A German Revolution?
Even before the defeats of the revolutions of 1848, they recognized that the mutually advantageous arrangements between the middle class and an old regime which it sought to reform to its specifications, would make a bourgeois revolution in Germany dependent upon wider political upheavals across Europe- more specifically another revolutionary breakthrough in France bringing a European and perhaps world war in tow. This would be a recapitulation of the sequence that unfolded from 1789 to 1814, but on a far more developed world market basis, one which would put a nascent international proletariat into contention. The backwardness of the continent in comparison to England led liberal and conservative parties to support economic demands that were the opposite of the ones upheld by their counterparts across the channel. In Prussia as well as in France, the liberal opposition was protectionist, while in this period, the conservative establishment was pro-free trade. It might seem to follow t...