Heart of Europe: A History of the Roman Empire (116 page)

Having been twice reminded by his ministers, Francis reluctantly signed the papers. On the morning of 6 August an imperial herald in full regalia rode through Vienna to the Jesuit church of the Nine Choirs of Angels. After climbing to the balcony, he summoned the inhabitants with a silver fanfare to announce the end of the Empire. The Reichstag was formally informed on 11 August, while letters were sent to foreign diplomats over the following week.
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The Empire was certainly not dead by the late eighteenth century, and if it was sick, as Zedler and others suggested, it was not yet on life support. If revolutionary France had not intervened, the most likely prognosis was that the Empire’s socio-political order would have persisted further into the nineteenth century, but it is unlikely that this could have been sustained against the levelling and homogenizing forces unleashed by capitalism and industrialization around 1830. Attempts to preserve the corporate order beyond 1806 will be addressed in this book’s final chapter, which also assesses the Empire’s longer-term significance for Germany and Europe.

13

Afterlife

DISMANTLING THE EMPIRE, 1806–15

Public Dismay

Despite the widespread awareness of changing circumstances, news of the Empire’s dissolution caused consternation. The idea that the general population were indifferent is a myth elaborated by later historians, usually by taking a few quotations from Goethe and others out of context.
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Some intellectuals and artists indeed welcomed its demise and looked to Napoleon as the herald of a new age. However, many were deeply affected, like the painter Caspar David Friedrich, who fell ill as a result.
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On 20 July 1806 the French envoy in Bavaria already reported waves of ‘nostalgia’ at the Empire’s imminent end, and noted the widespread concern at losing a system that protected the weak against the strong.
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The remaining envoys at the Reichstag received the formal announcement with dismay.
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The newly minted elector of Hessen-Kassel, with tears in his eyes, told an Austrian envoy that he regretted the loss of ‘a constitution from which Germany has long derived its happiness and freedom’.
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Even those who directly benefited were upset. Von Dalberg was close to tears when he signed the Confederation Act, while the dour, authoritarian Friedrich I, who had just become Württemberg’s first king, privately mourned the Empire’s end.
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With Germany full of Napoleon’s troops, few dared to protest. Johann Palm, a Nuremberg book dealer, was executed on 26 August for writing an anonymous 150-page pamphlet criticizing French policy.
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Hans von Gagern wrote that, as a government minister in Nassau, he could take no action, because the French occupied the principality, yet he
deeply regretted the division of ‘my general fatherland’. Many others noted how, in contrast to 1801–3, people were now too frightened to discuss political reform.
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Public discussion of the Empire’s end was thus delayed until 1813 when allied troops began liberating Germany after Napoleon’s defeat in Russia the year before. The period immediately following Napoleon’s final defeat in 1815 was profoundly conservative and saw debate constrained by tight censorship laws. These circumstances affected those who published memoirs, especially the last ‘imperial generation’ who reached later middle age around 1820. Their accounts reflected how their careers had fared after 1806. Predictably, those who had suffered most expressed the deepest regret, notably the old aristocratic and legal elite, and the princes mediatized after 1801.

Continuity amidst Change

Hegel famously described the imperial constitution as constructed of round stones that would roll away if pushed. Many historians have followed him in depicting 1806 as ‘zero hour’, deliberately using the term ‘old Empire’ (
Altes Reich
) to consign the imperial socio-political order to history and to present modern Germany as a product of nineteenth-century war and economic developments. ‘In the beginning was Napoleon,’ writes Thomas Nipperdey at the start of his general history.
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Many of Hegel’s stones in fact proved immovable boulders, because it took several years to dismantle the constitutional order and many more to remove underlying socio-legal arrangements.

