Vormärz

Vormärz (German pronun­cia­tion: [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 emphasizing 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, it was characterized by Austrian and Prussian police states, which practiced censorship on a massive scale in response to revolutionary calls for liberalism. In a cultural sense, the same period is known as Biedermeier 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 erasing the achievements of the American and French revolutions, 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. After the "French period" in large German territories including the Rhineland, the implementation of the Napoleonic Code, and the Prussian reforms, the movement towards a constitution and a parliamentary system could be retarded, but not reversed.

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