Long before the issue of the War of Liberation had been finally decided, diplomacy had been at work in an endeavour to settle the future constitution of Germany. In this matter, as in others, the weakness of the Prussian government played into the hands of Austria. Metternich had been allowed to take the initiative in negotiating with the princes of the Confederation of the Rhine, and the price of their adhesion to the cause of the allies had been the guarantee by Austria of their independent sovereignty. The guarantee had been willingly given; for Metternich had no desire to see the creation of a powerful unified German empire, but aimed at the establishment of a loose confederation of weak states over which Austria, by reason of her ancient imperial prestige and her vast non-German power, would exercise a dominant influence. This, then, was the view that prevailed, and by the treaty of Chaumont (March 1, 1814) it was decided that Germany should consist of a confederation of sovereign states.
The new constitution of Germany, as embodied in the Final Act of the congress of Vienna (June 9, 1815) was based on this principle. It was the work of a special committee of the congress, presided over by Metternich; and, The German confederation. owing to the panic created by Napoleon’s return from Elba (March 5), it remained a mere sketch, the hasty output of a few hurried sessions, of which the elaboration was reserved for the future. In spite of the clamour of the mediatized princes for the restoration of their “liberties,” no attempt was made to reverse the essential changes in the territorial disposition of Germany made during the revolutionary epoch. Of the 300 odd territorial sovereignties under the Holy Empire only 39 survived, and these were readjusted on the traditional principles of “compensations,” “rectification of frontiers” and “balance of power.” The most fateful arrangements were naturally those that affected the two leading powers, Austria and Prussia. The latter had made strenuous efforts, supported by Alexander I. of Russia, to obtain the annexation of the whole of Saxony, a project which was defeated by the opposition of Great Britain, Austria and France, an opposition which resulted in the secret treaty of the 3rd of January 1815 for eventual armed intervention. She received, however, the northern part of Saxony, Swedish Pomerania, Posen and those territories—formerly part of the kingdom of Westphalia—which constitute her Rhine provinces. While Prussia was thus established on the Rhine, Austria, by exchanging the Netherlands for Lombardo-Venetia and abandoning her claims to the former Habsburg possessions in Swabia, definitively resigned to Prussia the task of defending the western frontier of Germany, while she strengthened her power in the south-east by recovering from Bavaria, Salzburg, Vorarlberg and Tirol. Bavaria, in her turn, received back the greater part of the Palatinate on the left bank of the Rhine, with a strip of territory to connect it with the main body of her dominions. For the rest the sovereigns of Württemberg and Saxony retained the title of king bestowed upon them by Napoleon, and this title was also given to the elector of Hanover; the dukes of Weimar, Mecklenburg and Oldenburg became grand dukes; and Lübeck, Bremen, Hamburg and Frankfort were declared free cities.
As the central organ of this confederation (Bund) was established the federal diet (Bundestag), consisting of delegates of the several states. By the terms of the Final Act this diet had very wide powers for the development The federal diet. of the mutual relations of the governments in all matters of common interest. It was empowered to arrange the fundamental laws of the confederation; to fix the organic institutions relating to its external, internal and military arrangements; to regulate the trade relations between the various federated states. Moreover, by the famous Article 13, which enacted that there were to be “assemblies of estates” in all the countries of the Bund, the constitutional liberties of the German people seemed to be placed under its aegis. But the constitution of the diet from the first condemned its debates to sterility. In the so-called narrower assembly (Engere Versammlung), for the transaction of ordinary business, Austria, Prussia, Bavaria, Saxony, Hanover, Württemberg, Baden, Hesse-Cassel, Hesse-Darmstadt, Holstein and Luxemburg had one vote each; while the remaining twenty-eight states were divided into six curiae, of which each had but a single vote. In this assembly a vote of the majority decided. Questions of more than usual importance were, however, to be settled in the general assembly (Plenum) where a two-thirds majority was necessary to carry a resolution. In this assembly the voting power was somewhat differently distributed; but the attempt to make it bear some proportion to the importance of the various states worked out so badly that Austria had only four times the voting power of the tiny principality of Liechtenstein. Finally it was laid down by Article 7 that a unanimous vote was necessary for changing “fundamental laws, organic institutions, individual rights, or in matters of religion,” a formula wide enough to embrace every question of importance with which the diet might be called upon to deal. Austria, in virtue of her tradition, received the perpetual presidency of the diet. It was clear that in such a governing body neither Austria nor Prussia would be content with her constitutional position, and that the internal politics of Germany would resolve themselves into a diplomatic duel for ascendancy between the two powers, for which the diet would merely serve as a convenient arena.
