Friedrich Wilhelm IV King of Prussia

Frederick William IV, King of Prussia
(15.10.1795 - 2.1.1861)
place of birth: Berlin
König von Preußen: 7 June 1840

King of Prussia from 1840 to 1861, the son and successor of Friedrich Wilhelm III. A romanticist and a mystic, he conceived vague schemes of reform based on a revival of the medieval structure, with the rule of estates and a patriarchal monarchy. During the revolution of 1848 in Prussia, which broke out in March, he was forced at first to accede to revolutionary demands. Later, however, he crushed the opposition, dissolved the constituent assembly, and promulgated a conservative constitution, which, as modified in 1850, remained in force until 1918.

Friedrich Wilhelm IV refused the crown of a united Germany offered him (1849) by the Frankfurt Parliament on the grounds that a monarch by divine right could not receive authority from an elected assembly. He nonetheless desired German unity under Prussian leadership and presented the Prussian Union plan for a confederation of Prussia and the smaller German states. Austrian opposition to the plan forced him to abandon it in the Treaty of Olmütz (1850). In 1848, he briefly supported the revolt in Schleswig-Holstein against Denmark but yielded to British pressure for an armistice. In 1857 his mental condition necessitated a temporary (later permanent) regency of his brother, who succeeded him as Wilhelm I. He died in January 1861 in Potsdam.