The Enquiry Frame

Edexcel's row covers four connected problems:

• the Frankfurt Parliament, 1848-49
• revolution in Prussia, 1848-49
• the reasons the German revolutions failed
• the political impact of failure, especially in the years 1849-51

The enquiry question is: why did the German revolutions fail, and what did that failure
change?

Keep the chronology tight. In March 1848, rulers across the German Confederation were
frightened into concessions by revolutions in Paris, Vienna, Berlin and other cities. By
summer 1849, most armed revolutionary resistance had been crushed. By the end of 1850,
Prussia had abandoned its attempt to create a Prussian-led German Union. By 1851, the old
German Confederation had effectively been restored under Austrian leadership.

A strong exam answer needs two balances. First, weigh internal weakness against
external conservative strength. Second, weigh failure in 1849 against longer-term
impact. The revolutions failed to unify Germany or secure parliamentary government, but
they left behind constitutional ideas, a sharper Prussia-Austria rivalry and a powerful
lesson for later nationalists: unity would need state power as well as speeches, petitions
and principles.

The Frankfurt Parliament

The Frankfurt Parliament was the central national institution of the German revolutions.
It grew out of the Vorparlament, a preliminary parliament that met in Frankfurt from
31 March to 3 April 1848. The Vorparlament brought together liberal and democratic
opposition figures from the German states. It was not itself an elected national
parliament. Its importance was preparatory: it helped arrange elections for a German
National Assembly and created a bridge between street revolution and constitutional
politics.

The Vorparlament also revealed the revolution's first major division. Radicals such as
Gustav Struve wanted a democratic republic, a citizens' militia, the abolition of noble
privilege and far-reaching social and political change. Moderate liberals wanted national
unity and constitutional rights, but usually through a monarchy and legal procedure. The
moderates won the immediate argument. The revolution would try to build unity through an
elected parliament rather than through a permanent revolutionary convention.

The Frankfurt National Assembly opened on 18 May 1848 in St Paul's Church. It was a
remarkable achievement: the first all-German parliament, elected through arrangements that
varied between states but were based on a broad adult male electorate. Its membership,
however, shaped its politics. It was dominated by educated middle-class men: lawyers,
professors, civil servants, teachers, journalists and clergy. There were few workers or
peasants. That mattered because the Assembly was skilled at legal argument and
constitutional drafting, but less able to command popular street politics or satisfy
social-economic demands from artisans, labourers and poorer urban groups.

The Assembly's work was serious. Heinrich von Gagern became its first president. It
created committees, debated the future German state, and in June 1848 appointed Archduke
John of Austria as Reichsverweser, or imperial regent, to head a provisional central
authority. It also produced the Basic Rights of the German People, adopted in December
1848 and often taught in this course as the Fifty Articles. These rights included legal
equality, abolition of class privilege, personal liberty, freedom of the press, freedom of
assembly, freedom of religion, freedom of movement, protection against arbitrary arrest,
and the abolition of the death penalty.

Those achievements should not be dismissed. For a student judging significance, the Fifty
Articles show that 1848 liberalism was not empty rhetoric. The Assembly defined a rights
based German citizenship before Germany existed as a nation state. Its weakness was that
rights needed enforcement. The Assembly could proclaim liberties; it could not reliably
make Prussia, Austria, Bavaria or Saxony obey them.

Three disagreements weakened Frankfurt's authority.

The Schleswig-Holstein crisis made the weakness visible. German nationalists supported
the German population in Schleswig and Holstein against Danish rule, but Prussia made an
armistice with Denmark at Malmo in August 1848 without obeying Frankfurt's wishes.
Frankfurt first resisted, then accepted the armistice in September because it lacked the
power to fight Prussia or Denmark. The result was humiliating: radicals denounced the
Assembly, violence broke out in Frankfurt, and Prussian and Austrian troops suppressed
the unrest. A national parliament that had to depend on old-regime armies to restore order
was already in trouble.

