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| Turnout | 40–75% depending on the state | ||||||||||||||||||||
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Federal elections were held in all the 38 states of the German Confederation on 1 May 1848 to elect members of a new National Assembly known as the Frankfurt Parliament. The ballot was not secret, and elected 585 members, mostly from the middle class.
The Pre-Parliament (Vorparlement) convened in the Paulskirche in Frankfurt on 31 March 1848 and ended on 30 May 1849. Most of the 521 members of it were from South and West Germany, including 2 from Austria. There were 141 representatives from Prussia, of which 100 were from the Rhineland with a strong liberal tradition. The Pre-Parliament dispersed on 3 April having appointed a committee of 50. The radicals Friedrich Hecker and Gustav Struve were excluded as they had walked out; they had favored the abolition of both hereditary monarchy and standing armies, and a Federal constitution on North American lines. The rebuffed Hecker proclaimed the German Republic in Baden on 12 April, but the so-called Heckenputsch failed within a week. Hecker escaped to Switzerland and became a farmer in the United States. Later Struve also went into exile (in Switzerland and the United States) before returning to Germany.
The Pre-Parliament had favoured universal suffrage, although individual states set their own qualifications. While Austria, Prussia and Schleswig-Holstein imposed no restrictions, farm hands were excluded in Baden and Saxony. Bavaria and Wutternberg excluded domestic servants and workers, and Bavaria included only those paying direct taxation.
The Pre-Parliament set the ratio of one deputy to the National Assembly per 50,000 inhabitants of the German Confederation, totaling 649 deputies. However, Czech-majority constituencies in Bohemia and Moravia boycotted the election, reducing the total to 585. Those elected included 157 judges and lawyers, 138 high officials, over a hundred university and high school teachers, and about 40 merchants and industrialists. Most of the 90 members of the nobility were in the learned professions, and there was only one peasant and four handwerkers (skilled artisans or craftsmen).
The Frankfurt Parliament convened on 18 May at Frankfurt, when the members walked in solemn procession to the Paulskirche accompanied by the roar of cannon and the ringing of bells. It included the German political leaders of the past three decades: the political professors Friedrich Dahlmann, Johann Droysen and Georg Waitz; Ernst Arndt and Turnvater Jahn (Friedrich Jahn) from 1813; radicals like Robert Blum and Arnold Ruge; liberal nobles like Prince Felix Lichnowsky, and the Catholic leader Bishop Ketteler.
The German Confederation was an association of 39 predominantly German-speaking sovereign states in Central Europe. It was created by the Congress of Vienna in 1815 as a replacement of the former Holy Roman Empire, which had been dissolved in 1806 in reaction to the Napoleonic Wars.
The German revolutions of 1848–1849, the opening phase of which was also called the March Revolution, were initially part of the Revolutions of 1848 that broke out in many European countries. They were a series of loosely coordinated protests and rebellions in the states of the German Confederation, including the Austrian Empire. The revolutions, which stressed pan-Germanism, demonstrated popular discontent with the traditional, largely autocratic political structure of the thirty-nine independent states of the Confederation that inherited the German territory of the former Holy Roman Empire after its dismantlement as a result of the Napoleonic Wars. This process began in the mid-1840s.
The Frankfurt Parliament was the first freely elected parliament for all German states, including the German-populated areas of the Austrian Empire, elected on 1 May 1848.
Gustav Struve, known as Gustav von Struve until he gave up his title, was a German surgeon, politician, lawyer and publicist, and a revolutionary during the German revolutions of 1848–1849 in Baden, Germany. He also spent over a decade in the United States and was active there as a reformer.
William I was King of Württemberg from 30 October 1816 until his death.
Friedrich Franz Karl Hecker was a German lawyer, politician and revolutionary. He was one of the most popular speakers and agitators of the 1848 Revolution. After moving to the United States, he served as a brigade commander in the Union Army during the American Civil War.
St Paul's Church is a former Protestant church in Frankfurt, Germany, used as a national assembly hall. Its important political symbolism dates back to 1848 when the Frankfurt Parliament convened there, the first publicly and freely-elected German legislative body.
