AP European History
AP European History
The peace settlement crafted by the Congress of Vienna signaled the triumph of the conservative order, socially and politically. Dangerous ideas (liberalism and nationalism) associated with the French Revolution and Napoleonic period had been “contained” by the territorial provisions of the 1815 agreement. The status quo had been once again defined. Order and stability were to be expected from the European state system.
Underestimating the power of ideas, conservative leaders after 1815 faced a dramatic confrontation between those sponsoring the “new” ideas (which required political change) and those of the traditional ruling classes, reluctant to make any accommodation with the believers in “new” ideas. The result in most states was government-sponsored repression followed by revolution. Few states chose to answer the call for liberal reform. Only nationalist impulses in Greece and Belgium were successful, for reasons that hardly comforted liberals. The intellectual climate of romanticism provided a volatile atmosphere in which these events unfolded, because this artistic and historical movement strangely accommodated warring political ideologies, from liberal to reactionary.
Initially, the great powers followed the lead of the Austrian statesman Prince Metternich (1773-1859) in suppressing any expression of liberal faith. Most leaders attempted to reinstitute conservative means of governmental control, in order to prevent reforms that would further increase people’s participation in government. The literate middle class, supported by urban workers, demanded reform, and at least the latter group was willing to use violence to obtain it.
Nationalism, liberalism, and socialism were all factors in the outbreak of revolution in the first half of the nineteenth century. All three isms were opposed by conservative groups (royalists, clergy, landed aristocracy) rooted in the way of life before the Revolution. Promoting forces of change was a younger generation, the heirs of the Enlightenment who believed in progress.
At the 1815 Congress of Vienna, enforcement provisions of the settlement were designed to guarantee stability and peace in the international arena. The Quadruple Alliance (Austria, England, Prussia, and Russia) that had defeated Napoleon was to continue through a new spirit of cooperation and consultation that would be referred to as the “Concert of Europe,”At the suggestion of Lord Castlereagh, Britain’s foreign minister, foreign policy issues affecting the international order would be worked out in meetings or congresses so that no one nation could act without the consent of the others. But under the leadership of Metternich, the congress system became a means to preserve the political status quo of autocracy in Europe against all ideas. The congress system was short-lived because continental powers could not always agree on cooperative action, and the English refused to support interference in the domestic affairs of nation-states. In the end each nation became guided by its own best interests.
British fears that Metternich would attempt the restoration of Spain’s colonies, then revolting in Latin America, prompted Canning to suggest, then support, the foreign policy of the United States of America known as the Monroe Doctrine (1823), which prohibited further colonization and intervention by Europe in the Western Hemisphere.
England hoped to replace Spain in establishing her own trading monopoly with these former Spanish colonies. Throughout the nineteenth century, British commercial interests dominated Latin America, in spite of the Monroe Doctrine.
Inspired by the French Revolution and Napoleon, Latin American nationalism between 1804 and 1824 witnessed the end of three centuries of Spanish colonial rule and the emergence of new heroes such as Toussaint L’Ouverture, Jose San Martin, Bernardo O’Higgins, Simon Bolivar, and Miguel Hidalgo in Haiti, Argentina, Chile, and Mexico, respectively.
Spain (1820-1823) In January 1820, a mutiny of army troops arose in opposition to the persecution of liberals by the restored monarch. King Ferdinand VII. The Congress of Verona (1822) authorized a French army to invade Spain and crush the revolutionaries, who wanted to revive the liberal constitution of 1812.
Italy (1820-1821) Incited to revolution by the activities of secret liberal-nationalist organizations (carbonari), liberals revolted in Naples in 1820, protesting the absolute rule of Ferdinand I of the kingdom of the Two Sicilies. The Congress of Laibach (1821) authorized Austria to invade and suppress the rebels. An attempted uprising (1821) in Piedmont was crushed by Austrian forces.
The Greek Revolt (1821-1830) The revolution that broke out in Greece in 1821, while primarily a nationalist uprising rather than a liberal revolution, was part of an issue known as “The Eastern Question.” Greece was part of the Ottoman Empire, whose vast territories were receding in the early nineteenth century. The weakness of the Ottoman Empire, and the political and economic ramifications of this instability for the balance of power in Europe, kept the major powers in a nervous state of tension.
