The Bee and the Eagle: Napoleonic France and the End of the Holy Roman Empire (War, Culture and Scoiety, 1750-1850)

The Bee and the Eagle

War, Culture and Society, 1750–1850 Series Editors: Rafe Blaufarb (Tallahassee, USA), Alan Forrest (York, UK), and Karen Hagemann (Chapel Hill, USA) Editorial Board: Michael Broers (Oxford, UK), Christopher Bayly (Cambridge, UK), Richard Bessel (York, UK), Sarah Chambers (Minneapolis, USA), Laurent Dubois (Durham, USA), Etienne François (Berlin, Germany), Janet Hartley (London, UK), Wayne Lee (Chapel Hill, USA), Jane Rendall (York, UK), Reinhard Stauber (Klagenfurt, Austria) Titles include: Alan Forrest and Peter H. Wilson (editors) THE BEE AND THE EAGLE Napoleonic France and the End of the Holy Roman Empire, 1806 Alan Forrest, Karen Hagemann and Jane Rendall (editors) SOLDIERS, CITIZENS AND CIVILIANS Experiences and Perceptions of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, 1790–1820 Forthcoming: Karen Hagemann, Gisela Mettele and Jane Rendall (editors) GENDER, WAR AND POLITICS The Wars of Revolution and Liberation – Transatlantic Comparisons, 1775–1820 Alan Forrest, Etienne François and Karen Hagemann (editors) WAR MEMORIES The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Europe Richard Bessel, Nicholas Guyatt and Jane Rendall (editors) WAR, EMPIRE AND SLAVERY, 1770–1830

War, Culture and Society, 1750–1850 Series Standing Order ISBN 978–0–230–54532–8 hardback 978–0–230–54533–5 paperback (outside North America only) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England

The Bee and the Eagle Napoleonic France and the End of the Holy Roman Empire, 1806

Edited by

Alan Forrest Professor of Modern History, University of York

and

Peter H. Wilson GF Grant Professor of History, University of Hull

Editorial matter, selection, introduction © Alan Forrest and Peter H. Wilson 2009 All remaining chapters © their respective authors 2009 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin's Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–00893–9 ISBN-10: 0–230–00893–3

hardback hardback

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The bee and the eagle : Napoleonic France and the end of the Holy Roman Empire, 1806 / edited by Alan Forrest and Peter H. Wilson. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–00893–9 1. France – Foreign relations – 1789–1815. 2. Holy Roman Empire – History – 1648–1804. 3. Napoleon I, Emperor of the French, 1769–1821 – Relations with Europeans. 4. Napoleon I, Emperor of the French, 1769–1821 – Relations with Germans. 5. Napoleonic Wars, 1800–1815 – Campaigns – Germany. 6. Napoleonic Wars, 1800–1815 – Campaigns – Austria. I. Forrest, Alan I. II. Wilson, Peter H. (Peter Hamish) DC227.B44 2009 940.2⬘72—dc22 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

2008021225

Contents Foreword to the Series

vii

Acknowledgements

ix

Notes on Contributors

x

Maps

xv

Introduction Alan Forrest and Peter H. Wilson

1

1 The Meaning of Empire in Central Europe around 1800 Peter H. Wilson 2

The Political Culture of the Holy Roman Empire on the Eve of its Destruction Michael Rowe

22

42

3 The Napoleonic Empire Michael Broers

65

4 The Political Culture of the Napoleonic Empire William Doyle

83

5 A Matter of Survival: Bavaria Becomes a Kingdom Michael Kaiser

94

6 Napoleon as Monarch: A Political Evolution Alan Forrest

112

7 Napoleon and the Abolition of Feudalism Rafe Blaufarb

131

8

The Prussian Army in the Jena Campaign Claus Telp

155

9

Napoleon’s Second Sacre? Iéna and the Ceremonial Translation of Frederick the Great’s Insignia in 1807 Thomas Biskup

172

‘Desperation to the Utmost’: The Defeat of 1806 and the French Occupation in Prussian Experience and Perception Karen Hagemann

191

10

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11 Legends of the Allied Invasions and Occupations of Eastern France, 1792–1815 David Hopkin 12

‘The Germans are Hydrophobes’: Germany and the Germans in the Shaping of French Identity Michael Rapport

214

234

13 The Response to Napoleon and German Nationalism John Breuilly

256

Index

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Foreword to the Series Rafe Blaufarb, Alan Forrest, Karen Hagemann

The century from 1750 to 1850 was a seminal period of change, not just in Europe but also across the globe. The political landscape was transformed by a series of revolutions fought in the name of liberty – most notably in America and France, of course, but elsewhere, too: in Geneva and the Netherlands during the eighteenth century and across much of mainland Europe by 1848. Nor was such change confined to the European world. New ideas of freedom, equality and human rights were carried to the furthest outposts of empire, to Egypt, India and the Caribbean, which saw the creation in 1801 of the first black republic in Haiti, the former French colony of Saint-Domingue. And in the early part of the nineteenth century they continued to inspire anti-colonial and liberation movements throughout Central and Latin America. If political and social institutions were transformed by revolution in these years, so, too, was warfare. During the quarter-century of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, in particular, Europe was faced with the prospect of ‘total’ war, on a scale unprecedented before the twentieth century. Military hardware, it is true, evolved only gradually, and battles were not necessarily any bloodier than they had been during the Seven Years War. But in other ways these can legitimately be described as the first modern wars, fought by mass armies mobilized by national and patriotic propaganda, leading to the displacement of millions of people throughout Europe and beyond, as soldiers, prisoners of war, civilians and refugees. For those who lived through the period these wars would be a formative experience that shaped the ambitions and the identities of a generation. The aims of the series are necessarily ambitious. In its various volumes, whether single-authored monographs or themed collections, it seeks to extend the scope of more traditional historiography. It will study warfare during this formative century not just in Europe, but also in the Americas, in colonial societies and across the world. It will analyse the construction of identities and power relations by integrating the principal categories of difference, most notably class and religion, generation and gender, race and ethnicity. It will adopt a multifaceted approach to vii

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Foreword to the Series

the period, and turn to methods of political, cultural, social and military history, and of art history, in order to develop a challenging and multidisciplinary analysis. Finally, it will examine elements of comparison and transfer and so tease out the complexities of regional, national and global history.

Acknowledgements This collection of essays began life as papers given at a conference which the editors organised in October 2006, held in the handsome surroundings of the German Historical Institute in London. That conference, to mark the bicentenary of the end of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806, compared the structures and cultures of the two multinational empires which confronted each other at that time: the Holy Roman Empire itself, then in its death throes, and the empire of Napoleonic France which threatened to replace it. The meeting was sponsored by the German History Society; the Society for the Study of French History; the University of Sunderland; and the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies at the University of York. To these societies and institutions we wish to record our thanks and gratitude, as we do to those of our academic colleagues and graduate students who attended the sessions and played a defining role in our debates and discussions. They helped ensure that the conference achieved its goals and led us to believe that the papers, revised and expanded as they appear here, would form a coherent and useful collection. Finally, for the professional support and encouragement which they offered as publishers, our warm thanks go to Michael Strang and Ruth Ireland of Palgrave’s London office.

ix

Notes on Contributors Thomas Biskup is RCUK Fellow and Lecturer in Enlightenment History at the University of Hull; he previously worked at the universities of Oxford and Potsdam. His principal research interests are the political culture of seventeenth- to nineteenth-century Germany and the Anglo-German Enlightenment. Recent publications include Selling Berlin: Imagebildung und Stadtmarketing von der preußischen Residenz bis zur Bundeshauptstadt (Stuttgart, 2007), edited with Marc Schalenberg, and ‘Émigrés of the French Revolution and the Revival of French Court Culture in Brunswick around 1800’, Francia, 33:2 (2007). Rafe Blaufarb is Ben Weider Eminent Scholar and Director of the Institute on Napoleon and the French Revolution at Florida State University, Tallahassee. He is the author of The French Army, 1750–1820: Careers, Talent Merit (Manchester, 2002), and Bonapartists in the Borderlands: French Exiles and Refugees on the Gulf Coast, 1815–1835 (Tuscaloosa, Alabama, 2005). He is currently working on two related projects: a history of noble tax exemption in France (1530s–1830s) and a study of the transformation of seigneurial property in Europe across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. John Breuilly is Professor of Nationalism and Ethnicity at the London School of Economics. His principal interests are nineteenth-century German history, comparative nineteenth-century European history and the study of nationalism and ethnicity. Recent publications include Germany’s Two Unifications: Anticipations, Experiences, Responses, edited with Ronald Speirs (2005), and a lengthy introduction to the second edition of Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (2006). He is working on a book on the modernisation of the German lands c.1780–1880, and is editing the Oxford Handbook on the History of Nationalism. Michael Broers is a Fellow of Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford. He has written five books, the most recent of which, The Napoleonic Empire in Italy, 1796–1814. Cultural Imperialism in a European Context? (Palgrave, 2005) won the Prix Napoléon of the Fondation Napoléon in Paris. He has been a Visiting Member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and recently published in Past & Present, The Historical x

Notes on Contributors xi

Journal and The American Historical Review. He is currently working on a book for Oxford University Press, entitled Napoleonic Civilization. William Doyle was Professor of History at the University of Bristol from 1986 to 2008. A Fellow of the British Academy, he has written extensively on French history, and is general editor of the six-volume Short Oxford History of France. His most recent book is The French Revolution. A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2001). Alan Forrest is Professor of Modern History at the University of York, where he currently co-directs the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies. His recent publications include Napoleon’s Men: The Soldiers of the Revolution and Empire (2002), Paris, the Provinces and the French Revolution (2004), and, with Jean-Paul Bertaud and Annie Jourdan, Napoléon, le monde et les Anglais (Paris, 2004). With Philip G. Dwyer he has edited a collection of essays on Napoleon and his Empire (Palgrave, 2007), and is currently preparing a book on the concept of the nationin-arms in French republican memory. Karen Hagemann is James G. Kenan Distinguished Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research in modern German and European history and gender history focuses on a gendered cultural history of the military, war and the nation, the history of masculinity and citizenship, and on a comparative gender history of welfare and education systems. Her most recent publications include Männlicher Muth und Teutsche Ehre. Nation, Krieg und Geschlecht in der Zeit der Antinapoleonischen Kriege Preußens (2002), and as guest editor with Katherine Aaslestad of the special issue of Central European History, 39 (2006), New Perspectives on the Period of the Anti-Napoleonic Wars, 1806–1815. David Hopkin is Fellow in Modern History at the Hertford College, Oxford. His current research focuses on oral culture in nineteenthcentury France (often with a military or maritime twist), and, in collaboration with Breton colleagues, a history of the British raids on Brittany in the Seven Years War. Recent publications include Soldier and Peasant in French Popular Culture, 1766–1870 (Woodbridge, 2002); ‘Storytelling, Fairytales and Autobiography: Some Observations on Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century French Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Memoirs’, Social History 29:2 (2004); and ‘Female Soldiers and the Battle of the Sexes in France: The Mobilisation of a Folk Motif’, History Workshop 56 (2003).

xii Notes on Contributors

Michael Kaiser teaches Early Modern History at the University of Cologne. His research interests focus on military history and the political culture of the Holy Roman Empire. Besides numerous articles he has edited Der zweite Mann im Staat. Oberste Amtsträger und Favoriten im Umkreis der Reichsfürsten im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert with Andreas Pecar (Berlin, 2003); Militär und Religiosität in der Frühen Neuzeit with Stefan Kroll (Hamburg, 2004); and Membra unius capitis. Neue Studien zu Herrschaftsauffassungen und Regierungspraxis in Kurbrandenburg (1640– 1688) with Michael Rohrschneider (Berlin, 2005). Currently, he is preparing a study on the territorial estates of Cleves and Mark in the seventeenth century. Michael Rapport teaches European history at the University of Stirling and is Reviews Editor for the journal French History. He is author of Nationality and Citizenship in Revolutionary France: the Treatment of Foreigners (Oxford, 2000), of Nineteenth-Century Europe (Palgrave, 2005) and various articles on the French Revolution. He is currently writing a book on the 1848 Revolutions and is researching for two other works on the Decembrists and on the Napoleonic Wars in an imperial context. Despite all that, his main area of interest remains the French Revolution. Michael Rowe is Lecturer in Modern European History at King’s College London, and Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Publications include From Reich to State: The Rhineland in the Revolutionary Age, 1780– 1830 (Cambridge, 2003) and the edited volume Collaboration and Resistance in Napoleonic Europe. State-Formation in an Age of Upheaval, c.1800–1815 (Palgrave, 2003), as well as numerous chapters and articles devoted to the Napoleonic period. His current research interests remain focused on state/nation building in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Europe. Claus Telp is Senior Lecturer in the War Studies Department of the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, having studied at the GeorgAugust University Göttingen, Lancaster University and Kings College London. His doctoral thesis appeared as The Operational Art from Frederick the Great to Napoleon, 1740–1813 (2005). His current research interests are armoured warfare in the Second World War and military theory. Peter H. Wilson is GF Grant Professor of History at the University of Hull, having worked previously at Sunderland and Newcastle universities. His books include War, State and Society in Württemberg, 1677–1793

Notes on Contributors xiii

(Cambridge, 1995), German Armies: War and German politics 1648–1806 (1998), The Holy Roman Empire 1495–1806 (Palgrave, 1999), Absolutism in Central Europe (2000), From Reich to Revolution: German History 1558– 1806 (Palgrave, 2004), and as editor, The Blackwell Companion to Eighteenth-Century Europe (2008).

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Maps

Mecklenburg Prussia Hanover

Berlin

Kassel

Berg Nassau

Saxony

Electoral Hessen Saxon Duchies Fulda Prague

Darmstadt

Bohemia

Baden Regensburg

Württemberg

Bavaria

Austria

Augsburg

Vienna Salzburg

Hungary Habsburg monarchy Prussia

Styria

Tirol

Bavaria Saxony

Venetia

Hanover Württemberg Electoral Hessen Baden Hessen-Darmstadt Arch-Chancellor Salzburg

Map 1

The Holy Roman Empire in 1803–6

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xvi Maps

Map 2

Napoleonic Greater France 1811

Maps

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Introduction Alan Forrest and Peter H. Wilson

The year 2006 marked the bicentenary of two seminal events in German and French history: the dissolution of the old Reich or Holy Roman Empire that had encompassed much of Europe for over a millennium, and its replacement by a new, French-sponsored political order. The juxtaposition of the two empires in 1806 offers an ideal opportunity for a comparative approach to the transition towards modernity and serves as a snapshot moment in the vacillating balance of power and influence between France and Germany in the construction of Europe. The rapidity of these changes suggests a major turning point, to some even the birth of modernity itself, as Napoleon, the inheritor of the dynamic, rationalising traditions of the French Revolution, triumphed over a socio-political order that had its roots in the early middle ages and claimed direct descent from the ancient Roman Empire. However, recent research on both countries suggests that the contrast is considerably more complex than is commonly assumed. To date this research has been conducted largely in parallel and remains dominated by the concerns of two distinct national historiographies. The anniversary of 1806 is an ideal moment to draw these lines of investigation together. To place what follows in context, it is necessary to trace FrancoGerman relations back from 1806. Whereas the Revolution and Napoleon both represented significant ruptures in France, the inhabitants of the Reich lived in a political and legal framework that stressed unbroken continuity over many centuries. Without wishing to present the events of 1806 as some logical or natural culmination of long-term trends, it is nonetheless useful to range further than is customary for most discussions of the Napoleonic era. A standard image of Franco-German relations is one of conflict, of a hereditary enmity stretching back to the start of the Habsburg-Valois 1

2

Introduction

rivalry over the Burgundian inheritance in 1477 and lasting until the middle of the twentieth century. Yet, prior to the French Revolution there was scarcely a war in which the king of France found himself without at least one German ally. As early as 1534 François I forged ties to the dissident Protestant princes of the Schmalkaldic League opposed to Emperor Charles V; the alliance was brokered by Strasbourg, then an imperial city, which later came to symbolise Franco-German conflict over the Rhine, and then reconciliation from the early 1950s through what was to become the European Union.1 In the century and a half before Napoleon, France gradually upgraded its German alliance partners. First, Louis XIV formed the Rhenish Alliance with the elector of Mainz and a loose group of relatively weak princes in 1658 in order to frustrate Austrian Habsburg efforts to revive power within the Reich. Later, France switched to collaboration with the electorate of Bavaria, especially between 1701 and 1745, before changing to a Prussian alliance and finally to one with the Habsburgs from 1757. The outbreak of the French Revolutionary Wars in 1792 found France in the unusual position of fighting a major continental conflict without any support across the Rhine. This was not a situation the French sought or relished. The initial declaration of war on 20 April 1792 had been directed against Francis II as king of Hungary and Bohemia, until recently an ally of Louis XVI and brother to his queen, Marie-Antoinette. The wording was formally correct since Francis was not elected emperor until 5 July, ending the interregnum in the Reich following the death of his elder brother Leopold II on 1 March. However, the form of address also represented a French attempt to limit the scope of the war and encourage the other German princes to remain neutral.2 This was in line with preRevolutionary policy towards the Reich. The Bourbon monarchy had sought German allies less for whatever military assistance they might provide – though this was generally welcome too – but rather to deter their neighbours from combining with France’s enemies. The Austrian alliance of 1757 represented potentially the best guarantee for French security to the east, since the Habsburgs effectively monopolised the imperial title and, through it, the initiative in imperial institutions, including those required to mobilise for war. Furthermore, with the Austrians as allies rather than enemies, it should be easier for France to exercise its traditional stabilising function in the Reich, a role that became more formal through the French guarantee of the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. The overall intention was to ensure that no major power secured control of what French diplomats termed the forces

Alan Forrest and Peter H. Wilson 3

mortes, or inert potential, of the numerous minor principalities that still controlled around half of the Reich’s territory and which collectively counter-balanced the two German great powers of Austria and Prussia.3 Faced with war, Emperor Francis II was naturally anxious to harness these resources himself. Imperial defence relied on collective security through a constitutional framework intended to mobilise for defensive war, rather than maintain a permanent armed deterrent. Though the Austrian Habsburgs acquired a significant presence in the west with their inheritance of the former Spanish Netherlands in 1714, their strategic orientation remained primarily focused to the north and east by the growth respectively of Prussia and Russia. The French alliance merely reinforced this, not least by effectively neutralising the Italian peninsula which had seen much Franco-Austrian fighting up till 1748. Defence of the Rhine was largely devolved to the minor western German territories, and Emperor Joseph II had spent much of his reign between 1765 and 1790 trying to persuade the Wittelsbachs to exchange Bavaria for the Netherlands.4 The attention of his two successors was concentrated eastwards by renewed conflict with the Ottomans and the deteriorating situation in Poland, two developments, it was felt, which would only further benefit Prussia and Russia at Austria’s expense.5 Whilst these matters also unsettled the rulers of the lesser German territories, they generally had more immediate concerns with France, which was closer both politically and geographically. Three areas of friction can be detected which, while not directly causing the Revolutionary Wars, nonetheless affected German participation in them. One was the question of feudalism that remained fundamental to the political and legal framework of both Bourbon France and the Reich. Feudalism was not only a system of exploitation of human and material resources; it was crucial to social status, sustaining patterns of deference, subservience and thus aristocratic and other lordly influence. Many German peasants were locked in long-running disputes with their lords over feudal rights that imposed comparatively minor material burdens, but were perceived as derogatory.6 The distinction between lordly dominion and peasants’ rights of usage created further scope for conflict, as well as for the fragmentation of feudal powers between several ‘owners’. This was particularly true in the Rhineland, which remained a patchwork of small enclaves and overlapping jurisdictions. Since acquiring Alsace in 1648, the Bourbon monarchy had used a mixture of force, negotiation and economic muscle to ‘rationalise’ the frontier by eliminating the extra-territorial jurisdiction of foreign

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Introduction

lords over French subjects.7 The Revolution went a step further by abolishing feudalism in principle by the decree of 4 August 1789. German lords initially rejected offers of financial compensation and insisted on full restitution of their former jurisdiction over property on French soil. The French position hardened, but while a few ecclesiastical princes urged military action, most hoped the matter could be resolved by negotiation. The Reichstag (Imperial Diet) declared the French action illegal in August 1791, but left it to the emperor to choose between war and further negotiation. The likelihood of either method succeeding declined with the progressive radicalisation of French domestic politics. By 1793 the now republican government abolished the rents and obligations associated with usage as well as confirming the eradication of the derogatory aspects present in feudal dominion that had been swept aside in 1790. However, as Rafe Blaufarb’s chapter shows, matters did not end there in either country. Even something as central to the revolutionary ideals as the abolition of feudalism remained a debated subject in France, and political leaders continued to argue over the meaning of abolition and some tried to minimise its impact. Elsewhere in Europe, in the countries France invaded and annexed, the question became even more complex as the law was applied to very different systems of land tenure. Often, indeed, as Michael Rapport and Michael Broers both suggest, the abolition of feudalism became viewed as a litmus test of allegiance to the revolutionary and Napoleonic agenda. Yet the move from a statement of principle to detailed legislation was seldom easy, as officials tried to apply abstract ideals of liberty to diverse local structures and customs. By way of contrast, the Reich passed no legislation on feudalism, and it did nothing to prevent initiatives within its constituent territories, most notably, perhaps, in the margraviate of Baden which was already moving in the 1780s to emancipate its peasants. Napoleon was forced to address this issue while he was still campaigning against the Prussians in 1807. Though his victories the previous year had enabled him to redistribute German territory to suit his strategic concerns, it proved much harder to revise feudal relations, particularly where French officials held contrary opinions on the subject. The presence of émigrés in the Rhineland represented a second source of friction in 1792. Of the 150–160,000 émigrés who fled France following 1789, around a third crossed the Rhine, notably to the electorate of Trier, where Koblenz, with a normal population of 8,000, harboured 5,000 fugitives alone.8 The émigrés were far from universally welcome in Germany where their noble lifestyle and often arrogant behaviour

Alan Forrest and Peter H. Wilson 5

contributed to anti-aristocratic sentiment, fuelling long-standing grievances and contributing to unrest in a number of the smaller territories.9 Alongside these more visible refugees came other, more shadowy figures contributing to a third problem: fear of revolution. Received wisdom sees the response to all three difficulties as taking place primarily at the level of high politics, concentrating on the initial Austro-Prussian counter-invasion of France in the summer of 1792 and, following its failure, the subsequent expansion of the war with the formation of the first anti-French coalition in 1793 that included Britain, the Dutch Republic and other major European countries. Until recently, the Reich scarcely featured in this narrative, being widely perceived as moribund from at least the onset of active Austro-Prussian rivalry after 1740, if not already condemned to irrelevance by the Peace of Westphalia. This treaty is routinely, though inaccurately, credited with granting the German princes ‘independence’, allowing them to act in European affairs without reference to a Reich that appeared devoid of any central direction or meaning, supplying little more than a convenient label for the myriad of petty states.10 Revision of this interpretation began with the publication in 1967 of Karl Otmar Freiherr von Aretin’s study of the last three decades of the Reich’s existence. Four decades of further research have built a new picture of the Reich as a vital, flexible framework that defused serious tensions and allowed a diverse variety of political, economic, religious and social institutions to flourish across central Europe. Parallel enquiries into absolutist rule in the German territories have dispelled earlier images of petty despots tyrannising comic-opera principalities. The multi-layered imperial structure bound even comparatively large territories within a complex politico-judicial framework, protecting the weak against the strong and offering numerous avenues for popular redress through legal arbitration and bureaucratic review.11 There are signs, however, that this revisionism may have gone too far, with some recent studies presenting the Empire as the ‘first German nation state’, or even a ‘central Europe of the regions’ that safeguarded individual rights comparable to those offered by the modern EU.12 Undoubtedly, there were considerable geographical variations in the Reich’s cohesion, with the larger territories to the north and east being notably less closely integrated politically than the smaller, more numerous ones in the south and west. Above all, imperial politics were neither static, nor did they move uniformly in one direction. Some parts of the constitution were defective and were indeed perceived to be so in the eighteenth century. Individual institutions underwent periodic crises

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Introduction

and reform, notably the two imperial supreme courts that feature prominently in the recent, more positive reappraisals. As Michael Rowe explains, the Reichshofrat in Vienna and the Reichskammergericht in Wetzlar were charged with upholding the public peace that had been at the heart of the imperial constitution since 1495 and exerted a lasting influence on its political culture. Both courts had experienced a partial revival during the last third of the eighteenth century, and they were called upon to confront the spectre of revolution and to defuse tension in the Reich after 1789.13 Certain events were poorly handled, notably the Liège crisis of 1789–91, yet there is little to suggest that the Reich would not have coped had it not gone to war in 1793. The Reichstag provided a forum to coordinate these measures, as well as defence.14 For example, censorship laws were passed in August 1791, followed by a ban on the ‘German Jacobins’ in February 1793. The framework for collective security had already been activated in October 1789 for a partial mobilisation at regional level in the west to guard the frontier and quarantine the Reich from contagion from revolutionary France. These measures were entirely defensive, in keeping with the Reich’s political culture and sense of itself as a passive, non-aligned force stabilising European peace. Austro-Prussian pressure forced the Reichstag reluctantly to declare an offensive war against France on 22 March 1793. Both German great powers required this to legitimate their exploitation of Germany’s largely inert military potential following the failure of their combined invasion of France the previous summer. Neither Austria nor Prussia was a fully effective fiscal-military state, certainly not in the context of the new conditions of revolutionary warfare.15 Both were under considerable strain, not least because they remained locked in their mutually-hostile dismemberment of Poland until 1795. Prussia never mobilised more than one-third of its army, requiring the remainder to keep even this limited force in the field. The imperial declaration of war entailed the provision of contingents and financial support from the German territories. However, it also ensured that the Reich collectively became a participant in the protracted struggle with France. France encountered Germany on a number of levels after 1792. There was the great power contest for European influence against Prussia and Austria as members of the anti-French coalitions. Other German territories were related to this contest by the international character of German dynasticism. Hanover was connected by personal union to Britain, Pomerania to Sweden, Holstein to Denmark, and others by relations with Russia and other European monarchies.16 The French

Alan Forrest and Peter H. Wilson 7

encountered these, or rather their diplomats and soldiers, generally as opponents until the prospect of resuming the alliance networks formerly employed by the Bourbons re-emerged in the later 1790s. This would be achieved, albeit on a very different footing, by Napoleon in 1806, when it would entail the Reich’s destruction. In the meantime, the French also encountered Germans in the guise of revolutionary sympathizers, at least in small numbers following the capture of Mainz in October 1792. Germans rapidly appeared in larger numbers as occupied peoples, remaining so for the next decade when they would be formally recognised as ‘French’ with the annexation of the Rhineland.17 Finally, Germans were encountered in a collective sense through the Reich, entailing a French clash with ‘empire’ that began well before Napoleon’s seizure of power. One aspect of empire encapsulated in the word ‘Reich’ was that of a realm, or sovereign space, that has already been noted in the friction over feudal jurisdiction. A second was its imperial character, as expressed through a perceived legacy from ancient Rome. The Habsburgs’ claim to hold an imperial title stretching in unbroken descent to that of Caesar was central to their international standing and was, as Peter Wilson shows, a primary reason why Francis still fought to preserve the Reich. But the empire had precise French connotations, too. Eighteenthcentury France was well versed in Classical history and civilisation, the French aristocracy and the new mercantile classes were equally at ease with Greek and Latin literature and the precedents of ancient Greece and Rome. They made frequent reference, in works of literature and philosophy, in art and painting, to the empire of classical Rome. Napoleon, too, read history; he, too, made comparisons with the Roman Empire in its prime and also, as Michael Broers notes, with the medieval Frankish empire of Charlemagne. Both were seen as the predecessors of a new Europe-wide empire, to be based on the ideals of civil society that were best encapsulated in law, good administration and the civilisation of eighteenth-century France. Hegemony is a third element of empire, but one that was less obviously present east of the Rhine, though it would soon manifest itself clearly in Napoleon’s Grand Empire. Austria and Prussia spent much of the last third of the eighteenth century extending their hegemony at Poland’s expense and both, certainly the Habsburgs, can be said to have possessed territorial empires. Neither, however, competed on a global scale with Britain, or indeed Bourbon France, and neither can be fully classed as colonial powers, while Prussia’s true character as both Polish and German, together with the presence of Hungarians and others in

8

Introduction

the cosmopolitan Habsburg elite, makes it difficult to label their rule in their respective non-German-speaking possessions as truly ‘colonial’. Hegemony was still further removed from the Reich, the one formally constituted empire in Central Europe that is analysed further in Peter Wilson’s chapter. While the emperor was formally sovereign, his powers were shared with a multitude of imperial Estates (Reichsstände) occupying the higher reaches of the complex hierarchy underpinning the imperial constitution. Imperial rule was indirect, mediated through the different layers of authority that permitted considerable regional and local autonomy. The key decisions affecting daily life tended to be taken at the level of the governments of those territories recognised as imperial Estates. Those ruled by secular or ecclesiastical princes had been governed on increasingly absolutist lines since the later seventeenth century, but in practice could decide little by fiat. Most still consulted sections of their populations prior to administrative decisions or new legislation. Such consultation could involve negotiations with formal representative institutions, known as territorial Estates (Landstände), or less directly through surveys conducted by local officials. Even in the more absolute principalities, much local administration remained in the hands of village and municipal councils elected by enfranchised male property-owners. Local rights were woven into the wider imperial legal framework offering ordinary people considerable opportunities to appeal against arbitrary rule. Imperial pretensions rested on status and prestige, not hegemonic ambitions. The international character of German dynasticism served to reinforce the medieval legacy of universal Christendom that persisted in the Holy Roman elements of the Reich. French universalism was very different, deriving from abstract ideals of equality and expressed through a drive for administrative uniformity inimical to the patchwork of particular rights within a sentimental attachment to a common politico-legal framework represented by the Reich. Napoleon’s empire was, of course, based on territorial expansion and the absorption of a military culture, at least to a degree. Providing requisitions and conscripts remained a central part of its raison d’être. But it was also much more than that, a system of administration and justice that imposed on all an equal relationship with the state, a relationship based on principles of civic equality. When a territory was annexed it was not only administered and policed according to French norms. It also received the benefits of the French justice system, of the Napoleonic Code, and of a legal apparatus that guaranteed the equality of all before the law. If the Napoleonic Empire was imposed by military

Alan Forrest and Peter H. Wilson 9

force, and was resented as an exploitative invader and occupier, there were still some benefits to savour in the rights that came with citizenship. The combination of the Reich with Austria and Prussia represented a potentially formidable opponent for both the French Republic and Napoleon. Around twenty-nine million people inhabited the Reich; roughly equivalent to those in France on the eve of Revolution. However, the two German great powers held considerable additional land, especially to the east thanks to the annexation of Poland, as well as the Habsburg possessions in Hungary, the Balkans and northern Italy. While both had grown out of the Reich, Prussia’s transformation was both rapid and remarkable. By 1795 its population had doubled since 1772, but it was the proportion beyond the imperial frontier that increased most rapidly, by 560 per cent to over 3.6 million out of a total of 8.2 million. Taken together with the inhabitants of the lesser German territories, Prussia, the Habsburg monarchy and the Reich had a combined population of over forty-eight million.18 However, war is more than a matter of numbers. The lacklustre German war effort was certainly due in part to deficient military organisation, but neither was the collective security system completely unprepared, nor were the individual German forces necessarily more ‘backward’ than their French opponent.19 Still, the pace of change was faster in France and, above all, it was combined with a political will and determination entirely lacking east of the Rhine. In part this was cultural, reflecting a reluctance to embrace radical solutions for fear of sacrificing too much of the established order the armies were supposed to defend. But it was also directly political, determined not by the Reich’s decentralised constitution, but by a fundamental shift in the balance of power within it. Revolution was not the only spectre stalking the minor princes, who were haunted by the fear they might suffer Poland’s fate and be partitioned out of existence. The outbreak of war confronted them with an impossible choice. A French victory would entail the intrusion of revolutionary ideology and the collapse of the established order, whereas an Austro-Prussian triumph would enable both these powers to grab additional territory and consolidate their pre-eminence in the Reich. France’s unexpected success by 1795 made the former the more pressing danger, but the latter never entirely disappeared, and indeed resurfaced as the primary threat during the Congress of Vienna in 1814–15. For those living in northern Germany it became a reality as early as 1795 when France allowed Prussia to withdraw from the war and neutralise the entire area north of the river Main. This amounted to a

10 Introduction

virtual partition of the Reich into a northern Prussian sphere and an Austrian-dominated south. Not only did it make the question of the Reich’s ultimate fate more pressing, but it contributed to France’s dilemma of how to assert its influence east of the Rhine once its initial goal of ‘natural frontiers’ had been secured. While growing military power gave them some freedom of choice, France’s leaders still had to agree on what constituted the right mix of annexation, satellites and allies to be constructed in Germany. Much depended on a territory’s physical proximity to France, the trust which the local elites commanded, and hence the degree to which it seemed possible to integrate the invaded territories into the political body of France itself. Where these conditions pertained, the French usually tried to integrate the defeated country into France, forming it into départements on the model of metropolitan France, and imposing the appropriate constitution of the day. Under the Directory French rulers were already talking of creating their Grande Nation, stretching east across the Rhine. By 1811, at the height of the Empire, Greater France would extend to 130 départements, with prefects reporting back to Paris from Belgium, Holland, Switzerland, and much of northern and central Italy. Austria’s defeat by 1797 placed these questions on the negotiating table at the Rastatt Congress (1797–9). French demands for the Rhineland, the Austrian Netherlands and a renunciation of imperial jurisdiction over northern Italy threatened not only to truncate the Reich but to destroy its very existence as an empire. The scale of the proposed losses forced the imperial negotiators, those of the German princes, and a large, interested and literate public to consider what was central to the Reich. How far could territorial losses and constitutional change be accommodated without it ceasing to be an empire? This question has long received attention in German historiography from the perspective of national identity; an issue viewed primarily through the difficult experience of defining that identity in the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Current research, however, stresses that the Reich remained the primary reference point in these discussions, as well as the focus of substantial residual loyalty.20 The resumption of fighting in the War of the Second Coalition (1799– 1802) failed to provide definitive answers, but it did force wider acceptance of French demands. Significantly, the Peace of Lunéville was signed in February 1801 by Francis II not only as Austrian monarch, but as emperor as well, a fact that received reluctant ratification through the Reichstag the following month. The Reich thereby acquiesced to French and Prussian demands that those princes who had lost land west of the

Alan Forrest and Peter H. Wilson 11

Rhine should be compensated at the expense of the weaker territories east of that river. Redistribution was formally entrusted to the Reichstag, but Austria’s inability to control the process opened it to external influence, especially that of Napoleon in whom some princes now saw a more acceptable face of Revolutionary France. Bilateral arrangements between Napoleon and the better-armed princes enabled France to reconstruct a powerful German clientele and to play a major part in determining the shape of the territorial reorganisation that received official sanction by the Reichstag in February 1803. Nonetheless, the Reich remained an empire, not yet a federation, and there was considerable optimism that the changes had cleared the ground for overdue constitutional reform. The Habsburgs’ determination to retain the imperial title necessitated at least some outward commitment to making the new arrangements work.21 This was difficult due to the contraction of Austrian influence since 1795, the problems of dealing with the Prussian-controlled north and, above all, growing French pressure. Relations with France now resembled those between a besieged city and its assailants. The preceding struggle represented the bombardment and initial assault in which the besiegers had captured the outworks and seriously damaged the inner defences, leaving the inhabitants shell-shocked and divided over what to do next. Most hoped that if they stayed quiet the enemy might lose interest and go elsewhere. They feared that any attempt to rebuild their walls would simply prompt a resumption of the bombardment and result in further destruction of their homes. Reforms were either postponed, or mired in lengthy negotiations for which there was no longer time. Meanwhile, growing numbers of princes opened direct negotiations with Napoleon who exploited this opportunity to increase the pressure on Austria to give more ground. Habsburg goals contracted as Napoleon’s expanded. Until 1804 Francis II struggled to maintain his dynasty’s traditional international status, reacting to Napoleon’s decision to proclaim himself Emperor of the French by instituting an Austrian hereditary imperial title. Napoleon fleetingly and largely nominally accepted the pre-eminence of Francis’ Holy Roman imperial title, but abandoned this during 1805 as he ratcheted up the pressure, culminating in war that October. Victory at Austerlitz enabled him to dictate terms in the Peace of Pressburg (Bratislava) on 26 December 1805, imposing further territorial losses on Austria and some territorial redistribution in southern Germany. The leading southern territories of Bavaria, Württemberg and Baden formally joined Napoleon’s clientele and were rewarded with new

12

Introduction

sovereign titles. Michael Kaiser’s study of the new Bavarian title exemplifies the problems brought by Napoleon’s largesse. While the leading German princes had long sought titles as a means to exercise greater European influence, they had intended them as a means of enhancing their own position within the imperial hierarchy, not to step outside it as sovereigns of independent yet still minor and vulnerable states. The lack of pomp surrounding the new Bavarian title contrasts sharply with the celebrations of Napoleon’s new status discussed by Alan Forrest and Thomas Biskup. The pace quickened further, especially from March 1806 as Napoleon sought a decision on the remaining four issues: Habsburg retention of the Holy Roman title, the fate of the Reich, the future of Germany and the survival of Austrian influence there. In March 1806 Napoleon installed a French marshal, Murat, as duke of Cleves and Berg, territories that had belonged until Pressburg to Prussia and Bavaria respectively. While the Emperor deliberately left it vague whether his marshal was to have the status of an imperial prince (Reichsfürst), Murat publicly declared that he acknowledged no master other than Napoleon. Murat then joined fifteen other princes, including the newly-minted kings of Bavaria and Württemberg, in forming the Confederation of the Rhine on 12 July under French protection. Nine of these princes issued a formal statement to the Reichstag on 1 August 1806 explaining their action on the grounds that Austria’s recent defeat had effectively dissolved the Reich. The French representative delivered a note the same day informing the still numerous envoys at the Reichstag that his master no longer recognised its existence. The day before the French ambassador in Vienna delivered an ultimatum demanding that Francis II relinquish the Holy Roman imperial title. Francis agreed reluctantly, but skilfully combined his abdication on 6 August with the formal dissolution of all feudal bonds between himself and his vassals in the Reich. Combined with the physical possession of the imperial regalia that had already been moved to safety in Hungary, this successfully prevented Napoleon’s potential exploitation of the Reich’s legacy in his ongoing reorganisation of Germany. Dissolution of the Reich brutally exposed Prussia’s position in the north. Napoleon had consolidated his political hold on the south, enlisting the now enlarged, more potent sovereign states as military auxiliaries through the new Confederation. It was clearly not in Prussia’s interests to see this system extended to the north where it retained considerable, if scattered, possessions. Though this area had retreated with Prussia into neutrality after 1795, it had not left the Reich and, like

Alan Forrest and Peter H. Wilson 13

Prussia, the northern territories had maintained representatives at the Reichstag and other imperial institutions. The dissolution of these august bodies widened the political vacuum in the north. Prussia’s inability to reorder its relationship to its weaker German neighbours before the autumn of 1806 proved it was not an imperial power. Napoleon’s victories at Jena and Auerstädt that October revealed that Prussia was no longer a military power, at least not of the first rank. It is easy to see this outcome as a foregone conclusion; the triumph of modern, dynamic French citizens-in-arms over the obsolete, old-regime Prussians who had gone to sleep on the laurels of Frederick the Great, as their Queen Luise remarked. As Claus Telp indicates, Napoleon certainly did not hold all the cards, but the Prussians threw away those they possessed through unnecessary operational mistakes. Victory over Prussia cleared the way for Napoleon to complete his reorganisation of Germany, placing Franco-German relations on a new footing, increasing the exposure to French ideas and reforms, either mediated through allied German governments, satellite administrations such as those in ClevesBerg or the newly created kingdom of Westphalia, or directly in the areas annexed to France.22 Yet victory over Prussia meant much more, as Thomas Biskup shows. It was important to Napoleon’s self-perception as a successful general to have vanquished the one army of the old order which he most admired. His victory over the Prussians at Jena and Auerstädt in October 1806 took place only a few miles from Rossbach where old-regime France suffered its most humiliating defeat nearly fifty years before. Napoleon appropriated symbols from the conquered Prussians, such as Frederick the Great’s sword, to establish both his own credentials as a successful warrior-monarch, and to consolidate the legitimacy of his regime. For Prussia, defeat galvanised reforms that removed some of the barriers to national mobilisation and so provided the basis for the military resurgence during the War of Liberation after 1813. As Karen Hagemann argues, the humiliation of the defeat in 1806–7, followed by the burdens of French occupation until 1808, fuelled a hatred of all things French. Prussian and French censorship prevented the open expression of these sentiments until 1813, but they were widely felt throughout society. The accumulated emotions and desire for revenge helped sustain the popular mobilisation once Prussia rejoined the anti-French coalition. The Grand Empire and the old Reich overlapped for barely more than two years. The advent of the former clearly hastened the latter’s demise, yet Napoleon’s regime survived for only another eight years. Despite

14

Introduction

this comparatively brief period it left a lasting legacy for European history. For some, of course, for whom Napoleon had represented a threat, the image which his Empire conveyed was one dominated by military invasion, the imposition of foreign institutions and foreign values, and the ruthless exploitation of resources in the interests of France and of the continuing war effort. Such was the perception in Belgium, for instance, where Napoleon’s administrators seized onethird of the country’s grain, or in Lombardy, whose museums and art collections were looted to fill the newly-established French national museum at the Louvre. Anti-French feeling ran high in Spain, where the French were perceived as godless and sacrilegious, and in Naples, where the local population celebrated their ultimate liberation from French rule by executing their French-imposed king. But this was not the legacy everywhere, and it should be emphasised that in many parts of the inner empire the Code and the Napoleonic system of administration and justice inspired greater confidence than the systems they replaced. Some of Napoleon’s reforms lived on through the contrasting regimes of the nineteenth century, while for the youthful leaders of the Risorgimento, the Emperor appeared as a liberator and a modernizer who helped prepared the way for Italian nationhood. A full discussion of this legacy lies beyond the scope of present volume. But the experience of 1806 offers an important window on it: it was the year when the victories of 1805 were confirmed and extended, and when Napoleon’s empire visibly changed from being predominantly French to being truly European. The year 1806 is also a moment which encourages us to compare these two European empires, the one in its death throes, the other still inexorably in the ascendant. The most obvious contrasts that have attracted attention till now are not necessarily the most important, nor, indeed, are they wholly valid. In the period up to the later twentieth century the starting point for comparison was taken to be the perceived strength and ‘modernity’ of both empires as political systems and their supposed class character, a view that pitted a creaking, neo-gothic feudal-aristocratic Reich against a modern, dynamic, de-feudalised and capitalist Grand Empire. More recent writing, however, nuances this. German historians have been more prone to identify modern elements in the Reich, while the historiography of Napoleonic France has moved in the opposite direction, shifting attention away from the modernity of the regime and its achievements, towards interpretations that stress compromises with established institutions and practices, and even continuities with the old regime.

Alan Forrest and Peter H. Wilson 15

The apparent convergence of opinion may even imply that the two empires were not so dissimilar. The studies in this volume certainly suggest important parallels. Many inhabitants in both displayed a sense of cultural and political superiority, viewing those living elsewhere as the uncivilised, slavish subjects of benighted despotism. The chapters by William Doyle, Michael Broers and Mike Rapport discuss this from the French perspective, but similar views were expressed across the Rhine where they long predated both the Revolution and Napoleon. Since the late fifteenth century, Germans were convinced the French were under the yoke of a despotic monarch. Despite the growing absolutist pretensions of their own princes, they continued to believe this in the eighteenth century when most political theorists argued that German government, both imperial and princely, was bound by the web of territorial and imperial law.23 They were not surprised when the French rose in revolution, whereas even those critical of conditions at home felt that such violent upheaval was unnecessary and could be harmful to the steady pace of beneficial reforms enacted by enlightened princes and magistrates. Many welcomed the events in Paris as breaking the logjam delaying the kind of progressive measures already long implemented in Germany. News of the Terror soon transformed this complacent, patronising view into fear and loathing, but did little to displace the basic faith that German conditions were inherently superior.24 As Rapport demonstrates, examination of such views reveals they were related to individual experience and access to information and, consequently, contained subtle variations. While propaganda demonized ‘the other’, opinions were not invariably hostile and much of the prejudice derived from ignorance, even simple incomprehension when confronted with different ways of living. Closer inspection also reveals common roots behind these rival superiority complexes. Both French and Germans generally believed their state was best at guaranteeing peace and order and that it ran according to established, legal principles permitting ordinary folk some redress against perceived injustice. To an extent, such views can be found in any expressions of patriotism around 1800, but nonetheless both the French and German versions shared some distinctive common attributes. Both the Reich and the Empire drew inspiration from ancient imperial Rome; in the former these traditions were mediated through Renaissance Humanism, while in the latter they came through later eighteenth-century classicism. These different routes imparted important distinctions, visible not only in the symbolism of both empires, but also their legal systems that both drew in different ways on Roman

16

Introduction

law.25 The emperor stood as the ultimate guarantor of the rule of law in both cases. The imperative of preserving order and stability was likewise asserted to legitimate imperial authority in both. In France, Napoleon responded to the turmoil of Revolution and the Terror of the immediate past. In the Reich, these traditions looked further back, beyond the troubles of the Thirty Years War and Reformation to the feuding tearing the fabric of late-medieval society. It is noteworthy that Goethe, himself once a legal trainee at the Reichskammergericht in Wetzlar, concentrated in his memoirs on the need to eradicate the ‘law of the fist’ as the basis of the imperial legal system, rather than the more recent confessional and political strife it had been called upon to resolve.26 As the recent research on the two imperial courts indicates, this tradition was no less vibrant in the Reich than in France, despite its more distant origins. The sense of justice was central to the belief in each empire that it represented a force for good in Europe as a whole. It is in this universal dimension that the two begin to diverge more sharply. The universal character of the Reich rested on the social and intellectual cosmopolitanism of its elite and educated ‘public sphere’ that had reached back at least to the later seventeenth century, but had received further stimulus from the dissemination of Enlightenment views to which most of the governing classes subscribed. While public debate concentrated primarily on the relative merits of reform and action at the level of the territorial governments, the Reich nonetheless retained significance as the wider framework in which those governments operated.27 The Christian element of this framework received considerably less attention, particularly as the Turkish menace receded from the 1730s, but the Reich remained the embodiment of shared values of a just, legal and political order respecting and preserving considerable local diversity. This was expressed in the language of German freedom.28 That this was clearly understood differently by princes, burghers and peasants was entirely appropriate, since it was the language of liberties, not liberty. Much of it was deeply embedded in the corporate character of German society and expressed as collective rights deriving from membership of particular communities such as cities, villages, guilds, monastic orders and universities. Social and economic change, related to accelerating population growth ensured that many fell partially or entirely outside such communities. Nonetheless, German freedom also incorporated certain common individual rights, including considerable protection against discrimination and freedom of conscience for the three recognised Christian confessions. It is the presence of such rights that forms the

Alan Forrest and Peter H. Wilson 17

basis behind recent claims for the Reich’s modernity, rather than any passing resemblance between its institutions and those of the EU.29 The Napoleonic ideal was very different, possessing an expansionist, cultural imperialist drive entirely absent from the Reich. Each Holy Roman emperor was constitutionally required to expand the Reich and recover lost lands, but no one seriously expected any to fulfil these obligations. Austria and Prussia expanded considerably, and while their respective monarchs rationalised this as bringing the benefits of enlightened administration to supposedly backward peoples, such justifications scarcely acted as imperatives. Even at the height of the recovery of Habsburg imperial influence under Leopold I (r.1658–1705), no attempt was made to incorporate Austria’s extensive gains in Hungary and elsewhere within the Reich. But for Napoleon’s Grand Empire, expansion was a raison d’être. Already on 20 May 1804, two days after Napoleon announced his intention to proclaim himself emperor, the leading Austrian minister, Ludwig Cobenzl, warned Francis II that this would not be the end of his ambitions.30 Napoleon saw himself as heir to the Revolutionary dynamic and its humanist, civilising mission. Like the Romantic writers who lionized him, he was a dreamer, prepared to launch his troops into ever more ambitious military campaigns in order to impose his dominance on Europe. It was a powerful, intoxicating dream for many of his supporters, but it had at its heart an economy, a spoils system, and a political machine that were increasingly geared to the pursuit of war. The nature of imperial authority provides a second important distinction. The Reich was an old regime in the literal sense, claiming direct, unbroken descent from imperial Rome in its final, Christian form. The title was elective, yet combined with a sense of majesty requiring who ever held it to possess the ‘necessary qualities’. This had come to mean a long and distinguished ancestry, and established, legitimate rule over possessions sufficiently extensive and populous to support the active exercise of imperial functions. Given these criteria, it is scarcely surprising that the electoral princes invariably chose a member of the Austrian Habsburg dynasty as emperor after 1438, bar one, disastrous exception when they elected Carl Albrecht of Bavaria as Charles VII in 1742. Imperial monarchy was male in both France and the Reich, but decidedly less so in the latter, as Alan Forrest and William Doyle both demonstrate. Though only a man could be elected Holy Roman emperor, women could exercise some authority lower down the imperial hierarchy through the presence of imperial abbesses in the Reichstag. More significantly, the schizophrenic character of Habsburg rule, simultaneously emperor in

18 Introduction

the Reich and monarch in their own domains, created scope for female influence, achieved by Maria Theresa ruling as empress, first alongside her husband, Francis I Stephen (1745–65), and then her son, Joseph II (1765–80).31 The emphasis on established legitimacy was replicated at the lower levels of the imperial hierarchy, where territorial rulers stressed lineage, dignity and prestige. The rapid proliferation and inflation of titles that accompanied the territorial reorganisations after 1802 was deeply unsettling, as Michael Kaiser notes in his discussion of Wittelsbach efforts to secure recognition for a Bavarian royal crown. If monarchy meant power in the German context, the relationship was reversed for Napoleonic France. Francis II struggled to retain his Holy Roman title during 1806 as a prop for faltering Habsburg influence, whereas Napoleon’s growing military power enabled him to add to his own titles and distribute new ones to his relations and allies. He recognised the value of traditional titles and hereditary monarchies; he understood, as the Revolutionaries had not, that men were susceptible to honours, to titles, to economic rewards, and he did not hesitate to lavish lands and favours on those who served him. Where it suited his overall purpose – as in Bavaria and Saxony – he was happy to promote local dukes and electors, even, on occasion, to the regal title of king, with all that might imply to the titled families of Europe. But he deceived neither himself nor the men he honoured. Kings were valued for as long as they served the imperial purpose and helped ensure order and cohesion in the Empire. When they ceased to do so, Napoleon would have no hesitation in undermining their authority or removing them from office. For these kings had to earn their royal status through imperial service. They were far removed from the absolute monarchs of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. And they were left in no doubt that in the new Europe kings were in no position to challenge the authority of emperors. The difficulties encountered in projecting the Napoleonic imperial ideal beyond France indicate the presence of a cultural as well as political frontier with Germany. Only in France itself could Napoleon hope to produce a blueprint for a new civil society, one which took account of the rights gained during the Revolution and which based itself on the Revolutionary administrative traditions, but which was also capable of delivering the security that the French elites craved. And even here his instincts persuaded him to appeal to older sentiments, like honour and patriotism to create a new nobility based on service to the state. Outside France the empire was unable to impose French blueprints on often unwilling subject people, and across the Continent the Napoleonic

Alan Forrest and Peter H. Wilson 19

Empire was forced to compromise with local elites and diverse political cultures. These compromises are pinpointed by many of the chapters which follow. Michael Broers and Mike Rapport argue that the French judged others by the extent to which they already fitted, or were willing to accept, the Napoleonic template. But their judgements were far from uniform. As the example of the feudal question discussed by Rafe Blaufarb indicates, it was easy for Napoleonic officials to sign up to grand, abstract ideals, but much harder for them to define them, and still less to implement them in administrative practice on the ground.

Notes 1. T.A. Brady, ‘Princes’ Reformation versus Urban Liberty. Strasbourg and the Restoration in Württemberg 1534’, in I. Batori (ed.), Städtische Gesellschaft und Reformation (Stuttgart, 1980), pp. 265–91. 2. S.S. Biro, The German Policy of Revolutionary France. A Study in French Diplomacy during the War of the First Coalition (2 vols., Cambridge, Mass., 1957); T.C.W. Blanning, The French Revolutionary Wars, 1787–1802 (London, 1996). 3. P.H. Wilson, From Reich to Revolution: German History, 1558–1806 (Basingstoke, 2004), p. 307. See Ibid pp. 364–77 for a list of all German territories with their land and population c.1800. French policy is analysed by E. Buddruss, Die französische Deutschlandpolitik 1756–1789 (Mainz, 1995), and his ‘Die Deutschlandpolitik der französischen Revolution zwischen Traditionen und revolutionären Bruch’, in K.O. Frhr. v. Aretin/ K. Härter (eds.), Revolution und konservatives Beharren. Das alte Reich und die französischen Revolution (Mainz, 1990), pp. 145–54. 4. P.H. Wilson, German Armies: War and German Politics 1648–1806 (London, 1998), esp. pp. 280–97. 5. Excellent overview in H.M. Scott, The Birth of a Great Power System 1740–1815 (Harlow, 2006), pp. 185–213. Further detail in M. Hochedlinger, ‘Who’s Afraid of the French Revolution? Austrian Foreign Policy and the European Crisis 1787–1797’, German History, 21 (2003), 293–318; J. Lukowski, The Partitions of Poland. 1772, 1793, 1795 (Harlow, 1999). The eastern dimension is especially stressed by T.C.W. Blanning, The Origins of the French Revolutionary Wars (London, 1986). 6. D.M. Luebke, ‘Serfdom and Honour in Eighteenth-Century Germany’, Social History, 18 (1993), 141–61. 7. For example, by exchanging enclaves with the elector of Trier after 1763: B.J. Kreuzberg, Die politischen und wirtschaftlichen Beziehungen des Kurstaates Trier zu Frankreich in der zweiten Hälfte des 18. Jahrhunderts bis zum ausbruch der Französischen Revolution (Bonn, 1932). 8. J. Smets, ‘Von der “Dorfidylle” zur preußischen Nation’, Historische Zeitschrift, 262 (1996), pp. 695–738 at 696. 9. H. Berding (ed.), Soziale Unruhen in Deutschland während der französischen Revolution (Göttingen, 1988).

20

Introduction

10. For a critique of the relationship of the Peace to state sovereignty, see D. Croxton, ‘The Peace of Westphalia of 1648 and the Origins of Sovereignty’, International History Review, 21 (1999), 569–91. 11. K.O. Frhr. v. Aretin, Heiliges Römisches Reich 1776–1806 (2 vols., Wiesbaden, 1967), followed his Das alte Reich 1648–1806 (3 vols., Stuttgart, 1993–7). The bicentenary has prompted a number of major exhibitions and new publications, of which one of the more useful general introductions is S. Wendehorst and S. Westphal (eds.), Lesebuch Altes Reich (Munich, 2006). Further literature is cited in Chapter 1. 12. The former claim is made by G. Schmidt, Geschichte des alten Reiches. Staat und Nation in der Frühen Neuzeit 1495–1806 (Munich, 1999); the latter by P.C. Hartmann, Kulturgeschichte des Heiligen Römischen Reiches 1648 bis 1806 (Vienna, 2001). This aspect is discussed further in P.H. Wilson, ‘Still a Monstrosity? Some Reflections on Early Modern German Statehood’, The Historical Journal, 49 (2006), 565–76. 13. The literature on the courts is now extensive, but the following provide good guides: W. Sellert (ed.), Reichshofrat und Reichskammergericht (Cologne, 1999); R. Sailer, Untertanprozesse vor dem Reichskammergericht (Cologne, 1999). For the partial revival of the Reichskammergericht at the end of the eighteenth century, see K.O. Frhr. v. Aretin, ‘Kaiser Joseph II und die Reichskammergerichtvisitation 1766–1776’, Zeitschrift für Neuere Rechtsgeschichte, 13 (1991), 129–44. 14. K. Härter, Reichstag und Revolution 1789–1806 (Göttingen, 1992). 15. See the contributions to C.D. Storrs (ed.), The Fiscal-Military State in Eighteenth-Century Europe (Aldershot, 2008). 16. See for example, T. Riotte, Hannover in der britischen Politik (1792–1815). Dynastische Verbindung als Element außerpolitischer Entscheidungsprozesse (Münster, 2005). 17. T.C.W. Blanning, The French Revolution in Germany: Occupation and Resistance in the Rhineland, 1792–1802 (Oxford, 1983); M. Rowe, From Reich to State. The Rhineland in the Revolutionary Age, 1780–1830 (Cambridge, 2003). See also David Hopkin’s Chapter 11 in this volume. 18. Wilson, From Reich to Revolution, pp. 50, 307–26. 19. M. Hochedlinger, Austria’s Wars of Emergence 1683–1797 (Harlow, 2003), pp. 401–42; P.H. Wilson, ‘German Military Preparedness on the Eve of the Revolutionary Wars’, in F.C. Schneid (ed.), Warfare in Europe 1792–1815 (Aldershot, 2007), pp. 415–30. 20. See W. Burgdorf, Reichskonstitution und Nation. Verfassungsrefromprojekte für das Heilige Römische Reich deutscher Nation im politischen Schriftum von 1648 bis 1806 (Mainz, 1998). Further coverage of the public debates can be found in J.G. Gagliardo, Reich and Nation: the Holy Roman Empire as Idea and Reality, 1763–1806 (Bloomington, 1980). For the national question, see M. Hughes, Nationalism and Society. Germany 1800–1945 (London , 1988); J. Breuilly’s Chapter 13 in this volume. 21. P.H. Wilson, ‘Bolstering the Prestige of the Habsburgs: the End of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806’, International History Review, 28 (2006), 709–36. 22. A. Fahrmeier, ‘Centralism versus Particularism in the “Third Germany” ’, in M. Rowe (ed.), Collaboration and Resistance in Napoleonic Europe (Basingstoke, 2003), pp. 107–20; M. Rowe, ‘Napoleon and State Formation

Alan Forrest and Peter H. Wilson 21

23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

30. 31.

in Central Europe’, in P.G. Dwyer (ed.), Napoleon and Europe (Harlow, 2001), pp. 204–24. H. Dreitzel, Monarchiebegriffe in der Fürstengesellschaft (2 vols., Cologne, 1991), and his Absolutismus und ständische Verfassung in Deutschland (Mainz, 1992). T.C.W. Blanning, The Culture of Power and the Power of Culture: Old Regime Europe 1660–1789 (Oxford, 2002). J.Q. Whitman, The Legacy of Roman Law in the German Romantic Era (Princeton, 1990). J.W. v. Goethe, Collected works (12 vols. ed. T.P. Saine and J.L. Sammons; Princeton, 1987), vol. IV, From my Life: Poetry and Truth, pp. 388–91. See for example, M. Umbach, Federalism and Enlightenment in Germany 1740– 1806 (London, 2000). See Chapter 2. In addition to the works cited in n. 12 above, see also M. Hughes, ‘Fiat justitia, pereat Germania? The Imperial Supreme Jurisdiction and Imperial Reform in the later Holy Roman Empire’, in J. Breuilly (ed.), The State in Germany (Harlow, 1992), pp. 29–46. Cobenzl to Francis II, 20 May 1804, Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv Vienna (HHStA), Staatskanzlei Voträge Kart.167. This was noted by Cobenzl as a ‘Novum’ in his advice to Francis II that there were grounds for a distinct Austrian hereditary title. As n. 30 above.

1 The Meaning of Empire in Central Europe around 1800 Peter H. Wilson

News of Francis II’s abdication on 6 August 1806 spread rapidly throughout Europe, well before the reluctant emperor signed the official letters notifying imperial institutions and foreign heads of state. Johann Wolfgang Goethe heard it already the following morning as he set out on a journey to Jena, but his diary entry merely records that the ‘quarrel between the servant and the coachman on the coachbox agitated us more than the split of the Roman Empire’.1 Flowing from the pen of one of Germany’s greatest literary figures, this quotation has long been cited as proof that the Holy Roman Empire slipped away largely unnoticed and unlamented. More recently, historians have been less prepared to accept this in view of substantial research demonstrating the Empire’s vitality into the late eighteenth century.2 Most attention has been directed to the process by which the Empire ended, starting with the question whether Napoleon merely toppled a crumbling gothic edifice, or destroyed a flourishing state.3 In addition to the part played by individuals, such as the Arch Chancellor and Elector of Mainz, Karl von Dalberg4, historians have questioned whether the Empire’s dissolution was legal5 and whether it constituted a ‘fitting end’ for a state that claimed more than a thousand years of existence.6 The approach of the bicentenary in 2006 encouraged reflection on the place of 1806 in German history and the Empire’s legacy for later development.7 What has been surprisingly absent is any consideration of the meaning of ‘empire’. The lively debate on the Empire’s constitution has attracted several good studies that approach this indirectly, but the general assumption is still that the Napoleonic challenge forced Germans to choose between nation and empire.8 Its demise remains embedded in a chronology still heavily influenced by the nineteenth and twentieth-century preoccupation with nation states. Austria, it is 22

Peter H. Wilson 23

assumed, was already on the road to becoming a separate state, assisted by Francis’ assumption of a distinct hereditary imperial title in 1804.9 The collapse of the old Empire freed Germans from association with an anachronistic cosmopolitanism rooted in the fading ideals of universal Christendom, and allowed them to assert a new cultural nationalism identified with an idealised state. Prussia’s inability to construct a viable framework for harmonious national unity then provides the source for later German problems.10 The principal interest has thus focussed on the competing forms of nationalism supposedly embodied by Napoleonic France and the German resistance to it, rather than on different conceptions of empire. The chapter that follows examines the four empires – real or potential – that were involved in the dramatic reorganisation of Central Europe around 1800.

The Old Reich: Peace, justice and the imperial way The contemporary view of the Holy Roman Empire was far from universally positive. For some of its inhabitants, the Empire was the ‘sick man of Europe’. Johann Heinrich Zedler included an entry on the ‘German state sickness, or the state illnesses of the Holy Roman Empire’ in his Universal Lexicon published in 1745.11 The idea that the Empire was ‘sick’ can be traced back at least to the discussion following the Peace of Westphalia that ended the Thirty Years War in 1648. Samuel von Pufendorf famously described the Empire in 1667 as a ‘monstrosity’ because its ‘unusual form of government’ lacked many of the attributes of an effective state.12 Pufendorf already listed many of the symptoms appearing in Zedler’s medical report: slow judicial process, no standing army or central treasury, weak central executive exercised by an elected rather than hereditary monarch. Writing in response to the changes around 1800, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel asserted that ‘Germany is no longer a state’, echoing the reception of Pufendorf’s interpretation that the Empire had ‘declined’ from a regular monarchy into an irregular one. In keeping with the fashion for biological metaphors, Hegel presented Germany as an organism that had outgrown the shell of the Empire.13 Medical terminology permeated discussions of the political changes wrought by the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. In his address to the Koblenz ‘Patriotic Society’ on 7 January 1798, the Rhenish publicist Joseph Görres expressed the view that, after a long illness, the Empire had died eight days before when the Austrians surrendered Mainz to the French. Goethe’s mother wrote to her son two weeks after Francis’ abdication that ‘I feel the way I feel when an old friend is very

24 The Meaning of Empire in Central Europe

ill and the doctors have abandoned all hope. One knows that he will die, yet despite this certainty, one is nonetheless shaken when the death notice finally arrives in the mail’.14 Such metaphors were more pronounced in the writings of the German Romantics who argued that the Empire must die for Germany to be reborn. Later nationalist historians gave these views greater prominence than they deserve. Hegel’s opinion, for instance, was only published later, and for all his criticism of the Empire, he was unable to suggest how a German state might otherwise be organised. Even those employing the biological metaphor had far from given up hope that the patient might revive. The Empire suffered substantial losses as a result of its defeat in the French Revolutionary Wars. The Peace of Lunéville in 1801 obliged Francis II to accept the loss of the Netherlands and imperial jurisdiction over northern Italy, reducing the Empire to Bohemia and the German-speaking lands. This area was reorganised by compensating those princes who had lost possessions west of the Rhine at the expense of their weaker neighbours to the east. Francis II lost control of this process as the better-armed German rulers secured French and Russian support and began seizing land during 1802. The situation on the ground was largely confirmed by a special imperial deputation on 25 February 1803 and its final decision was accepted as part of the imperial constitution by both the emperor and Reichstag.15 Prussian territorial gains in Westphalia consolidated its hold on the north that it had controlled since withdrawing into neutrality at the Peace of Basel in 1795. The other main beneficiaries were the secular princes and electors in the south, many of whom now signed military pacts with France. Around 60 per cent of the German population changed ruler as 112 imperial Estates (Reichsstände) lost their distinctive immediacy under the emperor through annexation. The ‘holy’ element largely disappeared with the mediatisation of all but one of the Catholic ecclesiastical territories, while the number of imperial cities fell from 51 to 6. Though some minor counts and princes made small gains, land and political power were now heavily concentrated in around twenty medium and large principalities. In retrospect, the destruction of the weaker elements fundamentally undermined the basic constitutional order of a political hierarchy under the emperor’s overall authority but free from his direct control. Central Europe had taken a decisive shift towards a more federal organisation, and the real question was now whether Austria, Prussia, or France would achieve exclusive dominance or be forced to share control of Germany. None of this was obvious to contemporaries, however, who generally saw

Peter H. Wilson 25

the political reorganisation as a new beginning, rather than a step towards final dissolution. To understand this optimism we must remember that the Empire was not in terminal decline prior to the French Revolution. Imperial institutions were undergoing a renaissance during the last third of the eighteenth century, stimulated by, among other factors, a realisation that the Empire offered the best guarantee for the rights of the smaller territories and their inhabitants in an age when high politics were dominated by Austria and Prussia. Legislation and policy was decided at the Reichstag, which assumed even greater prominence by coordinating the response to the French Revolution and subsequent wars. The two imperial supreme courts enforced the rule of law, adjudicating problems that the territories were unable to resolve themselves and contributing to the important fact that, despite considerable hardship and endemic unrest, no constituted authority was overthrown by popular protest within the Empire after 1789. The regional framework of the imperial circles (Kreise) offered further venues to resolve conflict, coordinate policy, promote economic development and organise defence. Though the French overran the Netherlands, the Empire defended itself fairly well until Prussia’s problems in Poland forced it to pull out, taking the resources of north Germany with it after 1795.16 These factors were noted by Habsburg officials who advised Francis in the wake of the Empire’s reorganisation in 1803. Napoleon’s assumption of his own imperial title in 1804 and his defeat of Austria at Austerlitz the following year intensified these discussions, compelling the Habsburg government to evaluate the imperial title and decide whether it was worth defending.17 While they shared the publicists’ view that the constitution could be reformed, Habsburg advisors were sober in their assessment of the Empire’s material value to their master. As long as imperial politics remained open to French influence, there was little chance of persuading the German rulers to contribute men and money for Austrian policies. The Reichstag failed to back the emperor in 1805, and Bavaria, Baden and Württemberg sided openly with Napoleon. However, the Empire’s significance had long rested on prestige rather than resources. Responding to Napoleon’s intention to call himself emperor, Ludwig Cobenzl advised Francis II that ‘as Roman Emperor, Your Majesty has enjoyed till now precedence ahead of all European potentates, including the Russian emperor’.18 Cobenzl’s concern for the emperor’s status ran deeper than the purely diplomatic advantages this might confer. The notion that the emperor was Europe’s leading monarch was the

26 The Meaning of Empire in Central Europe

Empire’s defining characteristic, since the claim that it represented a direct continuation of the ancient Roman empire in its last, Christian incarnation, made it the only genuinely imperial state in Europe. All other empires had to define themselves in relation to it. This had long dictated the Habsburgs’ response to other, would-be emperors. Their recognition of imperial titles for the sultan and the tsar in 1606 and 1721 respectively was conditional on the continued pre-eminence of the Holy Roman Emperor. Cobenzl’s main fear in 1804 was that Napoleon’s assumption of another imperial title would prompt the Russians to insist on parity with Austria and encourage George III to proclaim himself ‘emperor of Great Britain’. France had accepted diplomatic parity with Austria as a distinct state in 1757, but still recognised that the emperor took precedence over both. Imperial precedence was still acknowledged by France in the peace settlements of 1797 and 1801. By responding with a hereditary Austrian imperial dignity, the Habsburgs strove to maintain this parity, whilst preserving the preeminence of the elective Holy Roman title. In their eyes, the new French and Austrian titles were more royal than imperial and there was still only one empire in Europe. This was reflected in Francis II’s official title that placed the new Austrian dignity behind that of the Holy Roman emperor, and represented his imperial status through the retention of established symbols rather than the insertion of ones associated more narrowly with the dynasty.19 Francis II slipped into his new imperial role without any of the ostentation displayed by Napoleon. As he had already been crowned emperor in 1792, there was no need for another coronation, and the festivities were restricted largely to Vienna.20 The emperor’s dual role as personification of the Empire and ruler of one of its major constituent lands was already expressed through several imperial crowns. The Empire was represented by the principal crown, dating from the tenth century but called the Karlskrone because it was then thought to have belonged to Charlemagne. Along with Charlemagne’s bible, sword and various relics including part of the holy cross, this crown constituted the imperial regalia that were entrusted to the imperial city of Nuremberg for safekeeping and only brought out for coronations. Copies of some items, along with Charlemagne’s stone throne, were kept in the old coronation site of Aachen. Since the fifteenth century, individual emperors commissioned additional ‘private crowns’ (Hauskronen), of which that made for Rudolf II was the most magnificent and the only one to survive intact by 1804. These crowns were used for other ceremonial occasions and could be used to demonstrate personal imperial dignity, separate

Peter H. Wilson 27

from that associated with the Empire. For example, when Joseph II was crowned king of the Romans, or successor designate, in 1764, he received the Karlskrone from the archbishop of Mainz, while his father, Francis I, wore Rudolf II’s private crown.21 The dynasty’s authority in its own lands was displayed through separate archducal and royal crowns. The title’s seniority expressed the Empire’s universal Christian dimension. This was always more an ideal than a reality, since the Empire had never encompassed all Christian Europe, nor had it been ruled directly from a single capital. Though the Habsburgs amassed their own territorial empire by the early eighteenth century, imperial authority rested on the emperor’s feudal jurisdictions and in the rights and prerogatives associated with the title. Chief amongst these was his status as highest secular ruler and advocate for the church. The lack of substantial crown domains since the thirteenth century simply reinforced the universalist character of the imperial title, since it was not identified with any specific area. Maximilian I’s decision to assume the title of Elected Roman Emperor in 1508 both removed the necessity of papal approval and diminished the status of German King, the title previously held by emperors until personally crowned by the pope. The universal character was sustained by the fact that the emperor’s feudal authority extended beyond the jurisdiction of the institutions that developed within the German, Bohemian and Netherlands in the late fifteenth century. The Empire could absorb considerable territorial losses without significantly diminishing the imperial dignity, not least because the parallel expansion of the Habsburgs’ dynastic patrimony since the early sixteenth century provided practical support for their continued imperial role. The connections of the Saxons, Hanoverians and other German dynasties to royal titles beyond the Empire from the late seventeenth century did not detract from the emperor’s pre-eminent status. The kings of Denmark and Sweden acknowledged vassalage on behalf of their German lands that remained part of the Empire until after Francis II’s abdication: Holstein was belatedly incorporated into the Danish kingdom on 9 September 1806, while Sweden, which had never recognised the distinct Austrian imperial title, expressed the hope that the Empire might be revived in a proclamation to its German subjects on 22 August. 22 The term ‘German empire’ (Teutsches Reich) already entered everyday speech during the eighteenth century, but was far from universal. The suffix ‘of the German nation’ was never officially adopted and public documents were thirty times more likely to omit it than include it. 23 Francis II used the formal designation Elected Roman Emperor, during

28

The Meaning of Empire in Central Europe

both the adoption of the Austrian title in 1804 and his imperial abdication two years later. 24 While the Reformation made the Empire more difficult to manage, it did not diminish its ‘holy’ element. The imperial constitution was revised in 1555 and 1648 to accommodate first Lutherans and then Calvinists, but Christianity remained the sole recognised faith, with toleration for Jews dependent on special dispensation from the emperor and other territorial rulers. The size of the imperial church (Reichskirche) diminished with secularisation, chiefly in the sixteenth century, but there were still over sixty major and minor ecclesiastical territories after 1648. Only Mainz survived in modified form after 1803 and it proved impossible to revive the sacral element of the constitution through a concordat with the papacy. Disappearance of the imperial church was preceded by a desacralisation of the Empire’s international position. Though the Turks remained mortal enemies in the popular imagination into the later eighteenth century, the emperor had already accepted the possibility of permanent peace with the House of Islam by signing the Peace of Karlowitz in 1699. By 1775 he was prepared to accept the Ottomans as temporary allies in his efforts to limit Russian expansion in the Balkans.25 Nonetheless, the Empire’s universal mission retained meaning for many of its inhabitants, who saw no trouble in making the transition from the late middle ages to modernity. Unlike their counterparts in France or America, publicists within the Empire were not concerned with the abstract basis for a new social and political order, but wanted to channel existing structures towards a better future. The Westphalian settlement of 1648 made the Empire’s constitutional balance part of a wider attempt to preserve international peace. The Empire was to remain a non-aligned, passive force in European relations; something that in fact suited the majority of its inhabitants. The Reichstag became a forum through which the weaker elements sought to compel the more powerful principalities to settle their differences and remain at peace with outside powers. Attempts to negotiate a settlement with Revolutionary France failed as Austria and Prussia combined to bully the others into declaring war in 1793. This did not prevent enthusiasm for the Empire as a model for a future European constitution, offering an alternative to both the universal republic projected by Revolutionary France and the universal monarchy of Napoleon’s Grand Empire.26 The Empire’s association with a particular form of peace and justice formed a central element in these discussions. In contrast to the ideals of 1776 and 1789, this derived from an overarching legal framework,

Peter H. Wilson 29

rather than individual rights and freedoms. Internal peace and external security rested, since constitutional reforms around 1495, on the emperor’s status as supreme judge and pretensions to act as arbiter of Europe.27 Both he and all properly constituted authorities within the Empire agreed to forswear violence and submit disputes to judicial arbitration. This system extended to the localities, offering ordinary folk legal redress against lords and princes through a system of appeals up to the two imperial supreme courts. While the Prussian and Austrian lands were largely exempt from the courts’ formal jurisdiction, their own judiciaries had been profoundly influenced by imperial legal practice. Writing in May 1806, Joseph Haas described this as ‘the most beautiful part of our constitution. Two imperial courts, whose judges are chosen with great care and are independent of external influence, compete with one another in impartial administration of justice, and uphold the rights of even the lowest subject against powerful princes’. He contrasted this with France where the situation was worse than the old Germanic ‘law of the fist’, because the French legal system was permeated by ‘the spirit of intrigue and corruption’.28 Despite problems, the courts were still functioning, and even Baden and Württemberg continued to pay taxes for their maintenance after the Peace of Pressburg. The benefits of this rule of law have been overemphasised by some contributors to the recent debate on the Empire. While the imperial constitution and its interpretation through territorial law did offer wide civil rights to subjects, going further in some respects than the Code Napoléon, it remained rooted in the corporate social order.29 Indeed, many saw it as a bulwark against the trappings of modernity that threatened true liberty. Haas correctly foresaw that the Empire’s dissolution would bring sweeping changes by emancipating the now sovereign princes from traditional constraints: And there is no doubt that all those measures that cost nothing beyond subjects’ freedom, work and money will proliferate. Canals will be dug, roads laid out, avenues and parks, theatres and spas constructed, towns illuminated, [and] one will shine and starve. No other robbers will threaten subjects’ property as much as the public tax collector and the French and German soldiers.30 There was a strong correlation between the degree of incorporation within the imperial legal framework and the level of emotional attachment to the Empire. Corporate groups like the imperial knights and communities such as the imperial cities looked to the Empire to assist

30 The Meaning of Empire in Central Europe

in resolving their problems and maintaining their distinct status. The imperial knights had a long tradition of serving the emperor, both in imperial institutions and the Habsburg army and administration.31 Many imperial cities used the double eagle as their coat of arms. Identification with the Empire was reinforced through local associations and privileges. For example, Nuremberg jealously guarded its custody of the imperial regalia and demanded their return even after the city had been annexed by Bavaria in 1806. Official prayers for the emperor’s well being were said in Frankfurt until after the abdication, whereas they had been abolished throughout the Prussian monarchy in 1750. Even Goethe recorded that his presence at Joseph II’s coronation in 1764 had been one of the high points of his youth.32 Such imperial connections gave people a wider sense of belonging beyond their local ‘home town’.33 Despite references to a ‘German fatherland’, this had little to do with the nation as defined by the cultural nationalists, since ‘German’ essentially meant ‘imperial’. ‘Nation’ remained a flexible term, as demonstrated by a proposal by Georg Ernst Straub, a Mainz district official, for a popular militia to fight the French, the principal merit of which would be the martial virtues of the local ‘Odenwald nation’.34 Yet it was also possible to embrace the fashionable enthusiasm for language and culture without having to agree with Schiller that the Empire and the German nation were entirely different things. German interest in the ‘national spirit’ was stimulated by Montesquieu’s L’esprit des lois (1748) since this shifted political debate from the categories employed previously by writers like Pufendorf and Zedler. For Montesquieu, a state’s viability had less to do with its actual form than with how well it matched its inhabitants’ national characteristics as expressed through geography, climate, history, religion and legal traditions. It was easy to embrace this idea in the Empire through the language of ‘German freedoms’, or values and virtues enshrined in the imperial constitution.35 The destruction of that constitution was keenly felt in 1806.36 The Habsburg government was aware of such sentiment, but did not see the Holy Roman title as the basis for a separate Habsburg empire. The idea of converting the existing elective title into a hereditary one had already been rejected in 1804 as unconstitutional.37 The overriding concern in 1806 was to avoid renewed war with France. Francis II decided to combine abdication with dissolution of the Empire to avoid the Holy Roman title falling into Napoleon’s hands. The universal Christian tradition, while a very worthy heritage, was now considered

Peter H. Wilson 31

as more properly belonging to the past. The ties to the Empire were broken, and his majesty could now concentrate on the welfare of his own imperial subjects.38 The question remained, how that empire was to be defined.

Austria: An imperial dynasty The defining characteristic of the Austrian empire was the ruling family’s imperial dignity that in turn derived from its long association with the Holy Roman title. A Habsburg had held the imperial title with one exception (1742–5) since 1438. There was no thought of returning to plans, last discussed in 1623, to raise Austria to a kingdom.39 The official announcement of the new Austrian hereditary title on 11 August 1804 cited the extent of the dynasty’s lands and the number of their subjects as justification for the new dignity.40 Yet what really counted was the sovereign status of these provinces and what they reflected on the dynasty. In preparing the announcement the state chancellory informed Francis II that he already possessed the ‘necessary qualities’ to call himself emperor independent of having been elected to the Holy Roman title.41 The discussions in 1804 and 1806 consistently stressed that the long lineage of hereditary rule legitimised a distinct Habsburg imperial title. Napoleon explicitly acknowledged this in his famous remark to Metternich in 1813: ‘Your ruler, born to the throne, can let himself be defeated twenty times and still always return to his residence. I can’t do this, I, the son of fortune. My rule would not last beyond the day I cease to be strong and feared’.42 The new title was assumed on the basis of Francis II’s existing imperial prerogatives as Holy Roman Emperor. As supreme Christian monarch, he alone was entitled to award himself the new dignity and he rejected the suggestion that the Estates of his various lands should be invited to proclaim him emperor. The Reichstag was not consulted, but there was little dissent when the new title was announced there on 25 August 1804. Only the Swedish representative demanded a formal debate, but found no support from the other delegates who rushed to forward their good wishes to Vienna.43 Having agreed to create a distinct dynastic imperial title in 1804, Francis II had to decide what he was going to be emperor of. Some ministers were concerned that the inclusion of Austria and Bohemia in the new title would contravene imperial law, since these lands were part of the Holy Roman Empire and lacked full sovereignty. The Hungarians feared that a new title would infringe their autonomy as a sovereign

32 The Meaning of Empire in Central Europe

kingdom, prompting one suggestion that Francis call himself ‘Emperor of Hungary and Galicia’. However, the emperor was determined the new title would apply to all his possessions without affecting either their existing constitutions or relationship to the Empire.44 This was duly reflected in the official announcement, which stressed that the term ‘Austria’ referred to the dynasty, not the archduchy. The expression ‘Austrian monarchy’ was already current by the early eighteenth century and consolidated with the Pragmatic Sanction of 1713 that declared Habsburg possessions both indivisible and inheritable in both the female and male lines. It was given visual form in an official map depicting all the possessions as a single unit that was issued to all primary schools in 1781.45 The coat of arms was redesigned to express ‘the unity of the monarchy, and the greater whole to the best effect, with due regard for the traditional constitutions and observances, and for the albeit more harmful than useful provincial patriotism’.46 The emperor was to be the focal point for the entire monarchy so that his subjects ‘seek the general existence nowhere but in the common combination of all provinces for the public good’. The result remained a uniquely Habsburg concept of unity, grouping the armorial bearings of the individual provinces on a single shield. The 1806 version closely followed that from 1804, simply padding out the display with additional heraldic devices associated with the Polish provinces to compensate for the German losses entailed by Pressburg. The Karlskrone disappeared, but Rudolf II’s private crown was there since 1804 and now moved to a more prominent position above the black double eagle. The only other significant alteration was the removal of the nimbi, or halos from the eagle’s heads that were associated with the holy element of the Roman imperial title.47 In keeping with prevailing political science, the word Land, or province, gradually disappeared in discussions of the component parts of the monarchy, which were now referred to as ‘states’ (Staaten). The use of the plural is noteworthy and, though the singular Kaiserstaat or Kaiserthum Österreich entered everyday speech, it did not become the official designation until 1849. The dynasty continued to substitute for the nation and no attempt was made to relate the new empire to any nationality.48 This left the Austrian title floating freely above any particular region, allowing it to represent the Habsburg monarchy without jettisoning the older Holy Roman traditions. Habsburg ministers routinely referred to the Holy Roman title as ‘German’ after the adoption of the new Austrian title. Francis released his German vassals from their obligations when he

Peter H. Wilson 33

renounced the Holy Roman title in 1806, but he remained ruler of a substantial German-speaking population. He also retained the old imperial insignia that had been moved for safekeeping into Hungary and were not returned after 1806. Though the formal announcement in 1804 included provisions for a coronation, this was never held. Francis’ successor, Ferdinand I, was crowned king in Hungary, Bohemia and Lombardy-Venetia, but not separately as emperor. Franz Josef took over amidst the 1848 revolution. Though the new constitution of 1849 envisaged a single coronation as a unifying act, the Hungarians argued successfully on the basis of the 1804 arrangements that the assumption of the Austrian title did not infringe existing arrangements. This remained the case in the revised constitution of 1867. The dynasty’s status thus seemed to stretch in unbroken continuity across the 1804/6 divide, and they remained for many Central Europeans the only truly imperial family.

