German Confederation

• 1. Introduction

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  On the 8th of June 1815, a 20-article act of the Congress of Vienna brought the German Confederation into being. It joined 39 predominantly German-speaking sovereign states across Central Europe. The thing it replaced, the Holy Roman Empire, had already collapsed in 1806 during the Napoleonic Wars. What the diplomats built in its place was meant to last forever. No member could ever legally leave. No new member could join without the unanimous consent of every other. And yet, 51 years later, it was gone. How does an alliance designed to be impossible to dissolve fall apart in a single summer? Why would the European Great Powers deliberately construct a union too weak to govern? And what happened to the 34 states still inside it when the whole arrangement finally broke? The answers turn on a single design flaw and on two members who could rarely agree.

• 2. A Union Built To Be Weak

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  The Confederation had only one organ, the Bundesversammlung, often called the Federal Convention or Confederate Diet, and it met in Frankfurt. It was not an elected body. Its members were appointed plenipotentiaries sent by the governments of the member states. There was no head of state, because the Confederation was not a state at all. The representative of Austria permanently presided, earning Austria the title of presiding power, but the source stresses this was a formality with no extra powers attached.

  The most important questions demanded unanimity, which handed even the smallest principality an effective veto. Constitutional changes, the admission of new members, and religious questions all fell under this rule. Plenary sessions, where larger states held more votes, were reserved for grave matters like declaring war or ratifying peace, and these required a two-thirds majority. Routine business went to a smaller inner council, the Engerer Rat, which carried 17 votes in total.

  Austria and Prussia, the largest and most powerful members, each held a single vote in that inner council, even though large parts of both lay outside the Confederation because they had never belonged to the Holy Roman Empire. Six other major states held one vote each: Bavaria, Saxony, Württemberg, the Electorate of Hesse, Baden, and Hesse and by Rhine. The four free cities of Bremen, Frankfurt, Hamburg, and Lübeck shared a single vote among them. This was the structural weakness most historians point to, and it set the stage for everything that followed.

• 3. From Empire To Confederation

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  The War of the Third Coalition ran from about 1803 to 1806 and ended badly for the old order. After defeat at the Battle of Austerlitz in December 1805, Francis II abdicated as Holy Roman Emperor on the 6th of August 1806, dissolving the Empire. Napoleon then assembled the Confederation of the Rhine in July 1806, drawing in 16 German allies of France, including Bavaria and Württemberg. After the Battle of Jena-Auerstedt in October 1806, more states such as Saxony and Westphalia joined. Only Austria, Prussia, Danish Holstein, Swedish Pomerania, and the French-occupied Principality of Erfurt stayed out.

  The War of the Sixth Coalition, fought from 1812 to the winter of 1814, ended Napoleon's grip and liberated Germany. In June 1814, the German patriot Heinrich vom Stein set up the Central Managing Authority for Germany in Frankfurt to replace the defunct Confederation of the Rhine. But the diplomats at Vienna wanted something far weaker than Stein imagined. Their design reduced more than 300 territories that had existed under the old Empire down to 39, a collapse from the patchwork known as Kleinstaaterei. The surviving members were recognized as fully sovereign and pledged to mutual defense.

  The Confederation's procedures were fully fixed only later, by a 65-article Final Act signed on the 15th of May 1820 and ratified on the 8th of June. The members jointly maintained fortresses at Mainz, the city of Luxembourg, Rastatt, Ulm, and Landau. Across the Confederation's life the number of states kept shrinking, as ruling houses died out and territories were absorbed.

• 4. Metternich And The Vormärz

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  Klemens von Metternich, Austria's reactionary premier, saw nationalism as the gravest threat of all, especially the nationalist youth movement. Austria was a polyglot empire where Slavs and Magyars outnumbered Germans, and the prospect of Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, Polish, Serb, or Croatian feeling stirring alongside middle-class liberalism alarmed the landed aristocracy. The era of mounting tension before the 1848 revolution is called the Vormärz, or pre-March, named for the riots that broke out in March 1848.

  Father Friedrich Jahn's gymnastic associations exposed middle-class German youth to nationalist and democratic ideas. These took shape as the Burschenschaften, liberal democratic college fraternities. The 1817 Wartburg Festival celebrated Martin Luther as a proto-German nationalist and ended with the burning of items that symbolized reaction, among them a book by August von Kotzebue. In 1819, Kotzebue was accused of spying for Russia and murdered by a theological student, Karl Ludwig Sand, who belonged to a militant nationalist faction and was executed for the crime. Metternich seized on the killing as a pretext for the Carlsbad Decrees of 1819, which dissolved the Burschenschaften, muzzled the liberal press, and curtailed academic freedom.

  Writers and thinkers rose against this backdrop, among them August Heinrich Hoffmann von Fallersleben, Ludwig Uhland, Heinrich Heine, Georg Büchner, and Bettina von Arnim. In philosophy there was Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, in theology Friedrich Schleiermacher, and in history Leopold von Ranke, who professionalized the discipline. The University of Berlin, founded in 1810, became the world's leading university, and by the 1830s Alexander von Humboldt and Carl Friedrich Gauss led world-class science.

• 5. The Zollverein

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  In 1834 the Prussian regime sought to widen trade and spur industry by decree, founding a customs union known as the Zollverein. Historians read three Prussian aims into it: to push Austrian influence out of Germany, to improve the economies, and to strengthen Germany against possible French aggression while reducing smaller states' independence. The union opened a common market, ended tariffs between states, and standardized weights, measures, and currencies, all while excluding Austria.