In this duel the victory of Austria was soon declared. The Prussian government believed that the effective government of Germany could only be secured by a separate understanding between the two great powers; and the indiscretion of the Prussian plenipotentiary revealed to the diet a plan for what meant practically the division of Germany into Prussian and Austrian spheres of influence. This threw the lesser princes, already alarmed at the growth of Prussian military power, into the arms of Austria, which thus secured a permanent majority in the diet. To avoid any possible modification of a situation so satisfactory, Count Buol, the Austrian president of the diet, was instructed to announce that the constitution as fixed by the Final Act, and guaranteed by Europe, must be regarded as final; that it might be interpreted, but not altered.
The conception of the diet as a sort of international board of control, responsible in the last resort not to Germany but to Europe, exactly suited Metternich’s policy, in which the interests of Germany were subordinate to the wider ambitions of the Habsburg monarchy. It was, moreover, largely justified by the constituent elements of the diet itself. Of the German states represented in it even Prussia, by the acquisition of Posen, had become a non-German power; the Habsburg monarchy was predominantly non-German; Hanover was attached to the crown of Great Britain, Holstein to that of Denmark, Luxemburg to that of the Netherlands. The diet, then, properly controlled, was capable of being converted into an effective instrument for furthering the policy of “stability” which Metternich sought to impose upon Europe. Its one effort to make its authority effective as the guardian of the constitution, in the matter of the repudiation of the Westphalian debt and of the sale of the domains by the elector of Hesse, was crushed by the indignant intervention of Austria. Henceforth its sole effective function was to endorse and promulgate the decrees of the government of Vienna.
In this respect the diet fairly reflected the place of Germany in Europe. The constitution was the work of the powers, which in all matters arising out of it constituted the final court of appeal. The result was not wholly one-sided. The question of constitutions. Until the congress of Troppau in 1820 “Jacobinism” was still enthroned in high places in the person of Alexander I. of Russia, whose “divine mission,” for the time, included a not wholly disinterested advocacy of the due carrying out of Article 13 of the Final Act. It was not to Russia’s interest to see Austrian influence supreme in the confederation. The lesser German princes, too, were quick to grasp at any means to strengthen their position against the dominant powers, and to this end they appealed to the Liberal sentiment of their peoples. Not that this sentiment was very deep or widespread. The mass of the people, as Metternich rightly observed, wished for rest, not constitutions; but the minority of thoughtful men—professors, students, officials, many soldiers—resented the dashing of the hopes of German unity aroused by the War of Liberation, and had drunk deep of the revolutionary inspiration. This sentiment, since it could not be turned to the uses of a united Germany, might be made to serve the purposes of particularism. Prussia, in spite of the promises of Frederick William in the hour of need, remained without a central constitution; all the more reason why the states of second rank should provide themselves with one. Charles Augustus, the enlightened grand duke of Weimar, set the example, from the best of motives. Bavaria, Baden, Württemberg and others followed, from motives less disinterested. Much depended on the success of these experiments.
To Metternich they were wholly unwelcome. In spite of the ring-fence of censors, and custom-house officers, there was danger of the Liberal infection spreading to Austria, with disintegrating results; and the pose of the tsar as Metternich and the constitutions. protector of German liberties was a perpetual menace. The zeal and inexperience of German Liberals played into his hands. The patriotism and Pan-Germanism of the gymnastic societies (Turnvereine) and students’ associations (Burschenschaften) expressed themselves with more noise than discretion; in the South-German parliaments the platitudes and catchwords of the Revolution were echoed. Soon, in Baden, in Württemberg, in Bavaria, the sovereigns and the chambers were at odds, united only in a common opposition to the central authority. To sovereigns whose nerves had been shattered by the vicissitudes of the revolutionary epoch these symptoms were in the highest degree alarming; and Metternich was at The Wartburg festival, 1818. pains to exaggerate their significance. The “Wartburg festival” of October 1818, which issued in nothing worse than the solemn burning, in imitation of Dr Martin Luther, of Kamptz’s police law, a corporal’s cane and an uhlan’s stays, was magnified into a rebellion; drew down upon the grand duke of Weimar a collective protest of the powers; and set in motion the whole machinery of reaction. The murder of the dramatist Kotzebue, as an agent of this reaction, in the following year, by a fanatical student named Karl Sand, clinched the matter; it became obvious to the governments that a policy of rigorous repression was necessary if a fresh revolution were to be avoided. In October, after a preliminary meeting between Metternich and Hardenberg, in the course of which the latter signed a convention pledging Prussia to Austria’s system, a meeting of German ministers was held at Carlsbad, the discussion of which issued in the famous Carlsbad Decrees (October 17, 1819). These contained elaborate provisions for supervising the universities and muzzling the press, laying down that no constitution “inconsistent with the monarchical principle” should be granted, and setting up a central commission at Mainz to inquire into the machinations of the great revolutionary secret society which existed only in the imagination of the authorities. The Carlsbad Decrees, hurried through the diet under Austrian pressure, excited considerable opposition among the lesser sovereigns, who resented the claim of the diet to interfere in the internal concerns of their states, and whose protests at Frankfort had been expunged from the records. The king of Württemberg, ever the champion of German “particularism,” gave expression to his feelings by issuing a new constitution to his kingdom, and appealed to his relative, the emperor Alexander, who had not yet been won over by Metternich to the policy of war à outrance against reform, and took this occasion to issue a fresh manifesto of his Liberal creed.
