Nationalist movement, which had been gathering force throughout the educated classes of Western Europe for a generation, at length came to a head.  The whole of Germany was in a ferment, a strong Republican movement manifested itself, and in almost every one of the many capital cities there was a rising with a demand for a free constitution and parliamentary government, and for the consolidation of German national unity in accordance with the same democratic ideals.  The princes had no alternative but to give way, and, as a result, local Constitutions were granted, and a national Parliament was summoned to meet at Frankfurt, to draw up a national German Constitution on democratic lines.

The task before the Frankfurt Parliament was similar to that which has confronted British statesmen several times during the last century, in framing the Dominion of Canada, the Commonwealth of Australia, and the Union of South Africa—­the task of welding a number of separate State governments with the free consent of their populations into a homogeneous and democratic central authority.  But in the case of an old and still largely feudal country like Germany the task was infinitely more difficult, for it could not be successful without a levelling-up of the political ideals of the backward States, such as Prussia, and the elimination of many ancient associations and dynastic interests.  The Frankfurt Constitution did actually come into being, and it was nobly planned.  It guaranteed to every German citizen the rights of civil liberty, equality before the law, and responsible parliamentary government, both central and local.  But the mind of the German nation was not yet equal to its new responsibilities.  The Frankfurt Parliament, like the first Russian Duma, was out of touch with realities; it wasted precious time on the discussion of abstract questions of principle, and failed to meet the practical needs of the moment.  While it sat and talked, the enthusiasm which had created it gradually evaporated.  Meanwhile the more reactionary States, and the princes whose prerogatives were endangered, became more and more openly hostile.  All through 1849 the Parliament was losing members by defection, and by the end of the year its influence had sunk to vanishing point.

The movement which collapsed thus ignominiously was not a popular agitation in the English sense of the term:  like other movements of its generation it sprang, not from the people but from the well-to-do, and its strength lay among the professional and educated classes.  The Frankfurt Parliament was a predominantly middle-class assembly:  lawyers and professors, always an important element in German national life, were strongly represented in it and largely responsible for its failure.  Its collapse was a bitter disappointment, and drove many of its leaders into exile abroad, more particularly to the United States, where some of them, such as Carl Schurz, lived to play a noteworthy part under more democratic political institutions.