The French grand empire Francis II’s position as Holy Roman emperor became untenable when 16 major and minor German princes left the Empire to form the Frenchsponsored Confederation of the Rhine on 12 July 1806. The French envoy told the Reichstag on 1 August that his master no longer recognised the Empire’s existence. That day, nine of the Confederation princes issued their own statement justifying their actions on the grounds that the Empire had already ceased to function following Austria’s defeat at Austerlitz. The Habsburgs seized on this to avoid the opprobrium of the final dissolution, consistently maintaining that the Empire had ended on 1 August, not with Francis’ abdication five days later.49 Linking the abdication to dissolution was a deliberate attempt to prevent Napoleon instrumentalising the Holy Roman imperial tradition in his ongoing reorganisation of Germany.50 The possibility that Napoleon wanted the Holy Roman title aroused considerable speculation both at the time and subsequently. Controversy surrounded Dalberg’s efforts to persuade Napoleon to become the Empire’s protector and, once this had failed, to preserve as much as possible of the old constitutional order within the new Rhenish Confederation. Dalberg had been in contact with Napoleon since 1796, sending him numerous proposals and deductions, including a set of ‘remarks on Charlemagne’s reign’ in 1806 that urged the French emperor to reunite France, Germany and Italy. Napoleon was clearly attracted to Charlemagne’s legacy. Already in 1801–2, David painted the words

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The Meaning of Empire in Central Europe

‘Karolus Magnus’ at Bonaparte’s feet in his famous painting of him crossing the Alps. Replicas of Charlemagne’s crown and sword were made for Napoleon’s coronation when the Austrians refused to release the originals. Other imperial traditions appeared ready-made for Napoleon’s plans. The Roman element chimed with his revival of ancient imperial symbols and with his claim to represent a new European order. The universal dimension matched the scope of his ambitions. Even the link to Christianity could serve his current agenda of reconciliation with the papacy. Finally, Caesar, Charlemagne and Otto, who had refounded the Empire in 962, had all been successful warriors who asserted their imperial status following spectacular victories. In these circumstances, it is scarcely surprising that Napoleon should have declared, ‘Je suis Charlemagne’.51 However, Napoleon’s Charlemagne was very different from Dalberg’s. Napoleon saw Charlemagne through the French tradition of a Frankish conqueror who had extended French dominion over Central Europe and Italy. Napoleon certainly followed in these steps in his reorganisation of Germany after Austerlitz, distributing lands to relations and subordinates, like Marshal Murat, and forging dynastic alliances with compliant German rulers, such as those of Bavaria and Württemberg. Such behaviour was totally at odds with Dalberg’s vision of Charlemagne as a German king. Despite his references to the middle ages, Dalberg wanted to preserve the early modern Empire, not revive the Carolingian one. His vision of empire drew on the traditions established in the constitutional reforms of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries that saw the renunciation of violence and established safeguards for the weak against the powerful. In a last bid to bind Napoleon to this constitution, Dalberg appointed Joseph Fesch, son of Napoleon’s grandmother by her second marriage, as his coadjutor and successor on 27 May 1806. This appeal to Bonapartist dynasticism failed completely. Dalberg’s German supporters were horrified by his choice, and while Napoleon approved of the appointment, he had no intention of allowing himself to become entangled in the Empire’s web of constitutional checks and balances. 52 The French were only imperfectly informed about the imperial constitution, but what information they had suggested that the emperor’s powers were limited and the Empire’s future uncertain. 53 The copy of the Karlskrone had been a useful accessory in 1804, but Napoleon no longer needed the original by 1806. After his victory over the Austrian and Russian emperors at Austerlitz, no one questioned his imperial credentials.

Peter H. Wilson 35

Prussia: The Empire that never was The growth of Prussia as a second Central European great power alongside Austria prompted speculation as to whether its Hohenzollern dynasty harboured its own imperial ambitions. Many already thought that Frederick II would propose himself as a candidate in 1740, but despite ongoing interest, the king privately rejected all such plans, arguing that additional territory would benefit Prussia more.54 Prussia nonetheless remained interested in the Empire. For all his public scorn for the imperial constitution, Frederick was adept at manipulating the opportunities it offered to protect his interests. Even after the First Partition of Poland in 1772, nearly two-thirds of Hohenzollern territory and three-quarters of their subjects still lay within imperial frontiers. Frederick invested considerable effort in securing the inheritance of the relatively small margraviates of Ansbach and Bayreuth, completed six years after his death. The situation changed only after 1793 as Prussia faced defeat in the west against France, while its centre of political gravity shifted eastwards with the other two Polish partitions.55 Disengagement from the Revolutionary Wars in 1795 forced Prussia to rethink its relationship to the Empire. France already proposed that Prussia might convert its north German neutrality zone into an empire in 1796 and renewed this suggestion in 1803–4.56 These offers completely misread Prussian intentions. Though the Hohenzollerns were keen to enlarge their German possessions, they did not covet an imperial title. One reason was their ambivalence to the Holy Roman tradition. Prussian ministers expressed regret at the poor state of the Empire after 1792, but criticised nostalgia for ‘old German liberty’ that they equated with the anarchic conditions prevailing in Poland prior to 1795.57 They were also pessimistic about the Empire’s survival chances, regarding the Revolutionary French as the ‘wild Franks’, true successors to the Carolingians who could not be defeated by conventional means.58 The geographical scope of Prussian interest in the Empire also contracted after its leading ministers gave up ambitions to acquire more territory in the south in 1803, though Ansbach and Bayreuth were not surrendered until 1806. The political form of Prussian influence was harder to decide. Various plans were discussed with Saxony, HessenKassel and other northern principalities that escaped outright annexation in 1803. Contrary to later claims, these were not intended to convert the Empire into a new German nation state, but instead to partition it into loosely linked federations. Federal solutions were in line with Prussian monarchism that could not countenance any sovereign

36 The Meaning of Empire in Central Europe

powers being relinquished to overarching institutions, as had been in the case in the Empire. Hardenberg, the chief architect of these schemes, regarded the Empire as ‘nothing more than some ruins’, obliging him ‘to establish a new order in Germany’.59 None of these plans envisaged an imperial role for the Hohenzollerns. Prussia’s king did not regard Francis II’s assumption of a distinct imperial title as a threat and had little time for Napoleon’s offer of an equivalent in autumn 1804.60 The situation shifted with the events of July and August 1806 as Prussia feared Napoleon would proclaim himself ‘emperor of Germany’. Preparations were made to announce a north German ‘imperial union’ (Reichsbund) under a Hohenzollern emperor to include those lands still outside the French orbit. The idea found little support and was dropped that September after Russia objected.61 Napoleon’s defeat after 1813 did not change the Hohenzollerns’ position. Though keen to obtain additional territory, they did not see themselves as an imperial dynasty. The concept of empire was too closely associated with the old Holy Roman tradition to permit an alternative basis. The Habsburgs’ inheritance of this tradition left little over for the Hohenzollerns who lacked any medieval imperial forbears. Even their monarchy was of recent origins, dating from 1700 as a gift from the Habsburgs in return for military support in the War of the Spanish Succession. This caused problems after 1871 when Bismarck persuaded the Prussian king to proclaim a Second Empire. Attempts were made to root this ideologically in an idealised pre-Habsburg imperial past of free knights and honest burghers. Prussia acquired a medieval emperor’s throne when it annexed the former imperial city of Goslar in 1803. Rumours circulated in 1914 that it would ask the Habsburgs to return the old imperial regalia, but in fact the Hohenzollerns remained illat-ease with their new role.62 Significantly, when Frederick became emperor in 1888 he chose to number himself ‘third’ after his eighteenthcentury royal Hohenzollern predecessor, rather than ‘fourth’ following the fifteenth-century Holy Roman emperor. The Hohenzollerns’ vision of empire as a conservative form of modernity was as much out of step with the Holy Roman imperial tradition as Napoleon’s post-Enlightenment Grand Empire. The Reich indeed contained both conservative and enlightened elements, but not in the mix or form adopted by Bismarck or Napoleon. Its conservatism was that of an early modern world of corporate rights, not an idealised Gothic medieval past that Bismarck, or more particularly those surrounding Kaiser Wilhelm II tried to combine with the technological trappings of modernity. The enlightened elements of the Reich owed

Peter H. Wilson 37

more to practical experience with a myriad of local problems than attempts to recast society according to an ideal blueprint. The Napoleonic regime attempted to create a new order based on enlightened principles, whereas the Reich simply allowed such change from below provided it did not conflict with its existing political and legal order. While it lacked many of the Reich’s key elements, the Habsburgs’ Austrian Empire remained much closer in ideal and practice to the pre-1806 imperial order and so it is perhaps fitting that the Holy Roman regalia are now preserved in Vienna.

Notes 1. J.W. Goethe, Sämtliche Werke, II part, vol. VI (Frankfurt/M., 1993), p. 75. For the official notification, see Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv, Vienna, Titel und Wappen [TW] Karton 3, Notifikationen und Antworten June–Dec. 1806. All subsequent documents referred to are in this archive. 2. For overviews see H. Neuhaus, Das Reich in der frühen Neuzeit (Munich, 1997); P.H. Wilson, The Holy Roman Empire 1495–1806 (Basingstoke, 1999). 3. H. Neuhaus, ‘Das Ende des alten Reiches’, in H. Altricher and H. Neuhaus (eds.), Das Ende von Großreichen (Erlangen/Jena, 1996), pp. 185–209; K.O. Frhr. v. Aretin, ‘Das Reich und Napoleon’, in W.D. Gruner/K.J. Müller (eds.), Über Frankreich nach Europa (Hamburg, 1996), pp. 183–200. 4. Dalberg has been the subject of a number of good biographies: K. Rob, Karl Theodor von Dalberg. Eine politische Biographie für die Jahre 1744–1806 (Frankfurt, 1984); K.M. Färber, Kaiser und Erzkanzler. Carl von Dalberg und Napoleon am Ende des alten Reiches (Regensburg, 1988); K. Hausberger (ed.), Carl von Dalberg (Regensburg, 1995). 5. G. Kleinheyer, ‘Die Abdankung des Kaisers’, in G. Köbler (ed.), Wege europäischer Rechtsgeschichte (Frankfurt/M., 1987), pp. 124–44; G. Walter, Der Zusammenbruch des Heiligen Römischen Reiches deutscher Nation und die Problematik seiner Restauration in den Jahren 1814/15 (Heidelberg, 1980). 6. Several writers have accused the Habsburgs of treason and abandoning the Empire: K.O. Frhr. v. Aretin, Heiliges Römisches Reich 1776–1806 (2 vols., Wiesbaden, 1967), esp. vol. 1, pp. 344, 503–5, and his Das alte Reich 1648– 1806 (3 vols., Stuttgart, 1993–7), vol. 3, pp. 489–90; H. Ritter v. Srbik, Das österreichische Kaisertum und das Ende des Heiligen Römischen Reiches 1804– 1806 (Berlin, 1927). Helmut Rössler responded by arguing that the Germans failed to rally behind the emperor: Österreichs Kampf um Deutschlands Befreiung (2 vols., Hamburg, 1940). For a more subtle attempt to rehabilitate Francis II, see the double entry by W. Ziegler, in A. Schindling and W. Ziegler (eds.), Die Kaiser der Neuzeit 1519–1918 (Munich, 1990), pp. 289–339. These questions are reappraised in P.H. Wilson, ‘Bolstering the Prestige of the Habsburgs: the End of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806’, International History Review, 28 (2006), 709–36. 7. See the discussion forum ‘1806: the End of the Old Reich’, German History, 24 (2006), 455–75.

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The Meaning of Empire in Central Europe

8. W. Burgdorf, Reichskonstitution und Nation. Verfassungsrefromprojekte für das Heilige Römische Reich deutscher Nation im politischen Schriftum von 1648 bis 1806 (Mainz, 1998); J.G. Gagliardo, Reich and Nation: the Holy Roman Empire as Idea and Reality, 1763–1806 (Bloomington, 1980). 9. G. Mraz, Österreich und das Reich 1804–1806 (Vienna, 1993). 10. F. Meinecke, Cosmopolitanism and the National State (Princeton, 1970), with further discussion in H. Angermeier, ‘Deutschland zwischen Reichstradition und Nationalstaat. Verfassungspolitische Konzeptionen und nationales Denken zwischen 1801 und 1815’, Zeitschrift der Savigny Stiftung für Rechtsgechichte, Germanistische Abteilung 107 (1990), 19–101. 11. J.H. Zedler, Große vollständige Universal-Lexicon aller Wissenschaften und Künste, vol. 43 (Leipzig and Halle, 1745). 12. P. Schröder, ‘The Constitution of the Holy Roman Empire after 1648: Samuel Pufendorf’s Assessment in his Monzambano’, Historical Journal, 42 (1999), 961–83; P.H. Wilson, ‘Still a Monstrosity? Some Reflections on Early Modern German Statehood’, The Historical Journal, 49 (2006), 565–76. 13. Hegel’s comments are summarised in Gagliardo, Reich and Nation, pp. 256–9. 14. As translated in K. Epstein, The Genesis of German Conservatism (Princeton, 1966), p. 669. For Görres, see Neuhaus, ‘Das Ende’, p. 191. 15. The text and ratification are printed in K. Zeumer (ed.), Quellensammlung zur Geschichte der Deutschen Reichsverfassung in Mittelalter und Neuzeit (Tübingen, 1913), pp. 509–31. Recent research is discussed by K. Härter, ‘Zweihundert Jahre nach dem europäischen Umbruch von 1803’, Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung, 33 (2006), 89–115. 16. Important examples of the now extensive literature include K. Härter, Reichstag und Revolution 1789–1806 (Göttingen, 1992); K.O. Frhr. v. Aretin, ‘Kaiser Joseph II und die Reichskammergerichtvisitation 1766–1776’, Zeitschrift für Neuere Rechtsgeschichte, 13 (1991), 129–44; M. Rowe, From Reich to State. The Rhineland in the Revolutionary Age, 1780–1830 (Cambridge, 2003). 17. The following is based on the memoranda prepared during 1804–6. Those for 1804 can be found in the Staatskanzlei Vorträge [SK], Kart.167 and TW Kart.2. The most useful papers from 1806 are in TW, Kart.3 in the packet Gutachten und Vorträge. They include an undated memorandum by Joseph Haas, head of the chancellory of the principal commission that represented the emperor at the Reichstag. It was written in early May 1806 and has been published in Walter, Zusammenbruch, pp. 132–44. It was sent as an enclosure when Baron Hügel, senior Habsburg representative to the Reichstag, submitted his advice on 17 May. His memorandum is published by K. Raumer, ‘Hügels Gutachten zur Frage der Niederlegung der deutschen Kaiserkrone (17. Mai 1806)’, Zeitschrift für Bayerische Landesgeschichte, 27 (1964), 390–408. Friedrich Stadion, representing the emperor in his capacity as king of Bohemia, presented advice on 24 May that appears in Aretin, Heiliges Römisches Reich, vol. 2, pp. 334–44. The three were summarised by Johann Philipp Stadion, the foreign minister, for the emperor on 17 June. Stadion is also the author of the anonymous ‘Remarks’ from 31 July 1806 that are in TW, Karton 3 Allgemeine Akten Juni–Sept.1806. See also H. Rössler, Graf Johann Philipp Stadion. Napoleons deutscher Gegenspieler

Peter H. Wilson 39

18. 19.

20.

21.

22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

27.

28. 29.

(2 vols., Vienna, 1996). U. Dorda, Johann Aloys Joseph Reichsfreiherr von Hügel (1754–1825) (Würzburg, 1969). Count Cobenzl to Francis II, 20 May 1804, SK Kart.167. The titles and arms are illustrated in Neue Titulatur und Wappen seiner Römisch- und Oesterreichisch-Kaiserlich- auch Königlich-Apostolischen Majestät ... (Vienna, 1804). Copy in TW, Kart.3. For the decisions surrounding the titles, see Josef Baron Hormayer’s memorandum from 9 August 1804 in SK, Kart.168. For imperial iconography, see M. Tanner, The Last Descendant of Aeneas. The Hapsburgs and the Mythic Image of the Emperor (New Haven, 1993); M. Goloubeva, The Glorification of Emperor Leopold I in Image, Spectacle and Text (Mainz, 2000): R.A. Müller (ed.), Bilder des Reiches (Sigmaringen, 1997). See also A.H. Benna, ‘Das Kaiserthum Österreich und die römische Liturgie’, Mitteilungen des Österreichischen Staatsarchivs, 9 (1956), 118–36. For a contemporary description of Francis II’s coronation see C. Hattenhauer, Wahl und Krönung Franz II. AD 1792. Das Heilige Reich krönt seinen letzten Kaiser (Frankfurt/M., 1995). Details of the 1804 ceremonies can be found in TW Kart.3. Imperial coronation rituals are analysed by H. J. Berbig, ‘Der Kronungsritus im alten Reich (1648–1806)’, Zeitschrift für Bayerische Landesgeschichte, 38 (1975), 639–700, and W. Goldinger, ‘Das Zeremoniell der deutschen Königskrönung seit dem späten Mittelalter’, Mitteilungen des oberösterreichischen Landesarchivs, 5 (1957), 91–111. See the set of three contemporary paintings of this event displayed in the Imperial Treasury at the Hofburg Palace in Vienna. Two are reproduced in M. Leithe-Jasper and R. Distelberger, The Kunsthistorischen Museum Vienna. The Imperial and Ecclesiastical Treasury (Munich & London, 1998), pp. 40–1. Further discussion in G.J. Kugler, Die Reichskrone (Vienna, 1968); H. Fillitz, Die österreichische Kaiserkrone (Vienna, 1959); K. Vocelka and L. Heller, Die Lebenswelt der Habsburger: Kultur- und Mentalitätsgeschichte einer Familie (Graz, 1997), pp. 161–75. Both proclamations in TW Kart.3, Korrespondenz mit den Gesandschaften Aug.–Dec.1806. H. Weisert, ‘Der Reichstitel bis 1806’, Archiv für Diplomatik, 40 (1994), 441–513. Pragmatikalverordnung 11 Aug. 1804, and abdication patent 6 Aug.1806, both in TW, Kart.3. K. Roider, Austria’s Eastern Question 1700–1790 (Princeton, 1982); M. Wrede, Das Reich und seine Feinde (Mainz, 2005). K. v. Raumer, Ewige Friede. Friedensrufe und Friedenspläne seit der Renaissance (Freiburg, 1953); W. Burgdorf, ‘Imperial Reform and Visions of a European Constitution in Germany around 1800’, History of European Ideas, 19 (1994), 401–8. C. Kampmann, Arbiter und Friedensstiftung. Die Auseinandersetzung um den politischen Schiedsrichter im Europa der frühen Neuzeit (Paderborn, 2001); W. Schulze, Bäuerliche Widerstand und feudale Herrschaft in der frühen Neuzeit (Stuttgart, 1980). Haas memorandum, May 1806 TW Kart.3 Gutachten und Vorträge. For a good, if perhaps unduly positive overview, see G. Schmidt, ‘Die “deutsche Freiheit” und der Westfälische Friede’, in R.G. Asch et al. (eds.),

40 The Meaning of Empire in Central Europe

30. 31. 32.

33.

34. 35.

36.

37. 38. 39.

40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

46. 47. 48.

Frieden und Krieg in der frühen Neuzeit (Munich, 2001), pp. 323–47. Further discussion of imperial political culture in the Chapter 2 by Michael Rowe in this volume. As n. 28 above. W.D. Godsey, Nobles and Nation in Central Europe. Free Imperial Knights in the Age of Revolution, 1750–1850 (Cambridge, 2004). F.H. Hye, ‘Der Doppeladler als Symbol für Kaiser und Reich’, Mitteilungen des Instituts für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung, 81 (1973), 63–100; J.W. Goethe, Poetry and Truth, part 1, book 5. M. Walker, German Home Towns. Community, State and General Estate, 1648– 1871 (Ithaca, 1971). For an interesting discussion in respect to later German nationalism, see A. Confino, The Nation as Local Metaphor. Württemberg, Imperial Germany and National Memory, 1871–1918 (Chapel Hill, 1997). Mainz Erzkanzler Archiv (MEA), Militaria, Faszikel 121, proposal from 17 Jan. 1794. C. Wiedermann, ‘The Germans’ Concern about their National Identity in the Pre-Romantic era. An Answer to Montesquieu?’, in P. Boerner (ed.), Concepts of National Identity (Baden-Baden, 1986), pp. 141–52, and his ‘Zwischen Nationalgeist und Kosmopolitanismus. Über die Schwerigkeiten der deutschen Klassiker einen Nationalhelden zu finden’, Aufklärung, 4 (1989), 75–101. See the reports on the reaction of representatives at the Reichstag to the news of Francis II’s abdication: Prinzipal Kommission Berichte [PK] Fasz.182b, as well as the diplomatic correspondence in TW Kart.3 Notifikationen und Antworten and TW Kart.3 Korrespondenz mit den Gesandschaften. Count Cobenzl to Francis II, 20 May 1804, SK Kart.167. Philipp Count Stadion to Francis II, 7 Aug.1806, TW Kart.3. G. Wagner, ‘Pläne und Versuche der Erhebung Österreichs zum Königreich’, in G. Wagner (ed.), Österreich von der Staatsidee zum Nationalbewußtsein (Vienna, 1982), pp. 394–432. Pragmatikalverordnung 11 Aug.1804, PK Fasz.179b. Mraz, Österreich und das Reich, pp. 37–40. Cited in H. Rössler, Napoleons Griff nach der Karlskrone. Das Ende des alten Reiches 1806 (Munich, 1957), p. 16. Baron Hügel’s reports from August 1804, PK Fasz.179b. Francis II to Archduke Joseph, 4 Aug.1804, Kaiser Franz Akten, Fasz.203 neu. G. Klingenstein, ‘Was bedeuten “Österreich” und “österreichisch” im 18. Jahrhundert?’, in R.G. Plaschka et al. (eds.), Was heißt Österreich? (Vienna, 1995), pp. 150–220. Court and State Chancellory memorandum, 3 Sept. 1806, TW Kart.3. Illustrated descriptions of both the 1804 and 1806 arms can be found in TW Kart.3. M. Hochedlinger, ‘ “La dynastie comme la patrie”. L’Autriche face à la Révolution et à la menace napoléonienne’, in J.A.A. Vicente (ed), La guerra de la Independencia (Zaragoza, 2001), pp. 751–60; A.K. Mally, ‘Der Begriff “österreichische Nation” seit dem Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts’, Donauraum, 17 (1972), 48–66.

Peter H. Wilson 41 49. Joseph Haas’ reports from the Reichstag, Aug. 1806, PK Fasz.182d. 50. See Count Stadion’s deductions in his unsigned ‘Remarks’, 31 July 1806, TW Kart.3 Gutachten und Vorträge. 51. Napoleon to Cardinal Fesch, 15 Feb.1806, in La correspondance de Napoléon Ier, publiée par ordre de l’Empereur Napoléon III (32 vols., Paris, 1858–70), vol. 12, p. 40. Helmut Rössler in his Napoleons Griff tends to take such statements at face value. 52. Färber, Kaiser und Erzkanzler. Carl von Dalberg, pp. 86–92. J. Tiainen, Napoleon und das Napoleonische Frankreich in der öffentlichen Diskussion des ‘dritten Deutschland’ 1797–1806 (Jyväskylä, 1971). 53. The most comprehensive sources available were the entries from 1784 and 1786 by Jean-Nicolas Démeunier in the Encyclopédie Méthodique (166 vols., 1781–1822). Démeunier had backed Napoleon’s coup in 1799 and became a count of the Grand Empire in 1808. See R. Dufraisse, ‘Das Reich aus der Sicht der Encyclopédie Méthodique 1784–1788’, in R.A. Müller (ed.), Bilder des Reiches, (Sigmaringen, 1997), pp. 123–54. 54. H. Duchhardt, Protestantisches Kaisertum und altes Reich (Wiesbaden, 1977), pp. 284–311. 55. R. Endres, ‘Preussens Griff nach Franken’, in H. Duchhardt (ed.), Friedrich der Große, Franken und das Reich (Cologne, 1986), pp. 57–79; B. Simms, The Impact of Napoleon. Prussian High Politics, Foreign Policy and the Crisis of the Executive, 1797–1806 (Cambridge, 1997). 56. L. Kittstein, Politik im Zeitalter der Revolution. Untersuchungen zur preußischen Staatlichkeit 1792–1807 (Stuttgart, 2003), pp. 96, 295. 57. Ibid, pp. 80–3. 58. G. Birtsch, ‘Revolutionsfurcht in Preußen 1789 bis 1794’, in O. Büsch and M. Neugebauer-Wölk (eds.), Preussen und die revolutionäre Herausforderung seit 1789 (Berlin, 1982), pp. 87–101. 59. Further discussion with extensive references in Angermeier, ‘Deutschland zwischen Reichstradition und Nationalstaat’, pp. 37, 53–4. 60. Kittstein, Politik, p. 295. 61. Ibid, pp. 326–54. 62. A. Werminghoff, ‘Von den Insignien und den Reliquien des alten Heiligen Römischen Reiches’, Neue Jahrbücher für des klassischen Altertums, 17 (1914), 557–69; E. Fehrenbach, Wandlungen des deutschen Kaisergedankens 1871–1918 (Munich, 1969); C. Hasenclever, Gotisches Mittelalter und Gottesgnadentum in den Zeichnungen Friedrich Wilhelms IV. Herrschaftslegitimierung zwischen Revolution und Restauration (Berlin, 2005).

2 The Political Culture of the Holy Roman Empire on the Eve of its Destruction Michael Rowe

It has become almost obligatory to preface any analysis of the Holy Roman Empire in its final decades with an observation on the historiography of this strange entity, and of how, in the last half century, our understanding of the old Reich has been transformed. Previously, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the early-modern Reich stood as an object of ridicule and condemnation, sentiments nowhere more strongly expressed than in the Borussian historiography that identified Prussia as the entity through which Germany’s destiny would be fulfilled. The condemnation of Prussia and Prussian values after 1945 provided one precondition for the rehabilitation of the Reich. The political context of post-war Europe, which celebrated the resolution of conflict through peaceful, legal channels, and rejected the unrestrained application of Realpolitik, was a second. The product of this reassessment from the 1960s onwards was a stream of publications devoted to those imperial institutions that contributed most to orderly and relatively peaceful conflict resolution, namely the imperial courts that administered justice and the imperial circles (or Kreise) that theoretically enforced legal judgements. Here is not the place to explore in greater depth this rich historiography pertaining to the eighteenth-century Reich. Suffice it to say that it celebrates the old Reich not as a state, but as a legal order that was in many respects unique in early-modern Europe.1 This interpretation has recently been challenged by the German historian, Georg Schmidt. Schmidt locates the Reich within the mainstream of European developments, and rejects interpretations that treat it as exceptional.2 Indeed, he goes so far as to describe the Reich as a ‘state’, 42

Michael Rowe 43

sharing many of the characteristics of Europe’s other states, albeit with certain unique features. He vigorously attacks the notion that it should be viewed as fundamentally different from its neighbours, claiming that to do so is simply to project the discredited notion of a German Sonderweg backwards into the eighteenth century. It is difficult to subscribe fully to Schmidt’s thesis.3 In many respects the Reich, despite its size, did not act like a state; it did not have a foreign or economic policy; and whilst it possessed some military force that could, on occasion, prove quite formidable – as has been shown by Peter Wilson – it was far from enforcing a monopoly of violence over its own territory.4 It lacked the capacity to engage in meaningful internal state-formation of the kind associated with absolutism. Admitting it had effective conflict resolution mechanisms does not overturn the difference between it and states that ruthlessly asserted themselves and ‘disciplined’ their own subjects. There was no Reich equivalent of the Habsburg suppression of the Rákóczi uprising, the Russian suppression of the Pugachev rebellion, or the British state’s assertion of its authority over the Scottish Highlands. In each of these cases the state in question deployed its own directly-accountable force to enforce its authority; the Reich, in contrast, rather like Metternich’s Holy Alliance of the Restoration period, or the United Nations of today, sub-delegated the difficult business of asserting its authority. Nonetheless, taken in conjunction with recent research on other states including Britain and Prussia, Schmidt’s arguments do beg the question as to what early-modern statehood actually amounted to, beyond the ability to deploy force. If we extend our gaze beyond foreign policy and war, and instead focus on areas that more commonly informed the daily lives of ordinary Europeans, then the distinctiveness of the Reich begins to vanish. Where doubts begin to arise is when one looks at recent historiography on other European states that demonstrates that whilst they might successfully overcome periodic large-scale rebellions in spectacular fashion, they were far less effective at ‘disciplining’ their subjects on an everyday basis. Instead, recent research on these states on the whole points in one direction, namely that their relationship with their subjects cannot be reduced to one of a leviathan bludgeoning people into subservience. The most recent work on eighteenth-century Britain, for example, suggests that it was not a tool of a tiny oligarchy imposing its will on everyone else, but rather, that the consensus underpinning it rested on a far broader social base.5 The impetus for greater central government involvement in local affairs more often than not came from the localities, not from Whitehall, which generally showed a complete lack of interest.6

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Similar reappraisal of the eighteenth-century state has extended to Prussia. If any entity could be held up as the very antithesis of the Holy Roman Empire, then it was the Hohenzollern monarchy, a large part of which was located within the Reich’s borders. Indeed, it was this very contrast that underpinned the Borussian historiography that remained dominant in Germany until 1945. Recent research forces a reappraisal of Prussia. The old picture – familiar to an English-speaking readership through the works of Hans Rosenberg, amongst others – is of a population of serfs crushed between an unholy alliance of Junkers and Prussian bureaucrats.7 According to this interpretation, the Prussian monarchy, especially in the formidable form of Frederick William I,8 bludgeoned the nobility into fulfilling its obligations to the state, but left it a relatively free hand in replicating this policy at a lower level in its dealings with the peasantry. A crucial mechanism through which this brand of social-disciplining was furthered was the army, to which the Prussian state was supposedly attached. This rather nightmarish Rosenbergian account has been echoed more subsequently, for example by Alf Lüdtke in his book on policing in early-nineteenth-century Prussia.9 Yet the trend of recent literature has been to stress the limitations of Hohenzollern absolutism and the resistance it encountered from the provincial Estates, and to highlight the extent to which manorialism in Prussia was distinguished by conflict in which both sides – landlord and peasant – were relatively evenly matched.10 Certainly, this is the picture that emerges from William Hagen’s Ordinary Prussians, a micro-history of the lordship of Stavenow in the core province of Brandenburg.11 Here, conflicts, which usually revolved around the non-monetary obligations owed by peasants to the landlord, were very far from being resolved in a one-sided fashion. Far from being ‘disciplined’ by military service, recently discharged peasants tended to be especially assertive of their rights and protective of their self-dignity, and tended to undermine the authority of the estate owner (Gutsherr) and his agents. And though, on the whole, the manorial courts unsurprisingly tended to favour the landlord, rulings were not so blatantly one-sided as to prevent a general tendency – replicated in those parts of the Reich where the imperial courts remained effective – towards the resolution of conflict through judicial mechanisms. In that sense Schmidt is perhaps right in playing down the Reich’s peculiarity in Europe. However, he goes about the exercise the wrong way: the Reich was not like the rest of Europe, but rather, the rest of Europe appears to have approximated the Reich.

Michael Rowe 45

The meaning of political culture Taken on its own, this chapter does not entertain the ambition of providing a comparative history of the later Reich. Instead, it examines the Reich on its own terms, and in particular, attempts an outline of its political culture. What is meant by this term? ‘Politics’, to quote Keith Baker, ‘is the activity through which individuals and groups in any society articulate, negotiate, implement, and enforce the competing claims they make one upon another’; ‘political culture’, he goes on, ‘may be understood as the set of discourses and practices characterizing that activity in any given community’. Its study involves looking at political strategies adopted by the actors, and the institutions through which competing claims were pressed.12 As such, the historian of political culture spans a variety of sub-disciplines, including the history of political ideas, institutional and legal history, the history of culture, and what in Germany is called Alltagsgeschichte – the history of everyday life. It is only recently that these various streams have converged in research that is revealing of the ‘political culture’ of the old Reich. For example, the vast amount of work on the rise of the public sphere, which formerly focused on the elite ‘enlightened milieu’, has increasingly recognised that this process had a considerable impact on the institutions of the Reich.13 The most obvious manifestation of this was the burgeoning literature lavished on the Reich and its role as a guarantor of liberty in the years immediately before the French Revolution. In the 1760s, in the context of the Enlightenment and developing public sphere, a new form of patriotism emerged that was bound up with a notion of freedom guaranteed by law – freedom of religion, of thought, of economic development and property. German authors of the time were divided over whether these freedoms would best be guaranteed by the individual territorial states, or by the Reich.14 Some, notably Friedrich Carl von Moser, saw the Empire as their ‘Fatherland’, and as the context where the free development of the German nation could occur. Moser publicly condemned the rulers of the territorial states for undermining the Reich, through their expansionism and militarism, and he believed strongly in the power of imperial institutions to guarantee peace and ‘German freedom’.15 He thus linked the empire with the notion of ancient German freedoms, and, extending this logic, concluded that the imperial constitution reflected the German national character. In particular, Moser stressed the importance of all the things nineteenthcentury liberal constitutionalists demanded: the establishment of the

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rule of law binding on all, including the government, and balance between the various elements within the constitution.16 The conflict between the Holy Roman Emperor, Joseph II,17 and the League of Princes – or Fürstenbund – that formed against him in the 1780s, in particular generated considerable public discussion. The dispute arose in the early 1780s as a result of Joseph’s uncompromising determination to consolidate his own dynastic holdings irrespective of his imperial responsibilities, and the existing rights and privileges of other interested parties within the Reich. Joseph’s schemes, which included a unilateral realignment of diocesan boundaries within the Reich to make them conform to Austria’s territorial limits and his ongoing plan to give up the Austrian Netherlands in return for Bavaria, also threatened the wider balance of power. In response, a league of German princes formed to oppose Joseph, and Frederick II (the Great)18 of Prussia astutely placed himself at the head of this anti-Habsburg movement. Both sides in the dispute produced a flood of propaganda pamphlets, claiming they were acting in conformity with imperial law and hence German liberties. What is interesting is that this propaganda targeted the German public, not just the elite. The official propaganda – that emanated directly from the Emperor in Vienna, or from the leading princes opposing him – was more concerned about the balance of power between the Emperor and the princes. However, a growing number of unofficial publications at this time argued that imperial institutions should ideally protect the liberties of all Germans.19 Within the smaller member states of the Fürstenbund in particular, calls for a reform of imperial institutions so that they would extend greater rights to a wider range of subjects met a receptive audience, including amongst some in government. Karl Theodor von Dalberg, coadjutor of Mainz (and later Prince Primate of Napoleon’s Confederation of the Rhine) even produced proposals for a Reich criminal code designed to improve protection of the individual within the general imperial framework.20 With hindsight one can see that these ambitious plans were unrealisable, given that the most powerful prince within the Fürstenbund, the King of Prussia, had no interest in seeing his territorial sovereignty undermined by the creation of what was in effect an imperial guarantee of individual (as opposed to corporate) rights. Hence, one might dismiss the burgeoning literature on imperial reform in the 1780s as theoretical speculation and as hopelessly unrealistic. Yet imperial institutions, even in their unreformed state, lent a degree of realism to the so-called ‘Reichspublizistik’. These institutions helped shape the Reich’s political culture, and must therefore be analysed.

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The administration of law Law and its administration were essential to the Reich. Supervision of the administration of law within the Reich was ultimately the responsibility of the Emperor and the imperial Estates in their entirety. In theory, this responsibility extended not only to the imperial courts, but to the entire legal structure within the Reich, including the territorial courts, and courts at the lowest level (including patrimonial courts). This is important: the imperial courts, which will be examined in greater depth below, were an integral part of the whole legal structure, which included all the territorial and local courts as well.21 It is also important to grasp that all inhabitants of the Reich were subject to the empire. Certainly, only a minority of inhabitants within the Reich owed allegiance to the emperor alone (that is, they enjoyed an ‘unmediated’ relationship with the emperor and Reich). The princes and imperial nobility were in this category. The vast majority also owed allegiance to a territorial prince (and hence had a ‘mediated’ relationship with the emperor and Reich). Yet, even those in the ‘mediated’ category, though subject to a territorial prince, were also subjects of the Reich, enjoyed its legal protection and had obligations towards it.22 Of course, this dual allegiance of the ‘mediate’ subjects became problematic if the Emperor and territorial prince to whom they were also subject were in conflict. When these two authorities issued conflicting orders, in the opinion of Germany’s leading constitutional expert of the eighteenth century Johann Jacob Moser, there was little that could be done from the legal point of view. Instead, he advised that the unfortunate subject had little option but to follow the authority that could exert most physical pressure on him. This was generally the prince rather than the emperor.23 The most important institutional elements at the apex of the Reich’s judicial edifice were the two imperial courts – the Reichshofrat (RHR) based in Vienna, and Reichskammergericht (RKG) in Speyer and then, from 1689 to 1806, in Wetzlar. Of the two, the RKG was the older. It emerged in the late fifteenth century, as a result of three-way negotiations between Emperor Frederick III,24 the Estates and the princes.25 The Emperor, facing invasion from Hungary, favoured the reinforcement of imperial institutions to preserve peace. For their part, the princes were tempted to accept the creation of an imperial court so long as it was independent of the emperor and physically removed from his residence. In addition, the greater princes were tempted by the proposed enforcement powers they would enjoy over their smaller neighbours.

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This combination of factors persuaded them to accept a reform that potentially reversed the earlier tendency for the exercise of justice to be left to the territorial courts whose verdicts were issued in the name of the prince and not the emperor, despite the latter’s theoretical position as the ultimate fount of justice. The coincidence of interest between the parties bore fruit in the Recess of Worms (1495) and the foundation of the RKG as a court of appeal for the territorial courts, and as a court of first instance for ‘unmediated’ subjects of the Reich and for cases involving the denial of rights or severe breaches of public peace (Landfriedenssachen). Amongst the then novel features of the RKG were its fixed location, and the fact that its judges could not be otherwise employed and needed to have attended university.26 The princes were mistaken in assuming that the creation of the RKG in any way precluded the emperor from establishing his own supreme court, which he proceeded to do. This was the RHR, located in the emperor’s residence in Vienna. Theoretically the RHR was an imperial court and not a court of the emperor. In practice, the RHR was dependent upon the emperor alone in terms of appointments and finance. Thanks in part to the personal oversight of the emperor, it tended to function more swiftly that the RKG. One accusation levelled against the RHR is that it was confessionally biased in favour of Catholics, but this appears to be unfounded. Certainly, it was dominated by Catholics, whereas the RKG (after 1648 at least) had a complex appointment procedure designed not only to respect confessional differences, but also to do justice to the status of secular as opposed to ecclesiastical princes. It also adjudicated between the different imperial Estates (electors, princes, imperial counts, imperial cities, and so forth). In that sense, the RKG was more embedded in the world of status and privilege that characterised the early-modern Reich than was its Viennese rival.27 What might be admitted is that the RHR tended to be subservient to Habsburg interests.28 Crucial to an understanding of the imperial courts is recognition that their status and area of responsibility were virtually identical after 1648. They functioned as courts of first instance both in cases involving ‘Landfriedensbruch’, denial of justice, and for those who were ‘unmediated’. Theoretically, they also functioned as appeal courts for all the higher territorial courts.29 They were in direct competition with each other, and it was ultimately up to the plaintiff to decide which of the two he approached. Once the plaintiff had decided, the other court was automatically debarred from taking on the case, though – as might be expected when dealing with the Reich – cases did arise when two parties

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in the same dispute opted for different courts almost simultaneously.30 Cases before both courts proceeded through a process of written exchanges, and not orally, and plaintiffs did not themselves appear in court to argue their case. The courts’ jurisdiction was free, but parties incurred costs in that they needed to pay agents to draft, dispatch and present the required legal documents, and this could be expensive and time-consuming.31 The activities of the imperial courts, as they developed, were displeasing to the greater princes, insofar as they undermined their own territorial sovereignty. The creation of the imperial courts at the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries coincided with moves by the larger territorial princes to establish themselves at the apex of the judicial pyramid within their own domains at the expense of the representative Estates. Within the individual principalities, territorial courts (Hofgerichte) emerged and expanded in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They were served by a growing number of legally-trained officials. These courts served as courts of first instance for the privileged Estates within the territories, and as courts of appeal for lower urban and rural courts. Despite princely intentions, these courts were often as much a creature of the Estates as of the territorial ruler. Hence, the rulers, following the example of the emperors who had founded the RHR as a rival of the RKG, themselves also created a parallel set of courts more directly under their own control. Initially, these princely courts (fürstlichen Kanzleien) dealt only with business directly involving the prince. However, over time, they tended to push the Hofgerichte into the background: they were generally better organised and funded, thanks to princely backing, and hence won the favour of plaintiffs. Thus, the Hofgerichte declined in significance by the end of the seventeenth century.32 Princely assertion of judicial supremacy within the territories was part-and-parcel of the spread of absolutism in the seventeenth century. Its chief victims were the Estates. Territorial princely absolutism also threatened the imperial courts. In order to diminish the capacity of the imperial courts to intervene in their territories, the greater princes did two things. First, they created their own territorial appeal courts. Prussia did so in 1703, though its new supreme court of appeal (Oberappellationsgericht) enjoyed jurisdiction over most but not all of the Hohenzollern lands. The Elector of Hanover followed with his own appeal court in 1711. Located in Celle, it established for itself a high reputation throughout the Reich, though significantly, this was because it could demonstrate its independence from rather than subordination

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to the prince.33 Second (and complementing the first strategy), the princes sought from the emperor the privilege of restricting the right of their subjects to appeal to the imperial courts (known as the privilegium de non appellando). The privilegium de non appellando came in two forms: restricted and unrestricted. The grant of an unlimited privilege remained the exception, and was accorded only to the mightiest of princes.34 However, and this needs to be stressed, even the award of an unrestricted privilegium de non appellando did not close off absolutely the possibility for subjects to appeal to the imperial courts: they could always do so if they could demonstrate that they had been denied justice in the territorial courts, and the imperial courts vigorously opposed attempts to limit such appeals.35 By the eighteenth century, it was the policy of the larger states to prevent their subjects from approaching the imperial courts. This was especially the case with Prussia, the largest state after Austria. In 1713–14, the Prussian government sought to persuade its provincial Estates to renounce voluntarily their right to appeal to the imperial courts, arguing that the new Prussian supreme appeal court provided cheaper and swifter impartial justice. The Estates refused, unanimously opting in favour of the imperial courts, much to the annoyance of the king.36 Next, the government sought to set up an institutional mechanism to sift appeals to Vienna and Wetzlar, and to prevent cases being appealed where the litigants were not entitled to approach the imperial courts. Increasingly, from the 1720s onwards, correspondence to and from the imperial courts was routed through Berlin. The government also banned investigatory commissions from the imperial courts entering Prussian territory, arguing that the courts were interfering in the relationship between the prince and his subjects. Prussia also resorted to large-scale and systematic bribery of the imperial courts, so that they might make favourable rulings. An annual budget of 15,000 Thaler was set aside for this purpose.37 This combination of policies resulted in a situation by mid-century whereby appeals from Prussian subjects to the imperial courts had dried up. The award to Prussia of an unrestricted privilegium de non appellando in 1750 (backdated to 1746) during the War of the Austrian Succession simply provided legal confirmation of an established fact. Other princes followed where Prussia led, pursuing a twin-track policy of attempting to gain formally an unrestricted privilegium de non appellando whilst in the meantime employing a range of policies in an effort to prevent their subjects from heading to Vienna or Wetzlar to seek justice. These policies included moral preaching from the pulpit against the penchant for litigation, not supplying necessary

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documents from archives when these were called for, cutting off funds from communities taking action so they could not finance cases, and attempting to provoke localities into stepping beyond the law in order to stigmatize them as rebellious.38 At this point, one might conclude that by the eve of the French Revolution the imperial courts had effectively been sidelined, at least insofar as the inhabitants of the larger states were concerned. This was certainly the view of foreign observers of Germany, who were dismissive of the notion that imperial institutions afforded protection from princely despotism.39 However, there are grounds to believe that the imperial legal structure did afford a degree of informal protection, even though formally the structure was weakening in the larger states. One characteristic of the judicial structure of the Reich that distinguished it from modern systems was the co-existence of courts whose jurisdictions were identical or at least overlapped to a considerable extent. As we have seen, this existed at the highest level, with the RKG and RHR, and was replicated to an extent at the territorial level, with the Hofgerichte and princely courts. The consequence of this is that there was an element of competition built into the judicial framework. Princes might try to limit this competition, by pressurising their subjects or through gaining the privilegium de non appellando. More positively, this competition provided princes with an incentive to improve their own territorial courts, to make them more attractive. Typically, they did so through instigating a system of inspection (or ‘visitations’) designed to eliminate abuses. In some instances, this princely oversight role resulted in the abolition of patrimonial justice in cases of blatant abuse, though instances of such severe sanction were rare.40 Nonetheless, vigorous princely oversight of justice had the beneficial effect of encouraging a professional approach to judicial administration, even at the lowest levels. By the end of the eighteenth century, the principle that judges could not be removed without some form of legal judgement generally asserted itself. At the same time, a new professional ethic, founded not so much on religion as on the notion of the common social good, emerged amongst lawyers and judges.41 Ironically, the imperial courts, and especially the RKG, served as something of a model for the territorial reforms, at least until the middle of the eighteenth century. For the smaller German territories in the west and south, the two imperial courts remained significant. Detailed research suggests that they functioned quite well in the late eighteenth century. The RKG in Wetzlar, for example, saw a burgeoning caseload in the 1780s. It made

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about one hundred formal judgements annually. More important than the formal judgements, though previously neglected in the historiography, were the extra-judicial proceedings of the court, reflected in thousands of decrees issued annually.42 Focus on the formal proceedings leaves the impression that the wheels of imperial justice moved exceedingly slowly, something that resulted in high costs that made redress for the poor impossible to obtain, despite the theoretical provision of legal aid. However, in practice, the courts preferred to facilitate compromise between parties rather than award outright victory to one side in final verdicts, as is the practice in modern courts of law.43 There is some evidence that the imperial courts in the 1780s went beyond their relatively uncontroversial role as mediators between conflicting parties. The imperial courts began to act with greater vigour in striking down examples of what was termed ‘Kabinettsjustiz’ – that is, the arbitrary justice of a prince deciding to overrule the regular territorial courts. Though lying beyond the reach of the imperial courts, the so-called ‘Miller Arnold case’ of the 1770s offers not only the most spectacular example of Kabinettsjustiz, but also illustrates the general issues such cases raised elsewhere. The regular court reached a biased verdict in favour of a nobleman against Arnold, a miller, but King Frederick II overturned the judgement. The intervention attracted widespread publicity and sparked discussion throughout Germany on the administration of justice. Though it was recognised that Frederick had acted from enlightened motives, he was nonetheless much criticised despotically interfering in legally-constituted judicial proceedings. There was little the Reich could do with respect to Prussia, whose power made it impervious to imperial sanction. However, within the smaller states, the imperial courts became increasingly inclined in the 1780s to overturn verdicts that smacked of ‘cabinet justice’. There are two potential reasons for this determination. First, a denial of justice, and in particular, a denial of the right to appeal to the imperial courts, infringed upon the rights not only of the potential litigants, but also of the courts themselves. ‘Cabinet justice’ ultimately represented an existential threat. This had nothing to do with modern notions of human rights grounded in individual liberties, but rather was rooted in the ageold world of corporate privilege. Second, in the course of the eighteenth century the influence of new thinking with respect of natural rights, associated with the writings of Pufendorf, Thomasius, Leibniz and Wolff, informed the thinking of the judges of the imperial courts. Some have even put this down to the courts themselves – or at least the RKG – having been infiltrated by the Illuminati, a secret society working

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towards far-reaching reform within Germany.44 Certainly, the RKG’s campaign against absolutism really took off in the 1780s, though the evidence for Illuminati penetration is inconclusive.45 At the same time as the imperial courts were flexing their muscles, so, too, were territorial courts increasingly willing to assert themselves against even the most powerful princes. There was an irony in this: the princes had encouraged the professionalisation of their own territorial courts as part of an essentially absolutist agenda to achieve sovereignty by blocking out imperial intervention. However, an unintended outcome of this was the creation of a professional legal class no longer willing to tolerate arbitrary princely interventions in the administration of justice; that the ‘Miller Arnold’ affair attracted so much attention is a testimony to this sentiment. So was growing anger on the part of princes at the perceived arrogance of upstart lawyers, as reflected in a letter of 1792 from Frederick the Great’s successor, Frederick William II, to one of his top officials. I must inform you that recently, the judicial officials have adopted such a tone as displeases me greatly. It is as if they view themselves as a kind of parliament, something that I will never accept; indeed, I will lose no opportunity to rap them on the knuckles if they continue in such manner.46 However, by that point it was too late to reverse the process: a relatively self-conscious and self-assertive territorial judiciary had emerged that challenged princely absolutism as effectively as had the institutions of the Reich.

The courts and the people So far, the discussion has largely been concerned with the balance of power between the imperial courts, the princes and the territorial courts. The point has come to consider how the administration of justice impacted upon the lives of ordinary subjects of the Reich. Legal disputes were a feature of the world of corporate privilege that distinguished the Reich. If anything, the quantity of such disputes was increasing, driven in part by socio-economic change in the eighteenth century. This often made past agreements (which in any case had often been couched in deliberately vague terms in order to arrive at a settlement) redundant, and it was this that gave rise to the numerous conflicts that ended up in the courts.47 That the rich and powerful were in a position to avail themselves of the judicial mechanism to assert their interests is obvious. What about those at the other end of the social scale?

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The greatest barrier to the vast majority of the Reich’s inhabitants in seeking redress through the courts was the expense of bringing cases. The fees demanded by advocates and procurators were determined by the number of pages of legal documents that were drawn up for presentation at court, though sometimes other specific arrangements might be made. Repeated attempts were made, at least within the imperial courts, to introduce some regularity in the calculation of fees. For example, in 1585, the RKG issued an ordinance regulating fees (Gebührenordnung), which were fixed at a relatively modest level. A period of inflation then set in, resulting in subsequent ordinances that again sought to reduce the fees. For those incapable of paying, recourse might be made to the ‘poor law’ (Armenrecht) that required the advocates and procurators to provide their services free of charge. At least insofar as the RKG was concerned, in order to qualify an applicant needed to swear an oath that he was indeed poor (Armeneides) and also receive a certificate attesting to his poverty from the authorities. In addition, beneficiaries of this aid were not allowed to bring cases adjudged malicious or without foundation. Once these preconditions had been met, one of the judges at the court would assign a procurator or advocate who would not be allowed to pass on the case or neglect it. However, the archives contain large numbers of complaints about lawyers neglecting such cases assigned to them.48 There is evidence that at least some advocates charged lower fees to poorer clients. The wellknown advocate from Nuremberg, Gottlieb Christian Karl Link (1757–98), was known to charge poorer clients only minimal amounts. The same was true of others, though there were undoubtedly cases of over-charging and exploitation. Nonetheless, one should not underestimate the humanitarian impulses of the Enlightenment in persuading at least some within the legal profession to waive or at least reduce costs for the poor. Similar considerations of making the law more accessible lay behind moves in the eighteenth century to simplify legal language, shorten written depositions and focus on the practical rather than the philosophical or formalistic in order to reduce costs and speed things up.49 Another potentially positive development from the perspective of the poor was that in the numerous cases involving disputes over seigneurial obligations – and these represented the bulk of business from rural areas – the general principle of praesumtio pro libertate was accepted in the course of the eighteenth century. This meant that the burden of proof in cases of dispute over services moved from the peasant to the lord, lightening the load on those who could least afford the costs of

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litigation.50 The same applied to the numerous cases involving conflict between magistracies and burghers, because it was assumed that ‘sovereignty’ resided in the city as a whole, rather than in a ruling clique, unless it could be proved otherwise.51 It was one thing to make justice accessible to the poor, and even produce rulings that protected the weak against the strong. It was another to see them enforced. The imperial courts did not have an imperial police at its disposal to do this. Instead, the power of enforcement was delegated to the larger territories of the Reich, which dominated the Kreise, the regional units into which the lands of the Empire were grouped.52 This was in accordance with a decree of 1555, the so-called Exekutionsordnung, and subsequent amendments. The imperial circles in the west and south-west of Germany, and especially the Swabian circle, have attracted particular scholarly attention, as they were by far the most effective at enforcing the rulings of the imperial courts.53 This is because the west and south-west of Germany were the most territoriallyfragmented parts of the Reich, boasting the majority of the 300 or so ‘unmediated’ territories into which it was divided. In the west and south-west, these units were, on the whole, very small. Indeed, some were no more than villages, numbering several hundred inhabitants. There were also numerous imperial cities that were no more than small towns in demographic terms, as well as sovereign abbeys, and the holdings of imperial counts. The further east one went in German-speaking Europe, the larger the unmediated territorial units became, with Prussia and Austria – both European great powers – being the largest and easternmost of all. Imperial institutions functioned best in the smaller territories, and especially in the imperial cities where the emperor reserved particular rights. They were least effective in the larger territories, where, as we have seen, powerful princes had the power to resist what they regarded as external interference. The power of enforcement (or ‘execution’, as it was referred to) was acted upon most vigorously in those cases where larger territories within the circles stood to gain some political advantage in ‘executing’ the legal judgements against smaller neighbours. Given the extreme fragmentation of the Reich in the south and west, and the delicate balance of power there, court rulings stood a good chance of enforcement. This was so even if the beneficiaries were amongst the most vulnerable groups of the Empire. One such group was the Reich’s Jewish minority. The mere fact that Jews appear to have been over-represented amongst the plaintiffs, at least before the RKG, suggests that they at least hoped that the courts could provide legal redress.54 One especially prominent case involving

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Jews came before the RKG immediately following the outbreak of the French Revolution, and as an indirect consequence of it, and is in many respects indicative of how imperial justice functioned.55 At this time, there existed a tiny Jewish minority in the small town of Ettenheim, in the far west of Germany. Ettenheim, though located on the right (eastern) bank of the Rhine, belonged to the territories of the Archbishop of Strasbourg. According to an earlier agreement, the Jews needed to pay a certain sum to be allowed to reside in town. The agreement was somewhat ambiguous as to the precise number of Jewish families allowed residence, though the range was in the region of five to ten. In actual fact, eleven Jewish families lived in the town at the time of the French Revolution. Following the outbreak of the French Revolution, the Archbishop of Strasbourg, Cardinal de Rohan (of Diamond Necklace Affair notoriety), was forced to flee France and set up residence in Ettenheim. He attempted to force the Jewish community to pay a large sum of money to cover his expenses, as secularisation by the revolutionary government combined with his own extravagance had placed him in financial difficulty. The community refused, and in retaliation, Rohan ordered the expulsion of six Jewish families from Ettenheim within fourteen days. In desperation, the community appealed to the RKG which, following ten days of discussion, ordered a postponement of the expulsion until the case had been considered. Rohan had little choice but to abide by this ruling, and instead resorted to harassment of the Jewish community, forcing them to do military service and do manual labour on fortifications. In the actual case, the Cardinal’s lawyer argued that the expulsion of the Jewish minority was ordered for the public good. This argument was rejected by the court, which stated that the essence of the ‘public good’ consisted of the right of all ‘citizens’ (Staatsbürger) and subjects (Untertanen) to live peacefully in enjoyment of their rights and property. The procurator at the RKG also rejected accusations that Jews were equivalent to a plague, stating that such arguments were evidence of superstition and barbarism, and that one would do better to follow the tolerance of Joseph II and Frederick the Great. Needless to say, the case dragged on, with a final verdict reached only in 1803 (three years before the final abolition of the RKG as part of the Napoleonic reordering). By this time, Cardinal Rohan had long since ceded Ettenheim to the Margrave of Baden, who had already decided in advance of the court’s judgement that the Jews might stay. What does this example tell us of the position of Jews with respect of the imperial courts? Certainly, in formal terms, they were afforded no

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less legal protection than Christians. The courts treated Jews as cives Romani, enjoying the same rights as other parties. Of course, more research needs to be done to determine whether Jews enjoyed the same chance of success as Christians, or whether the anti-Semitic prejudices of society at large influenced the exercise of justice. One could object that the exiled Archbishop of Strasbourg was a relatively easy target for the RKG, and that the court might have been less brave when confronting a more formidable prince. However, the effectiveness of the imperial courts cannot simply be measured by the number of their formal rulings, or even their enforcement. Their influence on the Reich’s political culture also operated at a more subtle level, thanks to the rise of the public sphere. Increasingly, court cases were reported in the press, in the form of so-called Prozeßschriften that were printed in a style designed to appeal to and shape public opinion.56 The result was that cases involving the alleged abuse of power became publicly known not only within the individual territories concerned, but throughout the Reich and occasionally even beyond to a European audience. In this sense, a court case threatened to turn into something analogous to a present-day ‘naming and shaming’ exercise, and those in power were usually prepared to go to some lengths to prevent such exposure and embarrassment.57 This was especially so following the outbreak of the French Revolution. For example, in the 1790s, the Electorate of Cologne found itself in conflict with the peasants of Vest Recklingshausen. The authorities attempted to clamp down, but went too far by violating the right of petition. This prompted the peasants to engage the services of an advocate called Kindermann, who travelled to the RKG in Wetzlar. The court reached a verdict favourable to the peasants in December 1800. When the peasant leaders were nonetheless imprisoned, the legal proceedings resumed. If we focus purely on the court proceedings, one might well come to the conclusion that all the odds were stacked against the poor peasants of Recklingshausen. However, operating in parallel with the proceedings was a public press campaign, run at the same time by Kindermann and his legal colleagues. These published a critical pamphlet condemning the electoral authorities’ conduct – Merkwürdige Probe peinlicher Rechtspflege in der Sache ... gegen die kurköllnische Landesregierung, Februar 1801. This was rapidly and widely disseminated throughout Vest Recklinghausen, read in public houses, and apparently caused the authorities ‘exceptional discomfort’.58 Advocates like Kindermann played an important role in the political culture of the Reich. They stood as intermediaries between ordinary

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subjects and the imperial judicial structure. It was they who instilled in the peasantry the realisation that the legal path rather than violence was the best strategy given that the imperial courts greatly esteemed an abstinence from arbitrary behaviour under provocation. It was also these advocates who translated the grievances of their humble clients into the kind of language suitable for presentation at court, and in the process disseminated an understanding of legal doctrines (including on natural rights) and legal procedure to the Reich’s humbler subjects. Amongst the means of dissemination was the so-called BauernrechtsLiteratur – legal publications accessible to the peasantry – that became increasingly voluminous as the century drew to a close. Given this, it is hardly surprising to learn that peasants increasingly availed themselves of the imperial courts in their disputes with landlords and rulers. As the procurator at the RKG, Christian Jacob von Zwierlein, reported in 1767, ‘daily one sees hordes of peasants coming into Wetzlar in pursuit of justice’.59 This spirit of litigiousness was also commented upon by foreign travellers to Germany.60 This was the most obvious manifestation of what historians have described as a hallmark of the political culture of the later Empire: the channelling of social and political conflict into the legal process.61 In wider respects, the courts assisted in the politicisation of ordinary people. This was so, for example, through their encouragement of new forms of association amongst social groups who were often excluded from the official provincial Estates (or Landtage) that continued to flourish in many parts of the Reich. Peasants bringing a suit, and who were usually not otherwise represented, commonly formed themselves into a legal syndicate in order to solicit the service of jurists or seek the advice of one of the law faculties. The syndicate was a body whose very existence the territorial authorities might object to, but whose status was given de facto legal recognition by the decision of the imperial courts to treat with them as one of the parties to the dispute. In all these ways, the whole experience of the legal process, irrespective of the final result, contributed greatly to the politicisation of large numbers of ordinary Germans, especially in the smaller states.62

The imperial courts and the French Revolution It is easy to see how this judicial framework served to immunise Germans from the revolutionary contagion spreading through France in 1789. The imperial legal mechanism responded to the relatively minor unrest that occurred within the Reich in reaction to the Revolution with the

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usual blend of negotiation, concession and threat of force. This continuity in approach was all the more natural in that all the new unrest grew out of existing disputes, many of which were already the subject of ongoing cases, although now they were dressed up in revolutionary/ counter-revolutionary rhetoric.63 Certainly, the imperial courts acted with uncharacteristic speed in threatening repressive measures to suppress tumults, including those of Liège, which were particularly serious.64 What comes across from the imperial courts’ discussions in 1789 and the 1790s is not only the understandable fear of revolution spreading from France, but also fear of a recurrence of the great peasant war of 1524–6. The constant references to this sixteenth-century upheaval point to the long-term significance of how memories of that event continued to shape German political culture even in the eighteenth century.65 What is also noteworthy is that the courts’ threats against revolting peasants and burghers almost never needed to be acted upon, but were in themselves effective in defusing trouble. Not that the courts’ strictures were completely one-sided: they also pointed to existing channels of legal redress, and in some cases warned the authorities to remove causes of grievance.66 There is also evidence that after 1789 the imperial courts were increasingly disposed to reward peasants’ submission to the rules with favourable judgements. Peasant associations played on this sentiment, stressing how they, in a time of general violence in Europe, nonetheless opted for the legal path.67 Even Karl Härter, who otherwise is more sceptical than most over the effectiveness of the imperial courts in protecting subjects from their rulers, admits that in the period of the French Revolution rulers were prepared to go to considerable lengths to prevent litigation because of the resulting damaging publicity.68 Nor were the courts blind to the danger that rulers were exploiting the revolutionary scare as an excuse to ignore legitimate grievances.69 It is perhaps a testimony to the imperial courts’ earlier effectiveness in providing subjects with a modicum of legal protection that the princes imposed on the new Emperor Leopold II,70 as a condition of his election in 1790, a far stricter limit on the ability of subjects to appeal to the imperial courts.71 Given their effectiveness, it is not surprising that many Germans at the time of the French Revolution held up the old Empire, its courts and law as successful institutions that had preserved them from the despotism and anarchy afflicting their western neighbour. This lay behind their enthusiasm for the Holy Roman Empire, the ‘Reichpatriotismus’ that witnessed a final flowering following the outbreak of the Revolutionary Wars in 1792.72 The typical

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response of Germans to French revolutionaries who believed they were spreading liberty was to claim that the imperial constitution already guaranteed this. Given what we now know about the old Reich’s political culture, this no longer appears arrogant and absurd.

Notes 1. K. O. Freiherr von Aretin, Heiliges Römisches Reich 1776–1806. Reichsverfassung und Staatssouveränität Teil 1.: Darstellung (Wiesbaden, 1967). J. G. Gagliardo, Reich and Nation. The Holy Roman Empire as Idea and Reality, 1763–1806 (Bloomington and London, 1980). More recently, P. H. Wilson, Holy Roman Empire 1495–1806 (Basingstoke, 1999). 2. G. Schmidt, Geschichte des alten Reiches: Staat und Nation in der frühen Neuzeit 1495–1806 (Munich, 1999). 3. H. Schilling, ‘Reichs-Staat oder frühneuzeitliche Nation der Deutschen oder teilmodernisiertes Reichssystem. Überlegungen zu Charakter und Aktualität des Alten Reiches’, Historische Zeitschrift, 272 (2001), pp. 377–95. 4. P. H. Wilson, German Armies: War and German Politics 1648–1806 (London, 1998). 5. P. Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England, 1727–1783 (Oxford, 1989). 6. P. Jupp, ‘The British State and the Napoleonic Wars, c.1800–1815’, in M. Rowe (ed.), Collaboration and Resistance in Napoleonic Europe State Formation in an Age of Upheaval, c.1800–1815 (Basingstoke, 2003), pp. 213–37. 7. H. Rosenberg, Bureaucracy, Aristocracy and Autocracy: The Prussian Experience, 1660–1815 (Cambridge, Mass., 1958). 8. Frederick William I, King in Prussia, 1713–40. 9. A. Lüdtke, Police and State in Prussia, 1815–1850, translated by P. Burgess, (Cambridge and New York, 1989). 10. A. Schwennicke, ‘Der Einfluß der Landstände auf die Regelungen des Preußisches Allgemeinen Landrechts von 1794’, in G. Birtsch and D. Willoweit (eds.), Reformabsolutismus und ständische Gesellschaft. Zweihundert Jahre Preußisches Allgemeines Landrecht (Berlin, 1998), pp. 113–29. 11. W. W. Hagen, Ordinary Prussians: Brandenburg Junkers and Villagers, 1500– 1840 (Cambridge and New York, 2002). 12. K. M. Baker (ed.), The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture, vol. 1 The Political Culture of the Old Regime (Oxford, 1987), p. xii. 13. E. Hellmuth, ‘Towards a Comparative Study of Political Culture’, in E. Hellmuth (ed.), The Transformation of Political Culture. England and Germany in the Late Eighteenth Century (London and Oxford, 1990), pp. 1–36 at 11–14. 14. A. Waldmann, ‘Reichspatriotismus im letzten Drittel des 18. Jahrhunderts’, in O. Dann, M. Hroch and J. Koss (eds.), Patriotismus und Nationsbildung am Ende des Heiligen Römischen Reiches (Cologne, 2003), pp. 19–61. Here p. 21. 15. Ibid., p. 23. 16. Ibid., pp. 25–6. 17. Joseph II, Holy Roman Emperor, 1765–90.

Michael Rowe 61 18. 19. 20. 21.

22.

23. 24. 25. 26.

27. 28. 29. 30.

31.

32. 33. 34.

35.

36. 37.

Frederick II (the Great), King in Prussia, 1740–86. Waldmann, ‘Reichspatriotismus’, pp. 32–41. Ibid., pp. 44–9. J. J. Moser, Von der Teutschen Justiz-Verfassung. Nach denen Reichs-Gesezen und dem Reichs-Herkommen, wie auch aus denen Teutschen Staats-Rechts-Lehrern, und eigener Erfahrung; Mit beygefügter Nachricht von allen dahin einschlagenden öffentlichen und wichtigen neuesten Staats-Geschäfften, so dann denen besten, oder doch neuesten, und in ihrer Art einigen, Schrifften davon. 2 parts. (Frankfurt and Leipzig, 1774), p. 5. J.J. Moser, Von der Teutschen Unterthanen Rechten und Pflichten. Nach denen Reichs-Gesezen und dem Reichs-Herkommen, wie auch aus denen Teutschen Staats-Rechts-Lehrern und eigener Erfahrung; Mit beygefügter Nachricht von allen dahin einschlagenden öffentlichen und wichtigen neuesten Staats-Geschäfften, so dann denen besten, oder doch neuesten, und in ihrer Art einigen, Schrifften davon. (Frankfurt and Leipzig, 1774), p. 16. Ibid., p. 20. Frederick III, Holy Roman Emperor, 1452–93. F. Hartung, ‘Imperial Reform 1485–1495: its course and its character’, in G. Strauss (ed.), Pre-Reformation Germany (New York, 1972), pp. 73–135. E. Döhring, Geschichte der deutschen Rechtspflege seit 1500 (Berlin, 1953), pp. 1, 19–20. For more detail on the organisation of the RKG, see R. Smend, ‘Das Reichskammergericht – Erster Teil: Geschichte und Verfassung’, in K. Zeumer (ed.), Quellen und Studien zur Verfassungsgeschichte des Deutschen Reiches in Mittelalter und Neuzeit (Weimar, 1911), pp. 243–374. Haggling over RKG appointments reflected in microcosm what politics in the Reich was largely about: the assertion of privilege and status. Smend, ‘Reichskammergericht’, pp. 270–89. J. Weitzel, ‘Ius publicum in den Prozessen vor dem Reichskammergericht’, in Blätter für deutsche Landesgeschichte, 131 (1995), pp. 171–87. Moser, Teutschen Justiz-Verfassung, pp. 301, 373, 394, 420. It might be added that cases involving the emperor directly were heard by the RHR. This court also dealt exclusively with imperial rights in Italy, though the King of Sardinia – in his capacity as Duke of Savoy – was treated as a prince of the Empire and could opt for the RKG if he so wished. Ibid., p. 397. M. Hughes, Law and Politics in Eighteenth Century Germany. The Imperial Aulic Council in the Reign of Charles VI (Woodbridge and Wolfeboro NH, 1988), pp. 41–2. Döhring, Geschichte der deutschen Rechtspflege, pp. 3–4. Ibid., pp. 27–8. For example, the court had the right to participate in appointments to the bench made by the prince and the estates. Ibid., p. 51. K. Perels, ‘Die allgemeinen Appellationsprivilegien für BrandenburgPreußen’, in K. Zeumer (ed.), Quellen und Studien zur Verfassungsgeschichte des Deutschen Reiches in Mittelalter und Neuzeit vol. 3, part 1, (Weimar, 1910), pp. xiv, 1–153 at 1–5. Ibid., pp. 7–9. The right of appeal in cases where justice had been denied remained a fundamental right, even after Leopold II’s Wahlkapitulation of 1790. Ibid., pp. 54–60. Ibid., pp. 66–91.

62 The Political Culture of the Holy Roman Empire 38. R. Sailer, Untertanenprozesse vor dem Reichskammergericht. Rechtsschutz gegen die Obrigkeit in der zweiten Hälfte des 18. Jahrhunderts (Cologne, Weimar, Vienna, 1999), pp. 468–9. 39. One British traveler who subsequently published his observations on German affairs in the 1770s wrote the following with respect of the power of princes over their subjects: If you ask the question, in direct terms, of a German, he ... will talk of certain rights which the subjects enjoy, and that they can appeal to the great council or general diet of the empire for relief. But after all his ingenuity and distinctions, you find that the barriers which protect the peasant from the power of the prince, are so very weak, that they are hardly worth keeping up, and that the only security the peasant has for his person or property, must proceed from the moderation, good sense, and justice of his sovereign. [John Moore], A View of Society and Manners in France, Switzerland, and Germany: with anecdotes relating to some eminent characters. By a gentleman, who resided several years in those countries (London, 1779), vol. 1, pp. 383–4. 40. Patrimonial justice was finally abolished in Prussia only in the aftermath of the 1848 revolutions. 41. Döhring, Geschichte der deutschen Rechtspflege, pp. 5–13, 67, 95. 42. K. Härter, ‘Soziale Unruhen und Revolutionsabwehr: Auswirkungen der Französischen Revolution auf die Rechtsprechung des Reichskammergerichts’, in B. Diestelkamp (ed.), Das Reichskammergericht am Ende des Alten Reiches und sein Fortwirken im 19. Jahrhundert (Cologne, Weimar, Vienna, 2002), pp. 43–104 at 47–8. 43. This, for example, is how the criminal case in the so-called ‘Lahrer Prozess’ between the Upper Rhenish city of Lahr and its Landesfürst was ended. J. Maurer, Der „Lahrer Prozess” 1773–1806. Ein Untertanenprozeß vor dem Reichskammergericht (Cologne, Weimar, Vienna, 1996), pp. 9–19. 44. B. Diestelkamp, Recht und Gericht im Heiligen Römischen Reich (Frankfurt am Main, 1999), pp. 325–48. Härter, ‘Soziale Unruhen’, pp. 53, 82–3. 45. Sailer, Untertanenprozesse, pp. 478–9. 46. Überhaupt muß ich Euch sagen, daß die Justizbeamten seit kurzem einen Ton annehmen, der mir gar nicht gefällt, denn es ist beinahe, als ob sie eine Art von Parlament vorstellen wollten, welches ich ihnen nie gestatten, sondern bei aller Gelegenheit derbe auf die Finger klopfen werde, wofern sie sich nicht solches bald abgewöhnen. Frederick William to Grand Chancellor von Carmer, 11 June 1792. Quoted from Döhring, Geschichte der deutschen Rechtspflege, p. 48. 47. J. J. Moser, Von Deutschland und dessem Staats-Verfassung überhaupt. Nach denen Reichs-Gesetzen und dem Reichs-Herkommen, wie auch aus denen Teutschen Staats-Rechts-Lehrern, und eigener Erfahrung; Mit beygefügten Nachrichten von allen wichtigen neuesten Staats-Geschäften, sodann denen besten, oder doch neuesten, und ihrer Art einigen, Schriften davon (Johann Benedict Mezler: Stuttgart, 1766), pp. 191–4, 199–204. 48. Smend, ‘Reichskammergericht’, pp. 349–50. Whether or not Jews were eligible for such support was a matter of dispute. Specifically with respect of the RKG, it seems that throughout its existence, fees were kept relatively low, accurately reflected the actual costs incurred and were

Michael Rowe 63

49.

50.

51.

52.

53. 54.

55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60.

61. 62. 63. 64. 65.

66. 67.

relatively low in the eighteenth century as compared to the sixteenth. Ibid., pp. 334–5, 349. Döhring, Geschichte der deutschen Rechtspflege, pp. 149–211. The emphasis on written depositions in the early-modern German court procedure does not mean that there were no opportunities to make oral presentations, especially in the lower courts. Ibid., p. 211. On the other hand, once the lord had proved to the court’s satisfaction that services were indeed due, the burden of proof shifted to the peasant to prove that they were at the level he claimed. Given that the documents were likely to be in the lord’s possession, this was understandably difficult. Sailer, Untertanenprozesse, p. 472. Ibid., pp. 467–79. For the clear distinction between legal cases from rural areas which were dominated overwhelmingly by existential questions relating to access to resources and the provision of services, and urban cases involving mainly ‘constitutional’ issues between magistracies and burghers over political participation, see: ibid., pp. 467–8. S. Westphal, ‘Zur Erforschung der obersten Gerichtsbarkeit des Alten Reiches. Eine Zwischenbilanz’, in Jahrbuch der historischen Forschung in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (1999), pp. 15–22. J.A. Vann, The Swabian Kreis. Institutional Growth in the Holy Roman Empire, 1648–1715 (Brussels, 1975). According to Rita Sailer’s research, Jewish plaintiffs accounted for about 1000 cases appearing before the RKG in the course of its existence, representing about 1.5 per cent of the total. Sailer, Untertanenprozesse, pp. 420–2. The following on the case of the Jews in Ettenheim is a summary based on Sailer, Untertanenprozesse, pp. 372–409. A. Würgler, Unruhen und Öffentlichkeit. Städtische und ländliche Protestbewegungen im 18. Jahrhundert (Tübingen, 1995). Here p. 26. For more on this ‘publicity function’, see: Ibid., especially pp. 280 ff. H. Gabel and W. Schulze, ‘Peasant Resistance and Politicization in Germany in the Eighteenth Century’, in Hellmuth, Transformation, pp. 119–46 at 125. Weitzel, ‘Ius publicum’, p. 180. A Tour through Germany. Containing full directions for travelling in that interesting country: with observations on the state of agriculture and policy of the different states; very particular descriptions of the courts of Vienna and Berlin, and Coblentz and Mentz. With the Banks of the Rhine, the presant theatre of war. (London, [1794]), p. 87. Gabel and Schulze, ‘Peasant Resistance’, p. 144. Ibid., pp. 131–2. Härter, ‘Soziale Unruhen’, p. 51. Ibid., pp. 54–62, 64–6. Ibid., pp. 67–69. Also, V. Press, ‘Von den Bauernrevolten des 16. zur konstitutionellen Verfassung des 19. Jahrhunderts. Die Untertanenkonflikte in Hohenzollern-Hechingen und ihre Lösungen’, in H. Weber (ed.), Politische Ordnungen und Soziale Kräfte im Alten Reich (Wiesbaden, 1980), pp. 85–112, here p. 102. Härter, ‘Soziale Unruhen’, pp. 72–5. Gabel and Schulze, ‘Peasant Resistance’, pp. 126–7.

64 68. 69. 70. 71.

The Political Culture of the Holy Roman Empire

Härter, ‘Soziale Unruhen’, p. 92. Ibid., pp. 75, 98. Leopold II, Holy Roman Emperor, 1790–2. For contemporary criticism of this, see H.W. von Bülow, Freimüthige und erläuternde Betrachtungen über die neue Kaiserliche Wahl-Capitulation und die zugleich an Kaiserliche Majestät erlassene Churfürstliche Collegial-Schreiben, besonders die neuen Zusätze der erstern ([Regensburg], 1791). 72. Waldmann, ‘Reichspatriotismus’, pp. 19–61.

3 The Napoleonic Empire Michael Broers

History and Ethnography: The Man, the Machine and Moeurs Few periods of modern European history entail so much paradox or, perhaps more correctly, evoke such perplexed reactions from historians, as the rise and fall of Napoleon. A challenging overview by the FrancoDutch scholar, Annie Jourdan, typifies this in her opening sentences. Her L’Empire de Napoléon begins with a series of questions, in a tone that recalls the introduction of Alexis de Tocqueville’s canonical work, L’ancien régime et la Révolution: Napoleon: assassin or saviour of the Revolution? Hero or charlatan? Manager or despot? Warmonger or pacifist? These are the questions French and foreign historians have tried to answer over the last two centuries.1 With great candour, she declares that these questions are her own ‘red thread’, too. In his seminal work of 1990, Napoleon’s Integration of Europe, Stuart Woolf challenged this whole approach to the period. Woolf sought, in many ways justifiably, to relocate the emphasis from ‘the man and the career’ to the machine he shaped, drove and, perhaps most significantly for the future of Europe, left behind him in working order. Woolf has had his stern critics, Geoffrey Ellis among the most eloquent and well-informed, who continue to insist on the omnipresence of the man and the decisive influence of his direct interventions in shaping the character of the regime.2 The importance of the empire as a historical phenomenon, and of Napoleon’s place in the imperial regime, would seem to turn on the 65

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emphasis put on particular chronologies. This represents a series of problems that pose fundamental choices for historians or, indeed, for anyone with an interest in the origins of contemporary Europe. To locate the real importance of the Napoleonic era in the man and the career, and thus to assign cardinal significance to the histoire événementielle of the years 1799 to 1815, is not just to give major emphasis to the wars, it is also to define the Consulate and First Empire as the work and the vision of one man, Napoleon, and to see all else as somehow marginal and ephemeral. This has nothing to do with the bitter divisions of ‘love and hate’ that swirl around Napoleon.3 From the outset, there were those among his enemies – epitomised, if never surpassed in eloquence, by Réné de Chateaubriand – as among his admirers,4 one no less than Byron, who defined their own times as the work of Napoleon. Byron lashed out at Napoleon’s failure to die gloriously at Waterloo in his 1815 Ode to Napoleon, but he could still declare that, even in its ruins, his career bore forever ‘the ineffaceable traces of grandeur and sublimity to astonish future ages’.5 And the finest mind of the age, Goethe, set the tone for them all. This is, indeed, a ‘red thread’ in the historiography of the Napoleonic period, which crosses lines of love and hate. While Geoffrey Ellis is no hagiographer of Napoleon, few contemporary scholars have been more direct in their detestation of him than Paul Schroeder.6 However, quite logically, this very detestation, no less than the hero-worship so common among military and nationalist historians, places the man and his personal influence at the heart of the period. The entire age gains its place in history through Napoleon – and, as a consequence, that place was transient. Such a point of view has the ironic corollary of diminishing the entire enterprise. For another school of thought, perhaps rekindled by Woolf more than any other modern scholar, it is the state Napoleon built that really matters. This was his real legacy, and it found a late flowering in the shared legal and administrative institutions which helped to foster the reconstruction of Europe after 1945. Some argue that this approach has drained the blood from a great adventure and risks reducing the history of Napoleonic Europe to something less than the sum of its parts. In the light of my own work, for what it may be worth, the conclusion must be that it was a risk well worth taking. Napoleon was anything but a bureaucrat, and the tempestuous times he played the major part in creating ensured that the daily realities of the period were always punctuated, and often dominated, by the caprices and exigencies of war. When all else failed, he turned first to his family and then – inevitably – to himself. Newly conquered territories changed rapidly from settled

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polities, to satellite kingdoms, to French departments under the Emperor’s direct rule. Yet this was far from the whole story. Empire-building is quite distinct from state-building, something Napoleon and his collaborators knew very well. How Napoleon and his family chose to try to rule the domains they purloined matters greatly to the future of Europe. Stuart Woolf’s enduring contribution to the historiography of the Napoleonic period is to have placed this at its heart. The administrative and legal order Napoleon introduced across western Europe – even if ruthlessly imposed, even if violently opposed at the time – laid the foundations for the public sphere of the next two centuries. These foundations were all too often occluded by two world wars, the European civil war that threatened to destroy an entire civilisation, its state structures included.7 Yet they survived, and this aspect of the Napoleonic legacy must outweigh the ebb and flow of a time of war; the vacillations of the warlord ought not to negate the consistency of the reform of the civil order he attempted. It is too often forgotten that continental Europe was at peace between 1801 and 1805 – one-third of the period of Napoleonic hegemony – and that Napoleon used these years to establish the prefectoral system, the Université, and to pacify his domains – including the annexed territories in northern Italy, western Germany and the Low Countries – as well as bringing the Civil Code to fruition. There was a considerable pause in military hostilities, if not in the distant war with Britain, and it was put to considerable use outside the military sphere.8 There were those in the ranks of his most devoted contemporary disciples who saw this enterprise not as the work of one man, however much they adored him, but as the achievement of a generation of Frenchmen whose vision he shared. This is quite distinct from the interpretation of Goethe, for example, who saw Napoleon as incarnating a Geist, as the agent of a collective destiny only he could articulate and enact. Stendhal, Napoleon’s most widely read admirer in the years immediately after his fall, and his first major biographer, Jacques Norvins de Montbretonne, give many intimations of the view that Napoleon led, but did not shape, those who supported his regime. Stendhal’s two major novels and his autobiographical works never deny Napoleon’s magnetic appeal, but he dwells above all on the identity of interest between a generation of educated Frenchmen who grew to maturity under his rule, and their leader. Norvins, from an older, preRevolutionary generation, felt much the same. For them, Napoleon was the product of a shared, superior French culture; his vision drew on

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their aspirations and their opinions on how a polity should be organised and run. Put in loftier, but apt, terms, Napoleon and his collaborators shared a common vision of ‘the good life’; it grew from their self-defined Frenchness. He did not reveal his vision of the world to them, still less impose one on them: Napoleon was not Rousseau’s Lawgiver. To follow the markers laid down by Norvins and Stendhal, the nature of the Napoleonic regime rests on conceiving it as a shared enterprise with deep cultural roots in its homeland, even if it was hardly a vision shared by all Frenchmen. Isser Woloch has shown with great skill and acumen how Napoleon alienated one cohort of collaborators in the first years of his rule.9 The story must be continued, however, and there is a growing body of evidence to sustain the contemporary prejudices of Stendhal and Norvins, that he gained a new one. What this analysis has achieved up to now is to draw attention to yet another source of division among historians of the Napoleonic era. It might just as well be termed the ‘man versus machine’ argument, if reduced to its essentials. The Napoleonic regime was either the product of the Gargantuan will of one man, or else it was a smoothly oiled bureaucracy. To accept this is to accept and to be led by one of the most profound tropes in western historical thinking. However, there is a wider dimension to this scholarly divide over the nature of the empire that needs to be confronted. In his recent anthropological study, Apologies to Thucydides, Marshal Sahlins goes right to the heart of the matter. He finds the roots of a gross, but almost eternal, failing of western historiography in the founder-text of the master himself: Thucydides was the culprit, for he was writing in the early stages of what was to become the vast Western delusion of conceiving society as a collection of autonomous individuals: as if there were nothing to consider in the making of history ... other than the interplay between sui generis individuals and the undifferentiated totality called society ... as if the historical issue hinged on negotiations between the city’s interests and individual interests (as Pericles put it) ... Missing from Thucydides’ account is the whole set of mediating institutions and values involved in the constitution of historical agency: the complex relationships ... that give authority to certain persons and groups ...10 This way of viewing the Napoleonic era is not the result of poor scholarship, still less of scholarly neglect. Rather, it is because the period is now, at last, regarded as seminal to the history of modern Europe. As

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investigation and debate intensify, however, so the trope of ‘history without ethnography’ emerges within our ranks. Sahlins is deeply aware of this as a wider problem in the writing of history, as he notes the marked polarisation ‘between the idea that people are creatures of some great social machinery, on the one hand, and on the other, the notion that individuals are autonomous and self-moving, society being nothing but the residue, in the form of relations between them, of their self-regarding projects.’11 As regards Napoleonic historiography, truer words were never spoken. It is still very much a question of Pericles and the city; of the relationship of an individual will to that of a collectivity which Pericles must either dominate or oppose. Napoleon either incarnates a French Geist – the view of Georges Lefebvre12 as much as of Goethe – or he leads it as a tyrant. He creates a machine that obeys him, until it rebels. There seems to be little thought, on my part as much as anyone else’s, that Napoleon was part of a culture – however recently a ‘convert’ to it – and that he shared its collective vision. His own version of his life does not help, but we should all know that. Nor will a more normal, ‘structuralist’ approach to the period as pioneered by Woolf and his adherents – myself among them – really break from the lacuna bequeathed to us by Thucydides. By trying to see the Napoleonic empire as the expression of a powerful strand of French culture, as the work of a particular group of Frenchmen produced by the late ancien régime, the Revolution and, finally, of the Napoleonic state itself, we may begin the scholarly enterprise of putting back the ethnography Thucydides missed out into our accounts. ‘Otherwise,’ as Sahlins has shown us, ‘in a historiography without anthropology, our accounts are reduced to the indeterminacies of a generic human nature or the implicit common sense of the historian’s own tribe’.13 There is much of ourselves to be seen in these observations. If the debate is repositioned à propos Sahlins’ insistence on the importance of ethnography for historical understanding – if we are to put it back into the history of the Napoleonic empire – then perhaps another set of questions might be set beside the traditional ones recently posed by Annie Jourdan. Presuming that Napoleon belonged, however recently ‘converted’, to a French society that was intensely aware of its shared cultural identity and its particular civilising mission, then one way to understand the nature of his regime may be to ask the following questions: What was the cultural identity Napoleon shared with his fellows? Why did they prize it so highly? How did they translate it into an imperialist civilising mission? What was the pan-European, ‘extra-Gallic’ empire they created like?

