In July 1819 the Austrian foreign minister, Klemens von Metternich, persuaded representatives from a select group of the larger states of the German Confederation to issue the Carlsbad Decrees, a series of resolutions that imposed a rigid discipline on German universities, established restrictions on the German press, and created a commission of inquiry to root out revolutionary activity in the confederation’s member states. (The confederation consisted of thirty-nine states, including the large and powerful Austrian Empire and the Kingdom of Prussia, several principalities and grand duchies, and four free cities.) The Carlsbad Decrees, created during a series of meetings in Carlsbad (in Bohemia, Austrian Empire), were a response to the growing unrest within university communities. The students and some members of the faculty were advancing liberal and nationalist philosophies current in the early nineteenth century. The incident that precipitated Metternich’s action was the murder of August von Kotzebue, a conservative German literary figure, by Karl Ludwig Sand, a German student nationalist. Metternich used the murder as an excuse to suppress the growing nationalist and liberal influences in the German universities and to censor the press.