitation for a new federal union, the former advocating Prussian and the latter Austrian leadership. Liberal writers and politicians began to advance plans for the reform of the German Confederation. Some of the states, detecting a shift in public opinion, decided to change their course accordingly. Here and there the conservative ministers of the reaction were retired or dismissed, and statesmen with more moderate views took their place.

The most significant portent of a new age in politics, however, appeared in Prussia. In 1857 Frederick William IV, crushed by memories of the mass insurrections and diplomatic defeats that he had been forced to endure, suffered a series of incapacitating strokes. A year later his brother became regent, and the government in Berlin immediately began altering the direction of its policy. Prince William, although a man of conservative inclination, had little sympathy with the mystical visions and pious dogmas prevailing at the court during the period of reaction. He dismissed Frederick William’s cabinet, announced a program of cautious reform in Prussian as well as German affairs, and won a popular endorsement of his course in elections that gave the liberals control of the legislature. After a long period of discouragement, the advocates of civic reconstruction could once again look to the future with hope and expectation.

Yet there was an important difference between the political attitude of the liberals in 1858–59 and that of 1848–49. Some liberals came to feel during the new era that they had owed their defeat 10 years before to an excess of idealism and exuberance. The fatal mistake of the revolution, they reasoned, had been the assumption that enthusiasm and selflessness could be translated into power and substituted for statesmanship. Now a more calculating policy, one of Realpolitik, must be adopted. Not theory and rhetoric but negotiation and compromise would lead to the attainment of unity and freedom. The liberals therefore pursued at first a strategy of conciliation, anxious not to frighten the established order into blind resistance against all reform. In Prussia, for example, they waited patiently for the regent to move against the forces of disunity and oppression, confident that if they only gave him enough time he would obtain for them by royal authority what they could not seize through revolutionary violence. Yet it gradually became apparent that their hopes would not be realized. Prince William, who in 1861 became king in his own right, was a moderate conservative but a conservative nevertheless. As the advocates of reform grew increasingly restless, the more militant among them formed the Fortschrittspartei (Progressive Party), which sought to hasten the enactment of liberal legislation by exerting pressure on the government. The monarch, afraid that he was being pushed farther to the left than he wanted to go, became more adamant and uncompromising. Sooner or later a conflict between crown and parliament was bound to arise.

It came in connection with the question of army reform, although, if that issue had not developed, there would undoubtedly have been another. The king wanted to strengthen the armed forces by increasing the number of line regiments and decreasing the size of the popular militia. The necessary budget increase, under the constitution, required legislative approval. The legislature, reluctant to enhance the power of the conservative officer corps, demanded a modification of the plan. The king refused, convinced that the politicians were attempting to gain control of the army, which he considered subject only to royal authority. The legislature responded by withholding approval of the budget. A complete deadlock ensued. In the spring of 1862 the liberal ministers who had been appointed under the regency were dismissed, and a conservative cabinet took office. But the new leaders of the government were as unsuccessful as the old in resolving the crisis. William I (commonly known as Kaiser Wilhelm after becoming emperor in 1871) began to think about abdicating in favour of his son, who was believed to have political views close to those of the parliamentary opposition. He was persuaded, however, to consider first the possibility of naming a new ministry led by Otto von Bismarck, then Prussian ambassador to Paris. There was a momentous interview between the monarch and the envoy, as a result of which the former abandoned all thought of retirement and the latter became head of a cabinet pledged to continue the struggle against the legislature. The battle between crown and parliament, which the liberals had been on the point of winning, was now to be waged without regard for constitutional provisions concerning the budget. On September 23, 1862, the nation was startled by the news that a statesman with a reputation for unyielding conservatism had become the prime minister of Prussia. It meant that the established order, having successfully defended its interests against the forces of reform after 1815 and after 1848, was determined to fight to the bitter end against the new challenge to its predominance.

The constitutional conflict in the Hohenzollern kingdom continued for another four years. The legislature refused to approve the budget until its wishes concerning military reform had been met. Bismarck’s government, after carrying out the controversial reorganization of the army, continued to collect taxes and disburse funds without regard for parliamentary authorization. The liberals condemned the prime minister as a violator of the constitution, while the prime minister denounced the liberals and maintained the government’s right to act autonomously, since the constitution did not specify a procedure in the event that the legislature failed to approve a budget. Although the electorate remained on the side of the opposition, the cabinet declared that it would not be swayed by party politics or parliamentary majorities. The broad masses of the population, it maintained, were still loyal to the crown. And so the struggle went on without prospect of alleviation or resolution. There were even dark prophecies of a violent uprising against a regime that was so indifferent to its constitutional obligations. Yet in fact Bismarck was not blind to the need for a reconciliation between crown and bourgeoisie. Despite his reputation as a fire-eating legitimist, he had a supple mind and recognized that the political principles of Frederick the Great could not solve the problems facing William I. He hoped, therefore, for an eventual reconciliation between the government and the legislature, but a reconciliation in which the prerogative of the monarch and the influence of the nobility would remain undiminished.