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The rest of this chapter represents an attempt to think about who made the empire, and begins from the premise that it was a collective effort of Frenchmen with a shared cultural identity that they transported with them. Their culture served them as a practical guide to empire-building; put less kindly and more provocatively, it was an agent of cultural imperialism.

The universal empire of the laws and French nationalism If any single characteristic of a national identity emerged from the French Revolution among the French elites, it was their belief in the universal significance of their collective experience. What prevailed among them, practical political animosities aside, was Condorcet’s bold assertion that ‘a good law is a good law’.14 What a good law actually was had been a subject of debate, revolt and the cause of much shedding of blood during the revolutionary decade, but all who held to the revolutionary cause, be it of 1789, 1792 or 1795, believed there was such a thing, and that the French possessed it. Napoleon shared this vision of things and, in principle if hardly in detail, so did many men of the old order. The reforms and political experiments of the 1790s had demonstrated as never before that this universally good political culture, founded on a shared acceptance of good laws and institutions, could be codified and made real. By 1804, claims to its universal utility and adaptability appeared valid with the achievement of the Civil Code, and the seemingly successful implantation of the Napoleonic system of administration in areas outside ‘old France’,15 as it was now called by its bureaucrats. This drew the French who rallied around the Consulate, and even those who rejected the regime as Napoleon was running it, such as Stäel or Constant, back to deeper cultural roots. It is in this sense of the universal goodness of their political culture that the real influence of Rome on the Napoleonic regime should be sought, rather than in its imagery or its nomenclature. Seen in this light, Cicero provides the guiding influence on French imperialism, more than Caesar. His dictum in Book I of De Legibus (The Laws) was at the heart of the Code, and the concept of the ‘empire of laws’ so often referred to by the agents of Napoleonic imperialism: There is one, single justice. It binds together human society and has been established by one, sole law ... Someone who does not accept

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this law is unjust ... we can distinguish a good law from a bad one simply by the standard of nature, itself. There were those under the Code, those still outside it and those deaf to its virtue who were not yet enlightened. Cicero’s view of the Roman polity, as expressed in Book III of the Laws, chimed even more with those who were amalgamated into the service of the Napoleonic administration: ‘A government is composed of its officials, the men who direct its administration ... It was our Roman ancestors who shaped the wisest, most sensible of administrative systems.’ This was the core of Napoleonic imperialism, and the essential tenets which those who strove to make it work clung to, in the uncertainties and upheavals of a war-torn period: a belief in the universal goodness of their laws and in the universal utility of their administrative system. Law and government were set upon a shared national culture that was rich, deeply rooted and highly complex. This was how the Napoleonic regime confronted the challenge of ruling much of Europe, and in so doing, put these notions to a very severe test. Cicero did not live to see the climax of Roman imperialism; his intellectual heirs, Napoleon’s collaborators, did. In so doing, they revived a different, truly universalist model of an ‘empire of the laws’ very different from that espoused by the last defenders of the Holy Roman Empire, as outlined by Peter Wilson in Chapter 1. Whereas the Old Reich drew its legitimacy and influence from the guarantees its arbitration offered to a corporate public sphere, the Ciceronian model of the new imperialism swept all particularisms before it.16 The first years of the Napoleonic regime provide a significant example of the exception that proves the rule of Ciceronean universalism. It occurred on one of the furthest flung parts of the pre-Napoleonic French empire, and in the embryonic early phase of Consular rule. In the wake of the successful revolt of Toussaint Louverture in SaintDomingue (modern Haiti), in 1800 Napoleon decreed a set of what he termed ‘particular laws’ for the colony. The main point for all concerned was that this legislation offered the possibility of restoring slavery, but their future import was that this was the first, last and only time that the Napoleonic regime spoke or acted in relativist, Montesquieuian terms. The First Consul made a nod – possibly of a cynical kind – to The Spirit of the Laws, when he justified the ‘particular laws’ by the vastly different ‘nature of things’ on Saint Domingue, by its tropical climate, its plantation economy and on the sheer ‘otherness’ of its habits, customs and interests.17 The French would never do this again. The marker for the future that was most evident in Napoleon’s handling of

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the problem of Saint-Domingue was his centralising instincts. As Laurent Dubois has observed: [I]t was a far cry from what many planters had hoped for at the beginning of the revolution: the ‘special laws’ would not be shaped by the residents of the colony, but instead decreed by the metropolitan government.18 The planters of Saint-Domingue were the first of many local, regional and, indeed, national elites who would be disenchanted by the loss of autonomy that came as a result of Ciceronian universalism. Napoleon’s treatment of Saint-Domingue marks a very significant watershed in the transformation from the old regime to the new, in an imperial context. It was the last time reference to particularism played a major role in French imperial policy, just as it was the first example of uncompromising control from the centre. In the course of building and losing the largest land empire in European history, the French saw two salient characteristics emerge within their hegemony, one that heartened them, another that puzzled and unnerved them. They discerned quite clearly that there was a real periphery to their empire, defined not just – or even essentially – in terms of military control, but rather through the apparent incongruity of their ‘universal’ norms to certain regions and societies. This appeared to those concerned as just as great a challenge as military expansion and far more disquieting. On the other hand, they also began to sense – correctly, if not entirely accurately – that there were polities and societies beyond France that approximated to their sense of civilisation and where the universality of their values seemed to be proved. The very existence of a periphery, the ‘outer empire’, tested their cultural confidence, while the extra-French nature of the imperial heartland, the ‘inner empire’, gave their vision new hope and, as it turned out, lasting life in the succeeding two centuries.19

The outer empire: Testing Cicero and defining environments The character and cultural confidence of Napoleonic imperialism was most sharply challenged and defined on its peripheries. When the French made themselves directly responsible for places like modern day Croatia and Slovenia – the Illyrian Provinces – or the territories of the city-states of the Hanseatic League, or even states that had long been

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sister republics or satellite kingdoms, such as the Netherlands, they found themselves on ground that tested their certainty in the universal applicability of their system of government, and their faith in much else besides. The young auditor of the Council of State who found himself the Intendant of the Illyrian province of Ragusa, present-day Dubrovnik, wrote thus of the people of its hinterland, in 1813: We are dealing with peoples who are too ignorant, too estranged from civilisation and, above all, too poor to hope to attain it quickly or without help. In the hopes of giving our laws to these people – who know none – at a stroke, before their levels of intelligence are sufficiently developed, we shall only create a further, hindering source of estrangement between them and our government. Scarcely a year has passed since the introduction of the French system and its useful effects can already be felt, but we must strike a balance if we are to contain the illness itself.20 The Intendants of the Illyrian Provinces were all auditors, young men raised in the Napoleonic lycées and ‘fast-tracked’ through the system. Optimism and resilience usually prevail in their lamentations, but their youth and their immersion in the mores of the Napoleonic system still made them acutely aware of the ‘otherness’ of the outer empire. The Intendant of Dalmatia could not escape the sense of such fundamental differences from western Europe, even in what elsewhere would have been the routine task of finding barracks for the Gendarmerie. He spoke of the ‘difficulties which arise from the nature of the place itself, and from the nature of the dwellings of the Morlaques (the Croats)’. His experience drew this from him: Their forebears were the Scythians and they still display these signs of their barbaric and warlike origins to the civilised world. Their houses are but wretched huts, where the family sleeps with the animals ... I’ve seen wheels (on ploughs and carts) that do not fit their bands, gradually losing their shape and turning square because they do not use metal.21 He concluded by wondering what use were roads, or even the maps he was trying to create, in such conditions. It was obvious that the French system of administration was not tailor-made for such an environment; to make it so, nothing short of a social revolution would be necessary.

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There were many parts of ‘the old France’ where similar conditions could be found in the early nineteenth century, but this was not how it struck the auditor. Such reactions were not confined to peripheral provinces whose peoples were considered barbaric and ‘beyond the pale’. Nor was puzzlement the sole preserve of the younger generation of imperial administrators. A distinguished magistrate in the ancien régime Parlement of Rouen, Beyts, was seconded from his post as ProcuratorGeneral of the Court of Appeal of Brussels, to organise the new tribunals of the Dutch departments in 1810. Unlike ‘Illyria’, these territories had been, first, a sister republic of France, from 1795 to 1805, and then the satellite kingdom of Holland, under Napoleon’s brother Louis, until he was deposed for incompetence. Not only did Beyts find a country far less acculturated to French legal and administrative norms than might have been supposed, but he thought he knew why, after criss-crossing its hinterlands on his Camargue pony. In his simple attempts to find the most convenient places to establish local courts, he found himself on a voyage into the unknown. This is his reaction to the province of Zealand: The province should be regarded as half below and half above the waters of the Northern Ocean ... It changes with the tides. Every twenty-three hours it is transformed from a vast expanse of sea into mud flats ... In such a country, a Frenchman could think himself in the Antipodes, or in some precariously perched Pacific island. Thus, everything differs from our mores and practices: the language, the form of government, the religion, the clothes they wear, the architecture, the way of life, the food and how it is consumed, the conduct of social life, everything really.22 The impact of the landscape on the society of Zealand forced Beyts back upon the certainties of Montesquieu, rather than Cicero. He was less than sanguine about the applicability of the French system to this region. His pessimism may have been the hallmark of an earlier generation, but it did not stem from contempt for the people of Zealand, whom he considered intrepid, enterprising and clever, but shaped by too alien an environment to assimilate to the imperial norm. Beyts is rare among French imperialists in not finding in diversity a sign of inferiority. Respect for difference was not absent from the opinions of his colleague, Faure, who had the same task of organising the judiciary of the new Hanseatic departments, just along the coast. Faure never criticised the basic competence or integrity of the native magistrates,

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but he had little respect for their legal culture, or the society he felt it reflected. His reports emphasise the gulf between the people of the Hansa ports and France and, interestingly, Faure did not see their commercial economy as an agent of civilisation. Quite the reverse: The character of these cities is such that they are dominated by commercial interests, and so they have little liking for Roman law, which they should learn to respect. There are some civil and criminal regulations that, even if they have largely fallen into disuse, are not compatible with the mores of civilised nations.23 It is tempting to speculate that the reactions of a highly trained Roman legalist such as Faure to the maritime culture of the Hansa may give an indication of how the French would have regarded Britain, had they conquered it. Less speculative is the spectre of the eternal trope of European history, first expressed by Thucydides in the conflict between Athens and Sparta, and writ larger in that between Carthage and Rome and the Napoleonic French were nurtured on the history of both. Commerce, the agent of Enlightenment so lauded by Diderot, as much as Adam Smith, did not impress the Napoleonic heirs of Rome. Indeed, it is in such attitudes that the genuine influence of Rome can be found in the Napoleonic regime; it was less obvious than the Roman imagery of its plastic arts, but far more powerful. The Napoleonic Empire was contemplating acquiring a ‘southern march’ in its last years, when plans were laid to annex all Spain north of the river Ebro to France. The region that came closest to annexation was Catalonia or, rather, those less mountainous portions of it adjoining the French frontier. This was a land close to France itself, yet the Frenchmen sent to organise its annexation felt that Roman law had not fared well in what should have been part of its heartland, in the many dark centuries separating the two great land empires. The opinions and policies of the French in Catalonia are noteworthy in that, when the practical work for the introduction of the Civil Code had to be done, it was the intellectual heritage of Rome, and not the territorial mantle of Charlemagne, that really mattered.24 Degerando, one of the most prominent of the ‘imperial trouble-shooters’ and a leading intellectual of the regime, was sent to fulfil this task. He perceived the degradation of the Roman law tradition – and the basic societal level at which the Code was alien to Catalans – at the level of the family itself: The practice of community of property is all but unknown in Catalonia. The rights of married spouses will have to be accepted

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before the terms of the Code on marriage contracts can be followed ... The Catalans have the widest latitude imaginable in the making and remaking of their wills. Parents can do almost as they like.25 In his analysis of Catalan jurisprudence, Degerando here expresses another recurring theme among French administrators throughout much of empire. His contempt for the lack of precision among Catalan jurists was echoed throughout Imperial Italy and in the Dutch and Hanseatic departments. It was a ‘trait of the race’ – of many different ‘races’, it seemed – that went far beyond the realm of differences between legal systems. The French Prefect of Rome, the young aristocrat and auditor Camille de Tournon, poured scorn on the Roman sense of timekeeping, the origins of which he felt lay in centuries of government by Baroque mores: A government based on precision and action is what is called for, utterly contrary to their customs, for until now, they have known an administration that works only on approximation.26 It was something which the French felt permeated most non-French societies and it infuriated them. At an administrative level, it was often felt to stem from ignorance of the doctrine of the separation of powers, particularly at local level. Whether in the former Habsburg province of Carinthia, now in ‘Illyria’, or in the Hanse departments, the French had no time for the office of Bürgermeister, uniting as it did administrative and judicial functions. At a more profound level, it could lead Degerando to lambast, on the one hand, the utter disregard of Catalan law for natural children and, on the other, the lax morals that lax legal norms allowed. In wider terms, imperial administrators in Italy and the Illyrian Provinces found intolerable – but could never prevent – the mass seasonal practices of transhumance that marked, for them as for the Tridentine Church before them, a nomadic society, almost by definition beyond the pale of the empire and its laws. In short, there were still Scythians, even if they were, in reality, the descendants of Virgil’s shepherds. The experience of ruling a vast and varied land empire brought forth the need, as perceived by the French imperialists at least, to confront the tropes that came with the mantle of Rome. The challenge of ruling the outer empire also brought the French back to what they had come to consider the core values of 1789. This is especially poignant when it comes from the pens of the auditors, who were chosen in no small part because they were too young to have

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served either the old order or the revolutionary regimes. This is the Intendant of Civil-Croatia, the former Hungarian territory on the furthest reaches of the Illyrian provinces, in 1813: Feudalism in all the rigidity of its origins still exists here. A handful of royal free towns are the only places where the laws, uses and abuses of feudalism have not reduced these people to a state of desperation through rendering over the fruits of their labours for the luxurious enjoyment of a handful of lazy, worthless ‘personages’, and so paralysing all industry, energy and initiative in the region.27 The author of these words was a La Tour du Pin, one of the oldest, most aristocratic families of the old order, and the possessors of several fiefs, themselves, before 4 August, 1789. This list of ‘core values’ extended to religious toleration, for the French championed the rights and, indeed, the advancement of religious minorities wherever they imposed direct rule. In the Dutch departments – a part of Europe often considered among the most tolerant under the old order – Beyts vigorously championed the presence of an appropriate number of Catholic magistrates on the Court of Appeal, and was prepared to lower his academic expectations of them to achieve a suitable quota.28 He also fought successfully to appoint Jewish magistrates in the city of Amsterdam, both within and beyond their traditional neighbourhoods.29 In the far less tolerant atmosphere of Siena, in Tuscany, the new French Prefect – a Piedmontese, as it happened – deployed troops and gendarmes to guard the Jewish quarter when there were rumours of a planned pogrom in 1808.30 The battle to enforce the terms of the Concordat against the Catholic Church in the Italian departments amounted to a ferocious, if largely bloodless, Kulturkampf.31 Several points emerge from the collective experience of those sent to integrate the outer empire into its core. Few thought seriously of any form of compromise with local mores, save on the most temporary and provisional basis. No one ever doubted, publicly or on their private correspondence, the innate superiority of French civilisation. Despair came to them from Montesquieu, in that climate and geography were insurmountable obstacles to the civilising mission in places like ‘Illyria’ or the Italian hinterlands, or just to uniformity, as in the case of Zealand. Hope, however, came from Cicero in the unshakeable belief that a good law was a good law, and theirs was the empire of good laws. It could also come closer to hand, through Voltaire, whose lives of Louis XIV and Peter the Great, as well as the Histoire des Moeurs, gave a sharp focus to

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the potential for progress if driven by both the principe naturale and the principe nuovo. If Voltaire took these definitions to lengths far beyond those originally sketched by Machiavelli, it was evident to the imperial administrators that Napoleon would have to play both roles simultaneously, as Peter, the principe nuovo in the outer empire, and as Louis, the principe naturale in the inner.32 Those who despaired admitted the triumph of the elements, not the negation of their own superiority; those who did not lose heart clung to the belief that good government could transform lives.

The inner empire: The new centre and ‘people like us’ The French had a very different, more settled relationship with the elites of the inner empire, although this was a regime by and for the elites, with no real aspirations to popular support. The French were never really accepted by the majority of the elites of even those regions longest annexed to France. Michael Rowe stresses that most of the Rhenish elites ‘invested little cultural capital’ in being part of France, and maintained strong links with German universities beyond the Empire.33 Likewise, in Turin, the French Prefect railed against ‘this recalcitrant deafness’ with which the old families surrounded him.34 Neither region regarded being subsumed into the Empire as an advantage, certainly not in political terms. Nevertheless, there were exceptions to this general climate of resentment that were of greater significance for the future than those at the time, particularly the local elites, might have realised. Rowe notes that the legal profession was alone in the Rhineland in becoming truly professionalised under French rule, and that the narrow training its new members were given was despised by many jurists educated under the old Reich.35 The exception was important, however, and the Prussians took good note of it in 1814, when they retained the Civil Code for the Rhine Province. Similarly in Piedmont, two of its most distinguished magistrates, Peyretti di Condove and Botton di Castellamonte, not only rose to the highest rank in Napoleonic service, but chose to remain in France after 1814.36 It was not long before Piedmontese magistrates began clamouring for a return to the essentials of the Code, such as public trials and published proceedings, after 1814.37 In some crucial respects, at least, absence could make the heart grow fonder. Cesare Balbo, the future reforming Prime Minister of Piedmont in the late 1840s, had served as an auditor under Napoleon and, although loathing

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his country’s subjection to imperial rule, he never hid his admiration for the system of government he learned about at first hand in the Council of State.38 The French, for their part, could get it wrong about the future of their impact. Although despised as a legalist by his French colleagues during the French period, Ferdinando Dal Pozzo, a Piedmontese who rose in spite of much opposition to high positions in the courts of first Genoa and then Rome, became a widely respected champion of the Civil Code and the French legal system under the Restoration.39 Likewise in the Dutch departments, Beyts had his doubts about the ability of his successor on the Court of Appeal of the Hague, Van Maalan, to cope at such a high level, his long career under the Kingdom of Holland and the great help he had given Beyts notwithstanding.40 Van Maalan went on to steer the survival of the Code and the French court system into the Restoration period.41 It was seldom clear to those concerned at the time, but there were parts of the inner empire, and specific sectors of its elites, where the French found ‘people like us’, even if it often proved to be later rather than sooner. At the time, Napoleon’s expressed policy was to place Frenchmen as public prosecutors and presidents of all tribunals, even at the level of première instance, hardly a sign of confidence in his new subjects. But it is clear that the experience made local converts. Conversely, there were ‘non-French’ parts of Europe that were clearly ‘of the Empire’ – within the Ciceronean circle, as it were – even if they were not actually imperial territory. The reactions of the French to the elite culture of south-western Germany is the most significant case in point. Hence, Norvins de Montbretonne on Baden, as he recalled his time there as imperial chargé d’affaires: ‘The Grand Duchy became a second Alsace, united rather than separated by the Rhine, to the point where it was impossible to be more in France than in that German state.’42 His contempt for Roman high society is well documented, and stands in stark contrast to the genuine intellectual friendships he formed in Germany, with both sexes. Of the Baroness von Krüdener, like many Badenese aristocrats well connected in Paris, and her daughter, he wrote: ‘Their literary conversation taught me something new. Their exquisite sensibility in matters of taste was ... the academic reflection of their souls.’ Of his friend, the Swiss-born historian Johann Müller, long a part of Prussian academic life, he recalled his ‘fine, lucid conversation on politics and literature in general; so good that the hour was always late when we got up from table.’43 Such men judged by French standards and they were impervious to many complex realities in those judgements.

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This sort of admiration was not confined within the frontiers of inner empire. Degerando had a real admiration for the notariate of Catalonia: The notariate was held in singular esteem in this country ... this high consideration was deserved and the corps of notaries offers us, on the whole, the combination of enlightenment and morality; their conduct has been wise and moderate in the face of all the upheavals this country has undergone.44 A new imperial heartland was beginning to emerge, often in very practical ways and for highly expedient reasons, often driven by French insistence on imposing the Civil Code and the French system of judicial administration on newly annexed regions as quickly and thoroughly as possible. Linguistic necessity sent Rhinelanders and Alsatians to the Hanseatic departments, Belgians to the Dutch departments, and Piedmontese to Liguria, Tuscany and Rome. They were usually met with as much, and often more, resentment by the indigenous elites than the French themselves. As a result, they may not have drawn closer to the French, but few developed real sympathy for their ‘fellow’ Germans, Italians or Netherlanders; almost none among them felt admiration for the judicial or administrative orders they had been sent to supplant.

Notes 1. Annie Jourdan, L’Empire de Napoléon (Paris, 2000), p. 7. 2. For a succinct exposition of this view see Geoffrey Ellis, ‘The Nature of Napoleonic Imperialism’, Napoleon and Europe (London, 2001), pp. 97–117. 3. No work has surpassed Pieter Geyl, Napoleon for and Against (New Haven, 1949; first published in Dutch in1947). 4. For a collection of Réné de Chateaubriand’s writings on Napoleon see Napoléon par Chateaubriand (Paris, 1969). 5. Ernest J. Lovell (ed.), Lady Blessington’s Conversations of Lord Byron (Princeton, 1969 edition), p. 120. Cited in Stuart Semmel, Napoleon and the British (New Haven and London, 2004), p. 233. 6. Paul Schroeder, The Transformation of European Politics, 1763–1848 (Oxford, 1994). 7. In this context, the work of Ian Kershaw on the Nazi state might acquire yet another crucial aspect for our understanding of the role of the state. Hitler’s system of government might be interpreted as a nihilistic assault on the Napoleonic system, which had taken root in the German states and, to a degree, in the Second Reich. The Third Reich might, at least in part, be seen as the deliberate uprooting of a common European public culture of law and justice. This is raised most directly in Ian Kershaw, The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation (London, 2000).

Michael Broers 81 8. Michael Broers, Europe under Napoleon, 1799–1815 (London, 1996), pp. 24–143 deliberately concentrates on this period. 9. Isser Woloch, Napoleon and his Collaborators (New York, 2004). 10. Marshal Sahlins, Apologies to Thucydides. Understanding History as Culture and Vice Versa (Chicago and London, 2004), pp. 122–3. 11. Ibid., p. 139. 12. Georges Lefebvre, Napoleon (2 vols., English trans. London, 1969–74). 13. Sahlins, Apologies to Thucydides, pp. 123–4. 14. Marquis de Condorcet, Réflexions sur les affaires publiques par une société de citoyens (Paris, 1789). 15. Specifically, the Belgian, Rhenish and Piedmontese departments and the satellite republics of Batavia (the Netherlands), Italy and Helvetia (Switzerland). 16. See Chapter 1 of this volume. 17. Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World. The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 2004), p. 241. 18. Ibid., p. 241. 19. I have used the concepts of an inner and outer empire in my Europe under Napoleon, and also in my, ‘Napoleon, Charlemagne and Lotharingia: Acculturation and the Borders of Napoleonic Europe’, Historical Journal, 44 (2001), 135–54. 20. Archives Nationales (AN) F1e 62 (Pays annexés et réunis, provinces illyriennes), Intendant Ragusa, to Intendant-General, Illyria, 1 March, 1813. 21. AN F1e 62, Intendant, Dalmatia, to Intendant-General, Illyria, 1 January, 1813. 22. AN BB5 289 (Organisation Judiciaire, Hollande), Beyts to Minister of Justice, 11 May, 1810. 23. AN BB5 268 (Organisation Judiciaire, départements hanséatiques), Faure to Minister of Justice, 26 January, 1811. 24. The territorial similarity with the Carolingian empire was striking. See Broers, ‘Napoleon, Charlemagne and Lotharingia’. 25. AN BB5 287 (Organisation Judiciaire, Catalonia), Degerando to Minister of Justice, 27 April, 1812. 26. Jacques Moulard (ed.), Lettres inédites du comte Camille de Tournon, préfet de Rome, 1809–1814, 1ère partie: La politique et l’esprit public (Paris, 1914), Tournon to his father, 11 February, 1810. Cited in Michael Broers, The Napoleonic Empire in Italy, 1796–1814. Cultural Imperialism in a European Context? (Basingstoke, 2005), pp. 220–1. 27. AN F1e 62 Intendant, Civil-Croatia, to Intendant-General, Illyria, 16 February, 1813. 28. AN BB5 280 (Organisation judiciaire, Hollande), Beyts to Minister of Justice, 25 February, 1811. 29. AN BB5 280 (Organisation judiciaire, Hollande), Beyts to Minister of Justice, 5 December, 1810. 30. Michael Broers, The Politics of Religion in Napoleonic Italy. The War against God 1801–1814 (London, 2002), pp. 33–5. 31. Ibid., pp. 33–5. 32. In this, I am deeply indebted to the work of John Pocock, especially J.G.A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, volume II, Narratives of Civil Government (Cambridge, 1999), Section 2.

82 The Napoleonic Empire 33. Michael Rowe, From Reich to State. The Rhineland in the Revolutionary Age 1780–1830 (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 156–7. 34. Marcel Tacel, ‘L’agitation royaliste à Turin de 1805 à 1808,’ Revue de l’Institut Napoléon, 52 (1954), 94–105. 35. Rowe, From Reich to State, p. 137. 36. Michael Broers, Napoleonic Imperialism and the Savoyard Monarchy, 1773–1821. State Building in Piedmont (Lewiston and Lampeter, 1997), pp. 443–4. 37. Isidoro Soffietti, ‘Sulla storia dei principi dell’oralità del contradditorio e della pubblictà nel procedimento penale. Il periodo della Restaurazione nel Regno di Sardegna,’ Rivista di Storia del Diritto Italiano, 64 (1971–2), 125–241. 38. Cesare Balbo, La Vita di Cesare Balbo (Turin, 1859), pp. 377–8, 403–4. 39. Broers, The Napoleonic Empire in Italy, pp. 177–180, 190–1, 289–90. 40. AN BB5 280 (Organisation judiciaire, Hollande), Beyts to Minister of Justice, 25 February, 1811. 41. The author is grateful to his colleague, Dr Matthias Bok, of the University of Utrecht, for this information based on his forthcoming research. 42. J. Norvins de Montbreton, Souvenirs d’un historien de Napoléon (3 vols., Paris, 1896–7), vol. 3, p. 62. 43. Ibid, vol. 3, pp. 261–7. 44. AN BB5 287 (Organisation judiciaire, Catalogne), Degerando to Minister of Justice, 23 April, 1812.

4 The Political Culture of the Napoleonic Empire William Doyle

Twenty years ago, in Chicago, there began a great series of conferences which sooner or later brought together most of the leading historians working on the French Revolution around the time of its bicentenary. The theme of these conferences, whose published proceedings eventually stretched to four handsome and weighty volumes, was The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture.1 This series was consciously intended by the editors who planned it as a manifesto for a new era in French Revolutionary studies; an era when the Revolution would be studied no longer in terms of class conflict and social movements, but in terms of culture. In order to set the scene, to explain the distinction he was drawing, one of the editors, Keith Baker, felt obliged to offer an explanation of what political culture was, defining it as a set of discourses and practices which were characteristic of the community in question. 2 Political culture, therefore, is our way of conducting public affairs, how we order our governance. And in this context, the great drama of the French Revolution was its attempt to reformulate French ways of governance from scratch, and comprehensively. Sooner or later, every facet of the old political order and the habits by which it worked was renounced. Entirely new rationales for authority, structures to give them working substance, and behavioural expectations to make them work, were all introduced. An absolute monarchy constrained only by custom was to be supplanted by a representative regime – first a monarchy, then a republic – circumscribed by abstractly defined national and citizens’ rights set down in a written constitution. Nothing so allembracing had ever been attempted before in the history of the world; but the attempt, or something like it, has often been made since. And that is the sense in which those volumes really were about the creation of modern political culture. 83

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And yet, within a handful of years, this bold attempt to create brandnew contours and habits for political life, untainted by all previous practices, was widely perceived to have failed. Successive attempts to embody a new regime had proved incapable of functioning in a stable and orderly manner. The country had been plunged into chaos, degenerating into a civil war only resolved by the systematic massacre of the Terror and its vengeful aftermath. And this was an experience that nobody felt sure might not be repeated at any moment. Napoleon rode to power on these fears. He set about healing the wounds opened up by the Revolution in masterful and imaginative style. He was young, he had a successful army to back up his authority, and plenty of able collaborators willing him to succeed. But he was not immortal; and the fear was, as his formula for restoring order seemed to be working, that it could all be destroyed if his guiding hand was removed. Over the five years of the Consulate, there were a number of plots aiming to achieve that removal by force. Making the general Consul for life did nothing to solve this problem of continuity, either in the long or short term. The Empire was originally conceived as an answer to this problem. In a certain sense, therefore, the Empire was itself a product of revolutionary political culture, because it was a created regime, the product of a conviction that even an empire could be started from scratch as an act of political will. Nothing could have been more different from the organically-evolved thousand year old German Reich. And although its central point was to make the ruler of France hereditary, there was never any question of making Napoleon simply king. Partly that was because he wanted to lay down a deliberate challenge to the ruler in Vienna who had hitherto always been the Emperor; but probably more importantly it was to emphasise that this new regime was to be in no sense a restoration of traditional French monarchy. For not only might that give the Bourbons the delusion (as it then seemed) that they might one day return to take over a state that they and many others thought legitimately theirs to rule over; it would also disappoint and affront anybody who believed something worthwhile had been achieved by the Revolution which had thrown them out. This lay behind the odd formula in the plebiscitary question which gave the change to an empire its veneer of popular legitimacy. It asked for consent for the government of the republic to be confided to an emperor. A French Empire really was something new. There was no precedent to it. Although the king of France had ruled various overseas dominions since the sixteenth century, they had never been described as an empire in constitutional terms. And although the term ‘French Empire’ had

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been used in the eighteenth century, it was a technical usage akin to that of Henry VIII when, in breaking with the papacy, he described the realm of England as an empire: that is, a jurisdiction acknowledging no superior. Louis XIV, in his less guarded moments, had sometimes fantasised about being elected Holy Roman Emperor, but he must have known that this was really an empty dream. So the only possible precedent for a French empire had to be sought as far back as Charlemagne, and the problem with that was that the Holy Roman Emperor in Vienna had prior claims on the legacy. That did not stop Napoleon trying to appropriate the legacy, or at least to trump it. He often declared in so many words, especially in speaking of his relations with the pope, that he was a new Charlemagne.3 He imitated Charlemagne in having himself crowned king of Italy with the iron crown of the Lombards.4 The imperial coronation, too, was full of Carolingian echoes and imitations.5 Appropriately, linking the new empire to Charlemagne also had the advantage of upstaging the family who had eventually usurped Carolingian authority, the Capets. On the other hand, any sort of empire provided useful precedents, especially the greatest and most long-lived of all empires, which all educated men were familiar with, the empire of Rome. Napoleon even had the advantage of looking rather like the known images of the first man who had turned a chaotic republic into a serene empire, Augustus; and his visual propagandists in sculpture made the most of that.6 Like Augustus, he had no son, and at this stage, given Josephine’s age, no likelihood of having one. But Augustus’s chief claim to legitimate authority was that he was the adoptive son of Caesar, and the imperial constitution made clear that Napoleon’s heir, too, might be an adoptive son.7 There was no provision, either in Napoleon’s line or that of the others placed in the line of succession, for women. Why not? It was not simply a matter of Napoleon’s notorious personal hostility to women in any sort of position of power. Much more important, surely, was that the Salic law, under which the throne in France had always been inherited, excluded women from succeeding to the crown. Now of course no postrevolutionary regime felt bound in any way by the Salic or any other pre-revolutionary law. But this went deeper than law. This was a matter of habit and instinctive reactions, simply the French way of doing things, a politico-cultural reflex. And the exclusion of women was a particularly vivid example of how, despite fifteen years of conscious attempts to uproot the tyranny of habit and custom and to replace it with a political culture planned on lines of utility and rationality, in many ways the political culture of the Empire, new and unprecedented

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entity though it was, was moulded by instincts deeply embedded within the French body politic and the minds of the men who ran it, ways of ordering and conducting the country’s public life as rooted in their way as the well-worn practices of the venerable Reich which France’s ruler was about to shatter. From the moment the First Consul broached the idea with him in March 1804, his consular colleague Cambacérès understood exactly what was going on. ‘I see’, he told Napoleon, ‘that everything is taking us back to the former order of things’.8 And as soon as Napoleon left he turned to the other consul, Lebrun, and said, ‘The consulate is finished. Imperial monarchy is about to begin’. Because it was a French imperial monarchy, it was instinctively constructed in the light of French traditions. That is not to say that Napoleon and his advisers set out consciously and deliberately to replicate the ways of the old regime monarchy in every detail. But what they did do was use French history and traditions as a sort of basic template, with Napoleon in effect saying, ‘I am now a French monarch. How did previous monarchs in this country do it? How did they conduct themselves? What sort of behaviour and apparatus did they require to make their rule work?’ And only then, ‘Is there any reason why I should not do the same?’ That process began at once with the question of a coronation. Should there be one? Yes, all monarchs had one. Coronation did not confer legitimacy, but it was the most important way of flaunting it. So out came all the accounts of previous coronations, with the Emperor and his advisers as it were ticking the yes or no boxes on every line. Reims? No. Paris was now the centre of everything, and this was something to be emphasised, not disguised. Regalia? These might seem essential to any monarchical display. But no fleur de lys! This symbol was far too closely associated with the deposed former dynasty. Much preferable were imperial eagles, the fierce and stately emblem deployed by both Austrian and Russian emperors; and bees, the oldest known symbol of French royalty, far predating the Capets.9 A solemn oath? Certainly, but not the jumble of ill-assorted commitments made by pre-revolutionary monarchs; instead, a brief brand-new pledge in which the Emperor bound himself to uphold the key revolutionary achievements which he had so far prospered by protecting. Blessing of the Church? Of course, a coronation is a religious service. Get the pope himself, who owes the Emperor so much! But Napoleon I, the founder of a dynasty whose very title presumed that he would be succeeded by others of the same name, would not be crowned by the pontiff, or any priest. He owed his crown to his own efforts, and the vague approbation of his people. The box-ticking went on right

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down to the minutest details of ceremonial. The guiding principle was to follow French precedents unless they appeared to contradict the basic tenets of the new Empire Napoleon was a great admirer of the old monarchy and its ways, and he seems to have admired it more as time went by. The only king of France for whom he seems to have had any time at all was Louis XIV,10 but he saw the institution as far stronger than the individuals who had worn the crown. He also knew that this mighty and impressive edifice had crumbled, and as its conscious successor he wanted to make sure the same thing did not happen to what he was now involved in setting up for himself and his posterity. Accordingly his whole policy was to replicate those aspects of the old regime which he saw as strengths, and to avoid what he identified as sources of fatal weakness. These reflexes, it is true, established themselves before the Empire came into being. Napoleon learnt them in his negotiations to restore the altars. This involved giving back the consolations of religion to the French people, and so making the church and its adherents a source of support rather than opposition to established authority in France. But none of it implied bringing back the proud old Gallican church. Its long-confiscated landed wealth was not restored, nor the useless monasteries which had sat on so much of it. Above all, the church’s political and institutional independence, as manifested by tax-exemption and quinquennial assemblies of the clergy, made no reappearance. The French church must never again be in a position to hold the country’s government to ransom. To achieve this, it is true, the First Consul had to recognise increased spiritual powers for the pope, and as Emperor he was later compelled to deal with some of the unforeseen consequences. Nevertheless the strategy he later adopted towards an unexpectedly obdurate papacy came straight out of French traditions: consciously looking back to Louis XIV, Napoleon reintroduced the four Gallican articles of 1682, and later called what he hoped would be a tame council of bishops to rebut the pretensions of Rome. Taking the pope prisoner so as to bully him in person, was, it is true, something that even Louis XIV had been unable to do, and might well have baulked at if he had. But what Napoleon liked about his great predecessor was his unwillingness to be dictated to, whether by foreigners (including the pope) or a fortiori by his own subjects. Apart from the amazing energy of Napoleon himself, the powerhouse of Napoleonic government was the Council of State. It, too, predated the Empire, coming into being with the Consulate itself. But it was plainly modelled on the pre-revolutionary institution of the same name

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and it fulfilled similar functions as an administrative and judicial clearing-house, and a place where laws were drafted and refined. Unlike pre-revolutionary kings, the First Consul was often present at the Council of State’s deliberations, but once he had become Emperor he was often away on campaign, and then instinct and tradition resurfaced, and the Council largely ran the Empire from day to day without much reference to its master. By then, too, it had also acquired the two-tier character of its old regime namesake, with a complement of virtually tenured councillors of state, serviced by a corps of aspirants called auditors. Before 1789 officials at this level were called masters of requests, and in 1806 an upper rank was introduced going by this very name. They were expected to be men of proven ability, with the potential to prove it yet further, but they were also chosen from men of substantial private means. All that distinguished them from their old order equivalents was that the latter had bought or inherited, and either way owned, their offices. The venal instinct runs deep in France. One of the more remarkable though relatively unsung achievements of the revolutionaries was to uproot most of the sale of offices, but their hopes of extirpating it entirely were never fully realised. Napoleon allowed the exchange of certain offices for money to re-establish itself among various categories of lawyer.11 But where it had been at its most spectacular he never considered bringing back sale, because in the courts of law from the sixteenth century right down to the Revolution venality had underpinned tenure, and made it virtually impossible to discipline magistrates who resisted the royal will without reimbursing the moneys that they or their ancestors had paid out. The Emperor Napoleon liked a lot about the old parlements.12 He created a series of courts of appeal with districts of jurisdiction not unlike the old ressorts. He also sought to recruit on to their benches as many of the former parlementaires as he could find, provided they were in easy circumstances. He was closely advised in all this by Lebrun, formerly secretary to Chancellor Maupeou, who had for a time broken the parlements’ power during the last years of Louis XV. But as such, Lebrun had been involved in an attempt to abolish judicial venality, and he made sure it was not revived now, any more than were the rights of registration and remonstrance which had enabled the magistrates to obstruct the royal will. There would be no judicial independence, and nothing to make it possible, under the Empire. Just as under Maupeou, courts shortlisted three candidates for any vacancies, but the central government made the final choice.

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And there was absolutely no chance of conflicts of jurisdiction between these appeal courts and the local agents of central government, the prefects; whereas in the later years of the old regime there had been constant clashes between provincial parlements and the intendants. Tocqueville pointed out long ago that prefects were the lineal descendants of the intendants13; but they were both more and less. More, because their power in the departments they ruled was uncontested and uncontestable by anyone; less, because departments were almost always smaller than old regime generalities, and also because prefects enjoyed none of the initiative and local freedom of action that intendants had exercised, particularly in the last forty years or so before the Revolution. Prefects were not expected to take initiatives. Their job was to provide constant and accurate information on their departments, and to implement and enforce the imperial will at that level. They were conceived as cogs in a uniform machine – and certainly not originators of any action that higher authority might not want to take responsibility for. It was, then, from top to bottom, a political culture of obedience. There was no space anywhere for opposition to or even public discussion of whatever the government decided to do. Napoleon shared the widespread conviction that the old order had fallen because government had lost control of public opinion to irresponsible writers peddling utopian dreams, the sort of ‘ideologues’ whom he so heartily and volubly despised. Accordingly, the Consulate was marked by wholesale forced closures and mergers of newspapers, a process which continued under the Empire. By 1810 there were only around ten political titles still being published in Paris, and Savary, the incoming minister of police, was determined to reduce them still further. ‘Their existence’, he declared,14 ‘is a relic of the Revolution, it seems just to organise them according to the maxims and the forms of the monarchy’. By the end of the year only four tightly controlled periodicals were still appearing; and by then, too, there had been put in place a structure of inspection and censorship for all publications whose machinery was closely modelled on the old regime’s directorship of bookselling, right down to the name (direction de la librairie). The difference was that censors had far less latitude than before. It was still possible for authors to slip through the net into print – or almost, as the famous case of de Staël’s De l’Allemagne showed. But the officials who allowed that to happen were mercilessly punished.15 Notoriously, Napoleon would employ men regardless of their previous political track record, so long as they agreed to serve him without question. When he became an Emperor this requirement became

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distinctly more personal, and higher officials took their oaths with their hands clasped in his, like vassals swearing fealty. But service and obedience were not to be seen as their own reward. They needed to be publicly recognised by imperial largesse. At the highest level, these recompenses were substantial – sénatoreries, majorats and apanages in the outer reaches of the Empire, with important revenues. In a well-known letter to Joseph of 1806,16 the Emperor spoke of raising up ‘100 fortunes, which have all been built up alongside the throne, and which are the only estates remaining of any size in the country’, and entailed on the descendants of their owners. All of these would be required to reside in Paris, and dance attendance on the Emperor at Court. Here were more signs of admiration for Louis XIV. It did not extend, it is true, to reoccupying Versailles. It was too redolent of the Bourbon monarchy. But older palaces like Fontainebleau were brought back into service, and in Paris there really was no realistic alternative to the Tuileries – from which anyway the last Bourbon monarch had been ignominiously bundled in a way the first Bonaparte did not intend to be repeated. But an Emperor had to have a Court, and a very lavish one at that; and it could not seem authentic without nobles. Some have seen the origins of the imperial nobility in the Legion of Honour, with its ranks and its red ribbon reminiscent of the old order of St. Louis, abolished in 1791. These were certainly authentic echoes. But something like the Legion had been suggested quite early in the Revolution; and by a man, too, who had helped to abolish the old nobility.17 The First Consul defended the Legion, when it was created, as eminently meritocratic and republican. It was only when the imperial nobility was created that the Legion of Honour began to be viewed as a sort of order of chivalry, whose higher ranks conferred imperial nobility itself. The Imperial Nobility has often been identified as Napoleon’s greatest betrayal of the Revolution. But once again, behind all the titles, heraldry and hierarchy so redolent of the world before an anti-aristocratic revolution, the imperial variant was a very different creature. There was no heredity, except at the highest and most financially secure level. There was no entry by purchase, which had been the main way in before 1789. And although Napoleon tried to give it tone by recruiting into it as many appropriate ci-devants (like himself) as he could, there was no automatic entry for people whose nobility derived from other sources.18 One thing, however, the imperial nobility did share with its prerevolutionary namesake: it had no collective representation or organisation. The nearest it came was in the Senate, which contained most of the Empire’s greatest notables, all enjoying special titles and privileges.

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At the Restoration, the Imperial Senate made an effortless transition into the Chamber of Peers. But neither then nor under Napoleon was it deemed to represent anyone. It was an advisory and legislative body nominated by the ruler. So, under Napoleon, were the other legislative branches. The only representative in the Empire was the Emperor himself, whose position had been initially sanctioned and legitimised by the Nation in a plebiscite. This could scarcely have been any other way, given how Napoleon had come to power in the first place, and the rationales he had used to justify his rule. The revolutionary attempt to establish viable parliamentary government had failed: that was the most basic premise of the whole Napoleonic epic. He had saved the country from the chaos that had ensued, and the Empire had been created to perpetuate that salvation. Any attempt by any of the chambers of nominees in the consular or the imperial legislative process to behave like elected representatives was sternly repressed; and in 1807 the Tribunate was abolished entirely while the Legislative Body was left to wither away. Yet legislative assemblies proved a genuinely new reflex that the Revolution had established in France. Even Napoleon never felt able to dispense entirely with this novel element in French political culture. In one of his famous gnomic remarks, he said that his system would see him out, but that his successor would have to rule very differently. Presumably he meant more co-operatively. That successor was not the one he hoped and planned for. Napoleon II may have been called King of Rome – surely a deliberate affront to his mother’s family, whose heir presumptive to the crown of the old Reich had enjoyed the title of King of the Romans? – but he never came to sit on the throne of a French Empire. But even the Bourbon who did succeed as ruler of France realised that his restored monarchy would have to be parliamentary. Paris today is still a city where echoes of Napoleon and images of him are everywhere and unavoidable, but there is one place where he is quite invisible. In the Palais Bourbon, seat of the National Assembly, there is no picture, no statue, no image of the First Republic’s destroyer. The only visual allusion to him is a volume labelled ‘Code’ high up in a frescoed cornice; and even the Code was something he did not create, but only brought to final fruition. All this is entirely appropriate. For the National Assembly, an elected body of legislative representatives, is the legacy of the Revolution’s distinctive contribution to accumulated French political culture, one that survived all the Emperor’s attempts to wipe it out by creating an imperial monarchy more absolute than anything the Bourbons had ever dreamed of.

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Notes 1. The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture (Oxford, 1987–94), edited by Keith Michael Baker (vols. 1 and 4), Colin Lucas (vol. 2) and François Furet (vol. 3). 2. Keith Michael Baker (ed.), The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture, vol. 1: The Political Culture of the Old Regime (Oxford, 1987), p. xii. The full quotation is given in Michael Rowe’s chapter in the present volume, p. 45. 3. See J. Christopher Herold, The Mind of Napoleon. A Selection from his Written and Spoken Words (New York, 1955), p. 109. 4. There was not the same objection in Italy as in France to the kingly title, and it was by virtue of this that the Emperor increasingly used the term ‘imperial and royal majesty’. Was this perhaps also a riposte to the Habsburg formula of kaiserlich und königlich? 5. See Thierry Lentz, ‘Napoléon et Charlemagne’, in Thierry Lentz (ed.), Napoléon et l’Europe (Paris, 2005), pp. 11–30. 6. See Annie Jourdan, Napoléon. Héros, imperator, mécène (Paris, 1998), pp. 177–84. 7. In 1806 Napoleon formally adopted his stepson, Eugène de Beauharnais. That he had made him Viceroy of Italy the year before suggests that he was preferred as a successor to the two brothers named in the Senatus consultum of 18 May 1804 constituting the Empire. A presumptive adoptive son was in any case placed ahead of them in the line of succession. 8. Laurence Chatel de Brancion (ed.), Cambacérès. Mémoires inédits (2 vols., Paris, 1999), vol. 1 pp. 714–15. 9. See Louis Madelin, Histoire du Consulat et de l’Empire, vol. 5 L’avènement de l’Empire (Paris, 1939). pp. 107–9; Michel Pastoureau, ‘Héraldique’, in Jean Tulard (ed.), Dictionnaire Napoléon (Paris, 1989), p. 870. 10. Lucien Bély, ‘Napoléon juge de Louis XIV’, in Lentz, Napoléon et l’Europe, pp. 29–40. 11. See William Doyle, Venality. The Sale of Offices in Eighteenth Century France (Oxford, 1996), pp. 313–4. 12. He would, he told Bertrand on St. Helena shortly before his final illness, have liked to restore the parlements, but it was not possible. Venality was ‘too far from the ideas of the age and from those of the Revolution’, there were too few rich old families to staff them, and they had exercised police powers, whereas ‘police belongs to the administration and not to the judiciary’. Paul Fleuriot de Langle (ed.), Journal du Général Bertrand, Grand Maréchal du Palais. Cahiers de Saint-Hélène. Janvier 1821 – Mai 1821 (Paris, 1949), pp. 50–1, 27 Jan. 1821. 13. Alexis de Tocqueville, L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution (2nd edition, Paris, 1856), book 2, ch. 2. 14. Quoted in André Cabanis, ‘Presse’, in Tulard (ed.), Dictionnaire Napoléon, p. 1398. 15. J. Christopher Herold, Mistress to an Age. A Life of Mme de Staël (London, 1958), pp. 385–91. See also Simone Balayé, ‘Madame de Staël et le gouvernement impérial en 1810, le dossier de la suppression de De l’Allemagne’, Cahiers Staëliennes, 19 (1974), pp. 3–78.

William Doyle 93 16. J.M. Thompson (ed.), Napoleon Self-Revealed (New York, 1934), pp. 148–9. 17. Jacques-François de Menou, who had been president of the National Assembly at the session in which hereditary nobility was abolished (19 June 1790), proposed six days later that all existing orders of chivalry should be replaced by a single ‘national order’. At this stage the proposal was rejected. Archives Parlementaires, XVI, 464, 25 June 1790. 18. Authoritative on this entire subject is Jean Tulard, Napoléon et la noblesse d’Empire (Paris, 1974, new edition 2001).

5 A Matter of Survival: Bavaria Becomes a Kingdom Michael Kaiser

Roi de Bavière Georg Liegel, a pharmacist and mayor in the Austrian town of Braunau, sent a letter to the Bavarian court in 1820 asking for permission to name a new sort of pear ‘Roi de Bavière’.1 He referred to the custom in pomology, the science of fruit, to ennoble the best sorts of fruit by giving them names of monarchs, generals and famous scholars, citing several examples of pears named after ‘Alexandre, François II, Fredérique de Prusse, the regent, Archiduc d’Autriche, Duc de Waterloo’ and many more. Obviously, Bavaria and its monarch had achieved such an elevated status that they found themselves among the undoubted heroes of history – a fact now even familiar among pomologists. At first glance, this story may appear irrelevant and quite ridiculous. But on the contrary, it illustrates how the Napoleonic era changed views of Bavaria. After all, less than twenty years before, Bavaria’s situation was so dire that no one would have counted its ruler among history’s great heroes. Bavaria faced military occupation and dismemberment at the end of the eighteenth century, not least because Austria sought to expand further into southern Germany. Coming to the Bavarian throne in 1799, Max Joseph found himself a pawn rather than player in the great European political game. His realm serves as an example for the German territories who witnessed the collapse of the Holy Roman Empire. Like most of its members, Bavaria lost the shelter the Old Reich had provided across many centuries. At the same time, Max Joseph was confronted by threats posed by the new emerging Napoleonic Empire and the other great powers. Preserving the status quo was no longer an option. Survival depended on embracing the new policies of political growth 94

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and territorial expansion. In the end, Bavaria did not fall victim to the other powers, but took her chance to realise long-cherished ambitions. What follows outlines how the ruling Wittelsbach dynasty escaped the many dangers and emerged as one of the winners in these times of change. Although this success was primarily due to the formidable political skills of Bavaria’s leading minister, Count Montgelas,2 I will not go into details and distinguish between his actions and those of Max Joseph. To keep matters simple, I will speak in most cases about Bavaria or Max Joseph as the ruling monarch, which is acceptable given that he was much more personally involved in foreign policy than in internal affairs.3 At first glance, Bavaria’s success during the Napoleonic era appears due to Montgelas’ and Max Joseph’s flexible and modern policy. However, powerful pre-modern elements were also still at work, determining and at times constricting Bavaria’s actions. These traditions form the starting point for this chapter, which begins by examining one of them in some detail: the Wittelsbachs’ dreams of becoming a royal house, a dream that inspired and drove many of their policies. The long-standing rivalry with the Austrian Habsburgs represented another tradition that will be considered in the second section, before surveying the situation by the end of the Holy Roman Empire and then examining the relationship between Max Joseph’s Bavaria and Napoleonic France which resulted in Bavaria’s elevation to a kingdom in 1806. I conclude with some remarks on the reactions to the Bavarian kingdom and evaluate the importance of the royal crown for Bavaria.

The Wittelsbach dream The Wittelsbach dynasty regarded itself as one of the great families of the Holy Roman Empire and as one of the finest dynasties in Europe. The origins of the house were traced back to the middle ages; Charlemagne was said to be their ancestor, thus linking Christendom and royalty to Bavaria.4 The title of king had thus always been considered a dignity appropriate to the Wittelsbach house.5 Ludwig the Bavarian, king and emperor in the late middle ages (r.1314–47), formed an integral part of the dynastic memory and played an important role in the political agenda of every ruling Wittelsbach. Neither the failure of Elector Max Emanuel to gain either a royal title or additional land in the course of the War of the Spanish Succession, nor the disastrous outcome of Karl Albrecht’s imperial reign as Charles VII (1742–5) discouraged the dynasty from this ambition. It was this legacy which

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appeared to be the driving force for Bavarian politics even at the beginning of the nineteenth century. So when Max I. Joseph became king in 1806, it seemed that the dynastic dream had finally come true. The idea remained alive even at those times when there was little chance of becoming king. After Charles VII’s failure, his successor, Max Joseph, was forced to pursue a defensive policy. Nonetheless, the new elector could hardly dissimulate the dynastic ambitions and stuck to the traditional claims of his House. The Austrian ambassador to Munich was surprised to find that ‘il faut s’agrandir’ remained the leading principle of Bavarian politics in 1749. Similarly, when a Wittelsbach princess married Joseph, Maria Theresia’s son and future emperor, in 1765, the Bavarian elector insisted on being treated with ‘honores regii’ in the course of the ceremony.6 Last but not least, the success of rival dynasties would not allow the Wittelsbachs to forget their own royal ambitions. There is an anonymous and undated document, probably dating from the beginning of the nineteenth century, which relates the Hohenzollern success story when Elector Frederick III became the first king of Prussia.7 The document opens by outlining the power and the glory of the house of Hohenzollern, suggesting that it was inevitable for Frederick to strive for – and thus gain – a royal dignity. The main part of the manuscript gives a full account of the elaborate Prussian coronation ceremony in 1701. Though the text omits any reference to the Wittelsbachs, the links are obvious: since the Wittelsbachs regarded themselves as the most prestigious German princely dynasty and thus superior to the Hohenzollerns, the mere mention of the Prussian royal title simply fuelled Bavarian royal claims. Like the other documents intended to legitimate the Bavarian crown in 1806, this discussion of the Prussian case affirmed that the Bavarian kingship was simply re-established and not newly obtained. The argument was typical within pre-revolutionary European society, which refrained from questioning the place of each member in the established hierarchy. Rather than altering the social structure, change was expressed as ‘reforming’ it in the strict sense of that word, the sense of returning it to the original state of being. Similarly, territorial claims were usually justified to be ‘reunions’, as with the claims of both Louis XIV and the later French Revolutionaries that border areas be ‘reunited’ with France. The Wittelsbachs’ idea of a restored dignity fitted perfectly into this common way of thinking. Consequently, the family never felt the need to confirm its ancient lineage and the long line of its ancestors. Since their royal descent

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was considered beyond question, it seemed obvious to them that Bavaria was indeed a kingdom. These old dreams of royalty were very much alive as the Holy Roman Empire declined at the end of the eighteenth century. However, changing circumstances meant that such ambitions were no longer a matter of prestige and dynastic obligation; they became central to the survival of the dynasty and of Bavaria itself.

Wittelsbach and Habsburg Fear, rather than dynastic aggrandisement, appeared now to drive Bavarian policy and that fear was not of Revolutionary France, but of the neighbouring mighty house of Habsburg. Dynastic rivalry between the Habsburgs and Wittelsbachs stretched back to the middle ages. In the long run, Habsburg had proven more successful, monopolising the elective Holy Roman imperial title since the days of Frederick III (r.1440–93) despite constant Bavarian competition. The only exception to unbroken Habsburg imperial rule was the election of Charles VII in 1742, but his success ended in near catastrophe for Bavaria, which was defeated and invaded by Austria in 1745. His successor, Max III Joseph, was obliged to refrain from such adventures. The Habsburgs had already taught the Wittelsbachs a tough lesson four decades earlier during the War of the Spanish Succession, which proved that Austria was not merely a powerful opponent but a threat to Bavaria’s very existence. Elector Max Emanuel was defeated at Blenheim (Höchstädt) in 1704 and forced to flee Bavaria. Austria’s predatory nature now became fully obvious for the first time as it emerged that Vienna contemplated complete annexation. Absorption of Bavaria would consolidate Austria’s presence in southern Germany and greatly increase its power within the Empire. The Austrian occupation of Bavaria was not an isolated instance. Barely forty years later, the unlucky Charles VII again lost his land to Austrian troops. And when the Munich branch of the Wittelsbach dynasty died out with Max III Joseph in 1777, Emperor Joseph II proposed to use his position as liege lord (Lehensherr) of the Holy Roman Empire to confiscate Bavaria as a vacant fief (erledigtes Lehen). This time it took Prussian military intervention to save the Wittelsbachs’ home. The French Revolutionary Wars redrew the map of Europe. Nowhere was this more far-reaching than for the Holy Roman Empire where some rulers lost titles and territories, some (namely the ecclesiastic princes) vanished completely, and others, rather fewer in number, increased their

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possessions. Bavaria was fortunate to be among the latter. Naturally, Max Joseph could be pleased with this outcome, but it proved to be a mixed blessing. The rapidity of the changes was very alarming as territories changed shape and hands many times within a few years. Stability, the watchword of the traditional order, was lost, and the Holy Roman Empire was unable to prevent any of those changes. Max Joseph rightly feared that Austria might seek Bavaria as compensation for the loss of the Netherlands and its considerable north Italian lands. Cetto, the ambassador to France, pointed out in autumn 1805 that Austria had already tried to annex Bavaria three times since Max Joseph’s accession.8 Given these circumstances, Max Joseph believed his only salvation lay in elevating his dynasty to the status of fully sovereign royalty.

The Bavarian crown and the Holy Roman Empire Previously, the Wittelsbach dynasty had two options to obtain a crown. One was to obtain a royal title outside the Empire, as had Karl Gustav from the Pfalz-Zweibrücken-Kleeburg branch who became Charles X of Sweden in 1654, establishing a line of Wittelsbach kings there that lasted until the death of Charles XII in 1718.9 The other was to seek election to the Holy Roman imperial crown. The alternative of establishing, or from their point of view re-establishing a specifically Bavarian kingdom was discounted because it would have destroyed the structure of the Empire. Bavarian deference to the imperial constitution was shaken when Francis II made himself emperor of Austria on 10 August 1804, despite the fact that he still was emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. This was widely perceived as violating the Empire’s fundamental laws (leges fundamentales) which he had sworn to protect in his electoral agreement (Wahlkapitulation), because the full sovereignty implied by a distinct Austrian imperial title contradicted Austria’s limited territorial sovereignty within the bonds of the Holy Roman Empire. Even as Holy Roman Emperor, Francis II had no right to alter the imperial constitution unilaterally.10 The contrariness of two imperial titles was a blow for the old Holy Roman Empire. The emperor appeared not to care that his actions were destroying a constitutional framework that had previously protected the German lands from the stormy shifts in European relations. Since the unification of the two principal Wittelsbach territories of Bavaria and the Palatinate in 1777, the dynasty and its servants had tried to establish the term of ‘Churpfalzbaiern’ as the new title to be

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used in official documents. This new term was meant to underline the integrity and indivisibility of all Bavarian territories, which were kept together by the electorate.11 The plan showed clearly the efforts of the Bavarians to seek security within the Holy Roman Empire, despite the radical changes which had already taken place. The title of elector was still important, at least until the end of the Holy Roman Empire on 6 August 1806. Though he no longer emphasised his electoral title after he had become king, Max Joseph refused to abandon it.12 As soon as he became king, the Bavarian coat of arms was redesigned to replace the mosaic of different heraldic symbols for each territory with the classical Wittelsbach pattern of white and blue lozenges, thus symbolising the unity of the territories of the Bavarian kingdom.13 Bavaria could not afford to be left behind if Austria was ignoring the institutions and the political structure of the Holy Roman Empire. Francis’ assumption of a distinct Austrian imperial title again placed the Habsburgs in the lead ahead of their Bavarian rivals, forcing the Wittelsbachs to do something to keep up. This had already become pressing, because the elevation of Württemberg and Hessen-Kassel to electoral status in 1803 devalued, or at least levelled, electoral prestige, eroding Bavaria’s distinction ahead of the other German princes.14 Francis’ adoption of his own imperial title prompted Max Joseph to consider plans for his own German kingdom based on his status as an elector and imperial vicar (Reichsvikar). The latter was a special distinction shared with the elector of Saxony that allowed them to exercise imperial powers during interregna.15 These plans represented the last time an elevation in status was contemplated within the existing structure of the Holy Roman Empire, but they were swiftly abandoned. Instead, Montgelas turned to securing Bavaria’s political survival through the acquisition of sovereignty.16 In the course of the negotiations in 1805 it became clear that Bavarian security and independence had to be based on territorial gains; but the more Bavaria expanded, the more necessary it became to express that expansion through a new dignity. Thus, territorial growth led naturally to a crown. As the discussions progressed to the treaty of Bogenhausen (25 August 1805), it was obvious that the newly acquired or postulated rights violated the structure and the constitution of the Old Reich.17 Bavaria’s pursuit of security became a pursuit of sovereignty which led out of the Holy Roman Empire. Neither Max Joseph nor Montgelas ever put this truth bluntly; and contemporary documents such as the treaty of Brünn (10 December 1805) showed the ambiguity of a newly sovereign Bavaria that nonetheless claimed to remain within the Empire.18 When he had no other

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choice, and only with considerable reluctance, the Bavarian monarch accepted Napoleon’s help to throw off the constraints of the Holy Roman Empire and achieve full sovereignty.

Bavaria, France and Napoleon Bavaria’s situation was undoubtedly difficult, and Max Joseph badly needed an ally to counter-balance the Austrian threat. Remembering the days of the War of the Bavarian Succession, when Fredrick the Great had saved Bavaria from Austrian annexation, or during the times of the League of Princes (Fürstenbund), when Prussia backed the territories of the Holy Roman Empire against Austrian hegemony, Max Joseph favoured an alliance with Prussia. But to his disappointment, Prussia showed no interest in strengthening ties with Bavaria. He was obliged to seek another partner, and France seemed the only choice. After all, there was a long tradition of Franco-Bavarian cooperation against the Habsburgs dating to the 1630s as Bavaria sought French assistance to counter-balance Austrian power within the Empire. For France, in turn, Bavaria often proved a useful foil against Austria and French kings had repeatedly fostered, and sometimes initiated, Bavarian plans for gaining a royal or even the imperial crown.19 It was thus entirely in keeping with past practice when Talleyrand assured the Bavarian ambassador that France wanted to see Bavaria safe, expanded and strengthened. When the French foreign minister also mentioned a plan to elevate Bavaria to a kingdom, he knew very well that his choice of words would strike an instant chord in Munich.20 However, it proved far from easy to translate these words into actions in the complex situation of the Empire. On the one hand, Napoleonic France was a threat to the Holy Roman Empire and to the political world of the electorate. On the other, Napoleon still had to face Austrian military power, and potentially the Prussian army as well. France’s strong man was looking for allies to fight Austria, or at the very least prevent an anti-Napoleonic alliance of German princes under Austrian control. The idea of a Third Germany composed of strong middle powers – mainly Baden, Württemberg and, last but not least, Bavaria – clearly sprang from those French fears.21 Furthermore, Napoleon needed Southern Germany as concentration area for the forthcoming and anticipated war against Austria. Thus, he found himself destined to follow the traditional track of French politics since the late middle ages. Despite their widely different political cultures, Napoleonic France and old-regime Bavaria were, particularly from a strategic point of view,

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natural allies. This view was expressly endorsed at several meetings between French and Bavarian diplomats.22 Personal bonds contributed to this political tradition. Napoleon himself never made a secret of his sympathy for Bavaria, a fact that would help Max Joseph at times when he was obviously more than hesitant, even hostile towards French politics and the French Emperor. The stakes were high and Max Joseph was taking considerable risks when he declined to meet with Napoleon at Mainz in the autumn of 1804 and again some weeks later when he twice refused the invitation to attend Napoleon’s coronation as French Emperor.23 He was not alone amongst the German princes in his reserved, even frosty relations with France.24 Yet, whereas the others paid a heavy price, he did not share their fate. Though he caused occasional irritation for the French, he had the reputation of being profoundly Francophile – which was little wonder, since in his early years as prince of Zweibrücken he had served in the French army as colonel of the prestigious Royal Alsace regiment, spending time in France itself and acquiring a familiarity with, and fondness for, French culture.25 Given this background, it is not surprising that Napoleon and Max Joseph moved closer together after the end of 1804. Nonetheless, Bavaria remained reluctant to make the final break with the old Holy Roman imperial order and tried to delay the French alliance as long as possible. This was less the result of an aversion towards the revolutionary power than of a lack of confidence in Napoleon’s military strength – the fate of Max Joseph’s predecessor Charles VII who had hoped in vain for French help served as a bad example. This time the historical outcome was completely different. Bavarian doubts dissolved within weeks of the alliance of Bogenhausen (25 August 1805), as the French crushed the Austrian and Russian forces at Austerlitz (2 December 1805). Evidently, Max Joseph had made the right decision, and Napoleon, hastily as ever, arranged the Treaty of Pressburg (first ratified 26 December 1805) to convert military success into political gains. Amongst others it granted Bavaria full sovereignty over all its territories and turned the electorate into a kingdom.26 Max Joseph’s share as Napoleon’s ally exceeded any previous gains by a Wittelsbach prince. Bavaria’s profits far outweighed its comparatively low expenses. The royal title was combined with full rights of sovereignty, allowing Max Joseph to push forward necessary internal reforms that enabled Bavaria to cope with social and political challenges to come. Above all, Wittelsbach rule now seemed safe, since Austria no longer threatened Bavaria’s existence. Max Joseph could be pleased with

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the outcome, but naturally presented it rather differently to his subjects. The proclamation of the elevation on 1 January 1806 claimed that the Bavarian monarch himself had made up his mind to accept the ancestral title of king.27 But while Max Joseph could suppress any mention of the French emperor, other troubling circumstances were more difficult to conceal.

A royal embarrassment The elevation of Bavaria to a kingdom did not coincide with the treaty of Pressburg, but took place several days later on New Year’s day 1806. The newly acquired title was promulgated to the people of Munich, and some festivities were held within the town and the court at Nymphenburg. Napoleon himself visited the Bavarian residence on that day, but celebrations were not his priority. Instead, he wanted to arrange a marriage between his step-son Eugène Beauharnais, whom he intended to impose as viceroy of Italy, and Max Joseph’s daughter Auguste Amalie. The French emperor pushed hard to conclude these negotiations, and the civil marriage took place within a few days, on 13 January, followed by the church wedding the next day. It proved to be the most magnificent celebration, which was quite easy for the Bavarian officials to arrange, because there was no royal coronation ceremony.28 Officially, the court claimed that the coronation, together with the unction, had been postponed until a ‘more convenient season’.29 In fact, the postponement was permanent: all five subsequent Bavarian kings assumed their dignity without coronations.30 The Württemberg kings did the same.31 The royal title was reduced to a mere matter of administration. Decrees were issued to inform all officials about the new dignity, together with detailed instructions on the new formalities of correspondence and clothing.32 Despite representing the achievement of a long-cherished ambition, the Wittelsbach court was obviously not inclined to celebrate its success and indeed exhibited little joy in joining the ranks of European royalty.33 Why did Max Joseph react this way? Some aspects of the elevation clearly left a bad taste in the royal palate and Max Joseph had to swallow deep indeed. First, the royal match was closely connected to the elevation of the dynasty, and this deserves a little more attention. The project of marrying Eugène to a Wittelsbach princess had already been devised by Napoleon in 1804,34 and resurfaced more forcefully after meeting initial Bavarian reluctance.35 Max Joseph finally gave in, and the contract of the marriage between Beauharnais and Auguste Amalie was signed on

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3 January 1806, eleven days before the wedding. The marriage was again a classical element of dynastic politics, typical of the ancien régime, when foreign relationships were regularly intensified by familiar ties. Without doubt, it was part of the price the Wittelsbachs had to pay for their new dignity. From Napoleon’s perspective, the marriage assisted his dynasty’s integration into the world of the leading European families, a point that was explicitly made by the French ambassador to Munich.36 Tying bonds with Europe’s old ruling dynasties was expected to stabilise the power of the French Empire; and Napoleon himself is reported to have estimated that this wedding matched the importance of his victory at Austerlitz.37 For the Wittelsbachs, the marriage was deeply embarrassing. From their perspective38 as one of the most noble and dignified dynasties of the Holy Roman Empire and Europe, they had been obliged to sacrifice a daughter and see their good name misused to allow the upstart Bonaparte to gain some respectability. Of course, this also dashed all the revolutionaries’ hopes of removing dynasticism from French politics, but this was scarcely any consolation for Max Joseph’s family. Their reluctance is revealed in the exclusive way the marriage was celebrated, with no attempt to involve the Bavarian people or a wider public. Why did Max Joseph accept the marriage? At least Auguste Amalie was married to a prospective viceroy and there was hope that Eugène would become actual king of Italy.39 The Bavarian negotiators tried to make this part of the marriage contract, though in vain.40 The intention was that the marriage would stress the equality of both houses and underline the dignity of the Italian and Bavarian crowns, bound together through Eugène Beauharnais and Auguste Amalie. In due course, the Wittelsbach family could expect the newly-married Amalie to produce some sons, thus ensuring dynastic survival. A contemporary pro memoria warned that there were not enough male princes to secure the royal line for future generations: the recently acquired kingdom seemed destined to vanish from the map of Europe.41 But all this could not compensate for the humiliation of one of Europe’s oldest aristocratic families. One episode provides a telling illustration of just why Max Joseph gave in. In the summer of 1805 there were rumours that Vienna would offer a Habsburg daughter as an alternative to Amalie – the news seems intended to startle Max Joseph who in fact was alerted. In all likelihood, the rumour was probably started by the French. In the end it served its purpose, but it also made clear that it was again fear of the Habsburg rival and not pride which fostered the royal marriage.42 Last but not least, Max Joseph had to

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acknowledge that he had no other choice than to accede. He confessed to his ambassador to Dresden that the alliance had been set up ‘according to the request of His Majesty the Emperor of the French’.43 This was perfectly true, but it showed once again how the Wittelsbach dynasty was driven into this marriage against their will. Second, Bavaria was not the only German principality to be elevated to a kingdom. The prince of Württemberg was made king too, thus being promoted to the highest rank within only a few years (he passed from duke to elector in 1803 and then to king in 1805). The Württemberg kingdom perfectly fitted the French idea of a Third Germany, that is, a group of middling powers to counterbalance Prussian and Austrian dominance within the Holy Roman Empire. Yet it also reduced the significance of the Bavarian crown; something that dipped further a few months later, towards the end of 1806, when Saxony was also made a kingdom.44 When a contemporary English satirical etching depicted Napoleon as a baker creating new kings for Europe, it alluded to the arbitrariness, the randomness and therefore the meaninglessness of all these elevations.45 Besides, Max Joseph had become king through sheer luck, not through his own merits. Indeed, this Wittelsbach monarch was luckier than any of his predecessors. Very well aware of this, Max Joseph was quite ambivalent towards his new status. He not only felt that his deep-rooted dignity might have been tarnished by the manner of his elevation, but he was also conscious that now, more than ever, Bavaria was dependent on Napoleon’s grace and favour. And what was the worth of sovereignty when the French emperor, who granted it, could just as easily withdraw it? Such fears were not unfounded, as the fate of the newly created elector of Hessen-Kassel revealed. He lost title and territory, when Napoleon was pleased to give his brother Jérôme the kingdom of Westphalia, largely created out of Brunswick and Hessen-Kassel in 1807.46 The French emperor himself, when he was at Munich, bluntly pointed out that it was lucky for Max Joseph that he had joined France in time, since otherwise Murat, a French Marshal and Napoleon’s brother-in-law, would have been made king in his place. Significantly, this ominous remark would resurface again in the summer of 1813, when Max Joseph pondered deserting Napoleon for the anti-French coalition.47

Securing the gains Princes and governments were not the only public to take notice of Bavaria’s elevation. There was wide interest throughout the Holy Roman

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Empire, as demonstrated by the files full of letters sent to the Bavarian court with congratulations on the royal title.48 Some were sent by other princes or Bavarian officials who might be expected to express their appreciation to the new king. However, many were written by members of the lesser nobility or burghers from various Wittelsbach provinces, or by Germans with little or no connection to the house of Wittelsbach. A Baron von Eberstein, then a court chamberlain at Bayreuth, claimed the elevation fulfilled a prophecy of Frederick the Great who once predicted that with Max Joseph in power a new sun would rise above Bavaria.49 Even Prussian subjects wrote from Berlin, Potsdam, Magdeburg and elsewhere to congratulate Max Joseph. A certain Benkowitz from Silesia, working in the Prussian provincial administration, added to his congratulations that he wished to transfer to Bavarian service, lacing his request with the flattery that the new Bavarian crown was a matter of importance to millions.50 Others expressed altruistic hopes and expected the Bavarian elevation to be a fortune for the Reich itself, obviously referring to the Holy Roman Empire or whatever state might replace it.51 A Baron de Kleinsorgen also referred to an ‘empire’, when he called the Bavarian king ‘the fairest and the most prosperous, not only for all his loyal subjects but for the whole empire as well’.52 Such letters suggest that the Bavarian title raised hopes and expectations among the wider German public. It was not only Max Joseph who was hailed and congratulated; his son, Prince Ludwig, was addressed as heir to a royal throne who would in future be the joy and pride of Germany and of his people.53 The house of Wittelsbach was counted among those dynasties associated with aspirations for a new German state and with growing patriotism. Prince Ludwig was open to patriotic sentiments,54 but those dreams never moved either his father or Montgelas who remained preoccupied with other, more urgent problems and could not but disappoint those who looked to them to provide a new national future. Shortly before he became king, Max Joseph exclaimed, ‘Of what use is the royal title to me, when I cannot be sure of my frontiers?’55 The Bavarian fear of the Austrian menace continued even after 1806. The Wittelsbachs, who had received the royal title only through Napoleon’s grace, were obliged to stick by him. Max Joseph reminded his son, Prince Ludwig, who struggled hard to suppress his hatred of the French,56 that he should ‘not forget that it is this man alone who has elevated us and that he will continue to do so’.57 He conceded that Bavaria should in future become truly independent, but for the moment the dynasty had to rely on Napoleon. Max Joseph pursued a defensive strategy and

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in the end he was proven right, as Napoleon served a useful purpose in difficult times. With his help, Max Joseph established the status and reputation of Bavaria as a considerable power. This was not a bad outcome according to Count Rumford, Bavaria’s American-born ambassador to France during this period. Congratulating Max Joseph on his kingship, Rumford starkly described Bavaria’s perilous position: without resources, the country was effectively lost, but the situation had been retrieved through the grant of the royal title. Always the perfect courtier, Rumford attributed this success to the Bavarian monarch and his political skills, praising ‘his wisdom, promptitude and prudence in the political measures he took at a decisive moment’.58 However, from his station in Paris, Rumford knew full well that Napoleon had been the puppet master of this political manoeuvre. Max Joseph’s political talent was never more required than after the royal elevation. Now the Bavarian king had to secure his gains, initially within the Napoleonic system, and then from 1813 against the French emperor. No monarch could take his acquisitions for granted in those years, and there were some who lost a considerable part of their territories, notably Friedrich August I of Saxony.59 Having become king at the end of 1806 thanks to Napoleon, Friedrich August failed to change allegiance in time and lost three-fifths of his original territory at the Congress of Vienna. By contrast, Max Joseph steered successfully through these dangerous times, spotting – shortly before the Battle of the Nations at Leipzig in 1813 – the decisive moment to switch sides and enter the antiNapoleonic coalition. In doing so he burnt all his bridges to his former sponsor, leaving Napoleon raging that he would destroy Munich and reduce the Wittelsbachs to minor status.60 This was precisely the fate that Max Joseph feared and he was careful not to abandon France before he secured confirmation from his prospective new allies that he could keep nearly all the advantages he had received from Napoleon. Foremost among these were territorial integrity and political independence; the royal title was not even put up for discussion.61 These concessions were confirmed in the Treaty of Ried (8 October 1813) that proved to be just the first step on the way to full acknowledgement of sovereignty in the course of the Congress of Vienna and beyond. When the Congress debated the future shape of Germany, there was some support for a strong German Confederation (Deutscher Bund) that would have left only limited sovereignty to its members. Bavaria vigorously opposed this solution and finally obtained her goal when the Congress’s Final

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Act (Wiener Schlussakte) specified full sovereignty within a loose confederation in May 1820.62 Compared to the dire situation at the beginning of the century, Max Joseph had achieved a great deal by 1820. True, Bavaria did not belong to the great powers, but it had survived both the breakdown of the Holy Roman Empire and the collapse of Napoleon’s empire, partly due to fortunate circumstances, and partly to Montgelas’ political acumen. And so it seemed entirely appropriate that the pomologist from Braunau chose that moment to honour the Bavarian monarchy by planting a new sort of pear named ‘Roi de Bavière’.

Notes 1. All translations from German and French sources and literature are the author’s. Georg Liegel to Max Joseph, Braunau 1 Feb. 1820, Geheimes Hausarchiv, München, Ministerium des königlichen Hauses, Nr. 75. Living at Braunau in the Innviertel, Liegel (* 1777 in Schäfferei near Waldmünchen/ Bavaria, † 1861 Braunau upon Inn) witnessed his country’s eventful history firsthand. The Innviertel originally belonged to Bavaria, but transferred to Austria as a result of the War of the Bavarian Succession in 1779. After an interlude of Bavarian rule from 1810 to 1816, it returned to Austria. Liegel was pharmacist, became mayor of Braunau 1809 and gained a reputation as one of the leading pomologists of Austria; cf. Österreichisches Biographisches Lexikon 1815–1950, vol. 5 (Vienna, 1972), pp. 208–9. 2. For Montgelas as the driving force and creative head of Bavarian politics, see Eberhard Weis, Montgelas (2 vols., Munich 1971–2005), I, pp. 445ff. Beside Montgelas there were of course other officials like Cetto or Hompesch. 3. On Max Joseph’s engagement in politics see Walter Demel, Der bayerische Staatsabsolutismus 1806/08–1817. Staats- und gesellschaftspolitische Motivationen und Hintergründe der Reformära in der ersten Phase des Königreichs Bayern (Munich, 1983) p. 31. 4. See Rita Haub, ‘Ob Bajern Könige gehabt?’, Sammelblatt des Historischen Vereins Ingolstadt, 108 (1999), pp. 73–93, esp. 82–3. 5. Alois Schmid, ‘Die bayerischen Königspolitik im Mittelalter und in der Frühen Neuzeit’, in Alois Schmid (ed.), 1806. Bayern wird Königreich. Vorgeschichte, Inszenierung, europäischer Rahmen (Regensburg, 2006), pp. 17–38. 6. See for those examples in the context of contemporary Wittelsbach ambitions Michael Kaiser, ‘Die verdeckte Konkurrenz. Bayern und Preußen 1701–1871’, in: Jürgen Luh, Vinzenz Czech, Bert Becker (eds.), Preussen, Deutschland und Europa 1701–2001 (Groningen, 2003), pp. 90–127, esp. pp. 101–4. 7. ‘Extract aus der preußischen Krönungs-Geschichte’, pp. 1–59, Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv, MA IV, Nr. 7093. An archivist’s note on top of the file suggests that it was written around 1800. 8. Adalbert von Bayern, Max I. Joseph von Bayern. Pfalzgraf, Kurfürst und König (Munich, 1957), p. 464.

108 A Matter of Survival: Bavaria Becomes a Kingdom 9. Åke Kromnow, ‘Die schwedischen Könige aus dem Hause Wittelsbach’, Zeitschrift für Bayerische Landesgeschichte, 44 (1981), 329–44; Paul Douglas Lockhart, Sweden in the Seventeenth Century (Basingstoke, 2004). 10. Hans-Christof Kraus, Das Ende des alten Deutschland. Krise und Auflösung des Heiligen Römischen Reiches Deutscher Nation 1806 (Berlin, 2006), pp. 42–7. 11. Montgelas in the name of Max Joseph to Rechberg, Bavarian ambassador to the imperial diet at Regensburg, München, 16 Aug. 1803, Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv, MA IV, Nr. 5486 Konz. 12. See Wolfgang Quint, Souveränitätsbegriff und Souveränitätspolitik in Bayern. Von der Mitte des 17. bis zur ersten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts (Berlin, 1971), p. 204. In the official proclamation of the royal dignity, reprinted in Schmid (ed.), 1806. Bayern wird Königreich, p. 16, Max Joseph appears as ‘König von Baiern, des heil. römisches Reichs Erzpfalzgraf, Erztruchseß, und Kurfürst’ (King of Bavaria, and Arch Palatine, Arch Seneschal and Elector of the Holy Roman Empire). 13. Hubert Glaser (ed.), Krone und Verfassung. König Max I. Joseph und der neue Staat. Katalog zur Ausstellung im Völkerkundemuseum in München 11. Juni – 5. Oktober 1980 (Wittelsbach und Bayern, vol. 3, part 2) (Munich, 1980), pp. 211–13, no. 418–22; Hermann Rumschöttel, ‘Montgelas und das bayerische Königtum’, in: Schmid (ed.), 1806 Bayern wird Königreich, pp. 69–81, esp. 79–80. According to Adalbert von Bayern, Max I. Joseph, p. 508, blue and white were introduced as the heraldic colours of the new Bavaria on 16 January 1806. 14. The struggle for the title of elector is debated by Ludolf Pelizaeus, Der Aufstieg Württembergs und Hessens zur Kurwürde 1692–1803 (Frankfurt/M., 2000). 15. Karl Otmar Frhr.v. Aretin, Heiliges Römisches Reich 1776–1806. Reichsverfassung und Staatssouveränität (2 vols., Wiesbaden, 1967), vol. 1, p. 476. 16. Relevant discussion by Quint, Souveränitätsbegriff, pp. 144ff. 17. See Ibid., pp. 149–51 for details. 18. See Rudolfine Freiin von Oer, Der Friede von Pressburg. Ein Beitrag zur Diplomatiegeschichte des Napoleonischen Zeitalters (Münster, 1965), pp. 132–3. For the treaty see Karl Bosl (ed.), Dokumente zur Geschichte von Staat und Gesellschaft in Bayern, vol. 3 part 2 Die Bayerische Staatlichkeit (Munich, 1976), pp. 34–5. 19. See Michel Kerautret, ‘Frankreich und Bayern in den Jahren 1805 und 1806’, in: Schmid (ed.), 1806 Bayern wird Königreich, pp. 105–25, esp. pp. 107–8. 20. Talleyrand first raised the possibility of a Bavarian royal title with Cetto on 2 November 1804; Daniela Neri, Anton Freiherr von Cetto (1756–1847). Ein bayerischer Diplomat der napoleonischen Zeit. Eine politische Biographie (Sigmaringen, 1993), p. 188; Weis, Montgelas, vol. 2, pp. 270–1. On these discussions see also Quint, Souveränitätsbegriff, pp. 151–2. 21. Cf. Napoleon to Talleyrand, Boulogne 23 Aug.1805: ‘Je marche sur Vienne, ... et j’ai augmenté tellement les États de l’électeur de Bavière que je n’aie plus rien à craindre de l’Autriche’, Correspondance de Napoléon Ier (Paris, 1863), vol. 11, p. 117. 22. For instance, the meeting of Talleyrand and Cetto in November 1804; Neri, Cetto, pp. 187–8.

