ABSTRACT
The humble origin of many of the most energetic and articulate spokesmen of liberalism made social reform a central preoccupation. The resultant social mobility and the prodigious expansion of population which accompanied it – a 60 per cent increase in Prussia alone between 1815 and 1848 – were vital contributory factors to the economic and social crises of the Restoration period. Most liberals in early nineteenth century Germany had been strongly influenced by the German Enlightenment. The reform programmes introduced into several German states in the wake of Napoleonic conquest, most notably Prussia, were motivated in a general way by a belief in the need to replace a caste society by a more efficient and liberal state. The social context of the 1848 revolution is now firmly established. Historians continue to corroborate in detail the scale of local grievances which contributed to the outbreak.
