Vormärz

Vormärz (German pronunciation: [ˈfoːɐ̯ˌmɛʁts] ; English: pre-March) was a period in the history of Germany preceding the 1848 March Revolution in the states of the German Confederation. The beginning of the period is less well-defined. Some place the starting point directly after the fall of Napoleon and the establishment of the German Confederation in 1815. Others, typically those who emphasise the Vormärz as a period of political uprising, place the beginning at the French July Revolution of 1830. The era also saw Germany gradually shifting from an agriculture-based society to an industrial one, during the late Industrial Revolution. This was accompanied by developments in science, literacy, literature and political awareness. Internationally known as the Age of Metternich, within Germany it was characterized by the dominance of Austria and Prussia in the German Confederation. Both Austria and Prussia established repressive absolutist police states domestically, and pressured other German states to do the same. These authoritarian regimes practiced censorship and mass surveillance on an unprecedented scale in response to even moderate reformist calls for liberalism, constitutional monarchy, and German unification, as well as more radical, revolutionary calls for republicanism and universal suffrage. Culturally, this period is known as the Biedermeier era. As such it is seen as a conclusion of the Romanticist era.¶

The text above is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Vormärz”, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence.¶

Vormärz is Period of German history before the 1848 revolution, according to the structured record cited below. This entry was generated automatically from that record and has not yet been reviewed by a person familiar with the tradition.¹¶

The source record links this tradition to 6 external registers, which can be verified through the citation.¹¶