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23. Theodor Bitterauf, ‘München und Versailles 1804’, Forschungen zur Geschichte Bayerns, 12 (1904), pp. 18–31 and 270–86; Neri, Cetto, pp. 182–4. 24. Wilhelm IX. of Hessen-Kassel is a prominent example of those who suffered; see Pelizaeus, Aufstieg, pp. 463ff. 25. See the detailed description of Max Joseph’s early years by Adalbert von Bayern, Max I. Joseph, pp. 44ff. 26. v. Oer, Friede von Pressburg, and more from the French point of view see the account by Amir D. Bernstein, Von der Balance of Power zur Hegemonie. Ein Beitrag zur europäischen Diplomatiegeschichte zwischen Austerlitz und Jena/ Auerstädt 1805–1806 (Berlin, 2006), pp. 63–9. 27. See the text in Schmid (ed.), 1806 Bayern wird Königreich, p. 16. The text was sent with slight modifications to Bavarian officials, ambassadors and European monarchs as well; see e.g. Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv, Bayerische Gesandtschaft Paris Nr. 405; Bayerische Gesandtschaft Dresden Nr. 863; Bayerische Gesandtschaft Berlin Nr. 519; Bayerische Gesandtschaft Päpstlicher Stuhl Nr. 11; Bayerische Gesandtschaft Paris Nr. 43. 28. Cf. Ferdinand Kramer, ‘Fest, Symbol, politisches Programm. Die Feierlichkeiten zur Annahme der Koenigswürde in Bayern 1806’, in: Schmid (ed.), 1806 Bayern wird Königreich, pp. 127–45, esp. pp. 142–3. 29. Proclamation of the elevation to royalty, Munich 1 Jan. 1806, in: Schmid (ed.), 1806 Bayern wird Königreich, p. 16. 30. Kramer, ‘Fest, Symbol, politisches Programm’, p. 129. 31. For Wurttemberg see the catalogue Das Königreich Württemberg, 1806–1918. Monarchie und Moderne. Große Landesausstellung Baden-Württemberg vom 22. September 2006 bis 4. Februar 2007 (issued by the Landesmuseum Württemberg, Ostfildern, 2006). 32. Cf. Max Joseph to Haeffelin, Munich 16 Jan.1806, Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv, Bayerische Gesandtschaft Päpstlicher Stuhl Nr. 713 Ausf. 33. See Kramer, ‘Fest, Symbol, politisches Programm’, p. 134–5, who speaks of a ‘strange’ (merkwürdig) act of state. See also Ferdinand Kramer, ‘Bayerns Erhebung zum Koenigreich. Das offizielle Protokoll zur Annahme der Koenigswuerde am 1. Januar 1806 (mit Edition)’, Zeitschrift für Bayerische Landesgeschichte, 68 (2005), 815–834. 34. According to Maria Probst, Die Familienpolitik des bayerischen Herrscherhauses zu Beginn des 19. Jahrhunderts (Munich, 1933), pp. 51ff, and Roger Dufraisse, ‘Napoleon und Bayern’, in Hubert Glaser (ed.), Krone und Verfassung. König Max I. Joseph und der neue Staat. Beiträge zur Bayerischen Geschichte und Kunst 1799–1825 (Wittelsbach und Bayern, vol. 3, part 1) (Munich and Zürich, 1980), 221–9, esp. p. 222, this idea came up probably in the late summer or September of 1804. 35. Probst, Familienpolitik, provides the most detailed discussion, while the most recent perspective is given by Weis, Montgelas, vol. 2, pp. 262–3. See related material in Geheimes Hausarchiv, Munich, Ministerium des königlichen Hauses, Nr. 79. 36. Neri, Cetto, p. 184. 37. Napoleon to Murat, quoted by Marcel Dunan, Napoleon et l’Allemagne. Le système continental et les débuts du Royaume de Bavière 1806–1810 (Paris,

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38.

39.

40.

41.

42. 43.

44.

45. 46.

47. 48.

49.

50. 51.

52.

A Matter of Survival: Bavaria Becomes a Kingdom 1948), p. 22: ‘... et je le regarde comme un grand succès, comme un succès égal à la victoire d’Austerlitz!’ There is evidence from a letter by Max Joseph’s wife Karoline (who herself desperately tried to thwart the marriage) that he himself felt dishonoured to give his daughter to Beauharnais, and Karoline spoke of a sacrifice; Adalbert von Bayern, Max I. Joseph, pp. 503–4. See also Weis, Montgelas, vol. 2, p. 316–17. This was stressed by Montgelas to Gravenreuth, 2 December 1805: ‘La seule chose sur laquelle il insistera comme père, c’est le futur soit Roy d’Italie’, Hans Karl von Zwehl (ed.), Die bayerische Politik im Jahre 1805. Urkunden gesammelt und ausgewählt von Hans Karl von Zwehl mit einer Einführung von Anton Ritthaler (Munich, 1964), p. 214. For the negotiations and the contract see Adalbert von Bayern, Eugen Beauharnais, der Stiefsohn Napoleons. Ein Lebensbild (2nd edition, Munich, 1950), pp. 124–5, and Dunan, Napoléon et l’Allemagne, pp. 20–1. Pro memoria on the marriage by Geh.Rat von Krenner to Montgelas, 8 Jan. 1806, Geheimes Hausarchiv, Munich, Ministerium des königlichen Hauses, Nr. 79 Konz. See the discussion on this episode by v. Oer, Friede von Pressburg, pp. 243–4. Max Joseph to Lerchenfeld at Dresden, Munich 7 Jan. 1806, Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv, Bayerische Gesandtschaft Dresden Nr. 863 Ausf.; later the king referred to the expectations and hopes as well. Dorit Petschel, Sächsische Außenpolitik unter Friedrich August I. Zwischen Rétablissement, Rheinbund und Restauration (Cologne, Weimar and Vienna, 2000), pp. 286ff. James Gillray, ‘Tiddy Doll, the great French gingerbread baker, drawing out a new batch of kings’, 23 Jan.1 806, in: Glaser (ed.), Katalog, pp. 203–4. See the classical study by Helmut Berding, Napoleonische Herrschaftsund Gesellschaftspolitik im Königreich Westfalen 1807–1813 (Göttingen, 1973). See Adalbert von Bayern, Max I. Joseph, p. 652, and Weis, Montgelas, vol. 2 p. 335, the latter discussing and approving the authenticity of the episode. Geheimes Hausarchiv, Munich, Nachlaß König Max Joseph I., Nr. 157: consists of congratulations on the coronation in alphabetical order; Ibid., Nr. 86: congratulations of various events, 1797–1806, some related to the coronation, Ibid., Nr. 158: the same for 1806–1811. Baron von Eberstein, Gehofen im Mansfeldischen 17 Jan. 1806, Geheimes Hausarchiv, Munich, Nachlaß König Max Joseph I., Nr. 157. Eberstein who said, that he was page and favourite of the famous king of Prussia, witnessed Frederick pronounce this prophecy. Carl Friedrich Benkowitz to Max Joseph, Großglogau 26 Jan.1806, Geheimes Hausarchiv, Munich, Nachlaß König Max Joseph I., Nr. 157. Dienheim to Max Joseph, Mainz 28 Feb.1806, who wished the Bavarian king would enjoy ‘in Ruhe und Friede wie auch in Völle des Seegens das späteste Zeitalter zum Glücke des Reichs erreichen mögten’ (my italics); it is hardly possible that Bavaria is called ‘Reich’, Geheimes Hausarchiv, Munich, Nachlaß König Max Joseph I., Nr. 157. Baron de Kleinsorgen, Schüren bei Arnsberg/Westfalen 15 Jan. 1806, Geheimes Hausarchiv, Munich, Nachlaß König Max Joseph I., Nr. 157: ‘... comme

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54.

55. 56.

57. 58.

59. 60. 61.

62.

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Roy de Bavière est le plus beau, et le plus heureux, non seulement pour tous Ses fidèles Sujets, mais même pour tout l’Empire ...’. Dr. Friedrich Johann Lorenz Meyer, President of the chapter of Hamburg to Prince Ludwig, Hamburg 11 Jan. 1806, Geheimes Hausarchiv, München, Nachlaß König Max Joseph I., Nr. 158: Lange, gnädigster Herr, wolle die Vorsehung Euer Königlichen Hoheit, und Bayern, Jhren erhabenen Königlichen Herrn Vater erhalten: gebietet aber einst eine höhere Bestimmung über Jhn, so werde Jhnen, die ganze Erfüllung Seines Segens, wie Er, als Mensch und als Fürst, der Stolz und die Freude Deutschlands und Seines Volks genannt zu werden. Eberhard Weis, ‘Die politischen und historischen Auffassungen Ludwigs I. in der Kronprinzenzeit’, in Johannes Erichsen and Uwe Puschner (eds.), ‘Vorwärts, vorwärts sollst du schauen ...’. Geschichte, Politik und Kunst unter Ludwig I., vol. 2: Aufsätze (Veröffentlichungen zur Bayerischen Geschichte und Kultur, 9) (Munich, 1986), pp. 11–28. Max Joseph to Gravenreuth, 17 Dec. 1805, Adalbert von Bayern, Max I. Joseph, p. 501. See Heinz Gollwitzer, Ludwig I. von Bayern. Königtum im Vormärz. Eine politische Biographie (Munich, 1986), esp. pp. 122–3 on Ludwig’s hatred towards France and Napoleon. Max Joseph to Ludwig, 7 June 1807; Adalbert von Bayern, Max I. Joseph, p. 534. Count Rumford to Max Joseph, Paris 8 Jan. 1806, Geheimes Hausarchiv, Munich, Nachlaß König Max Joseph I, Nr. 157: La Bavière étoit dans le plus grand danger: tout le monde la regardait comme sans ressource et déjà perdue. Elle a été non seulement sauvée, mais même portée tout d’un coup au plus haut degré de puissance et de splendeur par la clairvoyance et le courage de son Souverain. ... – la sagesse, la promptitude, et la prudence de vos mesures politiques dans un moment décisif. Petschel, Sächsische Außenpolitik, pp. 301 ff. Napoleon’s harsh reaction described by Weis, Montgelas, vol. 2, p. 687, and Adalbert von Bayern, Max I. Joseph, pp. 661–2. Weis, Montgelas, vol. 2, pp. 680–7. The Treaty of Ried between Bavaria and Austria on 8 October 1813 is printed in Dokumente zur Geschichte von Staat und Gesellschaft, pp. 43–4. Each of the three monarchs of Austria, Russia and Prussia had already promised Max Joseph his territorial status quo, Adalbert von Bayern, Max I. Joseph, pp. 656–7. For a detailed discussion on the Bavarian fight for sovereignty see Quint, Souveränitätsbegriff, pp. 274 ff. Quint’s verdict on Bavaria’s success is even harsher than that of contemporaries, p. 504.

6 Napoleon as Monarch: A Political Evolution Alan Forrest

There was little in Napoleon’s early career to suggest either a tolerance of the institution of monarchy or an appetite for the exercise of royal power. From an early age he read widely of the Enlightenment vulgate – works by Mably, Raynal, Voltaire and, of course, Rousseau – and wrote short tracts and essays on political topics. He excitedly discussed ideas of nation and patrie, even as he struggled to reconcile the competing pulls of his French and Corsican identities. For, unlike most of his fellow-officers, he had two different versions of political alignment to make during these formative years. He had, like his contemporaries, to decide where he stood on issues of authority, religion and the nature of the state. But he also had to decide where his national affiliations lay: with France, or with the Corsica of his ancestors, which was embroiled for much of the period in a struggle to regain its independence from the French crown. He chose to be French, a decision which nonetheless created a crucial tension with his love for Corsica and his continued admiration for the Corsican patriotic leader, Pasquale Paoli.1 If this was a clear choice on Bonaparte’s part, it was a choice made easier by clan infighting in Corsica and by the exile of the Bonaparte family from the island in June 1793.2 From this point he became single-minded in his pursuit of a military career in France, and in consequence loyal to his republican masters. But his views of kings cannot be ascribed solely to ambition. As early as the late 1780s he was already expressing his views on the Bourbons, and on the powers of kings generally, in an incomplete manuscript entitled ‘Dissertation on Royal Authority’ he wrote in 1788. In what might appear to be an endorsement of Rousseau, he declared that a state must represent the general will of the nation, a function which most monarchs patently did not perform. They were, in the young Bonaparte’s eyes, to be condemned as usurpers, and, he 112

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declared, ‘there are very few kings who have not deserved to be dethroned’.3

Revolutionary and Republican These views would not have distinguished Napoleon from many other young men of his day, tired of being excluded from the world of court insiders and eternally suspicious of monarchical privilege. More categorical are some of his writings after he became a serving officer, in which he declared his republican principles and at least pretended to Jacobin loyalties. In Souper de Beaucaire, the most famous of his youthful works written at the time of the federalist revolts across much of the Midi, he took – through the literary conceit of a conversation between four characters (a soldier from Carteaux’s army, a manufacturer from Montpellier and two citizens, referred to simply as a Nîmois and a Marseillais) – the side of the army against the Republic’s enemies, defending – by inference at least – the Jacobin position against that of their opponents. The soldier, the hero of the piece, puts the case for the nation and denounces those who wage civil war for self-interest and financial advantage; and he appeals to the collective force of the French people, that rather vaguely-defined spirit which he refers to as ‘le génie de la République’.4 This is, of course, the public voice of Bonaparte, and may represent little more than a passing genuflection in the direction of authority, an early attempt by an acknowledged master of propaganda to win the attention and good will of the regime.5 There would be many further instances in the military papers which he masterminded in Italy, or in the columns of the Paris press controlled, less directly, at a distance.6 But it may also represent, at least at this moment in his career, a feeling of affinity with the republic, not as a liberal regime but as a polity that freed him and men like him from the social and legal constraints of aristocratic privilege and monarchy. Throughout the 1790s there would be recurring references in his letters and writings to the tyranny of kingship, and lyrical passages praising the virtues of the nation. In 1798, for instance, he wrote proudly to Augereau that ‘the glory of the Republic is the fruit of the blood spilt by our comrades; we belong to no other coterie than to the nation as a whole’.7 The language here is wholeheartedly republican, the language of the Jacobins and the nation-in-arms. But Napoleon’s dislike of kings ran deeper, to encompass a disdain for the institution of monarchy itself. In June 1791, after learning of the King’s flight to Varennes, he entered an essay competition organised by the Academy of Lyon on the

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Enlightenment theme of ‘the truths and sentiments which it is most necessary to inculcate in men to ensure their happiness’.8 His entry, replete with overblown rhetoric and classical allusion, was rightly dismissed by the judges as ‘mediocre’. Its interest lies in Napoleon’s commitment to reason and humanism against what he saw as outdated dogma and authority. Sentiment and reason, he declared, were the characteristics that guaranteed mankind a privileged place in the universe, sentiment which underpinned human society and reason which ordered and maintained it. The great legislators of history were men whom their peoples called upon to give them laws and so guarantee their rights. They were not kings. The greatest of them, he somewhat bizarrely claimed, were Lycurgus, the lawgiver of antiquity,9 and his Corsican hero, Pasquale Paoli.10 What importance should we attach to these youthful ideas? It is easy to see in them little more than the blatant careerism of a provincial outsider who could not have hoped to gain preferment through traditional channels, and for whom the republic presented an opportunity for fame and fortune. This was a generation aware of the power of the political, in whatever sphere it could be found. They knew the power of words, identifying kings with tyranny and despotism while lauding new, collective revolutionary heroes like the French people and the divine legislators who guided their steps.11 They were too well versed in history – both the classical stories of Antiquity and the seventeenth century of David Hume – not to fear counter-revolution, and they were therefore driven to seek military leaders who would do their bidding without question.12 Napoleon proved himself to be eminently biddable, whether in Toulon in 1793 or later, in Paris, during the uprising in Vendémiaire. But to dismiss his youthful views as being nothing more than the product of opportunism is insufficient. He showed consistency in his rejection of traditional authority, not least the authority of Bourbon kings, and in his espousal of enlightened ideas. He was consistent, too, in his declared belief in order and authority, in his admiration for the power of the people as channelled through the apparatus of the state. These for him formed an important part of the appeal of the republic, and they were elements that made it possible for him to maintain a republican discourse after his seizure of power and to retain an alliance with the republicans of Brumaire until his plebiscite on the Life Consulate in 1802.13 But we should be careful not to over-emphasise Napoleon’s commitment to any republican ideology, whatever his words at various moments might suggest. Though it may seem an extreme jump from his writings

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and declarations in the early 1790s to the monarchist pomp of his later years – the celebration of his marriage to Marie-Louise, or the creation of an ersatz Versailles at Fontainebleau, or even, most extravagantly, his insistence on the use of the term ‘roi’ in the official ceremonial of the later Empire – there were already symptoms in his behaviour as a republican general that were suggestive of a liking for courtly formality and royal etiquette. This was especially true when he was away from French territory, when he would hold court in a manner which contrasted notably with that of his fellow-commanders. In the exotic surroundings of Egypt he basked in the mystique of the Orient, using the backcloth supplied by the desert and the Pyramids, camels and Mamelukes, to create an aura of personal authority that made a deep impression on opinion back in France. In reports published in the Paris press his personal contribution was inflated until, in the words of the Décade Philosophique, ‘Bonaparte is, they say, performing miracles in Egypt, to the point where he is almost being talked of as a successor to Mahomet’.14 But already during the Italian Campaign there are signs of Napoleon’s impatience with the mediocrity of the politicians to whom he was answerable and with the checks which republican tradition imposed on his freedom of movement. This led him to act less like a servant of the people and increasingly like a ruler in his own right, who took diplomatic as well as military decisions without reference to political authority. While on campaign he insisted on an elaborate etiquette that contrasted markedly with the conduct of other republican generals of the time. At the castle of Mombello, near Milan, Miot de Melito reported in 1797 that Bonaparte held court like a king, and that he received homage from diplomats and ambassadors.15 In particular he observed that Napoleon dined like a king, in public, thus drawing the public gaze to his person. So ‘Italians who came to catch a glimpse of the conqueror of Italy were allowed into the galleries to watch while he ate in a remarkable public display of the self reminiscent of Louis XIV’s performances at Versailles’.16 In the sumptuous surroundings of a historic castle looking down across the Lombard plain, he clearly enjoyed the atmosphere, the service of a huge staff, and the excitement of diplomatic exchange. He played out his ‘pseudo-monarchical role’ to the hilt, with obvious enjoyment.17 In France he remained content to burnish his image as a simple republican and man of the people and to milk public enthusiasm for his military victories. He was sufficiently astute to recognise that he was playing to two entirely different audiences, and that army officers were accustomed to shows of power and hierarchy where civil audiences were

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not. Indeed, even after his seizure of power at Brumaire he was careful to use a consciously republican rhetoric in politics, one that would not alarm his fellow Consuls or alienate the neo-Jacobins on whose support he depended. In one sense it scarcely mattered, since his personal power was now guaranteed. Brumaire, in Isser Woloch’s words, had ‘broken the fragile evolution of a certain kind of democracy, and closed off certain options, as Thermidor had not’.18 But he knew that he had to proceed carefully since in France the tradition of 1789 made associations of monarchy less easy to accept. The Constitution of the Year VIII, which established the Consulate in December 1799, claimed to be founded ‘on the true principles of representative government, on the sacred rights of property, equality and liberty’, and the proclamation of the Constitution ended with the famous, if slightly ambiguous, words: ‘Citizens, the Revolution is established upon the principles which began it. It is ended’.19 It took Napoleon until 1802 for the vote of a Life Consulate to be broached, and even then the public language remained staunchly republican, with the locus of sovereignty identified as being the French people whose will Napoleon still claimed to be obeying.20 Even the creation of the Empire in 1804 was couched in terms deferential to the republic and conscious of the evolutionary nature of the process. The government of the Republic is entrusted to an emperor who takes the title ‘Emperor of the French’, intoned the Senatus Consultum in May 1804 in a document that insisted on continuity and constitutional propriety, even as it handed to Napoleon both monarchical powers and the right of hereditary succession.21

Emperor and king What Napoleon admired in the trappings of monarchy which he observed on all sides as he sought acceptance for his empire among the established regimes of Europe was principally the legitimacy it conferred. He remained, for all the power that he had accumulated, aware of the depths of opposition that existed to his regime among both former Jacobins and unrepentant monarchists, those who, for one reason or another, had never accepted the idea of a hereditary empire. For all the grandeur of his court and his all-encompassing vision of himself as a new Charlemagne, there was something flimsy about his claims to legitimate power. Men served him out of fear, a patriotic devotion to France, or a sense of civic duty; few seem to have believed in the empire, as they had in the Revolution or the Bourbon monarchy. Chancellor Pasquier, who would be loyal in the service of the Empire and a member

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of Napoleon’s Council of State, nevertheless wrote of the Bourbons that theirs was the cause to which he had first pledged himself. ‘I was attracted to it by my birth, my convictions, the sacrifices I had made, and it was impossible for me to feel anything but the deepest sympathy for it’.22 Few felt that degree of emotional tug towards the imperial regime, and this – as much as the legacy of the revolutionary years that had just passed – explains Napoleon’s fear of plots and conspiracies and his reliance on police spies and measures of haute police to secure and maintain his rule.23 The conspiracy of Pichegru and Cadoudal during the Consulate merely reinforced Napoleon’s innate fears of plotters and conspirators, which in turn led him to show no mercy to the Duc d’Enghien, the supposed ‘prince’ whose leadership the conspirators were counting upon. The story of the duke’s kidnapping on foreign soil, his summary trial by a military court and execution at Vincennes shocked many across Europe, yet Napoleon’s reasoning was quite succinct. The Bourbons had plotted against him and would continue to do so; they had to be sent a clear message that his blood was as precious as theirs, and that ‘we must show the House of Bourbon that the blows which they strike at others will rebound on their own heads’. It was a message which their supporters across Europe had to understand – that there was nothing special about the blood of hereditary monarchs, nothing that made it more inviolate than his own.24 But that was not, of course, how the rulers of Europe understood monarchical authority, still seen by many as divinely inspired and – despite the fate of Louis XVI – divinely protected. By imitating established monarchies and by adopting the style of monarchy Napoleon was not merely playing to his own fantasies; he was laying claim to the power that traditionally belonged to kings whom he increasingly referred to as his ancestors in office. It was with this purpose that he constantly appealed to the memory of Charlemagne, adopting the symbols and insignia of Frankish kings and conjuring up images of a new Holy Roman Empire extending across the heartland of Europe. It was with this aim, too, that he made an official visit in October 1804 to Aix-la-Chapelle to venerate Charlemagne’s memory – the city that had witnessed the coronation of 36 Germanic emperors between 813 and 1531 and where Charlemagne’s tomb still stood.25 The power of symbolism and the appeal to a monarchical past were part of a concerted campaign to gain legitimacy in the eyes of his people, his bid to appear as the direct heir to Charlemagne. He would make the point a second time in 1805, some six months after his coronation in Paris, when he was crowned a second time, as King of Italy, in Milan. Again he

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surrounded himself with the symbols and artefacts linking him in the popular imagination to Charlemagne, but he was also seen to be crowned with the iron crown of the Lombards, the crown that had been worn in Lombardy by Holy Roman Emperors since Frederick Barbarossa.26 The ceremonial – like that of his Parisian coronation in Notre-Dame – was carefully calculated to identify the new king and emperor with a centuries-long tradition. Napoleon sought to legitimate his rule in the eyes of onlookers, and with the dominant political and social elites. He had already, as Thierry Lentz reminds us, established his juridical and constitutional legitimacy; he had won the approval of the French people in a plebiscite; and he still enjoyed republican legitimacy in as far as he remained the head of state of a republic. Now – both in Paris and in Milan – he used the coronation ceremony to establish a more solid form of legitimacy, that of a hereditary monarch.27

Napoleon’s coronation This logic is made especially clear in Napoleon’s coronation ceremony at Notre-Dame, where he insisted that he be crowned in the presence of the French people: the opulent ceremonial of the sacre was symbolic, as the traditional coronation ceremonies of the Bourbons at Reims had been in their day, of the legitimation by the people of their new ruler. As such it held great importance for Napoleon, even though he had already been proclaimed emperor by the Senate and had been endorsed both by a constitution and by plebiscite.28 Nothing was left to chance: Napoleon’s concern for the least detail of precedence and etiquette was at least as pronounced as that of any monarch. The arrival of the Emperor and Empress in a royal coach, the presence of a military cortege – for he never forgot the value of bright uniforms and military music in impressing the populace – the specially-designed costumes for Napoleon and Josephine and the lavish surroundings of Notre-Dame, all were planned to create the maximum impression of power. Just as in the ancien régime the people were there to admire and celebrate, to form the backcloth to a regal tableau, not to participate in any active way. Any idea that the coronation should be staged on the Champde-Mars, that it should take the form of a new Fête de la Fédération, as proposed by Regnaud de Saint-Jean d’Angély, Napoleon brushed dismissively aside. ‘We are no longer in that period when the people governed the king’, he declared; ‘and it is no longer necessary for them to meddle in politics’.29 Revolutionary ideas about the rights of the sovereign people he could afford to disregard.

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The emphasis throughout was on solemnity, whether in the arrangement of the guests or the choreography of the ceremony – a solemnity that emphasised the august functions which Napoleon was assuming on behalf of the French people. Nothing was left to chance. Notre-Dame itself, the setting for the ceremonial that was to follow, had been specially extended to create a porch in front of the main door and two galleries at the sides, and the Gothic cathedral was transformed into a coronation chamber symbolic of Napoleon’s imperial power and heavy with regal imagery. The porch was designed to form a grand entranceway that would harmonise with the surrounding masonry. In the words of the official programme, it was formed by ‘four great Gothic arches, supported by four pillars on which were placed statues of the thirty-six cities that were called to participate in the ceremony’. On the two main pillars were statues of Clovis and Charlemagne, ‘the founders of the French monarchy’, and suggestive of a continuity that had run through the centuries. But there were also, mingled in amongst these images of monarchy, other references that were clearly contemporary. ‘The arms of the Emperor decorated the top of the arch, accompanied by figures representing the sixteen cohorts of the Legion of Honour; and the whole display was crowned by Gothic pyramids and imperial eagles’.30 The effect was clear – to inject into the new Empire a sense of history and continuity, continuity with the Holy Roman Empire of the Middle Ages as well as with more recent traditions of kingship in France. The presence in Notre-Dame of the Pope – even if he was not to be allowed to place the crown on the emperor’s head – and the solemn singing of a Te Deum to mark the closure of the ceremony suggested, however obliquely, an aura of religious devotion appropriate to a monarch. The fact that the Pope had made the journey from Rome to Paris was itself worthy of remark, since popes did not make a habit of travelling to France, nor yet of attending the coronations of French kings. Indeed, as Napoleon was eager to explain, there was only one precedent – when Pope Stephen III had travelled north in the eighth century to crown Pepin King of the Franks. Even the great Charlemagne had to travel to Rome for Leo III to officiate at his coronation.31 If Napoleon understood the value of such solemnity, he also understood – more than had the revolutionaries – the value of fun in imperial celebrations, and here again he was going back to the less puritanical traditions of the Bourbon monarchy. For if the day of the coronation was dominated by a strict code of etiquette, the following day was devoted to festivities and popular entertainments – to games, music and street theatre, wine and fireworks over the Seine – a reminder that this

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was also a people’s ceremony. For several days, indeed, Paris was given over to a wild round of banquets, balls and military displays, giving the people the chance to celebrate their emperor’s triumph at the same time as they enjoyed extra time off work and wondered at the lavish spectacle before them.32 Throughout his reign Napoleon would show how well he understood the benefits to the regime of public festivals, which he used with as great acumen as any monarch to imprint on the public imagination the accomplishments of his reign – his military victories, of course (and for much of the Empire it would be these that were celebrated most noisily), but also his achievements at home, like the Concordat with the Church or the Civil Code. Military festivals took full advantage of the natural colour of soldiers parading through the streets of a town or city, the music of the military bands resonating in the ears of the populace. They offered a reassuring mixture of pride and patriotism, recalling great victories and reminding the civil population of their debt to the soldiery. Increasingly, the Church added its voice to the celebrations, mingling Christian prayers with the more traditionally patriotic language of the festival. The celebration of the victory at Friedland in 1807, marked all over France on the orders of the government, provides an excellent example. News of the victory was passed on to the population at the same time as they were celebrating a previous victory, at Marengo. And the clergy ordered prayers and thanksgiving in local churches. At Bayeux, for instance, the vicaire-général asked that all clergy take time to celebrate the festival with the civil authorities. On Sunday, 12 July, he asked that they sing a Te Deum, in the cathedral and in churches throughout the diocese, on the occasion of the victory ‘which the Emperor and King recorded against our enemies’.33 Napoleon could scarcely have asked for more.

The power of display Throughout the Empire Napoleon remained deeply conscious of the power inherent in public display, and it is notable how sedulously he followed monarchical precedent, ever conscious of the need to establish his authority with the French people. He had read widely in French history and understood the impact of previous generations of royal victories, the use made by Louis XIV and his court of the image of the warrior-king, leading his country to victory at the head of his armies. This image, Peter Burke has shown, was central to the propagandist process of ‘fabricating’ the person of Louis XIV as a national hero, an image so well diffused across the realm that it was at once appreciated

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by the noble elite and familiar to the population at large. Louis made use of painters and sculptors, poets and architects – indeed, like Napoleon more than a century later, they were part of his entourage. He took artists with him on campaign during the War of Devolution, and historians in the Dutch War; a cluster of poets in royal service, among them Corneille, wrote in praise of his exploits, while Racine was appointed to the post of historiographer royal in 1677. Artists vied with one another to represent his conquests as the palace of Versailles was hung with canvases celebrating his victorious passage across Europe. Equestrian statues were distributed around the kingdom; lavish festivals were held to hail the returning monarch after each victorious campaign, and triumphal arches, like that at the Porte Saint-Martin in Paris, were built in celebration of his prowess as a military commander.34 Significantly, the focus in all these works was on Louis alone, who was invariably presented as being personally involved in leading his armies and in directing his nation. Napoleon, as the next great warrior-monarch in French history – neither Louis XV nor Louis XVI had established a great reputation as a general – sought to have his own conquests and victories represented in a similarly heroic manner. It is true that he largely distrusted sculpture, and positively discouraged any statues to himself in the streets of Paris, perhaps because he had seen what happened to the statues of Bourbon kings during the Revolution. But he had no such qualms about using art to immortalise his glory and exploited state patronage to hire the most brilliant painters and engravers to execute his portraits and depict his victories on the battlefield. Art historians debate how far this objective was achieved. Some imply that the tension between artistic autonomy and state propaganda was just too great, and that propagandist images of war almost necessarily failed to convince.35 Artists felt aggrieved that they were denied the artistic licence they craved and which they believed to be their right. Girodet expressed his frustration more directly than most. ‘We are all enlisted now’, he wrote, ‘even if we don’t wear the uniform’.36 With so many artists dependent on state patronage, Girodet had a point. Increasingly Napoleon, through his able lieutenant and director of the Louvre (now renamed the Musée Napoléon), Dominique-Vivant Denon, was able to impose on both the French artistic community and the country as a whole his vision of himself as the last of the great warrior-kings.37 He also understood the potential of imposing buildings and formal architecture for communicating authority and power – something which, once again, he learned at the feet of kings. In particular he appreciated

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the value of royal courts and palaces in the process of legitimating the power of monarchs and emperors – something that was common across Europe, where the dense networks created by inter-marriage and dynastic ambition ensured that no subtlety of court etiquette was missed, no symptom of wealth and authority misunderstood in the competitive business of household expenditure.38 Palaces represented the spatial inscription of royal power, expressed through the material use of space and what has been aptly described as the ‘display of an imagery of force and intimidation’.39 This was especially true, of course, of Louis XIV’s château at Versailles, constructed as a monument to his power and opulence and destined to be the model to which all Europe turned in the eighteenth century, ensuring that French artists and sculptors had a special place in the courts of kings and emperors from Italy to Germany and Russia.40 Versailles offered visitors and foreign dignitaries a theatre of royal omnipotence, a reflection in stone of the absolutist ambitions of the French king. At every turning they were reminded that the person of the monarch lay at the very heart of the palace. Coats of arms and royal insignia dazzled the onlooker, voluptuous furnishings, awe-inspiring buildings on an imposing scale. Everything was ordered – the formal lay-out, the taming of space and nature, and, through the lavish history paintings and classical sculptures that adorned the palace and its gardens (for gardens, too, were a representation of political power),41 the gaze of Louis himself. The royal bedchamber was the focal point of the palace, the bedchamber from which power flowed and to which courtiers and supplicants would deliver humble addresses and petitions. Versailles was not the palace of His Most Christian Majesty; nor did it, like the Hofburg in Vienna, give a central place to religion and divine worship. It was a skilfully-choreographed presentation of royal power, a ‘fabrication’ in Burke’s terms, that sought to make others believe their own claims to absolute authority.42 In the court world of Versailles, strict rules of etiquette and precedence were imposed, reflecting both the workings of the court and the dictates of royal power. The clamour of the rich and powerful to gain the king’s ear and the burgeoning of royal bureaucracy over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, features common to all European monarchies, had been crucial in creating the image of a powerful monarch, and Napoleon had no interest in letting these instruments of power elude him. It is true, of course, that he had little time for the more inane fopperies of the ancien régime, for the games and petty jealousies that lay at the base of court society, or for a world riven by faction. But he did not discard all vestiges of Bourbon power. The

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insistence on etiquette which had been evident in the planning of the coronation ceremony would become a characteristic of his rule, with those who served the empire rewarded with privileges and made conscious of their place in the imperial order. The restoration of a society based on honours, and in which the principal officers of state could expect to be substantially rewarded for their loyalty, represents a real move away from the civic values of the Revolution towards hierarchy and patronage.43 These were not just the great military servants of the state, promoted to be marshals of France, but the top civil officers, too, the grands dignitaires of the Empire, appointed for life and following immediately behind members of the imperial family itself in state protocol and in the listings in the Almanach impérial.44 The imperial family – there, too, is a concept redolent of monarchy, with its almost obsessive interest in blood lines and rights of inheritance, a concept that had seemed throughout the 1790s to contradict every principle of the Revolution, with its emphasis on the rejection of privilege and of careers open to talent. European courts had revolved around their royal family as much as around the person of the monarch, with the personal apartments, the armies of valets and personal servants, and the special place of the queen – and, indeed, of the royal mistress – in the factional politics between noble families that characterised court life. In this context, royal marriages assumed an extraordinary symbolic importance, a process of unity and combination that focussed on the two individuals at the centre of the ceremony while joining together two bodies or two states. They were also powerful political moments. As Abby Zanger has recently observed, marriage was here ‘a ritual that does not so much preserve or maintain the constitution of the state as it works at state-building or change’.45 The people were there as onlookers, reverent and curious at the same time, invited to participate in one public moment of their monarch’s personal life. It is this element of curiosity, fed on stories of royal romances and dazzled by images of sartorial splendour, that was most widely reflected in the writings of pamphleteers at the time of Louis XIV’s marriage and helps explain the huge public interest in the ceremony.46 But it also played into the hands of the royal image-makers, who ensured that the populace was also present at a lavish display of royal power, complete with music and fireworks and all the glittering ceremony associated with the royal entry into Paris. Napoleon, too, understood the value of marriage in the construction of power. This was perhaps less true in the early years of his rule, when he was frequently away on campaign and when his image was still primarily a martial one, but with the passage of the years his treatment

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of his wife became more and more akin to that reserved for the queen of a royal house. On returning to Paris after Austerlitz, Napoleon expanded his court until by 1813 it numbered over four thousand staff. The Empress’s household was almost as large, while each of Napoleon’s sisters was provided with the lands and palaces that would guarantee their royal status.47 Display and protocol were paramount, both at Napoleon’s own palace of Fontainebleau and at Malmaison, which he had fitted out for Josephine. Since the Empire was hereditary, it was important that the empress could provide him with a son – something that was a preoccupation for all the crowned heads of Europe. Indeed, it was Josephine’s failure to produce an heir that explains their growing estrangement, culminating in divorce in 1809.48 And when Napoleon thought of remarrying, it is clear that he was looking to forge the most advantageous diplomatic alliance to guarantee the security of his dynasty. The result was his second marriage, to Marie-Louise, the eighteen-year-old archduchess of Austria, selected according to the same logic that motivated any other monarch. He thought of such matters as kings thought of them, and it is surely significant that by the time of his second marriage Napoleon was openly using the language of kings. No more did he resort to a republican language when talking of the Empire. He and Marie-Louise were le roi and la reine, and his prefects talked of him as ‘His Royal and Imperial Majesty’ (Sa Majesté impériale et royale).49 Even soldiers at the front were issued with notepaper emblazoned with a special letterhead to mark the happy event.50

Marriage and legitimation The celebrations to mark the marriage were an important part of the process of legitimising the empire, of providing the security he so consistently sought. Other fêtes followed. The anniversary of Napoleon’s coronation was celebrated in each locality by the marriage at public expense of a young girl ‘of pure heart’ to her lover, generally a soldier returned on leave.51 There were noisy celebrations throughout the empire to mark the birth of a son and heir, the King of Rome, in 1811, the celebrations to begin – as in the village of Thor in the Vaucluse – ‘as soon as Her Majesty the Empress has recovered from the birth and has gone to church to thank God for giving her an heir to the glory and lofty destiny of Napoleon’.52 Could even the royalist festivals of the Restoration, filled with references to dynasty and Catholicism, have put things more succinctly?53 No Bourbon, of course, would have gone quite as far as Napoleon in declaring himself a saint, or in celebrating Assumption – or

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it might be his birthday, or the signing of the Concordat, depending on preference – as the Saint-Napoléon.54 But then there may have been moments when Napoleon betrayed his lack of true monarchist credentials by stretching public credulity just a little too far. One suspects that he did not greatly care. For, however much he might seek to present himself as a legitimate monarch, both to the French people and to the other crowned heads of Europe, it was never clear that he believed kingship mattered. He had little need to be a king – though, of course, he was one, as King of Italy, from 1805, a fact which itself may go some way to explain his use of the title of ‘empereur et roi’. Kingdoms were clearly of secondary importance in the Napoleonic world order. When talking of the future status of Italy, was it not Napoleon himself who described it as ‘too weak to be independent, too strong to be annexed’ – and thus a suitable candidate for the intermediate position of kingship?55 Kings might have heredity on their side, might have legitimacy buffered by law and custom, but Napoleon exercised real power, power based upon an efficient administration and a powerful military.56 With it he made and unmade kings, trampling on their dynastic traditions when reason of state demanded it. Where, as in Bavaria, Napoleon worked with the local ruler, Max Joseph, he did so to consolidate his own imperial power, and if the Elector found himself the proud possessor of a kingdom as a consequence, it was to ensure that he remained faithful, adopting the imperial administrative system and much of the Napoleonic legal code.57 Similarly, in Saxony and Württemberg the ruling electors were upgraded to kings in 1806 by a stroke of the Emperor’s pen. Elsewhere, it was his own brothers who had kingdoms showered upon them, without concern for protocol or for the wishes of the population. Louis was made King of Holland in 1806, and Jérôme King of Westphalia in the following year, though Louis, after falling out with the Emperor, was deposed in 1810 just as peremptorily as he had been promoted. As for Joseph, who had been proclaimed First Prince of the Blood in 1804, he was successively appointed to the thrones of Naples in 1806, and – when more pressing affairs in the Peninsula beckoned – Spain in 1808.58 Naples had to be content with Napoleon’s brother-in-law, Joachim Murat, at least till the fall of the Empire; in the following year he would be shot by his angry subjects. For the Neapolitans saw their imposed monarch as little more than a conduit by which the Empire bled them dry. He did little to defend their interests; rather, in John Davis’s words, ‘the Kingdom’s function was to supply men, equipment and money for the emperor’s wars, raw materials for French manufactures, and markets for French

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products’.59 Its king was in no sense sovereign. Like the other client kings who littered Napoleonic Europe, he was a monarch in title only, a mere pawn in the dynastic politics of empire. If Napoleon could treat the rulers of dependent kingdoms with offhand disdain, the legitimate monarchs of Europe were unable to reciprocate. They were, simply, too dependent on the goodwill of the Empire, and too exposed to French counter-attack, to defy Napoleon and risk the punishment that would follow. Their role was as spearcarriers rather than leaders, unwilling allies in the imperial project. As late as 1813, for instance, the King of Saxony could not risk following through his preferred aim of signing a neutrality treaty with Austria, and a month later he returned meekly to the Napoleonic fold. Napoleon always retained the most powerful propaganda weapons, backed by the ultimate threat of force; and he did not hesitate to use them to win over faltering princes, pointing to the Russian and Prussian threat, and reminding them that an allied victory would spell revolution throughout the whole of Germany.60 Besides, not even the most established of monarchs was unmoved by the sheer grandeur of the Empire or left indifferent to the spectacle of Napoleonic power. Even the most scathing caricaturists depicted the lavish coronation procession of 1804 with a certain grudging admiration for the grandiose scale of the celebrations and the sumptuous detail of their planning.61 Napoleon might be an upstart and an interloper in the world of court ceremonial, but they could not deny that he had a certain style. Perhaps the clearest proof that even kings were impressed by imperial pomp lay in their attempts at emulation, their desire to prove to their subjects that they, too, were powerful men whose majesty commanded the respect of their subjects. George IV’s coronation in London in July 1821 is a case in point. It was the most expensive that Britain had ever witnessed, and was subsidised by Parliament to the tune of over a quarter of a million pounds, with the specific objective of outdoing Napoleon’s coronation nearly twenty years before. Of course George IV was not the Emperor, and he failed to cut anything like as impressive a figure. In Vic Gatrell’s words, ‘he sweated under his heavy robes, his head lolled, his eyes glazed, and he had to be revived with sal volatile during the ceremony’.62 But the effort of imitation was itself a form of flattery, and one that Napoleon would surely have appreciated had he lived a few extra months. It would be a generation later – and in response to the Second Empire rather than the First – before Napoleon’s vision of monarchy became a template for others to model themselves upon. The Napoleonic legend was by then securely embedded in French popular culture, especially in

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rural areas, where the myth of a charismatic, providential ruler, risen from the ranks of the people and answerable directly to the people without the interference of factions or parties, enjoyed a broad constituency. Personal power and military glory were integral to that myth, and Bonapartism emerged as a political current offering an alternative form of monarchy to the legitimacy of the Bourbons.63 In Europe, the collapse of the Empire and the rise of nationalism ensured that this form of nostalgia was largely limited to France. But elsewhere, and especially in the emergent nations of Latin America, Napoleon would continue to exert a considerable influence on the style of government new rulers adopted.64 Leaders emerged, like Santa Anna in Mexico, who sought to win popular appeal through a potent mix of military success and a modernising economic and social agenda and who looked for support to the ranks of the rural poor.65 Their authority was grounded in a strong economic base and in their social constituency as much as in formal institutions of state; they often emerged from the military, and their legitimacy was largely personal; they were in the tradition of the caudillos, local heroes who offered clientage and protection to those who followed them.66 The parallels with Napoleon, the product of a military coup at Brumaire who modernised the legal and educational systems of France and exported the Civil Code at the point of a musket, or with Napoleon III, who to some seems a bungling adventurer, to others a far-sighted social reformer, are temptingly obvious.67 They were obvious to contemporaries, too. Francisco Solano Lopez in Paraguay was an admirer of British technology who sought to import an industrial capacity for his country, but he also admired the imperial ideas of Napoleon III, increasing his standing army to 28,000 and dreaming of an empire stretching across South America and ruled from Asunción by a powerful military machine. To many contemporaries this was ‘a menacing if crude parody of a military state’, and already in the 1860s Lopez was accused of seeking to reinvent himself as the Napoleon of South America.68

Notes 1. Philip G. Dwyer, ‘From Corsican Nationalist to French Revolutionary. Problems of identity in the Writings of the Young Napoleon’, French History, 16 (2002), pp. 143–5. 2. Harold T. Parker, ‘Napoleon’s Youth and Rise to Power’, in Philip G. Dwyer (ed.), Napoleon and Europe (London, 2001), p. 39. 3. Quoted in Steven Englund, Napoleon. A Political Life (New York, 2004), p. 30. 4. Napoléon Bonaparte, Souper de Beaucaire (Paris, 1930), p. 22.

128 Napoleon as Monarch: A Political Evolution 5. Alan Forrest, ‘Propaganda and the Legitimation of Power in Napoleonic France’, French History, 18 (2004), pp. 426–45. 6. Marc Martin, Les origines de la presse militaire en France à la fin de l’Ancien Régime et sous la Révolution (Vincennes, 1975), and ‘Journaux d’armées au temps de la Convention’, Annales historiques de la Révolution française 44 (1972), 567–605; see also Wayne Hanley, The Genesis of Napoleonic Propaganda, 1796–99 (New York, 2005), pp. 72–109. 7. Letter to General Augereau, Paris, 7 nivôse VIII, in Napoléon Bonaparte, Correspondance générale – 2: La campagne d’Egypte et l’avènement, 1798–99 (Paris, 2005), p. 1118. 8. Napoléon Bonaparte, Correspondance générale – 1: Les apprentissages, 1784–97, p. 1345. 9. References to Lucurgus as the giver of laws to his people were a commonplace in the Revolution. See Timothy Tackett, When the King Took Flight (Cambridge, Mass. 2003), p. 190. 10. Napoléon Bonaparte, ‘Discours sur la question proposée par l’Académie de Lyon: Quelles vérités et quels sentiments importe-t-il le plus d’inculquer aux hommes pour leur bonheur?’, in Frédéric Masson and Guido Biagi (eds.), Napoléon inconnu (2 vols., Paris, 1895), vol. 2, p. 295. 11. Annie Jourdan, ‘Robespierre and Revolutionary Heroism’, in Colin Haydon and William Doyle (eds.), Robespierre (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 56–63. 12. Laurence L. Bongie, David Hume. Prophet of the Counter-Revolution (Oxford, 1965), pp. 133–40. 13. Martyn Lyons, Napoleon Bonaparte and the Legacy of the French Revolution (London, 1994), p. 117. 14. Frédéric Régent, ‘L’expédition d’Egypte de Bonaparte vue par la presse parisienne, 1798–99’ (mémoire de maîtrise, Université de Paris-I, 1992), p. 40. 15. Miot de Melito, Mémoires du Comte de Miot de Melito, (Paris, 1873), vol. 1, p. 150, cited in Philip G. Dwyer, ‘Napoleon Bonaparte as Hero and Saviour. Image, Rhetoric and Behaviour in the Construction of a Legend’, French History, 18 (2004), 391. 16. Philip G. Dwyer, ‘Napoleon Bonaparte as Hero and Saviour. Image, Rhetoric and Behaviour in the Construction of a Legend’, French History, 18 (2004), 391–3. 17. Robert Asprey, The Rise and Fall of Napoleon Bonaparte (2 vols., London, 2000), vol. 1, p. 220. 18. Isser Woloch, Jacobin Legacy. The Democratic Movement under the Directory (Princeton, New Jersey, 1970), p. 398. 19. John Hall Stewart, A Documentary Survey of the French Revolution (New York, 1951), p. 780. 20. Message from Napoleon to the Senate on accepting the Life Consulate, 15 thermidor X, cited in Malcolm Crook, Napoleon Comes to Power. Democracy and Dictatorship in Revolutionary France, 1795–1804 (Cardiff, 1998), p. 134. 21. Ibid., p. 135. 22. Robert Lacour-Gayet (ed.), The Memoirs of Chancellor Pasquier, 1767–1815 (Madison, Wisconsin, 1967), p. 50. 23. See Olivier Blanc, Les espions de la Révolution et de l’Empire (Paris, 1995), and, more exhaustively, E. d’Hauterive, La police secrète du Premier Empire, 1804–10 (5 vols., Paris, 1922–64).

Alan Forrest 129 24. Jean-Paul Bertaud, Le duc d’Enghien (Paris, 2001), pp. 345–6. 25. Thierry Lentz, ‘Napoléon et Charlemagne’, in Thierry Lentz (ed.), Napoléon et l’Europe. Regards sur une politique (Paris, 2005), pp. 19–21. 26. Roberto Conti, Il Tesoro. Guida alla conoscenza del Tesoro del Duomo di Monza (Monza, 1983), pp. 5–8. 27. Lentz, ‘Napoléon et Charlemagne’, p. 17. 28. Thierry Lentz (ed.), Le sacre de Napoléon (Paris, 2004), p. 9. 29. Ibid., p. 32. 30. Procès-verbal de la cérémonie du sacre et du couronnement de LL. MM. L’Empereur Napoléon et l’Impératrice Joséphine’, reprinted in Jean Tulard (ed.), Napoléon: Le sacre (Paris, 1993). 31. Timothy Wilson-Smith, Napoleon, Man of War, Man of Peace (London, 2002), pp. 161–2. 32. Lentz (ed.), Le sacre de Napoléon, pp. 141–2. 33. A.D. Calvados, M2786, letter from Audibert, vicaire-général in Bayeux, 8 July 1807. 34. Peter Burke, The Fabrication of Louis XIV (New Haven, Connecticut, 1992), pp. 75–83. 35. David O’Brien, ‘Propaganda and the Republic of the Arts in Antoine-Jean Gros’s Napoleon visiting the battlefield of Eylau the morning after the battle’, French Historical Studies, 26 (2003), p. 282. 36. David O’Brien, ‘Antonio Canova’s Napoleon as Mars the Peacemaker and the Limits of Imperial Portraiture’, French History, 18 (2004), 377. 37. Philippe Bordes, ‘Le Musée Napoléon’, in Jean-Claude Bonnet (ed.), L’Empire des Muses. Napoléon, les arts et les lettres (Paris, 2004), p. 84. 38. Jeroen Duindam, Vienna and Versailles. The Courts of Europe’s Dynastic Rivals, 1550–1780 (Cambridge, 2003), p. 21. 39. Marie-France Auzépy and Joël Cornette (eds.), Palais et pouvoir. De Constantinople à Versailles (Vincennes, 2003), p. 5. 40. Etienne François, ‘Copies et pastiches européens’, in Joël Cornette (ed.), Versailles. Le pouvoir de la pierre (Paris, 2006), pp. 77–82. 41. Chandra Mukerji, Territorial Ambitions and the Gardens of Versailles (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 35–8. 42. Joël Cornette, ‘Versaillomania’, in Cornette (ed.), Versailles. Le pouvoir de la pierre, pp. 20–4. 43. See the biographical sketches provided by Nicole Gotteri, Grands dignitaires du Premier Empire (Paris, 1990). 44. Ibid., p. 10. 45. Abby E. Zanger, Scenes from the Marriage of Louis XIV. Nuptial Fictions and the Making of Absolutist Power (Stanford, California, 1997), p. 8. 46. Ibid., p. 135. 47. Christopher Hibbert, Napoleon. His Wives and Women (New York, 2002), pp. 141–3. 48. Thierry Lentz, Nouvelle histoire du Premier Empire, vol.1, Napoléon et la conquête de l’Europe, 1804–1810 (Paris, 2005), p. 502. 49. For example, see the letter of 16 August 1810 from the sous-préfet of Orange to the Prefect of the Vaucluse (A.D. Vaucluse, 1 M 876). 50. Alan Forrest, Napoleon’s Men. The Soldiers of the Revolution and Empire (London, 2002), p. 102.

130 Napoleon as Monarch: A Political Evolution 51. A.D. Vaucluse, 1M 876, report from Carpentras, 3 December 1810; see also Denise Z. Davidson, France after Revolution. Urban Life, Gender and the New Social Order (Cambridge, Mass., 2007), p. 23. 52. A.D. Vaucluse, 1M 876, report from the mayor of Thor, dated 1811. 53. For instances of festivals under Louis XVIII, see Françoise Waquet, Les fêtes royales sous la Restauration, ou l’Ancien Régime retrouvé (Geneva, 1981). 54. See Sudhir Hazareesingh, The Saint-Napoléon. Celebrations of Sovereignty in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge, Mass., 2004), which traces the history of the festival once it was re-invented for the nineteenth century by Napoleon III. 55. Lentz, Nouvelle histoire, vol. 1, p. 117. 56. The role of the army in Napoleonic society – from the militarisation of honour to that of state the public imagination – is discussed by Jean-Paul Bertaud, Quand les enfants parlaient de gloire. L’armée au coeur de la France de Napoléon (Paris, 2006). 57. Michael Kaiser discusses the nature of Napoleon’s relationship with the Wittelsbach dynasty in ‘A Matter of Survival – Bavaria Becomes a Kingdom’ (Chapter 5 in the present volume); also Michael Broers, Europe under Napoleon, 1799–1815 (London, 1996), p. 62. 58. Clive Emsley, The Longman Companion to Napoleonic Europe (Harlow, 1993), pp. 106–10. 59. John A. Davis, Naples and Napoleon. Southern Italy and the European Revolutions, 1780–1860 (Cambridge, 2006), p. 1. 60. Paul W. Schroeder, The Transformation of European Politics, 1763–1848 (Oxford, 1994), p. 456. 61. Hans Peter Mathis (ed.), Napoleon I im Spiegel der Karikatur (catalogue of the Napoleon-Museum at Arenenberg, Zurich, 1998), pp. 2–3. 62. Vic Gatrell, City of Laughter, Sex and Satire in Eighteenth-Century London (London, 2006), p. 51. 63. Robert Gildea, ‘Bonapartism’, in The Past in French History (New Haven, Connecticut, 1994), pp. 62–111. 64. I am grateful to Peter Wilson for first suggesting this particularly apt parallel. 65. Jan Bazant, ‘Mexico from Independence to 1867’, in Leslie Bethell (ed.), The Cambridge History of Latin America, vol. 3 (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 436–43. 66. John Lynch, Caudillos in Spanish America, 1800–1850 (Oxford, 1992), p. 4. 67. James F. McMillan, Napoleon III (London, 1991), p. 136. 68. John Lynch, ‘The River Plate Republics from Independence to the Paraguayan War’, in Bethell (ed.), The Cambridge History of Latin America, vol. 3, pp. 666–73.

7 Napoleon and the Abolition of Feudalism Rafe Blaufarb

The latest research on Napoleon’s European empire paints a bleak picture of the French legacy: cultural imperialism, taxation, conscription, misery, war and death. Even Napoleon’s vaunted administrative and legal reforms turn out to have been nothing more than a means of facilitating imperial exploitation. In the face of this mounting evidence, it has become difficult to sustain the image of Napoleon as liberator of Old Regime Europe.1 One of his major European initiatives, however, has so far resisted critique: the abolition of feudalism. Napoleon extended French legislation dismantling feudal property relations to annexed territories. Similar policies were pursued in satellite kingdoms like Naples and Westphalia. And even after Napoleon’s Empire fell, restored monarchs made no attempt to undo these changes. Instead, they confirmed the transformation Napoleon had wrought because they believed it had modernized their states and increased their power. While Napoleonic domination of European lands was bitterly contested and soon proved ephemeral, his programme of feudal abolition was neither. Indeed, it was one of the most significant long-term legacies of the Napoleonic episode. From this perspective, Napoleon can still be seen as the faithful heir of 1789, as the vector by which the abolition of feudalism was spread to Europe. As far as it goes, this is an accurate sketch. But it rests on a misleading assumption, an assumption that obscures important political calculations that informed Napoleonic policy. This assumption is that it was a simple matter for Napoleon to apply the French laws on feudal abolition to the rest of Europe. In fact, there was no uncontested body of such legislation for Napoleon to apply. Rather, for the duration of Napoleonic rule, the feudal question was the subject of contentious discussion and the object of shifting jurisprudence in France itself. Napoleon’s policies 131

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towards feudalism in Europe were thus tied up with a domestic French debate. Re-examined in this light, it will become clear that Napoleon’s abolition of feudalism in Europe was aimed not only at foreign lands, but also at France itself. Before we proceed, however, some groundwork must be laid.2 First, by the eighteenth century feudalism was primarily (but not solely) a system of property law rather than a mode of production or a form of social domination. Originally, French feudalism involved royal grants of land (called fiefs) in exchange for military service. Over time, these service obligations lapsed and fiefs became private property – bequeathed, inherited, subdivided and traded in the land market. The vast majority of all real estate in Old Regime France was of this type, including in cities where even apartment dwellers typically had to pay feudal dues.3 Thus, feudal property law was not a subcategory of some broader system of property law in the Old Regime: it was the system. From this perspective the abolition of feudalism was less about transforming the rural economy or challenging lordly predominance than about redefining the legal and cultural parameters of property. Second, the feudal question was still an open one, a politically divisive one, in France when Napoleon took power and remained so throughout his rule. Even in 1806 and 1807, while busy fighting Prussia and Russia, Napoleon had to take time from his military preoccupations to send decrees back from the front to France on this contentious issue. The controversy stemmed from the fact that the French Revolution had abolished feudalism not once but twice. In the famous night time session of 4 August, the Constituent Assembly declared feudalism – including hated obligations such as corvées and banalités – abolished. The precise definition of what kinds of real estate and obligations fell into the category of feudal, as well as the mechanics of abolition, were articulated in a series of decrees promulgated in 1790. In 1792 and 1793 the National Convention modified the original abolition legislation in a more radical sense. These two approaches were not successive and complementary, but rather were based on contradictory principles. In 1790 the Constituent Assembly had not so much abolished feudal property as changed its nature.4 Under the presidency of the noted jurist Merlin de Douai, the Assembly’s Feudal Committee distinguished between legitimate dues and usurped rights in feudal property relations.5 Fees which lords collected from their tenants in exchange for grants of land were defined as legitimate and assimilated into ground rents. Those which did not stem from the concession of property, but derived from and signified lordly superiority, were abolished. To Merlin,

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the critical issue in making this distinction was whether or not a given payment had originated in a transfer of land. To resolve this question, he believed, one had to look beyond the language of feudal leases to their substance. Even if such documents employed a feudal rhetoric of social superiority, this alone was not enough to invalidate the genuine exchanges they stipulated. To do so would be to violate the sanctity of property by stripping ex-lords of both the land they had granted tenants and the rent payments they had received in return. Merlin’s aim was to extract from their feudal envelopes legitimate transactions between lords and tenants. In short, Merlin wanted to remake lords into landlords.6 The Assembly’s feudal settlement did not survive the pressures of war, economic mobilization, rural unrest and radicalization. In 1793 the Convention defined a new approach to the feudal question. It recognized that most leases contained clauses conceding real estate in exchange for annual payments. But it believed the Constituent Assembly had erred in considering such clauses genuinely contractual. Because of the inherent imbalance between lords and tenants, the exchanges such clauses stipulated could not be treated as free transactions between equals. Because of their social context, all feudal leases were fundamentally tainted by coercion. To try to extract legitimate property relations from such leases was to ignore this fatal flaw and bestow upon feudal usurpation the status of property. Consequently, on 17 July 1793 the Convention abolished the former feudal rents which the Constituent had preserved.7 Now any lease containing the slightest trace of feudal language would be considered null and void.8 For the Convention, form was substance, for it revealed the essential injustice at the heart of all relations between lords and tenants. Most studies of the abolition of feudalism end at this point. But far from settling the feudal question, the legislation of 1793 drew a new fault line between its supporters and those who preferred the Constituent Assembly’s original approach. After the reign of Terror ended, this conflict emerged into the open.9 Debate began in earnest in the Conseil des Cinq-Cents on 14 Germinal V (23 March 1797) with a motion to repeal the 1793 legislation and a report by the Finance Commission on 4 Thermidor (21 July 1797) calling for a return to the 1790 legislation. Heated discussion ensued, punctuated by charges that the motion’s proponents were seeking to re-establish feudalism and counter-charges that its opponents were attacking the rights of property. The coup of 18 Fructidor interrupted these proceedings, and an attempt to raise the issue again in the Year VI (1798) foundered in a wave of suspicion and

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insinuation. The feudal question was still alive, albeit in a state of suspended animation, when Napoleon took power.

The Draft Law of Ventôse VIII One of the Brumairians’ first legislative initiatives was to try to repeal the Convention’s feudal legislation. Only four months after the coup, on 18 Ventôse VIII (8 March 1800), the Council of State sent the legislature a draft law reviving the feudally-tainted ground rents abolished in 1793.10 The government’s spokesman, Councillor Claude-Ambroise Regnier, acknowledged that the blending of feudal and contractual elements in leases between lords and tenants constituted an ‘impure mixture’. But this alone was not a ‘legitimate reason to refuse payment of a ground rent which has nothing in common with an execrated regime’. Yet the Convention’s laws had enfolded simple ground rents and feudal rights in a ‘common proscription’. To restore the rights of property, it was necessary to return to the path indicated by Merlin de Douai in 1790, by distinguishing between the contractual and the usurped in feudal leases and placing the former ‘under the aegis of a protective law’. That the ground rents in question deserved such protection was beyond dispute. They were ‘sacred’, Regnier claimed, ‘because they were incontestably the price of the concession of real estate’. The government realized that, in proposing to revive ground rents stipulated in contracts bearing traces of feudalism, it was venturing into hazardous political terrain. Its spokesman Regnier took great pains to assure the legislators that this measure did not presage the reimposition of feudalism. ‘This regime is irrevocably abolished’, he intoned. ‘Feudal and seigneurial rights are held in horror by the French people’. And mindful of the friction likely to be generated by attempting to reverse the effects of nearly seven years of revolutionary legislation, he acknowledged that not all the problems it had caused could or should be repaired. ‘All the damage produced by the revolutionary crises cannot be mended; to attempt too much on this point would be more imprudent than just’. Therefore, the law would not have a retroactive character; landlords would not be allowed to claim unpaid rent for the period 1793–1800. Finally, Regnier invoked the national interest in support of the proposed law. Pointing out that the government itself owned many of these rents as part of the National Domain, he stressed that their revival would help stabilize the finances of the State. The draft law was then referred to a special commission of the Tribunate. Its reporter, Pierre-Francois Duchesne, presented its report

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on 23 Ventôse VIII (13 March 1800).11 It began with a historical account of the Revolution’s shifting approach to the abolition of feudalism. In Duchesne’s view, the Constituent Assembly had ‘dealt the final blow to the hundred-headed hydra’ (376). But driven by factionalism and radicalization, the Convention issued further laws which, although ‘destined in appearance to destroy the last vestiges of feudalism, instead attacked property’. (375) We all remember with horror the disastrous epoch that followed the fatal days of 31 May, 1 and 2 June 1793. France was covered with a shroud until 9 Thermidor II: ideas of right and wrong were sometimes confused in confiscatory laws; and your Commission does not hesitate to place in this class the law of 17 July 1793 ... Only the misfortunes of the time can today excuse such measures: they attacked the legitimate rights of citizens attached to the Revolution, and still more egregiously, the rights of the whole nation, which owns most of the rents unjustly swept up in the suppression ... Thus, Tribunes, the nation has seen itself unjustly deprived of 15 to 20 million annually in legitimate ground rents, and a multitude of proprietors, whose titles and possession were equally worthy of favour, have been utterly ruined. (375–6) Duchesne conceded that the proposed law was imperfect. It admitted oral testimony in litigation over contested ground rents, breaking with a long tradition of French civil law practice. Moreover, it did not go far enough. Duchesne felt that it should have repealed the 1793 legislation outright.12 But these shortcomings were not sufficient reason to reject a law he characterized as ‘an act of pure justice toward the entire nation’. (377) He concluded by urging his fellow legislators to ‘rise above the groundless aspersions that ill-will or false popularity may cast upon your intentions and those of the government’ (378) and approve the proposed law. Debate began three days later. A few speakers directly attacked the proposal on the grounds that, in overturning the indispensable legislation of 1793, it opened the door to the re-establishment of feudalism. The strongest defender of this position was the former conventionnel Jean-Pierre Chazal.13 He argued that the Constituent Assembly had erred in not abolishing all feudal or quasi-feudal rights in a single proscription. ‘Such is the link binding all feudal rights, that if they do not all die together, they will revive as one’. (458) The Revolution had had two great aims, he claimed: ‘the freeing of men and the freeing of lands’.

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The Constituent Assembly had accomplished the first and begun the second, which had been completed by the Convention. By revoking one of these gains and threatening the other, the proposed law ‘undermined the Revolution’. (457) Chazal painted a chilling picture of the consequences of reviving ground rents. France once again covered by black bands of feudistes; titles that the law ordered burnt produced in the name of the law; reward for those who had resisted the law by keeping them; punishment for those who submitted to its writ by surrendering them; ruinous trials in every family; new hatreds added to so many old ones; false witnesses bribed; the titles of the nation sold and destroyed by corrupt guardians ... judgments, constraints, seizures, sequestrations, auctions, desolation, despair, fallow, sterility, misery, and the gaping wound of feudalism on the breast of the patrie, corroding it and spreading each day. (459) It would end in revolts against injustice that would ‘spill torrents of blood’. (459) The nation had not gone through a decade of revolution to see feudalism take root again in French soil. Most of the proposal’s opponents, however, avoided such explosive rhetoric. Instead, in speech after speech, they attacked it with the same argument the government had used to justify it: the sanctity of property. Their main objection was that, despite the government’s assurances, the law was tainted by the ‘vice of retroactivity’.14 Although it forgave back rent owed for the period 1793–1800, the law would have significant retroactive financial implications for property transfers conducted during those years. Jean-Claude Gillet noted that properties formerly subject to ground rents had been sold ‘free and quit from all payments’ and thus ‘for higher prices than they were effectively worth’.15 ‘Today, can you subject the purchasers of these properties to rents they knew had been legally abolished?’ To revive the rents might well increase state revenue, but only at the expense of ‘public trust’, ‘the faith of contracts’, and ‘the principles of the Revolution’. Gillet recognized that the intentions of the government were pure, that it sought only to repair the injustice perpetrated against property holders by the Convention. But ‘what kind of system was this which would repair an injustice only by creating new ones?’ (447) The law’s opponents warned that its retroactive effect would sweep up vast sectors of French society. Among these potential victims were the purchasers of biens nationaux, property holders whose faith in the revolutionary land settlement and willingness to risk their fortunes on

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it deserved reward, not punishment. ‘Today when we want to redress these wrongs [inflicted by the Convention], let us take care not to augment them, by shifting them, by striking a greater number of individuals, by striking the purchasers of national domains’, urged the former conventionnel François-Siméon Bezard. ‘Let us respect the interests of all, let us not revolutionize in a misguided attempt to prove that the Revolution is over’.16 His colleague Gillet pointed out that the revival of suppressed ground rents would upset carefully-calculated inheritance arrangements, both past and future, and thus sow discord in families.17 ‘If the law is adopted, almost all family partages will have to be redone’, he warned. ‘In effect, the suppression of the rents was taken into consideration at the time of the partages; and a given child, who was satisfied with his share of some possession, free and quit of all dues, will now be entitled to take legal action against his copartageants’. JeanAugustin Pénières-Delors highlighted another group likely to suffer from the retroactive law: the soldiers of liberty.18 He offered a reading of history which, by linking the Convention’s suppression of feudalism to the military successes of the Jacobin period, cast those seeking to revive the ground rents as ungrateful egoists seeking to line their own pockets at the expense of national heroes. The courageous men [of the Convention] who animated the people’s ardour and directed its efforts, wanted it to reap from its heroic devotion advantages capable of upholding its constancy and rewarding its numerous sacrifices: with determination forged by these powerful considerations, the nation’s representatives abolished the rents. ... And it is only now that we are enjoying the fruits of the indomitable courage of the French people that we talk about confiscating its just reward. Were the Tribunes to approve the draft law, Pénières concluded, ‘how could we ever cleanse ourselves of the reproach of ingratitude?’ Other Tribunes spoke of the poisonous legal and political chaos that would surely follow the reintroduction of ground rents. Far from filling the coffers of the state with new revenue, one warned, passage of the draft law would produce only ‘general torment and innumerable trials’.19 Incredulous, another wondered how the government could have concocted such a divisive project at this juncture. It is now in the Year VIII of the Republic, it is at this happy moment when the Government is striving to reunite the French, to make

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them forget the troubles of a grand Revolution; it is at the very moment when it has ended, when we are approaching the conclusion of a durable peace, that you invent trials between citizens over the question of feudalism and necessarily reawaken political hatreds?20 Other speakers sketched horrific visions of revolution rekindled were the draft law to pass. Soon all French citizens will become either plaintiffs or defendants, witnesses, bailiffs, lawyers, arbitrators, or judges, and in this civil struggle, society will resemble a State in dissolution rather than a just Government. Aren’t you afraid that, by trying to right a few of the wrongs of the Revolution, you might spark a new one?21 The debate over ground rents in Ventôse VIII (March 1800) was significant not only because it offered the French political class an opportunity to revisit the feudal question and air its feelings about the two rival systems of abolition. It was also noteworthy because it turned out to be the occasion of Napoleon’s greatest legislative defeat. The proposal was rejected by a vote of 59 to 29, a stinging rebuke that led the government to withdraw the measure from legislative consideration before it could generate further opposition. Indeed, so sharp was the defeat that it led the government to reverse its policy – perhaps a unique accomplishment in the undistinguished annals of the Napoleonic legislatures.

Merlin de Douai and the Feudal Question For the next ten years, the government took no new initiatives on feudal issues. Instead, the Council of State simply applied the laws of 1793 to feudal matters brought before it, looking to the form and language of legal acts rather than their substance. But the doctrine of 1790 was not abandoned. It had a powerful advocate in the head of the French Supreme Court – the Cour de Cassation. This was none other than Merlin de Douai, former president and guiding light of the National Assembly’s Feudal Committee. From his post in the Court, Merlin issued a series of rulings between 1801 and 1807 that sought to reintroduce the feudal jurisprudence he had pioneered in 1790 – putting himself and his Court on a collision course with the Council of State. In Vendémiaire X (September 1801), Merlin opened his counteroffensive.22 Taken on appeal from the Civil Tribunal of the BassesPyrénées, the case involved a dispute over the nature of a lease that

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stipulated a perpetual annual rent and the right of retrait féodal (the feudal equivalent of right of first refusal). Writing for the Court, Merlin concluded that, even though the lease contained an unambiguously feudal provision (retrait féodal), the lessor was not a seigneur and thus never had the quality required to establish a genuine feudal lease. ‘Given that the lessor was not the local lord’, he wrote, ‘this feudal quality should have been null and of no effect because only seigneurs and fief-holders had the right to establish feudal rents’. Consequently, despite its undisguised feudal pretensions, the rent was a simple ground rent, which had not been abolished by the Revolution, and thus had to be paid. For the next six years, Merlin built upon these beginnings to reintroduce his 1790 doctrine of substance and the restricted definition of ‘the feudal’ it tended to promote. In the course of numerous rulings, two criteria of substance emerged as the decisive ones in determining the nature (feudal or non-feudal) of a lease. First, to qualify as feudal, a lease had to be granted by the seigneur of the place where the property was situated. All leases granted by non-seigneurs were non-feudal by definition and were thus legitimate rentes regardless of the language and stipulations they contained. Even leases granted by seigneurs were to be considered truly feudal only if the properties those leases concerned were located within the seigneurie of the lessor. Lords often owned property outside of their seigneurie; such property could never be alienated under a feudal lease. Second, only leases that were passed in explicit recognition of seigneurial overlordship (recognitive de la directe seigneuriale féodale or with réserve de la directe seigneuriale féodale) were legally feudal. Even land alienated by a lord within his or her fief, but without explicit clauses stating the alienated property’s subordination to the seigneur’s directe, was deemed to be held in non-feudal tenure. Taken together, these two criteria meant that feudal rents were only those established on property alienated directly from the local seigneur’s fief and in explicit recognition of that seigneur’s feudal directe. Rents which did not match this description exactly, whatever their trappings, were non-feudal, legitimate ground rents which remained in force. When applied to actual cases, Merlin’s narrow definition of the ‘feudal’ could produce outcomes as politically unpalatable as they were legally rigorous. For example, on 19 Nivôse XII (10 January 1804), the Cour de Cassation ruled that a disputed rent established by a certain seigneur Delalande over a mill was non-feudal and thus had to be maintained. Although the lease stipulated payment of the cens (a small payment which symbolized recognition of the seigneurial directe),

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Delalande was not seigneur of the place in which the mill was located and thus did not have the juridical quality necessary to establish a feudal lease. Moreover, Delalande himself had held the mill in censive from the local seigneur and, thus, did not even possess the seigneurie directe over it. As a result of these considerations, the Court concluded, the rent was a simple ground rent and had to be maintained. In his ruling, Merlin concluded unambiguously that ‘whatever qualification he gave the rent, the proprietor could only have conceded it as a ground rent’. In another case judged on 19 Vendémiaire XII (11 October 1803), Merlin and Court ruled that leases granted by the Duc de Soubise in the commune of Brimeux were not feudal and therefore still in effect. Although the Duke came from one of the most illustrious lordly families of the Old Regime, his ancestors had used their power to usurp communal property and then alienate it to individual inhabitants under leases stipulating the payment of lods et ventes and a seigneurial cens. But since the property in question did not really belong to the Soubises’ fief, but had been usurped by violence, it could not have been alienated under a feudal contract. The rent payments were thus simple ground rents which the inhabitants of Brimeux had to continue paying to the ex-Duke. Rulings such as these began to make the government nervous. Merlin’s fine legal distinctions might impress other jurists, but were unlikely to strike the rest of France as particularly just. His restrictive definition of the feudal seemed to have the paradoxical effect of rewarding exseigneurs who had abused their power, while penalizing those who had remained within the bounds of feudal law. And how would peasants feel about having to pay ‘feudal’ dues once abolished by the Revolution, but now resurrected on the grounds that they were usurpations and, hence, not really feudal? Concerned about the political implications of Merlin’s jurisprudence, the Council of State began to issue decisions of its own reasserting the principles of 1793. In its opinion (avis) of 13 Messidor XIII (2 July 1805), it directly attacked Merlin’s doctrine of substance.23 In cases where ‘the constitutive title of the payment presents no ambiguity’, it ruled, the question of the substantive relationship between lessor and lessee was immaterial and could not be raised in a court of law. Merlin struck back with new rulings, and the exchange rapidly escalated into a full-blown jurisdictional conflict pitting the Council of State against the Cour de Cassation. The dispute was finally brought to Napoleon’s personal attention in 1807 by the Minister of Finance, who needed to know what standard to apply – substance or form – to the administration of the Imperial Domain (which owned

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many suppressed rentes which Merlin’s doctrine could have revived). Napoleon interrupted his campaigning in far-off Prussia to issue a decree imposing silence on Merlin.24 Even this rebuke did not stop the jurist. Examining the Council’s avis of 13 Messidor XIII (which was now to serve as the basis for judging contentious issues of feudal property), Merlin realized that it contained a loophole through which his cherished doctrine of substance could be reintroduced and a more restricted definition of feudal property imposed. The avis stated that the language of a lease was sufficient to determine its character when it ‘presents no ambiguity’. Merlin seized upon this phrase to argue that, in vast areas of France, the overlapping of Roman and feudal law made it impossible to determine with certainty the character of a lease from the words it employed. In those parts of the country (roughly the entire southern half) where Roman or written law had predominated during the Old Regime and where property was considered allodial unless proven to be seigneurial, the Latin term dominus was employed in leases to indicate both seigneurs and non-feudal proprietors of the domaine directe. Also in these provinces, the term dominium directum was used to designate both the seigneurial directe and the directe of a Roman-law emphyteotic lease.25 In areas of written law, Merlin concluded, the use of the same word (dominus) to indicate both lord and proprietor and the same phrase (dominium directum) to indicate both the seigneurial and the allodial directe made it impossible to rely solely on the language of leases when judging their nature in written-law provinces. In southern France, therefore, the criterion of form offered nothing but ambiguity; there, the courts had no choice but to judge leases according to their substance. The Council of State was unimpressed by Merlin’s jurisprudential dexterity. In a series of rulings it issued in 1808 and 1809, it rejected the jurist’s subtle distinction between the seigneurial and the Roman directe.26 Worse, it issued a general interpretation (7 March 1808) ruling that all perpetual emphyteotic leases – even if Roman and allodial – were abolished without compensation if they contained any sign of divided domaniality, any of the terms commonly used to acknowledge the seigneurie or directe, or if they stipulated payments symbolic of seigneurie.27 The Cour de Cassation responded with dismay to this sweeping decision. ‘Does the Council of State’, the court asked, ‘intend to abolish rentes which recognize the directe, dominium directum, which, in terms of Roman law, is always retained by the leassor of an emphyteotic property?28 We cannot believe it!’. Merlin himself appeared before the Council of State on 17 January 1809 to argue for preserving the

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distinction between the seigneurial and the Roman directe. But a new avis, approved by the Emperor on 2 February 1809, rejected his position. The Cour de Cassation had no choice but to accept this decision. Merlin’s crusade for the criterion of substance seemed to be over. But during the next few years, Merlin would succeed in having his doctrine adopted as the basis of Imperial feudal legislation. In 1806 he had been nominated to the Council of State and, after the defeat of the Cour de Cassation, sought to continue his campaign from this new position. He received powerful support from Arch-Chancellor Cambacérès, Napoleon’s right-hand man, a former jurist from the Roman-law province of Languedoc, and former colleague of Merlin’s in the National Convention’s Feudal Committee. Together Merlin and Cambacérès waited for the proper moment to act. That moment came in 1810 when a wave of annexations in Holland, Northern Germany, and Italy forced the government to address the question of how to abolish feudalism in the new departments. Although the Napoleonic Code had already begun to undermine feudalism in these areas – particularly by attacking primogeniture – and earlier, indigenous attempts had been made (for example, in Tuscany during the eighteenth century) to reform feudal property law, the practical modalities of abolition had never been worked out. For this task, Napoleon turned to Cambacérès and the Council’s leading feudal expert, Merlin.

