German liberalism in the nineteenth century was a complicated political animal and its politics were wrapped up in the tangled politics of German unification in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars.

There was no German Empire (Deutsches Reich) in 1848. The geopolitical entity contemporaries called Germany was not a single, unitary state. Instead Central Europe consisted of some 39 independent states with a majority German-speaking population. These 39 states were members of the Deutscher Bund (German Confederation). This was a confederal structure that was set up during the Congress of Vienna as a substitute for the Holy Roman Empire. The Bund was largely a collective defense organization that barely functioned in that role. There was no executive leadership of the Bund and representatives to the federal assembly in Frankfurt had very little power to set policy. The two largest states of the Bund, Austria and Prussia, zealously guarded their own prerogatives and were wary of the other gaining too much power. The minor German states alternated between looking to the Bund to protect their interests or ignoring it. As such, the Bund did not really function as a state. This was where liberals came into the picture.

What someone in 2022 calls liberal bore relatively little relation to German liberals in this period. Liberalism was not so much a discrete political ideology, but rather a shifting set of beliefs that reflected wider developments within the societies of the German states. This could vary widely by region. For example, the Rhenish liberals in the Prussian Rhineland were somewhat Francophilic and championed liberties gained by the French Revolution and decried the arbitrary rule of the Hohenzollerns. In contrast, liberals in the Prussian heartland could be more anti-French and and pro-Hohenzollern. The general thrust of German liberalism was that it was a movement of the emerging middle classes. They were educated and prized Bildung, a rather complicated German word whose meaning in this period went far beyond just "education". German liberals tended to mythologize the 1813 liberation from Napoleon, even those who celebrated French innovations like the Napoleonic Code. Painting with a broad brush, German liberals believed in a Rechtstaat, a state governed by laws, and the importance of constitutional rule. But there was a wide variation within these generalities; some liberals were avowedly monarchist, others republican (ie no monarchy), while others favored harmonizing their sovereigns with constitutional rule. A large segment of German liberals pushed for German unification into a single state, although how that state would take shape and what it exactly would be were undefined.

As a whole though, liberals were locked out of political power during the years prior to 1848. The German states of the post-Napoleonic period were largely repressive and the political culture of the monarchs veered towards a rejection of any innovation that reminded them of the French Revolution. The 1848 Revolutions (note plural) had many well-springs, of which German liberals' estrangement with the existing political order was only one of them. But liberals were by virtue of their education and pre-existing political activism primed to take advantage of the political chaos of 1848. Meeting in the Paulskirche in Frankfurt, deputations from the German states, mostly consisting of liberals, met to debate a possible future German state. The Paulskirche crafted a German constitution in 1849 and offered the leadership of the Deutsches Reich to King Frederick William IV of Prussia.

Frederick William IV famously refused a crown with the snide remark he would not take something offered to him from the gutter. This rejection caught the Paulskirche assembly flat-footed, but fissures within the assembly and the wider 1848 movement as a whole were opening up. Some deputies went home while others gravitated to republican armies that fought against the reestablishment of monarchical authority in the German states. Those latter individuals were tended to be exiled from Central Europe with a fair number of them ending up in the United States as a part of the anti-slavery wing of the emerging Republican Party.

But German liberals were more than "Forty-Eighters" like Carl Schurz and a number did remain within Germany. Some German liberals were co-opted by the Prussian arch-conservative Otto von Bismarck and the latter's drive for German unification under the Prussian Hohenzollerns. Bismarck trampled on precepts of the Rechtstaat during his unification drive and the desire for a unitary German state overrode many German liberals' love for a state bound by legal norms. Much like the pre-1848 world, the German liberalism in the post-1871 German Empire wore many different masks. A good deal of the Protestant liberals supported Bismarck's Kulturkampf, a series of anti-Catholic measures directed against the southern German states. Catholic liberals did fight against the Kulturkampf but as a whole did little to protect their Polish co-religionists in Prussian Poland and Silesia against anti-Catholic legislation that targeted them. This anomaly had emerged during the Paulskirche when the contentious issue of whether non-German speaking parts of Central Europe could be part of the new Reich the parliment tried to create.

Tellingly, this contentious issue was tabled during the short-lived parliament. This bespoke of a larger issue of the Paulskirche and its liberalism. The 1848 moment was a unique constellation of political and social events which liberals were primed to take the limelight. But the heterogeneity of German liberalism prevented the Paulskirche from creating a cohesive political program that enjoyed a broad basis of popular support. The problem of the Paulskirche was that it was not "too liberal" but rather that it possessed very little in the way of actual power. Frederick William IV could reject its contentious and much-debated constitution because it was becoming clear in 1849 that Frankfurt could do little to counter such a rejection.

Sources

Langewiesche, Dieter. Liberalism in Germany. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000.

Sheehan, James J. German Liberalism in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Humanity Books, 1995.

Sperber, Jonathan. Rhineland Radicals: The Democratic Movement and the Revolution of 1848-1849. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993.