Frankfurt Parliament — Failed Liberal Unification
Germany's first elected national assembly met in a church in Frankfurt in May 1848 and offered a crown to a king who would not take it. The revolutions of March had produced governments across the German states willing to permit an election, and some 585 deputies were chosen by a franchise that varied by state — professors, lawyers, officials and judges in overwhelming numbers, which is why it was called the parliament of professors. Its authority rested on nothing but the moment. It spent months on a declaration of fundamental rights, which was genuinely liberal and which no state ever enforced, and on the question that could not be answered: whether a German nation should include Austria. The greater German solution required the Habsburgs to break up their multinational empire, which they were not going to do, and the lesser German one meant a Prussian empire without them. Two other decisions destroyed its credibility. It supported the Prussian war against Denmark over Schleswig and then had to accept an armistice Prussia signed without consulting it, which produced riots in Frankfurt; and it cheered the suppression of the Poles in Posen and of the Czechs in Prague, which showed that its liberalism stopped at other people's nationalism. The constitution was finished in March 1849 and the crown was offered to Friedrich Wilhelm IV, who called it a diadem moulded from the dirt and mud of revolution. The rump was dispersed by troops in June. Bismarck did it with armies eighteen years later.
- Year: 1848 CE
- Category: Political
