The Issue of Parliamentary Suffrage at the Frankfurt National Assembly

Universal suffrage is a commonplace in today's political world. In modern Western states it seems self-explanatory that there should be a general right to vote, or at least the pretense of such a right; and it is rather the exception to universal suffrage that requires explanation—at best as a quaint local peculiarity, at worst as a sign of pigheadedness or paranoia. In our era of bland populism, it is easy to forget the nineteenth century's passion over suffrage matters. But passion there was: from the sanscullottes of the 1790's to the suffragettes of the 1910's, no decade of the nineteenth century, no part of the Atlantic world was entirely free from this all-important question. Indeed suffrage issues erupted regularly whenever and wherever internal political tensions ran highest. Anti-Bourbon agitation in Restoration France, Chartist demands in England, Negro emancipation in the United States, demands for reform of Bismarckian Germany's Prussian heartland—these issues spanned the century, and they all contained at least some taint of the suffrage question. The European revolutions of 1848–49 came roughly at the mid-point of this century-long suffrage debate, and these revolutions too raised in various ways the issue of the right to vote. And one of the most interesting discussions of the franchise question came in February and March of 1849, when Germany's abortive constitutional convention, the Frankfurt National Assembly, turned its attention to an Electoral Law for the lower house of the projected national representative body.