The Growth Of Participatory Politics, 1830-1848

Abstract

Abstract IN HIS introductory essay to the first edition of. the Staatslexikon (1834), Theodor Welcker described the contemporary period as a distinctively ‘political era’. Never before, he argued, had the ambitions of individuals and nations taken such a manifestly political form, never had the clash of parties so dominated people’s thought and action. Welcker was surely correct. During the 1830s and 1840s Germans’ interest in public affairs steadily increased. Political news, diluted but not destroyed by the censors, found its way into the daily Press; theories and opinions on political matters were expressed in lexicons and lecture halls, periodicals and public meetings. The social, literary, and scholarly institutions that sustained the public sphere extended their reach, diversified their functions, and deepened their social base. ‘All of human reality’, Julius Froebel believed, ‘is subsumed under the unity of politics’. Politics even threatened to permeate the private space of Biedermeier sociability: as one hostess complained in the 1830s, ‘The affliction of political conversation was no longer to be excluded from the drawing room’. The growth of participatory politics in the German states was part of the historical process set in motion by the great revolution¬ary upheavals of the late eighteenth century and furthered by the social, economic, and cultural developments we have considered in the preceding chapters. More and more Germans felt themselves to be part of this process, which brought to some the hope of emancipation and progress, to others the fear of chaos and destruction. But in addition to the grand drama of revolutionary change being played out on the European stage, everyday considerations also drew Germans towards public affairs.