The final collapse came in 1849. Austria's March 1849 constitution declared the Habsburg
Empire indivisible, so Austria would not allow only its German lands to enter a German
nation state. Frankfurt therefore moved towards the Kleindeutsch solution. On 27-28 March
1849, the Assembly adopted an imperial constitution and elected Frederick William IV of
Prussia as hereditary emperor. On 3 April 1849, he refused the crown. He would not accept
an imperial title from elected representatives rather than from the German princes, and he
was unwilling to risk war with Austria and the other monarchs for a revolutionary
constitution.

After that refusal, Frankfurt had no real means of survival. Austria and Prussia recalled
deputies. Moderate liberals drifted away. A smaller radical rump moved to Stuttgart, where
Wurttemberg troops dispersed it on 18 June 1849. The campaign to defend the constitution
continued in places such as Saxony, the Palatinate and Baden, but these risings were
crushed by regular troops. The Assembly's failure therefore showed both internal weakness
and external coercion: divided revolutionaries could not make a parliament sovereign when
the armies still served the princes.

Revolution in Prussia

Prussia mattered because it was the strongest German state after Austria and the only
plausible leader of a Kleindeutsch Germany. The revolution in Prussia therefore had two
levels. In Berlin it was a struggle over constitutional government inside Prussia. In
Frankfurt it was also a struggle over whether Prussia would lead German national unity.

The decisive Berlin events came on 18-19 March 1848. Frederick William IV had already
been under pressure to make concessions after the fall of Metternich in Vienna and the
spread of revolution across Europe. Crowds gathered in Berlin demanding a constitution,
press freedom, a citizens' militia and the withdrawal of troops. On 18 March, after the
king announced concessions, a large crowd assembled near the palace. Shots were fired as
troops tried to clear the area, and barricade fighting spread through the city. Artisans
were especially prominent among the dead. The next day Frederick William ordered troops to
withdraw from Berlin.

For a brief moment the king acted as if he were the servant of the revolution. He honoured
the "March dead", rode through Berlin wearing the black-red-gold colours of German
nationalism, promised that Prussia would merge into Germany, and agreed to summon a
Prussian National Assembly. This response matters because it shows the initial success of
popular pressure. The monarchy did not fall, but it had to bend.

The liberal government that followed was moderate rather than revolutionary. The March
ministry associated with Ludolf Camphausen and David Hansemann wanted constitutional
monarchy, civil liberties and administrative reform. It did not want a social republic or
an attack on property. It also did not purge the army, remove the conservative officer
corps, or dismantle the monarchy's bureaucracy. That caution made sense to liberals who
feared disorder, but it left the old power structure alive.

The conservative reaction gathered strength through 1848. The king, court conservatives,
Junker landowners, senior officers and officials increasingly regained confidence. They
were helped by three developments: radical unrest frightened moderates; the Prussian army
remained intact; and revolutionary defeats elsewhere, especially in Austria, showed that
the old order was not finished.

The counter-revolution in Prussia came through controlled force and constitutional
management. In November 1848, Frederick William appointed his conservative uncle, Count
Brandenburg, as minister-president. General Wrangel led troops back into Berlin. The
Prussian National Assembly was ordered to move to Brandenburg; when it resisted and tried
to defend the principle that taxation required parliamentary consent, it was dissolved.
On 5 December 1848, the king imposed a constitution.

The Prussian constitution was not simply a return to pre-1848 absolutism. It preserved a
constitutional framework, a parliament and some civil rights. That is why the revolution in
Prussia cannot be described as achieving nothing. Yet it was a constitution from above,
not a constitution made sovereign by the elected assembly. The king retained control over
the army and executive government; ministers were responsible to him more than to
parliament; and the constitution was later revised in 1849-50 in a more conservative
direction, including the three-class electoral system that gave disproportionate influence
to wealthier voters.

The Prussian outcome is therefore a useful miniature of the German revolutions as a whole.
Popular action forced concessions, but the old state survived. Liberals gained a written
constitution, but not parliamentary control of the army or government. Nationalists gained
a possible Prussian route to unity, but only if the Prussian king chose to pursue it on
monarchical terms.