Because of conflicting interests, the great powers were unable to respond in a pragmatic way for years. The revolt dominated European organs of opinion throughout the 1820s. It immediately set afire the sensitivities of romantics in the West. A Greek appeal to Christian Europe did not move Prussia or Austria, but did fuse England, France, and Russia into a united force that defeated a combined Turkish-Egyptian naval force at Navarino Bay (1827). Greek independence was recognized through the Treaty of Adrianople (1829). In the process, the poet George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824), died in Greece fighting for independence – and unsuccessfully fighting a fever.
Russian intervention on the side of Greek revolutionaries was based on Russian national interest (that is, any diminution of Ottoman power increased Russian chances of further expansion into the Turkish Empire).
Greek nationalism triumphed over the conservative Vienna settlement, and three of the five great powers had aided a movement that violated their agreement of 1815. The self-interests of the great powers demonstrated the growing power of nationalism in the international system.
The Decembrist Uprising in Russia (1825) The sudden death of Tsar Alexander on December 1, 1825, resulted in a crisis over the succession to the throne and produced the first significant uprising in Russian history. The expected succession of Constantine, older brother of Alexander I, believed to be more liberal than the late tsar, did not occur. Instead, the younger brother Nicholas, the antithesis of all things liberal, prepared to assume the throne that Constantine had secretly renounced.
Hoping to block Nicholas’s succession, a group of moderately liberal junior military officers staged a demonstration in late December 1825, in Saint Petersburg, only to see it quickly dissipated by artillery attacks ordered by Tsar Nicholas I.
The Decembrists were the first noble opponents of the autocratic Russian system who called attention to popular grievances in Russian society. The insurrection hatched in Nicholas I a pathological dislike for liberal reformers.
Nicholas promulgated a program called Official Nationality, with the slogan “Autocracy, Orthodoxy, and National Unity.” to lead Russia back to its historic roots. Through it, Nicholas I became Europe’s most reactionary monarch.
On the domestic front, Russia became a police state with censorship and state terrorism. The government allowed no representation, no comment on public affairs, and no education that was not strictly prescribed and carefully monitored. A profound alienation of Russian intellectual life ensued that gave birth to that special Russian class, the intelligentsia.
In foreign affairs, the Russian regime demonstrated the same extreme conservatism. It crushed the Polish Revolution of 1830-1831, and Russian troops played a key role in stamping out Hungarian nationalism in the Habsburg Empire, during the revolutionary uprisings of 1848-1849. Russia’s traditional desire for expansion at the expense of the Ottoman Empire produced a confrontation between France and Russia over who was entitled to protect Christians and the holy places in the Near East. When the sultan of Turkey awarded France the honor, Nicholas I was prepared to go to war against Turkey to uphold Russia’s right to speak for Slavic Christians. The result was the Crimean War (1854-1856), which Russia lost. Nicholas died (1855) during this war.
The climax of repression in England was the passing of the Six Acts (1819). Yet even as Parliament enacted those laws, young conservatives were questioning the wisdom of their party elders (the Duke of Wellington, Lord Castlereagh) and calling for moderation. During the 1820s, a group of younger Tories would moderate their party’s unbending conservatism.
George Canning and Robert Peel promoted reform, in opposition to the reactionary policies of earlier Tory leaders. With the help of liberal Whig politicians, the younger Tories found enough votes to put England on the road to liberal reform.
Canning inaugurated a liberal policy in foreign affairs, including abandonment of the congress system. Peel reformed prisons and the outdated criminal code, as well as established an efficient metropolitan police force (thus, police officers came to be called “bobbies,” nicknamed after Peel).
Parliament acted as well. It liberalized mercantile and navigation acts, enabling British colonies to trade with nations other than England. It repealed the 1673 Test Act, a religious test that barred non-Anglicans from participation in government. (It was defiance of the Test Act that led to the election of Irish leader Daniel O’Connell, a Catholic, to the British parliament.) The Catholic Emancipation Act (1829) granted full civil rights to Roman Catholics.
The momentum for liberal reform continued into the 1830s, as Britain realized that accommodation with the new merchant and financial classes was in the spirit of English history. The acid test of liberal reform, however, would come to focus on the willingness of Parliament to repeal the Corn Laws and reform itself.
The conservative grip on Europe following the turbulent 1820s was loosened when revolution broke out in France in 1830. By then, forces of liberalism and nationalism had become so strong that they constituted threats to the security of many governments. In eastern Europe, nationalism was the greater danger, while in the West the demands of middle-class liberals for political reforms grew louder.
