1. ECONOMICS AND POLITICS, 1830-1848
1819
Assassination of Kotzebue; Carlsbad Decrees
1830/32
Revolution in France & Belgium; Great Reform Act in Great Britain
1834
Zollverein unites all German states between Hamburg and Austria in a customs union
Karl Marx earns doctorate in Hegelian philosophy at Berlin; edits the Rhenish Gazette 1842/43
1844
Revolt of the Silesian hand-loom weavers
Feb. 1848
King Louis Philippe overthrown in Paris; France founds a Second Republic
March 1848
Revolution spreads to Vienna, Berlin, and many other German capitals

2. Meeting of the Thinkers’ Club (cartoon, ca
Meeting of the Thinkers’ Club (cartoon, ca. 1825) “The important question to be discussed in today’s meeting: How long will we be allowed to go on thinking?”
"Meeting of the Thinkers' Club," cartoon on the suppression of freedom of speech, ca. 1825: "The important question that will be considered in the meeting today: how long will we be allowed to go on thinking?“ On the wall behind the table hang the new “Laws of the Thinkers’ Club,” which state that keeping silent is the highest duty of club members, and that no member will be permitted to let his tongue wag freely.

3. Censorship proved difficult to enforce: “The Reading Room” (Dresden, 1840)
Heinrich Lukas Arnold, "Das Lesekabinett," painted in Dresden around 1840; oil on canvas; 74 x 89 cm.
Newspapers and magazines were read and discussed avidly in the 1840s, despite strict censorship.
SOURCE: Hans Ottomeyer and Hans-Joerg Czech, eds., _Deutsche Geschichte in Bildern und Zeugnissen_ (Berlin: Deutsches Historisches Museum, 2007), p. 138.

4. Eugene Delacroix, “Liberty Leading the People” (1830)
Eugene Delacroix, "Liberty Leading the People (28 July 1830),“ painted in 1830, now in the Louvre. SOURCE:
The greatest depiction of the insurrectionary tradition of the people of Paris, inspired by witnessing a brave charge by ordinary citizens across the Pont d'Arcole against troops of the royal garrison on 28 July The painting was exhibited at the official Salon of The painter sought to depict an all-class alliance of insurgents, including a young bourgeois in a top hat, a student of the Ecole Polytechnique behind him, and a National Guard officer dead on the ground, but viewers in 1831 were made uncomfortable by the extent to which this group was dominated by a peasant girl, a street urchin, and a ferocious workers with a saber. Critics demanded (quite unrealistically) to know where were the doctors, lawyers, merchants, and men of fashion who had fought on the barricades. One asked: "Was there only this rabble at those famous days in July?" The painting was soon banished to the attic of the Louvre and only became popular again under the Third Republic.

5. The Hambach Festival of May 1832: “We swear to be a nation of true brothers…/ We swear to be free, as were our sires/ And sooner die than live in slavery.”
The Hambach Festival of 1832.
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6. The Frankfurt Uprising of April 3, 1833
The Storming of Frankfurt's Main Police Station (April 3, 1833)
On April 3, 1833, about 50 armed students stormed Frankfurt's main police station and attempted to free political prisoners (and perhaps seize the treasury of the German Confederation). In doing so, they sought to give a signal for general revolution in Germany. Intending to arm the people, arrest members of the Federal Diet, and proclaim the Republic, the group, comprised mostly of members of student fraternities, was frustrated to learn that people were reluctant to participate. Soldiers soon recaptured the station and the uprising collapsed, after which restrictions were tightened yet again. Contemporary colored wood engraving.
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High resolution picture:

7. “Noble & priest shall oppress us no more/
“Open your eyes!” (ca. 1845)
“Noble & priest shall oppress us no more/
Far too long have they made our backs sore….”
--French cartoon, 1789
"Eyes Open!" – Neither the nobility, nor the clergy will oppress us any longer; they have broken the backs of the people for too long." In the Vormärz (or "pre-March") era, the name given to the period preceding the revolution of March 1848, grievances mounted against the economic, intellectual, and political oppression exercised by an alliance of the clergy and nobility. In the lithograph above, representatives of these groups crowd around a small table and attempt to extinguish the flame of the truth (Wahrheit). The names of other parties associated with the oppression of the people are printed on sacks and banners underneath the table; the parties range from the feudal corveé to the religious orthodoxy. Lithograph, c
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8. G.W.F. Hegel (1770-1831) published his Philosophy of Right in 1821
Karl Marx ( ):
In Trier at age 18
Jakob Schlesinger, Portrait of Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel,
oil on canvas; 36 x 28,8 cm; Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin
SOURCE: Catalogue of the Alte Nationalgalerie

