unification of Germany

The unification of Germany into a politically and administratively integrated nation state officially occurred on 18 January 1871 at the Versailles Palace in the Hall of Mirrors in France. Princes of the German states gathered there to proclaim Wilhelm I of Prussia as German Emperor after the French capitulation in the Franco-Prussian War. Unofficially, the de facto transition of most of the German-speaking populations into a federated organization of states had been developing for some time through alliances formal and informal between princely rulers—but in fits and starts, as self-interests of parties hampered the process over nearly a century of aristocratic experimentation from the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire (1806) and the subsequent rise of nationalism over the span of the Napoleonic Wars era.