Constitution of the German Empire

• 1. Introduction

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  The Constitution of the German Empire came into force on the 4th of May 1871, binding together 25 German states under a single legal framework unlike anything Europe had seen before. At its heart sat a fundamental tension: a document that called itself a federation while ensuring that one state, Prussia, would always hold the commanding position. Historians sometimes call it Bismarck's imperial constitution, the Bismarcksche Reichsverfassung, and the name tells you something important about how it came to exist. Who held real power under this arrangement? How did a constitution designed for an authoritarian empire eventually bend toward something closer to a parliament? And what finally brought the whole structure down?

• 2. Bismarck's Blueprint

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  On the 10th of June 1866, four days before Prussia went to war with Austria, Otto von Bismarck handed the affected German states the outline of a new federal constitution. It ran to ten articles. That draft eventually became the Constitution of the North German Confederation, adopted on the 17th of April 1867, and it established the template that would govern Germany for nearly half a century.

  In September 1870, while the Franco-Prussian War was still being fought, the North German Confederation opened unification talks with the southern German states. Three November Treaties followed: one joined Baden and Hesse to the Confederation, and the other two individually absorbed Bavaria and Württemberg. All three took effect on the 1st of January 1871.

  A new Reichstag was elected on the 3rd of March 1871. It approved a revised text on the 14th of April, and the Act Concerning the Constitution of the German Empire of the 16th of April 1871 formally replaced the word "Confederation" with "Empire." The resulting document differed only in detail from the North German Constitution Bismarck had drafted five years earlier.

• 3. The Prussian Advantage

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  Prussia held 17 votes in the Bundesrat out of a total of 61. That may sound modest, but consider what the constitution required to block a constitutional amendment: just fourteen negative votes, spelled out in Article 68. Prussia's 17 votes were always more than enough. Despite holding roughly two-thirds of Germany's population, Prussia occupied just under 28 percent of the seats in the Bundesrat.

  The structure reinforced this asymmetry at every turn. The presidency of the entire Empire was a hereditary office of the King of Prussia. As of the 1st of January 1871, that king also carried the title of German Emperor. The emperor appointed the chancellor, and the chancellor in practice was almost always the minister president of Prussia as well. That dual role gave the chancellor the ability to speak in the Reichstag, introduce legislation, and wield Prussia's bloc of 17 votes all at once.

  Signatories to the original constitution included William I, king of Prussia, acting as president of the North German Confederation, along with the kings of Bavaria and Württemberg and the grand dukes of Baden and Hesse. The smaller states ranged from Saxony, which held four Bundesrat votes, down to 17 states that each held a single vote.

• 4. How Power Actually Flowed

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  Article 11 gave the emperor sweeping authority: to declare war and make peace, to represent the Empire abroad, to conclude treaties, and to accredit and receive ambassadors. But the constitution quietly hedged these powers. A non-defensive war required the consent of the Bundesrat. Both the Bundesrat and the Reichstag had to approve treaties before they could be ratified.

  The chancellor's formal position was narrower than most people assumed. Constitutionally, his only duties were to chair the Bundesrat's meetings and carry out its resolutions. He held no seat and no vote in that chamber, and he could not introduce legislation in his own right. His decrees and those of the emperor required the chancellor's counter-signature to be valid under Article 17, which in practice made him indispensable.

  Below the chancellor sat the state secretaries, who headed major Reich offices including Foreign Affairs. Though the constitution named no ministers other than the chancellor, these officials came to function much like cabinet ministers in other constitutional monarchies. The Bundesrat itself was a constitutional hybrid: it combined legislative and executive functions with limited judicial powers, a structure that left foreign observers unsure whether to call it an upper house or something altogether different.

• 5. What the Empire Governed

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  Article 4 listed the areas reserved for imperial legislation, and the catalogue was striking in its breadth. Banking, coinage, and the issuance of paper money fell to the Empire. So did intellectual property, criminal law, civil law, the post, and telegraphic services. Colonial activity and emigration were imperial concerns. Even the supervision of the medical and veterinary professions made the list.

  Single German citizenship was created by Article 3, guaranteeing equal treatment of citizens within each state. For the first four decades of the Empire's existence, however, a person's citizenship depended entirely on which state had granted it. Each state maintained its own rules for acquiring citizenship by descent, birth, marriage, or naturalization. It was not until the 22nd of July 1913 that a common nationality law, the Reichs- und Staatsangehörigkeitsgesetz, unified these rules across the Empire.

  Amendments to the constitution adjusted the balance of power in smaller ways before the war. The Lex Miquel-Lasker of the 20th of December 1873 handed the Empire full authority over civil law. On the 1st of January 1900, the resulting national civil code, the Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch, came into effect. In 1911, Alsace-Lorraine was granted limited voting power in the Bundesrat, which brought the council's total to 61 votes.

• 6. The October Constitution

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  By late October 1918, with Germany's defeat in World War I approaching, the Reichstag debated and passed what became known as the October Constitution, the Oktoberverfassung. The changes took effect on the 28th of October and fundamentally altered the relationship between the executive and the parliament.

  Declarations of war and peace treaties now required the Reichstag's assent. Ministers could simultaneously hold seats in the Reichstag. The chancellor and ministers were made accountable to both the Reichstag and the Bundesrat, answerable for the conduct of their affairs rather than to the emperor alone. The chancellor was made responsible for all political actions of the emperor. Even the emperor's longstanding right to appoint and promote military officers was curtailed: those decisions now required the counter-signature of the chancellor or the minister of war, and the minister of war became accountable to both legislative chambers.

  The transformation took an authoritarian empire and, on paper, turned it into a parliamentary monarchy. One month later, the November Revolution made the question moot.

• 7. The Constitution's End

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  With the November Revolution of 1918, the monarchy ceased to exist. The legislative and executive powers were taken over by a new revolutionary body. The amended 1871 constitution became technically obsolete, yet formally it remained in force. The Law on Provisional Reich Authority, passed by the Weimar National Assembly on the 10th of February 1919, made the first explicit legal break. The Transitional Law of the 4th of March 1919 went further, stating outright that the 1871 constitution remained valid except where it contradicted laws passed since November 1918.

  The Constitution of the Weimar Republic, which carried the same German title as its predecessor, Verfassung des Deutschen Reiches, came into force on the 14th of August 1919. That shared title was no accident: it signaled continuity of name while replacing the entire imperial structure with a republican one built by a popularly elected national assembly. The Bismarcksche Reichsverfassung had formally outlasted the empire it created by nearly a year.