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Carlsbad Decrees
plural noun
- resolutions adopted by the ministers of nine German states at a meeting called at Carlsbad in 1819 by Prince Metternich: aim was the suppression of revolutionary activities especially in the universities.
Example Sentences
In the privacy of royal commissions he continued to elaborate schemes for constitutions that never saw the light; but Germany, disillusioned, saw only the faithful henchman of Metternich, an accomplice in the policy of the Carlsbad Decrees and the Troppau Protocol.
In 1816 he had published his views in a brochure, Vom deutschen Bund und deutscher Staatsverfassung, dedicated to “the youth of Germany,” and his influence gave a powerful impetus to the agitation which led in 1819 to the issue of the Carlsbad Decrees by the representatives of the German governments.
The Carlsbad Decrees, hurried through the diet under Austrian pressure, excited considerable opposition among the lesser sovereigns, who resented the claim of the diet to interfere in the internal concerns of their states, and whose protests at Frankfort had been expunged from the records.
This was, in effect, an attempt to apply the principle of the Carlsbad Decrees to all the world; and, had the attempt succeeded, all Europe would have been turned into a confederation on the model of that of Germany; for a political alliance, charged with the safeguarding of the territorial settlement defined by treaty, would have been substituted a central diet of the great powers, armed with undefined authority; and the sovereign independence of the nations would have been at an end.
The “Jacobin” propaganda of the tsar’s agents continued, it is true, especially in Italy; and, in spite of the murder of the dramatist Kotzebue, as a Russian emissary, by the fanatical “Bursche” Karl Sand, Alexander joined with Castlereagh in protesting against the reactionary policy embodied in the Carlsbad Decrees of October 1819.
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