The revolutions which sweep through Europe in 1848 sparked riots and unrest, prompting Prussian
King Friedrich Wilhelm IV to propose a national assembly which considered a German constitution.
This resulted in elections in the various German states. But in March of 1849, Austria introduced a
new constitution treating her entire empire, including Hungary and north Italy, as a single unitary
state. Fearful, the German delegates at Frankfurt elected the Prussian king Friedrich Wilhelm IV as
Emperor of the Germans. On April 3, he turned it down and authoritarian governments were back in
charge by the spring of 1849 in both Berlin and Vienna.
Prussia and Austria vying for leadership of the German states remained the most important issue and
it flared up with the question of Schleswig-Holstein. Historically, Holstein had been within the
German empire and Schleswig outside it, but both duchies had been attached to the Danish crown
since 1460. In 1848, a revolutionary group seized Kiel, declared the independence of the two duchies
from Denmark and appealed to the German Confederation for help. The result was an invasion of
Schleswig-Holstein and then of Denmark itself by the Prussian army on behalf of the Confederation.
Political pressure forced the Prussians to withdraw and the two duchies were restored to Denmark
until another crisis in 1863 when joint Austrian and Prussian armies overran both Holstein and
Schleswig, resulting in the two duchies being ceded jointly to Prussia and Austria by the treaty of
Vienna in October 1864.
Under Bismarck, the agreement in 1865 that Prussia administer Schleswig while Austria would be
responsible for Holstein was unsatisfactory. Prussian troops marched from Schleswig into Holstein in
June, 1866. Austria fumed, and when on June 15 Saxony, Hanover and Hesse-Kassel refused to
promise their neutrality, Prussia invaded all three states. Prussia obtained a quick victory against
Austria in the war of 1866 largely as a result of reforms of the Prussian army under General Helmut
von Moltke who had greatly improved his army with recent technological developments. Eventually,
when a treaty was signed in Prague on August 23 under Bismarck's leadership, the entire German
world passed to Hohenzollern Prussia.
When France declared war in 1870, the three independent south German states (Württemberg,
Baden and Bavaria) place their armies under the command of Prussian king Wilhelm I. as predicted.
After the German victory, Wilhelm I accepted the title of Emperor. Bismarck issued a proclamation
in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, the symbol of French power that had bloodied and humiliated
Germany for decades. In the treaty of Frankfurt, France ceded Alsace and most of Lorraine back to
the new Germany, paid a massive indemnity of 5000 million francs and had to put up with German
occupation in part of France until the money was delivered, exactly what France had done to
Germany in 1807. The reconstitution of the ancient German Reich brought back the Reichstag as a
parliament with Bismarck himself as the first imperial chancellor. His German empire, like its
medieval prototype, consisted of separate constituent states: 4 kingdoms, 5 grand duchies, 13 duchies
and principalities, and the free cities of Hamburg, Lübeck and Bremen. It was, all the same, a nation,
and federal but with strong central control.