Vormärz

Vormärz (ˈfoːɐ̯ˌmɛʁts; English: pre-March) was a period in the history of Germany preceding the 1848 March Revolution in the states of the German Confederation. The beginning of the period is less well-defined. Some place the starting point directly after the fall of Napoleon and the establishment of the German Confederation in 1815. Others, typically those who emphasise the Vormärz as a period of political uprising, place the beginning at the French July Revolution of 1830. Internationally known as the Age of Metternich, within Germany it was characterized by the dominance of Austria and Prussia within the German Confederation. Both Austria and Prussia established repressive absolutist police states domestically, and pressured other German states to do the same. These authoritarian regimes practiced censorship and mass surveillance on an unprecedented scale in response to even moderate reformist calls for liberalism, constitutional monarchy, and German unification, as well as more radical, revolutionary calls for republicanism and universal suffrage. Culturally, this period is known as the Biedermeier era. As such it is seen as a conclusion of the Romanticist era. Upon Napoleon's final defeat at the Battle of Waterloo, the European powers, led by the Austrian state chancellor Prince Klemens von Metternich and British foreign secretary Lord Castlereagh, implemented the Conservative Order, thereby reversing the massive changes brought by the French Revolution, with the aim of recreating the pre-revolutionary balance of power. Against the nationalist and liberal tendencies among the German bourgeoisie that had risen during the Napoleonic Wars, the German Confederation was established as a successor of the shattered Holy Roman Empire, likewise not a nation state but a loose association of the German princes, who agreed on suppressing such political activities of their subjects—a scheme that ultimately failed.