This is how revolutions begin. Most people in Germany were not doing well economically 175 years ago. Many suffered hardship. They could hardly make their displeasure heard. The press was not free. Today, the model of government in most areas of Germany would be described as arbitrary rule. It was seething. Even their promise of an all-German constitutional state, which many longed for, had not been fulfilled by the rulers after the victory over Napoleon. Therefore, even the most affluent citizens in their cities, the economic winners of that time, were mostly dissatisfied. The paralysis had to be discharged, in meetings here, in debates there, now and then even by force, for example during the storming of the Frankfurt Konstablerwache in 1830, unsuccessfully. The Germans didn't really make any progress.
Carsten Knop
Editor.
- Follow I follow
In Paris, on the other hand, there was always something going on. When the so-called citizen king was overthrown there, the revolutionary idea jumped over to Germany in 1848 and unfolded strength, finally, as most contemporaries would have thought. The ruling princely houses were surprised by the breadth of events, some say overwhelmed, they quickly bowed to the demands of March 1848, granted freedoms, constituent state parliaments and, for the first time at the national level, an all-German parliament elected by universal suffrage for men, which was opened on 18 May 1848 in St. Paul's Church in Frankfurt.
That was an unlikely turn of events. Even the deputies of the pre-parliament, which had prepared the elections, were accompanied to St. Paul's Church in storms of jubilation. Then came disillusionment. Whereas in the March Revolution workers, journeymen, servants and apprentices had gone to the barricades and died, the National Assembly consisted of higher officials, district administrators, judges, prosecutors and teachers. The debates in the "professors' parliament" did not take the people with them. And the conservative constitutionalists, mostly from bourgeois circles, who were primarily concerned with establishing a constitutional German monarchy (without Austria), managed to buy the cutting edge from the democrats: order before freedom, that was the idea.
Fear of uprisings and anarchy
The social question also receded into the background. As early as June 1849, the historic opportunity was squandered and the National Assembly was dissolved. The powers of restoration took advantage of the fear of uprisings and anarchy widespread among the German bourgeoisie. They had the military, and soon they had power again. The work of German unification was later completed by Otto von Bismarck, on his terms.
Revolutionaries like Robert Blum, on the other hand, had not made it. Blum was certain that only the segmentation of peoples into "estates, confessions, asset classes, guilds and a thousand other splinters" would enable reactionary regimes to bind individual subgroups of society to themselves. It was with such thoughts that he had gone to Frankfurt. But the initial enthusiasm also evaporated when only the preparatory committee began its work. Nevertheless, he bet everything on parliamentary politics. In his view, only it was able to contain the anarchic forces of a democracy that was coming to life.