Heart of Europe: A History of the Roman Empire (114 page)

The Absence of Revolution

The lack of popular pressure for change was a significant factor behind the conservatism of the reform proposals. Burghers made growing use of the Reichshofrat to resolve disputes in their cities, while 28 per cent of all cases brought by peasants to the Reichskammergericht were initiated after 1750. Increased recourse to the supreme courts indicates greater acceptance of their role in conflict resolution, rather than evidence of a mounting crisis. Baron Knigge, organizer of the conspiratorial Bavarian secret society known as the Illuminati and a revolutionary sympathizer, wrote in 1793 that the long duration of Reichskammergericht cases allowed passions to subside, while ordinary people retained faith in eventual redress. This, he felt, was why ‘we in Germany probably should not expect a dangerous political revolution’.
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The Empire’s inhabitants viewed the French Revolution with a mixture of complacency, panic and, for a few, admiration. Many mistook the Liège, Belgian and Saxon revolts in 1789–90 for the spread of revolution to the Empire – not surprisingly, since protesters sometimes copied French slogans and symbols. A ‘liberty tree’ mysteriously appeared in Paderborn town square one night in 1792 with a notice exhorting the inhabitants to throw off the yoke of their aristocratic oppressors. Two years later, rioting peasants demolished the prison in Gesmold, Lower Saxony, as if it were a local Bastille and demanded ‘freedom and equality like in France’. French émigrés deliberately fanned the authorities’ fears, hoping to enlist the German princes for a counter-revolutionary crusade.
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In fact, there was little enthusiasm for the kind of changes enacted in France: no one heeded the notice in Paderborn, while the Gesmold peasants dispersed once they felt they had made their point. Protesters’ aims remained conventional, and the level of unrest did not increase despite the rapidly escalating burdens of war after 1792.

‘German Jacobins’, or open supporters of revolution, were a ‘tiny minority within a small minority’ of French sympathizers.
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The absence of support is not surprising given the prevailing hostility to
republicanism and individualism. French bourgeois equality with its inviolability of property suggested the horrors of an unfettered free market strongly at odds with the moral economy of the Empire’s regulated corporate society. A republic was briefly established in Mainz after French troops captured the city in 1792. Some German Jacobins envisaged extending this to the whole of the Empire, or reorganizing the Empire to exclude Austria and Prussia. Although they embraced French centralist ideas, some were still guided by elements of the imperial constitution. Christoph Friedrich Cotta, a former imperial publicist turned Jacobin, advocated converting the Reichstag into an elected parliament.
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French ideas were soon discredited by news of the accompanying violence and escalating terror. The French occupation of the Rhineland after 1792 made their freedom appear even more despotic than the rule of Louis XIV, whose troops had devastated the same region a century before. Animosity deepened with forced requisitioning and other demands across the next 20 years, cementing anti-French stereotypes that persisted into the mid-twentieth century.
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Most believed that a combination of imperial justice and progressive reforms by territorial governments had made revolution unnecessary. Although the Reichstag adjourned for its summer recess a few weeks after the storming of the Bastille on 14 July 1789, the Empire’s multilayered structure enabled effective coordination of security measures through the Kreise, which established a military cordon on the western frontier and tightened censorship after August 1789.
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It took war to force change on the Empire. The French revolutionaries abolished feudalism on 4 August 1789, though full implementation was delayed until 1838 by the difficulties of defining exactly what ‘feudalism’ was.
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The decree affected various Rhenish princes like the bishop of Speyer and landgrave of Hanau-Lichtenberg, who still possessed extensive jurisdictions and property in Alsace and Lorraine. The peace treaties transferring these territories to France in 1648 and 1738 had remained within the spirit of early modern European relations by leaving these rights intact. The French revolutionaries now asserted the modern notion of absolute sovereignty to argue their decree applied everywhere in France, whereas the princes clung to older ideals of fragmented sovereignty to defend their extra-territorial rights. Preoccupied with domestic problems, the revolutionaries initially offered financial compensation, but the Rhenish princes unwisely insisted on full restitution.
The other imperial Estates were reluctant to risk war over the issue, while Prussia manipulated the controversy as part of its general policy of causing trouble for Austria. By the time Leopold II offered to negotiate in December 1791, it was too late, as leadership of the revolution had passed to men who saw it as their duty to export their ideas and who regarded war as a solution to the mounting problems in France.
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Prussia Stands Alone

France initially only declared war on Austria on 20 April 1792, planning to conquer the Austrian Netherlands, which was still in ferment over opposition to local Habsburg administrative reforms. Austria bought Prussian support for a counter-offensive by agreeing to its annexation of Ansbach-Bayreuth (the childless prince of which retired to live with his English mistress on a Prussian pension). The joint invasion of France stalled at Valmy in September, a battle celebrated as a great revolutionary victory, but which consisted principally of the French army not fleeing from the Prussians, who retreated after losing only 184 men.
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This famous failure of nerve broke the Austro-Prussian offensive, but there had never been a real chance that the invaders could have crushed the Revolution. War resumed after the French regicide on 21 January 1793, with Austria and Prussia on the defensive and distracted by continued mutual rivalry over Poland’s fate. The two German great powers combined in March 1793 to force the Reichstag to declare war on France, thus legitimating their exploitation of collective security to bolster their own flagging military effort.
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Thereafter, the Empire’s fate depended to a considerable extent on Austrian and Prussian policy.

