Heart of Europe: A History of the Roman Empire (113 page)

BETWEEN EQUILIBRIUM AND INSTABILITY

Corpses and Funeral Pyres

By the time Haas submitted his memorandum, many felt the Empire was nearing its end. However, when this came just three months later, it was no
Götterdämmerung
, with a redemptive leap into the funeral pyre involving a final battle to forge a bright new future. Instead, the Empire fractured incrementally under relentless French battering. Contemporaries were fully aware that internal weaknesses hastened this process, if not directly causing it. In the subsequent search for explanations for central Europe’s subjugation to French imperialism, it was easy to blame the Empire that had disappeared rather than the princes who survived as rulers of larger, fully sovereign states and who, as Haas predicted, were free to silence their critics.

The overwhelming conclusion after 1806 has been that the Empire had been dead already since at least 1648, if not 1250, and now ‘stood like a corpse . . . ready to crumble at a touch’.
⁸⁰
This interpretation usually contrasts a supposedly moribund imperial structure with the alleged dynamism of the larger German territories, notably Austria and Prussia. The recent, more positive reappraisal of the Empire has the advantage of reflecting the lack of any sense of impending crisis prior to 1790, but has pushed revisionism too far in the opposite direction. Both approaches still view the Empire in dualist terms, underestimating how far social and political structures were entwined. Although substantially altered, much of the Empire’s pre-modern social structures outlived it for several decades at least. This historical debate
exists precisely because the situation remained open in the late eighteenth century. Many problems were surfacing, but they were not immediately life-threatening. Some institutions were no longer compatible with circumstances, or were too inflexible, while others gained new momentum as they tackled immediate problems. This section explains why it proved so hard for those with a vested interest in the Empire to envisage any other political structure for central Europe.

The German State Sickness

Many commentators believed the Empire’s form had outlived its substance by the mid-eighteenth century. Whereas princely governments were housed in palaces built in the fashionable baroque or rococo styles, the Reichstag still met in Regensburg’s gothic town hall. The contrast was not lost on contemporary visitors: the publicist Friedrich Nicolai remarked that the hall ‘is like the German Empire itself, old, rambling and decayed’ (see
Plate 20
).
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Whereas mid-seventeenth-century engravings depicted the hall full of people, later eighteenth-century illustrations showed it empty, reflecting the demise of a culture of personal meetings as the imperial Estates preferred written communication. Even the bishop of Regensburg, who lived a few streets away, was represented by an envoy, while many smaller territories entrusted their mandate to others to save paying diplomats. Six of the 51 imperial cities no longer even did this, while already in 1764 the 161 votes were collectively exercised by just 35 envoys.
⁸²

The same applied to other imperial institutions. One Reichskammergericht judge dismissed his own court’s decisions as ‘nothing more than worthless pieces of paper’, while Joseph II felt that ‘justice always gives way to politics; a wrongdoer, provided he is sustained by force, can go unpunished and be notorious without incurring disrepute.’
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Even the indefatigable Johann Jacob Moser, who devoted virtually his entire life to studying the Empire, abandoned his original project of describing the constitution because of the blatant discrepancy between theory and practice.
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The most influential criticism was that in Johann Heinrich Zedler’s article ‘German State Sickness, or the State Sickness of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation’, published in 1745.
⁸⁵
Zedler’s claim that the Empire displayed ‘unconventional forms of governance’ essentially
continued Samuel Pufendorf’s earlier term ‘monstrosity’ (see
pp. 279–80
). Nonetheless, Zedler’s article exemplified the growing trend to describe the Empire by listing what it lacked compared to a centralized state: a permanent army, swift justice, uniform fiscal and legal structures. Moreover, Zedler’s biological metaphor chimed with philosophical currents that increasingly saw the world in organic terms, rather than the mechanical universe popular in seventeenth-century thought. By 1806, some leading intellectuals expressed the sense that the Empire had been sick for a long time and that its doctors had long given up hope. Goethe’s mother wrote two weeks after Francis II’s abdication that the news was not unexpected, ‘as when an old friend is very ill’. Later historians have expressed similar views that the Empire died ‘a “natural” death’ from old age, rather than having been murdered by Napoleon.
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Criticism of the imperial constitution was boosted by Prussian propaganda during the Seven Years War, which included a new edition of Chemnitz’s tract from the 1640s presenting the Empire as an aristocratic federation. A tract entitled
Why Should Germany Have an Emperor?
(1787) advocated abolishing the imperial office as a relic of medieval barbarism and a barrier to enlightened progress.
⁸⁷
Although exceptional, its anonymous author nonetheless represented the new perception of historical time, involving a sharper and generally hostile characterization of the ‘Middle Ages’ between the flowering of classical civilization and its revival in the Renaissance. Enlightened thought expressed renewed faith in human progress provided it could be unshackled from the fetters of tradition.

