Germany from c. 1760 to 1815
Germany in the middle of the 18th century was a country that had been drifting in the backwaters of European politics for more than a hundred years. The decisive roles in the affairs of the Continent were played by those great powers—such as France, Britain, and Spain—whose economic resources and commercial connections provided a solid foundation for their military might. The German states, on the other hand, floundered in a morass of provincialism and particularism. All the forces that had contributed to the rise of powerful national monarchies west of the Rhine were lacking in the east. In the Holy Roman Empire the central government was losing rather than gaining strength, the princes were enlarging their authority at the expense of the crown, and business initiative was being discouraged by the lack of political unity and by the remoteness of the major trade routes.
Political power increasingly fell to small regional governments controlled by aristocratic overlords, ecclesiastical dignitaries, or municipal oligarchs. The history of Germany between the Thirty Years’ War and the French Revolution is largely the sum total of the histories of dozens upon dozens of small political units, each enjoying virtually full rights of sovereignty. The rulers of these gingerbread principalities, copying the example of the royal court of France or Austria, built costly imitations of the palaces of Versailles and Schönbrunn, which today are the delight of tourists but which were once the curse of an impoverished peasantry. The tradition of princely authority, an instrument of national greatness in western Europe, encouraged divisiveness in Germany. The country’s petty rulers legislated at will, levied taxes, concluded alliances, and waged wars against each other and against the emperor. Policies pursued in Munich, Stuttgart, Dresden, or Darmstadt reflected policies originating in Paris, Vienna, London, or Madrid but had no goal beyond the promotion of particularistic interests.
Political institutions designed theoretically to express the will of the nation continued to function, yet they had become empty shells. The Holy Roman emperor was still elected in accordance with a time-honoured ritual that proclaimed him to be the successor of Caesar and Augustus (indeed, the German word for emperor, Kaiser, was derived from Caesar). The splendid coronation ceremony in Frankfurt am Main, however, could not disguise the fact that the office conferred on its holder little more than prestige. Since all the emperors in this period except Charles VII were Habsburgs by birth or marriage, they enjoyed an authority that had to be respected. But that authority rested not on the prerogative of the imperial crown but on the possession of hereditary lands stretching from Antwerp in the west to Debrecen in the east. The sovereigns of the Holy Roman Empire, in other words, were able to play an important role in German affairs by virtue of their non-German resources. And, since, apart from Austria, Germany was not the main source of their strength, Germany was not the main object of their concern. The emperors tended to regard the dignity bestowed upon them as a means of furthering the interests of their dynastic holdings. The Imperial Diet meeting in Regensburg had also become an instrument for the promotion of particularistic advantage rather than national welfare. It continued in theory to express the will of the estates of the realm meeting in solemn deliberation. In fact it had degenerated into a debating society without authority or influence. The princes had ceased to attend the sessions, so that only diplomatic representatives were left to discuss questions for which they were powerless to provide answers. The other central institutions of the empire, such as the imperial cameral tribunal in Wetzlar, languished in indolence. Constitutionally and politically, Germany circa 1760 resembled Poland in that a once vigorous and proud state had become weakened by internal conflict to the point that it invited the intervention of its more powerful neighbours.
What saved Germany from the fate of Poland was the ability of one of the member states to defend the empire against aggression. For 200 years Austria acted as the bulwark of central Europe against French expansion. Its possessions, forming a chain of protective bases extending between the North Sea and the Danube, had time and again borne the brunt of attacks by French armies. The frontiers of France kept moving closer to the Rhine, but the Holy Roman Empire was at least spared the tragedy of partition that befell the Polish state. It was partly in recognition of the vital role that the Habsburgs played in the defense of Germany that the electors chose them as emperors with such regularity. The Austrian monarchy, moreover, endowed with resources comparable to those of the western nations, was able to pursue a policy of political rationalization with greater success than most of the principalities. The rulers in Vienna succeeded in improving the administration, strengthening the economy, and centralizing the government. Until the middle of the 18th century, Austria remained the only Great Power east of the Rhine.
Further rise of Prussia and the Hohenzollerns
The emergence of the Hohenzollerns of Prussia as rivals of the Habsburgs and the beginning of the Austro-Prussian dualism created the possibility of reversing the process of civic decentralization that had prevailed in Germany since the late Middle Ages. The interests of the territorial princes of the Holy Roman Empire inclined them toward a policy of particularism, while the government of Austria, with its Flemish, Italian, Slavic, and Magyar territories, could not perforce become the instrument of German unification. Prussia, on the other hand, was militarily strong enough and ethnically homogeneous enough to make national consolidation the main object of statecraft. Still, in the 18th century, no Prussian ruler thought in national terms. The intention of Frederick II (the Great) and of his successors Frederick William II and Frederick William III was to pursue dynastic rather than national objectives. Like the lesser princes of Germany, all they sought was to maintain and enlarge their authority against the claim of imperial supremacy. Far from wanting to end the disunity of Germany, they hoped to prolong and exploit it. The patriotic Prussophile historians, who a hundred years later argued that what Otto von Bismarck had achieved was the consummation of what Frederick had sought, were letting the present distort their understanding of the past. In fact, the greatest of the Hohenzollerns had remained as indifferent to the glaring political weaknesses of his nation as to its great cultural achievements. His attitude toward the constitutional system of the Holy Roman Empire was similar to that of the self-seeking princelings who were his neighbours and from whom he was distinguishable only by talent and power. He may have scorned their sybaritic way of life, but politically he wanted what they wanted—namely, the freedom to seek the advantage of his dynasty without regard for the interests of Germany as a whole.