9. EVEN AFTER RENOUNCING POLITICAL LIBERALISM, THE PRUSSIAN GOVERNMENT EMBRACED ECONOMIC LIBERALISM AND PUSHED THROUGH PAINFUL REFORMS:
Free choice of occupation (guilds lost the power to restrict entry into a trade)
Free choice of residence (towns lost the power to restrict poor relief to natives)
Free trade (internal tariffs should be abolished, and external tariffs lowered)
Strict enforcement of property rights in the countryside (landowners empowered to prevent poaching and “enclose” the village commons)
But the state defended the lords’ “residual feudal rights,” such as the monopoly over pressing grapes, forging iron, milling grain, and brewing beer.

10. The Zollverein formed by Prussia in 1834
Prussia’s vigorous highway building persuaded Bavaria to join, but Hanover & Hamburg did not….
The German Customs Unions led by Prussia as of 1834, with 18 member states and 23.5 million people. Bavaria and Saxony had each attempted to start their own customs unions in 1828, but a successful program of highway construction launched by Prussia helped to persuade them in 1833 to join the Zollverein as of January 1, On New Year’s Eve, lines of wagons formed at every border, and crowds of teamsters and merchants cheered as the tax barriers were demolished at midnight. Baden, Hesse-Nassau, and the city of Frankfurt a.M. joined in 1836, Brunswick in 1842, and Hanover in The free ports of Hamburg and Bremen held out until 1888.
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11. The Potsdam Railroad Station, 1838
The Potsdam train station in 1838 (color lithograph). The first railroad in Prussia connected the royal palaces in Berlin and Potsdam.
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12. The beginnings of Germany’s railroad network (1840)
In 1842 Prussia imposed a 33% tax on RR stock dividends over 5% to subsidize lines earning under 3.5%.
The first railroad lines in Germany were built as private initiatives funded by the merchants of Nuremberg and Cologne. As of 1840, only the Kingdom of Saxony had made a significant effort to link its major cities by rail.
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13. The German rail network in 1847
1840:
469 km
1847:
4,306 km
Price competition grew fierce wherever the RR arrived.
The Kingdom of Prussia greatly promoted railroad construction in 1842 by issuing a law to tax 1/3 of all railroad stock dividends over 5% in order to subsidize rail lines whose stock dividends ran under 3.5%. Germany’s railroad net expanded from 469 kilometers in 1840 to 4,306 kilometers in 1847.
SOURCE: and B.R. Mitchell, European Historical Statistics , abridged edition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), p. 315.

14. Continental Industrialization, ca
Continental Industrialization, ca. 1850: Coal was the most important raw material in the age of steam
WESTERN CIVILIZATION, 5th edn., p. 630.

15. Harkort Steam Engine Factory, Burg Wetter on the Ruhr, 1834
Alfred Rethel, “Die Harkort'sche Maschinenfabrik auf der Burg Wetter a.d. Ruhr,” 1834.
SOURCE:
This factory was founded around 1820 by Friedrich Harkort with funding from several merchants in Elberfeld (where Engels grew up). The Ruhr River Valley soon became the heart of the first wave of industrialization, based on the power of steam and steel, because it contains the richest coal deposits on the continent of Europe.

16. Blast furnaces at the new Königshütte Ironworks in Prussian Silesia, ca. 1830
The blast furnaces of the enormous Silesian ironworks at Koenigshuette, ca
SOURCE: T.C.W. Blanning, ed., _The Oxford Illustrated History of Modern Europe_ (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 45.

17. LARGE-SCALE FACTORY INDUSTRY WAS STILL RARE: The Pre-Industrial Working Class in Prussia (as percentage of the total labor force)
1822
1846
1861
Factory workers
2.5%
3.9%
5.3%
Miners
0.4%
0.8%
1.5%
Journeymen
6.4%
8.6%
9.6%
Day laborers
20.1%
21.1%
16.1%
Farmworkers
17.8%
15.9%
13.2%
Servants
1.9%
3.3%
All wage-earners
49.1%
52.8%
48.9%
Source: Gerd Hardach, "Klassen und Schichten in Deutschland, ," Geschichte und Gesellschaft, vol. 3 (1977), p. 510.