Frankfurt was a major city of the Holy Roman Empire, being the seat of imperial elections since 885 and the city for imperial coronations from 1562 until 1792. Frankfurt was declared an Imperial Free City in 1372, making the city an entity of Imperial immediacy, meaning immediately subordinate to the Holy Roman Emperor and not to a regional ruler or a local nobleman.
The Frankfurt Constitution or Constitution of St. Paul's Church, officially named the Constitution of the German Empire of 28 March 1849, was an unsuccessful attempt to create a unified German nation from the states of the German Confederation.
Friedrich Daniel Bassermann was a German liberal politician who is best known for calling for a pan-German Parliament at the Frankfurt Parliament. He emphasized the value of a national self-esteem based on progress and freedom.
The Hecker uprising was an attempt in April 1848 by Baden revolutionary leaders Friedrich Hecker, Gustav von Struve, and several other radical democrats to overthrow the monarchy and establish a republic in the Grand Duchy of Baden. The uprising was the first major clash in the Baden Revolution and among the first in the March Revolution in Germany, part of the broader Revolutions of 1848 across Europe. The main action of the uprising consisted of an armed civilian militia under the leadership of Friedrich Hecker moving from Konstanz on the Swiss border in the direction of Karlsruhe, the ducal capital, with the intention of joining with another armed group under the leadership of revolutionary poet Georg Herwegh there to topple the government. The two groups were halted independently by the troops of the German Confederation before they could combine forces.
The Baden Revolution of 1848/1849 was a regional uprising in the Grand Duchy of Baden which was part of the revolutionary unrest that gripped almost all of Central Europe at that time.
The factions in the Frankfurt Assembly were groups that developed among delegates to the Frankfurt Parliament that met from 18 May 1848 to 31 May 1849 in the Paulskirche in Frankfurt am Main. They coalesced as groups of like-minded representatives started meeting, and were named after the various hostelries at which they met.
The Reichstag of the North German Confederation was the federal state's lower house of parliament. The popularly elected Reichstag was responsible for federal legislation together with the Bundesrat, the upper house whose members were appointed by the governments of the individual states to represent their interests. Executive power lay with the Bundesrat and the king of Prussia acting as Bundespräsidium, or head of state. The Reichstag debated and approved or rejected taxes and expenditures and could propose laws in its own right. To become effective, all laws required the approval of both the Bundesrat and the Reichstag. Voting rights in Reichstag elections were advanced for the time, granting universal, equal, and secret suffrage to men above the age of 25.
The Grand Duchy of Baden was a state in south-west Germany on the east bank of the Rhine. It existed as a sovereign state between 1806 and 1871 and as part of the German Empire from 1871 until 1918.
The Palatine uprising was a rebellion that took place in May and June 1849 in the Rhenish Palatinate, then an exclave territory of the Kingdom of Bavaria. Related to uprisings across the Rhine river in Baden, it was part of the widespread Imperial Constitution Campaign (Reichsverfassungskampagne). Revolutionaries worked to defend the constitution as well as to secede from the Kingdom of Bavaria.
The Imperial Constitution campaign was an initiative driven by radical democratic politicians in Germany in the mid-19th century that developed into the civil warlike fighting in several German states known also as the May Uprisings (Maiaufstände). These conflicts against the counter-revolutionaries began in May 1849 and varied in length and intensity depending on the region. Some lasted until July that year. They marked the end phase of the popular and nationalist March Revolution that had started in March 1848.
Amalie Struve was a democratic radical participant in the 1848 March Revolution. She is also remembered as an early feminist and author.
Events from the year 1848 in Germany.
The Heppenheim Conference or Heppenheim Assembly was a meeting of 18 leading southern and western German liberal politicians on October 10, 1847, at the inn Zum halben Monde in Heppenheim, Bergstraße. A key outcome of the discussions at the Heppenheim conference was the demand for the creation of a German nation-state and the granting of civil rights. These demands can be seen as the program of the moderate bourgeois-liberal forces in the run-up to the March Revolution. At the same time, the meeting paved the way for the Frankfurt National Assembly.
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