His preoccupation with the welfare of his state rather than with that of his nation is apparent in the strategy by which he tried to check Habsburg ambitions after the Seven Years’ War (1756–63). During the first half of his reign he had relied primarily on military force to advance his dynastic interests at the expense of the Habsburgs. In the second half he preferred to employ the weapons of diplomacy to achieve the same end. In 1777 the ruling dynasty of Bavaria came to an end with the death of Maximilian Joseph. The elector of the Palatinate, the Wittelsbach Charles Theodore, now became ruler over the Wittelsbach territory of Bavaria as well. Without legitimate heirs and without affection for his newly acquired eastern possessions, he agreed to a plan proposed by Emperor Joseph II to cede part of the Bavarian lands to Austria. But any increase in the strength of the Habsburgs was unacceptable to Frederick the Great. With the tacit approval of most of the princes of the empire, he declared war against Austria in 1778, hoping that other states within and outside central Europe would join him. In this expectation he was disappointed. Expecting an easy success, Joseph also became discouraged by the difficulties that he encountered. The War of the Bavarian Succession dragged on from the summer of 1778 to the spring of 1779, with neither side enhancing its reputation for military prowess. There was much marching back and forth, while hungry soldiers scrounged for food in what came to be called the “Potato War.” The upshot was the Treaty of Teschen (May 1779), by which the Austrian government abandoned all claims to Bavarian territory except for a small strip along the Inn River. The conflict had brought Frederick no significant military victories, but he had succeeded in frustrating Habsburg ambition.
Joseph II, however, was a stubborn adversary. In 1785 he once again advanced a plan for the acquisition of Wittelsbach lands, this time on an even more ambitious scale. He suggested to Charles Theodore nothing less than an outright exchange of the Austrian Netherlands for all of Bavaria. The emperor, in other words, proposed to surrender his distant possessions on the North Sea, which were difficult to defend, for a territory that was contiguous and a population that was assimilable. The scheme went far beyond that which Prussia had defeated seven years before, and Frederick opposed it with equal determination. He hoped to enlist the diplomatic aid of France and Russia against what he regarded as an attempt to upset the balance of power in central Europe. But, more than that, he succeeded in forming the Fürstenbund (League of Princes), which 17 of the more important rulers in Germany joined. The members pledged themselves to maintain the fundamental law of the empire and to defend the possessions of the governments included within its boundaries. The growing opposition to the absorption of Bavaria by Austria persuaded Joseph that the risks inherent in his plan outweighed its advantages. The proposed exchange of territories was dropped, and Frederick could celebrate yet another triumph of his statecraft, the last of an illustrious career. But the association of princes that he founded did not survive its author. Its sole purpose had been the prevention of Habsburg hegemony. Once the danger had passed, it lost the only justification for its existence. Those nationalists who later maintained that it foreshadowed the creation of the German Empire misunderstood its origins and objectives. It was never more than a weapon in the struggle for the preservation of a decentralized form of government in Germany.
The Hohenzollerns’ subordination of national to dynastic interests was even more apparent in the partitions of Poland. Frederick the Great was the chief architect of the First Partition, that of 1772, by which the ill-starred kingdom lost about one-fifth of its inhabitants and one-fourth of its territory to Prussia, Russia, and Austria. His successor, Frederick William II, helped to complete the destruction of the Polish state by the partitions of 1793 (between Prussia and Russia) and 1795 (between Prussia, Russia, and Austria). The result was bound to be an enhancement of Prussia’s role in Europe but also a diminution of its focus on Germany. The Hohenzollerns willingly embarked on a course that would in time have transformed their kingdom into a binational state comparable to the Habsburg empire. The German population in the old provinces would have been counterbalanced by the Slavic population in the new; the Protestant faith of the Brandenburgers and Prussians would have had to share its influence with the Roman Catholicism of the Poles; the capital city of Berlin would have found a competitor in the capital city of Warsaw. In short, the centre of gravity of the state would have shifted eastward, away from the problems and interests of the Holy Roman Empire. Yet the rulers of Prussia did not shrink from a policy that was likely to have such far-reaching consequences. They never contemplated sacrificing the advantage that their state would gain from an enlargement of its resources in order to assume the role of unifiers of their nation. Such a political attitude would have been an anachronism during the age of princely absolutism in Germany. It was not design but accident that before long led to the abandonment by Prussia of most of its Polish possessions and that thereby allowed it to play a leading role in the affairs of Germany.
The cultural scene
Whereas in England the great literary epoch of Queen Elizabeth I had coincided with commercial and naval expansion, and in France the golden age of classicism had added lustre to the military glory of Louis XIV, German arts and letters flourished amid tiny principalities and somnolent towns that could only envy the powerful national monarchies west of the Rhine. In France and Britain public opinion could exert a significant influence on government, and the debate over issues of state and society was conducted with a vigour that reflected its importance, but in the autocratic states of Germany the debate was bound to remain purely theoretical. No Voltaires, Rousseaus, or Burkes were likely to emerge out of such an environment. The thinkers of Germany tended to emphasize introspection and spirituality. Culture became an escape from the narrow world of princely absolutism. Intellectual energies that could not reform the community fought to emancipate the individual through self-purification and self-perfection.
