North German Constitution

The North German Constitution, officially the Constitution of the North German Confederation (German: Verfassung des Norddeutschen Bundes) was the constitution of the North German Confederation, which existed as a state from 1 July 1867 to 31 December 1870. The Constitution of the German Empire of 1871 was closely based on it.

The Constitution bore a strong imprint of the German chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, who wanted a loosely organized confederation in which sovereignty rested with the individual states as a whole. The upper house of parliament, the Bundesrat, as the body representing the states, was thus the Confederation's sovereign. Its members were chosen by the states' governments. The members of the lower house of parliament, the Reichstag, were elected by universal manhood suffrage. The Reichstag participated on an equal footing with the Bundesrat in legislation for the Confederation.

The chancellor, who presided over the Bundesrat, was appointed by the king of Prussia and was responsible only to him. The king was head of state and was responsible for executing federal laws passed by the parliament but had no veto right. He was commander-in-chief of the federal army and navy and could declare war and make peace.

The Constitution did not provide for federal courts. Disputes between states were to be resolved by the Bundesrat. The individual states retained their statehood, constitutions, successions to the throne and electoral rights, although they lost their sovereignty to the Confederation.

The North German Constitution remained in force until the short-lived Constitution of the German Confederation, which was based largely on its predecessor, went into effect on 1 January 1871.

After the failure of the German revolutions of 1848–49, the government of Prussia was convinced that the German people would continue to pursue their "redemption from fragmentation and powerlessness" regardless of the continued existence of the individual states and the aristocracies that still ruled in them. The Prussian government made itself an advocate of the unification movement in order to preserve the Prussian, anti-democratic state and social order.

Prussia's victory over Austria in the Austro-Prussian War, which ended on 22 July 1866 with the Treaty of Prague, dissolved the German Confederation and allowed Prussia to annex many of the smaller German states to form the North German Confederation through the Treaty of 18 August 1866. On 10 June 1866, four days before the start of the war, the Prussian government had presented the other German states with the outlines of a new federal constitution containing ten articles that formulated its key principles. An assembly of the representatives of the individual states, the Federal Council (Bundesrat), was to be responsible for legislation along with a national assembly (Reichstag) elected according to equal, secret and universal manhood suffrage. The national assembly was initially to act as a constituent assembly to which the governments of the North German states were to submit a draft constitution for final approval.

Maximilian Duncker, a liberal member of the Prussian House of Representatives, produced a draft constitution at the request of Prussian minister president Otto von Bismarck in September 1866. He considered the proposal too cumbersome and centralistic, and as a result it was used as a counter-model and not as the prototype for the Constitution as it developed.