The Challenge of the New Departments In early 1811, they presented their report to the Council of State.29 It was a lengthy document that went beyond specific local cases to treat the question of imperial feudal policy in general. It began with a leading question: should the laws and avis of the Council of State ‘which have given such a strange extension to the abolition of feudal rights’ be extended to the new departments? The answer, of course, was no. As Merlin had long argued from the Cour de Cassation, these laws confused legitimate property relations, such as those established by Roman-law emphyteotic leases, with feudal ones. The task of abolishing feudalism in the new departments offered a wonderful opportunity to repudiate these errors, implement proper laws in at least part of the Empire, and perhaps even see these new legal/property regimes exert a salutary influence over France itself. Rather than extend current French anti-feudal legislation (i.e. the laws of 1793) to the new departments, Merlin and Cambacérès proposed to spare them ‘the extreme and

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unjust rigour with which the abolition of feudalism has been interpreted on the old French territory’. To the greatest extent possible, the laws of 1790 would be applied to the new departments. Under the influence of this enlightened legislation, they would serve as a beacon to the whole Empire. In time, perhaps, the rays they cast would extend to Old France itself and free it from the legacy of 1793. Liberation would move from the periphery to the heartland. The body of the report was divided into sections, each treating a specific area and discussing the extent to which local circumstances made it necessary to modify the laws of 1790. The first area examined was Holland. Formerly a sister republic (the République Batave) and then a satellite kingdom under Napoleon’s brother Louis, Holland had already been the subject of a great deal of anti-feudal legislation. This included decrees issued by the représentants du peuple who accompanied invading French troops in 1795, articles of the successive Batavian constitutions (1798, 1801 and 1805), a decree of 9 June 1806 and three detailed reports issued by King Louis’ Council of State between April 1809 and May 1810. But despite all of this, the actual mode of abolition had never been clearly determined. The various constitutions all reaffirmed the abolition of feudalism in principle, but said nothing about how the feudal regime was to be liquidated in practice. The reports of Louis’ Council of State were still under discussion when Holland was annexed to the Empire, and were thus never translated into legislation. 30 Only the decree of 1806 dealt with the specifics of feudal abolition, but it contained many provisions sharply at odds with the French constitutional order. For example, it allowed ex-seigneurs to appoint certain public functionaries and pocket a portion of their salaries, as well as to appoint parish priests. If this law were abrogated, Merlin and Cambacérès concluded, Holland would find itself in the same situation as France immediately after the passage of the laws of 4 August 1789. A tabula rasa, Holland offered an ideal opportunity to implement integrally the laws of the Constituent Assembly. 31 The departments of Rome and Trasimène, the report continued, resembled Holland in that few concrete steps had been taken to abolish feudal property relations. The governing Consulate had not published a single French law on feudalism; all it had done was to issue a general statement (24 July 1809) proclaiming the suppression of ‘feudalism, feudal dues, prerogatives, privileges, titles, and jurisdictions which derive from it ... in the Roman states’. But, as in Holland, nothing had been done to explain how this sweeping statement of principle was to

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be put into practice. Merlin and Cambacérès proposed two measures. The first was to implement the laws of the Constituent Assembly abolishing feudalism and seigneurial jurisdictions. The second was to issue an interpretative law exempting from abolition not only ‘rentes foncières which have been created with a mixture of feudal rights in exchange for the concession of real estate’, but even ‘purely feudal dues which were the price and condition for the transfer of property’. This was necessary to spare the Roman states from the ‘crying iniquity’ that France had suffered from laws which had gone far beyond the abolition of feudalism to ‘break the faith of contracts and violate all the rights of property’. ‘Let us share with the Roman states all that is wise and legitimate in our legislation’, concluded this section of the Merlin/Cambacérès report. ‘But it is neither useful nor necessary to inflict on them our injustices and spoliations’. Whereas both Holland and Rome were largely open terrain on which Merlin’s dreams of recreating the legal edifice of 1790 could be realized, Tuscany’s Old Regime history of feudal reform made a straightforward imposition of French legislation unnecessary. Laws of François of Lorraine (21 August 1749) and the Grand Duke Leopold (15 March and 11 December 1775) had already abolished most feudal dues and prerogatives, as well as freeing commerce (for example, by abolishing seigneurial banalités).32 By the time France took over Tuscany, little remained of its former feudal regime. French domination could thus add little to its strong anti-feudal tradition. An imperial decree of 30 June 1810 had been issued, applying all existing French legislation to the departments of the Arno, Méditerranée and Ombrone, but it had never been executed. The imperial decree of 29 August 1809, however, had been implemented. Treating the question of whether livelli (locallyspecific rentes attached to emphyteotic leases) could continue to be collected if they were stipulated in leases containing clauses recognizing a seigneurial directe, imposing lods or demi-lods, and creating the right of return (droit de retour), the decree ruled that the livelli were legitimate rentes foncières, but that the other stipulations – specifically the lods and demi-lods – were feudal and, hence, suppressed. Merlin and Cambacérès proposed modifying this decree in two ways. First, they recommended maintaining not only livelli stipulated in emphyteotic leases, but also rentes created by specifically feudal leases (par des actes d’inféodation proprement dits) if they had been established for the concession of property. Second, they urged that the right of return – which allowed suzerains to take back the fiefs of their vassals if those vassals had no male heirs – be maintained.33 The suppression of this right established

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a dangerous precedent which, if extended to the whole Empire, would cause the State ‘incalculable losses’. Today the State represents not only the King of France, on whom depend a large number of fiefs subject to return in Alsace ... but also many princes, as well as lay and ecclesiastical lords, of the four departments of the left bank of the Rhine, of Piedmont, of the part of Liguria formerly known as the Imperial Fiefs, the states of Parma and Plaisance, Tuscany, the Roman states, and very probably much of the jurisdiction of the imperial courts of the Hague and Hamburg, which had the same right over a multitude of fiefs or seigneurial emphytéoses in their mouvance.34 In addition to the financial implications of abolishing the right of return, Merlin and Cambacérès argued that it was not feudal in origin, but rather stemmed from the law of contracts and, as such, was actually guaranteed by article 951 of the Code Napoléon! Needless to say, this claim raised a few eyebrows on the Council of State. Unlike the other areas discussed in the report, the departments of Liguria, Parma and Plaisance, and Piedmont (collectively, the twentyseventh and twenty-eighth military divisions) had all been subjected to the full panoply of French anti-feudal laws. Rendered after much debate in the Council of State, the imperial decree of 4 Thermidor XIII (22 July 1805) had placed these departments on the same legal footing as the original departments of France.35 Short of modifying the legislation of 1793, there seemed little that could be done to spare these territories from ‘the extreme and unjust rigour with which the abolition of feudalism had been interpreted in the old territory of France’. From raising the possibility of altering the anti-feudal legislation of these departments, it was but a short step to altering the feudal settlement in the imperial heartland itself. Using the local case of Liguria, this is precisely the recommendation Merlin and Cambacérès made. As predominantly allodial, written-law territory, Ligurian farmlands were generally held under Roman perpetual emphyteotic leases identical to those frequently found in southern France. Like their French counterparts, the Italian leases contained the same linguistic ambiguity – did dominus mean seigneur or simply owner? – that made it impossible to tell whether they were feudal or Roman in nature. To cast these leases blindly into the abyss of abolition simply because they contained the phrase dominium directum or dominio diretto was to violate the sanctity of property. Even leases which stipulated a lods and reserved the directe were not necessarily

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feudal because the lods also had a respectable, pre-feudal Roman pedigree (laudimium). To repeal the legislation (that of 1793, as well as the Council of State’s avis of 1808 and 1809) which had abolished these legitimate property relations on the erroneous grounds that they were feudal ‘would be an unparalleled act of great justice’. But, the report continued, ‘this act of justice would be greater still and more worthy of Your Majesty if it were extended to all your Empire’. Culminating with this appeal for empire-wide reform, the Merlin– Cambacérès report inaugurated a new approach to the abolition of feudalism in Napoleonic Europe. With it, the return to the ‘true principles of 1790’, as Merlin put it, had begun. By calling for the application of the 1790 legislation to the newly-annexed territories, Merlin and Cambacérès wanted to do more than just spare these lands the excesses of 1793. They also hoped that this change of policy in the outlying lands of the Empire would shift feudal jurisprudence in France itself. Had their recommendation been adopted, it would have effectively revived throughout the Empire the rentes foncières that had inspired such heated debate in 1800. Seen in this light, the Merlin–Cambacérès report on the application of French laws on the abolition of feudalism to the newly-annexed departments had an internal purpose: to revise the feudal settlement in France itself. Paradoxically then, the effort to extend the abolition of feudalism abroad after 1810 was simultaneously intended to roll back anti-feudal legislation at home in France. The Merlin–Cambacérès report did not address the situation of the newly-formed German départements (the Ems-Supérieur, Bouches-duWesser and Bouches-de-l’Elbe) which had been created from former Westphalian and Hanseatic lands, as well as small principalities such as the Grand Duchy of Berg and the Duchy of Oldenburg. The imperial decree of 18 December 1810 instead charged Councillor-of-State chevalier Faure with designing a particular system of feudal abolition for these départements. The decree directed, however, that this specifically German approach to feudal abolition should pursue the same moderate aim as Merlin and Cambacérès: ‘to reconcile legislative principles with respect ... for all types of property’. In his lengthy report, Faure analysed the plethora of rights and duties which existed in the new départements, seeking always to distinguish between those which implied ‘personal servitude’ and those which stemmed from ‘concessions made [by lords] to vassals’.36 The sheer number of these obligations and their narrowly circumscribed geographical relevance make an exhaustive analysis impractical here. Several examples will suffice to illustrate the complexity of Faure’s task. At Rittrebuttel, a dependency of Hamburg, tenants

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owed their lords payments in kind known as ramhhühner. In those villages which had belonged to the Duchies of Bremen and Verden, tenants were subject to the meier-recht, comparable to the French droit de retour. Lauenburg, formerly possessed by the princes of the House of Brunswick-Lüneburg, was rife with ‘fiefs and incorporal rights of all kinds’. In the former Duchy of Oldenburg, most peasants in the bailliages of Vechta and Cloppenburg were still enserfed. Given the multiplicity and diversity of these obligations, the task of distinguishing between those which implied illegitimate personal servitude and those which originated in legitimate property transactions was a daunting one indeed. Faure’s task was eased substantially, however, by the fact that feudalism had already been abolished in most of the territory composing the new départements. Nearly two-thirds had been carved from the Kingdom of Westphalia, in which feudalism had been abolished by a series of comprehensive laws passed between November 1807 and December 1810.37 Those areas which had formerly been part of the Grand Duchy of Berg had also been subjected to anti-feudal laws.38 With some minor exceptions, the Hanseatic cities of Hamburg, Bremen and Lübeck were entirely allodial and thus free of all vestiges of personal servitude.39 Even in the lands which had belonged to the unambiguously feudal Duchy of Aremberg, a major step towards abolition had already been taken by the Duke who, by an ordonance of 3 October 1809, had permitted the rachat of ducal fiefs. By building on these foundations and modifying the French laws (a euphemism for not applying the legislation of 1793), Faure assured the government that it would be possible to ‘end the state of humiliation in which certain lords have kept their vassals’ while at the same time preventing ‘vassals from enriching themselves at their lords’ expense’. By the closing months of 1811, the Merlin–Cambacérès and Faure reports seemed to announce a return to the principles of 1790 in matters of feudal abolition and property law more generally. This programme, however, did not go unchallenged. While the legal framework of 1790 was imposed without difficulty in the Hanseatic departments and Rome and the Trasimène, Dutch specificities sparked renewed debate over the general approach to the abolition of feudalism in the Empire. After a particularly heated discussion in the Council of State on 19 February 1813, the legislative section was charged with drafting a new report on the subject.40 This was presented by Count Berlier on 21 June 1813.41 Berlier attacked two of the principal recommendations made by Merlin and Cambacérès. First, he analysed the case of Tuscany, which the two jurists had used to argue that transfer

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fees such as the right of lods were not inherently feudal and thus did not invalidate leases where they were stipulated. Berlier did not challenge Merlin’s legal reasoning; rather, he emphasised the practical problems that rehabilitating the lods would entail. He reminded the Council that the Tuscan lods had been suppressed by the decree of 29 August 1809, a decree that had been published and enforced. To repeal it now, as Merlin and Cambacérès had urged, would amount to changing retroactively the terms of contracts established during the past five years. What could we tell someone who said: ‘I acquired a property that I thought was free from transfer fees and the right of return; I believed so because the law had pronounced it; it is true that you are not demanding back pay; but by reviving for the future a charge that had been extinguished, are you not changing my condition. Will my property have the same value? When I try to sell it, will it fetch the same price?’ Berlier then turned to the case of Liguria, which Merlin and Cambacérès had used to demonstrate that emphyteotic leases in Roman-law areas were not necessarily feudal, even if they contained phrases suggestive of lordship. Again, Berlier did not attempt to challenge Merlin’s legal argument. Rather, he hinted at the legal chaos likely to ensue if his position were adopted. Given the state of perfect assimilation of Liguria with the territory of Old France ... we could not apply to this pays, by virtue of its allodiality, a legal exception without it being immediately demanded by those parts of Old France where the franc-aleu was natural, and there were many of these. Merlin’s jurisprudence was impeccable, Berlier concluded, but he consistently overlooked an imperative even more pressing than that of legal rigour. This was the ‘absolute rule’ of ‘upholding whatever has been implemented’, a rule pronounced by Napoleon himself in the Council of State’s meeting of 30 Messidor XIII (19 July 1805). According to the Emperor, Whether the laws against feudalism are based on just or unjust principles is not the issue we should examine: a revolution is a jubilee which destabilizes private property. Doubtless, such an upheaval is a misfortune which ought to be prevented; but when it has already

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occurred, we cannot reverse its effects without operating a new revolution, without making property uncertain and unstable (flottante): today we would go back on one thing, tomorrow on another; soon no one will be assured of being able to keep what he possesses. In the final analysis, it was this fundamentally conservative principle – ‘maintaining what already exists’ – which dictated the Napoleonic approach to the abolition of feudalism. One of its unintended consequences had been to introduce significant diversity into the property regimes of the Empire. In fact, Berlier recognised the coexistence of three distinct zones. In the inner Empire, the laws of 1793 had been applied, abolishing most emphyteotic leases and all transfer fees. In the second zone, essentially Tuscany, perpetual emphyteotic leases (livelli) had been maintained, but transfer fees abolished. In the third zone – Rome, the Hanseatic departments, and Holland – ‘the principles of the Constituent Assembly had been applied purely and simply’, thus preserving both emphyteotic leases and transfer fees. Moving from the first to the third zone, the scope of property rights grew progressively larger. In many respects, Napoleonic rule in Europe meant the imposition of uniformity. But in the critical realm of property, the drive to conserve trumped the drive to standardise.

Conclusion: Napoleon and the abolition of feudalism It is difficult to draw firm conclusions about Napoleon and the abolition of feudalism because the matter was still unresolved when his Empire fell. Perhaps this is the main point to emphasise: no more than 1793, 1815 did not bring closure to the debate over the definition and fate of feudal property. To recognise this is to raise a series of important questions. In those parts of Europe which had been part of Napoleon’s Empire, what became of the anti-feudal laws that had been implemented? Of those that were still pending? Of the half-executed projects? In sum, how did the abrupt halt in the ongoing Napoleonic efforts to abolish feudalism affect property relations in the newly-independent countries of the French Empire? In France, too, the feudal question remained unresolved. From my own brief survey of village archives in the south of France, I would hazard the guess that there was not a single rural community in the entire country that did not experience some sort of feudally-inspired contestation well into the nineteenth century, whether over usage rights (particularly water, forest and grazing land),

150 Napoleon and the Abolition of Feudalism

ownership (of public buildings, roads and fountains) or collective property (such as ovens and mills). Even in the domain of high politics and jurisprudence, the abolition of feudalism continued to raise questions and generate conflict after 1815. For example, the great debate during the Restoration over the question of biens nationaux was intimately connected with feudal issues. If the unsold biens nationaux were to be returned to their former owners, it was first necessary to define which of these biens had been suppressed by the laws abolishing feudalism and which, having been recognised as legitimate property, still existed and could thus be restored to their original owners. Even Merlin de Douai continued his crusade after 1815, drafting extensive legal consultations for French courts from Brussels, where he had been exiled as a regicide. Although he did not live to see it, he finally won his cause on 16 April 1838 when the Cour de Cassation (finally recognised the year before as the supreme legal authority in the land) repealed the avis of the Council of State of 13 Messidor XIII and ruled that the substance of a lease, rather than its language, was the critical aspect to be examined in determining its feudal or non-feudal character. The abolition of feudalism has a long history extending beyond the critical revolutionary years of 1789–93. This history, a European as well as a French one, largely remains to be written.

Notes 1. For example, see Michael Broers, ‘Cultural Imperialism in a European Context? Political Culture and Cultural Politics in Napoleonic Italy’, Past and Present, 170 (2001), 152–80, and Alexander Grab, Napoleon and the Transformation of Europe (New York, 2003). 2. The fundamental, indispensable work on the French Revolution and real property remains Marcel Garaud, La Révolution et la propriété foncière (Paris, 1958). 3. The remaining property in France was allodial or non-feudal. Most of it was located in the southern half of the country, where the Roman or written-law tradition provided it with a relatively favorable legal context. But even Roman-law allods resembled feudal property in that both were characterised by divided domainiality. Under this bifurcated legal construction of property, ownership was split into a superior, but largely theoretical domination (the domaine directe, roughly similar to the eminent domain of the United States) and actual possession of the material property (the domaine utile). Much of the confusion attendant upon the revolutionary transformation of feudal into modern property actually stemmed from the divided domainiality of property during the Old Regime and, as we shall see in the following pages, pertained no less to allodial than to feudal property. One can even say that the revolution in property begun in 1789 was more about creating a new

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4.

5.

6. 7.

8. 9. 10.

11. 12.

kind of undivided property (by uniting the domaine directe with the domaine utile) than abolishing feudal property per se. For succinct discussions of divided domainiality, see Thomas E. Kaiser, ‘Property, Sovereignty, the Declaration of the Rights of Man, and the Tradition of French Jurisprudence’, in Dale Van Kley (ed.), The French Idea of Freedom: The Old Regime and the Declaration of Rights of 1789 (Stanford, 1994), pp. 300–39, and David Parker, ‘Absolutism, Feudalism, and Property Rights in the France of Louis XIV’, Past and Present, 179 (2005), 60–96. For a comprehensive treatment of the historical origins of divided domainiality, see Ed. Meynial, ‘Notes sur la formation de la théorie du domaine divise (domaine directe et domaine utile) du XIIè au XIVè siècle dans les Romanistes. Etude de dogmatique juridique’, Mélanges Fitting (Montpellier, 1908), vol. 2. Merlin (10 Feb. 1790), but quoted in Archives Parlementaires (henceforth, AP), series II, vol. 1, 455: In destroying the feudal regime, you did not intend to strip of their possessions the legitimate owners of fiefs; but you have changed their nature. Henceforth freed from feudal rights, they remain subject to those of landed property; in a word, they have stopped being fiefs and have become veritable aleux ... The destruction of the feudal regime has converted all feudal and censual rights into simple ground rents. On Merlin, see Louis Gruffy, La vie et l’oeuvre juridique de Merlin de Douai (Paris, 1934); and Hervé Leuwers, Un juriste en politique: Merlin de Douai (1745–1838) (Lille, 1996). John Markoff, The Abolition of Feudalism. Peasants, Lords and Legislators in the French Revolution (University Park, Pennsylvania, 1996), pp. 530, 535. Paradoxically, this law was proposed by the Convention’s Feudal Committee while it was under the presidency of Merlin de Douai and also while Cambacérès was playing a leading role in its deliberations. It appears that in July 1793 political pressure forced these two key proponents of the 1790 approach to the abolition of feudalism to draft a law which they opposed and later repudiated. This determination was strengthened by a succession of interpretative decrees, notably that of 7 Ventôse II. AP, series II, vol. 1, 440. Summarised by Duchesne in the Tribunate, 23 Ventôse VIII, AP, series II, vol. 1, 376. The draft law presented to the Council of State was only the fifty-third document the Council considered. It is unclear what role Napoleon played in this initiative, although he was in Paris at the time. Regnier’s speech is in AP, series II, vol. 1, 328–9. For a useful (albeit tendentious) overview of the ground rents (rentes foncières), see H. Dard, Du rétablissement des rentes foncières, mélangées de féodalité, (Paris, 1814). On perpetual leases (including, but not limited to rentes foncières), see Garaud, La Révolution et la propriété, pp. 257–75. AP, series II, vol. 1, 374–8. Page numbers are in parentheses. Some deputies – among them Georges-Antoine Chabot – voted against the proposal for precisely this reason, because it did not go far enough. ‘I want us to return frankly to the decrees rendered by the Constituent and Legislative Assemblies, and that the iniquitous and confiscatory law of July 17, 1793, along with all those which form its worthy complement, be revoked.’ AP, series II, vol. 1, 455.

152 Napoleon and the Abolition of Feudalism 13. 27 Ventôse VIII, AP, series II, vol. 1, 457–60. 14. AP, series II, vol. 1, 439–447. The speaker was Gillet. 15. Interestingly, it was the most philosophical mind in the Tribune, Benjamin Constant, who advanced the most concrete argument against the revival of ground rents. Suppose that a fief had generated an annual income of 25,000 francs in ground rents and 5,000 francs in other kinds of leases, he began. If acquired after July 1793 – that is, after the abolition of ground rents – its price would have reflected the annual income it then produced: only 5,000 francs. What would happen if the ground rents were now reestablished? Who would own the 25,000 francs of annual income they generated? The buyer, who had only paid for land worth 5,000 francs annually? The seller, who had not even owned the ground rents when the transaction had been concluded and thus could not have sold them? These practical problems, Constant concluded, made it impossible to revive the ground rents. AP, series II, vol. 1, 460–2. 16. AP, series II, vol. 1, 438. 17. AP, series II, vol. 1, 447. 18. AP, series II, vol. 1, 435. 19. AP, series II, vol. 1, 446. 20. AP, series II, vol. 1, 439. Italics in original. 21. AP, series II, vol. 1, 435–6. 22. The following paragraphs on the jurisprudence Merlin crafted while serving on the Cour de Cassation are based on an invaluable article by Anne-Marie Patault, ‘Un conflit entre la Cour de Cassation et le Conseil d’Etat: l’abolition des droits féodaux et le droit de propriété’, Revue historique du droit français et étranger, vol. 56 (1978), 432–33. 23. Collection générale des lois, depuis 1789 jusqu’au 1er avril 1814 (henceforth, Collection générale), (Paris, 1819), vol. 10, 180–1. 24. This was the imperial decree of 23 April 1807, issued from the Camp of Finkenstein, which ruled that leases ‘stained with feudalism’ (entachées de la féodalité) were null and void. 25. Merlin based his argument on Loyseau’s distinction between seigneurie publique (private ownership of public authority, typically the right to exercise justice) and seigneurie privée (private ownership of private property, carrying with it no public authority). Loyseau noted that the Romans had never known the seigneurie publique, which he deplored as a feudal usurpation. See Charles Loyseau, Les oeuvres de Maistre Charles Loyseau, avocat en Parlement, contenant les cinq livres du droit des offices, les traitez des seigneuries, des ordres et simples dignitez, du déguerpissement et délaissement par hypothèque, de la garantie des rentes, et des abus des justices de village, dernière edition (Lyon: Compagnie des Libraires, 1701), Traité des seigneuries, chapitre 1er, ‘Des seigneuries en général’, 1–7. This fundamental work of feudal jurisprudence and absolutist theory has been neglected by historians in Englishspeaking countries, who have focused on Loyseau’s treatise on Ordres et simples dignitez. 26. These were the avis of 1 March 1808 and 17 January 1809. 27. Collection générale, vol. 10, 737–8. 28. An emphyteotic lease was a perpetual lease in which an owner alienated a given property in exchange for a perpetual rent payment, as well as the

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29.

30.

31.

32.

33.

34.

35. 36.

37.

38.

right to collect certain fees (notably the droit de lods) when the property changed hands. Such leases were common to both Roman-law and feudal property arrangements. Rapport et projet de décret sur le mode d’application des lois françaises concernant l’abolition de la féodalité aux départemens nouvellement réunis à l’Empire (2 février 1811). Merlin and Cambacérès also considered these reports defective, because they maintained a number of honorific and lucrative seigneurial prerogatives that had been abolished in France in 1790. These are detailed in Section II, paragraph 1 of their report. With some minor adjustments for local conditions (for example, assimilating the beklemming form of land tenure typical of the former province of Groningen to a Roman perpetual emphytéose and ruling that the East Frisian landhever and harrenhever were emphyteotic, rather than feudal, in origin) this was the direction adopted by Imperial policy. On these modifications, see M. le chevalier Faure, Observations et projet de décret concernant l’abolition de la féodalité dans les départemens de la Hollande (Paris, 2 février 1813). On these anti-feudal reforms, see Eric Cochrane, Florence in the Forgotten Centuries, 1527–1800: A History of Florence and the Florentines in the Age of the Grand Dukes (Chicago, 1973), 428–91; Furio Diaz, Francesco Maria Gianni: Dalla burocrazia alla politica sotto Pietro Leopoldo di Toscana (Milan, 1966); and Gabriele Turi, “Viva Maria”: La reazione alle riforme Leopoldine (1790– 1799), (Florence, 1969). They also would have liked to have preserved the rights of lods and demi-lods associated with livelli leases, but admitted that it would raise too many problems (notably, the problem of retroactivity) to do so. Here we find echoes of the long-standing tension between the fiscal and the domanial approach to finance characteristic of the early modern French state. How did Revolutionary developments (abolition of feudalism, nationalization of the royal domain, confiscation of the biens nationaux, disruption of taxation and monetary policy) affect this relationship? What effect did the Empire have (with its reestablishment of monarchy in France, absorption of so much new ‘domanial’ material through conquest, and erection of grand fiefs throughout Europe)? Until someone writes a history of the domain across the Revolutionary and Napoleonic period, there is no way to answer these important questions about the evolution of state finance in France and its empire. On these debates, see the Rapport et projet d’avis sur la suppression des droits féodaux dans le ci-devant Piémont (Paris, 12 Messidor XIII). Rapports et projets de décret sur l’abolition de la féodalité dans les départemens de l’Ems-Supérieur, des Bouches-du-Weser et des Bouches-de-l’Elbe (25 November 1811). The remainder of this paragraph is based on this document. The Acte constitutionnel (15 November 1807) and decrees of 23 January 1808, 28 March 1809, 27 July 1809, 18 August 1809, 20 April 1810, 7 September 1810 and 1 December 1810. In addition, Faure considered that an eighth decree (that of 13 April 1811) should also be considered as having taken effect in the former Westphalian territories, even though it had been promulgated after the annexation of the new départements. The decrees of 12 December 1808 and 11 January 1809.

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39. They did, however, recognise the Roman law distinction between domaine directe and the domaine utile, which posed problems similar to those encountered in the case of the twenty-seventh and twenty-eighth military divisions, as well as in the Midi of France itself. 40. For a full account of this session, see Jean Bourdon, Napoléon au Conseil d’Etat (Paris, 1963), 264–74. 41. Rapport et projets de décrets sur les modifications que les lois françaises, relatives à l’abolition de la féodalité, sont susceptibles de recevoir dans quelques-uns des pays réunis à l’Empire (Paris, 21 June 1813).

8 The Prussian Army in the Jena Campaign Claus Telp

Given that Napoleon had already defeated both Austria and Russia in the Austerlitz campaign, it is perhaps not surprising that the Prussian army, which had not fought the French since 1795, suffered the same fate. Considering the scale of the calamity that befell Prussia and its army, though, the question remains why the Prussian army was so decisively defeated, ensuring that the Jena Campaign remained embedded in Prussia’s collective memory as a singularly shameful débâcle. Several interpretations of this outcome have been offered since 1806. The most critical view was that the Prussian state and society were fundamentally flawed and, by extension, so was the army. Napoleon’s invasion of Saxony and subsequent clash with Prussian forces appeared as the kick that brought a rotten building crashing down. This was certainly the view of the Prussian reformers who not merely set out to reform the army, its organisation and tactics, but demanded a root-andbranch reform of the Prussian state and society – nothing less than an effort to reinvent Prussia. A variant of this interpretation was that the Prussian army had rested on the laurels of Frederick the Great and failed to adjust to the emerging threat of Napoleon and his army. According to this view, the army was still impressive to watch on parade and in reviews, but virtually useless in a serious shooting war against a skilful adversary. Defenders of the Prussian army disputed these structural explanations, claiming that the army was fundamentally sound but suffered from poor generalship – fateful mistakes made by individuals. An even kinder view is that the army was both effective and well-led and that its failure was due to circumstances beyond its control. These views have been expressed most forcibly by Curt Jany, William O. Shanahan and C.E. White, and most recently by Peter Hofschröer, who all point to 155

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reforms prior to 1806.1 This chapter rejects these attempts to relativise the differences between old regime Prussia and Napoleonic France.2 Instead, it argues that Prussia’s military catastrophe was due to a combination its own army’s failings with situational factors and the dynamics of the Jena campaign. The following compares the French and the Prussian armies and identifies crucial French strengths as well as serious Prussian weaknesses. While such comparisons have been made before, they have often been dominated by national bias or a presentminded concern to learn military ‘lessons’ from the past. The comparison here moves from the grand strategic and strategic levels of war down to the operational and finally the tactical level.

The grand strategic and strategic levels The most serious deficiency that hampered the Prussian conduct of the war from the beginning was the character of its king and commanderin-chief. Frederick William III was an indecisive leader who lacked a clear vision and purpose both prior to 1806 and once the campaign started. While he jealously reserved decisions for himself, he then either failed to make the tough choices required or, once he had decided on a course of action, was easily swayed to change his mind. As a consequence of his indecisiveness, Prussian foreign policy followed a zigzag course that alienated potential allies and resulted in Prussia going to war alone, though the Russians eventually decided to join the fray. Prussia did secure the support of the unenthusiastic Saxons who proved to be more of a liability than an asset. Hessen-Kassel, another potential ally, could not be persuaded to join Prussia and sat on the fence to avoid being on the loser’s side, no matter who won.3 The king also failed to develop a coherent grand strategy once the decision had been taken to go to war. Whilst the Prussian army had mobilised some two months before the Grande Armée, this military advantage was not used. Prussia ought either to have used its early mobilisation for a pre-emptive strike against the Grande Armée, which was dispersed in quarters at that time, or should have deferred its preparations for war until Russian forces were close enough for them to operate jointly. In the event, neither option was chosen.4 The picture on the French side could not have been more different. Napoleon was a strong-willed leader who pursued his aims before and during the campaign with determination and single-mindedness. Once he had realised that war with Prussia was coming, he set the wheels in motion to destroy the Prussian army and occupy the country. French

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diplomatic efforts, orchestrated by him and integrated in a coherent grand strategy, isolated Prussia, bought time for military preparations, and gave him the moral and propaganda advantage of seeming to be the victim of Prussian aggression. In addition, Napoleon used diplomacy during the campaign to deceive Frederick William III into believing that a peaceful resolution of the conflict might still be possible. Though France did not have any great powers as allies – both Britain and Russia remaining hostile to French ambitions – the Confederation of the Rhine, providing troops, resources and staging areas for offensive operations, proved more useful to France than Saxony did to Prussia.5 Even though the Prussian army mobilised much earlier than the French, preparations remained incomplete and some twenty-five thousand troops remained in East Prussia. The Prussians then grossly compounded the error by dispersing 90,000 men in various garrisons and 15,000 men in a small reserve army under Württemberg. If the field army was beaten, the garrison troops were too widely dispersed to be combined quickly as a second field army, whilst the reserve under Württemberg was both too small to rectify any major defeat and too far away from the front to have any influence on the outcome of a battle. These wasteful secondary deployments left the combined Prusso–Saxon field army in Saxony with only 126,000 men. The Prussians had dispersed troops and assets rather than concentrating them for a main effort.6 Napoleon also settled for a partial rather than for total mobilisation. In contrast to the Prussians, though, he did not waste first-line troops in unnecessary secondary deployments. He left coastal defence against British amphibious operations to his second-line coastal defence forces. The Army of Holland, whilst superficially a drain on the field army, served an economy of force measure as it fulfilled several roles: it protected the Low Countries, stood ready to intercept a British auxiliary force that might land in the Weser estuary to support the Prussians and served to confuse the Prussians as to the likely axis of a French attack. The sparing deployment of French troops for secondary purposes permitted Napoleon to assemble a Grande Armée of 180,000 men, a clear statement of where his main effort lay.7 This superiority in numbers, compared to the Prusso-Saxon army of 126,000 men, tilted the balance in favour of French arms right from the start of the campaign. During the deployment in early October, the Prussians, already suffering from the disadvantage of inferior numbers, felt compelled to stretch their army on an east–west axis in order to protect both HessenKassel, in the hope that it might join Prussia, and Saxony, which expected

158 The Prussian Army in the Jena Campaign

protection for its territorial integrity.8 This lateral dispersal of forces put the Prussian army at a disadvantage vis-à-vis the concentrated French columns approaching through the Thuringian Forest. When the Prussians became aware of the threat, they tried to consolidate their deployment, but this took so long that Napoleon was able to push up the right bank of the Saale and prevent them escaping north. Problems of deployment were compounded by indecision as the Prussian king and his generals hesitated between a show of force to persuade Napoleon to negotiate, or a more forceful defensive or offensive strategy. The French remained free of such problems. In order to cross the Thuringian Forest, they advanced in the flexible and resilient bataillon carré of three parallel marching columns each with two army corps, which permitted them to strike the Prussian army with concentrated forces in any conceivable case. There was also no lack of clarity in Napoleon’s mind as to what he wanted to achieve. His deployment was offensive, serving the strategic aim of finding and destroying the Prussian army.9 Apart from suffering strategic disadvantages during the campaign, the Prussian army also had more long-standing problems. Whilst the army had not rested on the laurels of Frederick the Great and had undergone a steady evolution, it still had weaknesses that could have been addressed by 1806. The gradual modernisation of the army between 1792 and 1806 had been conducted with less sense of urgency than was warranted, given the obvious weaknesses exposed in the campaigns between 1792 and 1795, as well as the prevailing conflict elsewhere in Europe. This same lack of urgency was also discernible in the allocation of resources to the military. The under-resourcing of the army prior to 1806 had serious implications for mobilisation, training and the availability of trained reserves.10 The French army, in contrast, was at the peak of its effectiveness, battle-proven, experienced and employing the latest tactics, procedures and forms of organisation.

The operational level Whereas the Prussian army was deployed in a vulnerable, overstretched and defensive pattern, the Grande Armée was in a good position to achieve the destruction of its adversary. Indeed, the opening clashes at Saalfeld and Schleiz went very badly for the Prussians as their isolated detachments were beaten in detail. Though the losses sustained were not crippling, the crucial opening skirmishes had ended in defeat, an undeniable fact that did not fail to depress the morale of Saxon and

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Prussian troops. Even when the Prussians consolidated their forces on the left bank of the Saale, their situation did not improve as Napoleon was now in a position to outflank them, cut their line of retreat towards Magdeburg and Berlin, separate them from Russian support and force them to fight with reversed fronts. The weak leadership affecting the Prussian state extended to the field army as well. Because of an unwillingness to offend Ruechel and Hohenlohe, as senior generals, the army was broken into three separate commands, under Ruechel, Hohenlohe and Brunswick as senior field marshal. Though Brunswick was nominally overall commander, Hohenlohe repeatedly challenged his authority. Failure to assert his already-reduced official authority effectively made Brunswick a primus inter pares, the first among equals rather than a true commander. Furthermore, Brunswick was hindered by the presence of the king who interfered in decisions and whose presence diluted the field marshal’s responsibility as well as authority. The lack of unity of command was further exacerbated by the fact that Brunswick and his chief of staff, Scharnhorst, fell out during the critical stage of the campaign, while Massenbach, Hohenlohe’s chief of staff, tried to usurp Scharnhorst’s functions. As a result, decisions were not made by a single overall commander but in councils of war. In these councils, the king and the three army commanders together with their chiefs of staff tried to agree a course of action. This process was not only very slow, since sometimes one faction prevailed and sometimes another, but there was no coherent selection and maintenance of war aims. Since the operational situation constantly changed, the resolutions in the council constantly changed as well. In effect, the Prussian high command was paralysed because it was still pondering one French move when the French had already made their next.11 Even once a decision had been reached, it took an inordinately long time to implement it at the troop level. Troops sometimes marched in the wrong direction as they followed outdated orders, because the new instructions had not yet filtered down the chain of command.12 Again, French command and control was very different from that of their adversary. Unity of command was not an issue as Napoleon was clearly in charge and his orders flowed down a clearly defined chain of command. Not only did he make decisions rapidly, but good staff work, slick procedures and adroit use of the chain of command ensured that orders were rapidly implemented.13 This permitted Napoleon to seize and hold the initiative and to keep a step ahead of the Prussian army. There was also none of the wavering that was so characteristic of the

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Prussian councils of war, as Napoleon had resolved to destroy the Prussian army and stuck to this aim even though he was willing to adapt the means to achieve it in the light of constantly changing situations on the ground. The Prussians also proved inferior in terms of organisation. Whereas the Grande Armée was divided into army corps and a cavalry reserve, the Prussians had organised their field army in all-arms divisions. Not only was the divisional system less potent than the corps system, but the Prussians introduced it only with the onset of the campaign. Since army and divisional commanders were unfamiliar with this form of organisation and did not understand its operational utility, it was largely ignored in practice and merely increased confusion on the Prussian side. Effectively, the three component parts of the Prussian field army more often than not operated as single entities. This meant that Napoleon could take full advantage of the Grande Armée’s corps system, which by now was well-rehearsed and understood by his marshals and generals.14 Given the size of both forces and the fact that they did not operate as unitary bodies, but rather as three separate Prussian armies and as a number of French corps, both sides needed an effective general staff to coordinate the administration and movement of their armies in the field. The Prussian general staff had only recently been established in that form, with the consequence that its officers were either unfamiliar with the routines or simply overtaxed by too much work for their small number. Blunders and crucial oversights committed by staff officers played a significant role in Prussia’s defeat.15 The French general staff, on the other hand, was well organised, was highly experienced, and used proven, smooth procedures which ensured that Napoleon’s decisions were implemented well and in a timely fashion. Though there were occasional glitches in French staff work, given the experience of troops and commanders, the flexibility and resilience of the corps system and the indifferent quality of their adversary, these had no serious consequences.16 Whereas the Prussian general staff greatly contributed to the defeat of the army, the French general staff was a crucial asset for victory. Another key difference between the Prussian and the French army was the way they supplied themselves. The Prussian army depended on rear supply, with flour wagons shuttling between magazines and field bakeries, and bread wagons shuttling between the bakeries and the units. This presented two major problems. First, troops had to be careful not to outmarch their bread wagons, slowing their movement to that of

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the wagons with the result that the further they moved from the bakeries, the shorter their marches had to be. Second, the method reduced operational flexibility, because rapid changes of direction by the army could throw the supply arrangements into chaos. Each part of the army also had to be careful not to cross the lines of communication of other units to avoid entangling troops and wagons. Rear supply also meant that the army commander had constantly to look over his shoulder and worry about the security of his supply lines. This anxiety was crucial in prompting Brunswick to order the retreat of his army on 12 October.17 In addition to this umbilical cord of rear supply, the Prussians were also burdened with baggage. Soldiers slept in tents which were carried in the regimental baggage train. Officers had riding horses and were permitted to take luxury items into the field. The combined effect of baggage and rear supply was that the Prussian army dragged along a tail of more than 3,000 vehicles, which was hardly conducive to rapid movement.18 Their ability to react rapidly was hampered by a snail-like decision-making cycle, slow implementation of orders, rear supply and baggage, as well as by their habit of sleeping in tents. This meant that at the end of a marching day, troops had to move on to a camp site that had already been staked out, where they erected their tents; come the next morning, they had to strike camp, return to the road, and organise themselves in marching order before they could resume their march. The speed that the Prussians could have achieved during the campaign only became apparent when remnants of the Prussian army, devoid of baggage and supply trains, rapidly force-marched through Prussia to escape the pursuing French. The French instead foraged where they were, though each army corps also carried a kind of iron reserve loaded on around three hundred wagons. The fact that they did not depend on rear supply allowed the French to move as fast as their infantry could march. They were also free from concerns over their lines of communications and simply ignored the Duke of Weimar when he tried to disrupt them with a raiding force. In the event, Weimar and his 11,000 troops were drawn too far from the main theatre to come to the aid of Hohenlohe when the battle of Jena was fought and lost. The short logistical tail also enabled the French corps to cross each others’ wake without entangling troops and wagons. Thus, when Napoleon rushed IV and VI Corps west and I and III Corps northwest on 12 October, the former could cut straight across the lines of communication of the latter without any ill effects. Living off the country, therefore, increased both speed of movement and operational flexibility. In addition, the French strictly limited the

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amount of baggage that accompanied the army and managed to make do without tents. Troops were issued with greatcoats which enabled them to bivouac by the side of the road. This meant that troops did not spend precious time in erecting a camp and tearing it down again in the morning, but rather could get up and continue marching without delay.19 Because the French had a more rapid decision-making cycle, quickly implemented new orders, utilised the corps system to the full and cut their army loose from rear supply and baggage, they could take two steps for every one step taken by the Prussians. This gave them a continuous head start and ensured that it was the Prussians who had to react to French moves. The French always moved first and they moved faster.20 The slow pace of Prussian movement increased the significance of timely and accurate intelligence. Here too, they compare poorly with their opponents. Reconnaissance was often organised on an ad hoc basis rather than conducted as a matter of routine, leaving the Prussian high command in the dark during critical stages of the campaign. Intelligence was sometimes very accurate, but given the slow command process, by the time a decision had been made and the orders had filtered down the chain of command, the intelligence picture had already been overtaken by events.21 By contrast, the French corps staffs and the general staff tasked light cavalry with reconnaissance as a matter of routine. Reports were quickly passed up the chain of command. Though French reconnaissance and intelligence were often imprecise and occasionally even grossly misleading, the flexibility of the corps system combined with a rapid decision-making cycle offered ample compensation. Thus, Napoleon could confidently march his corps into the fog of war.22 While the old clichés about the mercenary character of the Prussian army are an exaggeration, it is clear that their soldiers were given few positive incentives to perform their duty well. Thus, Prussian generals had to be wary when they conducted forced marches, as stragglers might fail to catch up with their regiment, or when they cut their troops loose to forage, as discipline might suffer and they might not return.23 All armies suffered desertion, including the French, but it was a more serious problem for Prussia given its relatively limited population and difficulties in recruiting and training replacements rapidly. The fact that losses certainly could not be replaced within the course of a single campaign simply increased the natural caution of the senior Prussian commanders. During the 1806 campaign, the Prussians suffered the

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added disadvantage that their army, which had not been to war for more than a decade and faced an adversary spoiled by a string of victories, suffered outright defeat at Saalfeld, the first serious clash of arms in this war. The panic that gripped the Prussian and Saxon troops on 11 October indicates that they were aware that their commanders were out-generalled by the French. Nonetheless, Prussian and Saxon morale was high on the day of battle, possibly because the troops were at last in a position to control their own fate, though morale quickly collapsed during the chaotic retreat that followed.24 On the French side, soldiers had a number of positive incentives to march hard and fight well, namely the prospect of promotion, a pension, booty, glory, perhaps even the Légion d’Honneur and not least the charisma of a great captain. In the course of the campaign, the French soldier’s trust in his proven and successful superior commanders was constantly reinforced and gloriously confirmed on 14 October. Thus, French commanders confidently conducted forced marches and let their troops forage, secure in the knowledge that most of them would rejoin the colours.25 The fact that Napoleon was operating in a relatively fertile and well-populated area ensured his men could find most of what they needed from the local population. Besides, the French army with its steady intake of conscripts and its far superior numbers in this campaign could tolerate a certain degree of wastage, something that the Prussians most certainly could not.

The tactical level It was surely inevitable that the Prussians would be outmarched by the French, given Grande Armée’s superior operational speed. It remained to be seen whether they would also be outfought. Prussian divisions consisted of some ten or eleven line infantry battalions, a light infantry battalion, between fifteen and twenty squadrons, and three to four batteries.26 Unfamiliar with the recentlyintroduced divisional system, Prussian commanders tended to ignore divisional organisation in battle by sending the various components of divisions to different parts of the battlefield, thus breaking up the combined arms team and increasing the chaos on the Prussian side. They had little choice, being forced to make ad hoc changes to the army’s tactical organisation as their divisional organisation distributed all cavalry squadrons and artillery batteries equally across the divisions.27 This was quite unlike the original French concept, which concentrated a significant number of batteries and squadrons in a cavalry reserve and

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an artillery reserve at army level so that they could intervene decisively and with concentrated force at the right time and in the right place. The French corps system was not only operationally more advantageous, since it permitted the corps to operate like small armies, but it also proved more effective on the battlefield. The corps commander had two or three divisions, consisting of infantry and artillery, plus a small cavalry and sometimes an artillery reserve. Napoleon, as overall commander, not only had the army corps as manoeuvre units, but also Murat’s cavalry reserve and the Guard’s artillery at his disposal, though it later turned out that he would have benefited from a stronger artillery reserve. Given the size of the corps, the experience of the corps commanders and their troops and the familiarity with close cooperation of all arms, French tactical organisation was bound to be a major asset.28 Whilst training standards in the Prussian army were high, several tactical weaknesses showed in the course of the battles at Jena and Auerstädt. Prussian artillery still relied on conscripted civilian drivers, who could not be trusted to stick with the batteries to move and redeploy the guns under fire. The guns were heavy and the horses weak, and this, again, hindered rapid deployment and re-deployment. Prussian light infantry, though very proficient and a match for their French equivalent, did not fight in close co-operation with line infantry by protecting them from enemy skirmishers. Instead, a large number of light infantry had been dispatched with the Duke of Weimar on his raiding expedition against French communications. On the battlefields, many of the remaining fusiliers, riflemen (Jäger) and sharpshooters (Schützen) were sent into the woods on the Prussian right flank where they fought well but with little impact on the overall outcome of the battle. Prussian line infantry, standing upright and in line in the open, meanwhile, provided target practice to French skirmishers, whose activities were unchecked by the Prussian light infantry. The French did better in their handling of artillery as well as light infantry. The French artillery train was militarised, which meant that the drivers were soldiers and therefore more likely to remain with the guns rather than run off with the horse teams when under fire. The guns were Gribeauval pieces, lighter than Prussian guns of the same calibre. Taken together, this permitted the French to handle their artillery very aggressively, deploying the guns close to the Prussian battalions and pouring canister fire into them from close range. The light infantry not only protected the guns; it also served as a skirmisher screen for the line infantry and closed in on Prussian infantry by adroit use of terrain and buildings.

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Not only were there problems with the nuts and bolts of Prussian tactics, but several fatal mistakes were made which, on their own, alone might have been sufficient to cause a Prussian defeat. At Jena, Hohenlohe failed to reposition his army from facing southwards to facing westwards. It was also strung out so that the Prussian divisions were unable to deploy together facing the enemy and were defeated one after another. At Auerstädt, divisions were also fed into battle piecemeal, permitting Davout’s inferior numbers to take on one division at a time. In the same battle, Blücher managed to lose the advantage of superior numbers of Prussian cavalry by conducting unsupported charges into French infantry and artillery fire until his troopers broke and left the battlefield. Not only were there mistakes in the failure to make proper use of divisions, the misuse of light infantry and errors of judgement by individual generals, but sheer bad luck also had an impact. When Brunswick was seriously wounded by a skirmisher’s musket ball at the village of Hassenhausen in the early stages of the battle, centralised command and control broke down with fatal consequences. The French, it seems, were tactically more proficient, particularly at Auerstädt where Davout prevailed against greatly superior numbers, not least by feeding his troops into battle at a more rapid rate than the Prussians. Mistakes were made, for instance when Ney and his vanguard rushed headlong into strong Prussian forces, but they could be rectified due to superior French flexibility. In spite of its weaknesses, the Prussian army fought well and bravely overall, and its performance in terms of morale and tactical effectiveness was creditable against such an experienced and battle-hardened enemy as the Grande Armée. How, then, can the disintegration of the Prussian field army in the aftermath of the two battles be explained? The most likely explanation is that given its lack of realistic training and recent war experience, and with little trust in the competence of its generals, the cumulative effect of chaos, friction and defeat had a disproportionate impact on the army’s cohesion and will to fight. Jena and Auerstädt would just have been two battles lost, rather than a kind of Prussian Götterdämmerung, had it not been for this breakdown of cohesion, heightened of course by a vigorous French pursuit which chased the remnants of the Prussian army all the way to the Baltic. Fighting against a different opponent, the Prussian army could have retreated, licked its wounds and learnt its lessons. Fighting Napoleon and his Grande Armée at its peak, however, it did not enjoy the opportunity of a learning curve. When Frederick the Great had suffered the catastrophic defeat at Kunersdorf during the Seven Years War (1756–63) in 1759, he

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believed that all was lost. His army, however, battle-hardened, and having seen both triumphs and defeats, reorganised itself.29 It was impossible to repeat this ‘miracle’ in 1806 because neither the Russians nor the Austrians unleashed the kind of devastating pursuit that the Prussians experienced after Jena and Auerstädt. When we compare the aftermaths of Kunersdorf and Jena, the Prussian army of 1806 emerges with some credit. Furthermore, while most fortress commanders and some field commanders failed in their duty, some fortresses held, elements of the fleeing Prussian army turned and fought at Altenzaun and Lübeck, and the Prussian participation on the snowy fields of Eylau in 1807 showed that they still had some fight left.

Conclusion It is clear that there is little evidence to support a more positive picture of the Prussian army, despite the recent historical interest in pre-1806 reform. The army was indeed essentially sound, but its training and organisation remained deficient. Defeat was largely due to a combination of unfortunate strategic circumstances, lack of recent war experience, individual mistakes by staff officers and generals, and, last but not least, a truly formidable enemy. The scale of that defeat can be largely attributed to a snowballing effect of increasing demoralisation and chaos in the hours, days and weeks after Jena and Auerstädt. Given the tactical and operational level strengths and weaknesses of both sides, the Prussian army might have hoped to achieve, at best, a draw in battle against the French; but there was very little likelihood that it could have emerged victorious from the campaign.

Notes 1. C. Jany, Geschichte der preußischen Armee vom 15. Jahrhundert bis 1914 (4 vols., Osnabrück, 1967), vol. 3; W.O. Shanahan, Prussian Military Reforms 1786–1813 (New York, 1945); C.E. White, The Enlightened Soldier: Scharnhorst and the ‘Militärische Gesellschaft’ in Berlin 1801–1805 (New York, 1989); P. Hofschröer, ‘The Prussian Army of 1806: Was it a Museum Piece?’, paper presented at the 34th Consortium on Revolutionary Europe, High Point, North Carolina, 2004. 2. French historiography has tended, perhaps understandably, to concentrate on Napoleon’s tactical and operational strengths. See, for instance, Arnaud Blin, Iéna (Paris, 2003). 3. This did not help the Hessian elector who lost his land in 1807 when Napoleon created the Kingdom of Westphalia. For Prussian diplomacy see C.P.G. von Clausewitz, Nachrichten über Preußen in seiner großen Katastrophe,

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4. 5.

6.

7.

8.

(2nd edition, Berlin, 1908), p. 60; Lettow-Vorbeck, Oscar von, Der Krieg von 1806 und 1807 (Berlin, 1891–1896), 4 vols., I, pp. 17, 96, 108, 121, 148, 156, II, pp. 37–9; F.L. Petre, Napoleon’s Conquest of Prussia: 1806 (London, 1972), pp. 4–13; B. Simms, The Impact of Napoleon: Prussian High Politics, Foreign Policy and the Crisis of the Executive, 1797–1806 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); L. Kittstein, Politik im Zeitalter der Revolution. Untersuchungen zur preußischen Staatlichkeit 1792–1807 (Stuttgart, 2003). For the lack of an integrated strategy see Clausewitz, Nachrichten, p. 75. Also Lettow-Vorbeck, Krieg, I, pp. 148, 154. For Napoleon’s diplomacy see Napoleon to Murat, 30 July 1806, Napoleon, Correspondance de Napoléon Ier: Publiée par ordre de l’Empereur Napoléon III (32 vols., Paris, 1858–1870), XIII, nos. 10575, 10586–7, 10604, 10757, 10760, 10764–10767, 10772, 10856, 10920, 10926, 10956, 10975, 10990; A.A.R. de Saint Chamans, Mémoires du Général de Saint Chamans (Paris: Plon, 1896), p. 41. Also D. Gates, The Napoleonic Wars: 1803–1815 (London, 1997), p. 51; Lettow-Vorbeck, I, pp. 12–17, 27, 32, 120–2, 126, II, pp. 37–9; J. MarshallCornwall, Napoleon as Military Commander (London, 1967), pp. 146–8; Petre, Conquest, pp. 189–90; S.T. Ross, European Diplomatic History: 1789–1815 (New York, 1969), pp. 239–41, 254, 256. On Prussia’s lacklustre mobilisation see Clausewitz, Nachrichten, pp. 59, 61, and the contemporary accounts in W. von Herwig, H Hollender (ed.), Erinnerungen und Briefe eines preußischen Offiziers aus den Jahren 1805 bis 1815 (Kattowitz, 1913), pp. 14–15; F Meusel (ed.), Friedrich August Ludwig von der Marwitz: Ein märkischer Edelmann im Zeitalter der Befreiungskriege (2 vols., Berlin, 1908), I, pp. 294–5, 301; O.A.J.J. Rühle von Lilienstern, Bericht eines Augenzeugen von dem Feldzuge, (2nd ed., 2 vols., Tübingen, 1809), I, pp. 6, 14, 28–9. Also LettowVorbeck, Krieg, I, pp. 96, 154. On the disposition of Prussian forces see Clausewitz, Nachrichten, pp. 63–6; W. von Unger (ed.), Denkwürdigkeiten des Generals August Freiherrn Hiller von Gaertringen (Berlin, 1912), p. 75. Also J.R. Elting and V.J. Esposito, Military History and Atlas of the Napoleonic Wars (2nd ed., London, 1999), p. 58; Petre, Conquest, p. 46. French deception efforts offer only a partial excuse for the dissipation of Prussian military strength. For French manpower mobilisation see Napoleon, Correspondance, XIII, nos. 10743, 10756; Napoleon to General Dejean, 5 September 1806, E Picard and L Tuetey (eds.) Correspondance inédite de Napoléon Ier (4 vols., Paris, 1912–13), I, no. 627. Also J.R. Elting, Swords around a Throne: Napoleon’s Grande Armée (London, 1988), pp. 40, 321; G. Lefebvre, Napoleon: 1799– 1807 (London, 1969), p. 217; Lettow-Vorbeck, Krieg, I, p. 61. On the strength and disposition of French forces see Elting and Esposito, Atlas, p. 57. For the strategic disposition of troops see Napoleon, Correspondance, XIII, nos. 10688, 10787–10789, 10809, 10817, 10915, 10964. Also J. Colin, The Transformations of War (London, 1912), pp. 233, 235; Marshall-Cornwall, Napoleon, p. 151; Petre, Conquest, p. 46. For Prussia’s burdensome alliances see Hiller, Denkwürdigkeiten, p. 75. Conteporary views in W. Kayser (ed.), Jena 1806: Aus gleichzeitigen Tagebuchaufzeichnungen (Berlin, 1937), p. 42; F.C.F. von Müffling, Operationsplan der Preußisch-Sächsischen Armee im Jahr 1806 (Weimar, 1807), p. 3. Also Lettow-Vorbeck, Krieg, I, p. 155; Petre, Conquest, p. 46. If Prussia had not occupied Saxony, the latter might have joined the French.

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9. For Napoleon’s operations plan see P.J. Foucart (ed.), Campagne de Prusse (2 vols., Paris, 1887), I pp. 281–2, 403, 426, 457; Napoleon, Correspondance, XIII, nos. 10744, 10757, 10760, 10787, 10792, 10817–10818, 10864, 10909, 10920, 10926, 10929, 10941, 10976; D.G. Chandler (ed.), The Military Maxims of Napoleon (London, 1987), pp. 55–8, 62, 64, 76. Also Colin, Transformations, pp. 229–32; Lettow-Vorbeck, Krieg, I, pp. 73, 123–6,131–2, 135, 144–5, 176–8, 218; Marshall-Cornwall, Napoleon, pp. 151, 156; Petre, Conquest, pp. 49–56, 62–3, 79, 169; J.B.M.E. Vachée, Napoleon at Work (London, 1914), pp. 7, 17, 20, 22. 10. For the impact of Prussian economic weakness on military effectiveness see Clausewitz, Nachrichten, p. 12. It was also noted by earlier military commentators: C. Jany, Der Preussische Kavalleriedienst vor 1806 (Berlin, 1906), p. 15; F.N. Maude, The Jena Campaign 1806 (London: Swan, 1909), p. 15, and taken up in standard handbooks: R. Wohlfeil, Vom Stehenden Heer des Absolutismus zur Allgemeinen Wehrpflicht: 1789–1814, vol. II of Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt (ed.), Handbuch zur deutschen Militärgeschichte: 1648–1939 (Frankfurt, 1964–79), p. 161. For the shortcomings of Prussian finances and their impact on the state’s ability to make war see W. Real, ‘Die preußischen Staatsfinanzen und die Anbahnung des Sonderfriedens von Basel, 1795’, Forschungen zur Brandenburgischen und Preußischen Geschichte, NF 1 (1991), 53–100. 11. For the relations between army commanders and their chiefs of staff see Clausewitz, Nachrichten, p. 23; F.C.F. von Müffling, Aus meinem Leben (Berlin: Mittler, 1851), pp. 10, 16. Also Lettow-Vorbeck, Krieg, I, pp. 115, 268. For contemporary comments on Brunswick’s lack of authority see Clausewitz, Nachrichten, pp. 18–19; W.L.V. Henckel von Donnersmarck, Erinnerungen aus meinem Leben (Zerbst, 1846), p. 42; Müffling, Leben, p. 15. Also Lettow-Vorbeck, Krieg, I, pp. 118–19, 156, 159; Marshall-Cornwall, Napoleon, p. 156. For councils of war see D. Schmidt (ed.), Erinnerungen aus dem Leben des Generalfeldmarschalls Hermann von Boyen, (2 vols., Berlin, 1990), I, p. 131; Müffling, Leben, p. 19. Also Marshall-Cornwall, Napoleon, p. 157; Petre, Conquest, p. 65. For political rifts in Prussian high command see Müffling, Leben, pp. 15–16; Scharnhorst to Rüchel, 27 September 1806, and Scharnhorst to his daughter, 6 October 1806, in K. Linnebach (ed.), Scharnhorsts Briefe (Munich, 1914), p. 178, p. 281. For Hohenlohe’s insubordination see Rühle, Bericht, I, p. 88. Also Lettow-Vorbeck, Krieg, I, pp. 157, 201–6; Petre, Conquest, pp. 88–9. 12. For operational command and control procedures and their impact on operational speed and flexibility see F.W.J.F.S. Leszczynski (ed.), Kriegerleben des Johann von Borcke (Berlin, 1888), p. 20; Rühle, Bericht, I, p. 85. Also Lettow-Vorbeck, Krieg, I, pp. 115–16, 299, 338; Marshall-Cornwall, Napoleon, p. 157; Petre, Conquest, p. 38. 13. For staff routines and Napoleon’s style of command see D.A.P.F.C.H. Thiébault, Manuel général du service des états-majors généraux et divisionnaires dans les armées (Paris: Magimel, 1813). Also Elting, Swords, pp. 1–3, 68, 90, 96–8; H. Giehrl, Der Feldherr Napoleon als Organisator (Berlin, 1911), pp. 28–32; Marshall-Cornwall, Napoleon, p. 159; Petre, Conquest, p. 28; Vachée, Napoleon, pp. 10, 149. 14. Since army corps were operationally semi-independent mini-armies, their manoeuvres could be coordinated in a variety of combinations. For an

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15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

explanation of the divisional and the corps system see Claus Telp, The Evolution of Operational Art From Frederick the Great to Napoleon, 1740–1813 (London, 2005). For the organisation and work of the Prussian general staff see Clausewitz, Nachrichten, pp. 28–30; Müffling, Leben, pp. 6–9; Rühle, Bericht, I, p. 36. Also Marshall-Cornwall, Napoleon, p. 156; Petre, Conquest, pp. 37–8; H. Stübig, Scharnhorst: Die Reform des preußischen Heeres (Göttingen, 1988), pp. 53–5. For contemporary accounts of Prussian staff failures see F. Pflug (ed.), Von Auerstädt bis Bellealliance: Nach den Erinnerungen eines preußischen Veteranen (2 vols., Berlin, no date), I, pp. 4–5; F.M. Kircheisen (ed.), Wider Napoleon! Ein deutsches Reiterleben: 1806–1815 (2 vols., Stuttgart, 1911), I, 92; M. von Unruh (ed.), Von Jena bis Neisse (Leipzig: Wigand, 1904), p. 12; Henckel, Erinnerungen, pp. 41, 45; Marwitz, Edelmann, I, pp. 234, 237–8; Marwitz, Jena, 1806. Aus gleichzeitigen Tagebuchaufzeichnungen (Berlin, 1937), pp. 26, 30, 35; Rühle, Bericht, I, p. 23; C. Troeger (ed.), Lebenserinnerungen des Generalleutnants Karl von Wedel (2 vols., Berlin, 1911), I, pp. 35, 37. Also Lettow-Vorbeck, Krieg, I, pp. 163, 230, 290, II, pp. 12–13. It must also be noted, though, that Prussian staff officers had an additional work load, such as staking out camps, organizing rear supply, and other tasks that were handled by others in the French army. On the structure of imperial headquarters and the general staff see M. van Creveld, Command in War (Cambridge, Mass., 1985), pp. 66–71; Elting, Swords, pp. 83–92; Giehrl, Feldherr, p. 27; Vachée, Napoleon, pp. 76–147. On the speed of staffwork see Creveld, Command, pp. 60–2, 88; Petre, Conquest, pp. 26–8; Vachée, Napoleon, p. 72. For mistakes in French staffwork see Berthier to Murat, 12 October 1806, Foucart, Campagne, I, p. 518; Napoleon, Correspondance, XIII, no. 10983. Also Lettow-Vorbeck, Krieg, I, pp. 129, 254; Vachée, Napoleon, p. 62. For contemporary accounts of the Prussian supply system see Major Eberhardt to his wife, 3 October 1806, in M. von Eberhardt (ed.), Aus Preußens schwerer Zeit: Briefe und Aufzeichnungen meines Urgroßvaters und Großvaters (Berlin, 1907), p. 49; Marwitz, Jena, pp. 33, 42; Rühle, Bericht, I, pp. 36, 89, 124. Also M. Kiesling, Geschichte der Organisation und Bekleidung des Trains der königlich- preussischen Armee: 1740–1888 (Berlin, 1889), pp. 10, 12; LettowVorbeck, Krieg, I, pp. 59–60, 208, 262–2, 289, II, p. 19; O. Meixner, Historischer Rückblick auf die Verpflegung der Armeen im Felde (2 vols., Vienna, 1895), I, pp. 72–3, 75; H. de Nanteuil, ‘Logistische Probleme der napoleonischen Kriegführung’, in W. von Groote and K.-J. Müller (eds.), Napoleon I. und das Militärwesen seiner Zeit (Freiburg: Rombach, 1968), pp. 37–65, at p. 65. For the baggage train and camp-followers see Borcke, Kriegerleben, p. 368; Boyen, Erinnerungen, I, pp. 132, 136; R. E. P. J. de Fezensac, Souvenirs militaires de 1804 à 1814 (Paris, 1863), p. 108; Prussia, Reglement für die königlichpreußische Infanterie (Berlin, 1788), pp. 382–91, 396–8; L. von Weltzien (ed.), Memoiren des königlich preußischen Generals der Infanterie Ludwig von Reiche (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1857), pp. 225–6; Rühle, Bericht, I, p. 37. Also Jany, Kavalleriedienst, pp. 62, 68–9; Lettow-Vorbeck, Krieg, I, p. 52; Meixner, Verpflegung, I, pp. 72–3. For the abundance of local resources see Soult to Napoleon, 10 October 1806, Foucart, Campagne, I, p. 484; F. Masson (ed.), Souvenirs du Capitaine Parquin (Paris: Boussod, 1892), p. 16. Also Creveld, Command, pp. 60, 148–9;

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20.

21.

22.

23.

24.

25.

A. Pernot, Apercu historique sur le service des transports militaires (Paris, 1894), pp. 121, 129, 131. For requisitioning see Foucart, Campagne, I, pp. 450, 481, 574–5, 606; Napoleon, Correspondance, XIII, no. 10995. For the supply train see Berthier to General Songis, 1 October 1806, in M. Dumas, Précis des événements militaires, ou Essais historiques sur les campagnes de 1799 à 1814 (19 vols., Paris, 1817–1826), XV, p. 463; Napoleon, Correspondance, XIII, no. 10758; Decrees 3 April 1800 and 15 April 1806 in T.E. Thouvenin, Historique général du train des équipages Militaires (Paris: Berger-Levrault, 1900), pp. 27–8. Also Elting, Swords, p. 563; Lettow-Vorbeck, Krieg, I, p. 64; Elting, Swords, p. 565; Nanteuil, ‘Logistische Probleme’, p. 38. In modern military parlance, this ability to continuously stay ahead of the enemy and force him into a reactive, and eventually ineffective posture, is expressed by the OODA loop theory. For Prussian reconnaissance and military intelligence see Clausewitz, Nachrichten, p. 100; Marwitz, Jena, p. 33; Müffling, Operationsplan, pp. 34–6; Müffling, Leben, p. 14; Rühle, Bericht, I, pp. 38, 133; Scharnhorst to his daughter, 2 October 1806, Scharnhorst, Briefe, p. 185. Also Elting and Esposito, Atlas, p. 58; Lettow-Vorbeck, Krieg, I, pp. 170, 267, 288, 290, 293, 296, 324, 331–2, 336–7; Petre, Conquest, p. 118. For French reconnaissance and military intelligence see L.C.E.J.C. Davout (ed.), Opérations du 3e Corps: 1806–1807 (Paris: Lévy, 1896), p. 13; Foucart, Campagne, I, pp. 60, 69–70, 92, 143, 145–6, 188–9, 191, 247, 302–3; Baron de Marbot, Memoirs (London, 1907), p. 433; Napoleon, Correspondance, XIII, nos. 10744, 10822, 10854–10855; Napoleon, Military Maxims, p. 81. Also Creveld, Command, pp. 66–7; Elting, Swords, pp. 116–18; Giehrl, Feldherr, pp. 45, 52–3; Marshall-Cornwall, Napoleon, p. 152. The fear that individual foraging might undermine discipline was not unwarranted. French marshals and officers struggled to keep their men in check. See Davout, Opérations, p. 60; Foucart, Campagne, I, pp. 231, 481; Saint Chamans, Mémoires, p. 34. Also Lettow-Vorbeck, Krieg, I, pp. 74–5; Petre, Conquest, pp. 222–3; Vachée, Napoleon, pp. 235–6. For Prussian morale and discipline during the campaign see Pflug (ed.), Erinnerungen, I, p. 5; Kircheisen (ed.), Reiterleben, I, pp. 61, 76–8, 102, 105–6, 152–4, 163; Carl Friedrich von Blumen, Von Jena bis Neisse (Leipzig, 1904), pp. 9–10, 25, 34; Boyen, Erinnerungen, I, p. 138; Clausewitz, Nachrichten, pp. 96, 136; Henckel, Erinnerungen, p. 51; Herwig, Erinnerungen, p. 12; Marwitz, Jena, pp. 28, 33, 44, 48–9; Rühle, Bericht, I, pp. 114–8, 125, 137; K. von Suckow, Aus meinem Soldatenleben (Stuttgart, 1862), p. 63; Wedel, Lebenserinnerungen, I, pp. 35, 42, 55–65. Also Hans Delbrück, Aufgewählte Aufsätze (Berlin, 1902), p. 228; Lettow-Vorbeck, Krieg, I, pp. 49, 53, 76, 265, 267, 272–3, 286, 298, 322, 334–5, 339, II, p. 19; Maude, Jena, pp. 94, 102, 155, 188; Petre, Conquest, pp. 111, 196. For positive elements of motivation see J. Fortescue (ed.), The Note-Books of Captain Coignet, Soldier of the Empire: 1799–1816 (London, 1986), p. 102; Robert Guillemard, Adventures of a French Serjeant during his Campaigns in Italy, Spain, Germany and Russia from 1805 to 1823 (London, 1826), pp. 11–13; Marbot, Memoirs, pp. 176, 355, 529; A. Buloz (ed.), Memoirs of General Count Rapp (London, 1823), pp. 101–2. Also Elting, Swords, pp. 63, 187, 195, 202, 347–8; Lefebvre, Napoleon, p. 219; Lettow-Vorbeck, Krieg, I, p. 62; Petre,

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26. 27.

28.

29.

Conquest, p. 19; Robert van Roosbroeck, ‘Der Einfluß Napoleons und seines Militärsystems auf die preußische Kriegführung und Kriegstheorie’, in Groote and Müller (eds.) Napoleon I. und das Militärwesen seiner Zeit, pp. 183–213, p. 186; Vachée, Napoleon, pp. 213, 224, 231. On the composition of divisions see Lettow-Vorbeck, Krieg, I, Annex, no. 1. On Prussian tactical organization and tactics see C. von der Goltz, Roßbach und Jena: Studien über die Zustände und das geistige Leben in der preußischen Armee während der Übergangszeit vom XVIII. zum XIX. Jahrhundert (Berlin, 1883), pp. 112, 129; Lettow-Vorbeck, Krieg, I, pp. 45, 56–7,267, 379, 387–8. For Prussian tactics see Pflug (ed.), Erinnerungen, I, pp. 6, 9–10, 12; Kircheisen (ed.), Reiterleben, I, pp. 92–4, 129, 154; Blumen, Jena, pp. 23–4; Henckel, Erinnerungen, p. 46; reports of various cavalry regiments reproduced in Jany, Kavalleriedienst, p. 83, 92–6; Marwitz, Jena, pp. 37, 54, 57–8; Rühle, Bericht, I, pp. 178, 182; Scharnhorst to his daughter, 16 October 1806, Scharnhorst, Briefe, pp. 286–7; Wedel, Lebenserinnerungen, I, pp. 40–1. Also LettowVorbeck, Krieg, I, pp. 357, 366, 372, 374, 385, 389, 391–3, 404; Maude, Jena, p. 157; Petre, Conquest, pp. 135, 138, 155, 157, 159, 161, 178. For French tactical organisation see Napoleon, Correspondance, XIII, no. 10734. Also Elting, Swords, pp. 231–2, 250–8; Lettow-Vorbeck, Krieg, I, Annex, no. 3. J. Kunisch, Das Mirakel des Hauses Brandenburg. Studien zum Verhältnis von kabinettspolitik und Kriegführung im Zeitalter des Siebenjährigen Krieges (Munich, 1978).

9 Napoleon’s Second Sacre? Iéna and the Ceremonial Translation of Frederick the Great’s Insignia in 1807 Thomas Biskup

By the end of 1806, and within only a few months, Napoleon had completely overthrown the political order of central Europe. In summer, the Confederation of the Rhine had been set up under French domination, and the Holy Roman Empire had been dissolved; in autumn, Prussia, the only great power that had as yet remained untouched by the Napoleonic Wars, had virtually collapsed after the simultaneous French victories at Jena and Auerstädt. As a consequence, much of North Germany, until then ‘neutralised’ under Prussian hegemony, was integrated into the French domain, and in the peace treaty of Tilsit, concluded in the following year, Prussia was reduced to a second-rank power. Napoleon, after beating the Habsburg Monarchy in the previous year, was now indisputedly master of Germany. Well into the second half of the twentieth century, German historians considered the establishment of the Second Reich in 1871 as the apogee of German history, and they were primarily interested in the Prussian bit of the story; in German textbooks, ‘1806’ above all signalled the end of the old, Frederician Prussia. The defeat suffered by the Hohenzollern state that was to unify Germany under Wilhelm I and Bismarck in a war against yet another Napoleon had supposedly led to a rejuvenation of Prussian forces in the so-called ‘reform era’, which then allowed Prussia to go on to fulfil its national destiny.1 In contrast to this grandiose scheme of things, the end of the fading Holy Roman Empire had indeed seemed the trifle famously, and deceptively, described by Goethe. In the decades following the end of the Third 172

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Reich, however, historians have come to view the Second Reich, and Prussia’s role in it, much more critically, and have abandoned this nationalistic teleology (and with it, to a degree, Prussian history in general). Instead, the Holy Roman Empire has been rehabilitated as a successful political system ensuring at least a minimum of peace and legal security almost to the very end. That it was overthrown now appears as a result of Napoleon’s violent intervention rather than the inevitable outcome of irreversible decline.2 As a consequence, the end of the Holy Roman Empire, and the ways it was perceived and experienced by contemporaries, were at the centre of most of the anniversary conferences and symposia held in Germany and Britain in 2006, whereas Prussia’s defeat against Napoleon was rather left to amateur historians re-enacting the battle of Jena on 14 October.3 It was not, however, the dissolution of the thousand-year-old Holy Roman Empire that had featured prominently in the propaganda of Napoleonic France, but the victory over Prussia, which had appeared on the European stage much more recently. Only half a century before Jena and Auerstädt, Prussia’s third king, Frederick the Great, had elevated the Hohenzollern territories to great power status through a series of wars of aggression, and established the Prussian military monarchy as a model of efficiency until revolutionary France again shook up the European political order.4 This rise of Prussia had come at the cost of France, and was epitomised by Frederick’s surprise victory over the French army at Rossbach during the Seven Years War, following which Prussia took the place of France as the continent’s leading military power. For the Napoleonic propaganda machine, the éclat provided by victory over the leading military power of the eighteenth century clearly mattered more than the legal act confirming the end of the seemingly moribund ‘Old Empire’. Only a few miles away from the historic battlefield of Rossbach, Napoleon had now redressed the balance, and he went on to use his victory not only to humiliate Prussia but, more importantly, to stabilise his domestic position two years after the Empire had been established. He first made sure that the victory was his alone by reducing the two separate battles of Jena and Auerstädt to a single encounter, ‘Iéna’, in the process sidelining Marshal Davout, whose corps had actually beaten the main body of the Prussian army at Auerstädt.5 Second, he established a connection between the battles of Rossbach and Iéna, and between himself and Frederick the Great, which was to become a dominant theme of Napoleonic propaganda over the course of the following year. The first allowed Napoleon to bring together the old France and the

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new under his rule; the second to place himself in a tradition of great warrior monarchs, thus symbolically reconciling all generations of Frenchmen, those who had served under the Bourbons, during the Revolution and under himself. In this process the notion of glory was central. The victory over Prussia provided the occasion to display the entire panoply of Napoleonic propaganda, ranging from bulletins to ceremonies and exhibitions, whose analysis permits greater insight into Napoleon’s strategies of propaganda and legitimation. In historiography, these have long received much less attention than the figure of Napoleon himself. Robert Holtman’s work on Napoleonic propaganda places a particular focus on press policy, and while the interplay of various genres and media, from press to art patronage, and from monument-building to ceremonial, has in recent years attracted the attention of a number of historians, these have tended to concentrate on Napoleon’s patronage of the arts.6 Once he had abolished the festivals of the French Revolution, Napoleon is usually considered to have been averse to ceremonial, supposedly preferring ‘eternal’ monuments in stone over the more ‘ephemeral’ festivals.7 The ceremonial transfer of Frederick the Great’s sword to the Hôtel des Invalides in May 1807, which is discussed in this chapter, will hopefully contribute to a reassessment of the festival policy of Napoleonic France.

Rossbach, Frederick and Prussia in eighteenth-century France Ever since the Seven Years War, Prussia had held a particular place in the perception of the French public.8 Britain may have been the great imperial rival, feared for its naval prowess and global reach; but it was the Prussia of the Francophile Frederick the Great that was seen as standing in a particular relationship with Bourbon France. Here, the battle of Rossbach in November 1757 had been a crucial moment for the perception of Prussia as well as for the image of the Bourbon monarchy in France. Militarily, the defeat of the Prince de Soubise’s forces at the hands of Frederick the Great’s smaller army was not a crucial battle that decided the outcome of the war. However, Rossbach was highly symbolic of France’s inability to gain significant successes against what still looked like an isolated medium-sized German power, even although the Bourbons were, on this occasion, allied with the Habsburg Monarchy, Russia and the Holy Roman Empire. After Rossbach, French troops did not threaten Prussia’s heartlands again for half a century, and they were

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again held at bay by numerically inferior Prussian, Hanoverian, Hessian and Brunswick forces for the remainder of the Seven Years War. The effects of Rossbach were thus moral and political rather than strategic, but they left very deep wounds.9 Unlike the war against Britain, the alliance with the Habsburgs and the war against Prussia had never found the unanimous support of the French elite. Frederick of Prussia’s carefully-cultivated ‘friendships’ with French philosophes such as Voltaire and Maupertuis seemed to herald the reign of a roi-philosophe unimaginable in Bourbon France. Partly because of these personal links, and partly out of diplomatic considerations, a faction of the French elite had continued to argue in favour of a Prussian alliance throughout the war in spite of the renversement des alliances.10 After Rossbach, however, it was not only writers who had been personally wooed by Frederick who welcomed his victory over the French. An entire wave of ‘Soubisiades’ appeared in Paris, songs and poems that mocked the French commander’s incompetence and linked the military disaster directly with the court and monarchy. Soubise, after all, was a protégé of the king’s mistress, Mme. de Pompadour, who continued to protect the failed commander despite further setbacks, and even managed to secure him the coveted title of Marshal of France. Frederick had beaten a general who above all was a creature of ‘la marquise’, making the Prussian monarch an ally of all those Parisians who were hostile to La Pompadour. Rossbach, moreover, directed criticisms at the French king, whose friendship with Soubise was well-known. Several pamphlets contrasted Frederick, who, at the head of his armies, shared all the hardships of war with his soldiers, with Louis XV, who was accused of preferring to watch things unfold from a safe distance while pursuing his pleasure at Versailles. In poems of unprecedented aggression which circulated in Paris from the winter of 1758, he was attacked as an ‘incestuous adulterer’ who should really become ‘Frederick’s boy’. The French minister Cardinal Bernis wrote that in Paris people were madly in love with the King of Prussia, and Marshal de Belle-Isle expressed the view that ‘half of Paris’ was in favour of Frederick rather than the French.11 Although this ‘Prussomania’, as Edmond Dziembowski has recently dubbed it, was largely a function of Austrophobia, it was more than an outlet for public disaffection with the new alliance and the way the war was conducted, and more than nostalgia for a monarch leading his armies in person. It provided a rallying point for very different critics of the Bourbon monarchy, who upheld Frederick as a positive model of kingship. In particular, many army officers came to see Prussia as a model for military reforms, with Rossbach accelerating a process that

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had started as early as the 1740s.12 The Prussian army was now considered the best-trained army in Europe, and the fact that the king himself led it lent conviction to the concept of a military monarchy, even if, by the mid-eighteenth century, Frederick’s personal generalship was an exception rather than the rule. After George II’s victory at Dettingen in 1743, Frederick was the only major monarch left combining the roles of monarch and commander-in-chief. It has been pointed out that Napoleon indulged in something of a Frederician cult himself; but this must be seen as typical of many officers who had started their careers in the French army before the Revolution, and who were disaffected by the Bourbon regime. Unhappy with the existing military and political establishment built on patronage, they celebrated Frederick of Prussia, happy to overlook the fact that high birth and royal patronage were also the cornerstone of any career in the Prussian army.13 Although after the Seven Years War the close links between Frederick and major French philosophes increasingly faded, and Diderot’s initial enthusiasm for the roi-philosophe cooled, even republican-minded thinkers such as Rousseau and Mably admired the Prussian king to a degree.14 Frederick’s support of Voltaire in the Calas affair re-affirmed their image of Prussia as a model of tolerance and philosophical kingship, as well as being a successful military power. Substantial parts of the French elite, among them professional diplomats like Favier, continued to see Prussia as a potential ally from the time of the renversement des alliances to the Revolution and beyond.15 As late as 1790, indeed, Mallet de Genève urged readers of the Journal Encyclopédique to ‘imitate Frederick: his hand at once holds the pen of writers and the sceptre of kings’.16 In the spring of 1792, the Duke of Brunswick, Frederick the Great’s nephew and Prussia’s most senior general, was seriously considered as the new commander-in-chief of the French revolutionary army.17 During the aborted Prussian participation in the Wars of the French Revolution, Prussian forces were never decisively beaten by the French, and after the Peace of Basel in 1795, Prussia was again courted by the French Republic. Napoleon, too, had initially shown great respect for Prussian arms, though by 1806, diplomatic wavering had begun to undermine Prussia’s reputation.18 More than any French reverse at the hands of British forces, Rossbach had linked the Bourbon regime of Louis XV with defeat, and after the last hurrah of the Bourbon army at Fontenoy, Rossbach remained a symbol of national decline well into the 1790s. It signalled the moral bankruptcy of an aristocratic clique, supposedly steered by a powerful woman and taking everything for itself while forgetting the nation; a patriotic sentiment which after 1789 came to be exploited by

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the revolutionaries when Marie-Antoinette took the place once symbolically occupied by La Pompadour.19 Where Madame de Pompadour and Marie-Antoinette and their protégés – real or imagined – were taken to stand for everything despicable in Ancien Régime France, Frederick was held up as a lone model of strong, personal royal leadership, an idealisation of monarchy at a time when almost all other models of political virtue celebrated in France were figures from ancient republicanism, such as the younger and the older Brutus.

Rossbach and Iéna, Frederick and Napoleon Following the battles of Jena and Auerstädt, Napoleon set out to build on this supposed link between Prussian and French history. On the day after the battle, he wrote in the 5th army bulletin that ‘The battle of Iéna has wiped away the disgrace of Rossbach’. 20 One day later, while his army was already on the march to Berlin, Napoleon visited the battlefield of Rossbach and had the so-called Rossbach column removed, the monument that had been erected to commemorate the Prussian victory over the French. The episode was chronicled in the Moniteur, and later commemorated in Vafflard’s monumental history painting. 21 When the Emperor approached Potsdam and Berlin in the weeks that followed, his bulletins expanded on the theme, seizing on the supposedly related fates of Prussia and France, but turning the traditional narrative on its head. Now it was the Prussians who, suffering from the same symptoms that had once characterised Bourbon France, had slumped into decline. This was articulated in a strictly gendered language defining politics as a ‘rational’ sphere of male activity where any female influence was seen as a dangerous intrusion of emotional instability. Prussia, Napoleon declared, owed this disaster to the influence of Queen Louisa, who had been allowed by a ‘good’ but ‘weak’ king to take command of Prussian politics.22 In Napoleon’s bulletins, she appears as a beautiful but naive woman, scheming and meddling in politics because illicit love had led her astray. By falling for Tsar Alexander of Russia (Prussia’s ally in the 1806/7 campaign) during his visit to Potsdam in 1805, she had become ‘turbulent and war-like’ in a kind of ‘revolution’,23 had managed to dominate her royal husband and thus led her country into a fateful war. Just as during the Seven Years War the Pompadour’s influence had been common knowledge, Napoleon maintained that the queen’s role was similarly well-known: ‘Everyone is witness that the Queen is the author of the difficulties that the Prussian

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nation suffers. Everywhere we hear it said, “A year ago she was so good, so sweet; but since that fatal meeting with the Emperor Alexander how she has changed!” ’ Worse still, this fateful intrusion of ‘female emotion’ into ‘rational politics’ had taken place by the side of Frederick the Great’s sarcophagus when in November 1805, the Tsar, the king and queen of Prussia had met in Potsdam’s Garrison Church and sworn an oath to bring Napoleon to his knees.24 According to the Emperor’s bulletins, it had been left to Napoleon to restore the honour of the great Frederick which had been so damaged by his own kin, to remove his insignia from the unworthy surroundings of that ‘scandalous scene’ and to have them transferred to a site where they would be treated with due respect.25 On entering Potsdam on 24 October, Napoleon visited the Sans-souci Palace and, two days later, Frederick’s tomb, silently paying his respects to the deceased king at the side of his sarcophagus;26 a moment which was not only elaborated on in two bulletins but also popularised in prints, like the one by Jazet and Fontaine, which was based on Marie Nicolas PonceCamus’s painting Napoléon au tombeau du Grand Frédéric. 27 Napoleon also had all statues of Frederick removed from the palaces of Berlin and Potsdam, and brought them to Paris, where he kept one of them in his study. 28 More significantly, the Emperor had Frederick’s sword, belt and ribbon of the Order of the Black Eagle handed over to him, and, a few weeks later, they were brought to Paris by a delegation of the French Senate, which dedicated them to the surviving French veterans of those ill-fated campaigns of the Seven Years War: ‘The old veterans of the army of Hanover will welcome, with a religious respect, everything that belonged to one of the greatest captains in human history’. 29 Far from belittling the contribution made by Frederick, whose Prussia had, after all, collapsed after just one battle, Napoleon preferred to emphasise the Prussian king’s individual ‘greatness’ and to contrast him with his successors and the condition of his state, highlighting that it was only the dead king’s own efforts which had elevated Prussia beyond its station. Standing at Frederick the Great’s tomb, Napoleon thus entered a dialogue between two of the truly great men of history, united not by national affiliation but by their share in a glory that transcended time and countries. Napoleon distinguished between the ‘great man’ on the one hand, and the Prussian nation on the other: Prussia for him was no more than an ‘artificial power’ that had been elevated to an eminent position by a set of extraordinary circumstances, and which had lapsed back into its seemingly natural status as a medium-sized power once

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Frederick’s unworthy successors had to make do with the limited resources the country had at its disposal.30 In Napoleonic propaganda during the months that followed, this distinction between great man and nation was not limited to Prussia but extended to history in general. This had two consequences: first, it allowed Napoleon and his propagandists to highlight the importance of Napoleon himself for the greatness of France. Second, it allowed Napoleon to appropriate Frederick for his own purposes, to create a genealogy of truly great as well as legitimate rulers changing the course of history. It was not the Hohenzollern dynasty but Napoleon who appeared as Frederick the Great’s true heir: if Frederick were able to witness the events of 1805–6, Bulletin No. 17 proclaimed, he would rather side with Napoleonic France than with the Prussian monarchy that had proved so unworthy of the dead hero-king: Frederick’s ‘genius, his spirit and his wishes were with the nation that he so much esteemed’.31 This theme was also taken up by the Swiss-German historian Johannes von Müller in January 1807. Müller had originally been employed by the Prussian court to compose a biography of Frederick the Great, and made his name with a celebrated lecture on Frederick in January 1805. Stranded in Berlin when Napoleon invaded Prussia, he was received by the Emperor in November 1806, and three months later took up the theme of historical greatness in the anniversary lecture he gave on Frederick’s birthday in January 1807 at the French authorities’ command.32 In De la gloire de Frédéric, Müller echoed the language of Napoleon’s bulletins, making the same distinction between Prussia and Frederick, who belonged to ‘humankind’ rather than to ‘a particular country, a particular people’.33 The great men in history, after all, were united ‘by victory, by greatness, by power’, and these three had now left Prussia and passed to the European leader who most resembled Frederick, who was of course the French Emperor.

