A three-and-a-half-year state quietly built the legal skeleton of modern Germany
Between July 1867 and December 1870, Germany north of the River Main was a single federal state led by Prussia. It lasted barely three and a half years, yet it introduced universal manhood suffrage, freedom of movement, equal rights for all faiths and the metric system, and counts as the earliest continuous legal ancestor of today's Federal Republic.
The German Confederation created at the Congress of Vienna in 1815 was a loose, defence-minded league of 39 states dominated by Austria and Prussia, disappointing Germans who had hoped for a nation after fighting Napoleon. Prussia's customs union of 1834 bound most of them economically but left the big question open: should a united Germany include Austria or not? The Frankfurt Assembly of 1848 leaned towards a smaller Germany without Austria, then collapsed when Prussia rejected its constitution.
War answered the question. In 1866 a dispute over Schleswig and Holstein set Austria against Prussia, with the larger states such as Bavaria and Saxony siding with Vienna. Otto von Bismarck pulled Prussia out of the old confederation and declared it finished; the fighting lasted little more than a month. At the Peace of Prague Austria agreed to stay out of German affairs, and Prussia swallowed Hanover, Hesse-Kassel, Nassau and Frankfurt outright. On 18 August 1866 Prussia and fifteen other states signed a treaty that led to the new confederation.
Its constitution, drafted to Bismarck's guidelines, passed on 16 April 1867 by 230 votes to 53 and took effect on 1 July. A Federal Council of state delegates held sovereignty, while a Reichstag elected by all adult men shared law-making equally. Prussia held four-fifths of the land and people but only 17 of 43 council votes; since amendments needed 29, it could still block any change. The Prussian king was head of state and commander-in-chief, and Bismarck served as chancellor answerable only to him.
The National Liberals, the largest party, pushed legal unification: free movement in 1867, equal rights for religious denominations including Jews in 1869, a common penal code in 1870, though without abolishing the death penalty as they had hoped. Bismarck held back from absorbing the southern states, knowing it would mean war with France. When that war came and was won, the confederation's members became the core of the German Empire proclaimed on 18 January 1871.
Source: North German Confederation
