German Confederation

The German Confederation (German: Deutscher Bund) was a loose association of Central European states created by the Congress of Vienna in 1815 to organize the surviving states of the Holy Roman Empire, which had been abolished in 1806.

Impact of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic invasions

The late 18th century was a period of political, economic, intellectual, and cultural reform, the Enlightenment (represented by figures such as Locke, Rousseau, Voltaire, and Adam Smith), but also involving early Romanticism, climaxed in the French Revolution, where freedom of the individual and nation was asserted against privilege and custom. Representing a great variety of types and theories, they largely respond to the disintegration of previous cultural patterns, coupled with new patterns of production, specifically the rise of industrial capitalism.

Related Topics:
18th century - The Enlightenment - Locke - Rousseau - Voltaire - Adam Smith - Romanticism - French Revolution

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However, the defeat of Napoleon enabled conservative and reactionary regimes such as those of the Kingdom of Prussia, the Austrian Empire and Tsarist Russia to survive, laying the groundwork for the Congress of Vienna and the alliance that strove to oppose radical demands for change ushered in by the French Revolution. The Great Powers at the Congress of Vienna in 1815 aimed to restore Europe (as far as possible) to its pre-war conditions by combating both liberalism and nationalism and by creating barriers around France. With Austria's position on the continent now intact and ostensibly secure under its reactionary premier Klemens von Metternich, the Habsburg empire would serve as a barrier to contain the emergence of Italian and German nation-states as well, in addition to containing France. But this reactionary balance of power aimed at blocking German and Italian nationalism on the continent was precarious.

Related Topics:
Napoleon - Kingdom of Prussia - Austrian Empire - Tsar - Russia - Congress of Vienna - French Revolution - Great Power - 1815 - Liberalism - France - Klemens von Metternich - Habsburg

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After Napoleon's final defeat at Waterloo in 1815, the surviving member states of defunct Holy Roman Empire joined to form the German Confederation (Deutscher Bund) — a rather loose organisation, especially because the two great rivals, the Austrian Empire and the Prussian kingdom, each feared domination by the other.

Related Topics:
Napoleon - Waterloo - 1815 - German Confederation - Austrian Empire - Prussian kingdom

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To contemporary observers, a post-Napoleon revolutionary upheaval in Prussia, however, would seem unlikely. Later to emerge as the dominant German state, the political base of a united Germany, and a power that would vie for continental preeminence toward the end of the nineteenth century, Prussia was at that time seemingly backward. In eastern Prussia, manorial reaction dated back to the fall of the Teutonic Knights. Although agricultural structures has been very decentralized in form under the Teutonic Order, the Prussian nobility would later expand their holdings at the expense of the peasantry in the territories once held by the Teutonic Order, reducing them to quiescent serfdom. The rise of urban burgers was also greatly impeded. The Junkers sought to reduce the curb the influence of the towns by short-circuiting them with their exports, leaving little revolutionary potential for free labor — urban and rural — from feudal obligation. In Britain and France, which proved far more hospitable to Western democracy from the Enlightenment to Germany's defeat in World War II, the decline of feudal obligations had been connected with the development of the urban citizens. In Prussia, conversely, the Hohenzollern rulers instead forged a centralized state, explaining the weak development of parliamentary government. By the time of the Napoleonic Wars, Prussia was thus a socially and institutionally backward state, grounded in the virtues of its established military-aristocracy stratified by rigid hierarchical lines.

Related Topics:
Teutonic Knights - Junker - Britain - France - Hohenzollern - Parliament

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Apart from Prussia, in Germany as a whole — or more precisely in the many German states —, political disunity, conflicts of interests between noblility and merchants, and the guild system, which discouraged competition and innovation, retarded the progress of industrialism. While this kept the middle class small, affording the old order a measure of stability not seen in France, Prussia's vulnerability to Napoleon's military proved to many perceptive minds among the old order that a weak, divided, and backward Germany could very well have been prey to its united and industrializing neighbor.

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After 1815, Prussia's defeats by Napoleonic France highlighted the need for administrative, economic, and social reforms to improve the efficiency of the bureaucracy and encourage practical merit-based education. Inspired by the Napoleonic organization of German and Italian principalities, the reforms of Karl August von Hardenberg and Count Stein were conservative, enacted to preserve aristocratic privilege while modernizing institutions.

Related Topics:
1815 - Karl August von Hardenberg - Count Stein - Aristocrat

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The reforms laid the foundation for Prussia's future military might by professionalizing the military, decreeing universal military conscription. To industrialize within the framework of Prussian aristocratic institutions, land reforms ended the monopoly of the Junkers on landownership, thereby abolishing serfdom and many other feudal practices.

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