This was the background of German idealism, a philosophical movement seeking to establish a foundation for ethics and aesthetics beyond the realm of empirical knowledge. Proceeding from principles articulated by Immanuel Kant, it attempted to prove that there was a realm of experience lying beyond the categories of scientific investigation: the realm of the good, the true, and the beautiful. There were realities of the spirit and the mind, in other words, that were inaccessible to the practicality of the British empiricists or the intellectualism of the French rationalists. The disciples of idealism hoped to transcend the barriers created by nation, class, and religion. They spoke in the name of humanity as a whole, which manifested its underlying harmony through the infinite variety of its political, social, and theological categories. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing pleaded for religious toleration on the basis of a common system of ethical values to which all men of goodwill could subscribe. Johann Gottfried Herder preached that the unique character and meaning of each culture contributed to the richness of common humanity that defied state boundaries. Johann Joachim Winckelmann idealized the Classical ideal of beauty that he found in Greek art as an eternal standard, immune to the vicissitudes of time and history. These were views that offered an escape from the narrowness of everyday life. Kant, Lessing, Herder, and Winckelmann all believed in the necessity of changing institutions, but they were convinced that the place to begin was the individual’s moral consciousness. This gave thought in Germany a metaphysical coloration that distinguished it from the more robust pragmatism of philosophy in the west. It was during the second half of the 18th century that the Germans began to consider their country “the land of thinkers and poets.”
The literary revival of the age displayed the same quality of introspective idealism as the philosophical movement. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the greatest genius of German letters, willingly accepted the existing system of civic and social values. He regarded the disunity of his nation as an expression of its historic character and defended the authority of the petty princes as an instrument of good government. He urged his compatriots to seek greatness not in collective action but in individual perfectibility. After a period of youthful rebellion against traditional canons of literary propriety, he turned to a classicism in which a serene acceptance of life harmonized with his own sympathy for the established order. Friedrich Schiller, a man of more turbulent temperament, resented political injustice and weakness. In his plays and poems there are occasional outbursts of indignation and appeals for reform. Yet there is also a pessimistic mood of resignation induced by the burden of civic ineffectualness that history had imposed on his people. Ultimately, he too sought refuge from the world in the poet’s private vision. The Sturm und Drang (“Storm and Stress”) was a movement of literary innovation through which a group of young writers in the last decades of the 18th century sought to throw off the yoke of accepted standards of composition, but it remained confined to problems of prosody and taste and reluctant to confront political and social issues directly.
The cultural achievements could not alter the harsh realities of national fragmentation and princely autocracy. They supported, however, the ideals of rational reform and social progress that the Enlightenment had introduced throughout the Continent. In Germany as elsewhere the 18th century became the age when the monarchical principle advanced the loftiest justification of its claim to power. The authority of the prince, so the argument went, was to be exercised not for his private advantage or gratification but for the greatness of his state and the welfare of his people. His power had to be unrestricted so that his benevolence might be unlimited. Absolute government was the only effective instrument for achieving the general good. Impressed by the scientific discoveries and material advances that they saw about them, Europeans began to believe that the prejudices and injustices that had plagued society would gradually disappear before the steady march of reason.
Enlightened reform and benevolent despotism
The main source of enlightened reform was to be the crown, but many well-intentioned people of means and education also began to apply a new standard of conduct in their dealings with their fellow man. This change in attitude was apparent in the decline of religious resentments and discriminations. Never before had the relationship between Roman Catholics and Protestants among the well-to-do classes of central Europe been as free of rancour as on the eve of the French Revolution. It was at this time also that Jews first began to emerge from the isolation to which a deep-seated intolerance had consigned them. The idea of assimilation held out to them the prospect of escape from the ghetto on the condition that they identify themselves in thought, speech, and attitude with the Christian society in which they lived. That prospect was to attract the Jewish minority in Germany more and more during the next 150 years. Religious toleration, however, was not the only article of faith of the Enlightenment. Its vision of a happier future included the reformation of education, the abolition of poverty, the alleviation of sickness, and the elimination of injustice. Men of goodwill established schools, founded orphanages, built hospitals, improved farming methods, modernized industrial techniques, and tried to raise the standard of living of the masses. While the hopes of the enlightened reformers of the 18th century far outstripped their accomplishments, the practical results of their efforts should not be underestimated.
