German Confederation

The German Confederation was the association of thirty-nine sovereign German states that the Congress of Vienna created in 1815 to replace the Holy Roman Empire destroyed by Napoleon. It was not a state but a perpetual alliance for security, with a single organ, the Federal Convention at Frankfurt under the formal presidency of Austria, where the great questions required unanimity and federal law bound the members. That structure was both its strength and its weakness: Austria and Prussia, the two giants inside it, paralyzed every reform while liberals demanded a real nation. The revolutions of 1848 tried and failed to turn the Confederation into an empire, and Bismarck finally broke it on the battlefield. Foreign kings voted inside it, Denmark for Holstein, the Netherlands for Luxembourg and Britain for Hanover, and Denmark's Schleswig rising of 1848 became the Confederation's federal war. After Prussia's victory in the Austro-Prussian War of 1866 the Confederation dissolved, Austria stepped out of Germany, and the North German Confederation took its place on the road to the Empire of 1871.