The death of Louis XVIII in 1824 brought his brother, head of the ultra-royalists, to the throne as Charles X, and set up France for a new Old Regime – or else revolution.
Attempting to roll back revolutionary gains, Charles X alienated moderate forces on the right as well as the left. Continued violations of the Charter enabled French voters to register their displeasure in the elections of 1827 by giving the liberals a substantial gain in the Chamber of Deputies.
In 1829, when Charles X appointed a ministry led by the Prince de Polignac, the personification of Reaction in France, liberals considered this a dire insult. Elections in 1830 produced a stunning victory for them. Charles responded by issuing the Four Ordinances, which would have amounted to a royal coup d’etat had the radicals of Paris, mostly workers and students raising barricades in the narrow streets, not revolted with the intention of establishing a republic. Charles abdicated and fled France.
The liberals in the Chamber of Deputies, under the leadership of Adolphe Thiers, preferred a constitutional cocktail – without Bourbon. With the leadership of Talleyrand and the Marquis de Lafayette, hero of the American revolution, they agreed on Louis-Philippe, head of the Orleans family and royal cousin to Charles X. Once again, Talleyrand had successfully betrayed a master.
Bourgeois (upper-middle-class) bankers and businessmen now controlled France. Louis-Philippe was “the bourgeois king” who would tilt government toward these interests. While the July monarchy of Louis Philippe was politically more liberal than the Restoration government, socially it proved to be quite conservative.
The news of the successful July Revolution in France served as a spark (“When France sneezes, the rest of Europe catches cold”) igniting revolution throughout Europe.
Since its merger with Holland in 1815. Belgium had never reconciled itself to rule by a country with a different language, religion, and economic life. Inspired by the news of the July Revolution in France, and an opera about a revolt in 1647 Naples, revolt against Dutch rule broke out in Brussels, led by students and workers. The Dutch army was defeated and forced to withdraw from Belgium by the threat of a Franco-British fleet. A national congress wrote a liberal constitution. In 183 I, Leopold of Saxe-Coburg (reigned 1831-1865) became king of the Belgians. In 1839, the great powers declared the neutrality of Belgium, including the Scheldt River.
The new tsar, Nicholas I (reigned 1825-1855), had a good opportunity to demonstrate his extreme conservatism in foreign policy when an insurrection broke out in 1830 in Warsaw. This nationalist uprising challenged the historic Russian domination of Poland. The Poles drove out the Russian garrison, and a revolutionary government deposed the tsar as king and proclaimed the independence of Poland.
Nicholas ordered the Russian army to invade; it ruthlessly crushed the nationalist rebellion. Poland became “a land of graves and crosses.” The Organic Statute of 1832 made Poland an integral part of the Russian Empire. The great composer Fryderyk Chopin (1810-1849) happened to be out of the country when the revolt occurred. When it was crushed in 1831, he was in Stuttgart, Germany, and there he composed his great Revolutionary Etude to a homeland he would never see again.
Outbreaks of discontent occurred in northern Italy, centering on Modena, Parma, and the Papal States. The inspiration for Italian nationalists to dream of unification came from (1) Giuseppe Mazzini and his secret revolutionary society called Young Italy; and (2) the Carbonari, the secret societies that advocated the use of force to achieve national unification. Too disorganized, Italian revolutionaries were easily crushed by Austrian troops acting on Metternich’s principle of international intervention. Still, the Italian risorgimento (resurgence of the Italian spirit) was well under way.
The Carlsbad Decrees of 1819 effectively restricted freedom in the Germanies. Hearing of France’s July Revolution, German students and professors led demonstrations that forced temporary grants of constitutions in several states. These expressions of liberal sentiment and nationalist desires for German unification were easily crushed by the German Confederation, as steered by Metternich with his influence over Prussia.
The death of George IV and accession of William IV in 1830 resulted in a general parliamentary election in which the opposition political party, the Whigs, scored major gains with their platform calling for parliamentary reform. With the Tory party divided, the king asked the leader of the Whigs. Earl Grey (1764-1845), to form a government.
Immediately, the Whigs introduced a major reform bill designed to increase the number of voters by 50 percent and to eliminate underpopulated electoral districts (“rotten boroughs”) and replace them with representatives for previously unrepresented manufacturing districts and cities, especially in the industrial Midlands.