According to the doctrines of benevolent despotism, however, the chief instrumentality for the improvement of society was not private philanthropy but government action. The state had the primary responsibility for preparing the way for the golden age that, in the opinion of many intellectuals, awaited humankind. The extent to which official policy conformed to rationalist theory depended, in central Europe as elsewhere, on the personality and ability of the ruler. Both of the leading powers of the Holy Roman Empire followed the teachings of benevolent despotism but with substantially different results. The emperor Joseph II, a well-meaning though doctrinaire reformer, attempted to initiate a revolution from above against the opposition of powerful forces that continued to cling to tradition. In the course of a single decade he tried to centralize the government of his far-flung domains, reduce the influence of the church, introduce religious toleration, and ease the burden of serfdom. His uncompromising program of innovation, however, alienated the landed aristocracy, whose support was essential for the effective operation of the government. The emperor encountered mounting unrest, which did not end until his death in 1790, and the subsequent abandonment of most of the reforms that he had promulgated. Frederick the Great was more successful as an enlightened autocrat, but only because he was more cautious. His reorganization of the government was not as drastic, his belief in religious toleration remained less profound, and his assistance to the peasants did not go beyond a prohibition against the absorption of their holdings by the nobility. He invited settlers to cultivate reclaimed lands, and he encouraged entrepreneurs to increase the industrial capacity of Prussia. Among his most important accomplishments, although it was not completed until after his death, was the Prussian Civil Code, which defined the principles and practices of an absolute government and a corporative society. Yet Frederick was also convinced that the Prussian landed noblemen, the Junkers, were the backbone of the state, and he continued accordingly to uphold the alliance between crown and aristocracy on which his kingdom had been built.
The achievements of benevolent despotism among the minor states of the Holy Roman Empire varied considerably. Some princes employed their inherited authority in a serious effort to improve the lot of their subjects. Charles Frederick of Baden, for example, devoted himself to the improvement of education in his margravate, and he even abolished serfdom, although manorial obligations remained. Charles Augustus of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach was a hardworking administrator of his small Thuringian principality, whose capital, Weimar, he transformed into the cultural centre of Germany. Charles Eugene of Württemberg, on the other hand, led a life of profligacy and licentiousness in defiance of protests by the estates of the duchy. Frederick II of Hesse-Kassel was another princely prodigal whose love of pleasure impoverished his subjects and forced his soldiers into mercenary service for Britain. The record of enlightened autocracy in central Europe was as uneven as in western Europe. Yet the ideas of the Enlightenment even at their best were unable to transform the basis of political life in the Holy Roman Empire. They could palliate, reform, and improve, but they could not alter a system of particularistic sovereignty and absolutistic authority resting on a hierarchical structure of society. They could not become an instrument of national consolidation or representative government. Only some great creative disruption of existing civic institutions could break through the crust of habit and tradition sanctified by history. Germany lacked the internal preconditions for a process of political reconstruction. The galvanizing forces of rejuvenation and regeneration were to come from the outside.
The French Revolutionary and Napoleonic era
In transforming the Bourbon kingdom into a constitutional state, the French Revolution aroused intense excitement east of the Rhine. Most German intellectuals were at first in sympathy with the new order in France, hoping that the defeat of royal absolutism in western Europe would lead to its decline in central Europe as well. The princes, on the other hand, were from the outset fearful of the Revolution, which they regarded as a serious danger, for the example of unpunished insubordination by the French might encourage demands for reform among the Germans. The result was a growing hostility between the government in Paris and the rulers of the Holy Roman Empire, which led in the spring of 1792 to the outbreak of the War of the First Coalition (1792–97), the first phase of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. The immediate occasion of the conflict was a quarrel over the rights of German princes with holdings in France and over the propagandistic activities of French émigrés in Germany. But the underlying cause was the clash of two incompatible principles of authority divided by profound differences regarding the nature of political and social justice. The course of hostilities soon revealed that the civic ideals and military power of Revolutionary France were more than a match for the decrepit Holy Roman Empire. After 1793 France occupied the German lands on the left bank of the Rhine, and for the next 20 years their inhabitants were governed from Paris. Yet there is no evidence that they were dissatisfied with French rule or at least no evidence that they strongly opposed it. Devoid of a sense of national identity and accustomed to submission to authority, they accepted their new status with the same equanimity with which they had regarded a succession to the throne or a change in the dynasty. The Prussians, moreover, discouraged by defeats in the west and eager for Polish spoils in the east, concluded a separate peace at Basel in 1795 by which they in effect recognized the French acquisition of the Rhineland. The Austrians held out two years longer, but the brilliant successes of the young Napoleon Bonaparte forced them to accept the loss of the left bank in the Treaty of Campo Formio (October 17, 1797).
End of the Holy Roman Empire
The peace proved short-lived, however, for, at the end of 1798, a new coalition directed against France was formed (the War of the Second Coalition, 1798–1802). This time Prussia remained neutral. Frederick William III, a conscientious and modest but ineffectual ruler, was notable for private morality rather than political skill. The government in Berlin drifted back and forth, dabbling in minor economic and administrative reforms without significantly improving the structure of the state. A decade of neutrality was frittered away while the army commanders rested on the laurels of Frederick the Great. Austria, on the other hand, played the same leading role in the War of the Second Coalition that it had in the War of the First Coalition, with the same unfortunate result. The French victories at Marengo (June 14, 1800) and Hohenlinden (December 3, 1800) forced Emperor Francis II to agree to the Treaty of Lunéville (February 9, 1801), which confirmed the cession of the Rhineland. More than that, those rulers who lost their possessions on the left bank under the terms of the peace were to receive compensation elsewhere in the empire. In order to carry out this redistribution of territory, the Imperial Diet entrusted a committee of princes, the Reichsdeputation, with the task of drawing a new map of Germany. France, however, exercised the major influence over its deliberations. Napoleon had resolved to utilize the settlement of territorial claims to fundamentally alter the structure of the Holy Roman Empire. The result was that the Final Recess (Hauptschluss) of the Reichsdeputation of February 1803 marked the end of the old order in Germany. In their attempt to establish a chain of satellite states east of the Rhine, the French diplomats brought about the elimination of the smallest and least viable of the political components of Germany. They thereby also furthered the process of national consolidation, since the fragmentation of civic authority in the empire had been a mainstay of particularism. That Napoleon did not intend to encourage unity among his neighbours goes without saying. Yet he unwittingly prepared the way for a process of centralization in Germany that helped to frustrate his own plans for the future aggrandizement of France.
