Vormarz

High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Vormärz (German pronunciation: English: pre-March) is the time period leading up to the failed March 1848 revolution in the German Confederation. Also known as the Age of Metternich, it was a period of Austrian and Prussian police states and vast censorship in response to calls for liberalism. The assassination of August von Kotzebue in 1819 led to the Carlsbad Decrees, which censored the press, limited academic discussion of the new political and economic philosophies of liberalism, and restricted public meetings and the public discussion of such ideas as national unity and wider suffrage. The ideals of the Enlightenment were reversed. The succession of the mentally handicapped Ferdinand I to the throne in 1835 made it possible for Metternich to have responsibility of the internal and external affairs of the Austrian Empire. Nationalism and the social developments in the empire created more tensions that would eventually erupt in the form of the March 1848 revolution. The emerging working class was looked at as a political, rather than a social, problem.