page_title: German Empire (1848–49)
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: German Empire (1848–49) / History
caption_attribution_description: Farblithographie, Jean Nicolas Ventadour, 1848. Druck: Eduard Gustav May, Frankfurt am Main. “Die innere Ansicht der Paulskirche in Frankfurt aM”
context_page_description: The German Empire was a short-lived nation state which existed from 1848 to 1849.
context_section_description: The state was created by the Frankfurt Parliament in spring 1848, following the March Revolution. The empire officially ended when the German Confederation was fully reconstituted in the Summer of 1851, but came to a de facto end in December 1849 when the Central German Government was replaced with a Federal Central Commission.
  The Empire struggled to be recognized by both German and foreign states. The German states, represented by the Federal Convention of the German Confederation, on July 12, 1848, acknowledged the Central German Government. In the following months, however, the larger German states did not always accept the decrees and laws of the Central German Government and the Frankfurt Parliament.
  Several foreign states recognized the Central Government and sent ambassadors: the United States, Sweden, the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, Sardinia, Sicily, and Greece. The French Second Republic and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland installed official envoys to keep contact with the Central Government.
  The first constitutional order of the German Empire was the Imperial Law concerning the introduction of a provisional Central Power for Germany, on June 28, 1848. With the order, the Frankfurt Parliament established the offices of Reichsverweser (Imperial Regent, a provisional monarch) and imperial ministers. A second constitutional order, the Frankfurt Constitution, on March 28, 1849, was accepted by 28 German states but not by the larger ones. Prussia, along with other German states, forced the Frankfurt Parliament into dissolution.
  Several of this German Empire's accomplishments outlasted it: the Frankfurt Constitution was used as a model in other states in the decades to follow and the electoral law was used nearly verbatim in 1867 for the election of the Reichstag of the North German Confederation. The Reichsflotte (Imperial Fleet) created by the Frankfurt Parliament lasted until 1852. The imperial law issuing a decree concerning bills of exchange (Allgemeine Deutsche Wechselordnungen, General German exchange bills) was considered to apply to nearly all of Germany.
caption: German National Assembly in St. Paul's Church, Frankfurt
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