Liberalism and Nationalism in Germany 1815-71

Introduction

  • From the Middle Ages to the end of the 18th century, the Holy Roman Empire occupied the center of Europe, comprising approximately 390 semi-independent states.
  • These states were under the nominal rule of the Holy Roman Emperor, who was also the Austrian Emperor, Francis II.
  • In 1804, Napoleon crowned himself Emperor of France.
  • The Holy Roman Empire collapsed in 1806 due to Napoleon’s invasion during the Napoleonic Wars (1803-1815), which involved a series of battles between France and the rest of Europe.
  • Napoleon's forces were powerful enough to conquer and control mainland Europe, including many German states.
  • Napoleon informally reduced the number of German states to 39 and established the Confederation of the Rhine, a league of 16 German states on the west, further unifying Germany.
  • Side note: The Confederation of the Rhine served as a satellite and military ally of the French Empire, with Napoleon as its “Protector,” acting as a buffer state against aggression from Austria, Russia, or Prussia.
  • Emperor Francis I, with Austrian Foreign Minister Klemens von Metternich, led the Austrian Empire, which had a population of 25 million and covered 647,000 square kilometers, encompassing diverse ethnic groups like Czechs, Slovaks, Croats, Poles, and northern Italians.
  • The majority of the empire’s subjects were Roman Catholics, loyal to the Pope.

The Impact of the Napoleonic Wars (1803-1815)

  • French armies disseminated Enlightenment ideas, challenging outdated political and social structures.
  • They replaced the diverse laws and judicial processes of German states with the French legal system.
  • German thinkers began to emphasize the distinctiveness of their culture and historical past, leading to a sense of German nationhood.
  • Writer J.G. Herder popularized the concept of Volksgeist (‘spirit of the people’), which posited that each nation had its own unique identity based on shared heritage and language.
  • German people started to recognize the importance of uniting against French occupation for defense.
  • After being defeated by Napoleon, Prussia reorganized its government and army, enabling it to join Austria and Russia in expelling French forces.
  • Napoleon was defeated at Leipzig in 1813 and Waterloo in 1815, leading to the end of the Confederation of the Rhine.
  • These battles fostered a sense of national pride among Germans.

Challenges from Liberalism and Nationalism

  • European leaders faced challenges from liberalism and nationalism, products of the French revolutionary era.
  • These leaders were political and social conservatives, determined to restore stability after the upheaval caused by the French Revolution and French military movements.
  • They aimed to reinstate the rule of old royal families who had lost power during the previous 20 years.

Congress of Vienna (1814-1815)

  • In September 1814, a congress of European nations met in Vienna, Austria, to address the issues caused by the wars and to establish new boundaries on the continent.
  • The congress was chaired by Austrian Foreign Minister Klemens von Metternich* (1809-48), who later became Chancellor (1821-48).
  • The most important states formed the Quadruple Alliance: Austria, Prussia, Britain, and Russia.
  • France, whose monarchy had been restored after Napoleon’s defeat (Napoleon abdicated in March 1814, and Louis XVIII, brother of Louis XVI, became king), attended but lacked decision-making powers.

Metternich System

  • The ‘Metternich System’ aimed to maintain absolute monarchy in the Austrian Empire and similar political systems in other European states.
  • Metternich was deeply suspicious of change, viewing ‘liberty’ and ‘equality’ as sources of evil that misled the masses.
  • Nationalism threatened the rule of the Habsburgs, Austria’s royal family.
  • Metternich feared that granting independence to Germans or other nationalities could lead to the empire’s collapse.
  • He avoided stationing troops in their regions of origin to reduce the chances of organized nationalist opposition.
  • His policy relied on repressive methods, such as press censorship and a network of secret agents who spied on political radicals, causing resentment.