The Reform Debate

The implications of these ideas only became obvious during the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars. Before then, most commentators found it difficult to see beyond the established order that still guided all reform plans. Corporate rights and local identities were still anchored in the imperial constitution, which remained the underlying source of legitimacy for the entire socio-political order. As we have seen (
pp. 599–602
), there was little enthusiasm for alternatives, like popular sovereignty, or equality as a new basis for liberty. The relatively open and vibrant public sphere provided opportunities for
thousands of contributors to discuss all kinds of reform, the sheer volume itself being a sign of the Empire’s continued importance.
⁸⁸
The debate was conducted across the Empire and involved all confessional groups and was generally constructive. Criticism usually focused on specific faults, in contrast to debates in France that increasingly attacked the entire monarchical system. The absence of radical suggestions was not due to ignorance of other political systems, because the open and extensive press and periodical literature disseminated information fairly freely. For example, Germans were informed about England through Hanover and its influential university at Göttingen, but few advocated reforming the Empire along the lines of the English constitutional monarchy. Friedrich Carl von Moser and Prince Leopold Friedrich Franz of Anhalt-Dessau simply suggested adding an elected lower house to the Reichstag, while Hegel proposed converting the existing civic corpus along similar lines.
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The more realistic proposals all envisaged some kind of princely league as a vehicle for renewed imperial reform. Interest was strongest amongst the middling territories like Mainz, Sachsen-Weimar, Baden, and smaller secular principalities like Anhalt-Dessau or Zweibrücken, who all felt increasingly powerless in the face of Austrian and Prussian expansion. Leagues were not seen as alternatives to the Empire, but as ways to improve coordination and prevent status disputes from undermining the weaker principalities’ collective weight in existing institutions. For example, the Reichstag’s princely corpus temporarily suspended its work in February 1780 after a dispute over who should exercise the votes for the duchies of Westphalia and Franconia, even though these no longer really existed as territories. League proposals after 1770 drew on new ideals of friendship emerging from late Enlightenment and early Romantic thought, which blurred earlier distinctions between political, literary and scientific activity, and advocated freer forms of interaction outside the now rigid status hierarchy. The League of Princes (
Fürstenbund
) emerged from a personal meeting between Leopold Friedrich Franz of Anhalt-Dessau and Carl Friedrich of Baden in July 1782.
⁹⁰