An inclusive ceremony of triumph and reconciliation The ceremonial expression of this transfer of historical greatness was the translation of Frederick’s sword to Paris, as a Latin poem published in Paris duly explained. Having mourned after the demise of the great Frederick, the sword is now happy to be here, and is almost returned to its former glory; it believes it has returned to the hand of its owner. And as often as it had directed the Prussian flags in battle, it now gladly follows the French eagles.34

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The ceremony was part of a series of events celebrating the battle of Iéna, which had started in October 1806 with a Te Deum and a musical work by Lemière de Corvey, La Bataille de Iéna gagnée sur les Prussiens,35 and which culminated in an exhibition of works of art taken from the collections of the king of Prussia and his allies, and opened on the first anniversary of the battle of Iéna in October 1807.36 This exhibition, which both set new art historical standards and constituted a gesture of military triumph, was organised by Napoleon’s Director-General of Fine Arts, Vivant Denon, who had also been present at the translation ceremony earlier in the year. This ceremony was organised by the other half of Napoleon’s propaganda team, Arch-Chancellor Jean-Jacques-Régis de Cambacérès, the ‘second man of the Empire’.37 Indispensable for maintaining control of government in the absence of the Emperor, he also co-ordinated the publication of Napoleon’s bulletins, and, with the help of the Interior Minister and the Grand-Master of Ceremonies, organised most of the official ceremonies of Napoleonic France (as a French diplomat during the Revolution, he had also been subject to a degree of Prussomanie and had pressed for an honourable peace with Prussia in 1794–5).38 The main speaker at the ceremony was another figure central to Napoleon’s propaganda machine, the president of the Corps Législatif and poet Louis (de) Fontanes.39 Having once formed part of the encyclopédistes group of enlightened writers, he used his considerable literary and oratorical skills to heap praise on the Napoleonic regime and became something of a specialist in organising ceremonies with a religious element. Aspiring from the start to reconcile Church and State under a strong Napoleonic monarchy, he had already argued in 1804 in favour of a coronation, the Sacre, to establish the Empire with appropriate solemnity, pointing out that the ‘sceptre, hand of justice, crown, and coronation’ were all of value ‘to move the people and to gain the recognition of Europe’.40 The translation of the sword did justice to these requirements: taking place on Pentecost, and thus characteristically combining Napoleonic ceremony with a religious festival, it was the biggest spectacle Napoleonic France was to see after the Sacre itself.41 It combined elements of Te Deum and ceremonial entry, triumphal parade and coronation, and represented a ceremonial hybrid without precedent as, indeed, the Empire itself remained a hybrid of monarchy and republic. The ceremony took place in the grand chapel of the Hôtel des Invalides, which still housed the 900 veterans of the Seven Years War to whom Napoleon had dedicated Frederick’s sword. With the exception of the Emperor and his commanders, who were still fighting scattered

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Prussian and Russian forces in East Prussia, almost all the French officials and institutions who had been present at the Sacre also participated in the translation ceremony: the Sénat, Conseil d’Etat, Corps Législatif, and Tribunal, the princes, ministers and grand officers of the Empire, who all occupied positions alongside an empty throne representing the absent Emperor. As Napoleon had decreed, two of his Marshals, Moncey and Sérurier, occupied a central position in the ceremony; both men had already played an important ceremonial part in the Sacre.42 The beginning and end of the ceremony were signalled by artillery salutes, and it was framed by processions and triumphal music, composed for the occasion by Charles-François Catel, who, together with Cherubini and Méhul, was instrumental in giving French music a distinctly solemn tone during the First Empire.43 After leaving the Tuileries Palace at midday, the procession, composed of members of the Legion of Honour, the Grand Officers of the Empire, ministers and the Paris municipal government, and accompanied by cries of ‘Vive l’Empereur! Vivent les armées!’, was followed by moving tableaux representing the triumph that had been won: the 280 flags captured from the Prussians; and Marshal Moncey on horseback, carrying Frederick’s sword. Once the procession had reached the Invalides, the conquered flags were carried into the church by veterans of the Seven Years War, and the dignitaries occupied their places in the nave, with Arch-Chancellor Cambacérès, Governor-Marshal Sérurier and the Grand-Maître des Cérémonies sitting near Napoleon’s empty throne. The core of the ceremony was the handover of Frederick’s sword, and the oath sworn by all the veterans present in the church ‘to guard loyally the treasure entrusted to us by His Imperial and Royal Majesty’.44 The sword would remain at the Invalides until March 1814, when it was destroyed by Sérurier before the Allied troops could retake the Napoleonic trophies. To highlight the inclusivity of the ceremony, a triumphal cantata was sung by ‘old warriors, women, young conscripts and the people’. Then, following Fontanes’s speech, Cambacérès handed the sword and decorations over to Marshal Sérurier, proclaiming that ‘Europe preserved a powerful memory’ of the monarch to whom they had belonged. By conquering Prussia, ‘the hero of France’ had added to French glory again, and the dedication of Frederick’s decorations was a new proof of Napoleon’s admiration for his old soldiers, whose proximity in age and spirit to the veterans also found expression in Alexandre VéronBellecourt’s painting Napoléon Ier visite la salle Napoléon à l’infirmerie de l’hotel des Invalides, 11 février 1808.45 No distinction was made between

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the courage of the two groups, the veterans once defeated by Frederick and Napoleon’s own, victorious soldiers. For the defeat at Rossbach, only the incompetent military and political elites of the Old Regime were blamed by Fontanes for ‘that fatal day when the talent of the generals did not match the valour of the soldiers’. Marshal Serurier also emphasised this in his acceptance speech: ‘The fathers were not less brave than the sons. But they did not have the same commander’. Apart from the Bourbon veterans, republican institutions and dignitaries had also been included in the ceremonial transfer of the Prussian trophies, notably the Senate delegation (headed by the old republican François de Neufchâteau, who had organised the festivals of the revolutionary calendar under the Directory), and the former republican general Moncey, who had never had a command under Napoleon but was now charged with carrying Frederick’s sword; like his appointment as a Marshal in 1804, this appears to have been a gesture of reconciliation to the old republicans.46 When Napoleon took yet another step back from the republic by establishing the Imperial nobility during the Prussian campaign, he made another gesture towards republican generals by appointing the old Republican stalwart Lefebvre first: in May 1807, days away from the Paris ceremony, Lefebvre was made Duke of Danzig.47

Indispensable Napoleon In the main speech of the ceremony, Fontanes used the ‘double tale’, as he called it, of recent French and Prussian history to focus on the theme already taken up by Napoleon’s bulletins: the importance of the great man for the security and stability of a new monarchy. Where Frederick the Great had made Brandenburg-Prussia a great power through his ‘audacious and circumspect genius’ alone, the ‘hero’ Napoleon had rescued France from inner turmoil, and established French hegemony ‘from Naples to the Baltic Sea’. It was Prussia’s rapid rise from relative obscurity to become one of Europe’s leading monarchies in the course of just a few decades which made the figure of Frederick so attractive for Fontanes: his main theme, after all, was the contribution of Napoleon to restoring peace in France, and to elevating it to an unprecedented position in Europe. Both Frederick and Napoleon, explicitly compared as ‘the hero of Prussia’ and ‘the hero of France’, thus appear as the great founder-monarchs of their times, although Napoleon, of course, was always the greater figure. France, after all, enjoyed the fruits of peace guaranteed by Napoleon’s victories abroad, whereas Frederick the Great’s capital, Berlin, had twice been occupied by enemy forces during the Seven Years War. In a wider socio-political perspective, Napoleon

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had proved the greater monarch due to his social conservatism, compared to Frederick’s subversive ways: the French emperor, after all, had recognised the importance of religion and law as the basis of society, and ‘has defeated the unsound doctrines’ which had contributed to society tearing itself apart during the decade of the French Revolution. The atheist Frederick, in contrast, had undermined Prussia’s religious foundations, which had caused it to fall ‘in just one battle’ after having ‘during the Seven Years War successfully fought the combined efforts of Austria, Russia, and France’.48 Frederick’s supposed failure to strengthen Prussia’s ‘national spirit’, which alone could guarantee her long-term strength, had already been criticised by Mably (‘everything, he believed, was built on sand’), and had for decades also been debated by Prussian publicists.49 Fontanes, however, above all highlights the contribution of a single individual to making a nation great. It was not that the unfortunate veterans of the Seven Years War had been less courageous than those of the Empire, nor were the Prussian soldiers beaten at Iéna less brave than those who had fought at Rossbach. It was the death of Frederick that had robbed the Prussians of their guiding spirit, which had animated ‘his soldiers, generals, ministers, and people’. A ceremony ostensibly honouring the French veterans as well as Napoleon’s own soldiers (‘Vive l’armée!’) is thus turned into a celebration of Napoleon’s genius alone: in the end it is not the soldiers who matter but their general, not the nation but its leader. In the words of Fontanes, the case of Frederick had demonstrated that ‘the death of one single man is the demise of all’. Far from avoiding the problematic question of what could happen to Napoleon’s own newly-established dynasty once his extraordinary powers are gone (and this, after all, depended on birthright rather than individual merit, to say nothing of ‘genius’), Fontanes prefers to address it head-on. Just as Prussia’s greatness had depended on Frederick, the greatness, and indeed safety, of France appear as dependent on the genius of Napoleon; and so ‘may the great man who is thus necessary to us ... live long so that he can confirm his work’. Two years after the establishment of the Empire, it would seem, the question of the dynastic succession loomed a great deal less prominently in the agenda of the regime than the problem of establishing the legitimacy of the new monarch in the first place.

Legitimate Napoleon The core problem of the legitimacy of the post-revolutionary monarchy established by Napoleon was still acute in 1806. It was still impossible

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for Napoleon to believe that he could simply assume the traditions of the Bourbon kings of France, the last of whom had been executed only just over a decade previously. If Napoleon and his advisers wished to assert the monarchical side of the regime, they had to act particularly carefully, since the sensitivities of republicans had to be taken into consideration, men who, after all, still made up the bulk of the political and military establishment.50 Napoleon the Emperor was particularly keen on identifying with indisputedly legitimate monarchs, rather than with mere generals, such as Hannibal (who had still been quoted by Bonapartist propagandists during the Consulate), or dictators associated with revolution, such as Cromwell or Caesar. But two years into the Empire, Napoleon could only establish his own monarchy against the Bourbon dynasty.51 Napoleon was ‘eager to have a national history which would integrate the ancien régime, the Revolution and the reestablishment of political order by himself into a single narrative framework, so as to provide a perspective on history which could be shared by all the rival factions in the nation’.52 His military victories were particularly suited to bring together all of France, not only healing the wounds of the Revolution but also avenging all the defeats French forces had suffered in the past. In the previous year, the armour of François I, taken captive at Pavia in 1525, had been brought back from Vienna, and in 1806–7, the infamous Rossbach column and Frederick’s decorations were in turn brought back to France. If the events of 1806 provided a propaganda opportunity for Napoleon, it was what Napoleon called the ‘legacy’ of the eighteenth century’s greatest roi-connétable, who was the only legitimate monarch of all the generals admired by Napoleon; and certainly not the legacy of the Holy Roman Emperors. Indeed, the very title of ‘Roman Emperor’ was problematic for two reasons: First, Napoleon thought that it had been devalued by the Habsburg and Wittelsbach dynasties, who had now submitted to his hegemony. Desirable and fitting as the title of ‘Emperor Caesar’ should be in theory, it no longer, as Napoleon pointed out, reminded people of the great figure of Julius Caesar, but rather of ‘those German princes, who were as weak as they were ignorant, and none of whom is any longer remembered today.’53 Second, the title had echoes of the ‘degenerate’ Roman Emperors of antiquity, who had followed the great (though admittedly also difficult) figure of Caesar. Pre-revolutionary writers, such as Mably, had regularly compared their tyrannical regimes to the Bourbon monarchy, and, apart from Frederick of Prussia, rather praised republican figures of antiquity, or ‘good’ monarchs of the distant medieval past, such as Charlemagne.54

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Charlemagne had first been compared to Napoleon by none other than Fontanes, who also placed him at the centre of Napoleon’s propaganda strategy in the context of the 1804 Sacre.55 In a brochure co-authored with Lucien Bonaparte, Fontanes had concluded as early as 1800 that the only fitting comparison for then-First Consul Bonaparte was with a ruler like Charlemagne who had set up a new dynasty.56 In January 1804, he expanded on the categories of greatness proposed by eighteenth-century writers to justify his comparison between Bonaparte and Charlemagne – conquest, legislation, mediation, reconciliation – and suggested that Napoleon should make use of the medieval Emperor’s ‘imperial emblems’.57 At the Sacre later that year, several marshals did indeed carry the so-called insignia of Charlemagne in the Cathedral of Notre-Dame; Napoleon had received them when visiting the medieval Emperor’s tomb in Aix-la-Chapelle in the months between the official proclamation of the Empire and the Sacre, and he is also represented holding Charlemagne’s ‘sword’ in Ingres’s coronation painting.58 These ceremonial elements were repeated in May 1807, with Moncey and Sérurier ceremoniously carrying Frederick’s sword and decorations through the chapel of the Invalides after they had been handed over to Napoleon at the Prussian king’s tomb. Moreover, Frederick’s sword was the real thing, in contrast to the original medieval insignia that had been long lost or taken by the Habsburgs and had to be replicated (or ‘restored’ as Denon put it). For Napoleon, the military monarch who had come to power through the Revolution, the sword was the unique symbol of a royal genealogy based on individual greatness, which differed fundamentally from the genealogy of blood that had characterised the dynasties of Old Regime Europe. This point was illustrated by a poem that was published in the Moniteur in November 1806, and linked glory and the right of inheritance beyond the rights of the conqueror: This shining sword forged for victory, Frederick’s weapon, instrument of his glory, Reposed with him in the night of the tomb. ... It must find itself again in the hands of a hero To acquire more honour ... ./ It gives Napoleon the Great his share By right of conquest as well as by right of heritage.59 With Frederick the Great, Napoleon had concluded a genealogical line leading from the early middle ages to the present. The figures of

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Charlemagne and Frederick the Great both had uniquely anti-Bourbon credentials while still having the monarchical associations the new Emperor was craving. The adulation of Frederick in Bourbon France had been one of those ‘rivalling cults’ that served to criticise and undermine a French monarchy whose story was being written as one of corruption and decay; quite as the figure of Charlemagne had helped to link the notions of ‘republic’, ‘nation’, and the ‘great providential man’ in the decades before the French Revolution.60 Distancing himself from the Bourbon kings, while refusing to assume the crown of the despised ancient Roman Emperors and the weak Holy Roman Emperors, Napoleon preferred to establish himself as the true heir of Charlemagne and Frederick the Great. The ceremony of May 1807, however, also marked a new point of departure for the social hierarchy of the Empire as a whole. Eleven days after the translation of Frederick’s sword, Napoleon established the Noblesse impériale by elevating Marshal Lefebvre to the rank of duke. Until then, Napoleon had been a monarch with a court, but without a nobility. After the old nobility had been abolished during the Revolution, however, a new nobility had to differ from the discredited royal one. Only a few years after the Revolution, it was impossible to make French soil a fief again or to base titles on any ancestral rights. The Emperor thus conferred titles on his marshals, which indicated neither their estates nor their birthplace, nor the place of origin of their families, but the battlefields where they had won particular glory. Lefebvre became Duke of Danzig after bringing the siege of this important Prussian port city to a successful end, and in 1808, Davout was made Duke of Auerstädt. With Eckmuehl, Wagram, Elchingen, Essling, etc, Europe came to be covered by an entire network of French titles highlighting the glory of French arms and the reach of the Grand Empire.61 The most spectacular victories, of course, remained reserved for Napoleon, among them the Pyramids, Austerlitz and Iéna.

Notes 1. This was articulated most prominently by H. von Treitschke, Deutsche Geschichte im neunzehnten Jahrhundert, vol. 1: Bis zum zweiten Pariser Frieden (Leipzig, 1879). 2. See Chapter 1 in this volume. 3. Exceptions were the conferences held at the universities of Jena and Magdeburg, as well as the exhibition of the Preussen Museum Kleve/Minden, see V. Veltzke (ed.), Napoleon. Trikolore und Kaiseradler über Rhein und Weser (Cologne, 2007). This chapter is partly based on a paper given at the Jena conference ‘Zäsur 1806’, a revised version of which is forthcoming as ‘Das Schwert Friedrichs des Großen: Universalhistorische “Größe”

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5.

6.

7. 8.

9.

10. 11. 12. 13.

14.

15.

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und monarchische Genealogie in der napoleonischen Symbolpolitik nach Iéna’, in H.-W. Hahn/A. Klinger/G. Schmidt (eds.), Zäsur 1806? Balance, Hegemonie und politische Kulturen (Weimar, 2008). P. Dwyer (ed.), The Rise of Prussia 1700–1830 (Harlow, 2000); L. Kittstein, Politik im Zeitalter der Revolution: Untersuchungen zur preußischen Staatlichkeit 1792–1807 (Stuttgart, 2003), in particular pp. 235–92; C. Clark, The Iron Kingdom: the Rise and Downfall of Prussia 1600–1947 (London, 2006), pp. 183–246, 284–311. From his first bulletin announcing the defeat of the Prussians on 15 October, Napoleon publically only ever spoke of ‘Iéna’, preferring to decorate Davout and his corps without admitting their vital contribution, see J.D. Markham, Imperial Glory: The Bulletins of Napoleon’s Grande Armée 1805–1814, with Additional Supporting Documents (London, 2003), pp. 81–100. R.B. Holtman, Napoleonic Propaganda (Baton Rouge, 1950); J.-P. Bertaud, La presse et le pouvoir de Louis XIII à Napoléon Ier (Paris, 2000); W. Telesko, Napoleon Bonaparte: Der “moderne Held” und die bildende Kunst 1799–1815 (Cologne, 1998); J. Myssok, Als friedensbringender “Mars” in Italien, wie kein Gott in Frankreich: Monumente zu Ehren Napoleons (Münster, 2005); B. Savoy, Patrimoine annexé: Les biens culturels saisis par la France en Allemagne autour de 1800 (2 vols., Paris, 2003). See now also D. O’Brien, After the Revolution: Antoine-Jean Gros, Painting, and Propaganda under Napoleon Bonaparte (2006). M.-L. Biver, Fêtes révolutionnaires à Paris (Paris, 1979), pp. 8, 159–70; T.W. Gaehtgens, Napoleons Arc de Triomphe (Göttingen, 1974). For the image of Prussia since Frederick the Great’s days, see S. Externbrink, Friedrich der Grosse, Maria Theresia und das Alte Reich: Deutschlandbild und Diplomatie Frankreichs im Siebenjährigen Krieg (Berlin, 2006), pp. 211–20, 347–8. Still indispensable is S. Skalweit, Frankreich und Friedrich der Grosse: Der Aufstieg Preussens in der öffentlichen Meinung des “Ancien régime” (Bonn, 1952). Ibid., pp. 96–100; E. Dziembowski, Un nouveau patriotisme francais, 1750– 1770: La France face à la puissance anglaise à l’époque de la guerre de Sept Ans (Oxford, 1998), pp. 170, 426–9. Ibid., p. 220. See also R. Peyrefitte, Voltaire et Frédéric II (2 vols., Paris, 1992), vol. 2. All quotations from Dziembowski, Nouveau patriotisme, pp. 427, 430, who speaks of ‘le divorce entre le monarque et certains de ses sujets’. H. Schulze, ‘The Prussian military state, 1763–1806’, in Dwyer, Rise of Prussia, pp. 201–19. R.B. Asprey, The Rise and Fall of Napoleon Bonaparte (London, 2001), pp. 36–8. On the Frederick cult of French officers, see Dziembowski, Nouveau patriotisme, p. 429. J. Schlobach, ‘Französische Aufklärung und deutsche Fürsten’, in W. Schneiders (ed.), Aufklärung als Mission/ La mission des lumières. Akzeptanzprobleme und Kommunikationsdefizite/ Accueil réciproque et difficultés de communication (Marburg, 1993), pp. 175–94; M. Fontius/J. Mondot (eds.), Französische Kultur – Aufklärung in Preußen. Akten der Internationalen Fachtagung vom 20./21. September 1996 in Potsdam (Berlin, 2001). Skalweit, Frankreich, pp. 164–88.

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16. Quoted in D. Schröder, ‘Siècle de Frédéric II’ und ‘Zeitalter der Aufklärung’: Epochenbegriffe im geschichtlichen Selbstverständnis der Aufklärung (Berlin, 2002), p. 100. 17. S. Stern, Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand, Herzog zu Braunschweig und Lüneburg (Hildesheim, 1921), pp. 185–91. 18. B. Simms, The Impact of Napoleon: Prussian High Politics, Foreign Policy and the Crisis of the Executive, 1797–1806 (Cambridge, 1997). 19. T.E. Kaiser, ‘Louis le Bien-Aimé and the rhetoric of the royal body’, in S.E. Melzer and K. Norberg (eds.), From the Royal to the Republican Body: Incorporating the Political in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century France (Berkeley, 1998), pp. 131–61; D. Goodman (ed.), Marie Antoinette: Writings on the Body of a Queen (New York, 2003); Dziembowski, Patriotisme nouveau, p. 332. 20. Markham, Imperial Glory, p. 81. 21. Eleventh Bulletin, Ibid., p. 88. See also Jean Tulard and Louis Garros, Itinéraire de Napoléon au jour le jour, 1769–1821 (Paris, 1992), pp. 256–7. In the weeks following the battles of Jena and Auerstädt, Rossbach also was at the centre of celebratory poems published by the French state paper Gazette nationale, ou le Moniteur universel, For example, No. 321, 17 November 1806, p. 1387. 22. Nineteenth and twenty-first bulletins, Markham, Imperial Glory, pp. 98, 100. 23. This and the following quotations are from Ibid., p. 97. 24. Although the Russo-Prussian alliance was not realised until the following year, the scene had proved extraordinarily popular in Prussia, with the engraver Daniel Berger producing a print depicting the three monarchs standing at Frederick the Great’s sarcophagus. 25. ‘The shade of the great Frederick could only have been indignant at this scandalous scene’, Seventeenth Bulletin, quoted in Markham, Imperial Glory, p. 95. 26. I. Mieck, ‘Napoleon und Potsdam’, Francia: Forschungen zur westeuropäischen Geschichte, 31 (2004), 121–46. 27. Versailles, MV 1721, INV 7264, see Y. Cantarel-Besson, Napoléon. Images et histoire. Peintures du Château de Versailles (1789–1815) (Paris, 2001), p. 169. Accounts of eye witnesses and several other members of Napoleon’s entourage vary, indeed, are contradictory, see Mieck, ‘Napoleon und Potsdam’. 28. Savoy, Patrimoine, vol. 2, p. 365. 29. Nineteenth Bulletin, Markham, Imperial glory, p. 97; Moniteur, No. 334, 30 November 1806, No. 338, 4 December 1806. 30. The term ‘puissance artificielle’ was taken up by Fontanes in his 1807 speech, see below. Already Frederick the Great had pointed out that due to her limited resources, Prussia really did not belong to the top group of great powers, see Clark, Iron Kingdom, p. 214. 31. Quoted in Markham, Imperial glory, p. 94. 32. W. Kirchner, ‘Napoleons Unterredung mit Johannes v. Müller’, Jahrbuch der Goethe-Gesellschaft, 16 (1930), 109–20; M. Pape, Johannes von Müller: Seine geistige und politische Umwelt in Wien und Berlin (Bern, 1989), pp. 207–17. J. von Müller, ‘De la gloire de Frédéric’, in Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 16 (Tübingen, 1814), pp. 367–84. German version: ‘Friedrichs Ruhm’, Ibid., pp. 385–402. The 1805 lecture ‘Über die Geschichte Friedrichs II.: Eine

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35. 36. 37. 38.

39.

40.

41. 42.

43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49.

50. 51. 52. 53.

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Vorlesung in der öffentlichen Sitzung der königlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin’, is reprinted Ibid., vol. 16, pp. 101–20. Müller, ‘Gloire’, pp. 386, 400. ‘In ensem FREDERICI MAGNI Invalidorum ad Aedes translatum NAPOLEONIS jussu, duce Moncaeo’, Moniteur, No. 140, 20 May 1807, p. 552. M. Noiray, ‘Le nouveau visage de la musique française’, in J.-C. Bonnet (ed.), L’Empire des muses: Napoléon, les arts et les lettres (Paris, 2004), p. 226. Savoy, Patrimoine annexé, vol. 1., pp. 235–8. On Cambacérès’s role in Napoleonic France, see I. Woloch, Napoleon and his Collaborators: the Making of a Dictatorship (New York, 2001), pp. 120–55. Cf. also J.J.R. de Cambacérès, Mémoires inédits: Éclaircissements publiés par Cambacérès sur les principaux événements de sa vie politique. Présentation et notes de Laurence Chatel de Brancion (Paris, 1999), pp. 146–9, 162–3, note 2. On his journalistic services to Napoleon, see J.-C. Berchet, ‘Le Mercure de France et la “Renaissance” des lettres’, in Bonnet (ed.), Empire des Muses, pp. 21–58; N. Alcer, Louis de Fontanes (1757–1821): homme de lettres et administrateur (Frankfurt/M., 1994); N. Savariau, Louis de Fontanes: belles-lettres et enseignement de la fin de l’Ancien Régime à l’Empire. Avec une étude sur le Traité des études de Rollin (Oxford, 2002), from pp. 245–331. Quoted Savariau, Fontanes, p. 327. According to Cambacérès, Fontanes was ‘l’un des plus dévoués serviteurs de la monarchie impériale et de son chef’. Cambacérès, Mémoires, p. 300. Thus Cambacérès, Mémoires, pp. 147–9. The official report with all the speeches was published in Moniteur, No. 138, 18 May 1807, pp. 542–4. Order of Napoleon, issued at Schloss Finckenstein on 21 April, quoted in Cambacérès, Mémoires, p. 147. See also L. Cabanis, Le sacre de Napoléon, 2 décembre 1804 (Paris, 1970), p. 199. Noiray, ‘Nouveau visage’, p. 218. Moniteur, No. 138, p. 544. Now also in Versailles, MV 1733, INV 8411, Cantarel-Besson, Napoléon, p. 220. I.F.W. Beckett, ‘An Honest Man: Moncey’, in D.G. Chandler (ed.), Napoleon’s Marshals (London, 1987), p. 303. Jean Tulard, Napoléon et la noblesse de l’Empire. Avec la liste des membres de la noblesse impériale, 1808–1815 (Paris, 2003), p. 86. This is a recurring motif in Fontanes’s speeches and articles, see Alcer, Fontanes, p. 252, and Savariau, Fontanes, pp. 292, 322. Skalweit, Frankreich, p. 161; E. Hellmuth, ‘Die “Wiedergeburt” Friedrichs des Großen und der “Tod fürs Vaterland”: Zum patriotischen Selbstverständnis in Preußen in der zweiten Hälfte des 18. Jahrhunderts’, in E. Hellmuth and R. Stauder (eds.), Nationalismus vor dem Nationalismus? (Hamburg, 1998), pp. 23–54. Tulard, Noblesse, pp. 79–85. Telesko, Held, pp. 64–105. S.M. Gruner, ‘Political Historiography in Restoration France’, History and Theory, 8 (1969), 346–69, at p. 346. Quoted in D. Gallo, ‘Pouvoirs de l’antique’, in Bonnet, Empire des Muses, p. 327.

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54. C. Grell, Le Dix-huitième siècle et l’antiquité en France 1680–1789 (Oxford, 1995), pp. 1067–74; R. Morrissey, L’empereur à la barbe fleurie: Charlemagne dans la mythologie et l’histoire de France (Paris, 1997), pp. 247–348. 55. G. Oesterle, ‘Die Kaiserkrönung Napoleons: Eine ästhetische und ideologische Instrumentalisierung’, in J.J. Berns and T. Rahn (eds.), Zeremoniell als höfische Ästhethik in Spätmittelalter und Früher Neuzeit (Tübingen, 1995), pp. 632–49. 56. Parallèle entre César, Cromwel, Monck et Bonaparte, quoted in R. Morrissey, ‘Charlemagne et la légende impériale’, in Bonnet, Empire des Muses, pp. 336–7, Savariau, Fontanes, pp. 272–3. 57. Ibid., p. 327. 58. S. Laveissière, ‘Le sacre’, in idem (ed.), Napoléon et le Louvre (Paris, 2004) pp. 86–91; Cabanis, Sacre, pp. 199, 641, Telesko, Held, p. 70. 59. Moniteur, No. 321, 17 November 1806, p. 1387. 60. Morrissey, ‘Charlemagne’, p. 334. 61. For the central role of generals in the Imperial nobility, see Tulard, Noblesse, pp. 87–9.

10 ‘Desperation to the Utmost’: The Defeat of 1806 and the French Occupation in Prussian Experience and Perception Karen Hagemann

The events of 1806 and their aftermath were one of the most important subjects in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German historiography. They stood at the centre of the national myth of Germany’s ‘renewal’ after the crushing Prussian defeat, which was interpreted as ‘national debacle.’ Yet, after 1945 western historians lost interest in the era, rejecting its earlier eminence and pro-Prussian interpretation, and set out to interpret the role of Prussia in German history more critically. As scholarship on Napoleonic Germany revived from the late 1960s, it moved in three directions, focusing on military campaigns and alliances, emerging sovereign states and reform movements, and early articulations of modern nationalism.1 These three thematic areas, however, were often treated in isolation from one another. Studies either featured specific campaigns, military organisations and diplomatic relations, or focused on the political and social consequences of Napoleonic conquest by highlighting structural transformations and state-building, or explored the emergence of nationalism. These themes, although very important and significant in their own right, were rarely related to each other. Moreover, this scholarship ignored the economic, social and cultural dimension of the Napoleonic Wars and the plurality of local war experiences in the German-speaking regions.2 As a result, scholars have tended to overlook the modern character of these first ‘total wars’, which were conducted by mass armies, mobilised by intensive patriotic and national propaganda, and affected millions of people across Europe and beyond. These wars altered, in various ways, the everyday lives of 191

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women and men of different regions and social strata, because the vast scale of the new mass armies, combined with intensified forms of economic warfare like the Continental System, had far-reaching consequences for the military and civil society alike.3 The ambiguities and paradoxes of the Napoleonic Wars can be better grasped by an approach that relates the analysis of the military and warfare to social, political and cultural history and focuses on the diversity of war experiences and perceptions. Contemporaries seem to have perceived the period in terms of the trauma of ongoing warfare, military occupation and economic hardship, but also as an opportunity to engage in society and politics in new ways. Scholars thus need to highlight the fundamental paradox of an era marked by violence, destruction and war as well as by modernisation and lasting changes, in which new ideas were developed while traditional values, structures and attitudes continued to resonate and endure.4 This approach could profitably be applied to a more precise study of the experience and perceptions of the Prussian defeat of 1806 and the two years of French occupation that followed. Given the significance accorded to these events in Prussian-German national historiography, it is remarkable how little we still know about them.5 If we wish to understand Prussian developments during and after the Anti-Napoleonic Wars, we need to take the material and mental aspects of war and occupation in the years between 1806 and 1808 more seriously. New research on Prussia stresses that hatred of Napoleon and all things French, as well as the patriotic-national mobilisation for the ‘War of Liberation’ against France in 1813, were apparently stronger in many Prussian regions than they were elsewhere in the German-speaking lands – especially the south and west.6 One important reason for this was that these Prussian regions suffered more than other parts of Germany under Napoleonic rule. It was the concrete experiences of French warfare and occupation that fed anti-French prejudices and patriotic-national sentiments, not only in educated circles, but also far beyond them in a population previously not much interested in politics. The chapter that follows cannot do justice to the concrete and diverse military and civilian experiences and perceptions of the wars of 1806/07 and the French occupation in Prussia. Such a history would need to include not just the differences between soldiers and civilians, town and countryside, metropolis and peripheral areas, but also a variety of social factors such as class, gender, family status and age in addition to political and religious differences. Instead, I focus on the most important trends. Before beginning, however, I define briefly my understanding

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of the disputed terms ‘experience’ and ‘perception’. Following William H. Sewell, I use them to characterise ‘the linguistically shaped process(es) of weighing and assigning meaning to events as they happen,’ processes which are embedded in the ‘cultural understandings and linguistic capacities’ of historical subjects.7 This implies that we need to consider the specific forms of the articulation of war experiences and perceptions and their narratives. We also have to historicise and differentiate them, in other words to analyse their specific political and military context, the economic and social conditions that prevailed at the time, the dominant public discourses and oppositional voices, as well as the concrete situations of specific individuals and groups and their expressions of experience.

The defeat of 1806/07 and its political consequences Prussia, in alliance with Russia, Saxony, Saxony-Weimar, Brunswick and Hanover, declared war on France on 9 October 1806. This was the first time since 1795 that the monarchy had joined in a coalition war against France. Prussia had left the earlier coalition with Britain, Austria and Russia through the separate Peace of Basel of 5 April 1795, leaving its allies to fight on alone. As a consequence, large parts of northern Germany enjoyed a decade of neutrality, in contrast to the south and southwest that bore the brunt of the ongoing struggle with France. However, the Prussian government felt obliged to abandon its neutrality when it learned in August 1806 that Napoleon had offered to restore Hanover to Britain in return for an alliance. Napoleon’s unwillingness to compromise and his arrogant and aggressive response to the Prussian king’s letter of 26 September, left Frederick William III with no ‘honourable’ alternative but to declare war.8 His decision met with the support not only of the ‘war party’ in his own entourage, which had promoted war against France since 1805, but also of a broader public. The imperialist politics of the French emperor spurred increasing scepticism, even hatred against France and all things French. After Napoleon assumed power, Germans, especially the educated, had hoped that he would promote political and social reform in Germany as well. However, the mood began to change in 1805–6. The French Emperor was now ‘more hated than admired’ in many parts of Germany.9 The French lieutenant-colonel Marcellin de Marbot (1782– 1854), who spent late August 1806 in Berlin, recalled in his memoirs, ‘Before my departure from Berlin I had evidence of the frenzy to which their hatred of Napoleon carried the Prussian nation, usually so

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calm. ... The officers whom I knew ventured no longer to speak to me or salute me; many Frenchmen were insulted by the populace.’10 The Prussian public perceived the coming war as a struggle in which the ‘honour and the continued existence of the fatherland were at stake.’11 According to eyewitnesses, public opinion was dominated by a ‘great thirst for war’ and ‘the certain hope of victory’.12 The memory of the Seven Years War was still glorious in the army, the political administration and the population at large. The Prussian army felt invincible, attacking with ‘high hearts, drums beating and trumpets sounding’.13 Nevertheless, the timing could hardly have been worse for Prussia: the coalition with Russia remained largely theoretical, the army corps promised by Tsar Alexander did not materialise, and apart from Saxony, Saxony-Weimar, Brunswick and, of course, Hanover, no other German territories were willing to join the coalition. Thus, the coalition army, with some 145,000 soldiers, was no match for Napoleon, who was able to mobilise over 200,000 men: 180,000 French and around 30,000 Germans who belonged to the troops of the Confederation of the Rhine, which had been established in July 1806. Prussia embarked on the war with only 108,000 men, nearly half of them from other Germanspeaking lands, many recruited by dubious methods and pressed into service as mercenaries and disinclined to fight. Moreover, the Prussian army was ill prepared after years of peacetime service, during which emphasis had been increasingly placed on elaborate forms of parade drill and appearance. A mechanically drilled and slow-moving army with a vast train dependent on magazine provisioning was not particularly well equipped to fight the flexible and fast-moving forces deployed by the Napoleonic army, which requisitioned everything needed from the lands it invaded.14 Only a few military reformers were aware of these problems. The majority in the state, army and society fully expected victory. The devastating defeat of 14 October at the battles of Jena and Auerstädt just five days after war was declared thus came as a terrible shock. Commanded by elderly and incompetent generals, and with officers in the middle and lower ranks drilled in obedience and incapable of independent leadership and action, the confused soldiers had fled headlong and in droves after the first blows by the French army. The train with hundreds of carts and coaches blocked the roads and prevented an orderly retreat. Thus the troops retreated in chaos, and all military order dissolved.15 Over the following fortnight, the French broke up a smaller Prussian force near Halle and occupied the city of Halberstadt. Soon thereafter the commanders of the Prussian fortresses

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of Küstrin (1 November) and Magdeburg (8 November) surrendered without a fight. It took the Grande Armée only a few weeks to conquer and occupy central and northern Germany, as well as large portions of Prussia. On 27 October 1806 Napoleon’s troops entered Berlin, where France declared the Continental Blockade against Britain. The royal family and the court fled along with the central administration to Königsberg, where Frederick William III arrived on 10 December, only to continue his flight to Memel in East Prussia with his retinue. At the end of 1806 Napoleon made peace with Saxony, which then joined the Confederation of the Rhine. The magnificent success of the French Army continued in the course of the subsequent campaign. The traditional Prussian and Russian armies had no chance against the modern French mass army. After the Prusso-Russian defeat at Friedland on 14 June 1807, Russia and Prussia were forced on 9 July to sign the Peace of Tilsit, which exposed the debacle of the Prussian monarchy to the whole world. The territory of the Prussian monarchy was cut from 314,448 to 158,008 square kilometres. The population dropped from approximately ten million in 1804 to 4.6 million in 1808, and fell a further 200,000 by 1814 as a result of war and crisis.16 The Paris Treaty of 8 September 1808 ended the occupation of Prussia, but also stipulated tribute payments totalling 140 million francs. This sum, on whose payment in instalments the withdrawal of the last French troops depended, was soon reduced to 120 million, but once interest and bank transfer costs at an extremely unfavourable exchange rate were added in, this amounted to over 34 million taler, payable over thirty months. Prussia also lost important material bases for its military power, since the French took the Prussian fortresses of Stettin, Küstrin and Glogau with their stocks of weapons and munitions as a security.17 Six secret articles of the Paris Convention also stipulated that for ten years the strength of the Prussian army could not exceed 42,000 men. Any additional recruitment of militias or civil guards was prohibited. The army was thus reduced to one-sixth of its peacetime size in 1806, which had been 247,000. A large number of soldiers and officers had to be discharged. These men lost their livelihoods and represented a substantial source of political unrest. Not least because of their own unfortunate social circumstances, they were among the most vehement supporters of a rapid, covert rebuilding of the Prussian army – and of ‘revenge’.18 This objective was difficult to realise after the defeat of 1806–7, not merely due to international circumstances, but also because of the

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state’s substantial financial problems. The defeat cast Prussia into a dramatic financial crisis, leaving it teetering on the brink of bankruptcy between 1807 and 1815. State spending during the war years 1806–7 and 1812–15 was at least twice the usual peacetime level. Revenue fell between 1807 and 1812 to less than half the 1805 level. For example, according to official calculations, the Prussian state took in about fifteen million taler in 1807–8. The budget, however, was over 28.1 million taler, of which the military claimed 16.6 million (or 59 per cent). Such a discrepancy between income and outlays remained the norm for more than a decade.19 The financial shortfall of the Prussian state was so great that many officials had to be dismissed, and their salaries and pensions went unpaid for months at a time. The situation for lower civil servants and pensioners, in particular, worsened dramatically. Their hardship, which contemporaries described vividly, was so great that little by little they had to sell all their possessions.20 Even middle and higher civil servants suffered visibly from the non-payment of their salaries.21 These were good reasons for them to support the preparations for ‘revenge’ too.

Perceptions of the defeat The campaign of 1806 revealed to the bewildered public a Prussian army in a very sorry state. It had not merely been defeated; it had been ruined. In the words of an officer who had been at Jena, ‘The carefully assembled and apparently unshakeable military structure was suddenly shattered to its foundations.’22 The many public and private accounts by contemporary witnesses painted an unflattering portrait of an army that had been convinced of its invincibility and had severely underestimated the strength of the enemy. The Prussian press was quick to criticise the army’s ‘failure’. This began on 4 November 1806 with the publication of an anonymous open letter from ‘a citizen to the Duke of Brunswick’ (the commander of the Prussian forces) in the Berlinische Nachrichten. It was followed by a long series of public complaints, critiques, slander and sarcasm, but also rebuttals and justifications in newspapers and magazines. A rapidly growing number of pamphlets and articles were devoted solely to the events of the recent war. Civilians and military men alike participated in this passionate public exchange.23 Among the harshest critics of the old Prussian Army and its ‘downfall of its own making’ were those officers who had already discussed the causes of the ‘French fortunes in war’ before 1806 and had repeatedly,

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but unsuccessfully, called for army reform.24 Only in the context of the discussion of the military causes of the defeat, which permanently shook the foundations of the state and the army, did they gain a hearing. This group of officers included the later Prussian general field marshal Neidhardt von Gneisenau (1760–1831), who was a second lieutenant in 1806. He reached the most devastating conclusions in his November 1806 exposé On the War of 1806: The inability of the Duke of Brunswick to design a solid campaign plan, ... the army’s distrust of him, the disunity among the luminaries of the general staff, the neutralization of some of its most able members, the fact that our army was unaccustomed to war, the lack of preparation visible in nearly all its branches, the fixation on worthless details of elementary tactics that had become habitual in the years of peace, our recruiting system, with all its exemptions, which demands military service from only a portion of the nation and extends their period of service inordinately, so that they serve reluctantly and can be held together only by discipline; ... the sorry state of our regimental artillery; ... the poor quality of our weapons; ... and to sum it all up, the arrogance that prevented us from moving with the times, [all this] causes the patriot to heave a silent sigh.25 In his memorandum, which he submitted to the king, Gneisenau analysed these weaknesses in great detail. In his conclusion he referred to a further central point that aroused general criticism: ‘Our blindness towards what measures the bold foe could undertake against us played an important role, however. We accounted it too easy to overcome this enemy.’26 Many years later, Johann von Borcke (1781–1862), who had taken part in the campaign of 1806 as a lieutenant, made a similar assessment. He wrote in his memoirs that The majority of young officers who so passionately desired the war imagined it as so simple that an army like ours had merely to appear in order to rout the French. Disdain and hatred had so possessed all minds, young and old, that the generals and higher-ranking officers never spoke of the French in other terms than as an assemblage of riffraff, who could never withstand the troops led by our valiant king himself and men of good name, and who would run like the devil as they had at Rossbach.27 This overestimation of their own abilities, coupled with national chauvinism, was brought down by the defeat of 1806, but many officers

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clung to the arrogance behind it, and consequently found the public debate over the causes for defeat difficult to stomach. Even Colonel Gerhardt von Scharnhorst (1755–1813), who headed the military reorganisation commission set up by the king immediately following the Peace of Tilsit in July 1807, complained bitterly in a number of letters written between 1806 and 1808 about the ‘low quibbling’ in the press.28 And Johann von Hüser (1782–1857), who would later serve as his adjutant, described in his memoirs, published posthumously, the sentiments that had led to this public criticism and the feelings it aroused among military men: The behaviour of many of our fellow citizens heaped new disgrace from within upon the disgrace that struck us from without. The ridiculing of the unhappy army, which after all had not earned its terrible fate by cowardice, punished some of the insolence that individual members of the garrison had once vented upon civilians, as well as the unwise boasting before we had been tested, most bitterly. In truth, the foe himself could not have humiliated us more deeply than our own compatriots did.29 With the defeat and the Peace of Tilsit, many Prussian officers, who had been raised for generations to see their ‘pride’ and ‘honour’ in the army, believed they had lost everything of personal value and importance. For many the insult to their individual and collective sense of honour, which they drew from the regiment, the army and the ‘Prussian nation’, was the most painful of all.30 In their haste to salvage something of their personal honour, indeed, officers engaged in wild mutual recrimination and denunciation in the wake of the defeat. Their verbal sparring often escalated into actual duels.31 Major Friedrich v. der Marwitz (1777–1837) explained the phenomenon in a report of 24 September 1808 to the army command: The army’s sense of honour was deeply wounded by the defeat suffered, and because this event came as such a surprise to most, since it would have been wholly incomprehensible before, and the majority were conscious of having done their duty in action, which consisted of not turning back and diligently shooting on, each man explained it to himself in terms of the dereliction of duty or cowardice of his fellows. Thus one saved oneself and one’s own honour and sacrificed that of others.32

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The king set up a ‘Royal Commission to Study the Capitulations and Other Events of the Recent War’ in November 1807 in a bid to restore the lost honour of the army and with it that of the ‘Prussian nation’. The commission was charged with ‘investigating the causes that led to the unfortunate events of the recent war’ and ‘identifying both those officers who contributed by violating their duties, and those who, despite the accidents that befell the army, distinguished themselves personally.’33 Additional ‘regimental tribunals’ were established shortly thereafter as corporate courts elected by the officers of each unit to assess their own performance in the recent war. The king intended the commission and the tribunals to bring about a ‘self-cleansing’ of the Prussian military.34 All officers ‘whom the regimental tribunals found to be above reproach’ were to receive a certificate stating ‘that they had been shown to be blameless’. This certificate was a prerequisite for their reinstatement or for receiving a pension.35 Younger officers in particular participated vigorously in the ‘selfcleansing’ process. Unlike many older, higher-ranking officers, they had little to lose. They wanted to justify themselves – ‘cost what may’ – ‘so they might continue to serve’.36 For similar reasons, they also far outnumbered older officers in supporting the plans for reform.37 They hoped that an honourable ‘self-cleansing’ and successful reform of the military would promote the formation of a strong fighting force equal to the French foe, and capable of compensating ‘through manly deeds’ for the painful losses of Jena and Auerstädt.38 Historians have underestimated the importance of the ‘self-cleansing’ of the officer corps. Only its success held out the possibility of restructuring the military sufficiently for the army reforms that were instituted in response to the dramatic defeat to be effective.39 The work of the ‘self-cleansing commission’ led to the dismissal of a large number of incompetent officers and a major restructuring of the officer corps, including a significant lowering of their average age. There were 7,096 officers (among them 142 generals and 885 staff officers) in the Prussian army at the start of the war of 1806–7. Of these, 4,933 had left by 1813 (including 103 generals and 635 staff officers); 208 were forced to leave in the course of criminal proceedings. Only 3,898 officers of the 1806 army also fought in the subsequent ‘Wars of Liberation’.40 By restructuring the officer corps, the ‘self-cleansing’ process significantly contributed to reducing resistance from within the military to army reform. It was also intended to improve the army’s greatly diminished reputation in civilian society and to promote the necessary public support for reform. This point seems to have been very important to

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the initiators.41 As a December 1807 cabinet decree to all regimental commanders noted, The inevitable consequences of an unfortunate war are the distrust and accusations of the other strata of society towards soldiers. The citizen believes himself justified in accusing the military – which could not protect him from the oppression and maltreatment of the enemy – of cowardice and dereliction of duty, and even if the law can prevent these unjust and irrational sweeping accusations from being loudly expressed, an indelible, spiteful prejudice against our estate nevertheless remains. ... We ourselves must counteract these effects by means of public justifications and our own investigation.42 This second objective, however, was not attained to the degree its instigators had supposed. Public criticism of the army’s ‘disgraceful failure’ did not end in 1807–8. For that reason, the king tried to forbid it by a cabinet decree in September 1808 prohibiting any form of oral or written ‘argument’ by military or civilian individuals that ‘might compromise’ the state and the army.43 This measure proved rather counterproductive, especially as it could only be enforced in the rump monarchy that was Prussia, and not in the territories controlled by France.44 Only with the implementation of military reforms, promoted by intense propaganda, and against the background of a persistently negative experience of the French occupiers did public attitudes towards the army in Prussia begin to change.

Patriotic discourse after 1806 The patriotic discourse on the ‘Prussian debacle’ began after 1806 with the debate on the causes of the Prussian military defeat, but quickly moved on to place the defeat in its broader political, social and cultural context. Everywhere in Prussia after 1806, patriotic circles – which included mainly civil servants, pastors, teachers, professors and reformoriented army officers – discussed the political, economic and social situation of the defeated monarchy and the reasons for its collapse.45 Because of severe censorship by the French and Prussian authorities, the main sites of this discussion were letters and internal memoranda exchanged outside the censorship system, as well as private social gatherings and patriotic associations, and books, brochures and journals published abroad, in other German-speaking states and in foreign countries, before being smuggled back into Prussia.46

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Two basic lines of argument emerged. The first attributed the collapse of the traditional state and military order primarily to political failings. The disintegration of German unity was seen as the chief cause of the defeat, and particular reproach was directed at the ‘treachery’ of the German princes. Fearing the ideas unleashed by the French Revolution, they had increasingly suppressed the liberties and rights of their subjects and made ‘dishonourable’ alliances with France for the sole purpose of maintaining themselves in power. The Prussian government, most notably, had clung to a rigid corporate organisation of states, an obsolete military system and outmoded methods of warfare. The other line of argument explained the debacle in terms of the ‘decay’ of ‘German customs and morals’, and the absence of a ‘national spirit’ of self-sacrifice, combined with a lack of a ‘valorous’ attitude and religious piety.47 This second, cultural explanation, which was quite compatible with the first, dominated in Prussia’s patriotic circles. It was so widespread because it offered a meaningful interpretation of a defeat that had seemed incomprehensible to many, and which had had such catastrophic results. It took up dominant, religiously coloured patterns of thought and feeling and did not fundamentally challenge existing political authority in Prussia.48 Based on this analysis, Prussian ‘patriots’ believed that liberation from Napoleonic rule depended on accomplishing three tasks. First, the monarchy needed thorough military reform. After 1806–7, the reformers in the army and administration largely agreed that Prussia would be able to withstand France only if it recast its own military system along French lines and introduced a system of universal conscription, at least in wartime. In order to put Prussia in a position to conduct a war, the country’s very obvious modernisation gap in other areas of politics, economics and society also had to be closed and the state’s finances stabilised.49 In conjunction with these reforms Prussia needed to create ‘military readiness’ in broad segments of the male population, who were to be mobilised for military service by means of universal conscription for the first time. Up to that point only a relatively small proportion of men of military age had been called to do service, and these had mainly been from the rural lower classes.50 At the same time a ‘warlike national spirit’ and ‘spirit of patriotic self-sacrifice’ had to be fostered in the population at large. The war of liberation could not begin without broad civilian material support. In order to inspire the necessary willingness to fight and promote patriotism and self-sacrifice, an intensive campaign of patriotic-national propaganda had to be waged before and during the war, with the French portrayed as the enemy at

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its centre.51 The patriots agreed that, in the face of French domination, awakening patriotism, understood as a spontaneous and self-sacrificing ‘love of country’,52 had to be inextricably linked to hatred of the fatherland’s enemies. For that reason, propagating patriotism was synonymous with promoting hatred of the French. The ideas of the nation that developed in these debates on the Prussian defeat and the necessary steps towards liberation remained quite open and ambiguous. The small circle of ‘patriotic’-minded and educated men who dominated the discourse used the word ‘nation’ synonymously with the terms ‘people’ (Volk) and fatherland, and referred both to the Prussian territorial state and the German nation as a whole. The dominant theme for these circles was a Christian, local and regional state patriotism tied to the vision of a German ‘cultural nation’ whose unity rested on primordial factors such as shared history, language and culture. They regarded Prussia as a ‘monarchical nation’, which stood outside the various ethnic groups in the population of the territorial state and formed the heart of the ‘German cultural nation’. 53 Many of these ideas had already been developed in the eighteenth century, and some went back to an even older tradition.54 What was new in Prussia under the specific conditions after 1806 was above all the focus on an objective: the struggle for liberation from Napoleon. This was accompanied not just by further politicisation, but also by a militarisation and virilisation of the concepts of ‘the nation’, ‘the people’ and ‘the fatherland’, and by an intensification of the exclusionary aspect of patriotic-national ideas. Political argument using patriotic-national rhetoric became increasingly commonplace among the educated classes after 1806–7.55 Part of this was based on an increasingly explicit hatred of Napoleon and ‘the French’, often reflecting concrete experiences with the French army during the war of 1806–7 and the period of occupation that followed.

Civilian experiences of war and occupation The experience of war and unexpected defeat came as a shock, not just to the military and reform-minded patriots in state service, but also to broad segments of the Prussian civilian population, who, after many years of peace, had their first experience of the violence of war. The worst affected were those living in the regions through which the Grande Armée passed, and which they besieged and occupied. French troops did not hesitate to bombard contested villages and towns, and to set fire to homes and farm buildings. The writer Willibald Alexis (1798–1871), who

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with his parents lived through the shelling of Breslau during the French siege of 6 November 1806 to 5 January 1807, recalled that The foe showered bullets upon the city and not upon its fortifications, and while few soldiers remained there, all the more citizens came to harm. Serious fires raged both day and night; the fire alarm vied with the rattle of the guns. Single bombs shattered entire houses.56 Since Breslau, unlike most other fortified cities, did not surrender without a fight, the city felt the full force of the enemy’s destructive fury. Its capitulation was followed by a veritable orgy of pillaging, in which, according to Alexis, those ‘German compatriots’ serving under Napoleon proved ‘more despotic and cruel than the French.’57 Eyewitnesses in other Prussian regions reported similar occurrences. The experience also appears to have stirred old conflicts between Catholic southern Germany and Protestant northern and eastern Germany. The rampant pillaging of conquered villages and towns was an everyday wartime experience in 1806–7. In a letter to her son Arthur from the embattled city of Weimar in late October 1806, the widowed author Johanna Schoppenhauer (1766–1826) reported that The hardship in the city is terrible. ... The town has been literally abandoned to pillaging; the officers and cavalry remained innocent of atrocities and did what they could to protect and to help. But what could they achieve in the face of 50,000 furious men who were left to do as they pleased that night, since the first leaders permitted it, at least passively! Many houses have been completely plundered; the shops, naturally, were first; linens, silverware, and money were carried off; furniture and anything that could not be transported was left to rot ... All those who abandoned their houses have lost nearly everything. Some were so fortunate as to be given officers to billet right away, and they offered them some protection, often at peril to their own lives. Those who came off best were those who, like us, had courage, showed no fear and were acquainted with the French language and customs.58 Similar scenes were repeated everywhere. Frequently, the accounts noted that officers had tried to maintain military discipline, but that the troops had been impossible to control, particularly while the fighting was still going on, and had pillaged, not stopping at sexual violence. All classes of people in the affected regions suffered, because the

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Napoleonic army lived off the land and was billeted in townhouses, estates, farms and cottages. Fear of the conquering troops of the Grande Armée spread quickly throughout Prussia, although the censored newspapers tried every means of preventing panic. Fear and terror, however, often seem to have been paired with hatred and anger. The Bavarian envoy François-Gabriel de Bray (1765–1832) described the mood in Berlin in a diary entry of 17 October 1806: ‘The bitterness towards Emperor Napoleon continues to increase among the citizenry. ... A large portion of the population is gripped by a terrible agitation – one hears despair and the fear that the French will occupy the city with flame and sword.’59 To the relief of many Berliners, the occupation of the city on 27 October proceeded in a far more orderly fashion than expected. Violence and pillaging were especially common during the actual fighting, whereas the occupation itself was less violent, especially when villages and towns surrendered voluntarily. The Grande Armée occupied Prussian soil for more than two years until the amount of the outstanding contributions had been agreed. The last French units left in December 1808, with the exception of the garrisons in the fortresses on the Oder at Glogau, Küstrin and Stettin. It is impossible to reconstruct precisely the material costs of the presence of the 150,000-man occupying force, which was distributed across the country in four commandements (only East Prussia, which had been evacuated in August 1807, was exempted). In any case the occupation represented a significant economic and social burden for the inhabitants, who had already financed Prussian arms and the war. The Continental Blockade weakened the economy, while contribution payments burdened the entire country. Following the peace treaty even the most remote corners of Prussia, which had previously known of the French troops only from hearsay, had to billet and provision soldiers, and provide forage as well as horses and servants for transport. Few people profited from the war: chief among these were army suppliers, carters, moneylenders and smugglers.60 The war and occupation left an economic and social crisis that encompassed broad segments of the Prussian population. Economic conditions deteriorated dramatically. The economy across Europe suffered from the many wars and the accompanying trade and tariff policies between 1792 and 1815. However, the situation in the kingdom after 1806 was particularly precarious in comparison to the states of the other German-speaking regions that belonged to the Confederation of the Rhine, or were directly annexed to France. The economy of the

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rump of the former Prussia, especially the export sectors, suffered severely from the Continental Blockade. Areas particularly affected were export-oriented grain production in the eastern provinces and textile manufacturing in the Mark Brandenburg and Silesia, which also depended strongly on exports. As elsewhere on the Continent, the demand for iron products, in contrast, remained relatively stable due to the wars. Unlike the western and southern regions of Germany that belonged to the Confederation of the Rhine, the exclusion of English goods from the Prussian market gave only a limited boost to domestic production. The French occupying forces sought to create a new market for their own industry in Prussia by fostering the import of French manufactured goods at a very modest tariff. This measure led to a severe depression in the Berlin and Potsdam silk-weaving industry, among others.61 In addition, Prussia’s enormous tribute payments in cash and kind to France exercised a chilling effect on economic and social life. Cities and counties rapidly amassed enormous mountains of debt with no prospect of relief. Where no money could be borrowed, all payments had to be tendered in cash or kind, or directly distributed among the population. This applied especially to the poorer provinces of Pomerania, Neumark and West Prussia. Frequent requisitions by the French army played their part as well. As a result, many firms and estates went bankrupt.62 Heinrich v. Beguelin, a senior official in the Prussian financial administration, described the precarious economic situation in his political memoirs, published posthumously in 1819: The plight of private citizens was just as terrible [as that of the state]. The estate owners were drained by the contributions, delivery of supplies, and billeting of troops. House owners suffered a similar fate, their properties also lost half their value, and it was only with great effort that they could let some of them for half the previous rent. Holders of government stocks received no interest and feared losing their capital, for which they were offered fifty per cent. The manufacturer was compelled, for lack of sales, to give notice to his workers. The merchant sold nothing, or did so only on credit. The civil servant daily feared dismissal, and many had received no salary for years.63 Prussia’s economic crisis not only affected many manufacturers, craftsmen, merchants and their employees, but also hit the owners of houses, agricultural land, and stocks and bonds. Indeed, few sections of the

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population escaped unscathed. The situation of the noble estate owners was particularly difficult. Many estate owners were already deeply in debt to private financiers as a result of the capitalisation of the large agrarian estates, which had increasingly become objects of speculation since the end of the eighteenth century. Sales crises and provisioning the army, along with the collapse of land prices, exacerbated their financial situation to such an extent that they were often forced to sell or face utter ruin.64 The significant burdens of the French occupation and the continuing transit of troops heightened the economic and social crisis. The two-year sojourn of Napoleonic troops in Berlin 1806–8 cost the city 15.1 million taler in contributions and billeting expenses.65 During this period, the capital’s 145,900 inhabitants had to support 15,000 French soldiers and officers.66 The situation in the countryside was more dramatic still. In July 1808, for example, 22,700 French soldiers set up their summer camp in the province of Kurmark outside Berlin.67 The ‘Memorandum of the Committee of the Kurmark Estates’ of May 1808 poignantly described the desolate state of the province. The memorandum concluded in these terms: Such is the situation in the countryside, where the helpless peasant, bereft of animals, grain, and bread in vain entreats his no less devastated landlord to help him, and at last, hard-pressed by billeting, desperately leaves the paternal farm – just as in every village many farms already stand utterly empty. Such, too, is the situation in the towns where the lack of bread daily raises the prospect of insurrection; where within a few days the growing want and the high price of provisions only increase the sense of desperation.68 The situation was especially grim in the small country towns and villages, which were hardest-pressed by passing troops.69 Agriculture came to a complete standstill in some regions. Farmers left their houses and farms. Rural poverty increased substantially. By the summer of 1807, there were complaints in Silesia about ‘immorality, the abandonment of obedience [and] tampering with other people’s property as natural consequences of war’. Petty crime and violence rose as economic hardship deepened. The increasing ‘wantonness’ of the female sex was also reported as a sign of destitution. The incidence of venereal disease in fact rose, because more and more women turned to prostitution in order to survive.70 Misery, starvation and epidemic disease (especially typhus, dysentery and cholera) spread. In their wake, death rates skyrocketed in

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town and country alike. In Königsberg, where soldiers, unemployed civil servants and other refugees from all over Prussia lived crowded together, the weekly number of deaths in August 1807 rose to 230–40 – and this from a pre-war figure of 30–40.71 Even in the relatively prosperous regions around Berlin and in the capital itself the situation became so dire that food riots broke out in April 1808 in response to grain and bread shortages.72 Such unrest over food remained rare overall, however. There were virtually no protest actions against the French occupiers between 1806 and 1808. The population generally remained calm and lived passively through what became known as the ‘time of the French’ (Franzosenzeit).73 The economic and social effects of the war and the occupation did, however, lead to radical changes in the civilian population’s attitude towards Napoleon and the French. Indifference and apathy were transformed into rejection and hatred well beyond military and patriotic circles. The letters and diaries written by educated contemporaries underline this observation. They provide the best evidence of the public mood during the French occupation, because autobiographical documents by ordinary people are so few and far between. One of the rare sources for the public mood of the broader population are the status reports compiled regularly for the Prussian king beginning in July 1807 by the financial official Johann August Sack, who served as chairman of the ‘Commission on the Implementation of the Peace’.74 These indicate that the occupation was dominated by complaints about the desolate economic, social and political situation. However, signs of resistance were as rare as utterances of patriotism.75 Regional patriotism and loyalty to the king were only expressed on a few extraordinary occasions between 1806 and 1809. These included the re-entry of the Prussian army in December 1808, led by the extremely popular major of the hussars Ferdinand v. Schill and the garrison troops of the successfully defended fortress of Kolberg under his command, as well as the return of the royal couple to the capital in December 1809.76 Otherwise, the monarch and his government suffered a dramatic loss of authority and popular confidence.77 The reforms introduced by the Prussian government after 1807 did little to change this, not least because their impact outside army reform was limited before 1812–13. Only thereafter did the practical effects of the administrative, financial, educational and agrarian measures become more obvious, together with the impact of trade regulations, the emancipation edict and the laws regulating municipal government. Moreover, from the perspective of the majority of the population, the reforms brought not relief but new burdens, while

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accelerating the loss of traditional values and ideas. Scepticism towards the reform programme was intensified by increased levies, in particular special taxes and compulsory loans. The reform policy thus appears to have increased people’s sense of upheaval and crisis, and widened the chasm between subjects and the Prussian state.78

Conclusion In the years between 1806 and 1808, ideas of German nationalism, and even a strong Prussian patriotism, were prevalent only in small circles of the educated middle class.79 It was not until the advance of the Russian army in the winter of 1812–13, which abolished censorship everywhere, that Prussian patriots had the opportunity for broad patriotic-national propaganda.80 Only then could the resentment and hatred that had built up against Napoleon and the French occupation army since 1806 be expressed publicly. The accumulated emotions found their public outlet: a flood of anti-French cartoons, satirical poems, farces, and calls to arms were published. Soon, more and more pamphlets appeared containing war songs and poems intended to mobilise the population. A whole wave of patriotic-national newspapers and journals were also founded beginning in the spring of 1813.81 Anti-French propaganda played an important role in the ‘war of words’ that accompanied the ‘war of swords’ in 1813–15. Apart from calling for German unity and a common struggle for liberation from foreign rule, most of the patriotic-national texts distributed in Prussia during these years focused on hatred of the French and their ruler.82 Contrary to the assumptions of many scholars, hatred of the French was by no means restricted to ‘a small group of educated propagandists’.83 It was, rather, widespread in the Prussian media during the wars. The many publications provided legitimacy for feelings of hatred and vengeance towards ‘the French’, which were very often based on concrete experiences during the wars of 1806–7 and the subsequent French occupation.84 For the majority of the Prussian population, these experiences and the resulting anti-French stance, combined with hope for ‘revenge’ and monarchical patriotism, seem to have been an important reason for supporting the ‘Wars of Liberation’ in 1813.

Notes 1. I would like to thank Pamela Selwyn for her support with the translation. S. Berger, ‘Prussia in History and Historiography from the Eighteenth to

Karen Hagemann 209

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8. 9. 10. 11.

the Nineteenth Century,’ in P.G. Dwyer (ed.), The Rise of Prussia, 1700– 1830 (Harlow, 2000), pp. 27–44; ‘Prussia in History and Historiography from the Nineteenth to the Twentieth Centuries’, in P.G. Dwyer (ed.), Modern Prussian History 1830–1947 (Harlow, 2001), pp. 21–40. For the state of research, see K. Hagemann and K. Aaslestad, ‘1806 and its Aftermath: Revisiting the Period of the Napoleonic Wars in German Central Europe,’ Central European History, 39 (2006), 547–79. S. Förster, ‘Der Weltkrieg, 1792 bis 1815: Bewaffnete Konflikte und Revolutionen in der Weltgeschichte,’ in J. Dülffer (ed.), Kriegsbereitschaft und Friedensordnung in Deutschland 1800 – 1814 (Münster, 1995), pp. 17–38. See also R. Epstein, Napoleon’s Last Victory and the Emergence of Modern War (Lawrence, Kansas, 1994); D. Bell, The First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It (Boston, 2007). W.K. Blessing, ‘Umbruchkrise und Verstörung: Die Napoleonische’ Erschütterung und ihre sozialpsychologische Bedeutung (Bayern als Beispiel),’ Zeitschrift für Bayerische Landesgeschichte, 42 (1979), 75–106; E.W. Becker, ‘Zeiterfahrungen zwischen Revolution und Krieg: Zum Wandel des Zeitbewusstseins in der Napoleonischen Ära,’ in N. Buschmann and H. Carl (eds.), Die Erfahrung des Krieges: Erfahrungsgeschichtliche Perspektiven von der Französischen Revolution bis zum Zweiten Weltkrieg (Paderborn, 2001), pp. 67–95. Exceptions to the relative neglect of the subject by historians are B. v. Münchow Pohl, Zwischen Reform und Krieg: Untersuchungen zu Bewußtseinslage in Preußen (Göttingen, 1987), and the contributions to K. Hagemann and K. Aaslestad (eds.), Special Issue of the journal Central European History, 39 (Dec. 2006), no. 4: ‘New Perspectives on the Period of the Anti-Napoleonic Wars, 1806–1815.’ With a focus on the military dimension: G. Fesser, 1806. Die Doppelschlacht bei Jena und Auerstädt (Jena, 2006). On Prussia, see K. Hagemann, ‘Männlicher Muth und Teutsche Ehre’. Nation, Militär und Geschlecht zur Zeit der Antinapoleonischen Kriege Preußens (Paderborn, 2002), pp. 281–8. For the South: U. Planert, Der Mythos vom Befreiungskrieg. Der deutsche Süden und die französischen Kriege. Alltag, Wahrnehmung, (Um)Deutung (Paderborn, 2007). For the West: M. Rowe, From Reich to State: The Rhineland in the Revolutionary Age (Cambridge, 2003). W.H. Sewell, Gender, History, and Deconstruction: Joan W. Scott’s Gender and the Politics of History (CSST Working Paper 34, Ann Arbor, 1989), p. 19. See also J.W. Scott ‘Experience’ in J. Butler and J.W. Scott (eds.), Feminists Theorize the Political (New York, 1992), pp. 22–40; K. Canning, ‘Feminist History after the Linguistic Turn: Historicizing Discourse and Experience,’ in her Gender History in Practice; Historical Perspectives on Bodies, Class, and Citizenship (Ithaca, 2006), pp. 62–100. C. Clark, Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600–1947 (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 296–311, esp. pp. 296ff. Ibid. J.-B.A.M. Marbot, Memoirs of Baron de Marbot Late Lieutenant General in the French Army (London, 1894), p. 173. L. Rellstab, Aus meinem Leben (Berlin, 1861), vol. 1, p. 45.

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12. A. v. Gerlach, letter of 30 August 1806 to her sister, in H.J. Schoeps (ed.), Aus den Jahren preußischer Not und Erneuerung. Tagebücher und Briefe der Gebrüder Gerlach und ihres Kreises. 1805–1820 (Berlin, 1963), pp. 347–8. 13. Großer Generalstab, Kriegsgeschichtliche Abteilung II (ed.), 1806. Das Preußische Offizierkorps und die Untersuchung der Kriegsereignisse (Berlin, 1906), p. 70. 14. Hagemann, Muth, pp. 36ff; Clark, Iron Kingdom, p. 306. 15. See Großer Generalstab, 1806; C. v. Clausewitz, Nachrichten über Preußen in seiner großen Katastrophe (1823–25), ed. Großer Generalstab, Abtheilung für Kriegsgeschichte (Berlin, 1888); N. v. Gneisenau, ‘Über den Krieg von 1806,’ in G. Förster and C. Gudzent (eds.), Ausgewählte militärische Schriften (Berlin, 1984), pp. 50–62; J. Rühle v. Lilienstern, Bericht eines Augenzeugen von dem Feldzug der während den Monaten September und Oktober 1806 unter dem Kommando des Fürsten zu Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen gestandenen königlichpreußischen und kurfürstlich sächsischen Truppen (Tübingen, 1807). 16. See I. Mieck, ‘Preußen von 1807 bis 1850: Reformen, Restauration und Revolution,’ in O. Büsch (ed.), Handbuch der Preußischen Geschichte, vol. 2: Das 19. Jahrhundert und Große Themen der Geschichte Preußens (Berlin, 1992), pp. 3–292, p. 17ff.; W. Treue, ‘Preußens Wirtschaft vom Dreißigjährigen Krieg bis zum Nationalsozialismus,’ in Ibid., pp. 449–604 at pp. 497–8. 17. Mieck, ‘Preußen,’ p. 33; Treue, ‘Preußens Wirtschaft,’ p. 501. 18. H. Stübig, Armee und Nation. Die pädagogisch-politischen Motive der preußischen Heeresreform 1807–1814 (Frankfurt/M., 1971), p. 13. 19. Cf. H. Schissler, ‘Preußische Finanzpolitik 1806–1820,’ in H. Schissler and H.U. Wehler (eds.), Preußische Finanzpolitik 1806–1810: Quellen zur Verwaltung der Ministerien Stein und Altenstein (Göttingen, 1984), pp. 13–64. 20. ‘Zeitungs-Bericht der Immediat-Friedens-Vollzugs-Kommission, Berlin, 1 November 1807,’ in H. Granier (ed.), Berichte aus der Berliner Franzosenzeit 1807–1809, nach den Akten des Berliner Geheimen Staatsarchivs und des Pariser Kriegsarchivs (Leipzig, 1913), pp. 37–44, at p. 41. 21. Memoirs of Heinrich and Amalie v. Beguelin published as A. Ernst (ed.), Denkwürdigkeiten aus den Jahren 1807–13, nebst Briefen von Gneisenau und Hardenberg (Berlin, 1892), p. 171. 22. Cf. Clark, Iron Kingdom, p. 298. 23. Cf. Gr. Generalstab, 1806, pp. 17–18; Stübig, Armee und Nation, pp. 39 ff. 24. Cf. Hagemann, Muth, pp. 75–7. 25. Gneisenau, ‘Über den Krieg,’ pp. 50–1 26. Ibid., 61. 27. J. v. Borcke, Kriegerleben des Johann von Borcke, weiland Kgl. Preuß. Oberstlieutenants, 1806–1815 (Berlin, 1888), reprinted in E. Kleßmann (ed.), Deutschland unter Napoleon in Augenzeugenberichten (Düsseldorf, 1965), p. 129. 28 . Cf. Scharnhorst’s letters of 27 November 1807 to Clausewitz from Memel (pp. 333–6), of 27 March 1808 to Müffling from Königsberg (pp. 340–1) and of 25 September 1808 to Count Götzen from Königsberg (pp. 347ff) in G. v. Scharnhorst, Briefe, vol. 1: Privatbriefe, ed. by K. v. Linnebach (Munich, 1914). 29. J. v. Hüser, Denkwürdigkeiten aus dem Leben des Generals der Infanterie v. Hüser größtenteils nach dessen hinterlassenen Papieren (Berlin, 1877), pp. 64–5.

Karen Hagemann 211 30. Letter of 29 December 1806 from Scharnhorst to his son Wilhelm, in Scharnhorst, Briefe, vol. 1, pp. 309–11 at p. 309. 31. Cf. Gr. Generalstab, 1806, pp. 86–7. 32. ‘Pflichtmäßiger Bericht über die Ereignisse vom 15.–28. Oktober 1806,’ Major v. der Marwitz, Friedersdorf, 24 September 1808, in Gr. Generalstab, 1806, pp. 202–40 at pp. 209–10. 33. ‘Instruktion für die zur Untersuchung der Capitulationen und sonstigen Ereignisse des letzteren Krieges niedergesetzte Commission,’ in Gr. Generalstab, 1806, pp. 13–15 at p. 13. 34. Cf. Ibid., pp. 50–86. 35. ‘Schreiben Friedrich Wilhelms III an die Immediatskommission zur Untersuchung der Kapitulationen und sonstiger Ereignisse des letzten Krieges,’ 9 June 1808, in Ibid., pp. 29–30. 36. ‘Bericht des L. v. Trillitz,’ in Ibid., p. 82. 37. Cf. Scharnhorst’s letters of 4 November 1808 to the Prussian king, and 12 November 1810 to General Heinrich W. v. Zeschau from Berlin, in Scharnhorst, Briefe, vol. 1, pp. 352–4 and 406–10. 38. H. v. Boyen, Erinnerungen aus dem Leben des Generalfeldmarschalls Hermann von Boyen, ed. by D. Schmidt (Berlin, 1990), vol. 1, p. 366. 39. Stübig, Armee und Nation, pp. 194 and 305. See also Hagemann, Muth, pp. 75–91; D. Walter, Preussische Heeresreformen, 1807–1870: Militärische Innovation und der Mythos der ‘Roonschen Reform’ (Paderborn, 2003), pp. 235–325. 40. Gr. Generalstab, 1806, pp. 104–6. 41. Cf. Gr. Generalstab, 1806, pp. 17–18; Stübig, Armee und Nation, pp. 39ff. 42. ‘Kabinettsorder v. 26 December 1807,’ in Gr. Generalstab, 1806, p. 57. 43. ‘Kabinettsorder an den Generalleutnant v. Blücher,’ Königsberg, 27 September 1808, in R. Vaupel, Das Preussische Heer vom Tilsiter Frieden bis zur Befreiung 1807–1814 (Berlin, 1938), vol. I, p. 592. 44. See Baron G. v. Cestra, Ein paar Briefe über den Empfang der preußischen Truppen in Berlin und die Rede des Herrn Major von Both (Königsberg, 1809). 45. For more on the social profile of this group, see Hagemann, Muth, pp. 158–202. 46. Ibid., pp. 175–84. 47. Frauensteuer an der Wiege des wiedergeborenen Vaterlandes. Von Elisabeth von F., n.p. [1814], pp. 10ff. 48. Cf. Hageman, Muth, 206–21; R. Ibbeken, Preußen 1807–1813. Staat und Volk als Idee und in Wirklichkeit (Cologne, 1970), pp. 50–61; Münchow-Pohl, Reform, pp. 31–89. 49. Cf. Mieck, Preußen, 16–71; P. Nolte, Staatsbildung als Gesellschaftsreform: Politische Reformen in Preußen und den süddeutschen Staaten 1800–1820 (Frankfurt/M., 1990), pp. 21–108. 50. Cf. Walter, Heeresreformen, pp. 235–324. 51. Cf. Hagemann, Muth, pp. 97–104 and 271–349. 52. ‘Patriotismus,’ in F.A. Brockhaus (ed.), Conversations-Lexicon oder Encyclopädisches Handwörterbuch für gebildete Stände, vol. 9 (Leipzig and Altenburg, 1817), pp. 306–7. 53. See Hagemann, Muth, pp. 271–303.

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54. Cf. H.-M. Blitz, Aus Liebe zum Vaterland. Die deutsche Nation im 18. Jahrhundert (Hamburg, 2000); J. Echternkamp, Der Aufstieg des deutschen Nationalismus (1770–1840) (Frankfurt/M., 1998), pp. 90–159. 55. Cf. Hagemann, Muth, pp. 188–97. 56. W. Alexis, Eine Jugend in Preußen. Erinnerungen (reprint, Berlin, 1991), p. 23. 57. Ibid., p. 30. 58. J. Schoppenhauer, in F. Schulze (ed.), Weimarische Berichte und Briefe aus den Freiheitskriegen 1806–1815 (Leipzig, 1913), cited in Kleßmann, Deutschland, p. 149. 59. F.G. de Bray, Aus dem Leben eines Diplomaten alter Schule (Leipzig, 1901), cited in Kleßmann, Deutschland, pp. 159–61. 60. Cf. Münchow-Pohl, Reform, pp. 94ff. 61. Cf. H.-U. Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, vol. 1.: Vom Feudalismus des Alten Reiches bis zur Defensiven Modernisierung der Reformära. 1700–1815 (Munich, 1987), pp. 486–505; Treue, ‘Preußens Wirtschaft,’ pp. 496–509; F.W. Henning, Handbuch der Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeschichte Deutschlands, vol. 2: Deutsche Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeschichte im 19. Jahrhundert (Paderborn, 1996), pp. 190ff. 62. Henning, Handbuch. 63. Beguelin, Denkwürdigkeiten, p. 171. 64. H. Schissler, Preußische Agrargesellschaft im Wandel: Wirtschaftliche, gesellschaftliche und politische Transformationsprozesse von 1763 bis 1847 (Göttingen, 1978), pp. 83ff. 65. See Treue, ‘Preußens Wirtschaft,’ p. 507. 66. Granier, Berichte, pp. 44, 148–9 and 453. 67. Ibid., p. 279. 68. Ibid., pp. 246–51. 69. See Ibid., pp. 350ff. and pp. 360–1. 70. Münchow-Pohl, Reform, p. 53. 71. Ibid., p. 51. 72. Cf. ‘Büsching an Stein,’ Berlin, 26 April 1808, in W. Hubatsch (ed.), Freiherr v. Stein, Briefe und Amtliche Schriften, vol. 2,2 (1807–8) (Stuttgart 1960), pp. 714–16. 73. Münchow-Pohl, Reform, pp. 94ff. 74. Cf. Granier, Berichte, V–XIII; A. Hofmeister-Hunger, Pressepolitik und Staatsreform. Die Institutionalisierung staatlicher Öffentlichkeitsarbeit bei Karl August v. Hardenberg (1792–1822) (Göttingen, 1994), pp. 184–5. 75. Granier, Berichte, pp. 377, 387, 390, 393–4, 466ff., 505, 510–11; MünchowPohl, Reform, pp. 97ff. and pp. 410–43. 76. Granier, Berichte, pp. 320, 512–13 and 544; see also Hagemann, Muth, pp. 366ff. 77. Cf. Münchow-Pohl, Reform, pp. 89–384. 78. Münchow-Pohl, Reform, pp. 171–312; Ibbeken, Preußen, pp. 254–304. 79. Ibbeken, Preußen, 175–84. 80. Cf. K.-H. Schäfer, Ernst Moritz Arndt als politischer Publizist. Studien zu Publizistik, Pressepolitik und kollektivem Bewußtsein im frühen 19. Jahrhundert (Bonn, 1974), pp. 59ff. 81. Cf. Hagemann, Muth, pp. 128–57.

Karen Hagemann 213 82. Cf. K. Hagemann, ‘Francophobia and Patriotism: Images of Napoleon and ‘the French’ in Prussia and Northern Germany at the Period of the AntiNapoleonic Wars, 1806–1815,’ French History, 18 (2004), 404–25. 83. M. Jeismann, Das Vaterland der Feinde. Studien zum nationalen Feindbegriff und Selbstverständnis in Deutschland und Frankreich 1792–1918 (Stuttgart, 1992), p. 95. 84. For more on this, see Hagemann, ‘Francophobia’.

11 Legends of the Allied Invasions and Occupations of Eastern France, 1792–1815 David Hopkin

Introduction: Legends as historical sources The relationships that soldiers of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic era had with each other, the states they represented and enemy combatants are relatively well known, their relationships with the civilians of the various states they passed through rather less so. Thanks to the innovative approaches of the ‘new military history’ the ‘face of battle’ has become familiar; but the ‘face of invasion’ still remains largely concealed. Yet combat was a relatively small part of the soldiers’ experience. To judge by the sources left to us, such as soldiers’ letters and memoirs, interactions with civilians were often of more immediate import. Soldiers’ letters home dwelt on the quality, quantity and cost of food, the trustworthiness of merchants, the state of the houses in which they were billeted and their relations with their hosts, the kinds of crops that were grown and the farming methods that were used. Memoirs were more likely to recall erotic encounters, but also, in the fashion of the travel literature of the period, delineated the customs of the people as well as the climate and topography of places visited.1 This knowledge of other lands enhanced the reputation of old soldiers in their home communities and helps explain the preference given to them in communal appointments.2 The nineteenth-century literary image of the ‘veteranteacher’ lecturing his neighbours in the village pub about the bigotry of the Spanish, the filthiness of the Poles and the beauty of the Italians is not entirely an invention.3 Soldiers needed to know something about the contexts in which they operated in order to survive, and this turned them into amateur anthropologists. But for civilians, too, invasion and 214

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occupation were opportunities for cultural contact. The average Prussian peasant may have had only a very hazy idea of what a Frenchman was until faced with a concrete example in the shape of a sergeant with a requisition notice. Such experiences of representatives of other nations may have helped shape the development of popular nationalism in the nineteenth century. After all, soldiers of whatever nation were really quite similar in dress and behaviour, and it was only in their interactions with civilians that typologies and hierarchies of cultural (and sometimes racial) difference could be worked out. Occupation has seldom attracted the full attention of the professional historian, and such histories of occupation as do exist are seldom characterised by professional objectivity.4 Straight military history is infused with a corporate sense of honour that treats even defeated enemies as relative equals, worthy adversaries, but such attitudes do not extend to relationships with civilians. Rather victors’ vices and victims’ virtues are reified in national histories. The sense of humiliation in these writings is too raw, particularly where wounds had been reopened by the experiences of 1870–1 or later conflicts. The recent historiography of twentieth-century occupations has demonstrated how often public memory has been at odds with the documented version of wartime events. Post-war states distorted history to create founding mythologies for their own polities.5 Something similar happened after the Napoleonic wars. Myths of mass patriotic resistance made the traumas of the period easier to bear. And while it would not be fair to suggest that these heroic narratives remain unquestioned, it is surprising how often they can still be repeated, even among professional historians. Great claims are made about the attitudes of whole populations based on the flimsiest of evidence.6 Assessing the opinions of the usually disenfranchised and often illiterate masses is, of course, a common problem for historians. Napoleonic prefects did regularly sample what they referred to as ‘l’esprit public’, although what weight can be attached to their reports is quite another matter.7 However, invasions presented particular difficulties in that the normal collection of data for the archives was interrupted. Bureaucrats left hurriedly, sometimes burning incriminating papers or taking them with them. Orders from ministers and responses from subordinates were intercepted by enemy cavalry patrols. The politicisation of conflict in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars exacerbated the difficulties. During the dynastic wars of the eighteenth century local administrations usually remained at their post, convinced that it was their duty to maintain order even under enemy authority. However, during the

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invasions of 1814 and 1815 officials were more likely to run, fearful of being punished, whether as the lackeys of the usurper Napoleon or as collaborators with the Allies should the turn of events deliver another surprise like the Hundred Days. Not surprisingly, the records for these crucial weeks are a bit of a mess. The remainder of this chapter argues that oral legends, circulating among the general population and noted by folklorists during the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, may provide a source through which to explore popular attitudes towards foreign soldiers. Drawing mostly on material relevant to Lorraine in eastern France during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, but ranging both geographically and chronologically when comparisons seem useful, my aim is to show that the inhabitants of the countryside had available a set of guides to behaviour in the presence of the enemy, and a system of representations through which to remember their passing. In my treatment of these sources I lean heavily on recent work by historians and folklorists from Ireland and the Nordic/Baltic countries who have done most to bring together folklore, oral history and social memory.8 In particular, I am indebted to the ideas developed by Guy Beiner in his study of the folk memory of 1798 in Ireland.9 The French landings in Connaught and the United Irishmen’s Rebellion share some features with the invasions of eastern France. In both cases memories of conflict intertwine with moments of cultural contact. However, the particular value of Beiner’s work is that he does not use legends simply to fill in gaps in national histories. This is not to dismiss their usefulness as correctives to the archival record, but Beiner has greater ambitions. Thematic patterns within these stories permit comparisons between what he terms ‘vernacular historical discourses’, current in the communities directly affected by the Rebellion, and the ‘historical metanarratives constituted in the hegemonic centres of knowledge’. In this binary division of historical discourse, of memory, local legend emphasised the military role of local people, rather than of the French regulars who supported them, gave women a much more prominent part and sometimes offered very different interpretations, sometimes even alternative factual accounts, of key moments. The legends reveal that the history of the rebellion had different meanings at local and national levels. Folk history provided alternative assessments of what mattered and why; indeed, it amounted to an entire alternative historiographical tradition.10 Beiner had the resources of the Irish Folklore Commission to draw on to make his arguments. This is a large and relatively homogeneous

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collection compiled by trained folklorists. There is nothing comparable in France. The nearest equivalents are the monographs prepared for each commune by its head-teacher for the 1889 centenary of the Revolution, many of which survive. The rubric sent out from Paris to the communes of eastern France specifically asked about the local memory of the invasions (in 1814–15 and 1870) as well as the evidence of oral tales and traditions. Unfortunately the ‘black hussars of the Republic’ were not ideal intermediaries; by training they were hostile to anything as retrograde as an oral legend with its overtones of superstition and rural backwardness. Nonetheless some contain useful material. Nineteenth-century regionalist literature provides a number of other texts, while from the twentieth century we have collections by folklorists such as Angelika Merkelbach-Pinck and Roger Maudhuy, among others. One must admit that this is, compared with the Irish cornucopia, a rather disparate body of material. Nonetheless the effort is, I hope, worthwhile, because these legends do offer a rather different sense of what happened, or at least of what mattered. One can perceive the vague outlines of a ‘folk history’ of the invasions, particularly of 1814, and it does stand in contrast to national accounts.