The German Confederation (1815)

  • At the Congress of Vienna in 1815, allied forces dissolved the Confederation of the Rhine to eradicate memories of French occupation.
  • The German states formed the German Confederation (Bund) of 39 states under Austrian control.
  • Prussia gained land, including the Rhineland, while Poland was granted to Russia.
  • These states varied in size, from kingdoms like Bavaria and Saxony to self-governing city-states like Hamburg.
  • The aim was to avoid the development of a united Germany, protecting its members and giving them a stronger voice in Europe.
  • Germany in 1815 was not a single unified country but consisted of 39 states within the German Confederation.
  • The German Confederation had a Diet or Bundestag (Parliament), but it achieved little because decisions required unanimity. It met in Frankfurt.
  • The Diet controlled the foreign policies of member states, but individual rulers managed their internal affairs.
  • It lacked its own civil service and made no attempt to develop it as an economic area.
  • In 1821, an attempt to create a federal defense force failed due to conflicts over command and funding.
  • Each state had its own ruler, laws, and army. The Austrian representative always chaired the Diet.
  • Austria had a veto over constitutional changes and often relied on support from Bavaria, Württemberg, Baden, and Hesse-Darmstadt, which were culturally closer to Austria due to their Catholic populations.

Prussia

  • The largest German state was Prussia, mainly rural in the northeast, with Berlin as its capital.
  • It was ruled by an authoritarian monarch, King Friedrich Wilhelm III, supported by the conservative landowning class, the Junkers, who formed the core of the Prussian army’s officer corps.
  • In the 1815 peace settlement, Prussia gained territory, including the Rhineland in the west, an industrialized area that doubled Prussia’s population to over 10 million.
  • Prussia was Austria's only potential rival for dominance in Germany, but both states aimed to prevent political change.

The Influence of Liberal Ideas and the Emergence of a Middle Class

  • Liberal thinkers advocated for an elected parliament to pass laws and govern, rather than power residing solely with an absolute monarch.

  • They championed freedom of speech and an end to censorship.

  • Liberalism, suppressed by the Metternich System, was mainly an ideology of the educated middle class, including:

    • Professionals (lawyers, officials, doctors, and university teachers)
    • Business people, primarily in the Rhineland and ports like Hamburg, who controlled small workshops or employed domestic workers

  • In Prussia, they benefited from the removal of privileges previously enjoyed by traditional guilds, allowing anyone to become an employer.

  • The emergence of the middle class led to the growth of the newspaper press.

  • Increased literacy and awareness of public affairs led to the establishment of societies promoting cultural activities.

  • The middle classes felt excluded from the upper levels of the social order, dominated by a privileged landowning aristocracy.

  • In Prussia, the aristocratic Junker class, which owned large agricultural estates in the eastern part of the country, controlled most of the higher positions in the army and civil service.

Middle-Class Liberal Objectives

  • Political Aspect

    • Middle-class liberals wanted people to have some say in government but did not want fully democratic, republican systems.
    • They favored representative assemblies or parliaments, elected by property-owning people like themselves, with constitutional monarchy as their preferred form of government.
    • They sought guarantees of freedom, such as the rights to free speech and fair trials.
    • This was a middle way between authoritarian monarchy and democracy, which was seen as dangerous and leading to mob rule, as exemplified by the violence against people and property during the French Revolution.

  • Economic Aspect

    • Many liberals believed in laissez-faire economics, where trade and business functioned without government interference.
    • They wanted to remove tariffs that restricted trade between countries.
    • Economic liberals aimed to promote competition between businesses, which they argued would reduce prices and improve the quality of goods for consumers.

  • Liberals believed that freedom would lead people to improve their circumstances, benefiting society as a whole.

  • The period from 1815–48 saw significant intellectual excitement, with the publication of books and pamphlets and public lectures, though this primarily reached well-off, educated people.

  • Some liberals took their ideas to working-class areas, such as Hamburg; however, most workers interested in political ideas tended to be radicals favoring a democratic republic, often through popular uprising rather than rational debate.

