The State of the Press in Nineteenth-Century Prussia 

As an author, journalist or even politician, you may find it important to consider the situation surrounding free press in the years leading up to the Revolutions of 1848.

Laws about press didn’t have much of an impact on the populace as a whole until the late eighteenth century, because printing was not widespread and a wide portion of the population was illiterate. In the 1790s, many more people started reading due to a huge increase in the printing of books in the German states, and so the press rose to the forefront. Starting in 1792, police examined newspapers more thoroughly before publication, and the Habsburgs banned public reading rooms, lending libraries and coffeehouse reading material in Vienna in 1798.

The loose German Confederation of 1815, had wide discrepancies in press freedom. Broadly speaking, censors were focused on three things: religious preservation, morality, and civic order. New ideas of liberty spreading through Europe provided impetus for stricter laws. In 1817, nationalist writings by students led to the “Carlsbad Decrees,” laws aimed at preventing the spread of press within the confederation, arguing that news harmless in one state could cause unrest in another. This meant that the states and the Diet had to constantly be on edge for bad press — an inconvenience that irritated even those who were in charge of doing the censorship.

The lawyer, writer and politician Johann Georg August Wirth established a “Press and Fatherland Society” in 1830, but within a year the Confederation made him a fugitive and accelerated censorship of the press. Anti-Christian writings, including David Strauss’s Life of Jesus (1835) provided an impetus for the state to protect their religious interest. When Frederick William IV came to power in 1840, it was thought he might be more lenient due to statements he had made about publicity, however he proved to be loyal to Christianity and the state and pursued laws against attacks on Christian values. Karl Marx, then a young newspaper editor, criticized the monarchy in books including Debates on Freedom of the Press (1842), and had his magazines and newspapers censored but escaped further punishment. Progressive politician Johann Jacoby was not so lucky — he was tried for high treason for publishing anti-crown material in 1841 and received 30 months in jail (although he was acquitted of high treason). 

But censorship only serves to drive free press underground. Censored books were often published in neighboring countries like Switzerland, and the bans led more people to read the censored material out of pure curiosity about why the government was banning it. These strands of “public opinion” played a major role in the political schism of the revolutions of 1848, with radical ideas spread underground and above-ground stirring up revolutionary sentiment. 

Best, 

Ian Svetkey 

Assistant Director 

Sources: 

Ohles, Frederik (2001). "Germany: The French Occupation (1806–14) and the German Confederation (1815–71)". In Jones, Derek (ed.). Censorship: A World Encyclopedia. Vol. 2, E–K. London: Fitzroy Dearborn. pp. 920–922. ISBN 978-1-57958-135-0. 

https://web.archive.org/web/20050826042119/http://www.ohiou.edu/~chastain/ip/jacoby.htm Karl Müssel: Bayreuth in acht Jahrhunderten. Geschichte der Stadt. Gondrom, Bayreuth 1993, ISBN 3-8112-0809-8, p. 148.