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The period in the German Confederation before the March Revolution of 1848, dated by some from the Congress of Vienna in 1815 and by others from the July Revolution of 1830. Under the restoration order led by Metternich, Austria and Prussia suppressed the liberal and national movements by censorship and surveillance, while industrialisation, spreading pauperism and the harvest failures of the 1840s prepared the ground for revolution. Culturally it coincides with the Biedermeier era.
In depth
Internationally the era is known as the Age of Metternich. The Carlsbad Decrees of 1819 suppressed the student fraternities and the press; after the July Revolution of 1830 risings in Brunswick, Saxony, Hanover and elsewhere won constitutions in some states. The banned black, red and gold flags flew at the Hambach Festival of 1832, the storming of the Frankfurt guardhouses failed in 1833, and seven Göttingen professors were dismissed in 1837. Writers such as Heine, Herwegh and Büchner went into exile.
In the same years the German Customs Union of 1833 bound the states together economically, and national liberals saw it as a first step towards a Lesser German unification. The Silesian weavers' revolt of 1844, the harvest failures and famine of 1846–47 and the Berlin "potato revolution" of 1847 turned pauperism into a political question, and news of the February Revolution in Paris in 1848 set off the March Revolution.