Why the Revolutions Failed

The German revolutions failed because revolutionary weakness met conservative recovery.
Neither side was fixed in March 1848. At first, rulers were shaken and reformers had
momentum. By 1849, however, the balance had shifted back towards princes, armies and
bureaucracies.

The strength of conservative forces was the most immediate reason. Across Germany, rulers
still possessed the institutions that decide whether a revolution can be enforced: armies,
police, civil service, courts, local administration and diplomatic recognition. In many
states, soldiers had retreated or waited in March 1848, but they had not transferred their
loyalty to elected parliaments. Once monarchs recovered nerve, they could use regular
troops against revolutionary risings in Berlin, Dresden, the Palatinate and Baden.

The old elites also adapted. Conservative rulers did not always reject every concession.
In Prussia they kept a constitution while stripping it of much democratic potential. In
the smaller states, rulers accepted some March ministries or reforms and then narrowed
them once danger passed. This mattered because counter-revolution did not always look like
an instant restoration of the old system. It often looked like a bargain: preserve a few
legal reforms, but restore the authority of crown, army and bureaucracy.

The revival of Habsburg power was equally important. In March 1848, Austria appeared
crippled: Metternich fled Vienna, unrest spread in the empire, and Hungarian, Czech,
Italian and German liberals all challenged Habsburg authority. By late 1848 and 1849,
the monarchy recovered. Windischgratz suppressed the Prague rising in June 1848 and later
helped retake Vienna. Radetzky defeated the Piedmontese challenge in northern Italy.
Ferdinand abdicated in December 1848, allowing the young Francis Joseph to take the throne
without being bound by all the concessions made earlier. Felix Schwarzenberg then pursued
a harder centralising policy.

Austria's recovery damaged the German revolutions in two ways. First, it restored a major
conservative power at the centre of German politics. Second, it wrecked Frankfurt's
Greater German option. The Habsburg monarchy would not break itself apart so that its
German-speaking lands could join a German nation state. Austria's March 1849 constitution
insisted on the unity of the empire. Once Hungary was crushed with Russian help in August
1849, Austria could again focus on Germany and block Prussian or Frankfurt schemes for
national reorganisation.

Revolutionary divisions made this conservative recovery easier. The revolutionaries did
not agree on what "freedom" meant. Moderate liberals wanted constitutions, rights, free
discussion, property and national unity. Democrats wanted wider popular sovereignty,
republicanism and more radical political equality. Workers and artisans often wanted
social protection as well as political rights. Peasants, once some feudal burdens were
reduced or abolished, often had less reason to keep risking themselves for urban
constitutional politics.

Nationalism also divided as much as it united. German nationalists claimed the right of
Germans to unite, but this created conflicts with Danes in Schleswig, Czechs in Bohemia,
Poles in Prussian lands, Italians under Austrian rule and the many non-German peoples of
the Habsburg Empire. The Grossdeutsch versus Kleindeutsch argument was not a technical
map problem; it exposed the fact that liberal nationalism could not easily solve the
multi-national structure of central Europe.

The Frankfurt Parliament's weaknesses should therefore be seen as part of a larger
pattern. It was slow, divided and over-dependent on legal debate, but it was operating in
an exceptionally difficult environment. Its fatal weakness was not discussion by itself.
Its fatal weakness was trying to make a constitutional nation state without command of
the armed power that still belonged to the existing states.

Political Impact 1849-51

The failure of revolution did not end the German question. It changed who could answer it.
After 1849, elected revolutionaries were weaker, and the initiative moved back to the two
great powers: Prussia and Austria.

Prussia's ambition after April 1849 was contradictory. Frederick William IV refused the
Frankfurt crown because it came from elected representatives and threatened conflict with
other princes. Yet he and his adviser Joseph Maria von Radowitz still wanted a
Prussian-led German settlement if it could be made by agreement between rulers. This was
the basis of the Erfurt Union or Prussian Union.