After a national debate, new elections, and a threat from William IV to alter the composition of the House of Lords, Parliament enacted the Great Reform Bill of 1832. While the Reform Bill did not resolve all political inequities in British political life, it marked a beginning. Subsequent reforms would redraw the landscape of British society.
Neither the forces of revolution nor those of Reaction were able to maintain the upper hand between 1789 and 1848. Liberalism and nationalism, socialism and democracy, were on the march, but the forces of conservatism and reaction were still strong enough to contain them. The polarization of Europe was becoming clear: the liberal middle-class West, which advocated constitutionalism and industrial progress; and the authoritarian East, committed to preserving the status quo. The confrontation would continue until one or the other side would win out decisively.
The year 1848 is considered the watershed of the nineteenth century. The revolutionary disturbances of the first half of the century reached a climax in a new wave of revolutions that extended from Scandinavia to southern Italy, from France to central Europe. Only England and Russia avoided violent upheaval.
The issues were substantially the same as in 1789. What was new in 1848 was that these demands were far more widespread and irrepressible than before. Whole classes and nations demanded to be fully included in society. The French Revolution of 1789 came at the end of a period (“ancien regime”), while the revolutions of 1848 signaled the beginning of a new age. Being aggravated by a rapid growth in population and the social disruption of industrialism and urbanization, a massive tide of discontent swept across the western world.
The 1848 upheavals shared the strong influences of romanticism, nationalism, and liberalism, as well as a new factor of economic dislocation and instability throughout most of Europe. Some authorities believe that it was the absence of liberty that was most responsible for the uprisings.
Several similar conditions existed in several countries:
Middle-class predominance in the unregulated economy continued to drive liberals to push for more reform of government and for civil liberty. They pursued this by enlisting the help of the working classes in putting more pressure on the government to change. The marriage of liberals and workers would be short-lived.
France In France, working-class discontent and liberals’ unhappiness with the corrupt regime of Louis Philippe – especially his minister François Guizot – erupted in street riots in Paris on February 22 and 23, 1848. With workers in control of Paris, Louis Philippe abdicated on February 24, and a provisional government proclaimed the Second French Republic.
Heading the provisional government was the liberal Alphonse Lamartine (1790-1869), a poet who favored a moderate republic and political democracy. Lamartine’s bourgeois allies had little sympathy for the working poor and did not intend to pursue a social revolution.
Working-class groups were united by their leader Louis Blanc (1811-1882), a socialist who expected the provisional government to deal with the unemployed and anticipated the power of the state to improve life and the conditions of labor. Pressed by the demands of Blanc and his followers, the provisional government established national workshops (ateliers) to provide work and relief for thousands of unemployed workers.
An election in April resulted in a National Assembly dominated by moderate republicans and conservatives under Lamartine, who regarded socialist ideas as threats to private property. When Lamartine’s government closed the national workshops, Parisian workers, feeling that their revolution had been nullified, took to the streets again.
Later called the “June Days:’ this new revolution (June 23-26, 1848) was unlike previous uprisings in France. It marked the inauguration of genuine class warfare; it was a revolt against poverty and a cry for the redistribution of property. It foreshadowed the great social revolutions of the twentieth century. The revolt was extinguished after General Cavaignac was given dictatorial powers by the government. The June Days confirmed the political predominance of conservative property holders, including well-off peasants, in French life.
The Constitution of the Second Republic provided for a unicameral legislature (manned by the current members of the National Assembly) and executive power vested in a popularly elected president. When the election returns were counted, the candidate of the government, General Cavaignac, was soundly defeated by a “dark horse,” Prince Louis Napoleon Bonaparte (1808-1873), a nephew of the great emperor. On December 20, 1848, Louis Napoleon was installed as president of the Republic.
It was clear that voters turned to the name Bonaparte for stability and greatness. They expected him to prevent further working-class disorders. However, the election of Louis Napoleon doomed the Second Republic. He was a Bonaparte, dedicated to his own fame and vanity-not republican institutions. On December 2, 1851, Louis Napoleon staged a bloody coup d’etat to kill the republic; a year later, in 1852, he became Emperor Napoleon III. France once again had, like a courtesan, flirted with republicanism only to drop it for a stronger, better-paying leader.