Invasions as ‘pre-remembered’ events Clearly, given these dates, we are not dealing with eyewitness accounts. This exercise is not comparable with the oral histories of occupation and resistance during the Second World War which have appeared since the 1960s, though given the cultural influences on the formation of memory there are interesting overlaps.11 Rather, these legends packaged the experience of 1792 or 1814–15 into readily transmittable narrative form. In the process much that was particular and contingent was lost as the legend crystallised the message at the expense of historical detail. The adventures of a number of individuals tended to accrete around the best-known contemporaries. Events migrated from one location to another. Narrators adapted narrative templates already available in folk culture, so that stories told about Cossacks in 1814 were directly related to those told about the Swedes of 1635 and the Uhlans of 1870. Folklorists term these ‘migratory legends’: although they are always told about a particular place and time, equivalents can be found over a wide geographical area.12 Many of the stories of invading Russians and Prussians told in Lorraine were similar to those told in the Low Countries and the Rhineland about the French. We are dealing with what another Irish historian, Niall O’Ciosain, in his work on legends of the Irish Famine,

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terms ‘popular memory’, consisting of ‘a stylised repertoire of images, motifs, short narratives and supernatural legends, many of them part of a wider international narrative repertoire, which form a system of representation of [in this case] famine and scarcity as well as a guide to behaviour during such crises’.13 There is indeed some overlap between legends of famine and legends of invasion, given the voracious appetites of the soldiers. Such characteristics might seem to call into question what useful deductions a historian can make from such material. However, the existence of recurrent patterns is, in some ways, their most valuable aspect because they suggest that the people who experienced invasion and occupation had a mental schema into which to fit these events, a system of representation that gave them meaning, that perhaps enabled them to deal with them. To use Beiner’s terminology, the invasions were ‘pre-remembered’ events.14 Memory is an imaginative act rather than the record of experience. It takes shape around our existing assumptions, prejudices and expectations. The memory of invasion as transmitted to us in the form of legends has as much to do with what was anticipated, what was envisioned before it happened, as with what actually happened. The invasions of 1792 and 1814–15 were widely anticipated by the people of Lorraine. Since 1790 the municipal authorities of the fortified towns of eastern France had been worrying about their ability to defend themselves. Proclamations concerning measures of defence issued by commanders, municipalities, prefects and sous-préfets, warned the population of the impending crisis. Requisitions of material and labour, and the movement of prisoners and wounded men, served to spread alarm well before the appearance of enemy troops. Even if they had no access to other sources of information, the people in the regions directly under threat had encountered retreating French soldiers who relayed their stories about the enemy. The retreat, as well as the invasion, figures in the popular memory on both sides of border, not least as a presage of things to come. In Altenkessel, near Saarburg, for example, a retreating French soldier hanged himself under the Mandelbach bridge, and his ghost can still be heard (or at least it could in the early twentieth century) moaning ‘O mon dieu, O mon dieu’.15 In other parts of the Saarland, people pointed the graves of Napoleonic officers, sleeping until they heard once more the call of their Emperor.16 This echo of ‘sleeping kings’ narratives is indicative of the supernatural nimbus which surrounded Napoleon, among the conquered as well as his own troops.

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The news of invasion imparted by retreating French soldiers was filtered by the receiving populations through a matrix of ideas about soldiers, and about invasions, coloured by previous encounters. The populations of 1792 and 1814–15 had been brought up on stories of previous wars, and they had narrative expectations of what a new war would be like, based on the social memory of previous conflicts, such as the Austrian raids of the 1740s, or Marlborough’s brief sojourn around Thionville in 1709, or going right back to the wars between the Armagnacs and Bourguignons in the Middle Ages. However, in Lorraine, it was the memory of the Thirty Years War and the irruption of the French, the Croats and above all the Swedes, which provided the model for the horrors of war by which to judge all subsequent experiences.17 Xavier Thiriat observed in the 1870s that ‘Lorrainer peasants speak of the Swedes as monstrous beings whom they credit with every vice’.18 Swedish membership of the grand alliance in 1814 added a special frisson of terror to expectations of invasion. The evil reputation of the Swedes, but also the Croats, Pandours, Armagnacs and even Marlborough, lived on as bogeymen figures to frighten children, as insults to be hurled at residents of a neighbouring village or as toponyms in the landscape (the Swedish Cross which marked a site of mass burial, the Swedish Oak – of which there are several – from which the Swedes hanged their victims, and so on ...).19 In addition they provided a whole series of legends which formed a ‘system of representation’, a set of motifs that were repeated across the region and which could be applied, with greater or lesser credibility, to all subsequent invaders. These memories still circulate locally: during the Balkan wars of the 1990s a Lorrainer was overheard to remark that the Serbs were preferable to the Croats, given the wrongs the Croats had done in the past, in Lorraine.20 Memories of the Thirty Years War were just as lively across the border, as recent work by Jill Stephenson in Württemberg has shown. In 1945, the Nazi district leadership told the inhabitants of Zipplingen to prepare themselves to face death. The villagers responded that their commune simply could not be defended and that ‘it seemed senseless to allow our homeland to be destroyed for a second time’ after it had been totally ruined by the Swedes in the 1630s. Only two men managed to escape on that occasion to preserve the story, and its moral.21 However, we are dealing here with a migratory legend. This same story, that only one man survived the Swedes, was told at Insming in Lorraine, where it was one woman.22 In the latter case legend states that the village instituted a third procession for the Fête-Dieu in remembrance – except we happen to know that this procession dated

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from the sixteenth century when the village was in dispute with a Protestant seigneur. Legends do not have to be true to be worth telling, or to be functional. Two fairly obvious remarks can be made about these figures of terror. First, by and large, memory fixated on light horsemen and irregular troops rather than regulars – those whose job it was to sow terror, maraud and extract contributions with exemplary violence. In 1870 Prussian uhlans were employed in this duty and took up the same narrative mantle. The same distinction is apparent in memories of 1814 and 1815. The inhabitants of the Vosges distinguished two types of foreign soldier, regardless of their actual nationality – the good ‘kaiserlick’ (or kinserlink) and the bad ‘Cossack’.23 In Niederfillen in Lorraine, good Bavarian occupiers were compared, not with the reality of the Cossacks, but with the terror their name inspired.24 Elsewhere the destroyers of the Napoleonic regime were all lumped together in a single national category – as ‘Cossacks’ or occasionally ‘Croats’ – just as the AustroPrussian émigré forces of 1792 had been referred to as ‘Pandours’. 25 The second point is that these terror troops were mostly drawn from the edges of Christendom – Swedes from the far north, Cossacks from the east, Croats and Pandours from the south. Only the last two were definitely Catholic, the defining quality of civilisation as far as most rural Lorrainers and Saarlanders were concerned. The invaders were wild men, nomads, from beyond the pale. Their dress emphasised their outsider qualities: the loose trousers of the Cossacks, and the Pandours, with their moustaches and beards, were signs of disorder, compared with the tight, clean-cut uniform of regular troops. The evil reputation of these migrant horse-soldiers from the edge of the world was used by the authorities in 1814 to stir up resistance among the civilian population. The Minister of the Interior issued a circular to mayors warning that the enemy, by permitting barely civilized men to satisfy their most vicious and brutal passions, ensures the ravage of our provinces and the destruction of our resources; he spares neither rank, nor age, nor sex; he pillages less for booty than for the pleasure of destruction; in short, he wages war on the entire population, on villages as much as cities, on cottages as much as castles.26 However, such tactics proved counterproductive as many took this as their cue to flee to the woods rather than attempt to resist such monsters.

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Michael Broers’s division of Napoleonic Empire into an ‘inner’ and ‘outer empire’ had a popular echo, or rather a popular precursor.27 At the core were the civilised people, the French and their near neighbours the Germans and Italians, with whom equal relationships were readily conceivable even in times of war. But beyond these were populations whose culture was so different that any sort of exchange would be fraught with danger. It is interesting to consider where the British fit into this ladder of civilisation. As far as the French authorities were concerned the British were more or less equals. Their prisoners-of-war were significantly better treated than Russians or Spaniards or even Austrians. But at a more popular level the English, too, could become bogeymen, a nation of pirates preying on their more settled and peaceloving neighbours. This, at least, was exactly how one peasant woman described the English to two British prisoners-of-war; in her imagination the entire population lived on ships marauding up and down the coast of continental Europe.28 And the British were also heretics, of course. People may have been aware that a Croat was an Imperial soldier, that a Cossack was a Russian soldier, or that an uhlan was a Prussian soldier, but these stories do not represent so much the relationship of one nation to another as the irruption of disorder into stability, violence into peace, nature into culture. This is exemplified in the story of the Wildfrauloch of Kerbach, in north-eastern Lorraine. During the Swedish invasion of 1635, so the story goes, all the population of the village fled to the woods, except for one woman who could not flee as she was nursing her new-born baby. The Swedes dragged her from her home, raped her and threw her baby into a burning house. The child’s screams drove the woman mad, and she took refuge in the woods, eating roots and berries till the end of her days. Locals can still point out her cave.29 Whether or not these events really did take place in Kerbach, this same story is told about other women, in other caves, in Luxembourg and in southern Belgium, where it was the ‘blues’, French Republican troops, who drove the woman mad. This is an example of a migratory legend, a story which seems firmly anchored both in time and place, but in fact is readily transferable. Its popularity, I suggest (following Philippe Raxhon’s study of Walloon legends of the French Revolution), was due to the way it encapsulated the sudden incursion of the wild into settled, civilised life, turning a mother into a wild-woman living in the forest.30 I wanted to emphasise how the enemy can mutate because it was obviously easy for nationalist writers to dress up this kind of material as if it encapsulated some key aspect of the relationship between two

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national communities – feminine France at the mercy of rapacious masculine Germany/Russia, for example. Something of this transformation can be seen in the work of the dual-headed author Erckmann-Chatrian, hugely popular in the 1860s, who often took (or claimed to take) oral memories as the starting point of their novels, and then embroidered them into a nationalist historiography. For example, their novel L’Invasion – about 1814 – contains a long, apparently oral history of the passage of the Russian army up from Alsace to Phalsbourg, delivered by a forest guard who had witnessed these events in his youth.31 It is not unlikely that there really was a forest guard who had told the authors something on these lines, for the narrative uses a lot of the motifs familiar from invasion legends. It would have been hard for Alexandre Chatrian, born in a hamlet called Soldatenthal, to ignore such sources. But the authors, convinced republican propagandists, could not resist adding their own political comment on international relations. Legends as they were collected from oral rendition were concerned less with the threat to the national community than about the threat to the local community. The invaders could be foreign but they could also be domestic. Exactly the same stories were told about the Blues in France as were told about them in Belgium and other conquered territories. To take one example, in 1792 a group of Prussians marched up to Varennes in the Argonne to arrest those responsible for preventing Louis XVI’s escape the previous year. Going past the former convent of the Annonciades, a Prussian soldier lobbed a ham bone at the statue of the Virgin placed over the door, who caught it in her arms. Soon after this miracle, the soldier turned black and drowned. At first sight this legend would seem to set a representative of heretical Prussia against the defender of Catholic France.32 The Prussian invaders of 1792 are remembered in the Meuse above all for their gluttony: they stuffed their faces even with unripe crops or uncooked food, particularly pig meat.33 So to give the legend specificity the soldier’s weapon had to be a ham bone. However, once set in its local context the message changes somewhat. The convent had become a barracks, and the Jacobin mayor of Varennes wanted to get rid of the statue, but a crowd of women prevented him. During the Terror he had it boarded up, but merely knowing it was there preyed on his mind to the point of paranoia and he used to fire off letters to the District and to the Department, demanding that it be destroyed.34 So the legend fed into an ongoing local battle about the statue’s fate. Its miraculous qualities justified resistance to dechristianisation and helped explain the failure of the Jacobin authorities to exert their will.

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At one level, then, this narrative is very particular to Varennes in 1792, yet it is also true that very similar stories were told about many other statues. Almost every major settlement in the Meuse – Verdun, Vaucouleurs. Commercy, Dun-sur-Meuse, Toul (to look a little beyond the boundaries of the department) has a similar miraculous statue or other image of the Virgin. At Bar-le-Duc, for example, as a group of attacking soldiers approached the Porte-au-bois, one of them threw a roof tile at the Virgin above the gate, who caught it in her hand and passed it to the baby Jesus. At this miracle the invaders ran off. The statue’s cult only really got going in the 1670s, by which time the identity of the invaders was forgotten (though they are sometimes vaguely referred to as English). Smashed during the dechristianisation campaign of 1793, the various bits were hidden by worshippers and glued back together, to become the focus of a renewed cult in both 1870 and 1914.35 Similarly Notre-Dame-des-Clés in Verdun surprised a night attack by the Huguenots in 1562, and became the object of a cult which again was revived during the First World War.36 Virgins represent, symbolically, the cities they stand guard over. They represent the unity of the civic commonwealth; they embody its sense of honour; they are the expression of a desire to preserve intact the urban order. When chroniclers and street singers represented the capture of a city, they used metaphors of penetration, rape and dishonour to portray its fate.37 When they sang of cities that repelled invaders they represented them as maidens defending their honour, which is how the defence of Lille and Thionville was celebrated by Parisian street singers in 1792.38 The Virgin’s transformation of an insult into a miracle is a symbolic enactment of victory: the enemy is repulsed, order is preserved and civic authority is upheld. However, the threat does not have to come from an invader. In Paris, the same story is told about Notre-Dame-dela-Carole, but in this case the defiler was a soldier in the garrison. Sometimes he was spoken of as Swiss, and on one occasion as ‘Marlbrook’, but the story still worked whether the soldier was foreign or not.39 Miracles of defeat take a rather different form. A statue of a saint (usually but not always the Virgin), either hidden in advance of the enemy’s arrival, or carried off by them, returns under his or her own steam to a preferred shrine (or, occasionally, independently decides to move to a new one). At Mutterhouse, near Sarreguemines, local people tried three times to remove the statue of the Virgin from an isolated chapel to the parish church for safety, but on each occasion she reappeared in her original location. Since then, the waters of a nearby spring have been a curative for the eyes.40 At Tremblois in the Ardennes, a statue of the

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Virgin miraculously reappeared after the pillage and destruction of a wayside chapel by republican soldiers from Sedan.41 Again the identity of the soldiers involved varies considerably, though the narrative works better for Protestants and dechristianising Blues than for others. This is a very common type of legend in Catholic Europe, associated with all kinds of events in addition to troop movements, such as the arrival of a bumptious new priest, keen to clear the church of outmoded religiosity. The statue’s ability to replace itself is a sign of the revival of local popular will, a testament to survival in trying times, and a reassertion of community in the face of an outside threat. On the other hand, in legends, church bells hidden or buried so that they might be saved from military requisition were seldom recovered.42 As Alain Corbin has shown, bells were vital to a community’s sense of self-identity; so it is reasonable to interpret this as a symbolic comment on collective loss.43

The social function of legends What is the point of these stories? Why did people, around the family hearth or in the village inn, tell each other about the Swedes, or the Croats, or die grossen Zeit when the Cossacks covered the land? The transmission and retention of knowledge is more difficult in an oral culture; pointless pieces of information are not repeated and so are soon forgotten, what folklorists call ‘structural amnesia’. We must assume, then, that these legends had some sort of current relevance to the people who told them. However, we cannot reduce any one legend to a single function; meanings change in the context of performance. It is precisely because those contexts are unpredictable that folk culture prefers narrative to didactic methods of instruction. The latter can quickly become redundant.44 However, one can suggest a number of ways in which legends could have been useful. Much of it takes the form of aetiology, the desire to explain how things are now in terms of what happened in the past, what one might term folk historicism. Family names, village nicknames such as ‘maraudeurs’, and place names such as ‘Krawaten Felder’ (Croats’ field) were likely to possess some narrative of origin, as were the broken arm of a local saint’s statue or the architectural leftovers of former inhabitants, even former civilisations. In particular, legends hovered over deserted villages, isolated graves and crosses and defunct fortifications. However, anything unusual might require some explanation. As we have seen, if a village had three processions for the Fête-Dieu, a legend gave a reason why, even if it was a wrong one.

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Most legends are tied to the landscape, so that physical features could act as a mnemonic. However, this also meant that narrative could act as a guide through the landscape. In an age before the widespread availability of maps, the shape and location of landmarks were as good as directions. Legends, as we have seen, have a particular interest in boundaries, whether between communes, between civilisation and the wild, and even between the human world and the supernatural. Legends are fundamentally concerned with things being in the right place.45 Of course this drawing of boundaries also applied to people: familiarity with a particular narrative told in a particular community created a sense of belonging within that community, strengthening opposition to outsiders who knew different, possibly contradictory stories.46 Work on post-1945 memory cultures tends to emphasise the contemporary political utility of memory. Past wrongs are recalled in order to call for present redress, past suffering is emphasised in order to justify present redistribution of resources. There undoubtedly is an element of this in legends of invasion. For example, an outlying hamlet could use a statue’s miraculous choice of shrine to put pressure on the parish priest to erect a proper chapel and ensure that services were held there. Many legends refer, directly or indirectly, to communal claims to disputed lands. Always among the last news to reach sub-prefects and prefects as the enemy approached were reports from forest guards that villagers were taking advantage of the chaos to reoccupy forests claimed by the state or local landowners.47 In legends, if the villagers flee to a named wood, or hide a statue of the virgin in it, the implication is that it is their wood. However, oral cultures cannot afford to be quite so utilitarian in their use of memory. The municipal spaces of late nineteenth-century France were filled with statues and ceremonies of remembrance to heroes who had been utterly forgotten locally, but whose name had been plucked from the archive by some antiquarian with a political axe to grind, and who was able to propagate a new legend for his own time. But in an oral culture, a hero or an act once forgotten remains forgotten, forever. Oral cultures preserve memories of past acts and personae, not only because of their present utility, but because they have potential to have future utility. What worked with the Croats may work with the Cossacks. What worked with the Cossacks may work with the uhlans. In O’Ciosain’s words, stories ‘are a guide to behaviour during such crises’, and so they are a preparation against future disasters. The three possible reactions of an undefended community faced with the immanent arrival of hostile troops are flight, fight or welcome.

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Of course, any one of these choices could have dire consequences. Those who flee to the woods with whatever they can carry risk coming back to a pillaged or ruined home. In soldiers’ morality, undefended property is fair game.48 However, if they stay and welcome the invader in the hope of preserving their homes, they cannot be sure they will not be raped or murdered anyway. And finally there is armed resistance: impossible against the full might of an invading army, but not out of the question when dealing with isolated patrols, or small gangs of marauders and deserters. But resistance runs the risk of massive retribution. Legends encompass all these three possible courses of action and consider their consequences. Flight was the most commonly recommended form of action: the story of the Wildfrauloch warns of what might happen if villagers failed to flee the invader. Yet stories from nearby Niederfillen, Tuntingen and Sarrebourg have women going out to meet the Cossacks with schnapps, with some success. Note that it is always the women who get left behind, for better or worse: ‘Where are the men?’ asks one Cossack on arrival in Tuntingen, but another replies: ‘We know where they are, the Patriots! They’ve hidden in the forest.’49 Stories of resistance likewise often promote women to the front rank, as Beiner also found in the case of 1798. Sometimes these are akin to folktales of peasant resourcefulness in the face of authority, such as the woman who lets all her fellow inhabitants out of a locked church before it is fired by the Swedes,50 or another woman who, at the approach of the Cossacks, puts green logs on the fire, so that the smoke deters them from entering the house,51 or yet another who, to avenge her massacred children, poisons a group of Cossacks. Thereafter she and her husband take to the woods, ambushing enemy soldiers and notching a tree near Hohneck to mark their kills. The fir, known locally as the charcoalburner’s book, had 77 notches on it when it was finally felled to build a road.52 And it also emphasises another aspect of some of these stories: if one is going to resist physically, then one has to be prepared to kill them all, since a single escapee would nullify the whole action. There are several stories of this kind, in which a village collectively annihilates a troop of soldiers. They tend to congregate around the French invasions of the seventeenth century, rather than the Swedes or the Cossacks.53 The latter are often presented as an unstoppable flood, more akin to a natural disaster like the plague or famine (which in both cases they followed in their wake). To provide convincing proof that stories provide guides to action, we might compare two maps, one of different kinds of invasion narrative, the other, an overlay, of acts of resistance, flight or welcome, and

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demonstrate that they coincide. But this is difficult to do effectively, since, at least on the French side, the geographical spread of legends, and for that matter precise knowledge of what actually happened in particular communities, is just too patchy. There are some indications of a continuity of response: the same Verdunois communities that armed themselves against the Prussians in 1792, for instance, took up their weapons again in 1814; the same communities that provided franctireurs to defend the passes of the Vosges in 1814 and 1815 did so again in 1870. And I think it at least plausible that part of the explanation for this continuity of behaviour lies in the local oral tradition about what to do in these circumstances. The ‘future functionality’ of these narratives helps explain why we are so often dealing with ‘migratory legends’, rather than with a slice of the community’s actual experience of invasion. Contingent events may not adequately encapsulate the message one wants to impart; so it is better to borrow an existing tale and localise it. Thus similar stories crop up in different regions. Administrative and even national borders are no barrier to the diffusion of narrative models. However, if narratives serve as guides then it is only to be expected that legend and experience will coincide, and that the sort of actions suggested in story really will replicate themselves at various points in the landscape. This of course, depends on the behaviour of the soldiers, but they too are guided in their actions by stories about what is done, what could be done, what should be done. For example, invading soldiers feared that wells had been poisoned, and once this belief took hold it directed the way they behaved towards civilians.54 This is not to suggest that all stories were known everywhere. On the contrary, there are observable patterns of distribution. But those patterns do not coincide with national or other administrative boundaries, nor even entirely with language boundaries, though these can be influential. It is a very great irony that folk culture plays such an important part in the culture of nationalism, given that its genres, themes and motifs are seldom limited to specific nations, but are either transnational, or more local. Such localised narrative preferences are what folklorists call ecotypes, narratives that find a niche in a particular region or community, or a particular socio-professional group, and propagate happily within it, but do not prosper outside it. So, for example, narratives of resistance, whether of the crafty peasant kind or the more violent kind, are more common in the Vosges. Obviously resistance was more practical in wooded, mountainous areas of dispersed settlement and this geographical explanation has been advanced to explain the

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patchy nature of counter-revolution in 1793 or the maquis during the Second World War. However, landscape is an enabling factor; it is not in itself a sufficient cause. How does the observation that one is surrounded by hedges and woods transform into carrying arms? Narrative provides the link by making certain types of action imaginable. Stories told in particular communities, such as the Camisard legends of the Cévenol Protestants, helped make the idea of resistance more plausible to later generations.55 Similarly in the Vosges, knowledge of how, and with what success, one’s ancestors had resisted the Swedes or the French in the seventeenth century, made joining the francs-tireurs more imaginable.

Legends of occupation I am not suggesting that narratives are such powerful imaginative schemas that they dominate experience. The way folklorists think about how stories are generated is through a matrix in which cultural baggage interacts with personality and with immediate circumstances to create, on each occasion, a slightly different version, an updated narrative tailored to that narrator and that audience at that time. In this case novelty is provided by the legends of occupation, a very different genre from the horror stories of invasion, but quite numerous too. Despite the incredible demands placed on the civilian population by the occupying armies in 1814 and even more so in 1815, all of which followed immediately on the no less rapacious demands of the retreating French army, and despite this extra burden falling in a period of poor harvests, of genuine starvation in some cases, by and large the occupiers were, at least locally, remembered as not that bad. In retrospect, relations between locals and occupation troops, collectively or individually, could be quite good. This was a rather unexpected finding in the teachers’ memoirs of 1889, and I should imagine it is not what the exhibition organisers were looking for, but it is recurrent: at Commercy, for example, ‘the most perfect harmony reigned between victor and vanquished’; while at Dieue, Brandenburg hussars and locals danced around the bonfire together on the King’s birthday in 1818.56 The Cossacks, so terrifying in prospect, were not such monsters on closer inspection, but rather wretched types, always desperately hungry but not necessarily violent as they wandered from house to house calling ‘Mother, butter; father, schnapps’.57 Communities that not so long ago had been harbouring draft-dodgers and escaping prisoners of war, now provided refuge for runaway Russians and Prussians.58 The demand for male labour after the Napoleonic hecatomb made this a real headache for the

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occupying authorities. Romantic affiliations could even blossom. These memories were added to the store of more horrific tales, suggesting other forms of action, and other forms of relationship, between victor and vanquished.

Conclusion: A folk history of invasion and occupation In what ways does the ‘folk history’ outlined here differ from the national histories of invasion and occupation? Although the material is not as rich as Beiner’s sources, one can offer some tentative suggestions. For example, folk history is providential history: God and his saints intervene directly in human affairs to achieve particular outcomes, leading to the saving of some communities, the ruination of others. However, God’s providence worked only at the local level, within the community defined by the reach of the church bells. There is very little evidence of a sense of national community. The village and its environs were the focus of interest and, as far as one can tell, of loyalty. There is little overt sense of patriotism; even acts of resistance were to avenge personal, not national, wrongs. If this is any indication of the state of local opinion in 1814–15, it is little wonder that efforts to stir up a ‘levée en masse’ against the invaders failed. Indeed, ideas of nationhood seem rather vague in legends. Cossacks and kaiserlicks appear, but not necessarily as representatives of particular states. The same stories could be told about soldiers in a variety of uniforms, including French bleus. Conflict was less between France and the Allies than between civilians and soldiers as members of opposed social orders. It was in the nature of soldiers to prey upon peasants, regardless of nationality. This is a very different picture to that portrayed in ‘national histories’ emerging from what Beiner terms the ‘hegemonic centres of knowledge’. For example, André Roger’s 1920 history of the 1815 invasion paints a picture of ethnic struggle: The representatives of the Latin races, the Piedmontese and the Spaniards, provided no instances of savage brutality. The AngloSaxons acted with relative moderation and propriety. The Slavs behaved when under authority, but surrendered to their instincts for rape and pillage when left to their own devices. The Germans and the Alemannic Swiss maintained a constant attitude towards France; their hatred and their gross appetites worked together to ruin her.59

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If this reflects any historical reality, it is of Talleyrand’s use of propaganda to propagate rivalries among the occupying powers in an attempt to split the Allies. Meanwhile, the word on the high street in the villages of Lorraine was less of elemental racial rivalries than of everyday accommodations, with Germans just as much as with Russians. If the ‘folk history’ of the invasions and occupations became a source for popular nationalism in the nineteenth century, it was less in these legends than in the uses to which they were put by provincial literati such as Erckmann-Chatrian. In oral culture legends were flexible both in their content and in their interpretation. Only when written down, and provided with a pointed moral lesson, did they become vehicles for eternal verities about the relationship between one nation and another.

Notes 1. Soldiers’ everyday concerns are dealt with by Alan Forrest, The Soldiers of the French Revolution (Durham NC, 1990), chapter 6, and Alan Forrest, Napoleon’s Men: The Soldiers of the Revolution and Empire (London, 2002), chapters 6–7. 2. Natalie Petiteau, Lendemains d’empire: Les soldats de Napoléon dans la France du XIXe siècle (Paris, 2003), pp. 210–25. 3. On the image of the soldier-teacher, and the ‘philosophical’ outlook of the veteran, see David M. Hopkin, Soldier and Peasant in French Popular Culture, 1766–1870 (Woodbridge, 2003), chapter 5. 4. The recent profusion of works on the expansion of France and the Napoleonic Empire may have made this comment less relevant, though by and large they do not focus on day-to-day interactions of soldiers and locals. One of the few that does, Tim Blanning’s The French Revolution in Germany: Occupation and Resistance in the Rhineland, 1792–1802 (Oxford, 1983), is quite polemical in tone, which does not mean I think his conclusions are wrong! 5. The literature on post-war memory is huge, but the point is illustrated by, among others: Jeffrey Herf, Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys (Cambridge, Mass., 1997); Pieter Lagrou, The Legacy of Nazi Occupation. Patriotic Memory and National Recovery in Western Europe, 1945–1965 (Cambridge, 1999); Henry Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome. History and Memory in France since 1944 (Cambridge, Mass., 1994); Richard J.B. Bosworth and Patrizia Dogliani (eds.), Italian Fascism. History, Memory and Representation (London, 1999). 6. For example, in Adam Zamoyski’s recent study of the 1813 campaign, which concentrates on the affairs of generals, diplomats and rulers, whole populations tend to be subsumed under ‘patriotic’ clichés. Adam Zamoyski, Rites of Peace: The Fall of Napoleon and the Congress of Vienna (London, 2007). 7. Gavin Daly, Inside Napoleonic France: State and Society in Rouen, 1800–1815, (London, 2001), pp. 248–64. 8. I am thinking specifically of: Timothy Tangherlini, Interpreting Legend: Danish Storytellers and their Repertoires (New York, 1994); Juha Pentikäinen, Oral

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9. 10. 11.

12.

13. 14.

15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28.

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Repertoire and World View: an Anthropological Study of Marina Takalo’s Life History (Helsinki, 1978); Annikki Kaivola-Bregenhøj, Narrative and Narrating: Variation in Juho Oksanen’s Storytelling (Helsinki, 1996); Niall O Ciosain, ‘Approaching a Folklore Archive: The Irish Folklore Commission and the Memory of the Great Famine’, Folklore, 115:2 (2004), 222–32; and the contributors to the Celtic-Nordic-Baltic legends symposiums. Guy Beiner, Remembering the Year of the French: Irish Folk History and Social Memory (Madison, 2007). Guy Beiner, ‘Who were “The Men of the West?” Folk Historiographies and the Reconstruction of Democratic Histories’, Folklore, 115 (2004), 201–21. See, in particular: Vieda Skultans, The Testimony of Lives: Narrative and Memory in Post-Soviet Latvia (London, 1998); Alessandro Portelli, The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History (Albany, 1991); Alessandro Portelli, The Battle of Valle Giulia: Oral History and the Art of Dialogue (Madison, 1997), especially part 2; and for an investigation of the links between the genres of oral culture and oral history, see Raphael Samuel and Paul Thompson (eds.), The Myths We Live By (London, 1990). For a definition and examples, see Reidar Christiansen, The Migratory Legends: A Proposed List of Types with a Systematic Catalogue of the Norwegian Variants (Helsinki, 1958). O Ciosain, ‘Approaching a Folklore Archive’, 225. Guy Beiner, ‘Triumph of Defeat and Defeatist Triumphalism: Competing Traditions of Remembrance in Modern Ireland’, paper delivered to the ‘Defeat and Memory’ conference, Edinburgh, September 2005. Karl Lohmeyer, Die Sagen von der Saar, Blies, Nahe vom Hunsrück, Soon- und Hochwald (Saarbrücken, 1935), p. 175. Ibid., pp. 218, 229. On the memory of the Thirty Years War in Lorraine, see Philippe Martin, Une guerre de Trente Ans en Lorraine, 1631–1661 (Nancy, 2002), pp. 353–62; and Roger Maudhuy, La Lorraine des légendes (Paris, 2004), pp. 33–61. Xavier Thiriat, La vallée de Cleurie, (Mirecourt, 1869), p. 210. Henri Lerond, Lothringische Sammelmappe (Forbach, 1892), vol. 3, p. 62. Maudhuy, La Lorraine des légendes, p. 49. I have heard similar remarks myself. Jill Stephenson, Hitler’s Home Front: Wurttemberg under Nazi Rule (London, 2006), pp. 325–6. Martin, Une guerre de Trente Ans, p. 355. Thiriat, La vallée de Cleurie, p. 240. Angelika Merkelbach-Pinck, Aus der Lothringer Meistube (Cassel, 1943), vol. 2, p. 292. Gabriel Noël, Au temps des volontaires: lettres d’un volontaire de 1792 (Paris, 1912), p. 249. Max Bruchet, L’Invasion et l’occupation du département du nord par les alliés, 1814–1818 (Lille, 1920), p. 5. Michael Broers, ‘Napoleon, Charlemagne, and Lotharingia: Acculturation and the Boundaries of Napoleonic Europe’, Historical Journal, 44, (2001), 135–54. Alexander Stewart, The Life of Alexander Stewart, Prisoner of Napoleon and Preacher of the Gospel, ed. Dr Albert Peel (London, 1948), p. 78.

232 Legends of the Allied Invasions 29. Henri Lerond, Lothringische Sammelmappe (Forbach, 1893), vol. 6, p. 75. Merkelbach-Pinck, Aus der Lothringer Meistube, vol. 2, p. 111. The same story was told about Schwarzerden and Staufenberg in Germany: Lohmeyer, Die Sagen von der Saar, pp. 265–6, 336–7. 30. Philippe Raxhon, ‘Folklore wallon et mémoire de la Révolution française: le territoire de la légende’, in Maurice Agulhon (ed.) Cultures et Folklores républicaines (Paris, 1995), 461–76. 31. Erckmann-Chatrian, L’invasion; ou, Le fou Yégof (7th edition, Paris, 1862), p. 1. 32. Henri Labourasse, Anciens us, coutumes, légendes, superstitions, préjugés, etc du département de la Meuse, (Bar-le-Duc, 1903), p. 167. This legend also appears in the teacher’s 1888 monograph for Varennes-en-Argonne. 33. Louis Lallement, Folklore et vieux souvenirs d’Argonne, (Chalons-sur-Marne, 1921), p. 172. 34. Charles Aimond, Histoire de la Ville de Varennes-en-Argonne, (Bar-le-Duc, 1928), chapter 5. 35. Charles Hallot, Notre Dame du Guet: Protectrice de Bar-le-Duc, couronnée le 1 juillet 1920 (Bar-le-Duc, 1920). 36. For further information on all these miraculous statues, see Charles Aimond, Notre Dame dans le diocèse de Verdun (Paris 1943). 37. Ulinka Rublack, ‘Wench and Maiden: Women, War and the Pictorial Function of the Feminine in German Cities in the Early Modern Period’, History Workshop Journal, vol. 44 (1997), 1–22; David Hopkin, ‘Sieges, Seduction and Sacrifice in Revolutionary War: The “Virgins of Verdun”, 1792’, European History Quarterly, 37 (2007), 528–47. 38. Ladré père, Le chansonnier patriote ou recueil de chansons nationales (Paris, n.d.): ‘Dialogue entre le Général Autrichien et la Ville de Lille, dédié aux invincibles Lillois’. 39. F.M. Grimm et al., Correspondance littéraire, philosophique et critique, ed. Maurice Tourneux (Paris, 1880), vol. 13, p. 322. 40. Marie-Louise Tenèze, ‘Le Folklore des eaux dans le département de la Moselle’, Nouvelle Revue des Traditions Populaires, 2 (1950), 152. 41. Albert Meyrac, Traditions, coutumes, légendes et contes des Ardennes (Charleville, 1890), p. 55. 42. Maudhuy, La Lorraine des légendes, pp. 107–9. 43. Alain Corbin, Village Bells: Sound and Meaning in the 19th-Century French Countryside (New York, 1998). 44. For a brilliant exposition of how a single narrative can take on different meanings in changing contexts, see Michael Gilsenan, Lords of the Lebanese Marches: Violence and Narrative in an Arab Society (London, 1996), especially chapter 8. 45. Terry Gunnell, ‘Legends and Landscapes, Narratives and Space’, paper given to the Social History Society annual conference, Exeter 2006. 46. See, for example, David Hopkin, ‘Legendary Places: Oral History and Folk Geography in Nineteenth-Century Brittany’, in Richard Thomson and Frances Fowle (eds.), Soil and Stone: Impressionism, Urbanism, Environment (Aldershot, 2003), pp. 65–84. 47. AD Meuse 8 R 4, ‘Approvisionnement de siège et travaux de défense de la place de Verdun (1814–1815)’. Letter from the Commander of the Department

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48. 49. 50.

51. 52. 53. 54.

55.

56. 57. 58. 59.

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of the Meuse to the sub-prefect of Verdun, 2 February 1814, and letter from the Governor of Verdun to the sub-prefect of Verdun, 13 February 1814. François-Etienne Marquant, Carnet d’étapes du dragon Marquant, G. Vallée & G. Pariset eds (Nancy, 1898), p. 183. Merkelbach-Pinck, Aus der Lothringer Meistube, vol. 2, p. 439. Charles Charton, Les Vosges pittoresques et historiques (Paris, 1862), p. 300. According to legend, the Swedes had a habit of locking the population in the church and then firing it. Thiriat, La vallée de Cleurie, p. 240. Fernand Baldenne, ‘La Charbonnière du Hohneck’, Le pays lorrain 1 (1904), 354–6. See also Maudhuy, La Lorraine des légendes, pp. 84–8. Jean-Christophe Demard, Tradition et mystères d’un terroir comtois au XIXe siècle: Les Vosges méridionales (Langres, 1981), p. 229. Frédéric-Christian Laukhard, Un allemand en France sous la Terreur: souvenirs de Frédéric-Christian Laukhard, 1792–94 (Paris, 1915), p. 73; Jean Conan, Les Aventures extraordinaires du citoyen Conan (1765–1834) ed. Paolig Combot (Morlaix 2001), pp. 125–7. Rod Kedward, In Search of the Maquis: Rural Resistance in Southern France, 1942–1944 (Oxford, 1993) 148. See also Philippe Joutard, La Légende des Camisards: une sensibilité au passé (Paris, 1977). Archives départementales de la Meuse: Les monographies communales des instituteurs de 1888–9: Commercy and Dieue. Merkelbach-Pinck, Aus der Lothringer Meistube, vol. 2, pp. 439, 292–3. See also Demard, Tradition et mystères d’un terroir comtois, p. 234. Merkelbach-Pinck, Aus der Lothringer Meistube, vol. 1, pp. 180, 293; vol. 2, p. 293. André, Roger, L’Occupation de la France par les alliés en 1815 (Paris, 1924), pp. 150–1.

12 ‘The Germans are Hydrophobes’: Germany and the Germans in the Shaping of French Identity Michael Rapport

Historians of national identity in Europe have frequently distinguished between ‘western’ and ‘eastern’ patterns of belonging. In the ‘western’ form, the nation is defined politically, that is as a matter of explicit or implicit political choice by its individual citizens whose continued existence together as a nation, as Ernest Renan famously declared in 1882, was a tacit ‘daily plebiscite’.1 This makes one’s nationality, at least theoretically, a matter of political choice, defined by one’s determination to share the political and civil rights of citizenship with other citizens in the same state. It may take years or even a generation before some individuals or groups, such as foreigners and immigrant communities, are allowed to enjoy the full rights of citizenship, but their ethnicity, racial origins or religion are not an obstacle to that process. Indeed, in some cases, their new nationality is meant to transcend, if not efface altogether, such identities. The ‘eastern’ form of national identity is one which glories in the shared ethnic roots and distinct culture of a people, who, it is claimed, enjoy a common descent from a particular ancestry, real or mythical. One remained ‘organically’ part of one’s nation, whatever one did and wherever one went. Ties of ‘blood’ and ‘culture’ are often evoked to justify or to explain this immutable sense of belonging. In this definition, foreigners who cannot claim to share the same ethnicity or ‘race’ can never be full citizens. Based on these two different conceptions of national identity, ‘nationalism’ can therefore take, respectively, two different forms: ‘civic’ and ‘ethnic’.2 ‘Nationalism’ itself can be defined variously.3 For the purposes of this chapter, it is understood as a belief that the individual is part of a people 234

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called a ‘nation’ which is bound together in ways which transcend social and, sometimes, religious and ethnic differences. The nation is held to be an essential source of individual identity. It owes no loyalty to any institution beyond itself: it is the source of sovereignty and legitimacy.4 Nationalism can therefore be the expression of a programme of national unity or liberation, or conversely, of territorial conquest and domination, based on a nebulous sense of entitlement or superiority. What ‘nationalists’ of all kinds have in common is the assumption that the nation exists objectively, but that some sort of activity is required to ensure that the nation is recognised and that its rights are fulfilled. This might mean dramatic actions such as an insurrection to expel foreign rulers, or conquering other people to ‘restore’ or ‘reunite’ territories claimed as integral to the nation. It might equally entail the development of a programme of education or other cultural initiatives to awaken a dormant, provincial population to their true identity as part of a wider, national community. It follows that nationalism is based on a sense of national identity (even if, at the outset, it is shared only by a rarified bunch of intellectuals) and seeks to galvanise, instil or even create that sense of identity amongst the wider population which is said to be the nation. Ironically, while nationalists generally claim that the nation has ‘always’ existed (even if awareness of that existence remained subterranean), in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries most European nationalists faced the awkward fact that most of the people they thought belonged to the ‘nation’ were in fact entrenched in older loyalties – regional, dynastic, religious. It was for this reason that Massimo d’Azeglio famously declared just after Italian unification that ‘We have made Italy. Now we must make the Italians’.5 It was one thing to create the political framework of a unified state, but quite another to mould the people with their older, divergent loyalties into citizens bound to the abstract idea of the Italian nation. The French revolutionaries of the 1790s faced precisely the same task when they swept away – on paper at least – the corporate, municipal and provincial privileges which, prior to 1789, had distinguished one part of France from the other and one social group from the next. All French people were henceforth meant to be, first and foremost, citizens of the national community, defined by the enjoyment of the rights of man proclaimed repeatedly by the revolutionaries over the course of the decade. Religion, culture or ‘race’ were not preconditions for French citizenship in any of the constitutions of the 1790s, but, for a foreigner seeking naturalisation, living on the nation’s territory and taking the civic oath were.

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The modern French Republic, therefore, with its emphasis on this revolutionary heritage, is usually held to be representative of ‘civic’ nationalism, while Germany is usually considered as a classic example of ‘ethnic’ nationalism, where once the Volk did not simply mean ‘people’, but carried strong connotations of blood and culture.6 Yet recent work has suggested that the distinction between the ‘civic’ and the ‘ethnic’ is a false dichotomy and that all forms of European national identity and nationalism carry elements of both. Anne-Marie Thiesse emphasises the common eighteenth-century origins of national identities in Europe. In a metaphor which will strike a chord with anyone who has been exposed to the dubious pleasures of ‘do-it-yourself’ furniture, she refers to the European variations on the same essential themes as ‘the IKEA system’, which, ‘from the same basic categories, allows for differences in assembly’.7 Anthony D. Smith distinguishes between ethnic and civic identities for the sake of analysis, but stresses that ethnic and civic elements are ‘the profound dualism at the heart of every nationalism’.8 Most recently, the editors and authors of a rich and dense volume of essays on the subject agree that ‘the dichotomy between civic and ethnic forms of nationalism corresponds, at most, to an ideal type. In most cases, it fails to describe the diversity and contradictoriness ... of nationalism in modern Europe’.9 Not all historians accept, however, that French republican nationalism was cut from the same cloth as other European nationalisms. David A. Bell, for example, argues strongly that what distinguished the French type after the Revolution was not only the single-minded purpose with which representatives of the French state (most notably republican schoolteachers) pursued the goal of turning provincials into ‘Frenchmen’, but also the genuine universalism in French nationalism, which sought not only to build the nation, but also to expand it so that it embraced as much of humanity as possible.10 These differences of opinion raise important questions about the evolution of French national identity and nationalism. In the first place, as French power surged across Europe over the course of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, French soldiers and officials encountered non-French people whom they struggled to understand or accommodate. If the rights of man were universal, it seemed that they were, in fact, buried beneath deep seams of cultural difference. Put another way, the universalist aspirations of the French Revolution were heavily blunted once they made contact with the ‘other’. In the Holy Roman Empire, the variety of local customs and practices – and the obvious attachment to them which persisted amongst many

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Germans – bemused and frustrated the French as they sought to export revolutionary ideals and institutions. Cultural difference was a still more urgent issue in those areas like Belgium, Piedmont and the Rhineland, which were directly annexed by the Republic. When these regions officially became part of France, the challenge of turning their people into French citizens seriously tested the revolutionaries’ universalist ideas, since they constantly struck against a wall of much older loyalties, social relations and customs. As Stuart Woolf has shown, the ‘universalism’ of French revolutionary notions of nationhood was predicated on the assumption of the superiority of French civilisation, judged in terms of manners (moeurs), politeness (civilité) and laws (police – which also means organisation, administration).11 Michael Broers has further proposed that the French exercised a ‘cultural imperialism’ or indeed an ‘orientalism’ within Europe, predicated on this sense of having the blueprint for a state arranged along lines of citizenship exercised within a rational, ordered and centralised state.12 The cultural process by which these French ideas of citizenship, nationhood and civilisation developed did not start with the Revolution, but began, as David Bell has shown, at the beginning of the eighteenth century when, in opposition literature, the ‘nation’ rather than the king started to be regarded as the source of legitimacy, particularly amongst the Jansenists.13 Moreover, in what Peter Sahlins terms the ‘citizenship revolution’, the monarchy itself sought from the 1760s to make clearer distinctions between nationals and foreigners, while writers began to explore concepts of the active citizen participating in the public sphere.14 Liah Greenfeld argues that the development of French nationalism in the eighteenth century was spurred by a sense of ressentiment towards France’s great rival, Britain. This term did not only mean ‘resentment’, but also a more complex knot of envy for, reaction to and imitation of British mores and institutions, driven by a patriotic sense that France could and ought to do better.15 David Bell, too, charts the evolution of French nationalism with reference to French perceptions of the British, particularly during the Seven Years War and its aftermath.16 While recognising the central importance of the Franco-British rivalry to the development of nationalisms and national identity on both sides of the Channel,17 this present chapter suggests that French perceptions of Germany and the Germans also played an important role in shaping the French self-image. Additionally, in one important sense French relations with the Germans had a greater impact in moulding French notions of citizenship and civilisation because the French were never presented with a genuine opportunity of annexing any part

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of the British Isles. Yet they did, of course, annex the Rhineland and, under Napoleon, a broad swathe of territory as far as the Hanseatic cities. Consequently, Germany in general offered an example of the ‘other’ against which French civilisation was judged, while the Rhineland in particular became one of the testing grounds for the universal application of revolutionary citizenship.

Germany and the Germans as the ‘Other’ Germany, or rather the territories of the Holy Roman Empire, provided a rich though very fragmented mirror in which progressive Frenchmen and women could find a reflection of France’s own virtues, vices and, ultimately, superiority. This process, of course, went back a very long way – at least to Froissart – and in a more intense and consistent way from the seventeenth century.18 One should also add that an important source of French images of Germans came not from across the Rhine, but from within the boundaries of the French kingdom – in Alsace, which first fell to France in 1648. In the later 1790s, one of the Directory’s commissioners in Mainz warned the government that although Alsace had been united to France for a century, ‘the same prejudices and the same ills’ still afflicted the province, thanks to the over-indulgence shown by the conquerors.19 From his perspective, the stubbornly persistent ‘Germanness’ of Alsace was still too evident and provided a salutary warning to the French about accommodating local customs in the Rhineland.20 One of the earliest eighteenth-century French observers to commit pen to paper on Germany proper was none other than Montesquieu, who travelled through southern and western Germany in 1729. This was not the Montesquieu of the Lettres Persanes, which used the device of sophisticated foreigners staring in satirical wonder at French customs and institutions. Instead, Montesquieu’s Voyage en Allemagne reflects the author’s own, private perceptions (since they were not published until the nineteenth century), but they certainly reflect wider French prejudices. Germans are phlegmatic, have no sense of irony and have an excessive penchant for wine and beer while avoiding water – for this reason, Montesquieu flatly states that the Germans ‘are hydrophobes’. A traveller passing through a village asking for water would provoke a gathering of the entire populace who would watch as the stranger drank and laugh uproariously. Having made this judgement on German dipsomania, however, Montesquieu then fell seriously ill – from having imbibed the local water.21 Montesquieu also relates – again, without any

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flourish – some odd Germanic customs. In Heidelberg, for instance, he visits the famously giant wine vat in the cellars of the castle. One may drink from it, but if one fails to observe certain rituals, including toasting the health of the Elector, or if one strikes the barrel, one would be soundly spanked on the backside.22 Montesquieu’s political observations are more serious. Prussia (this, of course, just a decade before the accession of Frederick II) is intolerably frugal, boorish, despotic and militarist. The duke of Württemberg is capricious and frivolous, while in Bavaria the local magistrates ‘live like princes and are little tyrants’.23 The fragmented nature of the German polity, even with the overarching structure of the Holy Roman Empire, elicited less-than-enthusiastic French commentary: the Encyclopédie wrote that ‘one conceives that this form of government, establishing within the same empire an infinity of different frontiers, assumes the existence of different laws from one place to the next, money of different types and goods belonging to different masters’.24 In Candide, Voltaire famously ridiculed the tinpot nature of the small German states, the obsession with noble pedigree and the unwieldy language.25 Decades before the Revolution, therefore, French commentators were remarking on the odd German political and social jumble. Yet there were also nuances. Progressive French publicists lionised Frederick the Great because of his enlightened reforms, his military prowess (visited, not least, against the French themselves during the Seven Years War), his famous preference for the French language over German and, perhaps above all, the consistently anti-Austrian orientation of his foreign policy. Respect for Frederick’s legacy persisted into the 1790s, and, indeed, through the Napoleonic era.26 At the end of 1791, as the National Assembly debated the prospect of war against Austria, Frederick, now dead for five years, was described (not inaccurately) as a ‘philosopher king’ whose state was rich, just and stable.27 With the eruption of the Revolutionary Wars, the revolutionaries cast themselves in the role of liberators because of the strong sense that their principles of liberty and equality were universal. It was not long before France itself was identified with ‘civilisation’, and later its selfproclaimed mission would be applied not only to Europe, but to the wider world, as the ‘civilising mission’, which became a central justification for French overseas imperialism.28 In the 1790s, any people who did not match up to the exacting standards of the Revolution would fall beneath France and the French in the hierarchy of moral and political development.

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This was well expressed when the revolutionaries cast a glance over what, to their eyes, were the unacceptably arcane structures of the Holy Roman Empire. When making his case to the Directory for the annexation of the Rhineland in January 1796, the stridently republican JeanFrançois Reubell grudgingly admitted that the French would still have to treat with the German princes. The sort of overarching structure provided by the Empire had its uses in that it provided unity and protection to Europe’s soft centre, ‘however vicious [the Empire] is in its political principles, in the bizarreness and incoherence of its elements’. But, Reubell continues: If the war which we have waged had yielded more generous successes, we could have disdainfully refused to treat with the Princes and have thought only of Nations, those great families of the human species. But since circumstances did not allow us to refine our system to that stage, let us still do something for the Princes, until such time as the slow workings of reason, more terrible than Victories, hurl them from their trembling thrones and call on their the subjects, whom they keep curbed beneath a shameful yoke, to participate in the rights which we have conquered, so leaving around us only people driven by the same principles and who are, consequently, friends.29 The rhetorical implications of Reubell’s analysis are striking. On the one hand, the princes and Germany’s imperial structures may have been an international necessity, but the language left Reubell’s fellow Directors in little doubt that France was still to regard these Germanic survivals as offensive to the whole idea of an international order based on national rather than dynastic sovereignty. On the other hand, once the Germans had understood their rights and claimed them, there was no doubt that friendship between the two peoples would logically follow. That time, however, seemed long distant. Meanwhile, it is implied, there could be no true friendship between peoples who could not greet each other as equals – and in this context, ‘equality’ meant adopting republican forms of government and citizenship. French perceptions of the differing levels of enlightenment imposed limits on the cosmopolitanism implicit in the principles of the Revolution – and ‘cosmopolitanism’ meant the spread of liberté à la française, not a pluralist vision of different expressions of nationhood. The French could work towards the ‘regeneration’ of the people of the soon-to-be-annexed Rhineland, who were meant to be turned into fully-fledged citizens of the Republic, but the high tide of civilisation would clearly stop on the left bank of the Rhine.

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This was some contrast from the very early days of the war in 1792, when French revolutionaries looked for, and found, evidence that while the old regime authorities might have been benighted, the population was not. Religion – or rather the levels of religiosity displayed – played an important role in French assessments of the levels of German enlightenment. In May 1792 the secretary of the French legation to Prussia, Louis-Marc Rivalz, wrote to the then foreign minister Dumouriez, at the end of his outward journey across Germany to Berlin. He was damning about Catholic attitudes, but not those of the Protestants. ‘I can assure you that the Spanish, whose morals and opinions I have studied with some care, have resisted the influence of the Roman clergy more than the Germans have.’ He argued, nonetheless, that among the Protestants he met, there was more enthusiasm for the French Revolution. Among them, Rivalz reported that when he handed out a tricolour ribbon, it was immediately cut up into small pieces so that everyone could have a piece of the French red-white-blue.30 Despite the scowling of the Reubells of the Revolution, and even as the initial optimism about being greeted as liberators rapidly evaporated, the nuances in French perceptions of the Germans proved to be surprisingly persistent. French superiority in civilisation was never doubted – at least, not by revolutionary and Napoleonic officials – but observations about the Germans were not entirely negative and in some cases they were quite the opposite. Even on the eve of their crushing defeat of the Prussians at Jena and Auerstädt in 1806, the French regarded the military ethos of the Prussian state with a mixture of derision and admiration. A sense emerges from the French diplomatic correspondence from Berlin that the Prussian army was not as good as the French, but was better than the Russians and the Austrians. Moreover, it was argued, the good thing about the Prussians was that they loathed the Austrians and the Prussian army would march to war against them with a spring in their step. To satisfy their sense of honour, however, the Prussians would fight the French because they, of course, were the most worthy of adversaries.31 Interestingly, while French diplomats remarked on the state of the Prussian army and spoke with a certain awe of Frederick the Great’s military legacy,32 they revealed no sense that France, too, was a militarised state – by the later 1790s perhaps the most militarised state in Europe. If one may speculate, this apparent blindness may have stemmed from a deep sense that French national values and identity were always rooted in the civil and political rights of citizenship – even, in theory if not fact, under Napoleon.

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As a conglomerate of different lands, the Grand Duchy of Berg, created by Napoleon on the right bank of the Rhine in 1806 out of the Duchies of Cleves and Berg, ceded respectively by Prussia and Bavaria,33 offers a picture of these nuances in microcosm. On the formerly Prussian territories, a report of March 1806 informed Napoleon, some institutions were good enough to be kept, some could be transplanted from one part of the Grand Duchy to another, while others had to be swept away altogether. Among the useful institutions which were even worth emulating elsewhere were the fire insurance company, which was cheap enough to be accessible to almost anyone, and the prison regime, which ensured the humane treatment of the inmates, while also imposing on them useful tasks which instilled the work ethnic amongst criminals.34 Yet there was less to be said for the formerly Bavarian areas of the new state. In the same month, Marshal Murat, who was the first Grand Duke, thundered to Napoleon that the administration is a chaos which is giving me a great deal of trouble to disentangle. There has never been an organisation less regular than that which exists here . ... There was a royal regency council, a ducal regency council, a privy council, a commission ... no one has fixed responsibilities ... I cannot find anyone who is completely familiar with any single branch of the civil service.35 The differences across the Grand Duchy were still apparent in 1809, which was a very difficult year for the French in Germany. A report on the public mood in March declared that morale was generally good in the formerly Prussian areas, where the government had been enlightened. The County of ‘Lamarck’36 was a small province which had ‘profited from all the good laws of Frederick II’. Yet even here there were problems, for a Gordian knot of administrative and fiscal offices had been deliberately maintained to prevent the Prussian state from raising taxation. Needless to say, the local population now had cause to regret to arrival of ‘a government which is too close and too clairvoyant’. The former bishopric of Münster,37 meanwhile, was a ‘land of Candides’, where the population was divided between a twelfth-century nobility and a mass of peasants who are ‘enserfed and brutalised’. Like the German gentry ridiculed by Voltaire, these nobles were obsessed with their status, particularly their honours and titles, but, the report continues, the regeneration of the country has begun with the decrees which suppress serfdom and feudal inheritance ... it has changed slaves into men. The brutishness of these slaves is such that they do not feel its

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benefits yet, but measures are being taken to hasten their education. Now there is a mass of people who have been rescued. This comment was, of course, a little optimistic, not least because all peasants had to pay compensation to their lords for the abolition of seigneurialism. Since the costs were prohibitive for many peasants, the system remained unaltered in many parts of the Grand Duchy. The report concludes with a remark on state-building à la française: But it will surely require time and effort to create a patrie from these people gathered up from ten or twelve different jurisdictions and amongst whom, unlike on the other bank of the Rhine, there has occurred no revolution, which is a terrible, but very rapid, method of education for a people.38 The overwhelming sense of all this is that the Germans would require an enormous dedication of time and effort before they could be cultivated to the levels of civilisation represented by the French Revolution. France had earned the right to lead the process precisely because it had had a revolution. It was regenerated.

Germans into Frenchmen: the Rhineland If the Germans were so different from the French, how could they be shaped into citizens, as they had to do when, from 1798, the French began the process of annexing the Rhineland?39 In the 1790s, the obvious answer for the revolutionaries was an ideological one: the question was answered by the universalist implications of the rights of man. From the French perspective, the full enjoyment of these rights could only occur within a French republican framework, but sincere loyalty to that Republic and active engagement in citizenship were – in revolutionary theory – the essential determinants of nationality. Initially in the spring of 1798, when annexation seemed very likely to go ahead, the French commissioners in the conquered territories of the Rhineland spoke of their gratification over the apparent enthusiasm with which the Rhenish people petitioned for annexation.40 Some officials even claimed that the Rhineland, like France, had had its own revolution, even if it was nipped in the bud by Prussian resurgence in 1793–4. In a carefully-scripted festival held in March 1798, an official was to declare that ‘the people of these territories had courageously thrown off the yoke of its tyrants, who coalesced in order to retake that sovereignty which had just been reconquered’. All of this suggested that the

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Rhinelanders did, indeed, have the political will to the part of the French Republic and that they, unlike much of the rest of Germany, had awoken to their rights. Nonetheless, it was made amply clear that the ultimate thanks were owed to France, ‘the great nation [which] through its power ended that cruel struggle’.41 Significantly, this festival was held in Mainz, which could claim, at least, to have had a hard core of revolutionaries during the first French occupation of 1792–3 and who, while they may have been a minority, at least represented a cross-section of urban society. Yet French optimism in 1798 proved to be very short-lived, for it soon became obvious that there were more hindrances than assistance to the integration of the Rhineland into the Republic. Speaking in republican terms, it seemed clear to the Directory’s commissioner in the Rhineland, François Rudler, that the Rhenish were not yet ready for the plenitude of French political liberties. In March 1798, Rudler and his friend the justice minister, Lambrechts, had an interesting exchange of letters regarding the introduction of the French constitution of the Year III (1795) into the four Rhenish departments. The commissioner was clearly grappling with his conscience: Should the Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man and the Citizen, founded on a morality which ought to be universal and which ought to bind the great human family together in all times and in all places, and which cannot be tampered with when one is a French citizen, should it suffer modifications, or exceptions?42 Articles 17 and 20 of the Declaration struck Rudler as especially problematic for the Rhineland. The first of these declared that ‘sovereignty resides essentially in the universality of citizens’, while the second proclaimed that ‘each citizen has the equal right to participate, directly or indirectly, in the formation of the law, in the nomination of the representatives of the people and of public officials’.43 Rudler, in other words, was not yet ready to recognise his Rhenish administrés as part of the sovereign French nation. Yet if the rights of man were immutable and universal, then how could one deny the Rhinelanders their political liberties when, by the very fact of annexation, the Republic was claiming them as citizens? Lambrechts’ reply 12 days later is revealing. There should, he said, be no modification to the Declaration: The truths which are proclaimed there are eternal truths, independent of circumstance and place. The rights and duties of man are the

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same in Constantinople as they are in Paris. But if those rights are imprescriptible, the course of events can indefinitely suspend their application. They have often been sold by corruption, they have often been forgotten by ignorance and fanaticism. Sometimes, finally, the laws of war, which make one people dependent on another, deprive it momentarily of the exercise of its sovereignty. The inhabitants of the left bank of the Rhine are in this last category. But the Republic is great enough to allow these people to know the full extent of their rights, as it is strong enough to maintain the practical measures which circumstances impose and which are necessary for its own conservation.44 The practical application of Lambrechts’ reply is perhaps not surprising in that, as one might expect, the occupiers were reluctant to open up any legal channels through which concerted opposition might be expressed. Yet it is also clear that Lambrechts and Rudler were unwilling to admit even to each other, in closed correspondence, that the rights of man did not necessarily apply to the Rhineland. Significantly, Rudler was from Alsace and Lambrechts was from Belgium: both men, in other words, were from the geographical and cultural peripheries of the French Republic. Both probably understood more than most that the revolutionary state not only had to undertake the administrative integration of the periphery through the imposition of uniform structures, but that it also had to encourage the cultural absorption of the people of the periphery. The doctrine of the rights of man, by transcending language, customs and other sources of ethnic identity, had the potential to integrate diverse people into one polity – once it was no longer deemed risky to give the people of the periphery the freedom to express themselves. Yet in the 1790s, that moment seemed long distant. The correspondence of the representatives of the French power on the ground is replete with remarks about nostalgia for the old regime, the persistence of religiosity and – tellingly – language as a barrier to the forging of the Rhenish people into French citizens.45 Although it was never explicitly whispered, there was some recognition that, for all the cosmopolitanism implicit in the revolutionary ideal of citizenship, the universality of the rights of man was buried beneath weighty layers of cultural difference and the persistence of older social relations. In practice, the Rhinelanders would not be granted full constitutional government until the Consulate of Napoleon Bonaparte, by which time the idea of active citizenship was all but an empty concept. To Napoleon, there was no need to shape the Rhenish into politically engaged citizens, since

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the role of all French subjects – a term which officially supplanted the word ‘citizen’ in 1806 – was primarily to obey, not participate in politics. Yet the revolutionaries persisted in the belief that the Rhenish could be forged into citizens. One suspects that the French ultimately hoped to assimilate – that is, following Michael Broers and the theorist Nathan Wachtel,46 to obliterate the indigenous culture and impose the imperial one in its place. In pondering how to do so, some republicans came up with radical solutions that dwelt on the issues of language and cultural identity. In February 1799 the naturalist and antiquarian Casimir Rostan, who had been sent by the interior minister, François de Neufchâteau, to gather information about the left bank of the Rhine, suggested the colonisation of the Rhineland by French people from the interior, so that there would be cultural mixing in which, gradually, the Rhenish people would lose their original identity and melt into the mass of French people.47 A ‘Citizen’ Berger, who was in Mainz in the late 1790s, declared that there could be no indulgence of local languages among the republic’s officials: If the French language is to be the nursing mother of its pupils, it must propagate its work and make itself understood wherever a man decorated with the tricolour ribbon applies and executes the law. You want to open a temple of reason, but only Frenchmen should carry the flame there ... The Frenchman is rebutted once he pronounces one word, since it is true that the administrators sustain that antipathy amongst his family, at the shopkeeper’s, and that it rebounds visibly against the French. Encourage the propagation of the French language: you can do it, you want to do it, and the interest of the republic demands it. Echoing Rostan’s idea of colonies, Berger suggested that republicans be encouraged to settle in all corners of the Republic. Encouraging French people to settle in Mainz and according administrative and judicial posts to Frenchmen would nourish the spread of the French language in the region. Without that, future generations of Mainzers would simply inherit the prejudices of the old regime.48 None of these proposals were taken seriously at the time, but they show that, for all the emphasis on citizenship as the determinant of nationality, in reality some of the revolutionaries believed that cultural uniformity was necessary. Under pressure the revolutionary proponents of ‘civic’ nationalism could adopt tenets more usually associated with the ‘ethnic’ kind.

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Yet the reality on the ground proved to be very different. The Rhineland was never fully assimilated into the French imperium, but was rather integrated into it – that is, again following Broers and Wachtel, French institutions were imposed, but then the local population adapted them, which allowed for older mentalities, loyalties and cultural and social ties to remain intact, or at the very most mutated. The Rhineland was strategically too important and local society too vigorous for the French to risk alienating those whose co-operation or quiescence was needed. Lambrechts told Rudler at the start of his mission that he was not to strike indiscriminately at all customs, for fear of alienating the population.49 The republican festivals held in 1797 were bilingual.50 While initially Rudler hoped that he could use only fully-paid-up Rhenish republicans to administer the French conquests, later officials, especially under Napoleon, recognised the importance of local knowledge and a grasp of the local dialect more than ideological conformity, as well as the importance of having the respect and trust of the population, even if this meant recruiting officials and jurists who had served the Old Regime.51 This meant, in effect, that the French used intermediaries: local people who could to some extent mediate between the demands of the revolutionary or Napoleonic state and the local population. In some cases – as in Cologne and Dormagen – these intermediaries mounted a robust and, for a time, successful defence of local institutions against the levelling impulses of the French. This was a situation which the government in Paris found hard to swallow: It is evident that the unity which is so necessary in the administrative order and in any well-established political system demands the reform of the government of Cologne. ... It would be contradictory to establish our republican regime in all the other parts of that region, while only the city of Cologne keeps a form of Government entirely opposed to our own.52 In fact, as Michael Rowe has shown, Rhenish officials, including those of Cologne, were not counter-revolutionaries, but, under pressure from both sides, were trying hard to steer a middle course between the French and their exiled German rulers.53 Throughout the ‘French period’, the Rhinelanders proved that they were not the passive subjects of the Napoleonic state; rather, they took what they wanted from the French – not least the Napoleonic Code – while working to mitigate the impact of other aspects of French rule.54

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For the French revolutionaries, it was clear that while the Germans were, by and large, a frustratingly complex people whose loyalties remained rooted in the past, there was still some good raw material with which officials could work as they reordered central Europe. If one admitted that, then it also meant that one could potentially go a step further and suggest that Germany had never been as benighted as some French policy makers suggested. Germany therefore could be used – in a positive sense – as a means of chastising French action in Europe. In 1810, Germaine de Staël did just that when she tried to publish one of her greatest works, De l’Allemagne, which had a clear polemical objective in attacking Napoleon’s policies. Before 1806, she writes: Germany was an aristocratic federation; this empire had no common centre of enlightenment and public spirit; it did not form a compact nation, and the binding was missing from the bundle. This division of Germany, though fatal to its political strength, was nonetheless very favourable to efforts of all kinds which might have tempted genius and imagination. There was a kind of gentle and peaceable anarchy, in terms of literary and metaphysical opinions, which allowed each man to develop completely his own individual way of seeing things. Staël is far from gushing over Germany and the character of its peoples. Rather, she highlights the contradictions and the tensions within German culture. For example, the Germans can be fiercely individualist in their philosophy, but docilely obedient to their government, while feudalism persisted in the midst of enlightenment.55 Staël had personal reasons to express nostalgia for the Holy Roman Empire: coming from Switzerland, she was well aware that a confederation of states provided an alternative to the heavily centralised model which French nationalists saw as the apogee of rational administration.56 In addition to her innate ability to get under Napoleon’s skin, Staël also ran into trouble with the censors because she tried to present Germany in a more positive light, rather than through the critical lens of Napoleonic conceptions of civilisation. Savary, the Minister of Police, chased Germaine into exile, explaining in a letter dated 3 October 1810 that her work on Germany showed that ‘the air of this country does not suit you, and we are not yet reduced to the point where we need to find models amongst the peoples whom you admire’.57 With Staël, Germany was entering into the rhetoric of opposition to Napoleonic rule: there were alternative forms of civilisation to that imposed by the French Revolution.

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The final unravelling of Napoleonic Europe left French imperialists with some explaining to do: if the standards of civilisation achieved by the French Revolution were so superior, then why did the Empire collapse so spectacularly between 1813 and 1814? After 1815, diehard French republicans and Bonapartist conspirators might have grumbled that the Revolution still offered the best model for the workings of the rights of man, and, more prosaically, for a rational administration, but it was uncomfortably clear that they had been defeated militarily by a coalition of states stubbornly opposed to their ideals. Amongst these awkward facts was that the two great German powers were central to the defeat of Napoleon, and, even more awkwardly, in the process the Germans had shown that they could be motivated and stirred by patriotism, a patriotism which wholeheartedly rejected French civilisation. Historians like Matthew Levinger have shown that such patriotism was rarely devoted to the wider cultural and political concept of ‘Germany’, but was more often focused on loyalty to one of the individual German states and its dynasty – Staatspatriotismus – or, even more fundamentally, to a particular region within a state – Landespatriotismus.58 These loyalties were powerful forces operating within the framework of the Old Regime. From the contemporary point of view, therefore, the war in Germany showed that the capability of a state to mobilise its people in a national cause was not a monopoly of the French, nor were states always going to rally behind the French Revolutionary version of liberty. The hard realities of defeat showed the French that there were still alternative paths of development. Even if these did not have to be followed, they still had to be treated with some respect. Nineteenthcentury French nationalists might still cast France in the role of liberator and educator – as they did in 1830 and 1848 – but the collapse of the French imperium in Germany marks the start of a process by which French nationalism began to recast its role in Europe. No longer seeking to regenerate and integrate other Europeans in the French image, France would now lead a Europe of nationalities. This would prove, of course, to be a myth, but it was one which, in exile on Saint Helena, the Ogre of Europe himself had begun to cultivate. In the years before the Revolution and in the initial flourish after 1789, the French idea of the nation was certainly shaped in relation to the wider world, particularly with the often painful exercise of making comparisons between the French and the British. The Germans, too, played a role as the ‘other’ in defining French national identity. Yet the main thrust in shaping the concept of the nation was political and internal, in the sense that in 1789 the sovereign nation was defined

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against the absolute monarchy and the privileged orders. This still made, as David Bell has shown, active proselytising necessary among the French people to awaken them to their new rights and sovereignty as part of the ‘nation’.59 French revolutionary nationalism, therefore, involved a programme of political and cultural activity, aimed at forging a nation-state out of the various people of the French Republic. The nationalism of the French Revolution was defined by these efforts at nation-building. In trying to shape the population into citizens, whether within France or in the annexed territories, the revolutionaries came up against the harsh realities of other cultural and political identities: religious, linguistic, regional and dynastic. In the Rhineland some republicans responded with solutions which made revolutionary nationalism sound very close to the ‘ethnic’ or ‘eastern’ type. Indeed, Rostan and Berger’s concerns for culture and language were echoes of the earlier, short-lived attempt to impose linguistic uniformity on France itself in 1794. Those efforts collapsed along with the Terror and, while French administrators in the Rhineland under both the Republic and the Empire saw education in its various forms as an essential tool in shaping the locals into good citizens, they also recognised that German would remain the language of the majority of the Rhenish people for a very long time. This was why festivals were held in two languages and why bilingual officials, such as Rudler, were preferred by the government. In France itself, patois were tacitly allowed to survive even under the Third Republic, provided they did not appear to threaten national unity.60 At the same time, the use of intermediaries in the relationship between the government and the local population helped to ensure – as the revolutionaries themselves were well aware – the survival of older loyalties and identities. Much of the reluctance to enforce a programme of cultural uniformity was certainly a practical response to the logistical difficulties in imposing it. Yet some of the revolutionaries, like Rudler and Lambrechts, appeared to take the universalist, ‘civic’ language of the French Revolution seriously. Pragmatism and idealism combined to ensure that the Revolution’s ‘civic’ nationalism survived even the challenges of cultural difference. It ensured that even people who were regarded culturally as ‘others’ could be forged into citizens of the Republic, even if it would take time for them to attain the levels of civilisation represented by the French Revolution. The cultural assimilation or integration, which the revolutionaries undoubtedly saw as desirable, would take time, but meanwhile the essential facts of French belonging – the rights (and duties) of citizenship and the benefits of the legal and administrative systems

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of the Republic – would still define people like the Rhinelanders as citizens. Yet that same universalism (the term used at the time was cosmopolitisme) ensured that French nationalism was also expansive: if political rights – and not culture – were the prime determinants of nationhood, then there were, potentially, no limits to the expansion of revolutionary France. This sense of purpose, based as it was on a sense of superiority, was later called the mission civilisatrice, or civilising mission, which justified French overseas imperialism in the nineteenth century. Yet there was an important rupture, between French nationalism as an imperial ideology in Europe and the nationalism which was visited upon the overseas empire of the nineteenth century. As the French imperium in Germany shows, in Europe it was hoped that French laws and administration would eventually be as applicable among the conquered people as they were in France, but this universalist premise was not extended to the indigenous populations of the overseas empire. While there were programmes for ‘assimilation’ and, after 1900, ‘association’ (which accepted limits on complete assimilation and a slower pace of francisation, or ‘Frenchification’), in practice local people were legally ‘subjects’ and, as such, they did not enjoy anywhere near the same rights as citizens.61 This suggests that, in the nineteenth century, a racial dimension to French identity did emerge. Yet in metropolitan France, nationalists continued to insist on the civic heritage bequeathed by the Revolution.62 This republican inheritance remained – and remains still – a weighty ‘site of memory’, which has ensured that in the post-colonial era it is the civic form of nationalism which informs mainstream French identity. While this tradition has sometimes struggled to deal with the multicultural challenges of other identities (most notably in the recent hijab affair), it has also proved to be robust in the face of the bleaker forms of nationalism posed by the extreme right, which would define Frenchness in ethnic or racial terms.

Notes The author wishes to thank the British Academy for a small research grant: the fruits of some of the research undertaken on the original project have been used here. He also thanks many people for their useful comments and references, among others Phia Steyn, Clarissa Campbell Orr, Peter Wilson, Alan Forrest, Bill Doyle, David Hopkin, Michael Rowe, Michael Kaiser, Rafe Blaufarb, John Breuilly, Dom Lieven and Karen Hagemann. Helpful pointers were also raised when a version of this paper was delivered to the History Department’s seminar at the University of Stirling.

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1. Quoted in many, many places, most recently in T. Baycroft and M. Hewitson, ‘Introduction: What was a Nation in Nineteenth-century Europe?’, in T. Baycroft and M. Hewitson (eds.), What is a Nation? Europe 1789–1914 (Oxford, 2006), p. 1. 2. H. A. Kohn, Nationalism: Its Meaning and History (revised ed., Princeton, NJ, 1965), pp. 19–37; J. Plamenatz, ‘Two Types of Nationalism’, in E. Kamenka (ed.), Nationalism: The Nature and Evolution of an Idea (London, 1976), pp. 22–36; A.D. Smith, National Identity (Harmondsworth, 1991), pp. 8–13. 3. Historians of nationalism are divided between ‘modernists’ and ‘perennialists’. The former, like Elie Kedourie, John Breuilly and Eric Hobsbawm, argue that nationalism was a modern creation stemming from such conditions as the French Revolution, the emergence of the modern state and the impact of economic and social change; see E. Kedourie, Nationalism (revised edition, London, 1960), J. Breuilly, Nationalism and the State (Manchester, 1982), and E. J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780 (2nd edition, Cambridge, 1992). The latter suggest that ideas which can be equated with nationalism are discernible much earlier, for instance in some of the contractual or proto-contractual theories of government which emerged in the Middle Ages or the early modern period. See, for example, J.A. Armstrong, Nations before Nationalism (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1982). Among the most recent critics of the modernist view is Tim Blanning, The Culture of Power and the Power of Culture: Old Regime Europe 1660–1789 (Oxford, 2002), pp. 15–25. The most recent rebuttal of the ‘perennial’ position can be found in Baycroft and Hewitson, ‘Introduction’, pp. 1–13. 4. L. Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), p. 3. 5. Quoted in D. Beales and E. F. Biagini, The Risorgimento and the Unification of Italy (2nd edition, London, 2002), p. 157. 6. R. Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany (Cambridge, Mass., 1992). 7. A.-M. Thiesse, La Création des identités nationales: Europe XVIIIe–XXe siècle (Paris, 1999), p. 14. 8. Smith, National Identity, p. 13. 9. Baycroft and Hewitson, ‘Introduction’, p. 7. 10. D.A. Bell, The Cult of the Nation in France: Inventing Nationalism, 1680–1800 (Cambridge, Mass., 2001), pp. 206–7. 11. S.J. Woolf, ‘French Civilization and Ethnicity in the Napoleonic Empire’, Past and Present, 124 (1989), pp. 104–5. 12. See, among his other publications, M. Broers, The Napoleonic Empire in Italy, 1796–1814: Cultural Imperialism in a European Context? (Basingstoke, 2005). 13. Bell, Cult of the Nation, p. 26. 14. P. Sahlins, Unnaturally French: Foreign Citizens in the Old Regime and After (Ithaca, N.Y, 2004), pp. 215–24. 15. Greenfeld, Nationalism, pp. 15–17. 16. Bell, Cult of the Nation, pp. 78–106. 17. See, for example, M. Rapport, ‘ “Deux nations malheureusement rivales”: les Français en Grande-Bretagne, les Britanniques en France, et la construction des identités nationales pendant la Révolution française’, Annales historiques de la Révolution française, 342 (2005), 21–46.

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18. H. Marquis, ‘Aux origines de la Germanophobie: la vision de l’Allemand en France au XVIIe–XVIIIe siècles’, Revue Historique, 286 (1991), 283–94. 19. Archives Nationales, Paris [hereafter, AN] F/1e/42 (Berger to the Directory, Mainz, n.d.). 20. On the problems of integrating Alsace into France, see D. A. Bell, ‘NationBuilding and Cultural Particularism in Eighteenth-Century France: the Case of Alsace’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 21 (1988), 472–90. 21. Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de, Voyage en Allemagne in A. de Montesquieu (ed.), Voyages de Montesquieu (2 vols., Bordeaux, 1894–6), vol. 2, pp. 131, 138, 153–6. 22. Montesquieu, Voyage en Allemagne, p. 165. 23. Montesquieu, Voyage en Allemagne, pp. 157, 161, 190–1, 197–8, 202. 24. ‘Allemagne’ in Diderot and D’Alembert, Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des Sciences, des Arts et des Métiers (Paris, n.d.), vol. 1. 25. Voltaire, Candide ou l’Optimisme, ch. 1, in Voltaire (ed. R. Peyrefitte), Romans (Paris, 1961), p. 143. 26. The persistence of respect for Frederick the Great in France during the First Empire is discussed in this volume in Chapter 9 by Thomas Biskup. 27. T.C.W. Blanning, The Origins of the French Revolutionary Wars (London, 1986), p. 110. See also the letter of the French ambassador to Berlin, General Custine, to Dumouriez, 1 April 1792, in AN, AF/III/76, dossier 313. 28. Woolf, ‘French Civilization and Ethnicity’, pp. 104–5. 29. AN AF/III/59, dossier 230, doc. 10 (‘Plan de Pacification générale et en particulier de la Pacification de l’Allemagne’, pluviôse an IV). 30. AN AF/III/76 (Rivalz to Dumouriez, 12 May 1792). 31. AN, AF/IV/1690, dossier 1 (‘Notte sur la Prusse’, 1797 or possibly 1804); dossier 3 (General Duroc to Napoleon, 21 Fructidor Year 13). 32. AN, AF/IV/1690, dossier 1 (‘Notte sur la Prusse’). 33. Alexander Grab offers a useful introduction to the Napoleonic regime in the Grand Duchy in Napoleon and the Transformation of Europe (Basingstoke, 2003), pp. 97–9. 34. AN AF/IV/1225, dossier 1806, doc. 2 (‘Tableau de l’administration civile et judiciaire des Duchés de Cleves et de Berg dans le Régime prussien’, March 1806), pp. 24, 37–9. 35. AN AF/IV/1225, dossier 1806, doc. 6 (Murat to Napoleon, 31 March 1806). 36. In German this is known as the ‘Mark’. 37. Those regions not given to the new Kingdom of Westphalia were sliced off and annexed to the Grand Duchy of Berg. I should like to express my thanks to Peter Wilson for this information. 38. AN AF/IV/1225, dossier 1809, doc. 10 (‘Bulletin du Grand Duché de Berg: 1ère semaine de mars 1809’). 39. Among the best works on the French occupation and annexation of the Rhineland are T.C.W. Blanning, The French Revolution in Germany: Occupation and Resistance in the Rhineland 1792–1802 (Oxford, 1983), and M. Rowe, From Reich to State: the Rhineland in the Revolutionary Age, 1780–1830 (Cambridge, 2003). 40. AN, F/1e/40, dossier 2 (Rudler to the Minister of Justice, 24 Germinal VI; 16 Floréal VI).

254 ‘The Germans are Hydrophobes’ 41. AN, F/1e/41, document 34 (‘Programme pour la Fête de la Souveraineté du Peuple’). 42. AN F/1e/41, document 31 (Rudler to Lambrechts, 11 Ventôse VI). 43. J.M. Roberts and J. Hardman (eds), French Revolution Documents, vol. 2, 1792–5 (Oxford, 1973), p. 341. 44. AN F/1e/41, pc. 31 (Rudler to Lambrechts, 11 Ventôse VI; reply of Lambrechts, 23 Ventôse VI). 45. Among others, Casimir Rostan complained in early 1799 of the ‘silent intrigues of the priests’ who ‘warn against our principles and adroitly throw disfavour on to republican institutions’. (AN F/1e/42, ‘Mémoire sur la situation des esprits dans les quatre nouveaux départemens de la rive gauche du Rhin, par Casimir Rostan’, 13 Pluviôse an VII). 46. Broers, Napoleonic Empire in Italy, pp. 23–5; M. Broers, ‘Napoleon, Charlemagne, and Lotharingia: Acculturation and the Boundaries of Napoleonic Europe’ Historical Journal, 44 (2001), 135–54; N. Wachtel, ‘L’acculturation’, in J. Le Goff ad P. Nora (eds.), Faire de l’histoire (Paris, 1974), pp. 130–31. 47. AN, F/1e/42, ‘Mémoire sur la situation des esprits dans les quatre nouveaux départemens de la rive gauche du Rhin’. 48. AN F/1e/42 (Berger to the Directory, Mainz, n.d.). 49. AN, F/1e/40, dossier 3 (‘Instructions adressées par le Ministre de la Justice au Commissaire du Gouvernement dans les pays conquis d’entre Meuse, Rhin et Moselle’, 4 Frimaire Year VI). 50. AN, F/1e/41, document 34 (‘Programme pour la Fête de la Souveraineté du Peuple’). For an interesting article on the dissemination of French republican culture through songs and images in the early 1790s, see R. Reichardt, ‘Une citoyenneté franco-allemande sous la Révolution? Concepts et images comparées’, in R. Monnier (ed.), Citoyens et citoyenneté sous la Révolution française (Paris, 2006), pp. 53–76. 51. AN, F/1e/43 (‘Tableau des quatre nouveaux Départemens’, 21 Vendémiaire Year IX). 52. AN AF/III/59, dossier 230, doc. 8 (‘Rapport au Directoire Exécutif, par le Ministre des Relations Extérieures’, 3 Pluviôse IV). 53. M. Rowe, ‘Between Empire and Home Town: Napoleonic Rule on the Rhine, 1799–1814’, Historical Journal, 43 (1999), p. 659; M. Rowe, ‘Divided Loyalties: Sovereignty, Politics and Public Service in the Rhineland under French Occupation, 1792–1801’, European Review of History, 5 (1998), pp. 154–5, and Rowe, From Reich to State, pp. 68–9, 74–5. 54. See, for example, Rowe, From Reich to State, pp. 259–60. 55. G. de Staël, De l’Allemagne, in Oeuvres complètes (2 vols., Paris, 1871), vol. 2, pp. 5, 9. 56. I am grateful to Clarissa Campbell Orr for these insights. For the activities of some of Staël’s circle in Geneva, see her article, ‘A Republican Answers Back: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Albertine Necker de Saussure, and Forcing Little Girls to be Free’, in idem (ed.), Wollstonecraft’s Daughters: Womanhood in England and France 1780–1920 (Manchester, 1996), pp. 61–78. 57. Quoted in Staël, De l’Allemagne, p. 1. 58. M. Levinger, Enlightened Nationalism: the Transformation of Prussian Political Culture, 1806–1848 (Oxford, 2000); Rowe, From Reich to State, p. 72. 59. Bell, Cult of the Nation, pp. 159–68.

