The next three years were full of events.  The revolution of 1848 forced all the German sovereigns who had thus far retained absolute power, among them the King of Prussia, to grant representative constitutions to their people.  The same year witnessed the initiation of a great popular movement for the unification of Germany.  A national Parliament was assembled at Frankfort, and in 1849 it offered to the King of Prussia the German imperial crown; but the constitution it had drafted was so democratic, and the opposition of the German princes so great, that Frederick William felt obliged to refuse the offer.  An attempt was then made, at a Parliament held in Erfurt, to establish a “narrower Germany” under Prussian leadership; but this movement also came to nothing.  The Austrian government, paralyzed for a time by revolts in its own territories, had re-established its power and threatened Prussia with war.  Russia supported Austria, and Prussia submitted at Olmuetz (1850).  In these stirring years, Bismarck—­first as a member of the United Diet and then as a representative in the new Prussian Chamber of Deputies—­made himself prominent by hostility to the constitutional movement and championship of royal prerogative.  He defended the King’s refusal of the imperial crown, because “all the real gold in it would be gotten by melting up the Prussian crown”; and he compared the pact which the King, by accepting the Frankfort constitution, would make with the democracy, to the pact between the huntsman and the devil in the ‘Freischuetz’:  sooner or later, he declared, the people would come to the Emperor, and pointing to the Imperial arms, would say, “Do you fancy this eagle was given you for nothing?” He sat in the Erfurt Parliament, but had no faith in its success.  He opposed the constitution which it adopted, although this was far more conservative than that drafted at Frankfort, because he deemed it still too revolutionary.  During the Austro-Prussian disputes of 1850 he expressed himself, like the rest of the Prussian Conservatives, in favor of reconciliation with Austria, and he even defended the convention of Olmuetz.

After Olmuetz, the German Federal Diet, which had disappeared in 1848, was reconstituted at Frankfort, and to Frankfort Bismarck was sent, in 1857, as representative of Prussia.  This position, which he held for more than seven years, was essentially diplomatic, since the Federal Diet was merely a permanent congress of German ambassadors; and Bismarck, who had enjoyed no diplomatic training, owed his appointment partly to the fact that his record made him persona grata to the “presidential power,” Austria.  He soon forfeited the favor of that State by the steadfastness with which he resisted its pretensions to superior authority, and the energy with which he defended the constitutional parity of Prussia and the smaller States; but he won the confidence of the home government, and was consulted by the King and his ministers with