18. But handicraft trades were transformed by falling prices and new commercial practices (a cobbler’s shop, ca. 1850)
Cobbler's Workshop (c. 1850)
Depiction of customers and workers in a cobbler's workshop. The scene shows the respective activities of the shop's various workers and indicates a gendered division of labor. Lithograph after a drawing by T. Streich, c
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19. King Frederick William IV of Prussia (r
King Frederick William IV of Prussia (r ) paid more attention to medieval architecture than to economic problems.
Frederick William IV was crowned in 1840 and formally declared insane in 1859; as Blackbourn notes, he was a great patron of medievalist Romantic art and devoted more attention than any previous ruler of Prussia to inventing traditions to unify his people. He contributed most generously, for example, to the completion of the great cathedral of Cologne as a gesture of reconciliation with his Catholic subjects in the Rhineland. In 1842 he came to Cologne to celebrate the completion of the great gothic cathedral whose construction began in 1248.
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20. See the graph in Blackbourn, p. 85….
“The Seizure” (1847): Bad harvests spread hardship among family farmers throughout Germany in the 1840s
See the graph in Blackbourn, p. 85….
Ferdinand Georg Waldmueller, THE SEIZURE, 1847, oil painting in the Historical Museum of the City of Vienna (from Waissenberger, VIENNA ), p. 67.

21. K. W. Hübner, “The Silesian Weavers,” 1844: Merchants reacted to falling linen prices by reducing the price paid the weaver for each bolt of cloth….
“Die schlesischen Weber,” by Karl Wilhelm Hübner, oil painting from 1844.
SOURCE:
A melodramatic depiction of the anguish caused the hand-loom weavers because the wealthy merchants who bought their cloth kept reducing the prices offered. The basic problem was that their high-quality linen encountered ever sharper competition from the mechanized production of cheap cotton cloth in England and the Rhineland.

22. The Silesian weavers revolted in 1844, sacking the homes of many merchants (a look back by Käthe Kollwitz in 1897)
Der Weberzug
Radierung von Käthe Kollwitz
Ein Blatt aus dem Zyklus "Ein Weberaufstand" von Käthe Kollwitz.

23. “Hunger and Despair” “Government Assistance” (Satirical leaflet, early 1848)
An engraving from the "Fliegenden Blättern,” published clandestinely on the eve of the revolution of 1848, reminds its audience of the government’s response to the distress of the Silesian weavers. According to Hegel, the alleviation of poverty was the foremost duty of the state.
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24. Fiscal crisis induced Frederick William IV to convene Prussia’s first “United Diet” [Landtag] in April 1847
The opening of the First United Landtag (State Parliament) in the White Hall of the Royal Palace in Berlin on April 11, 1847 (contemporary lithograph by K. Loeillot de Mars). The Kingdom of Prussia experienced bankruptcy in 1847, and the House of Rothschild insisted that any application for a major loan by the royal government be counter-signed by a national representative body. Only this demand persuaded the king to invite the eight provincial assemblies of Prussia to send delegates to a “United Diet” in Berlin. This development convinced Marx and Engels that Prussia now stood at exactly the same point in historical development as did France at the beginning of the year 1789, when King Louis XVI ordered the holding of elections for the first time in 176 years for the “Estates General.” David Hansemann and other liberal businessmen lived up to these expectations in the United Diet by demanding vociferously that it transform itself into a “National Assembly” and write a democratic constitution for Prussia.
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25. The young Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels believed that Germany would now experience the “bourgeois revolution” that broke out in England in the 1640s and France in 1789

26. “Lamartine before City Hall, 25 February 1848
“Lamartine before City Hall, 25 February 1848.” The Paris crowd now proclaimed a “Second Republic,” led by this Romantic poet and the socialist Louis Blanc. But rural voters elected a more conservative legislature in April.
Henri-Félix-Emmanuel PHILIPPOTEAUX , “Lamartine devant l'Hôtel de Ville de Paris, le 25 février 1848.”
Petit Palais - Musée des Beaux-Arts de la ville de Paris ( After three days of heavy fighting against the royal garrison (February 22-24), the insurrectionary crowd spontaneously acclaims the Romantic poet Lamartine as head of the provisional government of the Second Republic.

