ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the emergence of such a plan', its substance, and the means by which Metternich thwarted its realization. The evidence presented should establish the reality of the South German-Prussian challenge to Austrian direction of the German Confederation and to the conservative politics of Metternich, who saw any German condescension to constitutionalism or liberal economics as the first steps on the slippery road to revolution. A major threat to Metternich's German Confederation accompanied, the war scare that passed over Europe in 1831, when the July Revolution seemed to herald the crumbling of the Vienna Settlement of 1815 and the dawn of a new French revolutionary era. The impetus to such a perceptive, if premature, assessment was the European war scare of 1831, a scare that Austrian policies had a large part in provoking.
