The Carlsbad Decrees

The Bundestag passes a number of repressive measures

During the Napoleonic occupation of the 1800s, Germany was gripped by two political movements: liberalism and nationalism. Whilst both liberals and nationalists wanted a unified German national state, liberals also demanded greater freedoms and wider political participation. After Napoleon’s fall, the Austrian chief minister Metternich led a coalition of German states in an attempt to suppress the new ideas and return to the old ways of princely absolutism. Metternich seized on two incidents in 1819 – the murder of the writer August von Kotzebue by a nationalist student, motivated by Kotzebue’s links to Russia, and the anti-Semitic “Hep-Hep riots” – as an excuse to launch an authoritarian crackdown.

Meeting with his allies in the Bohemian town of Carlsbad, Metternich issued a set of ordinances that came to be known as the Carlsbad Decrees. Adopted by the Bundestag of the German Confederation on 20 September 1819, the decrees suppressed public expressions of political opinion, censored publications, supervised universities, banned student associations and gymnastics clubs and persecuted those agitating for change. In this climate of fear, ordinary people had to be on their guard against state informers, and many withdrew into the private world of the Biedermeier era.