What Bismarck sought in essence was an alteration in the form of government to create parliamentary institutions that would not undermine monarchical authority. The middle class wanted to end the domination of the traditional forces in society, he calculated, but it also wanted to achieve national unification in Germany. Here was the key to a solution of the constitutional conflict. Unity could be used to restrict freedom; nationalism could become the means of taming liberalism. Bismarck had concluded that the political integration of Germany was, in the long run, inevitable. If the established order did not effect it, the reformers, democrats, and revolutionaries would. Thus, it was in the interest of conservatism to take the task of centralization in hand, bring it to a successful conclusion, and create a new system of authority compatible with the preservation of royal and aristocratic dominance. Such a policy would make possible a compromise between crown and bourgeoisie by which the latter obtained the benefits of national consolidation while the former retained the advantages of political domination. The achievement of national unification by military means would have the further advantage of reconciling the bourgeoisie with a strong military. Through this strategy the prime minister hoped to end the constitutional conflict.

The defeat of Austria

The international situation was favourable to an aggressive program of unification in the German Confederation. Since its defeat in the Crimean War (1853–56), Russia had ceased to play a decisive role in the affairs of the Continent. Britain remained preoccupied with the problems of domestic reform. And Napoleon III was not unwilling to see a civil war east of the Rhine that he might eventually use to enlarge the boundaries of France. Bismarck could thus prepare for a struggle against Austria without the imminent danger of foreign intervention that had faced Frederick William IV. His first great opportunity came in connection with the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein, which were ruled by the king of Denmark but which were politically and ethnically tied to Germany. When the government in Copenhagen sought to make Schleswig an integral part of the Danish state in 1863, nationalist sentiment in Germany was outraged. William I proposed to Francis Joseph that the two leading powers of the German Confederation should occupy the duchies in order to prevent the violation of an international agreement that had guaranteed their autonomy. Afraid to let the Prussians act on their own, the emperor agreed, and in 1864 the brief German-Danish War demonstrated the strength of the reorganized Prussian army. Danish hopes for foreign assistance proved illusory, and by the Peace of Vienna (October 30) the duchies became the joint possession of Prussia and Austria.

The easy victory of the allies, however, was only the prelude to a bitter conflict between them. Vienna would have liked to see Schleswig-Holstein become an independent secondary state in the German Confederation, committed to a policy of particularism. Berlin, on the other hand, hoped for the outright annexation of the duchies or at least the indirect control of their government. Even more important than the disposition of the spoils of war, however, was the mounting rivalry between the two Great Powers for hegemony in Germany. In 1865 their differences were papered over by the Convention of Gastein, which placed Schleswig under Prussian and Holstein under Austrian administration but which also reaffirmed the joint sovereignty of the two governments over the duchies. Still, this was only a temporary solution, and before long the danger of civil war in the German Confederation began to grow once again.

In the course of the spring of 1866 both sides stepped up their preparations for a military solution to the Austro-Prussian rivalry. Bismarck concluded an alliance with Italy by which the Italians were to receive Venetia as a reward for participating in a war against the Habsburg empire. He also sought to gain the support of public opinion in the German Confederation by introducing a motion in the federal Diet for the convocation of a national parliament elected by equal manhood suffrage. The Austrians in the meantime secured a promise of French neutrality in the event of hostilities and tried to win the adherence of the secondary states in the impending struggle. The last desperate attempts to preserve peace collapsed in June. Vienna announced that it would submit the question of the duchies to the federal Diet. Berlin, condemning this step as a violation of the Convention of Gastein, ordered its troops in Schleswig to expel the Austrians from Holstein. Francis Joseph in reply called on the other states of the confederation to mobilize their armies against the Prussian threat to domestic tranquility, and Germany trembled on the verge of civil war. The only question now was the position of the secondary states. Most of them lined up behind Austria, which they regarded as the defender of their independence against the ambitions of Berlin. Bismarck’s attempt to enlist the aid of the national movement by advocating reform of the confederal system thus failed. It alarmed the particularists without propitiating the centralists. Public opinion remained frightened and confused, distrusting one side and fearing the other. The future of the nation was decided not by popular insurrections or parliamentary deliberations but by the force of arms.

The Seven Weeks’ War between Prussia and Austria (June–August 1866) produced a diplomatic revolution in Europe, destroying the balance of power that had been established 50 years before by the Congress of Vienna. Yet this momentous alteration in the international equilibrium was accomplished so swiftly that foreign diplomats had barely begun to grasp its implications before the struggle for hegemony in Germany ended. The Prussian armies had a brilliant strategist in Helmuth von Moltke and a deadly weapon in the breech-loading needle gun. The Austrian high command, on the other hand, became irresolute and demoralized before a decisive encounter had even taken place. The Prussians succeeded in dividing and defeating the forces of the secondary states, and on July 3 they routed the Habsburg troops as well, at the Battle of Königgrätz (Sadowa). The war was thus decided within a few weeks after its outbreak. Bismarck, refusing to be dazzled by the brilliance of the victory, urged the swift conclusion of an honourable peace. Not only did he feel that the preservation of a strong Austria was essential for the maintenance of stability on the Continent, but he also feared that a prolongation of hostilities would enable Napoleon III to intervene in the affairs of Germany. By the preliminary Peace of Nikolsburg (July 26) and the definitive Treaty of Prague (August 23), Francis Joseph was permitted to retain all of his possessions except Venetia, which had been promised to the Italians. There was to be no occupation and only a modest indemnity. The emperor had to acquiesce, however, in the Prussian annexation of Hanover, Nassau, Hesse-Kassel, Schleswig-Holstein, and Frankfurt am Main, in the dissolution of the German Confederation, and in the formation under Prussian leadership of a new federal union north of the Main River. The contest between Berlin and Vienna that had determined the history of the German states for more than a century was now over.