This culminated in the festival on the Wartburg in October 1818, when a bonfire was made of a book of police laws and Uhlan stays and a corporal's stick.

It was followed the next year by the assassination of the dramatist and political spy Kotzebue by the student Sand.
Panic seized the reactionists, and the Austrian Minister Metternich, one of the chief pillars of absolutist principles in Europe, induced the King to commit himself to the Austrian system of repression.

In 1821 the Reactionary party succeeded in getting the projected Constitution abandoned and the bureaucratic system of provincial estates established by royal warrant two years later (1823).

The Prussian police with their spies then became omnipotent, and a remorseless persecution of all holding Liberal or democratic views ensued, the best-known writers on the popular side no less than the rank and file being arbitrarily arrested and kept in prison on any or no pretext.

The amalgamation of the new districts into the Prussian bureaucratic system was not accomplished without resistance.