At the conference of ministers which met at Vienna, on the 20th of November, for the purpose of “developing and completing the Federal Act of the congress of Vienna,” Metternich found himself face to face with a more formidable opposition than at Carlsbad. The “middle” states, headed by Württemberg, had drawn together, to form the nucleus of an inner league of “pure German States” against Austria and Prussia, and of “Liberal particularism” against the encroachments of the diet. With Russia and, to a certain extent, Great Britain sympathetic, it was impossible to ignore their opposition. Moreover, Prussia was hardly prepared to endorse a policy of greatly strengthening the authority of the diet, which might have been fatal to the Customs Union of which she was laying the foundation. Metternich realized the situation, and yielded so gracefully that he gave his temporary defeat the air of a victory. The result was that the Vienna Final Act (May 15,1820), which received the sanction of the diet on the 8th of June, was not unsatisfactory to the lesser states while doing nothing to lessen Austrian prestige. This instrument merely defined more clearly the principles of the Federal Act of 1815. So far from enlarging the powers of the diet, it reaffirmed the doctrine of non-intervention; and, above all, it renewed the clause forbidding any fundamental modification of the constitution without a unanimous vote. On the vexed question of the interpretation of Article 13 Metternich recognized the inexpediency of requiring the South German states to revise their constitutions in a reactionary sense. By Articles 56 and 57, however, it was laid down that constitutions could only be altered by constitutional means; that the complete authority of the state must remain united in its head; and that the sovereign could be bound to co-operate with the estates only in the exercise of particular rights. These provisions, in fact, secured for Metternich all that was necessary for the success of his policy: the maintenance of the status quo. So long as the repressive machinery instituted by the Carlsbad Decrees worked smoothly, Germany was not likely to be troubled by revolutions.
The period that followed was one, outwardly at least, of political stagnation. The Mainz Commission, though hampered by the jealousy of the governments (the king of Prussia refused to allow his subjects to be haled before it), was none the less effective enough in preventing all free expression of opinion; while at the universities the official “curators” kept Liberal enthusiasts in order. The exuberance of the epoch of Liberation gave place to a dull lethargy in things political, relieved only by the Philhellenism which gave voice to the aspirations of Germany under the disguise of enthusiasm for Greece. Even the July revolution of 1830 in Paris reacted but partially and spasmodically Revolutions of 1830. on Germany. In Hanover, Brunswick, Saxony and Hesse-Cassel popular movements led to the granting of constitutions, and in the states already constitutional Liberal concessions were made or promised. But the governments of Prussia and Austria were unaffected; and when the storm had died down Metternich was able, with the aid of the federal diet, to resume his task of holding “the Revolution” in check. No attempt was, indeed, made to restore the deposed duke of Brunswick, who by universal consent had richly deserved his fate; but the elector of Hesse could reckon on the sympathy of the diet in his struggle with the chambers (see [Hesse-Cassel]), and when, in 1837, King Ernest Augustus of Hanover inaugurated his reign by restoring the old illiberal constitution abolished in 1831, the diet refused to interfere. It was left to the seven professors of Göttingen to protest; who, deprived of their posts, became as famous in the constitutional history of Germany as the seven bishops in that of England.
Yet this period was by no means sterile in developments destined to produce momentous results. In Prussia especially the government continued active in organizing and consolidating the heterogeneous elements introduced The Prussian system. into the monarchy by the settlement of 1815. The task was no easy one. There was no sense of national unity between the Catholics of the Rhine provinces, long submitted to the influence of liberal France, and the Lutheran squires of the mark of Brandenburg, the most stereotyped class in Europe; there was little in common between either and the Polish population of the province of Posen. The Prussian monarchy, the traditional champion of Protestant orthodoxy, found the new Catholic elements difficult to assimilate; and premonitory symptoms were not wanting of a revival of the secular contest between the spiritual and temporal powers which was to culminate after the promulgation of the dogma of papal infallibility (1870) in the Kulturkampf. These conditions formed the excuse for the continual postponement of the promised constitution. But the narrow piety of Frederick William III. was less calculated to promote the success of a benevolent despotism than the contemptuous scepticism of Frederick the Great, and a central parliament would have proved a safety valve for jarring passions which the mistaken efforts of the king to suppress, by means of royal decrees and military coercion, only served to embitter. Yet the conscientious tradition of Prussian officialism accomplished much in the way of administrative reform.