The Union plan tried to turn the national cause into a conservative-monarchical project.
In May 1849, Prussia, Saxony and Hanover agreed the Three Kings' Alliance. A union
constitution followed, drawing partly on Frankfurt's work but giving more power to princes
and to the head of state. Many moderate liberals supported the plan at Gotha because they
believed it was the only remaining route to unity after Frankfurt's defeat. Democrats
often rejected it as a betrayal of popular sovereignty.

The plan quickly lost strength. The southern kingdoms, especially Bavaria and Wurttemberg,
would not accept Prussian domination. Hanover and Saxony drifted away by late 1849. The
Erfurt Parliament met from 20 March to 29 April 1850, but low enthusiasm and diplomatic
opposition made it fragile. Prussia wanted leadership, but Frederick William IV was not
ready to fight a major war to secure it.

Austria's ambition was to restore its authority in Germany and prevent Prussia from
turning revolutionary failure into Prussian leadership. Schwarzenberg insisted that the
German Confederation had legal continuity and that Austria should retain the chair in the
Federal Diet. Austria also explored more ambitious schemes for drawing the wider Habsburg
Empire into a German confederal system, but its essential success was simpler: it blocked
Prussia's Union and restored the old confederal framework.

The crisis came in 1850 over Hesse-Kassel and Schleswig-Holstein, where Austrian and
Prussian policies collided. Russia supported Austria as the more reliable defender of the
1815 order. Prussia backed down. On 29 November 1850, at Olmutz, Prussian minister
Otto von Manteuffel and Austrian minister Schwarzenberg agreed the Punctation of Olmutz.
Prussia abandoned its Union policy and accepted the restoration of the German
Confederation under Austrian leadership. Many Prussians remembered this as a humiliation.

The Dresden conferences of December 1850 to May 1851 then considered reform of the
Confederation, but Austria and Prussia could not agree on the basic issue: Austria claimed
the old presidency and legal continuity; Prussia wanted parity. The result was not a new
Germany but the re-establishment of the Confederation. The Federal Diet at Frankfurt again
became the central institution, dominated by state sovereignty and Austrian influence.

For German nationalism and liberalism, the significance was mixed.

This final point is central for judgement. The revolutions failed in their own terms:
they did not create a liberal, united, parliamentary Germany. Yet they transformed the
political imagination. They showed that national unity had mass appeal; they exposed the
weakness of the German Confederation; they made the Prussian route more visible; and they
taught both liberals and conservatives that the German question could not be ignored
forever.

Exam Judgement and Source Utility

For an AO1 essay, avoid treating "failure" as one cause. The best answers rank causes by
function:

• Immediate defeat was caused mainly by conservative military power. Armies retook
  capitals, dispersed assemblies and crushed constitution campaigns.
• Political failure was caused by the inability of Frankfurt and the Prussian National
  Assembly to make elected institutions sovereign over monarchs, armies and bureaucracies.
• Strategic failure was caused by the Austria-Prussia problem. A German national state
  could not be made while Austria rejected division of its empire and Prussia would not
  accept a crown from elected representatives.
• Social failure came from the gap between middle-class liberal aims and the demands
  of workers, artisans, democrats, peasants and national minorities.

A strong judgement might argue that conservative force was the decisive immediate cause,
but that revolutionary division explains why force worked. If liberals, democrats,
workers, peasants and national minorities had been united, armies might have faced a more
durable revolutionary movement. Yet they were not united, and most regular soldiers,
officials and princes remained attached to the old states.

For AO2 source evaluation, think about provenance and perspective.

The neatest overall judgement is this: the German revolutions failed because
revolutionaries won enough concessions to start constitution-making, but not enough power
to control the states that had to enforce it. Frankfurt supplied principles; Berlin
showed how a monarchy could survive by concession and counter-revolution; Austria's
recovery restored conservative great-power politics; Olmutz confirmed that the German
question had moved from revolutionary assemblies back to the rivalry of states.