Growth of Nationalist Ideas

  • Nationalists believed that people of the same race, language, culture, or history should be united in an independent nation of their own and govern themselves independently from other nations.
  • Throughout the 19th century, the populations of the separate states began to develop a sense that they were part of a German volk (people), not just citizens of their individual states.
  • Support for national unity in Germany was mainly limited to small sections of society: literate, professional people and members of student associations known as the Burschenschaften.

Strength of Nationalism in Germany

  • Most ordinary Germans felt greater loyalty to their region rather than a strong sense of national identity.
  • Communications were poor, and people typically lived and died in the same villages or neighboring towns, with each region having its own traditions and customs.
  • The majority were peasants engaged in agriculture, who faced a daily struggle and had little interest in abstract ideas of this kind.
  • There was little desire for a strong central government, which might impose additional taxes, interfere with civil liberties, and draft people into the armed forces.
  • Germany had a common language and culture but lacked religious unity.
  • The southern states, such as Bavaria and Baden, along with the western provinces of the Rhineland and Westphalia, and West Prussia and Posen in the east, were mainly Catholic.
  • Prussia proper, like most of northern Germany, was largely Protestant.
  • The industrialized Rhineland was economically very different from the agricultural regions to the south and east.
  • Germans had relatively high literacy rates, but most early-19th-century newspapers focused on local rather than all-German issues.
  • A sense of German cultural nationalism emerged in reaction to French invasions in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, filtering through to the educated middle classes between 1815 and 1848.
  • In the cities, some workers were influenced by more radical democratic ideas, based on the sovereignty of the people, but they remained a minority.

Conservative Reaction to Nationalism

  • Metternich successfully contained liberal and nationalist movements in the decade and a half after the Congress of Vienna.
  • After a member of a liberal student association (Karl Ludwig Sand) murdered a conservative writer, August von Kotzebue, Metternich passed the repressive Carlsbad Decrees through the Diet in August 1819.

Key Features of the Carlsbad Decrees

  • Universities: Each university had an ‘extraordinary commissioner’ to supervise the teaching program. Liberal professors were removed, and unauthorized student organizations were dissolved.
  • The press: Member states of the Confederation and the Diet censored the newspaper press.
  • A central investigating commission was set up in Mainz to root out organizations promoting liberal and nationalist ideas.
  • Disbanded the Burschenschaften.

Vormarz (Pre-March) Years 1815-1848

  • Middle class spread liberal ideas from minorities to the masses.
  • 1820s: Metternich suppressed the impact of liberalism and nationalism.
  • Congress of Troppau 1820: Russia, Prussia, and Austria snubbed such activities.

Spread of Liberalism

  • Liberalism took a stronger hold across Germany, especially in the south, partly in response to the revolution in Paris in July 1830.
  • Louis Philippe established a parliamentary monarchy based on the consent of the educated, property-owning middle class.
  • Side note: French Revolution ➔ Louis XVI 1774-1792 (executed in 1793) ➔ Napoleon Bonaparte 1804-1814 (defeated 1815) ➔ Louis XVIII 1815-1824 (by the Quadruple Alliance) ➔ Charles X 1824-1830 ➔ Louis Philippe I 1830-1848.

Vormarz Years 1815-1848

  • Background: revolution in Paris July 1830.
  • In four small German states – Saxony, Hanover, Hesse-Cassel, and Brunswick – rulers were obliged to grant liberal constitutions, and increased press freedom allowed more criticism of governments.
  • Bavaria, Wurttemberg, and Baden already had constitutions with liberal seats in the parliament.
  • In May 1832, nationalists organized the Hambach Festival in Bavaria, where liberal and nationalist ideas were openly discussed.
  • A group called Young Germany was established, calling for a united Germany based on liberal principles.

Conservative Reaction to Liberalism & Nationalism in the 1830s

  • Metternich reacted to these developments with harshness.

  • Organizers of the Hambach Festival were acquitted by an ordinary court but later tried and imprisoned by a special police court.