27. The spread of popular uprisings in 1848: Governments were overthrown from Paris to Bucharest
Feb 22: Paris
Feb 27: Baden (Offenburg Program)
Mar 13: Vienna
Mar 15:
Budapest
Mar 18: Berlin
Mar 18: Milan
Mar 19: Munich
June 9: Bucharest
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28. J. Albrecht, “The First Victims of the Revolution: Scene Outside the Landhaus in Vienna, March 13, 1848”
J. Albrecht, "The First Victims of the Revolution: Scene outside the Landhaus in Vienna on 13 March 1848," lithograph in the Historical Museum of the City of Vienna (from Waissenberger, VIENNA, , p. 45). Army troops killed five citizens and wounded many more after they were ordered to clear the Herrengasse of demonstrators calling for the cabinet's resignation.

29. “A Cavalry Attack at the Municipal Armory,” March 13, 1848
August von Pettenkofen, "A Cavalry Attack in Front of the Municipal Armory," 1848, colored lithograph in the Historical Museum of the City of Vienna (from Waissenberger, VIENNA, , p. 46). The insurrectionaries stormed the armory in Vienna on 13 March 1848 to seize and distribute arms; here the Imperial cavalry counter-attacks, seeking to prevent their distribution.

30. “The Fall of Metternich on the Evening of March 13, 1848”
Franz Kollarz, "The Fall of Metternich on the Evening of 13 March 1848," lithograph in the Historical Museum of the City of Vienna. To show the people their willingness to reform the system, leading courtiers urged the Kaiser to dismiss the man who had been the dominant personality in the Austrian cabinet ever since 1809, and the emperor agreed. Here the prince maintains an ironic smile as he bids the cabinet ministers and generals farewell.
SOURCE: Waissenberger, _Vienna _, p. 47.

31. J.C. Schoeller, “Caricature of Metternich’s Flight,” 1848
Johann Christian Schoeller, "Caricature of Metternich's Flight," 1848, watercolor in the Historical Museum of the City of Vienna (from Waissenberger, VIENNA, , p. 49). Metternich's villa was destroyed on 14 March 1848, and he and his family were compelled to flee through Prague, Dresden, Hanover, and Amsterdam; everywhere they encountered jeering crowds until they were able to reach England five weeks later. The caption notes that there will be no more champagne for this famous bon vivant. The hostile crowds wave the new colors of a united Germany, an image of Metternich hanged in effigy, and a banner saying "Long live the constitution!"

32. “The National Guard of the Suburb of Döbling,” Vienna, 1848
Michael Neder, "The National Guard of the Suburb of Doebling in 1848," oil painting in the Historical Museum of the City of Vienna (from Waissenberger, VIENNA, , p. 49). Following the example of the Parisian revolutionaries of 1789, the Viennese began on 14 March 1848 to organize a citizens' militia with elected officers to replace the old army. Troops were expected to purchase their own uniform and weapons, which tended to restrict participation to the middle class, but in Vienna relatively poor students and workers played an ever larger role in the Guard.

33. Barricade fighting on the Breite Strasse in Berlin, March 18, 1848
Barricade fighting in front of the Kölln city hall on Breite Straße on March 18-19, By early March, the revolution seemed to have triumphed in Prussia as well. But after shots were fired accidentally on a peaceful crowd that had gathered in front of the Prussian king's palace to cheer his concessions to revolutionary demands, fierce street fighting returned to Berlin. Lithograph by Jab, 1848.
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34. Two apprentice locksmiths defend a barricade against royal troops, Berlin, March 18, 1848
Two apprentice locksmiths, Wilhelm Glasewaldt, age 19, and Ernst Zinna, age 17, defend the corner of Jaegerstrasse and Friedrichstrasse against the royal garrison, Berlin, 18 March 1848 (lithograph by Theodor Hosemann, 1848), from ILLUSTRIERTE GESCHICHTE DER DEUTSCHEN REVOLUTION 1848/49, p. 8.

35. Berliners celebrate on the barricades on the evening of March 18, 1848 (royal palace in background)
In this contemporary colored lithograph, the revolutionaries of Berlin celebrate on the barricades on the Breite Strasse on the evening of March 18, King Frederick William IV, in the royal palace glimpsed in the background, had just ordered his troops to cease fire, and they evacuated the city on March 19 (much to the dismay of the king’s brother William and the Prussian generals).
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