German Confederation

The German Confederation was a loose association of 39 German-speaking states established at the Congress of Vienna (1815) to fill the political vacuum left by Napoleon's dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806. Austria held the permanent presidency and, with Prussia, dominated the Diet at Frankfurt. The Confederation was a conservative instrument designed to suppress liberal and nationalist movements — it used the Carlsbad Decrees (1819) to censor universities and the press. The revolutions of 1848 briefly seemed to offer a path to German unification, but the Frankfurt Parliament's failure left the old structure intact. It was dissolved following Austria's defeat by Prussia in the Austro-Prussian War of 1866, after which Bismarck reorganised the northern states into the North German Confederation.

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