German Revolutions: 1852-1863
1852 CE to 1863 CE
1848 is the year of revolution all over Europe.
There are outbreaks in Austria, Belgium, France, Hungary, and Poland, but they are particularly widespread in Germany.
Prussia, the most powerful and militarily the most important of the German monarchies, plays a leading role.
It leads in both the movement for unification and the suppression of radicalism.
Aside from Austria and its Empire, the German-speaking part of Europe at mid-nineteenth century consists of countless sovereignties.
There are six kingdoms&emdash;Baden, Bavaria, Hesse, Prussia, Saxony, and Württemberg; five grand duchies; thirteen duchies and principalities; three free cities; and hundreds of sovereign mini-mini-states.
Many of them are loosely affiliated with the Germanic Confederation, which had been founded in 1815 to replace the ancient and obsolete Holy Roman Empire.
In the confused revolutionary struggles of 1848-49 two main currents cross and clash with each other: (1) internal political reform, including radical demands by workers, and (2) unification of all German states in a national government.
The German problem is really the fundamental question: Who should unite what under which form of government-democratic or autocratic, republican or monarchical?
The foregoing, and the chronology that follows, is drawn primarily from Karl Marx on Revolution, Saul K. Padover, Editor (McGraw Hill, New York, 1971).
Additionl meterial is drawn from Encyclopaedia Britannica's History of Germany.
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The trial of eleven members of the Communist League, former associates of Karl Marx (at this time living in London), is held in Cologne from October 4 to November 12.
The police use forged evidence, as Marx will later show in Revelations of the Cologne Communist Trial (Enthüllungen über den Kommunisten Prozess zu Küln).
Three of the accused—journalist Heinrich Bürgers, tailor Peter Nothjung, and cigar maker Peter Gerhard Röser—are sentenced to six years in a fortress, and three of the accused—journalist Hermann Heinrich Becker, chemist Karl Wunibald Otto, and Wilhelm Joseph Reiff—receive five-year prison sentences.
One, Friedrich Lessner, a tailor who will later become a close associate of Marx in London, gets off with one year.
Germany has experienced a period of unmitigated reaction in the 1850s.
Those who had dared to defy royal authority are 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, are now restricted or abrogated.
Austria, for example, has revoked the constitution that had been promulgated in 1849, and legitimacy, centralization, and clericalism have become the guiding principles of government.
While in Prussia the constitution granted by the king remains in force, its effectiveness is reduced through the introduction of a complicated system of election by which the ballots are weighted in accordance with the income of the voters.
This results in the control of the legislature by well-to-do conservatives.
The restoration of the confederal system also serves the interests of the Habsburgs, who stand at the pinnacle of their prestige as the saviors of the established order.
In Berlin, on the other hand, the prevailing mood is one of confusion and discouragement.
The king, increasingly gloomy and withdrawn, comes under the influence of ultraconservative advisers who preach legitimism in politics and orthodoxy in religion.
The government, smarting under the humiliation suffered at the hands of Austria, is as timid in foreign as it is oppressive in domestic affairs.
The people, tired of insurrection and cowed by repression, are politically apathetic.
The German Confederation as a whole, rigid and unyielding, remains blind to the need for reform that the revolution had made clear.
As wealth continues 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 gains strength.
While the reactionaries solemnly proclaim the sanctity of traditional institutions, economic change undermines the foundation of those institutions.
By the end of the decade, a new struggle between the forces of liberalism and conservatism is brewing.
Nordstern, a weekly under the editorship of a former communist, Karl von Bruhn, is first publishedin on January 1, 1860, in Hamburg.
Otto von Bismarck becomes Prussian Prime Minister on September 24, following refusal by the country's Landtag to accept the military budget.
Bismarck delivers his Blood and Iron speech to the Prussian Landtag on September 29.
Concerning the unification of the German territories, it is also a transposed phrase that Bismarck utters near the end of the speech that has become one of his most widely known quotations.
Stressed the need for military preparedness to solve the German Question, he concludes his speech with the following statement: "The position of Prussia in Germany will not be determined by its liberalism but by its power [...] Prussia must concentrate its strength and hold it for the favorable moment, which has already come and gone several times. Since the treaties of Vienna, our frontiers have been ill-designed for a healthy body politic. Not through speeches and majority decisions will the great questions of the day be decided—that was the great mistake of 1848 and 1849—but by iron and blood (Eisen und Blut)."
This phrase, relying on a patriotic poem written by Max von Schenkendorf during the Napoleonic Wars, will be popularized as the more euphonious Blut und Eisen ("Blood and Iron"), and become symbolic of Bismarckian Machtpolitik ("Power politics").
Bismarck is an outstanding diplomat, but the phrase "blood and iron" will become a popular description of his foreign policy partly because he will on occasion resort to war to further the unification of Germany and the expansion of its continental power.
Therefore he will become known as "the iron chancellor."
The Nordstern becomes an organ of Ferdinand Lassalle's Allgemeiner Deutscher Arbeiterverein (General German Labor Association), the first socialist workers party in Germany, in 1863.
The Allgemeiner Deutscher Arbeiterverein (ADAV), Germany's first national workers' association, is founded in Leipzig on May 23 under the leadership of Ferdinand Lassalle.
The ADAV, or Allgemeiner Deutscher Arbeiterverein, has one thousand members by August.