Carlsbad Decrees

Impact

The results of the Carlsbad Decrees were dramatic. The forces of German conservatism now had the weapons with which to combat liberalism and nationalism at a basic level. The decrees banned nationalist student organizations, forbade student activism on pain of expulsion, curtailed faculty involvement in liberal and nationalist causes, dismissed those faculty members who had been active, and prohibited publishing nationalist and liberal materials at any level. Still, as a result of the Carlsbad Decrees, the members of the Jena Burschenschaft dissolved their organization, but that same night many of the students formed a secret society to carry on the spirit of the one that had been outlawed. As one historian of the period has written:

During the remainder of Metternich's age, there appeared to be almost no progress at all, and in the long years of this stagnation the hopes of German liberals almost died. Spies and officials of the governments persecuted the men who had helped to liberate Germany from Napoléon, and who now looked forward to still better things. (Turner, p. 224)

Among those persecuted were the educator Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, who had founded the Prussian gymnastic societies; the poet Ernst Moritz Arndt; the writer Johann Joseph von Görres; and the philosopher Jakob Friedrich Fries. Metternich hoped to use the commission of inquiry to root out subversives in the German states. His belief that secret societies in Germany and throughout Europe were centrally organized was never proved. The commission functioned for nearly eight years, during which time proceedings were instituted against 161 individuals, forty-four of whom were acquitted.

In a larger sense, the Carlsbad Decrees provided Metternich with the ability to coerce those German states that were reluctant to follow his lead. By using the power of the confederation, Metternich was able to force a number of the more independent-minded states to adhere to his wishes. Through the Carlsbad Decrees and other actions, Metternich suppressed revolutionary impulses for a generation. The conservatives' use of secret police, coercion, and censorship prevailed until the continent-wide revolutionary explosion of 1848, when revolts and insurrections for reform rocked France, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Poland, Italy, and even Brazil in South America. The forces of liberalism and nationalism had been forestalled for over three decades, but the revolutionary eruption of 1848 ended Metternich's career and initiated a sequence of events that pitted Prussia and Austria against each other for the leadership of German unification. Metternich was able to delay German nationalism, but he could not eradicate it.