North German Confederation
북독일 연방
The federal state that Prussia, victorious in the Austro-Prussian War of 1866, formed from the German states north of the river Main, which existed from July 1867 to December 1870. The Prussian king was head of state and Bismarck federal chancellor; it had a Federal Council (Bundesrat) of delegates of the state governments and a Reichstag elected by universal manhood suffrage. When the south German states joined during the Franco-Prussian War it became the German Empire on 1 January 1871.
In depth
In 1866 Prussia went to war with Austria over Schleswig and Holstein and won in little more than a month; in the Peace of Prague Austria stepped back from German affairs and accepted a North German Confederation under Prussian leadership. On 18 August 1866 Prussia and fifteen north and central German states signed the North German Confederation Treaty, and Prussia annexed Hanover, Hesse-Kassel, Nassau and Frankfurt outright. In the election of 12 February 1867 to the constituent Reichstag (297 seats) the National Liberals won the most seats, 78. The draft constitution, drawn up to Bismarck's guidelines, passed on 16 April by 230 votes to 53, the Progress Party, many Catholics, August Bebel and the Polish members voting against. It came into force on 1 July, and two weeks later Wilhelm I appointed Bismarck federal chancellor.
Sovereignty lay with the Bundesrat of the state governments, while the Reichstag elected by universal manhood suffrage took part in legislation on an equal footing. The chancellor was appointed by the king of Prussia and answerable only to him. Prussia had four-fifths of the territory and population and 17 of the 43 votes in the Bundesrat, enough to block any constitutional amendment, which needed two-thirds. In three and a half years the Confederation legislated free movement, a common postal system and passports, equal rights for all denominations including Jews (1869), the metric system and a unified penal code (1870), and passed a trade code that included freedom of association. Prussia restructured the Customs Union to draw in the south German states, and a Customs Parliament was elected in 1868.
The labour movement won its first seats in this parliament. In February 1867 the Saxon People's Party, an anti-Prussian alliance of radical democrats and socialists, returned two members, among them Bebel, the first Marxist in a German parliament. In the August election the Saxon People's Party won three seats and the General German Workers' Association two. The parting of bourgeois radical democrats and socialists led in 1869 to the founding of the Social Democratic Workers' Party at Eisenach.
During the Franco-Prussian War Bavaria, Württemberg, Baden and Hesse-Darmstadt joined the Confederation by treaties signed in November 1870. On 8 December the Bundesrat voted to rename it the "German Empire" and to make the king of Prussia German Emperor; the Reichstag approved on 10 December, and the change took effect on 1 January 1871. The emperor was proclaimed at Versailles on 18 January 1871, and the Constitution of the German Empire, a minimally altered version of the North German one, took effect on 4 May. In the General Council's second address on the war, printed in The Civil War in France, Marx recalled King William's declaration in his speech from the throne to the North German Diet that he made war upon the emperor of the French and not upon the French nation, and warned that just as the Second Empire had thought the North German Confederation incompatible with its existence, autocratic Russia must think herself endangered by a German empire under Prussian leadership.