The chief victims of the Final Recess were the free cities, the imperial knights, and the ecclesiastical territories. They fell by the dozens. Too weak to be useful allies of Napoleon, they were destroyed by the ambition of their French conquerors and by the greed of their German neighbours. They could still boast of their ancient history as sovereign members of the Holy Roman Empire, but their continued existence had become incompatible with effective government in Germany. The principal heirs to their holdings were the larger secondary states. To be sure, Napoleon could not keep Austria and Prussia from making some gains in the general scramble for territory that they had helped make possible. But he worked to aggrandize those German rulers, most of them in the south, who were strong enough to be valuable vassals but not strong enough to be potential threats. Bavaria, Württemberg, Baden, Hesse-Darmstadt, and Nassau were the big winners in the competition for booty that had been the main object of the negotiations. Napoleon’s strategy had been in the classic tradition of French diplomacy, the tradition of Richelieu and Mazarin. The princes had been pitted against the emperor to enhance the role that Paris could play in the affairs of the German states. Yet the German princes did not resent being used as pawns in a political game to promote the interests of a foreign power. Whatever objections they raised against the settlement of 1803 were based on expediency and opportunism. The most serious indictment of the old order was that in the hour of its imminent collapse none of the rulers attempted to defend it in the name of the general welfare of Germany.
The Final Recess was the next to last act in the fall of the Holy Roman Empire. The end came three years later. In 1805 Austria joined the Third Coalition of Great Powers determined to reduce the preponderance of France (resulting in the War of the Third Coalition, 1805–07). The outcome of this war was even more disastrous than those of the wars of the First and Second coalitions. Napoleon forced the main Habsburg army in Germany to surrender at Ulm (October 17, 1805); then he descended on Vienna, occupying the proud capital of his enemy; and finally he inflicted a crushing defeat (December 2, 1805) on the combined Russian and Austrian armies at Austerlitz in Moravia (now in the Czech Republic). Before the year was out, Francis II was forced to sign the humiliating Treaty of Pressburg (December 26), which ended the dominant role his dynasty had played in the affairs of Germany. He had to surrender his possessions in western Germany to Württemberg and Baden, and the province of Tirol to Bavaria. Napoleon’s strategy of playing princely against imperial ambitions had proved a brilliant success. The rulers of the secondary states in the south had supported him in the war against Austria, and in the peace that ensued they were richly rewarded. Not only did they share in the booty seized from the Habsburgs, but they also were permitted to absorb the remaining free cities, petty principalities, and ecclesiastical territories. Finally, asserting the rights of full sovereignty, the rulers of Bavaria and Württemberg assumed the title of king, while the rulers of Baden and Hesse-Darmstadt contented themselves with the more modest rank of grand duke. The last vestiges of the imperial constitution had now been destroyed, and Germany was ready for a new form of political organization reflecting power relationships created by the force of arms.
In the summer of 1806, 16 of the secondary states, encouraged and prodded by Paris, announced that they were forming a separate association to be known as the Confederation of the Rhine. Archbishop Karl Theodor von Dalberg was to preside over the new union as the “prince primate,” while future deliberations among the members were to establish a college of kings and a college of princes as common legislative bodies. There was even talk of a “fundamental statute” that would serve as the constitution of a rejuvenated Germany. Yet all these brave plans were never more than a facade for the harsh reality of alien hegemony in Germany. Napoleon was proclaimed the “protector” of the Confederation of the Rhine, and a permanent alliance between the member states and the French Empire obliged the former to maintain substantial military forces for the purpose of mutual defense. There could be no doubt whose interests these troops would serve. The secondary rulers of Germany were expected to pay a handsome tribute to Paris for their newly acquired sham sovereignty. On August 1 the confederated states proclaimed their secession from the empire, and a week later, on August 6, 1806, Francis II announced that he was laying down the imperial crown. The Holy Roman Empire thus came officially to an end after a history of a thousand years.
