Making of a German Constitution : a Slow Revolution

Undermining Absolutism • 1551840. 165 The heated constitutional struggles continued in Hanover right up to 1865,and liberals were in a decidedly weakened position. In his Die Rechtswidrigkeit desin Hannover bestehenden Verfassungszustandes, which he published anonymouslyin 1861, Gottlieb Planck described these events in detail and defended the validity ofthe 1848 Verfassungsgesetz. 166 As Frensdorff wrote, liberals in Hanover were indeeddisheartened after 1855 by the weakening of much of the legislation they had introducedafter 1848, including the 1850 procedural code. 167Paradoxically, constitutional transformation was given a new life by Hanover’sdefeat at Prussian hands in 1866. It was Planck who wrote the key articles in theZeitung für Nord Deutschland following annexation. 168 Here, he argued that a newepoch had begun and that annexed lands and Prussia must work together. In particular,he emphasized that the ‘passive role that Hanover had played in the last months’must be changed, and the annexed lands must as quickly as possible be made intoliving members of the Prussian State’, on an equal basis. 169 ‘The aims of the NationalLiberal Party’, he wrote, ‘would remain German unity and securing liberty’. 170 As henoted, Prussia had secured only military and financial unity, but it still had to securethe moral and spiritual unity of the annexed lands and this was exactly where he feltthat Hanover, specifically Hanover’s liberals, could exercise decisive influence. 171Indeed, as Frensdorff wrote, the triad of Hanoverians, namely Bennigsen, Miqueland Planck, wished to inject ‘fresh blood’ into the liberal movement in Prussia. 172Bismarck essentially reversed his position on legal reformation in these yearsand probably out of absolute necessity. He initially resisted calls to consolidate thelegal system before unification, and Prussia abstained from participation in the draftingand introduction of the Gemeines Handelsgesetzbuch of 1861. Bismarck wentso far as to begin legal reforms in Prussia in an attempt to make them an attractivealternative for the other German states. Yet, as James Brophy has shown, the Prussianstate accommodated the juridical and economic demands of the business elite. 173This would seem to indicate that Bismarck faced the need to compromise at leastas much as German liberals. Indeed, after the Austro-Prussian War of 1866, ‘legalreform provided Bismarck with an opportunity both to flatter the Hanoverians andto demonstrate to the suspicious middle states the good faith of Prussia in pursuing anational consolidation of Germany that, while under the auspices and to the advantageof Prussia, did not simply consist of an extension of the Prussian system to allof Germany’. 174The problem of how to integrate the newly acquired territories was a pressingstructural problem, and we should not underestimate the degree to which Bismarckmay have backed himself and conservatives into a corner. Under the threat of theapproaching Landtag elections in 1866, Bismarck warned conservative officials notto oppose the election of moderate liberals lest Prussia be turned over to radicalliberals and the revolutionary forces of liberal nationalism. His hope, as Otto Pflanzeargued, was ‘to overthrow parliamentarianism with parliamentarianism’. 175 Clearly,he hoped to compromise liberalism by embracing it, as other scholars have argued,