  • Metternich persuaded the princes to accept new repressive measures (through the Diet):

    • The Six Articles of June 1832: Limited the rights of elected assemblies in states with constitutions and declared the supremacy of federal law over state laws.
    • The Ten Articles of July 1832: Banned political meetings and festivals and made it illegal to wear the colors of the student associations in scarves and ties.

Recap of Nationalism and Liberalism

  • Nationalism: access to political power, reduction of taxes, removal of trade restrictions.

  • Liberalism: establishment of state constitutions, civil equality/fair trials, freedom of speech/freedom of press, direct suffrage, laissez-faire/no trade barriers.

  • Activities/groups:

    • 1815: Burschenschaften
    • 1830s: Louis Philippe, Young Germany, Hambach Festival (Bavaria)

  • Conservative Reaction:

    • Carlsbad Decrees 1819
    • Congress of Troppau 1820
    • Six Articles June 1832
    • Ten Articles July 1832

  • There was never a real danger of revolution in Germany during this period.

  • Liberals and nationalists were too few.

  • Austria could always rely on its control of the Confederation and the support of Prussia in suppressing opposition.

  • Most princes ensured they retained control when granting constitutions. They maintained the right to veto unwelcome proposals and relied on the support of upper houses of parliament dominated by the aristocracy.

  • Princes used various means to limit the power of elected assemblies:

    • Restricting the vote to wealthy property owners
    • Using indirect voting or having different classes vote in separate estates
    • Assigning greater weighting to those in which the upper classes were represented.

  • In 1837, the new king of Hanover, Ernest Augustus, abolished the constitution granted by his predecessor, and seven professors who objected lost their posts at the University of Göttingen. The ‘Göttingen Seven’ included Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, who promoted a sense of German culture through their collection of traditional folk tales.

The Impact of Zollverein (1834)

  • Economic growth/progress was a key factor in the long-term development of a united Germany.
  • Germany’s geographical situation allowed it to trade easily with both east and west.
  • 70% of the population still made their living from agriculture.
  • Mostly Rhineland and Saxony were industrialized.
  • The main growth areas were in the production of consumer goods, e.g., textiles.
  • Heavy manufacturing began to take off from the 1840s with the rapid development of railways, especially in Prussia.
  • Railway building attracted capital investment and stimulated the coal and iron industries, encouraging the emergence of larger industrial firms and the rise of new urban centers.

Obstructions in German Economic Growth

  • Customs barriers between the members of the German Confederation restricted growth and slowed down the process.
  • Products crossing borders were taxed by the territory they entered.
  • Larger states such as Prussia often had their own internal boundaries and imposed tolls on goods.
  • This entailed time-consuming bureaucratic paperwork at borders, increasing transport costs.
  • German industries had to contend with competition from foreign products without competitive advantages outside.

Opportunities in German Economic Growth

  • Prussia led the way in promoting change.
  • In 1818, it abolished its 67 internal customs barriers, and other German states followed.
  • It protected its own industries from foreign competition by charging a tariff on imports, initially set low to discourage smuggling and retaliation.
  • It worked to remove barriers to trade within the German Confederation, creating a larger market and reducing the price of goods.
  • The appearance of new roads and railways & steamboat services on the Rhine and Elbe rivers also helped the growth of the Prussian economy.

