Germany did not exist as such, but there was a German Confederation of States (formed by the Congress of Vienna at the end of the Napoleonic wars) made up of Prussia, Austria, Bavaria, Saxony, and so on, each still with its duke, prince, or king at its head.

After Napoleon, kings and nobles were restored in Europe, who were even more absolutist than before. Their fear of fresh revolutions caused them to discourage liberal ideas and reform to an even greater degree than would be usual.

“For nearly forty years the idea of the Holy Alliance, the Concert of Europe which arose out of it, and the series of congresses and conferences that succeeded the concert, kept an insecure peace in war-exhausted Europe. Two main things prevented that period from being a complete social and international peace, and prepared the way for the cycle of wars between 1854 and 1871. The first of these was the tendency of the royal courts concerned, towards the restoration of unfair privilege and interference with freedom of thought and writing and teaching. … The obstinate disposition of Monarchy to march back towards past conditions was first and most particularly manifest in Spain. Here even the Inquisition was restored.”

H. G. Wells, Outline of History, Part II, 37.6, “The Map of Europe in 1815.”

The failure of the French Revolution to produce any lasting change, the even deeper entrenchment of absolutist kings and nobles in Europe, and a growing knowledge of unprecedented personal freedom and opportunity of immigrants to America, not enjoyed by their family members still remaining in Europe, led to a series of uprisings of the people against their absolutist rulers in 1848.

“The history of Europe, then, from 1815 to 1848 was, generally speaking, a sequel to the history of Europe from 1789 to 1814. There were no really new motifs in the composition. The main trouble was still the struggle, though often a blind and misdirected struggle, of the interests of ordinary men against the Great Power system which cramped and oppressed the life of mankind.”

H. G. Wells, Outline of History, Part II, The Realities and Imaginations of the Nineteenth Century: The Fermentation of Ideas, 1848, 38.3