Prussian ministers were inhibited by personal rivalries from formulating a consistent policy, something that merely heightened Austrian suspicions.
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The Hohenzollerns’ advisors were profoundly unsettled by events, but their yearning to restore politics to a more predictable course compelled them to confront Prussia’s relationship to the Empire. They concluded that ‘old German liberty’ and the Empire’s ‘decrepit constitution’ were creating the same weaknesses which they were busy exploiting in Poland to carve up that country. Although their proposals went further than those voiced in the earlier reform debate, they still only envisaged streamlining rather than dissolving the Empire. The
ecclesiastical and minor territories were to be distributed amongst the secular principalities, while the territorial Estates were to be abolished to remove them as constraints on the ability of rulers to raise taxes and reshape society. The most famous of these proposals was submitted by Carl von Hardenberg on 5 February 1806 and was intended to simplify imperial politics by reorganizing the Empire into six, more geographically logical, Kreise, in turn grouped into three federations led by Austria, Prussia and Bavaria under the emperor’s overall leadership.
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Prussia’s ministers hoped to salvage something of the old order, not create a German nation state. They wanted a viable Empire that could contain Austria and ensure Prussia’s security, especially given the unreliability of allies like Britain and Russia. Prussia even restored autonomy to Nuremberg in September 1796 after briefly annexing the city without permission.
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The ministers were aware of the contradictions between what they thought best for the Empire and their own desire to aggrandize Prussia, but were reluctant to choose between these goals until compelled by military failure and state bankruptcy to make a separate peace with France at Basel in April 1795.
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Prussia was thrust into a semi-imperial role by agreeing with France to convert northern Germany into a neutrality zone. Unable to pay its own troops, Prussia fell back on imperial structures to corral the northern imperial Estates into funding an ‘army of observation’ to uphold neutrality, including convening a combined Upper and Lower Saxon Kreis Assembly at Hildesheim in 1796. Northern Germany experienced Prussia’s presence as a foreign occupation, and longed for a restoration of pre-war conditions.
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Meanwhile, Prussia had reduced its debt by 22 million talers to 33 million by 1806, while making considerable territorial gains during the reorganization of 1801–3, appearing ‘to have achieved the dream of every gambler: to win without betting’.
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The establishment of a more stable French government, known as the Directory, in 1795 did not bring the expected normalization of relations, and Prussian envoys still found the situation in Paris confusing. Even after 1803, ministers hoped that continued Habsburg imperial rule would prevent Napoleon establishing vassalage over southern Germany, and so rejected a French offer in October 1804 to convert the neutrality zone into a Prussian north German empire.
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Austria and the Empire

Many later German historians quietly ignored the catastrophic impact of Prussia’s withdrawal into neutrality after 1795, arguing instead that the Empire was already dead and criticizing Francis II and his chief minister Baron Thurgut for placing Austrian above ‘German’ interests.
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Like his Prussian counterparts, Thurgut already contemplated major changes, including secularizing the three ecclesiastical electorates. Similarly, he struggled to reconcile saving the Empire with advancing Habsburg objectives. His successors after 1800 were even more determined to save the old order, especially Johann Philipp Stadion, who became foreign minister on 25 December 1805. Like his brother Friedrich Lothar, who was Habsburg envoy for Bohemia at the Reichstag after 1803, Johann Philipp was an imperial knight with a deep attachment to corporate society. Baron Hýgel, Austria’s primary Reichstag envoy after 1793 and an ennobled burgher, shared this sentiment and oversaw the crucial effort to save the imperial insignia from advancing French troops in 1796.
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France’s revolution was a serious setback for Austria, robbing it of its principal ally since 1756; cementing that alliance had been the reason Francis II’s daughter Marie-Antoinette had married the future Louis XVI in 1770. Meanwhile, Austria engaged in a costly and largely unsuccessful war against the Ottoman empire between 1788 and 1791, mainly to please Russia, whose friendship was vital in holding Prussia in check. The failure of the Austro-Prussian offensive in 1792 convinced Thurgut that Austria was engaged in an existential struggle requiring an entirely new approach. As war resumed early in 1793, he wrote: ‘the Empire is lost and can only hope to be rescued by Austria and Prussia. Consequently, these powers are entitled to establish a permanent order in the Empire even without asking the imperial Estates.’
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Austria’s temporary understanding with Prussia after 1790 gave Thurgut a unique opportunity to dispense with the customary wrangling to secure half measures, and instead force policies through the Reichstag against opposition from the weaker Estates.

Faced with French invasion after 1793, many of these backed the declaration of war, hoping that this would keep the military effort within the framework of collective security. Imperial mobilization was impressive. The lesser territories provided three-quarters of their
official quotas, together with additional auxiliaries and militia more than making up the difference. The weakest elements often contributed disproportionately. The imperial knights paid 5.7 million florins in voluntary contributions between 1793 and 1801, while Prussia failed to pay its war taxes. Prussia provided 12,000 troops as its imperial contingent, plus another 10,000 in return for cash in lieu from weaker Estates and another 20,000 subsidized by Austria. Yet Prussia retained over 160,000 men at home, because it did not want to antagonize its own subjects by raising taxes.
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The Refusal to Sacrifice Liberties

Consequently, the principal burden fell to Austria, which had spent 500 million florins fighting France by 1798, pushing its debt to 542.5 million.
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Efforts to raise further resources proved counter-productive. The south-western Estates mobilized militia in 1793–4, but service was soon seen as another burden. Military setbacks and Prussia’s withdrawal spread disillusionment, as did the growing acceptance that France could not be defeated by conventional means.
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Two anecdotes illustrate the general reluctance to sacrifice what was being fought for just to achieve victory. The Reichshofrat upheld an appeal in 1794 from an official who had been dismissed by the Hanoverian government after he had lodged his own court case opposing the war against France as unconstitutional. Three years later, when challenged by Napoleon to defend the imperial church’s wealth in the light of Christ’s poverty, Friedrich Lothar Stadion argued simply that it was sanctioned by imperial law.
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