The Zollverein and the Rise of Prussia

  • 1834: Prussia formed the Zollverein, a customs union of 18 German states.
  • This was the largest free-trade area in Europe, soon comprising 25 states with a combined population of 26 million.
  • The aim of the Zollverein was to manage tariffs and economic policies and promote economic expansion in member states.
  • Income from tariffs was divided between the member states in proportion to their population size.
  • Soon they were linked by a rapidly growing rail network, centered on Berlin, and in time, they adopted a common currency and system of weights and measures.
  • However, the Zollverein was also a symbol of division.
  • Many states in the south had not joined.
  • Austria had excluded itself to protect its own industry from competitors.
  • Prussia can be seen to have used the Zollverein to increase its influence.
  • The economic success of Prussia was envied by many of the German states.
  • The Zollverein effectively divided the German states into two camps: those under Prussian influence and those under Austrian.
  • The Zollverein helped Prussia assume a predominant economic position within Germany, but it did not necessarily lead to its political leadership.
  • Decisions in its governing body, the Zollverein Congress, had to be unanimous, and the states were determined to retain their independence.
  • Nationalists who hoped that the Zollverein might provide a basis for a political union were disappointed.
  • One of the nationalists’ key weaknesses was their inability to agree on the frontiers of a German state.
  • Some favored a ‘large Germany’ (Grossdeutschland) including German-speaking regions of Austria, dominated by Austria.
  • Others preferred a ‘small Germany’ (Kleindeutschland) without those regions, dominated by Prussia.
  • These preferences reflected cultural differences between Protestant northern Germany and the Catholic southern states.
  • The industrialized Rhineland remained more economically developed than the still largely agricultural east.

Social and Economic Problems in the 1840s

  • King Friedrich Wilhelm III of Prussia, who had denied granting a constitution, died in 1840.
  • Friedrich Wilhelm IV succeeded to the throne in 1840. He was a complex and unstable character who believed God expected him to rule firmly but kindly.
  • He relaxed censorship and gave greater powers to the provincial Diets or assemblies but rejected demands for a single parliament/united diet for all Prussian territories.

Background to 1848

  • The year 1848 is known as the ‘year of revolutions.’
  • In February, the monarchy of King Louis Philippe was overthrown in France.
  • In March, Metternich was forced into exile by disturbances in Vienna.
  • However, revolutions were short-lived, and authoritarian regimes soon re-established control.
  • The revolutions were not just caused by liberalism and nationalism.
  • The events of 1848–49 had a variety of causes – economic, social, and political.

Social and Economic Causes of the 1848 Revolution

  • Publication of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto (21st Feb 1848).
  • Continuing poor living standards for peasants in the countryside under Junkers.
  • Two years of bad harvests in 1846 and 1847 (corn and potato).
  • Cholera pandemic.
  • Increasing population.
  • Rising food prices.
  • Recession in the textile industry in 1847.
  • The economic downturn led employers to cut wages.
  • Poor working conditions in factories/long hours in an unhealthy environment.
  • Cheap alcohol - drunkenness.

Social and Economic Causes of the Revolution (Skilled Workers)

  • Cologne and Bonn - politically aware
  • Elected representative assemblies to discuss grievances.
  • Met at Frankfurt.
  • Drew up an Industrial Code to regulate working conditions, but the Frankfurt Parliament turned it down.

Social and Economic Causes of the Revolution (Educated Middle-Class)

  • They were motivated & influenced by ideas of liberalism and nationalism.
  • Resented the power held by the privileged nobility, who dominated the army and civil service.
  • Wanted political reforms.
  • In Württemberg, the ruler, Wilhelm I, was pressured into appointing liberal ministers and granting a new constitution.
  • In Saxony, King Friedrich Augustus II agreed to similar demands.
  • Demands for a bill of rights were accepted by the princes of Hesse-Darmstadt, Nassau, and other states.
  • In Bavaria, the only German ruler who gave up his throne was Ludwig I of.

Outbreak of Revolution in Germany

  • A meeting at Heidelberg in March 1848, attended by representatives from six states (Prussia, Bavaria, Württemberg, Baden, Nassau, and Frankfurt), led to the summoning of a Vorparlament or ‘pre-parliament.’

  • It met in Frankfurt to elect a Parliament - Frankfurt parliament.

  • The role of parliament would be to draw up a constitution for a united Germany.

  • Each state in the German Confederation would be asked to hold elections to this parliament, using its own voting system.

  • In Prussia,

    • King Friedrich Wilhelm IV took over in 1840.
    • He needed to build a railway to link agricultural lands to the markets (railway links would help the Junkers).
    • He called a National Assembly