VII 
THE FRANKFORT NATIONAL ASSEMBLY 

{New-York Daily Tribune, No. 3389, February 27, 1852] 

It will perhaps be in the recollection of our readers that in the six 
preceding papers we followed up the revolutionary movement of 
Germany to the two great popular victories of March 13, in Vienna, 
and March 18, in Berlin. We saw, both in Austria and Prussia, the 
establishment of Constitutional Governments and the proclamation, 
as leading rules for all future policy, of liberal or middle-class 
principles; and the only difference observable between the two great 
centers of action was this, that in Prussia the liberal bourgeoisie in the 
persons of two wealthy merchants, Messrs. Camphausen and 
Hansemann, directly seized upon the reins of power; while in 
Austria, where the bourgeoisie was, politically, far less educated, the 
liberal Bureaucratie walked into office and professed to hold power 
in trust for them. We have further seen, how the parties and classes 
of society, that were heretofore all united in their opposition to the 
old Government, got divided among themselves after the victory or 
even during the struggle; and how that same liberal bourgeoisie that 
alone profited from the victory turned round immediately upon its 
allies of yesterday, assumed a hostile attitude against every class or 
party of a more advanced character, and concluded an alliance with 
the conquered feudal and bureaucratic interests. It was in fact 
evident, even from the beginning of the revolutionary drama, that 
the liberal bourgeoisie could not hold its ground against the 
vanquished, but not destroyed, feudal and bureaucratic parties 
except by relying upon the assistance of the popular and more 
advanced parties; and that it equally required, against the torrent of 
these more advanced masses, the assistance of the feudal nobility and 
of the bureaucracy. Thus, it was clear enough, that the bourgeoisie, 
in Austria and Prussia, did not possess sufficient strength to maintain 
their power and to adapt the institutions of the country to their own 
wants and ideas. The liberal Bourgeois Ministry was only a halting 
place from which, according to the turn circumstances might take, 
the country would either have to go on to the more advanced stage of 
Unitarian Republicanism, or to relapse into the old clerico-feudal 
and bureaucratic régime. At all events, the real, decisive struggle was 
yet to come; the events of March had only engaged the combat. 

Austria and Prussia being the two ruling States of Germany, every 
decisive revolutionary victory in Vienna or Berlin would have been 
decisive for all Germany. And as far as they went, the events of 
March, 1848, in these two cities, decided the turn of German affairs. 

3* 

It would, then; be superfluous to recur to the movements that 
occurred in the minor States; and we might, indeed, confine 
ourselves to the consideration of Austrian and Prussian affairs 
exclusively, if the existence of these minor States had not given rise 
to a body which was, by its very existence, a most striking proof of the 
abnormal situation of Germany and of the incompleteness of the late 
revolution; a body so abnormal, so ludicrous by its very position, and 
yet so full of its own importance, that history will, most likely, never 
afford a pendant to it. This body was the sq-called German National 
Assembly at Frankfort-on-the-Main. 

After the popular victories of Vienna and Berlin, it was a matter of 
course that there should be a Representative Assembly for all 
Germany. This body was consequently elected, and met at Frankfort, 
by the side of the old Federative Diet. The German National 
Assembly was expected, by the people, to settle every matter in 
dispute, and to act as the highest legislative authority for the whole of 
the German Confederation. But at the same time the Diet which had 
convoked it had in no way fixed its attributions. No one knew 
whether its decrees were to have force of law, or whether they were 
to be subject to the sanction of the Diet or of the individual 
Governments. In this perplexity, if the Assembly had been possessed 
of the least energy, it would have immediately dissolved and sent 
home the Diet—than which no corporate body was more unpopular 
in Germany—and replaced it by a Federal Government chosen from 
among its own members. It would have declared itself the only legal 
expression of the sovereign will of the German people, and thus 
attached legal validity to every one of its decrees. It would, above all, 
have secured to itself an organized and armed force in the country 
sufficient to put down any opposition on the part of the Govern- 
ments. And all this was easy, very easy at that early period of the 
revolution. But that would have been expecting a great deal too 
much from an Assembly composed in its majority of liberal attorneys 
and doctrinatre professors, an Assembly which, while it pretended to 
embody the very essence of German intellect and science, was in 
reality nothing but a stage where old and worn-out political 
characters exhibited their involuntary ludicrousness and_ their 
impotence of thought, as well as action, before the eyes of all 
Germany. This Assembly of old women was, from the first day of its 
existence, more frightened of the least popular movement than of 
all the reactionary plots of all the German Governments put 
together. It deliberated under the eyes of the Diet, nay, it almost 
craved the Diet’s sanction to its decrees, for its first resolutions had to 
be promulgated by that odious body. Instead of asserting its own 

Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany 4] 

sovereignty, it studiously avoided the discussion of any such 
dangerous questions. Instead of surrounding itself by a popular 
force, it passed to the order of the day over all the violent 
encroachments of the Governments; Mayence, under its very eyes, 
was placed in a state of siege and the people there disarmed, and the 
National Assembly did not stir.** Later on it elected Archduke John 
of Austria Regent of Germany, and declared that all its resolutions 
were to have the force of law**; but then, Archduke John was only 
instituted in his new dignity after the consent of all the Governments 
had been obtained, and he was instituted not by the Assembly, but by 
the Diet; and as to the legal force of the decrees of the Assembly, that 
point was never recognized by the larger Governments, nor enforced 
by the Assembly itself; it therefore remained in suspense. Thus we 
had the strange spectacle of an Assembly pretending to be the only 
legal representative of a great and sovereign nation, and yet never 
possessing either the will or the force to make its claims recognized. 
The debates of this body, without any practical result, were not even 
of any theoretical value, reproducing, as they did, nothing but the 
most hackneyed commonplace themes of superannuated philosophi- 
cal and juridical schools; every sentence that was said or rather 
stammered forth in that Assembly having been printed a thousand 
times over and a thousand times better long before. 

Thus, the pretended new central authority of Germany left every 
thing as it had found it. So, far from realizing the long-demanded 
unity of Germany, it did not dispossess the most insignificant of the 
princes who ruled her; it did not draw closer the bonds of union 
between her separated provinces; it never moved a single step to 
break down the custom-house barriers that separated Hanover from 
Prussia and Prussia from Austria; it did not even make the slightest 
attempt to remove the obnoxious dues that everywhere obstruct 
river navigation in Prussia. But the less this Assembly did, the more it 
blustered. It created a German Fleet—upon paper; it annexed 
Poland and Schleswig; it allowed German Austria to carry on war 
against Italy, and yet prohibited the Italians from following up the 
Austrians into their safe retreat in Germany; it gave three cheers and 
one cheer more for the French Republic and it received Hungarian 
Embassies, which certainly went home with far more confused ideas 
about Germany than what they had come with. 

This Assembly had been, in the beginning of the Revolution, the 
bugbear of all German Governments. They had counted upon a very 
dictatorial and revolutionary action on its part—an account of the 
very want of definiteness in which it had been found necessary to 
leave its competency. These Governments, therefore, got up a most 

comprehensive system of intrigues in order to weaken the influence 
of this dreaded body; but they proved to have more luck than wits, 
for this Assembly did the work of the Governments better than they 
themselves could have done. The chief feature among these 
intrigues was the convocation of local Legislative Assemblies, and in 
consequence, not only the lesser States convoked their Legislatures, 
but Prussia and Austria also called Constituent Assemblies. In these, 
as in the Frankfort House of Representatives, the liberal middle 
class, or its allies, liberal lawyers and bureaucrats, had the majority, 
and the turn affairs took in each of them was nearly the same. The 
only difference is this, that the German National Assembly was the 
parliament of an imaginary country, as it had declined the task of 
forming what nevertheless was its own first condition of existence, 
viz.: a United Germany; that it discussed the imaginary and 
never-to-be-carried-out measures of an imaginary Government of its 
own creation, and that it passed imaginary resolutions for which 
nobody cared; while in Austria and Prussia the constituent bodies 
were at least real parliaments, upsetting and creating real ministries, 
and forcing, for a time at least, their resolutions upon the Princes 
with whom they had to contend. They, too, were cowardly, and 
lacked enlarged views of revolutionary resolution; they, too, 
betrayed the people, and restored power to the hands of feudal, 
bureaucratic and military despotism. But then, they were at least 
obliged to discuss practical questions of immediate interest, and to 
live upon earth with other people, while the Frankfort humbugs 
were never happier than when they could roam in “the airy realms 
of dream,” im Luftreich des Traums.* Thus the proceedings of the 
Berlin and Vienna Constituents form an important part of German 
revolutionary history, while the lucubrations of the Frankfort 
collective tomfoolery merely interest the collector of literary and 
antiquarian curiosities. 

The people of Germany, deeply feeling the necessity of doing 
away with the obnoxious territorial division that scattered and 
annihilated the collective force of the nation, for some time expected 
to find in the Frankfort National Assembly at least the beginning of a 
new era. But the childish conduct of that set of wiseacres soon 
disenchanted the national enthusiasm. The disgraceful proceedings 
occasioned by the armistice of Malmoe (September, 1848),°> made 
the popular indignation burst out against a body, which, it had been 
hoped, would give the nation a fair field for action, and which 

“ Heinrich Heine, Deutschland, ein Wintermiirchen, Chapter VII.— Ed. 

Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany 43 

instead, carried away by unequalled cowardice, only restored to their 
former solidity the foundations upon which the present counter- 
revolutionary system is built. 

London, January, 1852