Period of French hegemony in Germany
The long conflict between emperors and princes in Germany had concluded with the triumph of the latter. Yet the victors soon discovered that, instead of achieving independence, they had merely exchanged one master for another. Indeed, they were more subordinate now to the wishes of Paris than they had been to those of Vienna. Napoleon gradually induced or forced all the states of Germany except Austria and Prussia, 36 states in all, to join the confederation. The inclusion of the two leading powers of central Europe might have proved troublesome for him or even dangerous. The participation of the secondary states, on the other hand, provided him with reliable mercenaries who owed him too much and feared him too much to oppose his wishes. He was free to do as he liked in the region between the Rhine and the Elbe rivers. In order to enforce his embargo on continental trade with England, he annexed the entire coastline along the North Sea, including much of the electorate of Hanover, a dependency of Britain, Napoleon’s archenemy. When that was not enough, he added Lübeck on the Baltic to the French Empire. He carved out the kingdom of Westphalia, consisting mainly of the remainder of Hanover and conquered Prussian territory, for his brother Jérôme and the grand duchy of Berg, incorporating additional Prussian territories, for his brother-in-law Joachim Murat. He was the undisputed master of all of western Germany.
After the formation of the Confederation of the Rhine, there was only one state in central Europe that had not yet been forced to submit to France. But the leaders of Prussia hesitated and wavered in their policy until they lost the opportunity of profiting from the War of the Third Coalition. Had they joined Austria and Russia against Napoleon, they might have kept him from gaining hegemony over Germany. Or had they become the allies of Napoleon, they might have established a sphere of influence in the region north of the Main River. As it was, they waited until they fell between two stools. They finally declared war against the French in October 1806, after Austria had been forced to surrender, Russia had decided to retreat, and the secondary states had become the vassals of Paris. Yet public opinion in the Prussian capital remained confident that the army of Frederick the Great would prove a match for the conqueror of Europe. The result of such self-deception was a military disaster of unparalleled magnitude. In the two simultaneous battles of Jena and Auerstädt (October 14, 1806), the Prussian armies were completely routed, and the road to Berlin lay open before the French invaders. The city was occupied on October 27.
More disastrous than the military defeat, however, was the moral collapse of a state that had taught its citizens that obedience to authority was the supreme political virtue. The civilian population never thought of offering resistance to the advancing enemy. Even many army officers were so disheartened by Napoleon’s success that they surrendered one fortified position after another without a fight. Frederick William III had to pay a terrible price for the policy of his ancestors, who had built efficient government at the expense of civic initiative. He tried to hold out in East Prussia, hoping that the Russian armies, which were still at war with Napoleon, would help him regain the rest of his kingdom. But when in July 1807 Alexander I concluded peace with France at Tilsit, the unfortunate Frederick William had no choice but to follow suit. The treaty that he was forced to sign was a catastrophe. Prussia lost almost half its territory and population, including most of the Polish possessions in the east as well as all the territories west of the Elbe River. Subsequent agreements, moreover, imposed a heavy indemnity, a military occupation, and a reduction in the size of the army. The proud monarchy of Frederick the Great had been reduced to a secondary state in Germany.
Central Europe remained under the dominant influence of France for more than a decade. That influence was at first limited and indirect, then pervasive and overpowering. Yet it was during this period of alien preponderance that Germany for the first time felt the stirrings of liberalism and nationalism. The regions that had become part of the French Empire experienced firsthand the advantages of efficient centralized government in which equality before the law and freedom of opportunity were accepted principles. Those states that retained a pseudo-independence as satellites of Napoleon, moreover, sought to imitate the example of their master, partly in order to gain his favour, partly in order to emulate his success, but most importantly in order to integrate the new territories that they had so suddenly acquired. One government after another began to remove religious restrictions, relax economic barriers, eliminate servile obligations, and centralize administrative functions. Above all, constitutional rule and popular representation ceased to seem utopian to men of property and education who had witnessed the stirring events of the years since 1789. The French hegemony also led to the birth of nationalism in Germany. For one thing, the achievement of political unity became a distinct possibility, once the territorial fragmentation of the Holy Roman Empire had come to an end. Furthermore, the presence of foreign occupiers—arrogant, overbearing, and avaricious—aroused among Germans a sense of nationality that they had never felt in the tranquil days of the old order. Finally, all who admired or envied the triumphs of Napoleon had an example of the great deeds that the love of fatherland could inspire. The ideal of cosmopolitan individualism that had been generally accepted in the 18th century began to give way before a growing consciousness of national identity. Yet the emergence of the concepts of constitutional freedom and national unity not through indigenous developments but rather in response to foreign domination influenced the form that these concepts assumed in Germany.
Every German state felt the influence of the new principles of government and economy that the period of French hegemony had introduced, but nowhere was that influence more consequential than in Prussia. For only in the hour of deepest humiliation did the Hohenzollern kingdom finally make an effort to adapt its structure to the changing political and social conditions that it had stubbornly ignored during its years of greatness. Between 1806 and 1813 the statesmen in Berlin initiated a revolution from above to transform a rigid despotism into a popular monarchy supported by the loyalty of a free citizenry. Out of the disasters of Jena and Tilsit emerged a group of gifted reformers who sought to regenerate their country. The leading figures in this movement for civic reconstruction were the civil servants Karl, Freiherr (baron) vom Stein, and Karl August, Fürst (prince) von Hardenberg, along with the military commanders Gerhard von Scharnhorst and August, Graf (count) Neidhardt von Gneisenau. Among their most important achievements was the abolition of serfdom, a measure designed to create citizens out of human beasts of burden. Yet, while the reforms gave the peasant personal freedom, they failed to provide him with economic independence. Most of the land remained in the hands of the aristocracy, which therefore continued to dominate the countryside politically as well as socially. More successful was the law establishing municipal self-government. Thereafter the cities of the kingdom were to be administered by officials chosen not by the central bureaucracy but by the propertied inhabitants of the cities themselves. The autonomy of the cities, it was hoped, would help train a politically conscious and active middle class. The most effective reforms, however, were those introduced in the armed forces. After the officers who had shown themselves incompetent during the war were dismissed or retired, the high command carried out a thorough reorganization of the military system. Discipline became more humane, promotion was to be based on merit rather than aristocratic connections, the method of recruitment was improved, and the training in tactics was modernized. Most important, the army’s leaders sought to instill in the soldiers a new spirit rooted in inner conviction rather than unquestioning obedience. Defeat had changed Prussia from a garrison state into a centre of political and intellectual ferment.
