St Paul's Church is a Protestant church in Paulsplatz, Frankfurt am Main with important political symbolism in Germany.  It is a parish of the Protestant Church in Hesse and Nassau, a United member church of the Evangelical Church in Germany.  Consecrated in 1833, this church served as the seat for the first German national assembly in 1848, the Frankfurt Parliament, which in turn provided the basis for Germanys present-day constitution. It was the first publicly and freely-elected German legislative body and where the first democratic constitution was brought to paper.  Although now a United Protestant church, it was started as a Lutheran church in 1789�coincidentally the same year as the French Revolution.

The Church was destroyed during the allied bombardments on the 18th March 1944 after it had already been hit in October 1943.  The last church service was held on the 12th March 1944.  Because of its symbolic importance as the cradle of German democracy it was one of the first Frankfurt buildings to be reconstructed after the war.
 
It is today used for symbolic functions like the ceremony around Goethe Prize award every 3 years or the Peace Prize Award of German Book Publishers annually during the Frankfurt Book Fair.

The Free City of Frankfurt, then governing its legally non-separated Lutheran state church, commissioned Johann Andreas Liebhardt to construct the oval-shaped central church building in 1789. The new church building was to replace the former Church of the Discalced, which had been torn down in 1786 due to dilapidation.  Constructions halted during the Napoleonic wars. The new building was completed between 1829 and 1833 by Johann Friedrich Christian Hess. Between 1786 and 1833 Lutheran services were held at the Old St Nicholas Church in the R�merberg square to the south, also owned by the free city and then actually used as garrison church for its troops.

In 1830, the free city issued the "deeds of dotation" fixing its long-lasting practice of owning and maintaining the church buildings in its old city center, but leaving their usage to congregations of the Lutheran state church or parishes of the Catholic church, newly emancipated during the Napoleonic era.  The deed of dotation statutorily established the use of nine city-owned church buildings by six Lutheran congregations and three Catholic parishes. Other religious groups, such as Jews and Reformed Protestants were not part of that government funding.

Because of its typical Protestant centralized design, allowing everybody easily to hear the preacher or speaker, it was desired as the meeting place for the Frankfurt Parliament in the course of the German revolutions of 1848.

From 31 March until 3 April 1848, the building was the meeting place for the Vorparlament, which prepared the election for the National Assembly. On 18 May 1848, the National Assembly met for the first time in the church, and was therefore named the Paulskirchenparlament. Until 1849, the National Assembly worked in the church to develop the first constitution for a united Germany. The resistance of Prussia, the Austrian Empire and a number of smaller German states ultimately destroyed the effort.
In May 1849, there were a number of uprisings to force the implementation of the constitution, but these were destroyed with the help of Prussia. On 30 May 1849, the Paulskirchenparlament was dissolved. After 1852, St. Paul's was again used for Lutheran services.

In March 1944, during World War II, the church was destroyed along with much of the Frankfurt wider city center in the Allied Bombing of Frankfurt. As a tribute to its symbolism of freedom and as the cradle of Germany, it was the first structure in Frankfurt the city rebuilt after the war. However, the city itself wanted to make use of the to-be-reconstructed building, thus St. Paul's Lutheran congregation and the city concluded to exchange the congregation's use of this building for that of old St. Nicholas Church, only damaged by bombing.

St. Paul's was reopened on the centennial of the Frankfurt Parliament. Due to financial restraints and an altered concept of use, the original inner form was dramatically altered by the architectural team of Rudolf Schwarz.  An inserted floor now divides the basement�which currently serves as a display room�from the actual hall in the main floor.