German Confederation
The German Confederation was created by the Congress of Vienna in June 1815 as a loose association of thirty-nine sovereign states, replacing the Holy Roman Empire that Napoleon had dissolved in 1806. It was designed to be weak. Its purpose, as understood by Metternich and accepted by the powers, was to keep central Europe stable and unable to threaten anyone — strong enough to deter France, too fragmented to become a state. Its only organ was the Federal Diet at Frankfurt, an assembly of instructed ambassadors rather than a parliament, whose members voted as their governments directed and which required unanimity for anything of substance. Austria held the permanent presidency, and Prussia was the other great power inside it, which made the confederation an arena for their rivalry rather than a government. Its members included the kings of Britain, Denmark and the Netherlands for their German territories, and Austria and Prussia joined only for the lands that had been within the old empire. It functioned chiefly as an instrument of repression. The Carlsbad Decrees of 1819, passed after a student murdered a conservative playwright, imposed censorship, dissolved the nationalist student fraternities and placed university teaching under supervision. What actually unified Germany grew up alongside it. The Zollverein, a customs union led by Prussia from 1834, excluded Austria and created a single market long before a single state. The confederation was suspended by the 1848 revolutions, restored in 1850, and dissolved in 1866 when Prussia defeated Austria and excluded it from Germany.
- Year: 1815 CE
- Category: Political