The legality of Francis II’s abdication was the most immediate issue since the majority of central Europeans remained governed by rulers who, till then, had been imperial vassals. Austrian ministers carefully phrased the abdication patent to blame the new Confederation of the Rhine for having already wrecked the Empire, reducing Francis’s act to simply releasing his vassals from their feudal ties. For this reason, Austria’s representative told the later German Federal Assembly on 5 November 1816 that the Empire had ceased to exist when the Confederation princes ratified their alliance with Napoleon on 1 August 1806.
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Legalism still guided behaviour. Austrian ministers seriously debated whether the imperial insignia belonged to the Habsburgs or the Empire collectively, and strove to avoid the impression that Francis
had simply stolen them. As in 1803, there was a continued sense of duty towards those who had served the Empire, and Austria provided pensions for the Reichshofrat staff who found themselves unemployed.

Sweden issued an official protest on 22 August 1806, arguing that the Empire still existed but was merely under French occupation. Britain took a similar line, even briefly going to war with Prussia for having annexed Hanover. Most imperial lawyers concluded that, though Francis was entitled to abdicate, he could not unilaterally dissolve the Empire, which was a collective order of emperor and imperial Estates.
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The sense of uncertainty was heightened by the continued existence of the Prussian-controlled northern neutrality zone, which still adhered to the constitutional order established in 1803 and whose princes had refrained from joining the Confederation of the Rhine.

Prussia used the opportunity to increase pressure on the northern princes from July onwards, presenting them with a stark choice of either accepting closer cooperation on its terms or becoming French vassals. Prussian ministers envisaged annexing the three wealthy cities of Hamburg, Bremen and Lübeck, whilst allowing Hanover and Saxony to assume royal titles and permitting Hessen-Kassel to take the remaining smaller north-western territories. Hessen-Kassel and Saxony were prepared to accept a
Kayßer von Preußen
, but wanted to retain more of the old structures, including the Westphalian and Lower and Upper Saxon Kreise. Even Prussia wanted to preserve a Danish presence in Holstein and accept Russian possession of the tiny lordship of Jever. Russia rejected this, refusing to respond to official notification of Francis’s abdication and acting as if the Empire still existed. However, Austria was prepared to accept Prussian plans, because it saw these as the only way to restrict the Confederation of the Rhine to the south and west. France did not have to do much to block Prussia’s belated imperial project. Minor north German princes like those of Waldeck and Lippe-Detmold had already joined the Confederation in August 1806 to escape annexation. Prussia failed to secure more than defensive treaties with Saxony and Hessen-Kassel, leaving it isolated when Napoleon decided to settle matters by war in October.
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Liquidating the Empire

The imperial postal service was already in difficulties during the 1790s and fragmented into 30 rival territorial networks during 1806, though
the Thurn und Taxis family would continue to operate a reduced business until forced by Prussia to sell this in July 1867.
¹³
Otherwise, the deeply engrained legalism persisted, smoothing the new territorial reorganization, as it had done in 1801–3. However, this time there was no longer a single, superior constitutional order, and it was not clear where formal responsibility lay. In practice, the Imperial Deputation’s Final Decision from March 1803 continued to operate and its guidelines were incorporated in the Confederation Act of July 1806 by obliging members to look after the employees and debts of the territories Napoleon permitted them to annex.
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For example, the 300-square-kilometre Westphalian county of Rietberg had been elevated to a principality in 1803 and survived into 1806 through its incorporation within the neutrality zone. It was assigned to the Department of Fulda, an administrative subdivision of the new kingdom of Westphalia, created in 1807 by Napoleon for his brother Jérôme, using the Hessen-Kassel and former Westphalian and Lower Saxon bishoprics recently annexed by Prussia. The new district official reported on the fate of Rietberg’s ‘army’ of one lieutenant and 23 men ‘that these soldiers are not National Guards, but were a real and long-standing military force, maintained partly to discharge obligations to the Empire and partly for police and public-order duties’. Accordingly, the new government ruled that they were entitled to pensions at public expense.
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Meanwhile, the grand duchy of Berg, another Napoleonic creation, inherited responsibility for liquidating the affairs of the Westphalian Kreis on the grounds that the former duke of Berg had been the Kreis convenor. It took until 1811 to wind up business and arrange pensions for former officials. Liquidation of the Swabian Kreis fell to Württemberg and was completed in 1809. Austria did what it could to disrupt this, entrusting the former Reichshofrat president Count Philipp Öttingen-Wallerstein with heading a commission in February 1807 to divide the court’s cases between those still ongoing and a historic archive. The work was incomplete when renewed French occupation of Vienna forced Austria to surrender the documents in 1809. Napoleon planned a central archive for all Europe and had the court papers, along with some other Habsburg material, carted off in 2,500 chests to Paris. After Napoleon’s defeat, the Treaty of Paris (May 1814) compelled France to return to Austria all documents relating to
l’ancien Empire Germanique
.
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The Reichskammergericht staff fared less well than those of the Reichshofrat, because no one wanted to take responsibility for what had been a common institution maintained by all imperial Estates. Nonetheless, thanks to their prestige and competence, over half the former judges found posts in the successor states, including Karl Albert von Kamptz, who became Prussian minister of justice.
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The court’s base, the former imperial city of Wetzlar, had already been assigned in 1803 to Dalberg’s new arch-chancellor principality. He established a new law school there in 1808 ostensibly modelled on French examples, but in practice continuing the Reichskammergericht’s function to train jurists for all Germany. Former staff were employed as teachers. The German Confederation confirmed the employment of Reichskammergericht archivists to look after the court’s documents in 1816. Prussia, which had received Wetzlar within the renewed redistribution of territory after Napoleon’s final defeat the year before, forced the Confederation to establish a commission in 1821 to disperse the documents. It is a measure of the complexity of the Empire’s legal history that it took 24 years to work out where to send them, since it was far from clear which of the successor states ‘owned’ individual cases. The papers were sent across Germany between 1847 and 1852, much to the frustration of modern historians, who ever since have had to search numerous regional archives to reconstruct imperial legal history.
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The Persistence of Corporate Society