Patriotic sentiments became increasingly widespread in Germany as the burden of French domination grew progressively heavier. The financial sacrifices that Napoleon demanded reinforced the personal resentments aroused by his ruthless statecraft. Before long a network of secret organizations had sprung up in the German states seeking the expulsion of the foreign invaders. Yet it would be a mistake to think that all Germans regarded the hegemony of France as an unmitigated evil. There were, in fact, wide differences of opinion among them. The rulers of the secondary states and their supporters in the army and the bureaucracy saw Napoleon as the instrument of their new importance. Many reformers in the south—the Bavarian statesman Maximilian Joseph, Graf (count) von Montgelas, for example—believed that only French influence had made possible the modernization of government in Germany. Some men of letters (writers, journalists, and professors) continued to argue, moreover, that the political disunity of Germany was a natural result of its historical experience and reflected its essential character. Even among those who opposed French domination, there was no agreement regarding the future political structure of the nation. Many of them dreamed of a liberal and united fatherland that would take its place among the Great Powers of Europe. Others preferred a loose association of governments, similar to the Confederation of the Rhine, that could safeguard the interests of the secondary states against Prussia and Austria. Still others hoped for a complete restoration of the old order in which they had grown up and to which they longed to return. And then there were the broad masses of the population of the German states—exploited, illiterate, and uninformed. They remained by and large indifferent to the crosscurrents of political thought, seeking nothing more than an improvement in their standard of living and the preservation of their way of life. Germany was beginning to move toward new civic and social norms, but the transformation of political attitudes was gradual and intermittent.
The slow spread of the ideals of unity and freedom became apparent during the first serious effort to throw off the yoke of foreign domination in the German states. The Austrian government concluded in 1809 that Napoleon’s recent reverses in Spain presaged a general uprising against French hegemony on the Continent. The result was an ill-fated attempt at a war of liberation, in which the Habsburg troops challenged Napoleon for the fourth time, only to go down in defeat once again. Appeals from Vienna to the people of Germany found little response except in Tirol and among a few nationalist hotspurs in the north. The princes refused to risk French wrath until they could be sure of ultimate victory, while their subjects refused to rise against French oppression without princely approval. The result was that the war in central Europe, unlike the one in the Iberian Peninsula, was waged primarily by regular forces rather than by guerrilla bands. Archduke Charles gained important successes for the Austrian army at Aspern and Essling (May 21–22, 1809), an indication that the strategic mastery of the French was drawing to a close. But at Wagram (July 5–6) Napoleon was able to work the last of his military miracles. Vienna had to sue for peace once more, the Treaty of Schönbrunn (October 14) ceding Salzburg to Bavaria, West Galicia to the grand duchy of Warsaw, and the Adriatic coastland to France. The defeat finally persuaded the emperor, who had exchanged the title Francis II of the Holy Roman Empire for Francis I of the Austrian Empire, that resistance would be as futile in the future as it had been in the past. He therefore adopted a policy of collaboration with France, signaled by the marriage of his daughter Marie-Louise to Napoleon. Germany continued to languish in the grip of foreign domination.
The Wars of Liberation
A new struggle for liberation opened three years later with the defeat of Napoleon’s grande armée in Russia. As the Russian armies began to cross western frontiers in December 1812, the crucial question became what reception they would find among the rulers and the inhabitants of central Europe. The first state to cut its ties to Paris was Prussia. It was not the king, however, but one of his generals, Johann, Graf (count) Yorck von Wartenburg, who decided on his own initiative to cooperate with the Russians. Only hesitatingly and fearfully did Frederick William III then agree in February 1813 to a war against France, although many Prussians greeted the outbreak of the conflict with enthusiasm. The other rulers of the German states refused initially to follow the Prussian example. The members of the Confederation of the Rhine were still convinced of Napoleon’s invincibility, while Austria preferred to see the combatants exhaust each other until it could play the role of mediator and arbiter. The foreign minister in Vienna, Klemens, Fürst (prince) von Metternich, was afraid that the hegemony of France in central Europe might be replaced by that of Russia. He tried, therefore, to pursue a strategy of armed neutrality, hoping that he could persuade the opposing sides to accept a compromise that would maintain an equilibrium between Alexander I and Napoleon. This plan failed because of the obstinacy of the latter, who feared that concessions in foreign affairs would weaken his control over internal politics in France. The upshot was that in August 1813 Austria entered the conflict on the side of Russia and Prussia, and the balance of military power shifted in favour of the anti-French coalition. The faith of the secondary states in Napoleon’s star began to weaken, and Bavaria became the first member to secede from the Confederation of the Rhine (October 8). One great allied victory would now suffice to bring all of Germany into the struggle against France.