  By 1842 the Zollverein took in most German states, and within the next 20 years German furnace output rose fourfold. German industry, especially the works of the Krupp family, introduced the steel gun, the cast-steel axle, and a breech-loading rifle. Britain no longer supplied half of Germany's manufactured goods as it once had. This rapid shift toward industrial capitalism quickly ended the era of guilds in the small princely states. It also crushed older trades, sparking the 1844 revolt of the Silesian Weavers, whose livelihoods drowned under the flood of new manufactures.

  The customs union was meant to keep the rising bourgeoisie at bay, but it swelled their ranks instead. Economic unity sharpened the appetite for political unity, weakening Austria's hold over the Confederation. Germany began to show the features of a proto-nation, and the social base for liberalism and nationalism grew larger by the year.

• 6. The Revolutions Of 1848

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  News of the 1848 Revolution in Paris reached discontented German liberals, republicans, and radical workingmen, and the first uprisings broke out in Baden in March 1848. On the 15th of March, the subjects of Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia rioted in Berlin. The king gave in to the fury and promised a constitution, a parliament, and support for German unification, protecting his own rule in the process.

  On the 18th of May the Frankfurt Parliament opened its first session with delegates from across the German states. It split at once between a kleindeutsche, or small German, solution and a grossdeutsche, or greater German, one. The first would offer the imperial crown to Prussia. The second favored the Habsburg crown in Vienna, integrating Austria proper and Bohemia but not Hungary. The Assembly installed a provisional German Central Government, to which the inactive Federal Assembly transferred its powers. The Federal Convention itself dissolved on the 12th of July 1848.

  When the leadership of the Reich was offered to Friedrich Wilhelm, he refused to pick up a crown from the gutter. Monarchist armies crushed rebellions across Austria and Germany, and the Frankfurt Assembly fled to Stuttgart, where, too few to form a quorum, it was forcibly dispersed by the Württemberg army on the 18th of June 1849. Thousands of middle-class liberals and red Forty-eighters fled into exile, chiefly to the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia. In 1849 the king proposed his own scheme, the Erfurt Union, but Austria and Russia pressured Saxony and Hanover to withdraw and forced Prussia to abandon it in the treaty mocked as the humiliation of Olmütz.

• 7. Blood And Iron

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  In 1851 King Wilhelm I of Prussia appointed Bismarck to outmaneuver the liberals in the Landtag, who resisted Wilhelm's autocratic militarism. The Federal Assembly, dissolved during the revolution, had been revived in 1850 on Austrian initiative and fully reinstalled in the summer of 1851. Bismarck told the Diet that the great questions of the day are not decided by speeches and majority votes but by blood and iron. Prussia already held a great army, and rapid economic growth now strengthened it further.

  The Confederation's military structure showed why blood and iron mattered more than votes. Its rules allowed three kinds of intervention: the federal war against an outside attacker, the federal execution against a member state that broke federal law, and the federal intervention to prop up a government facing a popular uprising. Only one federal war ever happened, the war against Denmark that began with the Schleswig-Holstein uprising in 1848, the First Schleswig War, with Prussia conducting it for Germany.

  The German Federal Army was meant to defend the Confederation chiefly against France. The Diet held the power to declare war and to appoint the supreme commander, which made mobilization extremely slow and political. The army was split into ten Army Corps, later joined by a Reserve Corps, drawn from member states' own armies. Prussia's army had nine Army Corps but contributed only three to the federal force. Projected federal strength was 303,484 men in 1835 and 391,634 in 1860. In 1846 the members chose the old Imperial two-headed eagle as a common symbol, but stripped of crown, scepter, and sword, prompting Frederick William IV of Prussia to deride the disarmed imperial eagle.

• 8. Dissolution And Legacy

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  In June 1866 the Federal Convention took measures against Prussia, which the majority judged to have broken federal law by sending troops into Holstein. There was no time to follow the proper procedure for a federal execution. The decision led straight to the Austro-Prussian War of 1866, fought between Austria and its allies and Prussia and its allies. The Confederation, which still had 34 members, could not even combine its federal troops to fight the Prussian secession, and the war proved its ineffectiveness.

  In the Prague peace treaty of the 23rd of August 1866, Austria accepted that the Confederation was dissolved, and the remaining members confirmed it the next day. Prussia then annexed Electoral Hesse, Frankfurt, Hanover, Holstein, and Nassau in full, along with Hesse-Homburg, all former allies of Austria. In 1867 Prussia created the North German Confederation, a true federal state of 22 members combining the German states north of the river Main with the Hohenzollern lands in Swabia. Limburg, Liechtenstein, and Luxembourg were left out.

  The Franco-Prussian War brought the four southern states of Baden, Bavaria, Hesse-Darmstadt, and Württemberg into the fold by treaties in November 1870. On the 1st of January 1871 the Empire was declared in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, with the King of Prussia made German Emperor. According to historian Michael Kotulla, the German Confederation was an association of states with some federal elements, while its successor was a federal state with some elements of an association. Its clearest descendant survives today: the Federal Council of 1867 copied the Federal Convention of 1815, and from it descends the modern Bundesrat of the Federal Republic.