Italian nationalists and liberals wanted to end Austrian, Bourbon (Naples and Sicily), and papal domination, to unite these disparate areas in a unified liberal nation. A revolt by liberals in Sicily in January 1848 was followed by the granting of liberal constitutions in Naples, Tuscany, Piedmont, and the Papal States, Milan and Venice expelled their Austrian rulers. In March 1848, following the news of the revolution in Vienna, a fresh outburst of revolution against Austria occurred in Lombardy and Venetia, with Sardinia-Piedmont declaring war on Austria. Simultaneously, Italian patriots attacked the Papal States, forcing Pope Pius IX to flee to Naples for refuge.
The temporary nature of these successes was illustrated by the speed with which conservative forces regained control. In the North, Austrian Field Marshal Joseph von Radetzky swept aside opposition, regaining Lombardy and Venetia and crushing Sardinia-Piedmont. In the Papal States, the establishment of the Roman Republic (February 1849) under the leadership of Giuseppe Mazzini and the protection of Giuseppe Garibaldi failed when French troops took Rome in July 1849, after a heroic defense by Garibaldi. Pope Pius IX returned to Rome cured of his liberal leanings, In the South and in Sicily, the revolts were suppressed by the former rulers.
Within eighteen months, the revolutions of 1848 had failed throughout Italy. Among explanations for these failures were the failure of conservative, rural people to support the revolution: the divisions in aim and technique among the revolutionaries: the fear the radicals aroused among moderate groups of Italians, who would be needed to guarantee the success of any revolution: and the general lack of experience and administrative ability on the part of the revolutionists.
Italy Charles Albert, king of Sardinia, having granted his people a constitution, and hoping to add the Habsburgs’s Italian holdings to his kingdom, declared war on Austria. Unfortunately, the Sardinian army was twice defeated in battle (at Custozza and Novara) by Austrian General Radetzky.
King Charles Albert abdicated in favor of his son, Victor Emmanuel, who was destined to complete the unification of Italy (1859-1870).
The revolutions of 1848 failed in Austria for several reasons. The subject nationalities sometimes hated each other more than they despised Austria. Habsburgs used the divisions between the ethnic groups as an effective weapon against each. The imperial army had remained loyal to its aristocratic commanders, who favored absolutism. There were too few industrial workers and an equally small middle class. Workers could not exert political power, and the middle class feared working-class radicalism and rallied to the government as defender of the status quo.
The Austrian Empire was vulnerable to revolutionary challenge. Declared in 1804, as the Holy Roman Empire was dying (death: 1806), the new Austrian Empire was a collection of subject nationalities (more non-Germans than Germans) stirred by acute nationalism, its government was reactionary (liberal institutions were nonexistent), and its reliance on serfdom doomed the mass of people to misery, As soon as news of the February Days in France reached the borders of the empire, rebellions began. The long-suppressed opponents of the government believed the time had come to introduce liberal institutions into the empire.
Vienna In March 1848, Hungarian criticism of Habsburg rule was initiated by the Magyar nationalist Louis Kossuth (1802-1894), who demanded Hungarian independence. Students and workers in Vienna rushed to the streets to demonstrate on behalf of a more liberal government. The army failed to restore order, and Prince Metternich, symbol of reaction, resigned and fled the country. Emperor Ferdinand I (reigned 1835-1848) granted a moderately liberal constitution, but its shortcomings dissatisfied more radical elements, and continual disorder prompted the emperor to flee from Vienna to Innsbruck, where he relied on his army to restore order in the empire. Austrian imperial troops remained loyal to the Habsburgs. Prince Felix von Schwarzenberg, Chancellor of Austria, was put in charge of restoring control.
A people’s committee ruled Vienna, where a liberal assembly gathered to write a constitution. In Hungary and Bohemia, revolutionary outbreaks were successful.
The inability of the revolutionary groups in Vienna to govern effectively made it easier for the Habsburgs to lay siege to Vienna in October 1848. The rebels surrendered, and Emperor Ferdinand abdicated in favor of his young nephew, Francis Joseph (reigned 1848-1916), who promptly restored royal absolutism.
The imperial government had been saved at Vienna through the loyalty of the army and the lack of ruling capacity on the part of the revolutionaries. The only thing the revolutionaries could agree on was their hatred of the Habsburg dynasty.
Bohemia Nationalist feeling among Bohemians (Czechs) had been smoldering since the Hussite Wars. They demanded a constitution and autonomy within the Habsburg Empire.
