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the Netherlands, were heading inevitably towards a very un-genteel revolution.
    As revolutions go, the Revolution of 1848 was a peculiar affair. Though bloody and by appearances initially successful, it was ultimately unable to achieve its primary objectives of liberalising either society or the economy. It also largely failed in its most important ambition, which was the unification of the German Federation into a single German state, under a constitutional monarch. At its conclusion, exhausted revolutionaries managed at least theabdication of the feeble-minded Emperor Ferdinand I, Metternich's pawn for the past dozen years, and had him replaced by his 18-year-old nephew, ‘Franzl’. Metternich fled to London, though three years later, with most of the important revolutionary leaders executed or imprisoned and the others compliantly subsumed within various local assemblies, he returned to Vienna as advisor to Austria's fresh-faced 21-year-old Emperor, now known as Franz Joseph I.
    A short-lived but important achievement to grow out of the revolution was the freely-elected National Assembly or Nationalversammlung that met from March 1848 until its dissolution in May/June 1849. Like the ‘Bundestag’, it also met in Frankfurt, but at the Paulskirche (St Paul's Church). It was an elected assembly of lawyers, professors, intellectuals and idealists, and provided a forum in which the shape and nature of a united German State could be debated.
    The complexities of the debate should not be underestimated. The notion that disparate German states and far-flung German enclaves in Russia, Poland, Hungary, Romania and other corners of Europe could somehow join together to become a single state was fraught with conflict. Though the rise of France under Napoleon had made it obvious to everyone except the delegates at the Congress of Vienna that a united German state was a necessary survival tactic, the diplomacy needed to create this was more than even the bien-pensant members of the Paulskirche Assembly could achieve. Germany was simply not the tidy country then that it appears today. In the nineteenth century, the concept of ‘German’ was quite literally everywhere in Europe that wasn't Slavic or Latinate. The English king was represented in the German Bundestag by the House of Hanover, as were countless other non-German holdings which historically had ended up under the rule of various German heads. This extremely wide concept of ‘German’ extended beyond Britain and into the Netherlands and Scandinavia.
    Unification debates in the Paulskirche led to discussion of the pros and cons of a ‘Greater’ or ‘Lesser’ German solution. The ‘Greater’ solution included Austria and its many non-German holdings; the ‘Lesser’ solution excluded Austria altogether, which meant losing Vienna, the seat of the Habsburg Emperor and until then, the figurehead of all that was German. Defenders of the ‘Greater’ solution, who simply could not envisage a unified German state without such central players as Bohemia and Austria, toyed with the idea of subsuming non-German Austrian and Prussian holdings as satellites of a Greater Germany. Ultimately, however, it was clear that only with Austria excluded could the resulting enterprise be purely German. The price to pay would be high, so another solution was put forward to hive off Austria's German holdings, and allow them to join the united German statewhile excluding the non-German holdings altogether. This was not an arrangement that the Habsburgs were prepared to accept.
    Thus the Lesser German Solution eventually won through, and with Austria excluded from the newly mapped out German State, the National Assembly offered the Imperial German crown to the Prussian King, Friedrich Wilhelm IV, in April 1849. He refused, since he did not see it as a gift that was the people's to give. He would only accept the title if offered by other ruling families within the German Federation. As he is