Revolutions of 1848 in the Austrian Empire Catholicism and between members of different confessions. These conflicts were often mixed with conflict with the state. Important for the revolutionaries were state conflicts including the armed forces and collection of taxes. As 1848 approached, the revolutions the Empire crushed to maintain longstanding conservative minister Klemens Wenzel von Metternich's Concert of Europe left the empire nearly bankrupt and in continual need of soldiers. Draft commissions led to brawls between soldiers and civilians. All of this further agitated the peasantry, who resented their remaining feudal obligations. Despite lack of freedom of the press and association, there was a flourishing liberal German
History of the Catholic Church in Germany of the Teutonic Knights and Knights of Saint John. Monasteries and abbeys lost their means of existence as they had to abandon their lands. The secularization of society became a main theme of European history in the 18th and especially 19th century and was vehemently opposed by the Catholic Church, resulting in a struggle which was later termed “Kulturkampf”. In Germany, this process had its first culmination in the German revolutions of 1848–49 and, after their suppression, gained new momentum with the establishment of liberal governments in various German states in the 1850s and 1860s and in the empire in