That victory came on October 19, 1813, at the Battle of Leipzig. After four days of bitter fighting, the French army was forced to retreat, and its domination of central Europe was finally at an end. Before the year was out, Napoleon had withdrawn across the Rhine. Of all his conquests in Germany, only the left bank was still under the effective control of Paris. The Confederation of the Rhine promptly collapsed, as its members rushed to go over to the winning side before it was too late. The Rhineland was reconquered early in 1814, after the allies had launched their invasion of France. In the course of the spring, the capture of Paris, the restoration of the Bourbons, and the conclusion of peace in the first Treaty of Paris (May 30) ended the Wars of Liberation except for the episode of the Hundred Days, when Napoleon briefly returned to power and was ultimately beaten at Waterloo. The western frontier of the German states was to remain essentially the same as at the time of the initial outbreak of hostilities more than 20 years previously. New state boundaries within Germany would still have to be determined, to be sure, and the problem of a new political organization of the nation awaited the victorious statesmen, but the period of foreign hegemony was over at last. The rulers of the German states, relying partly on the forces of innovation, partly on those of tradition, had succeeded in freeing themselves from alien domination. Now they had to decide what use they would make of their freedom. Would they create a new polity of unity and liberty, which many reformers demanded, or would they reestablish the old order of absolutism and particularism, which the conservatives advocated? As the statesmen began to gather in Vienna in the fall of 1814 to restore peace to a continent ravaged by two decades of war, they pondered the problem of devising an enduring form of government for Germany.
Results of the Congress of Vienna
The men who, in the nine months from September 1814 to June 1815, redrew the map of Europe were diplomats of the old school. Francis I and the prince von Metternich of Austria, Frederick William III and the prince von Hardenberg of Prussia, Alexander I of Russia, Viscount Castlereagh of Britain, Talleyrand of France, and the representatives of the secondary states were all intellectual heirs of the 18th century. They feared the principles of the French Revolution, they scorned the theories of democratic government, and they opposed the doctrines of national self-determination. But they recognized that the boundaries and governments of 1789 could not be restored without modification or compromise. There had been too many changes in attitudes and loyalties that the rigid dogmas of legitimism were powerless to undo. The task before the peacemakers was thus the establishment of a sound balance between necessary reform and valid tradition capable of preserving the tranquility that Europe desperately needed. The decisions regarding Germany reached during the deliberations in Vienna followed a middle course between innovation and reaction, avoiding extreme fragmentation as well as rigid centralization. The Confederation of the Rhine was not maintained, but neither was the Holy Roman Empire restored. Although the reforms introduced during the period of foreign domination were partly revoked, the practices of enlightened despotism were not entirely reestablished. Despite the complaints of unbending legitimists and the dire predictions of disappointed reformers, the peacemakers succeeded in creating a new political order in Germany that endured for half a century. The long years of war and unrest that had convulsed Europe during the era of the French Revolution and Napoleon were followed by even longer years of stability and tranquility.
The Germany that emerged in 1815 from the Congress of Vienna included 39 states ranging in size from the two Great Powers, Austria and Prussia, through the minor kingdoms of Bavaria, Württemberg, Saxony, and Hanover; through smaller duchies such as Baden, Nassau, Oldenburg, and Hesse-Darmstadt; through tiny principalities such as Schaumburg-Lippe, Schwarzburg-Sondershausen, and Reuss-Schleiz-Gera; to the free cities of Hamburg, Bremen, Lübeck, and Frankfurt am Main. The new boundaries in Germany bore little resemblance to the bewildering territorial mosaic that had been maintained under the Holy Roman Empire, but there were still many fragments, subdivisions, enclaves, and exclaves, too many for the taste of ardent nationalists. Yet the overall pattern of state frontiers represented a significant improvement over the chaotic patchwork of sovereignties and jurisdictions that had characterized the old order. The peacemakers not only created more integrated and viable political entities but also altered the role that these entities were to play in the affairs of the nation. Without design or even awareness on the part of Frederick William III, his kingdom of Prussia assumed a pivotal position in Germany. The victorious powers, on guard against a revival of French aggression, decided to make Prussia the defender of the western boundary of Germany. The Rhineland and Westphalia, including the Ruhr district, which would develop into the greatest industrial centre on the Continent, became Prussian provinces. More than that, the king agreed, at the urging of Alexander I, to cede the bulk of his Polish possessions to Russia in return for a substantial part of Saxony. Prussia, which at the end of the 18th century had been in the process of becoming a binational state, was thrust back into Germany and given a strategic position on both frontiers of the nation. The centre of gravity of Austria, on the other hand, shifted eastward. Francis I had decided to abandon the historic role of his state as protector of the Holy Roman Empire against the French for the sake of greater geographic compactness and military defensibility. The possessions in southern and western Germany were surrendered along with the Austrian Netherlands in return for Venetian territory on the Adriatic. The Habsburg empire thus became less German in composition and outlook as its focus shifted in the direction of Italy and eastern Europe. The consequences of this territorial rearrangement were to be far-reaching.