Leopold Friedrich Franz expressed the reform programme through laying out a 100-square-kilometre park at Wörlitz. Opened to the public, this was intended to appeal to both the senses and the intellect by mixing English-style landscaped gardens with ‘scientific’ model farms
into a composite without any specific focal point, in deliberate contrast to the baroque formal gardens designed to present a centralized order. Wörlitz thus expressed the smaller princes’ argument that regional diversity, not standardization, was the best route to progress.
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Other measures were more immediately practical and were intended to present smaller principalities as model states to disarm arguments for annexation on grounds of efficiency that were voiced during the First Partition of Poland (1772). The ecclesiastical territories were often at the forefront of such reforms, because they felt most vulnerable. Following serious fires in 1781, the bishopic of Paderborn combined various insurance schemes into a single society backed by the government to cover property worth 2.3 million florins. Mainz replaced charity with state welfare in 1785, providing free maternity cover for unmarried mothers and other enlightened measures not seen in many other Catholic states until the late twentieth century.
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Concrete proposals for wider reform of the entire Empire were rather thin, and the potential of the League of Princes has been overestimated since it suggested nothing beyond tinkering with existing arrangements.
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The Reichskammergericht was to be overhauled by another visitation, while the Kreise were to be rationalized by adjusting membership, revising quotas to align more closely with actual wealth, and to incorporate Bohemia and Silesia as additional Kreise to force Austria and Prussia to contribute more. Other ideas included imposing additional curbs on imperial prerogatives at the next election, or backing Prince Max Joseph of Zweibrücken-Birkenfeld as next king of the Romans, a suggestion that was not totally far-fetched given that he was heir to both Bavaria and the Palatinate, which he had inherited in 1799.

Some proposals would have weakened existing structures by widening princely autonomy, for instance by transferring responsibility for imperial debt commissions from the Reichshofrat to committees of princes. A few proposals involved more fundamental reform in specific areas. Carl Theodor von Dalberg, the future imperial arch-chancellor, started revising the 1532 Carolina penal code as a National Law Book after 1787, and advocated abolishing serfdom, customs barriers and guild restrictions, all of which would have struck at the heart of corporate society.
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Most were reluctant to go that far. Saxony only joined the League of Princes to preserve its existing status, while Justus Möser
and other writers struggled to reconcile enlightened ideals with corporatist hierarchical structures.
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The new princely sociability was still exclusive, indeed more so than some earlier forms. Unlike the fifteenth-century reform era, the middling princes did not cooperate with counts, knights or imperial cities in their proposals, justifiably raising suspicions about their true motives. Several proposals simply ignored the right of ecclesiastical princes to their fiefs, and proceeded immediately to considering how to legitimate their expropriation.

It hardly inspired confidence that Landgrave Wilhelm IX of Hessen-Kassel asserted inheritance claims by invading the tiny principality of Schaumburg-Lippe in 1787, a year after joining the League of Princes. A Reichshofrat verdict, backed by Prussian, Hanoverian and Cologne diplomatic pressure, secured a bloodless withdrawal and obliged the landgrave to pay reparations.
⁹⁶
While this appeared to demonstrate the efficacy of existing institutions, unrest in Liège between 1789 and 1791 revealed serious defects in the Empire’s peacekeeping system, as neither the courts nor the Kreis Assemblies could compel Austria and Prussia to cooperate. Prussia recognized the Belgian revolutionaries’ declaration of independence in January 1790, making it hard for Austria to call on the Empire to restore order.
⁹⁷

By then, princely reform efforts were losing momentum. They faced the same problems as Luther and the other reformers in the early sixteenth century who were unable to reform the Catholic church without papal cooperation. None of the princes wanted to leave the Empire, but equally none could interest the Habsburgs in imperial reform. Unlike Maximilian I or Charles V, neither Joseph II after 1780 nor his two successors had any incentive to change existing arrangements. Reform was more likely to make the Empire harder to manage, rather than increase its material benefit to Austria. Despite Joseph’s sometimes rough treatment of the ecclesiastical princes and other minor Estates, Austria still appeared their more natural ally than Prussia or the middling princes. Austria could count on 65 votes in the electoral and princely colleges between 1785 and 1792 compared to 43 likely to side with Prussia, while the cities overwhelmingly backed the Habsburgs.
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Any chance of princely sponsored reform ended with the Convention of Reichenbach on 27 July 1790, which established an Austro-Prussian alliance of convenience lasting until April 1795. Another separate league of middling princes was proposed at a meeting in Wilhelmsbad
in September 1794, when it was hoped this might attract British financial backing, but the scheme was soon scotched by Austrian diplomacy.
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