A Pan-Slav Congress meeting in June 1848 attempted to unite all Slavic peoples, but accomplished little, because divisions were more decisive among them than was unified opposition to Habsburg control. During the congress’s doomed but symbolically important tenure, Austrian military leader General-prince Alfred von Windischgrkitz bombed Prague into submission, accidentally killing his own wife in her palace. Prague submitted to military occupation, followed by a military dictatorship in July, after all revolutionary groups were crushed.
Hungary The kingdom of Hungary was a state of about twelve million under Habsburg authority. Magyars or Hungarians, who represented about five million subjects of the emperor, enjoyed a privileged position in the empire. The remaining seven million Slavic, Jewish, Polish, Romanian, and other natives were powerless.
In March 1848, Louis Kossuth took over direction of the movement and tamed a more radical rebellion. The nationalists declared autonomy in April, but failed to win popular support for the revolution, because of tyrannical treatment of Slavic minorities. Since the government in Vienna was distracted by revolutions everywhere in the empire in the summer and fall of 1848, Kossuth had time to organize an army to fight for Hungarian independence.
Austria declared war on Hungary on October 3, 1848, and Hungarian armies drove to within sight of Vienna. But desperate resistance from Slavic minorities forced the Hungarians to withdraw. Hungary was invaded by an Austrian army from the West, in June 1849, and a Russian army (Nicholas offered assistance to new emperor Francis Joseph) from the North. Along with Serbian resistance in the South and Romanian resistance in the East, the opposition proved too much for Kossuth’s Hungarian Republic (proclaimed in April 1849), which was defeated. Kossuth fled into exile, while thirteen of his guards were executed. Not until Austria was defeated by Prussia, in 1866, would Hungary be in a position again to demand equality with Austria.
The immediate effect of the 1848 revolution in France was a series of liberal and nationalistic demonstrations in the German states (March 1848), with rulers promising liberal concessions. The liberals’ demand for constitutional government was coupled with another demand: a union or federation of the German states. While demonstrations by students, workers, and the middle class produced the promise of a liberal future, the permanent success or failure of these “promises” rested on Prussian reaction.
Prussia, the Frankfurt Parliament, and German Unification Under Frederick William IV (reigned 1848-1861). Prussia moved from revolution to reaction. After agreeing to liberalize the Prussian government following street rioting in Berlin, the king rejected the constitution written by a special assembly. The liberal ministry resigned and was replaced by a conservative one. By fall, the king felt powerful enough to substitute his constitution, which guaranteed royal control of government, with a three-class system of indirect voting that excluded all but landlords and wealthy bourgeois from office. This system prevailed in Prussia until 1918. Finally, the government ministry was responsible to the king and the military services swore loyalty to the king alone.
Self-appointed liberal and nationalist leaders called for elections to a constituent assembly, from all states belonging to the 8und, for the purpose of unifying the German states. Meeting in May 1848, the Frankfurt parliament was dominated by intellectuals, professionals, lawyers, businessmen, and writers. After a year of deliberating the issues of (1) monarchy or republic, (2) federal union or centralized state, and (3) boundaries (that is, only German-populated or mixed nationalities), the assembly produced a constitution.
The principal problem facing the Frankfurt Assembly was to obtain Prussian support. The smaller German states generally favored the Frankfurt Constitution, as did liberals throughout the large-and middle-sized states. Austria made it clear that it was opposed to the work of the assembly and would remain in favor of the present system.
Assembly leaders made the decision to stake their demands for a united Germany on Frederick William IV of Prussia. They chose him as emperor in April 1849, only to have him reject the offer because he was a divine-right monarch, not subject to popularly elected assemblies. Without Prussia, the German states could not succeed, so the Frankfurt parliament dissolved without achieving much aside from the airing of liberal desires.
Frederick William IV had his own plans for uniting Germany. After refusing Frankfurt’s offer, which he considered a “crown from the gutter:’ he offered his plan to German princes, wherein Prussia would playa prominent role, along with Austria. When Austria demanded allegiance to the Bund the Prussian king realized pushing his plan would involve him in a war with Austria and her allies (including Russia). In November 1850, Prussia agreed to forego the idea of uniting the German states at a meeting with Austria later called the “Humiliation of Olmutz.” Austria had confirmed its domination of the German Bund.