Napoleon was defeated, at the Congress of Vienna the princes endeavoured to turn back the clocks. But the ideas of freedom and democracy could no longer be suppressed. While the majority of Germans settled into their Biedermeier parlours, the French took to the barricades again in 1830. But there was also growing unrest in the German provinces. After the wars of liberation, more and more people wanted unity and democracy. The German national movement was above all a student movement, and one of its members, Heinrich Heine. At home both in France and Germany, he witnessed France’s revolutionary wave finally sweeping over Germany.
