As in 1831 it all started with the news from Paris: once again a king had been dethroned, and there had been fighting at the barricades and revolutionary martyrs. Rioting broke out in the streets of almost every German capital. In the parliaments the moderate Liberal and democratic radical opposition was demanding freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, authorisation of political parties and the arming of the people (the establishment of citizen militias, to provide a bourgeois counterweight to the individual states armies, the guarantors of the old order). Finally, they crowned this subversion by demanding a German National Parliament. These March demands were followed by the March governments – everywhere, from Saxony to Baden, from Bavaria to Oldenburg, new cabinets consisting of Liberal dignitaries were formed. In Heidelberg delegates from the Liberal factions in the south German parliaments met up to found a pre-parliament, the first step to a national representative body for all Germans. Once again the nation succumbed to the optimism of spring and, without encountering very considerable opposition, the black-red-gold banner of the national movement waved over nearly all Germany.

Everything now depended on how the two leading powers of the German Confederation, Austria and Prussia, proceeded. The events of the March revolution in Berlin have been extensively told. They ended provisionally with the humiliation of king and army, the pillars of the absolutist régime, with the armament of the burghers, the appointment of a Liberal ministry and Friedrich Wilhelm's statement: ‘Prussia is henceforth merged into Germany.’