The continuity of personnel encouraged that of practice, contributing to the uneven experience in the Empire’s former territories across 1806–15. Full French-style legal and administrative reforms were limited to Berg and Westphalia, the two states governed by Napoleon’s relations, as well as the Rhineland directly annexed to France, and to the grand duchy of Würzburg and Dalberg’s grand duchy of Frankfurt, established in 1806. Elsewhere, change was largely an acceleration of earlier rationalization and codification, driven now by the need to incorporate mediatized territories and to meet Napoleon’s demands for military support. Württemberg more than doubled in size between 1802 and 1810, annexing 78 smaller territories, while its population changed from being solidly Lutheran to nearly one-third Catholic.
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The situation was similar in Baden, Bavaria, Hessen-Darmstadt and
Nassau, which all made significant gains. Existing administrations could not cope, and were hastily overhauled using prevailing enlightened ideas, French models and pure expediency. Saxony, Mecklenburg and the surviving smaller principalities were more stable, because they were given little or no additional territory after 1806.

Much of the socio-legal order survived even multiple territorial reorganizations. Mecklenburg retained its 1755 constitution until 1918. The Saxon Estates survived until 1831, Hadeln’s peasant assembly met until 1884, while corporatism continued to shape Prussia’s internal politics long after that. The mediatized princes retained privileged legal status, and control of their own domains and over clerical appointments, plus lesser jurisdiction, hunting and fishing rights within the boundaries of their former imperial fiefs, until 1848. Prussian manors enjoyed tax exemption until 1861, police authority up to 1872, and favourable control over servants until 1918, with lordly influence over local churches persisting even after that. Manorial districts remained the primary units of state administration in Prussia until 1927, all despite the fact that reforms between 1807 and 1821 emancipated serfs from the manorial economy.
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Hamburg’s Jewish Ordinance from 1710 remained in force into the later nineteenth century, while Bavaria’s partially codified civil code from 1754 persisted until 1900. Prussia lacked a uniform commercial code before 1861, while a supreme court for the German states was not established again until 1879. Codification of civil law across the states of the Second German Empire took from 1879 until 1900 to complete. Some cultural elements of the old order displayed still greater longevity: Buchenbach parish near Freiburg assumed the spiritual responsibilities of the Swabian monasteries secularized in 1803 and continued to say prayers in memory of Emperor Frederick I ‘Barbarossa’ until after the First World War.
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