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60. Rowe, From Reich to State, pp. 120–1; Bell, Cult of the Nation, p. 177. 61. See, for example, J. Suret-Canale, French Colonialism in Tropical Africa 1900– 1945 (London, 1971), p. 83; M. Crowder, Senegal: A Study of French Assimilation Policy (revised ed., London, 1967); R. Aldrich, Greater France: A History of French Overseas Expansion (Basingstoke, 1996), p. 110. I thank my friend and colleague Phia Steyn for her advice and for references on the colonial dimension. 62. T. Baycroft, ‘France: Ethnicity and the Revolutionary Tradition’, in Baycroft and Hewitson (eds.), What is a Nation?, pp. 40–1.

13 The Response to Napoleon and German Nationalism John Breuilly

Introduction The dominant image of the German response to Napoleon has been that his conquest and exploitation of the country stimulated strong nationalism.1 This is partly the work of a national historiography which assumes what it should be seeking to establish, namely a propensity amongst ‘Germans’ to respond on a national basis against ‘foreign’ conquest. This historiography has been sharply criticised to make the point that nationalism was rather less important than other concerns, such as material deprivation or dynastic interest. However, both national historiography and its critics assume that ‘nationalism’ can be seen as an alternative to these other concerns. That in turn implies that nationalism and its alternatives are the same kinds of thing – perhaps a set of motives or a political ideology or a sense of identity. However, this is rarely made explicit.2 In recent decades there have been important general debates about how to define and understand nationalism which require one to be explicit about the use of the term. Although specific historical interpretations can be aligned to various positions in these debates, all too often the abstract debates and the empirical historical accounts move in separate spheres. What I try to do in this chapter is to combine the two in order to critique ‘nationalist’ and ‘anti-nationalist’ interpretations of German responses to Napoleon and to suggest an alternative. I begin with general debates and take up a particular position in relation to those. I then present the nationalist and anti-nationalist interpretations in the light of that position. Finally from that position I outline an alternative account. 256

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General debates on nationalism Definitions and discriminations Nationalism is often left undefined and the word indiscriminately attached to a range of different objects. Here I define nationalism as the three-fold claim that: (a) a nation exists; (b) this nation is a source of special value and loyalty; and (c) this nation should be as autonomous as possible. Clearly any definition has implications for both theory and empirical study, but without one it is impossible to delineate a subject of study. This working definition relates closely to those offered by other writers, both modernist and non-modernist, and also to implicit views of nationalism in much of the German historiography. This definition – as with definitions of every ‘ism’ – is framed in terms of ideas. Many studies of nationalism, including nationalism in Napoleonic Germany, are studies of ideas. However, nationalism is also understood as sentiments (how people think about themselves, a sense of identity) and as politics (how people organise and act to promote the nationalist cause). It is necessary to keep these discriminations in mind because nationalism can work in very different ways at each of these levels and there is no general formula by which the levels can be related to one another.3 Modernist and non-modernist theories A major debate on nationalism is between modernists and nonmodernists. On one side are those who insist that certain modern conditions are both sufficient and necessary for nationalism to become significant. By contrast there are those who argue that non-modern situations can generate nationalism, or at least that without certain premodern forms of ethnic and/or national identity, modern nationalism cannot develop in any strong or sustained fashion.4 There is not space here to say much about this debate. I, therefore, focus on how it relates to the specific German case. For example, the ‘ethno-symbolist’ approach (which insists that pre-modern ethnic myths and memories are essential conditions of nationalism, even if conceding the modernity of nationalism itself) links to historical accounts which insist on the importance of pre-modern sentiments of Germanness that bring together different kinds of Germans and set them against different kinds of non-Germans.5 A non-modernist political approach can be related to those historians who argue that institutions and loyalties associated with the Holy Roman Empire generated forms of patriotism which informed nationalist responses to Napoleon.6

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A modernist position My own position is that of a modernist who places a particular emphasis on the role of the modernising state and the emergence of modern, specialised and popular politics as providing both sufficient and necessary conditions for the formation of nationalism. I consider nationalism primarily as organised politics which justifies itself in terms of nationalist ideas and seeks to create and appeal to nationalist sentiments. I argue that the political use of nationalist ideas and sentiments takes three principal forms: elite coordination, popular mobilisation and international legitimation. I also seek to broaden this approach beyond a narrow political focus by linking the development of modern state forms and politics to a concept of modernisation as institutional transformation of a particular kind which leads to more functionally specialised institutions (bureaucracies, schools, churches, markets, etc.) with a wider societal reach than pre-modern institutions. This wider reach brings together many strangers in specialised and anonymous relationships. National ideas play an important part in embodying such relationships in quasi-personal forms (e.g. nation as extended family).7 Two modernist views of nationalism Within the modernist paradigm there is ambiguity about nationalism as motive for or effect of the modernising processes. This ambiguity is a major problem in the work of Ernest Gellner. His original theory saw nationalism as one effect of modernisation understood as structural transformation. However, especially when Gellner turned to cases of nationalism in societies which had not yet undergone modernisation he shifted to the argument that elites took up the nationalist cause to bring about the modernity they had enviously observed elsewhere.8 This latter view of nationalism is important in work on Napoleonic Germany such as Wehler’s view of nationalism as ‘defensive modernisation’, or Gellner’s own comments on Friedrich List as an economic nationalist.9 By contrast, the structural position regards the national idea as only acquiring significance in response to the formation of collectivities of strangers brought together by modern institutions and networks, seeking to make sense of such collectivities and looking for orientations for action towards the future. I argue that this ‘structural’ nationalism is central and that only following its formation can ‘motivational’ nationalism acquire wide significance. Basically, modernisation underpins nationalism, and modernisation, as in the original formulation of Gellner’s theory, is a process rather than a project.

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General theories and the case of Napoleonic Germany Introductory points In what follows I present nationalist and anti-nationalist accounts in terms of the definition and various levels of nationalism outlined above. Different historical narratives often fail to make clear just what they mean by nationalism and shift between the levels of ideas, sentiments and politics. There is often a projecting back of some later ideal of nationalism to explain what is at work in the Napoleonic period. However, I do think there is usually an implicit understanding that nationalism starts as an idea, broadens into a sentiment and then makes an impact on politics. So I present the nationalist and anti-nationalist accounts in that order. I make one pragmatic distinction at the level of sentiments between elite and popular because much of the argument about nationalist ideas links closely to views about elite sentiment or discourse. Nationalism as ideas and elite discourse One frequently encounters the claim that German thinkers of the time were stimulated to take up nationalist positions by Napoleonic conquest. Perhaps the best known single figure and text is Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814) and the lectures he delivered in occupied Berlin in the winter of 1807–8, published later in 1808 as Reden an die deutsche Nation.10 It is also worth starting here because one of the major texts establishing the modernist position that nationalism was something constructed under modern conditions, and not an expression of a longer, pre-existing sense of nationality, begins its argument with ideas, and especially Fichte’s ideas. Elie Kedourie, in his classic study of nationalism, opens with the assertion: ‘Nationalism is a doctrine invented in Europe at the beginning of the nineteenth century’, and makes Fichte’s lectures central in supporting this claim.11 According to Kedourie, Fichte transferred Kant’s concept of self-determination from the individual to the nation, which, following Herder, he regarded as a cultural, in particular a language entity. In turn one can relate this text and its arguments to a much wider range of ideas such as those of many German Romantics. Kedourie also suggested the ways in which such ideas could shape sentiments and politics, such as the capacity of a modern intelligentsia to mobilise uprooted masses.12 It is difficult to establish direct connections between nationalist intellectuals like Fichte and either popular sentiment or politics – points made forcibly in anti-nationalist critiques. However, one could argue for connections to the discourse of elites, above all educated elites, from

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both noble and bourgeois backgrounds, who subscribed to notions of cultural nationality which were substantiated in the historicist turn in philology, history, linguistics, economics, philosophy, aesthetic studies and other scholarly practices.13 That discourse was given institutional form through the German university and high school system with increasingly interconnected curricula and practices and cross-state mobility. Historians have stressed the connections made through Vereine (associations) and reading circles and shown how these generated a particular kind of national rhetoric, moralistic, future-oriented, consensual, and abstractly appealing to strangers in cultured Hochdeutsch. This can be analysed as a code used to understand unprecedented situations in which established practices no longer worked, as well as to outline some programme of action for the future.14 We can make such connections in the case of Fichte. The audience which Fichte addressed in Berlin in 1807–8 consisted precisely of the kind of educated German to which we have referred, as indeed some of his formulations make clear: I speak simply for Germans and of Germans. I do not recognise but set aside and reject completely all the divisions and differences created in this nation through centuries of unhappy events. You, gentlemen, are indeed in my eyes the foremost and immediate embodiments of precious national qualities which you bring before my mind. You are the visible spark at which the flame of my lectures is kindled. But my spirit gathers together the educated part of the whole German nation from all the countries in which they are scattered. [Fichte then goes on later in this first address to state that the result of his proposed programme of national education will be] ... that the educated classes of today and their descendants will become the people (Volke); while another, more highly educated class will arise from the existing people.15 Furthermore, the style and content of Fichte’s addresses mirror precisely what Bernhard Giesen claims for the cultural codes of this class of Germans. They are highly abstract, moralistic, unconcerned with empirical matters, insistent on the need for consensus (a consensus that exists by virtue of cultural agreement rather than which is produced by means of political work) and a shared sense of identity and commitment which goes beyond individual will and choice, involving a continuous appeal to an imagined community of strangers, strangers imagined as fellow Germans.16

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The critic of the nationalist approach could, however, argue that it is precisely the abstract rhetoric and the elite nature of the discourse, the discourse of an urban, professional and civil official elite with limited power in comparison with, for example, regular army officers and locally dominant noble landowners, which raises doubts as to whether connections to popular sentiments or organised politics of any significance could be, let alone were, made. The two key connections that would need to be established are downwards, to nationalism as popular sentiment; and upwards, to nationalism as providing an agenda or orientation, if not a set of motivations, for the holders of political power.17 Nationalism as popular sentiment Some historians have claimed a popular resonance for national ideas, referring to those who volunteered for military service against Napoleon in 1813–15, or joined a range of associations such as choral, gymnastic and sharp-shooting societies. Rather than Fichte’s lectures, which had only an elite reception, this is linked to the publicist impact of the work of Father Jahn (1778–1852) in Berlin and the poetry and songs of Ernst Moritz Arndt (1769–1860).18 More recent research has considered women who in various organised ways sought to shape opinion and in particular to bring pressure to bear upon men to act in the right, national way.19 There is also a little work on lower-class responses.20 However, the main thrust of such work is seen to support antinationalist accounts. Apart from German nationalist propaganda, for example, there was much that was couched in terms of localism, or religion, or monarchism. It is difficult to know which, if any, worked, and indeed it appears to me that the various advocates themselves had little idea of what impact they might have. Nationalism as politics Finally there is the question of how far any nationalist ideas and sentiments were taken up in organised political ways. One can point to clear examples such as the appeals made to Germans by the Austrian emperor at the outset of the war of 1809 and by the Prussian king in 1813. Some historians have argued that, especially with Prussia, this went beyond opportunist rhetoric (though even that implies that nationalism is important enough to be opportunist about) to political actions, above all reforms designed to mobilise enthusiasm for the state by permitting participation in urban government, emancipating peasants, devising schemes of national representation and decreeing universal military conscription.21 Against this, anti-nationalist accounts argue that any

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such politics was always under the control of the various German rulers who would regard nationalism as a threat to their interests and who persecuted German nationalists in the years following 1815. The nationalist narrative and its critique If these elements are combined into a narrative history, merging their distinctions into a single ‘nationalist’ story, the war of 1813–15 becomes a struggle for national liberation – an account which became especially influential and accepted in the second half of the nineteenth century, informing propaganda during the war of 1870–1 and even more during that of 1914–18.22 A long process of historical critique has undermined this story. I have already mentioned elements of this, but will bring together those points here, along with additional criticisms. At the level of ideas and elite discourse, apart from the marginality and political weakness of those who advocated nationalist ideas, such as Fichte, the nationalist account is criticised for projecting back later meanings. Sometimes this is linked to the point that particular thinkers, like Fichte, actually had more influence in a later period than in their own time.23 National accounts focused on ideas and elite discourse are also highly selective, ignoring the influence of other ideas and elite discourses, such as those of enlightened Napoleonic reform or new forms of conservatism reacting against precisely such reformist ideas.24 There is almost universal agreement that, at a popular level, regional and local, religious and royalist sentiments mattered much more than any concern with German nationality or even state-wide identities in the conglomerate polities of Austria and Prussia.25 This is to be distinguished from recent historical work on late nineteenth and twentiethcentury Germany which sees national identity articulated through region and religion rather than being imposed upon and displacing such affiliations and loyalties.26 In the Napoleonic period such nonnationalist sentiments operated in the absence of powerful national imagery. This range of sentiments can be traced across a continuum of complex responses to the French ranging from willing collaboration to violent resistance. It is especially valuable that such work is being placed in a larger European framework.27 Finally, at the level of organised politics, recent historiography emphasises the continued control of princes over the direction of affairs and their concern only to invoke national arguments if they served and did not threaten monarchical government and the established hierarchies of authority and prestige which were seen as integral to such government.28 Again, one can criticise the selectivity of the nationalist

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approach. There were often references to non-national identity, even in the most ‘nationalist’ texts. Frederick William’s appeal to his people An Mein Volk (17 March 1813) distinguishes between Prussians (meaning his subjects) and Germans, sometimes yoked with the conjunction ‘and’ but sometimes also with that of ‘or’. Even when framed as a direct mode of address, the appeal is to ‘Brandenburgers, Prussians (meaning his subjects in the province of East Prussia), Silesians, Pomeranians, Lithuanians!’29 Arguments amongst specialists are more nuanced than can be conveyed in this brief outline. Variations across time, space and social groups must be noted. Pre-1806 responses to French power are different from post-1806 ones, when that power was more widespread and suffocating. Protestant regions of north and east Germany responded differently from Catholic regions of south and west Germany. Noble landowners had different views from non-noble state officials and urban artisans from peasant farmers. One can keep adding to these variations until any dominant image of response disappears. Indeed, the increasingly complex historiography of the subject threatens to lead to this outcome. The double outcome of such critiques, therefore, is (a) to debunk the older notion of a strong nationalist reaction against Napoleon combining, if only implicitly, ideas, discourses, sentiments and politics, and (b) to break up the historiography into a complex range of responses in which nationalism either does not figure, or is given a minor role, or is itself differentiated within the more general historiography. However, the critiques are often as unclear about what is meant by ‘nationalism’ as is the narrative historiography which they criticise. From being vague and significant, nationalism has become vague and insignificant. The challenge is to be more precise about the role of nationalism and how it changes over time, both at the different levels of ideas, sentiments and politics and in the way these levels relate to one another. In the final section I sketch out an argument that seeks to do this.

Nationalism, Modernity and the German response to Napoleon Ideas and elite discourse I return to Fichte. Fichte’s Addresses are indubitably nationalist as I have defined that term. They assert the identity of a unique nation, insist that this nation has a peculiar and precious character, above all embodied in its language, and advocate striving for the autonomy of this

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nation. What is novel is that Fichte argues that such striving requires full national consciousness which can only be achieved by means of education and purification. Fichte insists that it is the lack of true Germanness in the recent past and present which has enabled foreigners to subjugate Germany.30 One can make the case that the capacity to argue in the way Fichte did, and to be understood and warmly received by his audience, as he was, is indicative of modernity. The audience largely consisted of a specialised class of educated academics and officials, shaped by German rather than state-specific institutions. Many non-Prussians served the Prussian government and many Prussians had been educated in nonPrussian universities and schools. All were embedded in German networks of associations, journals, books and correspondence. These networks not only underpinned a sense of German identity; they were its most important embodiments, which accounts for the precocious nationalism of precisely this class of people.31 The Addresses expressed a particular ethos, even a pathos, of progress and equality within the nation. It has no time for the plurality of states or the divisions of privilege which prevented such a sense of national identity spreading beyond this special group.32 The stress on language, culture and education related precisely to the areas in which this class of Germans excelled. Apart from political marginality, there was much else that prevented Fichte’s nationalist demands – a German state, a sense of national identity based on shared cultural practices, equality within the nation – from acquiring resonance or significance. Fichte avoided specifically political questions. Pragmatically one can explain that by the need to avoid French repression.33 The French were not much exercised about an abstract set of arguments that were barely understandable to all but highly educated listeners and the practical conclusion of which appeared to be ‘education, education, education’. It must have come as a refreshing change from advocacy of insurrection, guerrilla warfare, alliance diplomacy and other ‘practical’ ways of overturning French domination. However, there was more than pragmatism at work. Fichte found this mode of argument congenial and it fitted with his earlier work. This can be linked, I think, to the deeply apolitical character of the class of Germans to which Fichte belonged and to whom he lectured. There were no specialised, let alone open, institutions for the activity we call politics. Power over military and diplomatic affairs was exercised through the unspecialised world of monarchical courts. Educated officials implemented decisions through, to the modern eye, a hotchpotch

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of functional, collegial and regional institutions; while many forms of coercive power were held by corporate bodies such as churches, privileged landowners, cities and guilds. It was precisely their feeling of being external to this world and wishing to see a different world, one in which responsible, educated officials formulated policy, exercised power and supervised its administration through rationally organised and special institutions, which informed much of the ‘nationalism’ of educated Germans. A typical manifestation of this was the composing of memoranda which sketched out sweeping changes along these lines. It was in the crisis in Prussia following 1806–7, as the older order proved so manifestly impotent, that a re-ordering led by this educated and national class appeared distinctly possible. It is, therefore, less nationalism than the possibility of moving to the centre of power which links Fichte to his audience. Only in the years immediately following his lectures, for example, did Prussian officials draft out schemes for the implementation of the Pestalozzian educational principles that Fichte so lauded. After 1815, when it was actually possible to pursue a practical educational policy again, the ideas were dropped. To call this abstract demand for re-ordering itself modern is wrong. Many of Fichte’s key ideas fit very well with pre-modern features of his world. Some have seen his sketch of an ideal education system as anticipatory of totalitarianism. I think it is better understood as a generalised, abstract ideal of the corporations (guilds, seminaries, military academies) with which Fichte was familiar. His educational world is not the specialised institution of the modern university or school but rather a secular and national version of such corporations, sometimes understood as a severe form of classical republicanism.34 The same could be said of his ideas on the closed commercial state, an archaic fantasy related to notions of mercantilism rather than a future-oriented vision of the protectionist nation-state. Generalising the power of pre-modern corporations and drawing inspiration from the small-scale model of classical city-states, even if confined to the world of education, were not ideas which could reach, let along organise, the large-scale collectivity which Fichte imagined as the German nation. Fichte’s proposals had, and could have, no practical significance.35 Indeed, they would only be taken up seriously in Wilhelmine Germany when protectionism and large-scale organisation, including compulsory primary and secondary state schooling, provided an institutional background which made such ideas more meaningful than they could ever have been in Fichte’s own times. However, this necessarily imparted to such ideas a new, modern meaning, unlike anything Fichte himself envisaged.36

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There were more modern ideas and discourses. These did not perhaps fare much better in the Napoleonic period but, I suggest, they provide us with more clues as to the roots of a more enduring and significant nationalism. In a completely opposed direction to those of Fichte, we encounter early liberal ideas, strongly influenced by writers like Adam Smith, which advocate the dissolution of corporate organisations and privileges, and retreat from collective (a more accurate term than state) organisation in the social, economic and cultural spheres. This is precisely the programme which the French claimed to wish to introduce, and they managed to do so, at least in part, with the help of German collaborators in the relatively peaceful years of the Rheinbund from 1807 to 1811. Insofar as such ideas were not realised, this had less to do with elite commitment to corporate, pre-modern values and more with the exigencies of power, for example Napoleon’s need to create the material base for an imperial elite or simply to find the most efficient channels for extracting money, material and soldiers for his continuing imperial projects. Furthermore, the requisite conditions for such change were usually not present, and at most all that happened was that state officials spouting enlightenment rhetoric took over the functions of corporations, such as with the secularisation of monasteries, without greatly changing their mode of operation.37 It does not make much sense to call this ‘liberal’ in the sense of a political programme or movement. Under French control it was associated with authoritarian government and was constantly undermined by the statism required by continual warfare. In the Rheinbund states it was more closely related to earlier traditions of enlightened absolutism than political liberalism. Liberalism as an organised programme and movement began with the rise of oppositional groups after 1815.38 Nevertheless, one can link these liberal ideas to modern impulses in the politics of the time. The strongest process of corporate withdrawal came in post-1806 Prussia with peasant emancipation, the abolition of the guilds, and the sale of royal domain land. This policy would be continued after 1815 with the removal of internal tariffs and town-country fiscal boundaries, and was helped by the removal of the military burdens imposed both by Napoleon and in fighting Napoleon.39 The early liberalism which justified (though often did not motivate) these reforms contributed more to the longer-term development of German nationalism than the romantic, organic and corporatist views which are identified in studies of nationalism as ideas and elite discourse. However, in the first instance the political ideology associated with this liberalism was not

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focused on Germans as an ethnic group or Kulturnation or as a single, closed nation-state, but on Germany as customs union, constitutional order and free civil society.40 The Fichtean nationalist idea was rapidly and easily marginalised, not so much through persecution (though there was plenty of that in the years following 1815), but principally because of its archaic, increasingly obsolete character.41 Early liberalism was more difficult to eliminate, partly because its ideas had penetrated the practices of government but also because it related positively to other trends such as the growth of specialised economic interactions across and beyond different regions of Germany. After 1815 these ideas worked to enable coordination across increasingly diverse and complex elites of businessmen and officials as well as to underpin converging programmes of political reform in the various German states. The national component of this liberalism was one effect of the wide-ranging interactions brought about by these forms of modernity, including the ‘national’ form that persecution took through the German Bund. Liberal ideas, largely non-national in form, had purchase in the Napoleonic period, both through French-inspired and Prussian anti-corporate reform. After 1815, and increasingly in national guise, their significance continued to grow. If there is a continuous story to be told it is not of ethnic or cultural or romantic nationalist ideas increasing in significance, but of liberal ideas articulating with modernity as a process of increased institutional specialisation and then becoming national.42 Structural change (modernisation) leads to increasing acceptance of the national as a meaningful framework, and that in turn leads to significant motivational nationalism. By contrast, the non-modern motivational nationalism of men like Fichte was quickly marginalised. Nationalism as popular sentiment Current historiography has emphasised the diverse regional, confessional, class and gender differences in the popular response to Napoleon. It is difficult to envisage just what institutions or experiences before 1812 could act in a homogenising way (through extensive communications, or common interests) across many of these differences. We are constantly forced back to consideration of a class of educated Germans, although some limited claims are also made about certain kinds of urban artisans, for example among Prussians volunteering for military service. The imperial legacy offers little that is promising in terms of motivational nationalism. When a return to the ‘old’ ways was demanded, it was in terms of the individual rulers rather than the imperial order

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within which those rulers operated. Insofar as there was a federalistnational political conception, it increasingly expressed itself in liberal terms (for instance, of the powers to be accorded to provincial representative institutions) rather than as imperial patriotism. In any case, however, these were all elite concerns.43 There is, however, one plausible contender for a homogenising force operating at a popular level, and that is the increasingly oppressive weight of Napoleon’s militaristic empire upon many kinds of Germans spread across many different regions. This was especially true during the preparation and execution of the invasion of Russia and its subsequent failure. The argument for a common experience of war as oppressive is not so strong for the period before 1812. The first impact on the German lands came during the revolutionary wars of the 1790s and fell mainly upon the war zones of western Germany. This provoked strong anti-French but not nationalist sentiments while the area was affected by military operations.44 After about 1804, when the left bank of the Rhine had been annexed by France, there is a shift in response to the effective integration of parts of German territory into the French system. More indirect integration occurred in Rheinbund states east of the Rhine.45 These territories constituted part of Napoleon’s ‘inner empire’.46 Quite understandably, the quiet, even relatively prosperous years from 1804 to 1811, interrupted admittedly by the wars of 1805 and 1809 against Austria and 1806–7 against Prussia, did not breed extensive anti-French sentiments in these regions. One has, therefore, to examine those regions of southern and northeastern Germany during the wars of 1805, 1806–7 and 1809, before finally investigating the impact of Napoleon’s Russian campaign and its failure. Again there are marked regional differences. Prussia and much of north Germany enjoyed a decade of peace after 1795 while Austria and southern Germany were embroiled in continual war. The war of 1805 pitting Austria and Russia against France as well as that of 1806–7 of Prussia and Russia against France were instigated and controlled by rulers. The only popular responses came in the aftermath of defeat. There was, for example, the disaffection in the Tyrol which eventually led to insurrection. However, this movement was expressed in Habsburg loyalist terms and was principally aimed against Bavaria, which had been granted control of Tyrol by Napoleon.47 This provided – along with what was understood about the Spanish rising against Napoleonic rule – some of the ground for the decision of the Habsburg regime to appeal to German patriotism in 1809 and to seek popular

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military mobilisation with a Landwehr (militia). My own impression is that it had only limited impact, failing because it could not tap the sort of defensive localism that had been evident in the Tyrol. Nevertheless, this response calls out for systematic comparison with the Prussian response of 1813–15.48 As for Prussia in 1806–7, it is the story of the absence of popular reactions against the French that is best known. The reforms of the 1807–12 period had little positive significance at the level of popular sentiment; indeed if anything they had a negative effect. There was popular disenchantment as land reform measures were increasingly restricted in scope; a negative response to urban government reform which seemed like a device to replace paid officials with unpaid volunteers; and organised artisan hostility to the abolition of guilds, which was in any case seen as a device to justify taxing anyone who wanted to practise a craft. Naturally there was resentment against the French for many reasons – religious, economic, political – but they divided people and even set them against one another. So the story looks clear-cut – until we get to 1813–15. Here what needs to be understood is the extraordinarily negative impact of Napoleon’s preparations for the Russian campaign across most of the German lands, and especially in the eastern and central regions which served as the jumping-off points for the invasion. A passage from Clark’s recent study of Prussia conveys well the impact of the massive preparations. From March [1812] onward, the men of the Grand Army tramped through the Neumark, Pomerania, West and East Prussia, making their way eastwards to assembly points. By June 1812, some 300,000 men ... were gathered in East Prussia. It soon became clear that the provincial administration was in no position to coordinate the provisioning of this vast mass of troops. The previous year’s harvest had been poor and grain supplies were quickly depleted. [It was] ... reported in April that the farm animals in East and West Prussia were dying of hunger, the roads were strewn with dead horses, and there was no seed corn left ... . One report from a senior official spoke of devastation ‘even worse than in the Thirty Years War. When no horses were to be had, the French commanders forced peasants into harness’.49 The negative feeling extended westwards, where Napoleon made increasing demands on his Rheinbund allies, especially in the form of

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conscription which fell most heavily on the poorest classes. Indeed, the more integrated a state was into Napoleon’s imperial system, the harder it was hit by such conscription. The Rhineland, and the Rheinbund states from the largest, Bavaria, to tiny entities such as Anhalt-Bernberg, were far more heavily burdened than parts of France itself such as Brittany and the Vendée. The result was that regions with the most pliant, least ‘nationalist’ elites were also those where popular hatred of the French was growing most rapidly in 1812.50 This negative impact was compounded by the failure of the Russian campaign, the retreat by Napoleon, and his efforts to raise new armies. All this could help create popular support for anti-French exertions, but was not in itself enough to produce a German nationalist response, and it certainly cannot explain the effective uses of the national idea at the political level. Nationalism is not about motivating popular emotion, but rather about exploiting a novel, large-scale disaffection. This is the final level of nationalism that has to be considered. Nationalism as politics The first point to note is the limited scope for ‘organised politics’ in Napoleonic Germany. Prussia, for example, was a conglomerate monarchy where the dynasty and its small apparatus of officials and courtiers furnished the only unifying institutions. Different legal and administrative procedures operated in the various territories, and there were important confessional divisions. The limited ‘public’ that did exist was largely apolitical and confined to an elite world of associations and periodicals. The impact of war and occupation reduced the already limited capacity of these institutions to form, communicate and express collective views on political matters. The versions of the national idea which were theoretically available to be used in these institutions and in an organised political manner were those of Kulturnation and Staatsnation. The former idea was associated with the formation of a limited public sphere and with refining written German into a language of high culture. Almost by definition this was an elitist idea which lacked popular resonance. There were some examples of what one might call populist, Herderian ‘folk’ national appeals – for example when the women of the Habsburg court affected peasant dress in the prelude to the 1809 war – but this was clearly little more than a patronising flirtation with elite conceptions of popular culture. Furthermore, there was an apolitical element to much of this cultural nationalism, most clearly expressed in Schiller’s famous lines of 1804. ‘The German Empire and the German nation are two different

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things. The glory of the Germans has never been based upon the power of its princes. Separated from the political sphere, Germans have established their own values. Political defeats could not undermine those values’.51 In addition, the national idea was often focused on a particular state and expressed in elite, enlightenment terms rather than in populist or romantic ones.52 The second available alternative was that of imperial patriotism. Baron Stein can be seen as an advocate of such a position. However, the example of Stein reveals the limitations of this idea. Stein acquired political prominence through service to the Prussian state and, as a Prussian official, never pursued a broader German policy. It is only after his removal from a position of political influence that he took up broader patriotic themes. Even then, he had influence only by virtue of his connections to other monarchs and their courts, first in Austria during the 1809 war and then, more significantly, as an exile in Tsar Alexander’s court, when he was empowered through the Tsar to play a leading role in the newly ‘liberated’ German territories as the allied armies pushed Napoleon back towards France. Even then, Stein’s ‘programme’ was vague, unconnected to functioning institutions and unable to tap into any significant loyalties at either elite or popular level. His practical impact was on the emergency administration of occupied territories without agreed princely rule as the Allies moved westwards.53 Not only that, but the imperial idea as a form of patriotic resistance had the least resonance in what one might regard as the ‘heartland’ of the old empire, the myriad small territories of south and west Germany. There, as much recent research has abundantly demonstrated, political initiative was with the princes and their reforming officials who worked with the French. The elites of the left bank of the Rhine were by 1813–14 far more alarmed about the prospect of restoration (for example, of Prussian rule) than about continuing as a part of greater France.54 What is more, that initiative remained with most princes after Napoleon’s removal. The principal reason for that lies with the deliberate decision of Metternich, the Austrian Chancellor, to make agreements with Rheinbund states, such as the Bavarian monarchy.55 However, there also seemed precious little impetus from below to protest against princely rule. Rather we find the continuing influence of a political culture which did not think in ‘modern’ terms of an order of sharply defined, sovereign territorial states, and still held to confederal values of shared powers and coordinating institutions, though without an imperial or even, as with Napoleon, ‘protector’ figure. That political culture also sought to restore many of the privileges and statuses

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associated with the old empire, for example in the prerogatives granted to Standesherren, formerly independent imperial nobles who were now subject to the authority of a territorial ruler but with a degree of autonomy not granted to other nobility. Insofar as ‘imperial patriotism’ had long-term significance, one might argue that it was by retaining archaic features in the new order of territorial states which formed after 1815. There was another legacy to which I will return. The empire did embody notions of constitutionality and shared powers across the German state. Early liberalism could build on these notions in Vormärz Germany to promote a more modern national idea. But I would emphasise the transformations rather than the continuities in this idea. However, as already indicated, the situation changed significantly in 1812–13 with the massive impact of the war against Russia. As the fortunes of war turned, so zones that became free of direct Napoleonic power shifted towards the anti-French political and military alliance that was developing. Chronologically it begins with the exiles gathered round Stein in Russia; it then extends to parts of eastern Prussia – initiated with the Convention of Tauroggen in December 1812. The Prussian centre moves a little later; then Austria after the truce period of 1813, then the various Rheinbund states (with the tragic exception of Saxony). Unable to make these moves were the areas incorporated directly into France or the ‘model’ states. Despite what I have argued above about ‘German’ legacies in terms of political culture and concern with privilege, this meant that the political process was increasingly dominated by a set of sharply defined territorial states joined not through the archaic constitutionality of the old Reich but as a military and diplomatic coalition. Combining the levels of nationalism The key question then becomes: what might the national idea mean for the shift from ally to enemy of Napoleon in these circumstances? The clue to the answer is not to trace continuities with earlier forms of the national idea, but to explore how the national idea could articulate itself through institutions and sentiments which actually opposed such existing forms of the national idea as imperial patriotism, romantic and republican nationalism. I focus on the best known and most important aspect of the shift: Prussia’s rejection of France and its amazing transformation from impotent rump state and client of France at the end of 1812 into the energetic military power of mid-1813 which played a major role in Napoleon’s defeat and, by virtue of that, in the post-war settlement. Here I seek to

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explain this transformation, to pinpoint the role of nationalism within it, and to relate it to post-1815 developments. I begin by listing pertinent features of the situation of the Prussian state.56 First, although it was a rump state it remained outside the direct restructuring efforts of Napoleon. Second, being a rump state meant that it contracted to what one might consider its ‘core’ territories which rather simplified the question of pushing through reform measures. New states formed by amalgamation or extension – largely due to measures taken by Napoleon – might appear to have gained more than Prussia from re-organisation; but in fact they found their power diffused over such a variety of territories that this reduced their capacity to make change.57 Yet it was also important that these core territories – Brandenburg, Silesia, East Prussia – had a good deal of autonomy. At first glance this would appear to constrain the power of the central monarch. It certainly prevented the exercise of what one might term ‘despotic’ power, meaning the negative capacity of the centre to ignore local arrangements and to issue commands to individuals without having to go through any further consultation. However, it helped ‘infra-structural’ power, or the positive capacity to make arrangements which released new energies.58 The constraining aspect of monarchy-provincial power relations had been clearly revealed when local elites resisted elements of the planned land reform programme, blocked the attempt to introduce new policing powers with authority vested in the centre, and sabotaged attempts to construct some sort of ‘national representation’. The most effective reforms were those which streamlined central administration rather than reconfigured central-provincial relations.59 However, the ‘enabling’ aspect of the selfsame relations became clear in the political vacuum created by the retreat of Napoleon’s forces westward in early 1813 and the imminent arrival of Russian troops from the east. At this point dominant landowning elites saw the urgent necessity of cooperating with the core Prussian army to create a regional military presence which could both maintain order and block takeover by either resurgent Napoleonic or advancing Russian forces. To do this required a massive expansion around that core army. This was achieved not so much by an appeal for volunteers as through the self-imposition of large quota targets reached by a combination of local bureaucracy (drawing up of lists, ordering those listed to assembly points) and coercion (especially in Silesia during the armistice period). Once these conscripts were transported out of their immediate neighbourhood, their capacity for

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resistance rapidly diminished, and a training and induction programme re-shaped them for combat. In this programme, the administrative and military reforms set in train since 1807 came to be of crucial importance. It was the technical aspect of these reforms, and their association with an improvement in the quality of the administrative and military elites brought about through purges following 1807, which mattered, not the broader social and political reforms or any popular enthusiasm inspired by reform. At this stage the (Prussian) national idea served less to mobilise popular support or provide new legitimacy to authority and more to coordinate the unprecedented initiatives taken by dominant local landowning elites with the reform bureaucracy and high military officials at the centre. By contrast, the principal societal reforms which were being implemented in this period aimed to reduce state commitments (creating free land markets, delegating urban government functions) and to raise revenue (here the real significance of the abolition of guilds was its replacement by a tax to be paid by every artisan wishing to practise independently). Government effort was focused on the single task of mass military mobilisation. With the continued retreat of Napoleon, the formation of a grand alliance following the entry of Austria into the war, and the opening up of Baltic ports which permitted the inflow of British goods and money, the focus of military effort shifted from regional defence and autonomy to offensive action against Napoleon. At this point the national idea began to acquire new functions. It was used to appeal to areas that remained under French control. Insofar as these were not former Prussian territories, such an appeal could not invoke Prussian identities or practices. The language of German interests, of freeing German areas from French control, became central. There were, of course, different emphases, such as the imperial patriotism of Stein, the state-led concerns of Prussia, Austria and the larger Rheinbund states (excepting Saxony), and notions of small-state restoration for imperial knights and counts and also the Catholic church. However, all had to work with an extended notion of Germany. Precisely how these different, often conflicting agendas would work themselves out depended on the outcome of the war and the negotiations which followed at the Congress of Vienna. The national idea served as a motivating force for small groups of zealots. However, it had much more significance in helping coordinate a range of elite interests and providing a broad ideological map by which those interests could steer after the end of the war. In this process an elaborate set of compromises was engineered between Austria, Prussia

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and the medium states of western Germany, to the disgust of archaic romantic nationalists and imperial restorationists, as well as radicals and liberals. Each of these groups left a record of their views and actions. In a later age of nationalism the pragmatic, mapping functions of the national idea were forgotten, and instead the views of these sects were placed at the centre of a nationalist narrative. In the 1860s and 1870s a liberal and statist view of Prussia became significant with unification and the state-building of Wilhelmine Germany, and so what had happened in 1813–15 was transformed into an early version of this form of nationalism.60 By the 1890s, when Germany was proclaiming the need for Weltpolitik in an era of inevitable struggle between ‘old’ and ‘new’ nations, the romantic-organic conceptions of the national idea were selected, now often overlaid with ethnic, even racial, features and given a prominence they did not possess at the time. The national idea has undergone yet further changes in the twentieth century. Volksgeschichte under the Third Reich encouraged a move away from a Prussian focus to an ‘all-German’ approach. Marxist, especially East German, perspectives looked to a populist and class aspect to a war of liberation which was hijacked and repressed by ruling-class politics. West German interest in federalism and the sharing of state powers both at national and European levels helped generate sympathy for the imperial legacy, seen now as a legal or peaceful rather than a military or power order. The post-modern concern for the politics of identity has generated an interest in the roles of religion, locality and gender in the national sentiments and movements of the Napoleonic period. Yet all these, precisely by virtue of projecting back later concerns, fail to see that the national idea achieved significance in the Napoleonic period for very specific reasons. Most broadly it was a way of adjusting political rhetoric to mass mobilisation in war and to the need to bring together across a very wide area of very diverse social arrangements different elites, first in a war against France and then in the implementation of a European-wide peace settlement. The language of religion and monarchical legitimacy, though still important, did not suffice. At the very least some acknowledgement of political and popular opinion had to be made. A distinct, specialised sphere of politics (including military power) was forming in which many and very different strangers were being brought together under the control of sharply demarcated territorial states. The language of nationalism fitted well with this world, even if for some time there would be a tension between a plurality of German states each seeking to develop their own identity and a loose German

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political system through which those states organised their relations with each other.

Conclusion The problem with many accounts of German nationalism in the Napoleonic period, whether positive or negative, is that they tend to begin with some notion of a ‘German’ response which is either regarded as significant, or as marginal in the case of interpretations which stress instrumental dynastic interest, elite manipulation, the materiality of popular concerns or the continued prevalence of non-nationalist values. Instead of this, I start from the perspective that the national idea had significance when linked to modernisation and see the German lands in the Napoleonic period as one or more zones amongst others in which such a modernisation process can be traced and analysed. My especial interest is in political organisation, movement and action. At this level it is easy to conclude that there is a very limited significance to a German nationalist response to Napoleon. The problem with this purely negative conclusion is that it leaves out of consideration fragments of ‘nationalism’ which are not fitted into any broader picture, except that of the myth-making of later, more authentically nationalist times. By distinguishing between the levels of ideas, sentiments and politics, and by working out which versions of the national idea work with or against the grain of modernisation, I argue that it is possible to provide a more satisfactory interpretation of the role of nationalism in Napoleonic Germany. The first and most important point to note is that Napoleon’s achievements changed the conditions for successful military and political action against him. Direct and more specialised state action was required – expressed initially in the most obvious forms of mass military mobilisation and the substitution of bureaucratic for corporate command. These actions were kept largely under princely control but necessarily changed the nature of that control. The prince was increasingly the chief official in a specialised state, dependent on taxation rather than domain revenue, operating through ministers rather than courtiers. These changes would also have implications for the ideas and sentiments of political loyalty that would be transmitted to and received by the population. There was no immediate move to national German ideas and sentiments but there was a shift away from localist and corporate rhetoric to a more impersonal rhetoric of citizenry and state. In particular, as the allies moved towards France and sought to exert

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authority over an increasingly large and diverse range of territories, the national idea began to inform these notions of citizenship and state. These ideas played themselves out in different ways in the territories of greater France, the Confederation of the Rhine states, Austria and Prussia. In this chapter I have drawn attention to Prussia and the ‘core state defensive mobilisation’ of 1813. This created the conditions for the formation of certain kind of national Prusso-German ideology. That was then used in a modified way in the 1814–15 settlement, for example to justify the buffer role against France associated with the acquisition of the Rhineland and, more generally, the increased stake in German lands which Prussia took on compared to Austria. The later liberal and Prusso-centred nationalist myths would write out the key roles played by Austria (which fought longer and harder and more often against France than did Prussia) and by the ‘third’ Germany of the Rheinbund. These myths would also project back their particular values, singling out for attention those small groups of zealots whose values at the time bore the closest resemblance to their own. There are further variations on the national idea in other German zones that have been emphasised later, such as the recent presentation of the Rheinbund as progressive rather than collaborationist, or of Austria as the bastion of an imperial legacy, or displaced exiles such as those around Stein as embodiments of a radical, all-German nationalism. 1806 was a key moment in the diminishing importance of federalist and culturalist notions of nationality and the increased importance of statist and political notions of nationality. Yet it also provoked some of the most eloquent statements of those federalist and culturalist notions, while statist views initially avoided the language of nationalism. As a result we have looked in the wrong places for the significant nationalist responses of the time.

Notes 1. A fine example of the ‘classical’ national approach is F. Meinecke, Das Zeitalter der deutschen Erhebung 1795–1815 (Bielefeld and Leipzig, 1906). Note the phrase ‘deutschen Erhebung’ meaning ‘German rising’. The war of 1813–15 quickly acquired various names such as ‘Freiheitskrie’ (war for freedom) or ‘Krieg der Nationalbefreiung’ (war of national liberation), each carrying different, even conflicting meanings. For a good, critical and fairly recent account in English see J. Sheehan, German History 1770–1866 (Oxford, 1989), especially chapters 5 & 6. A recent issue of Central European History, 39 (2006) has a good collection of essays on the Napoleonic wars and Germany. See the introductory essay by the editors Katherine Aaslestad and Karen Hagemann.

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2. For a debunking account in English see M. Hughes, Nationalism and Society: Germany 1800–1945 (London, 1988). A recent study, sceptical about the role of German nationalism, is U. Planert, Der Mythos vom Befreiungskrieg. Frankreichs Kriege und der deutsche Süden. Alltag – Wahrnehmung – Deutung, 1792–1841 (Paderborn, 2007). Some of her arguments can be consulted in English in her article, ‘From Collaboration to Resistance: Politics, Experience, and the Memory of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars in Southern Germany’, Central European History, 39 (2006), pp. 676–705. A collection of essays considering the role of ‘nationalism’ in various countries for the period is O. Dann and J. Dinwiddy (eds.), Nationalism in Europe in the Age of the French Revolution (London, 1987). 3. I develop this argument in J. Breuilly, ‘Culture, Doctrine, Politics: Three Ways of Constructing Nationalism’, in J. Beramendi et.al. (eds.), Nationalism in Europe. Past and Present (Santiago de Compostela, 1994), pp. 127–134. 4. There is a large and fast growing literature on this debate. For judicious accounts from rather different perspectives see U. Ozkirimli, Theories of Nationalism (London, 2000), A.D. Smith, Nationalism and Modernism (1st edition, London, 1998). 5. A particular German variant of this approach concerns the notion of a Kulturnation as a community or at least a sentiment of community that could exist in the absence of matching political institutions. The idea is especially associated with the work of F. Meinecke, Cosmopolitanism and the Nation State (Princeton, NJ, 1970). 6. There has been much work on this. See now M. Rowe, ‘Napoleon and the “Modernisation” of Germany’, in P.G. Dwyer and A. Forrest (eds.) Napoleon and his Empire: Europe, 1804–1814 (London, 2007), pp. 202–20., especially pp. 205–8, who himself stresses the impact of the empire on political culture rather than directly on political action and organisation. See also his essay in this book. 7. The argument is developed generally in J. Breuilly, Nationalism and the State (2nd edition, Manchester, 1993). I seek to relate it in a general way to nineteenth-century German history in J. Breuilly, The Formation of the First German Nation-State, 1800–1871 (London, 1996). Finally I have related some of the arguments about modernisation, though not specifically nationalism, to Napoleonic Germany in my ‘Napoleonic Germany and State-formation’, in M. Rowe (ed.), Collaboration and Resistance in Napoleonic Europe: StateFormation in an Age of Upheaval, c.1800–1815 (London, 2003), pp. 121–52, and to modernisation as a longer term process in nineteenth-century Germany in J. Breuilly, ‘Modernisation as Social Evolution: The German Case, c.1800–1880’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Sixth Series, 15 (2005), pp. 117–147. 8. See E. Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (2nd edition, Oxford, 2006). This second edition includes a 50-page introduction by myself which develops these critical points about Gellner. 9. H.-U. Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte I: 1700–1815 (Göttingen, 1987). The subtitle of this volume is ‘from the feudalism of the Old Empire to the defensive modernisation of the reform era’. Gellner’s essay on List entitled ‘Nationalism and Marxism’ is in E. Gellner, Encounters with Nationalism (1st edition, Oxford, 1994), pp. 1–19.

John Breuilly 279 10. For the German text I have used J.G. Fichte, ‘Reden an die deutsche Nation (1808)’, in J.H. Fichte (ed.), Fichte: Sämmtliche Werke, Vol 7: Zur Politik, Moral, und Philosophie der Geschichte, (Leipzig, 1845). For an English translation see J.G. Fichte, Addresses to the German Nation (1808), R.F.Jones & G.H.Turnbull trans. (Westport, CT, 1922). A recent analysis of the text in terms of the kind of nationalism Fichte expresses is A. Abizadeh, ‘Was Fichte an ethnic nationalist? On cultural nationalism and its double’, History of Political Thought, 26 (2005), pp. 334–359. I would now recommend the most recent critical German edition: J.G. Fichte, Werke 1808–1812, ed. Reinhard Lauth et al., vol. 10, (Gesamtausgabe der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt 2005). 11. E. Kedourie, Nationalism (2nd edition, London, 1961). 12. I consider Kedourie’s general arguments in the Elie Kedourie Memorial Lecture of 1999, published as John Breuilly, ‘Nationalism and the History of Ideas’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 105 (2000), pp. 187–223. 13. J. Breuilly, ‘On the Principle of Nationality’, in G.S. Jones and G. Claeys (eds.), The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Political Thought (Cambridge, 2008), forthcoming. 14. I draw here on the arguments of B. Giesen, Intellectuals and the Nation: Collective Identity in a German Axial Age (Cambridge, 1998). 15. Fichte, ‘Reden an die deutsche Nation (1808)’, pp. 266, 279 (my translation). For what we know of who attended the lectures see the introduction to the Reden by E. Fuchs in Fichte, Werke 1808–1812. 16. The notion of the nation as an imagined community goes back, of course, to Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: reflections on the origins and spread of nationalism (2nd edition, London, 1991). 17. The situation at the time Fichte gave his lectures was peculiar in Berlin. The court had moved eastwards to Königsberg, beyond direct French control and occupation. Those government officials who continued to live in Berlin were more immediately under the power of the French occupiers than that of their own king and his ministers. 18. See, for example, Sheehan, German History, pp. 380–3. 19. K. Hagemann, ‘Mannlicher Muth und Teutsche Ehre’. Nation, Militär und Geschlecht zur Zeit der Antinapoleonischen Kriege Preußens (Paderborn, 2002). 20. Such as Planert, Der Mythos vom Befreiungskrieg. 21. 1809 is still under-researched and the principal work remains W. Langsam, The Napoleonic Wars and German Nationalism in Austria (2nd edition, New York, 1969; 1st edition 1930). More recently on the possible combining of national enthusiasm with military resistance to Napoleon see E. Zehetbauer, Landwehr gegen Napoleon: Oesterreichs erste Miliz und der Nationalkrieg von 1809 (Vienna, 1999). The literature on Prussia is, by contrast, vast. For a recent English language work which provides much information on the account of the war and the role of reforms see C. Clark, Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600–1947 (London, 2006), especially chapters 10 and 11. 22. From a large and growing literature on the commemoration and memory of war, see K. Hagemann, ‘German Heroes: The Cult of Death for the Fatherland in Nineteenth-Century Germany’, in S. Dudink et al (eds.), Masculinities in Politics and War: Gendering Modern History, (Manchester, 2004), pp. 116–34;

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23.

24.

25.

26.

27.

28.

29.

30.

31.

K.A. Schäfer, ‘Die Völkerschlacht’, in E. François and H. Schulze (eds.), Deutsche Errinerungsorte (3 vols, Munich, 2001), vol. 2, pp. 187–201; K. Wenzel, ‘Befreiung oder Freiheit: Zur politischen Ausdeutung der deutschen Kriege gegen Napoleon von 1913–1923’, in H.-A. Winkler (ed.), Griff nach der Deutungsmacht. Zur Geschichte und Geschichtspolitik in Deutschland (Göttingen, 2004), pp. 67–84. On the basis of the material cited in the introduction by Fuchs to the 2005 edition of the Reden an die deutsche Nation, as well as a compilation of responses to Fichte’s work, it is clear that contemporaries were well aware that he had no popular resonance. My own reading of the enthusiasm with which he was received is that it had more to do with the fact that he actually gave these lectures in occupied Berlin, himself thinking it might lead to his arrest and even execution, than for what he argued about language and education. The compilation is E. Fuchs (ed.), J.G. Fichte im Gespräch : Berichte der Zeitgenossen: 1806–1812 (6 vols., Stuttgart, 1978), vol. 4. I am indebted to Professor Fuchs for giving me a copy of his introduction. One can even trace through successive shifts between these currents of thought, for example in the case of Joseph Görres who shifted from enthusiasm for the French revolution to German patriotism to Catholic conservatism. For brief details see Sheehan, German History, pp. 374–5, 617–8; for a recent biography see J.V. Heuvel, A German Life in the Age of Revolution: Joseph Görres, 1776–1848 (Washington DC, 2001). See for example Planert, Der Mythos vom Befreiungskrieg. Some of her arguments are now available in summary English form in U. Planert, ‘Conscription, Economic Exploitation and Religion in Napoleonic Germany’, in P.G. Dwyer and A. Forrest (eds.), Napoleon and His Empire: Europe, 1804– 1814 (London, 2007), pp. 133–148. C. Applegate, A Nation of Provincials: The German Idea of Heimat (Berkeley, California, 1990); A. Confino, The Nation as a Local Metaphor: Württemberg, Imperial Germany and National Memory, 1871–1918 (Chapel Hill and London, 1997). For examples of such research see M. Rowe (ed.), Collaboration and Resistance in Napoleonic Europe: State Formation in an Age of Upheaval, c.1800–1815 (London, 2003). For a renewed emphasis on international relations as of primary importance and understood in terms of relationships between dynastic states see B. Simms, The Struggle for Mastery in Germany, 1779–1850 (London, 1998). For an English translation of this passage from the Appeal, see J. Breuilly, Austria, Prussia and Germany 1806–1871 (London, 2002), Document 19, pp. 118–19. The basic ideas of the Addresses are clearly summarised in Abizadeh, ‘Was Fichte an ethnic nationalist?’ The debates Abizadeh goes on to consider are not whether Fichte expresses an authentic nationalism – it is quite obvious that he does – but whether this is primarily a matter of political values, cultural formation through language or based on ethnicity, that is common descent. There is a huge literature on this German Bildungsbürgertum. Sheehan, German History 1770–1866, chapters 3 and 6, provides a good introduction and Giesen, Intellectuals and the Nation offers a stimulating analysis.

John Breuilly 281 32. That is not to say that the values of this class were only national or were in some sense ahead of their time, whatever that phrase means. For a detailed sense of the self-images of the most articulate members of this group which brings out, amongst other things, the significance of a particular kind of Protestant sensibility, see M. Maurer, Die Biographie des Bürgers. Lebensformen und Denkweisen in der formativen Phase des deutschen Bürgertums (1680–1815) (Göttingen, 1996). 33. The lectures were submitted to Prussian, not French, censorship but it was clear that French intervention was seen as an ever-present possibility and the lectures were carefully scrutinised for any objectionable political content, leading to the demand for changes in a couple of instances. See Fuchs, introduction to Fichte, Werke 1808–1812 for details. 34. The historical model which contemporaries called to mind, for example with his demand that children be taken away from their families and educated by the state, was Sparta. 35. I can only assert this here but it is linked to the argument that the powerful modern state could only come into existence through divesting itself of non-political functions while taking over the political functions of nonstate corporations. See Breuilly, ‘Modernisation as Social Evolution: The German Case, c.1800–1880’. 36. Even the most enthusiastic of his listeners usually rejected his educational ideas as monstrous and/or impractical. See Fuchs, introduction to Fichte, Werke 1808–1812. Furthermore, virtually no-one spent much time on Fichte’s abstruse arguments about the German language. 37. For overviews of the ideas and practices of the French and Rheinbund reformers, and the limits of their reforms, see P. Nolte, Staatsbildung als Gesellschaftsreform. Politische Reformen in Preußen und den süddeutschen Staaten, 1800–1820 (Frankfurt am Main, 1990); H. Berding and H.-P. Ullmann (eds.), Deutschland zwischen Revolution und Restauration (Königstein/T. and Düsseldorf, 1981); E. Weis, Reformen im rheinbündischen Deutschland (1st edition, Munich, 1984). 38. I follow the argument of D. Langewiesche, Liberalism in Germany (London, 2000). 39. For the Prussian reforms see Clark, Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600–1947; and B. Vogel, Preussische Reformen (Königstein im Taunus, 1981). 40. This liberalism did also operate with a complex of ideas about cultural nationality as is well brought out by B. Vick, Defining German : the 1848 Frankfurt Parliamentarians and National Identity (Harvard Historical Studies 143, Cambridge, Mass. and London, 2002). 41. In the early 1820s the Prussian censors rejected an application from Fichte’s publisher for a second edition of the Addresses. Some did see it as potentially subversive but for others it had become irrelevant. One argued that Fichte had served a purpose when things seemed hopeless in 1808 but since then he had been proved wrong (it was not education but force which freed Germany) and Germany would move forward in other ways. 42. I outlined some of these arguments in J. Breuilly, ‘State-Building, Modernization and Liberalism from the Late Eighteenth Century to Unification: German Peculiarities’, European History Quarterly, 22 (1992), pp. 257–284.

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43. See essays in D. Langewiesche and G. Schmidt (eds.), Föderative Nation. Deutschlandkonzept von der Reformation bis zum ersten Weltkrieg (Munich, 2000). 44. T.C.W. Blanning, The French Revolution in Germany: Occupation and Resistance in the Rhineland, 1792–1802 (Oxford, 1983). 45. For the Rheinbund states see Berding and Ullmann (eds.), Deutschland zwischen Revolution und Restauration, and Weis, Reformen im rheinbündischen Deutschland. For the German territories on the left bank of the Rhine directly incorporated as départements into France see M. Rowe, From Reich to State: the Rhineland in the Revolutionary Age, 1780–1830 (Cambridge, 2003). 46. For this idea see M. Broers, Europe under Napoleon 1799–1815 (London, 1996), and his contribution to this book. 47. For an introduction in English see L. Cole, Andreas Hofer: the Social and Cultural Construction of a National Myth in Tirol, 1809–1909 (EUI working paper 94/3, Florence, 1994). A vivid example of the absence of any ‘German’ perspective on such conflicts is provided in J. Walter, A German Conscript with Napoleon: Jakob Walter’s Recollections of the Campaigns of 1806–1807, 1809, and 1812–1813 (Otto Springer trans., Lawrence, Kansas, 1938). Walter served in the Bavarian army in the Tyrol. 48. See now E. Zehetbauer, Landwehr gegen Napoleon: Oesterreichs erste Miliz und der Nationalkrieg von 1809 (Vienna, 1999). 49. Clark, Iron Kingdom, p. 355. 50. This is a story of the whole Empire. The most detailed research on the resistance to conscription is on France but a similar story can be told of German, Italian and other regions of the Empire. 51. Quoted in M. Hughes, ‘Fiat justitia, pereat Germania? The imperial supreme jurisdiction and imperial reform in the later Holy Roman Empire’, in J. Breuilly (ed.), The State of Germany: the National Idea in the Making, Unmaking and Remaking of a Modern Nation-State (London, 1992), pp. 29–46, at p. 31. 52. M. Levinger, Enlightened Nationalism: the Transformation of Prussian Political Culture, 1806–1848 (New York, 2000). 53. The classic study remains G. Ritter, Stein: eine politische Biographie (3rd ed., Stuttgart, 1958). For Stein’s political role in the 1813–14 period see P. Graf von Kielsmansegg, Stein und die Zentralverwaltung 1813/14 (Stuttgart, 1964). 54. They were also alarmed, in 1813–14, about nationalist demands for the punishment of ‘collaborators’ and discrimination against Frenchmen. See Rowe, From Reich to State, especially chapter 8. 55. The Treaty of Riedl in September. Metternich was concerned to head off the radical nationalist threat from Stein and his reorganisation commission and one can already see the broad approach he would adopt at the Congress of Vienna. See E. Kraehe, Metternich’s German Policy. Vol. 1: The Contest with Napoleon, 1799–1814 (Princeton, NJ, 1963), chapters 6–8; and P.W. Schroeder, The Transformation of European Politics 1763–1848 (Oxford, 1994), chapter 10. 56. For a full account of this see Clark, Iron Kingdom. 57. I elaborate this argument in Breuilly, ‘Napoleonic Germany and Stateformation’. 58. For this distinction see M. Mann, The Sources of Social Power. Vol. 1: A History of Power from the Beginning to AD1760 (Cambridge, 1986), especially pp. 477–83; and M. Mann, The Sources of Social Power: Vol. 2: The Rise of

John Breuilly 283 Classes and Nation-States 1760–1914, 1st ed. (Cambridge, 1993), especially pp. 59–61. 59. For a survey of the Prussian reforms see Vogel, Preussische Reformen. 60. Symptomatic was the debate in the Prussian United Diet of 1847 as to whether Friedrich Wilhelm III had broken repeated promises in 1815–15 to grant his people a constitution. Liberals insisted it was enthusiasm for a constitutional state which underpinned mass mobilisation; conservatives that it was religious and monarchist sentiments. Bismarck was closer to the mark when he stressed the material resentment against France but, typically, could not see that political ideas are more than simply masks for interests. E. Engelberg, Bismarck: Urpreuße und Reichsgründer (Berlin, 1985), pp. 245–6.

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Index Aachen, imperial city, 26, 117, 185 absolutism enlightened, 17, 266 German, 5, 8, 43–4, 49, 53 Aix-la-Chapelle, see Aachen Alexander I, Russian tsar 1801–25, 177–8, 194, 271 Alexis, Willibald, 203 Alsace, province, 3, 238 Altenzaun, battle (1806), 166 Anhalt-Bernberg, principality, 270 Ansbach, margraviate, 35 Aremberg, duchy, 147 Arndt, Ernst Moritz, poet, 261 art patronage, 121–2, 174, 180–1 art theft, 14, 180 associations, 260, 261, 264 Auerstädt, battle (1806), 164, 165, 173, 186, 199 impact, 13, 172, 194 Augereau, Pierre-François, French general, 113 Auguste Amalie, princess of Bavaria, 102–3 Augustus, Roman emperor 63BC– 14AD, 85 Austerlitz, battle (1805), 25, 33, 34, 101, 155, 186 Austria army, 6, 241, 268–9 as empire, 23, 30–3 and France, 2, 175, 277 interpretations, 7–8 as kingdom, 31 population, 9 possessions, 3, 9, 11, 17, 32 see also Habsburg dynasty Baden, margraviate, grand duchy (1806) and France, 11, 25, 79 and Reich, 29, 56, 100

Balbo, Cesare, Piedmontese minister, 78–9 Basel, peace (1795), 24, 176, 193 Bavaria, electorate, kingdom (1806) becomes kingdom, 11–12, 18, 94, 99–105 exchange plans, 3, 46, 94, 97 and France, 2, 25, 34, 95, 100–7, 125, 239, 270 imperial tradition, 95–6, 98, 100 and Reich, 99–101 Bayreuth, margraviate, 35 Beauharnais, Eugène de, viceroy of Italy, 102–3, see also Josephine Beguelin, Heinrich v., Prussian official, 205 Belgium, 14, 73, 143, 222 Belle-Isle, Charles-Louis-Auguste Fouquet, French general, 175 Berg, duchy, grand duchy (1806), 12, 13, 146, 147, 242–3 Berlin, 182, 195, 205–7 Bernis, François-Joachim-Pierre de, cardinal and minister, 175 Beyts, magistrate, 74, 77, 79 Bismarck, Otto v., German chancellor, 36, 172 Blenheim, battle (1704), 97 Blücher, Gebhard v., Prussian general, 165 Bogenhausen, treaty (1805), 99, 101 Bohemia, 24, 33 Borck, Johann v., Prussian officer, 197 Bourbon dynasty, 112, 117, 174, 184 restoration, 91, 124, 130 Brandenburg, electorate, 44, 205, 273 Braunau, town, 94 Bray, François-Gabriel de, diplomat, 204 Bremen, city, 147 285

286

Index

Britain empire, 7, 126 fights France, 5, 157, 193 French views of, 174, 221, 237–8, 249 government, 43 Brünn, treaty (1805), 99 Brunswick, duchy, 104, 147, 175, 193, 194 Brunswick, Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand duke of, Prussian general, 159, 161, 165, 176, 196 Burgundy, 2 Byron, George Gordon, poet, 66 Caesar, Julius, Roman general, 34, 70, 85, 184 Calvinism, 28 Cambacérès, Jean-Jacques-Régis de, French chancellor, 86, 142–50, 180, 181 Capet dynasty, 85, 86 Carl Albrecht, see Charles VII Castellamonte, Botton di, magistrate, 78 Catalonia, 75–6 Catel, Charles-François, composer, 181 Celle, town, 49 censorship, 6, 13, 89, 200, 248 Charlemagne, king of the Franks and Holy Roman emperor, 7, 26, 33–4, 75, 85, 95, 116–18, 119, 184–6 Charles V, Holy Roman emperor 1519–58, 2 Charles VII, Holy Roman emperor 1742–5, 17, 95–6, 97 Charles X, king of Sweden 1654–60, 98 Charles XII, king of Sweden 1697–1718, 98 Chateaubriand, Réné de, 66 Chatrian, Alexandre, writer, 222, 230 Chazal, Jean-Pierre, French official, 135 Cicero, Marcus Tullius, statesman and writer, 70–1, 77 civil society, 7, 18 Cleves, duchy, 12, 242

Clovis, king of the Franks 481–511, 119 coats of arms Bavarian, 99 French imperial, 86 Holy Roman imperial, 30, 32 see also regalia Cobenzl, Ludwig, Habsburg minister, 17, 25–6 Cologne, city, 247 Cologne, electorate, 57 colonialism, 7–8, 71–2, 239, 246, 251 Concordat (1801), 77, 120, 125 Condorcet, Marie-Jean-Antoine Caritat de, philosopher, 70 Condove, Peyretti di, magistrate, 78 Confederation of the Rhine (1806) army, 194, 269–70 break-up, 271–2 economy, 204–5 formation, 12, 33, 172, 195 and France, 266, 268, 277 see also ‘Third Germany’ Conseil d’Etat, see Council of State conservatism, 36–7, 248 Constituent Assembly, French, 132–3, 135–6, 143, 149 Consulate, French, 66, 70, 71, 84, 87, 89, 114, 116, 245 Continental System, 192, 195, 204–5 coronation absence in Bavaria, 102 in Austria, 26, 33 British, 126 imperial (1792), 26 Napoleon’s, 26, 85, 86–7, 101, 117–20, 126, 180–1, 185 Prussian, 96 Corsica, 112 Corvey, Lemière de, composer, 180 Council of State, Napoleonic, 87–8, 117, 134, 138, 140–2, 181 Croatia, 72–3 Cromwell, Oliver, English general, 184 culture assimilation, 74, 246 Bavarian, 100 French, 67–9, 72–80, 100, 239–51

Index 287 culture – continued military, 8, 118, 120 political, 45–6, 59–60, 83–91, 271–2 popular, 126–7 see also imperialism Dal Pozzo, Ferdinando, magistrate, 79 Dalberg, Karl Theodor v., elector of Mainz, 22, 33–4, 46 Dalmatia, see Illyrian Provinces Danzig, 186 David, Jacques-Louis, painter, 33 Davout, Louis-Nicholas, French general, 165, 173, 186 Denon, Dominique-Vivant, museums director, 121, 180, 185 Denmark, 6, 27 desacralisation, 28 Dettingen, battle (1743), 176 Diderot, Denis, philosopher, 176 Directory, French, 10, 182 Douai, Merlin de, lawyer, 132–3, 134, 138–50 Dubrovnik, see Ragusa Duchesne, Pierre-François, French official, 134–5 Dumouriez, Charles-François, French general, 241 Dutch Republic, 5 dynasticism Bonapartist, 34, 67, 85–6, 102–3, 124–6, 185–6 German princely, 6–7, 8, 27, 98, 102–5, 249 as substitute for nation, 32–3, 249, 262, 270 see also under individual dynasties émigrés, French, 4–5 empire classical roots, 7, 15–16, 17, 34, 71, 184, 186 concepts of, 7, 23–37 inner/outer, 14, 72–80, 149, 221, 268 see also Grand Empire; Reich; Second Empire Enghien, Louis Antoine de Bourdon-Condé duke of, émigré general, 117

Enlightenment and Napoleonic regime, 36–7, 75, 112–14 and Reich, 16, 36, 45–6, 54, 239, 248, 266 Estates German territorial, 8, 49, 58, 206 imperial, 8, 24, 47, 48 Ettenheim, town, 56 experience defined, 193 and memory, 216–18, 225 of occupation, 202–7, 214–30, 262, 267–8 of soldiers, 214 Eylau, battle (1807), 166 Ferdinand, emperor of Austria 1835–48, 33 Fesch, Joseph, cardinal, 34 festivals, 120, 174, 247 feudalism abolition, 4, 131–50 in French empire, 19, 77, 142–9, 186 in Prussia, 44, 207, 266 in Reich, 3–4, 27, 146–7, 242–3, 248 in Tuscany, 144, 147–8 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, nationalist, 259–66 Fontainebleau, palace, 90, 115 Fontanes, Louis, poet, 180, 182, 183, 185 Fontenoy, battle (1745), 176 France annexes German lands, 7, 10, 147, 238, 240, 243 and German princes, 2–4, 10–12, 100 and Holy Roman emperor, 2–3, 24, 85 invasion (1792), 5, 218–20, 222–3, 227 judicial system, 8, 70–80, 88–9 population, 9 see also Grand Empire; Napoleon; revolution Francis I Stephen, Holy Roman emperor 1745–65, 18, 27

288

Index

Francis II, Holy Roman emperor 1792–1806 and emperor of Austria 1804–35 abdication, 12, 22, 23, 27, 30 and France, 2–3 and imperial title, 11, 18, 23, 25–8, 30–2, 36, 98, 99 and Reich, 7, 10 Franco-German relations character, 6–7 French views of Germany, 15, 79–80, 229, 237–50 German views of France, 15, 101, 105, 192–4, 197, 201–4, 207–8 interpretations, 1–2 François I, king of France 1515–47, 2, 184 Frankfurt, imperial city, 30 Franz Josef, emperor of Austria 1848–1916, 33 Frederick I Barbarossa, Holy Roman emperor 1155–90, 118 Frederick II ‘the Great’, king of Prussia 1740–86, 46, 52, 100, 155 as general, 165–6 image, 173, 175, 239, 241 Napoleon’s view of, 176, 178–9, 182–4 tomb, 178, 185 Frederick III, elector (1688), king (1701) of BrandenburgPrussia, 96 Frederick III, Holy Roman emperor 1440–93, 47 Frederick III, German emperor 1888, 36 Frederick William I, king of Prussia 1713–40, 44 Frederick William II, king of Prussia 1786–97, 53 Frederick William III, king of Prussia 1797–1840, 156–7, 193, 195, 263 freedom, German, 16–17, 29, 30, 35, 45–6, see also liberty Friedland, battle (1807), 120, 195 Friedrich I August, elector (1763), king (1806) of Saxony, 106, 126 Froissart, Jean, chronicler, 238 Fürstenbund, see League of Princes

Gallican articles (1682), 87 Gendarmerie, French, 73 gender and military occupation, 203, 206, 216, 221–4, 226 and nationalism, 222, 261, 267, 270 and political authority, 17, 176–7 see also monarchy George II, king of Britain 1727–60, 176 George III, king of Britain 1760–1820, 26 George IV, king of Britain 1820–30, 126 German Confederation 1815–66, 106–7, 267 Glogau, fortress, 195, 204 Gneisenau, Neidhardt v., Prussian general, 197 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, writer, 16, 22, 23, 30, 66, 69, 172 Görres, Joseph, publicist, 23 Goslar, city, 36 Grand Empire administrative structure, 67, 80, 87–91, 247 and ancient Rome, 71, 75, 85 character, 7, 15–19, 28, 36–7, 71–80, 149, 268 and the church, 75, 87, 119–20, 124–5, 180 expansion, 17 interpretations, 14 legacy, 13–14, 249 political culture, 84–91 see also under individual countries and regions Haas, Joseph, Habsburg official, 29 Habsburg dynasty ceremonial, 26–7 imperial title, 17–18, 25–6, 30–3, 36, 84 rivalry with Wittelsbachs, 97, 99, 103 Haiti, 71–2 Halberstadt, city, 194 Halle, town, 194 Hamburg, city, 146–7

Index 289 Hannibal, Carthaginian general, 184 Hanover, electorate army, 175, 178, 194 and Britain, 6, 27, 193 legal system, 49–50 Hanseatic cities, 72, 74–5, 76, 146–7 Hardenberg, Karl August v., Prussian minister, 36 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, philosopher, 23, 24 Heidelberg, town, 239 Henry VIII, king of England 1509–47, 85 Hessen-Kassel, landgraviate, electorate (1803), 35, 99, 104, 157, 175 Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen, Friedrich Ludwig prince of, Prussian general, 159, 161 Hohenzollern dynasty, 35–6, 96, 179 Holland French rule in, 74, 77, 79, 125, 143 see also Netherlands Holstein, duchy, 6, 27 Holy Alliance (1815), 43 Hume, David, philosopher, 114 Hungary, 33 Hüser, Johann v., Prussian officer, 198 Illuminati, secret society, 52–3 Illyrian Provinces, 72–4, 76–7 imperial church, 28, 97 imperial circles, 25, 42, 55 imperial cities, 29–30, 48, 55 imperial courts, see Reichshofrat; Reichskammergericht imperial crown, see regalia imperial diet, see Reichstag imperial Estates, see Estates imperial Italy, 10, 24 imperial knights, 29–30, 274 imperial title Austrian, 11, 23, 26, 27, 30–3, 36, 98, 99 French, 11, 17, 26, 84–7 Holy Roman, 11–12, 17, 25–8, 30–2, 33–4 Prussian, 36–7

imperialism, cultural, 70, 131 insignia, see regalia intendants, French, 73, 84 Invalides, Paris, 174, 180 Ireland, 216 Italy, French rule in, 34, 67, 76, 103, 125, 143–6, see also imperial Italy; and under individual states Jacobins French, 113, 116 German, 6 Jahn, Friedrich Ludwig ‘Father’, publicist, 261 Jansenism, 237 Jena, battle (1806) conduct, 161, 165, 194 impact, 13, 172, 196–7, 199 interpretations, 155–6 re-enactment, 173 Jérôme Bonaparte, king of Westphalia 1807–13, 104, 125 Jews in Italy, 77 in Reich, 55–7 Joseph II, Holy Roman emperor 1765–90, 27, 30, 46, 56, 96, 97 Joseph Bonaparte, king of Naples (1806), and Spain (1808), 125 Josephine Beauharnais, empress of the French, 85, 118, 124 justice administration in French empire, 8, 70–80, 88–9 administration in Reich, 47–60 arbitrary, 52 concept, 16, 28–9, 70–1 cost, 54 denial, 48 Karlowitz, peace (1699), 28 Kerbach, myth, 221 Kindermann, lawyer, 57 Koblenz, town, 4, 23 Kolberg, fortress, 207 Königsberg, city, 195, 207 Kreise, see imperial circles Kunersdorf, battle (1759), 165–6 Küstrin, fortress, 195, 204

290 Index League of Princes (1785), 46, 100 Lebrun, Charles-François, French consul, 86, 88 Lefebvre, François-Joseph, French general, 182, 186 Legion of Honour, 90, 119, 181 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, philosopher, 52 Leipzig, battle (1813), 106 Leo III, saint and pope 795–816, 119 Leopold I, Holy Roman emperor 1658–1705, 17 Leopold II, Holy Roman emperor 1790–2, 2, 59 as grand duke of Tuscany, 144 liberalism, 266–7 liberty ideals of, 4, 16, 28–9, 239, 249 individual, 46, 52, 244 see also freedom Liège crisis 1789–91, 6, 59 Liegel, Georg, pharmacist, 94 Link, Gottlieb Christian Karl, lawyer, 54 List, Friedrich, economist, 258 logistics, 160–2, 194, 203–4 Lombardy Austrian rule, 33 French rule, 14, 85 Lopez, Francisco Solano, Paraguayan president 1862–70, 127 Lorraine, duchy, 218–21 Louis XIV, king of France 1643–1715 admired by Napoleon, 87, 90, 115, 120–2 German policy, 2, 85, 96 Louis XV, king of France 1715–74, 121, 175 Louis XVI, king of France 1774–93, 2, 117, 121, 222 Louis Bonaparte, king of Holland 1806–10, 74, 125 Louvre, museum, 14, 121 Lübeck, city, 147 Lucien Bonaparte, 185 Ludwig I, king of Bavaria 1825–48, 105 Ludwig the Bavarian, Holy Roman emperor 1314–47, 95

Luise, queen of Prussia, 13, 177–8 Lunéville, peace (1801), 10–11, 24 Lutheranism, 28 Mably, Gabriel Bonnot de, philosopher, 112, 176, 183 Magdeburg, city, 195 Mainz, city capture 1792, 7, 244 capture 1798, 23 Mainz, electorate, 2, 27, 28, 238, 246 majesty, 17 Malmaison, palace, 124 Marbot, Marcellin de, French officer, 193–4 Marengo, battle (1800), 120 Maria Theresa, Habsburg empress 1740–80, 18, 96 Marie-Antoinette, queen of France, 2, 177 Marie-Louise of Austria, empress of the French, 115, 124 Marlborough, john Churchill duke of, English general, 219 Marwitz, Friedrich v.d., Prussian officer, 198 Massenbach, Christian v., Prussian officer, 159 Maupeou, Réné de, French chancellor, 88 Maupertuis, Pierre-Louis Moreau de, philosopher, 175 Max Emanuel, elector of Bavaria 1679–1726, 95, 97 Max III Joseph, elector of Bavaria 1745–77, 97 Max Joseph, elector (1799), king (1806) of Bavaria, 94–6, 98–107 Maximilian I, Holy Roman emperor 1493–1519, 27 Memel, town, 195 Metternich, Clemens Lothar Wenzel prince, Austrian chancellor, 31, 43, 271 Mexico, 127 ‘Miller Arnold case’, 52

Index 291 monarchy and dynasty, 32 French, 84–6, 90, 112–14, 116–26 and gender, 17, 32, 85–6, 102–3, 123–4, 177–8 Latin American, 127 legitimacy, 18, 85–6, 183–4, 237 military element, 175 Moncey, Bon-Adrien-Jeannot de, French general, 181–2, 185 Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de, philosopher, 30, 238–9 Montgelas, Maximilian Joseph count, Bavarian minister, 95, 99, 105, 107 mortality, 206–7 Moser, Friedrich Carl v., publicist, 45 Moser, Johann Jacob, publicist, 47 Müller, Johannes v., historian, 179 Münster, bishopric, 242 Murat, Joachim, French general, 12, 34, 104, 125, 242 Naples, kingdom, 125–6, 131 Napoleon I Bonaparte, emperor of the French 1804–15 attitude to monarchy, 84–7, 112–27 becomes emperor, 26, 34, 84, 116–20, 126, 180–1 and Corsica, 112 defeat, 36, 123, 131, 184, 186 defeats Prussia, 155–66, 172, 193–5 as emperor, 11, 17, 31, 78, 88, 91 fear of plots, 117 and feudalism, 4, 131–2, 142, 148–50 as First Consul, 71, 84, 87–8, 114, 116, 185, 245–6 and Holy Roman title, 33–4, 85, 117, 184, 186 interpretations, 65–9, 131, 256 legacy, 1, 14, 126–7, 131, 249, 276 propaganda, 113, 115–16, 126, 173–4, 177–86 reorganises Germany, 7, 11–13, 18, 25, 34, 101–4

and the Revolution, 90, 123, 131, 184, 186 writings of, 112–15 Napoleon II, king of Rome, 91, 124 Napoleon III, emperor of the French 1852–70, 127 Napoleonic Code, 8, 14, 29, 67, 70–1, 75–6, 78–9, 80, 120, 125, 127, 247 nation concept, 22, 234–5, 249–50 and gender, 222, 261, 267, 270 and honour, 194, 198 see also nationalism National Assembly, French, 91, 239 National Convention, French, 132–3, 134 National Domain, French, 134, 140–1 nationalism defined, 234–6, 257 in Europe, 127, 235–6, 259 French, 23, 186, 234–7, 243–7, 249–51 German, 23, 27, 30, 45, 202, 249, 256–77 interpretations, 234–6, 249, 256–9 and popular animosity, 207–8, 221–2, 270 Prussian, 194, 198–202, 208, 261–3, 272–5 see also nation; patriotism Netherlands, Austrian exchange plans, 3, 46 French annexation, 10, 24, 25 see also Belgium; Dutch Republic; Holland Neufchateau, François de, French official, 182, 246 nobility, French service, 18, 90–1, 123, 186 Norvins de Montbretonne, Jacques, writer, 67–8, 79 Notre-Dame cathedral, Paris, 118–19, 185 Nuremberg, imperial city, 26, 30 Oldenburg, duchy, 146–7 Otto I, Holy Roman emperor 936–72, 34 Ottoman empire, 3, 16, 28

292

Index

Palatinate, electorate, 98 Paoli, Pasquale, Corsican leader, 112, 114 papacy and France, 86, 87, 119 and Reich, 27 Paraguay, 127 Paris, treaty (1808), 195 Parma, 145 Pasquier, Etienne-Denis, French chancellor, 116 patriotism Austrian, 32, 261, 268–9 Bavarian, 105 ideal, 18 imperial, 15, 59–60, 248, 257, 267–8, 271–2, 274 Prussian, 200–2, 207, 267 see also nationalism Pavia, battle (1525), 184 Pepin, king of the Franks 751–68, 119 Piedmont, kingdom, 78–9, 145 Poland, partitions of, 6, 7, 35 Pomerania, duchy, 6, 205 Pompadour, Jeanne Poisson marquise de, 175, 177 Potsdam, town, 178, 205 Pragmatic Sanction (1713), 32 Pressburg, peace (1805), 11, 29, 32, 101 prisoners, 221, 228 prostitution, 206 Prussia army command, 159–60, 194, 197 defeat (1806), 13, 155–66, 172, 192–5, 200–2, 241 economy, 204–6, 274 fiscal-military potential, 6, 158, 162–3, 175–6, 194–6, 241, 273–4 and France, 2, 6, 176, 272 French occupation, 13, 195, 101–7, 270 French view of, 174–80, 182–5 interpretations, 7–8, 23, 42, 44, 155–6, 72–3, 191–2 legal system, 49–50, 52 neutrality (1795–1806), 9–10, 12–13, 24, 35, 172, 193, 268

population, 9, 35, 195, 206–7 possessions, 9, 24, 35, 195, 242, 273 reform era, 172, 207–8 and Reich, 25, 28, 30, 35–7, 100, 105 see also nationalism public sphere, 16, 45, 57, 264 Pufendorf, Samuel v., philosopher, 23, 30, 52 Pugachev rebellion (1773–5), 43 Pyramids, battle (1798), 186 Ragusa, city, 73 Rákóczi revolt (1703–11), 43 Rastatt congress (1797–9), 10 Raynal, Guillaume-Thomas-François, philosopher, 112 Reformation, German, 16, 28 regalia Holy Roman, 12, 26–7, 30, 32, 34, 36–7, 185 imperial French, 34, 85, 86, 117–18, 185 Prussian, 36, 178, 179 see also coats of arms regicide, 14 Regnier, Claude-Ambroise, French official, 134 Reich classical roots, 1, 7, 15–16, 17, 34 constitution, 5–6, 8, 18, 24–5, 28–9, 34, 42, 98 deficiencies, 23 dissolution (1806), 12, 30–1, 32–3, 94, 99, 101 and Europe, 25–6, 28–9, 31 German character, 27–8, 30, 32 ‘holy’ element, 24, 28, 32 interpretations, 5, 10, 14, 17, 22–3, 42–3, 172–3, 239 legacy, 12, 36–7 legal system, 6, 15, 16, 28–9, 44, 47–60 military potential, 9, 43 popular unrest in, 5, 57, 58 population, 9 reactions to dissolution, 2–4, 30, 172, 248, 267–8 reform, 46

Index 293 Reich – continued reorganisation (1802–3), 10–11, 24–5, 28, 97–8 size, 9, 27 statehood, 23, 42–3 see also patriotism; regalia; Reichstag Reichshofrat, 6, 47–51 Reichskammergericht, 6, 16, 47–59 Reichsstände, see Estates Reichstag, 4, 6, 11, 13, 24 revival, 25, 28 religious toleration for Christians, 16, 28, 45, 176 for Jews, 56–7, 77 Reubell, Jean-François, French official, 240 revolution European (1848), 33, 249 French (1789): centenary, 217; and the church, 22–4, 241; fear of, 5, 9, 15, 97, 101, 201; and feudalism, 4, 132–8; ideals, 28, 76, 123, 201, 235, 239–41, 243–5, 248; impact on Germany, 58–60, 96, 97–8; interpretations, 83; legacy, 1, 17, 18, 66–7, 84, 91, 236, 251 Rheinbund, see Confederation of the Rhine Rhenish Alliance (1658), 2 Rhineland French annexation, 7, 238, 240, 243 French rule in, 78, 244–7, 250–1, 271 Ried, treaty (1813), 106 Risorgimento, Italian, 14, 235 Rivalz, Louis-Marc, French diplomat, 241 Rohan-Guemené, Louis Renatus prince and cardinal, bishop of Strasbourg 1779–1801, 56 Rossbach, battle (1757), 13, 173–6, 182 Rostan, Casimir, naturalist, 246, 250 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, philosopher, 112, 176 Rudler, François, French official, 244–5, 247, 250

Rudolf II, Holy Roman emperor 1576– 1612, 26 Ruechel, Ernst Friedrich Wilhelm Philipp v., Prussian general, 159 Rumford, Benjamin Thompson count, Bavarian minister, 106 Russia army, 241, 273 expansion, 28 fights France, 156, 193, 194–5, 268, 272 influence in Germany, 3, 6, 24 Saalfeld, battle (1806), 158, 163 Sack, Johann August, 207 Saint-Domingue, see Haiti Saint Helena, island, 249 Saint-Jean d’Angély, Regnaud de, 118 Saint Louis, order of, 90 Salic law, 85 Sans Souci, palace, 178 Santa Anna, Antoine de, Mexican president, 127 Savary, Anne-Jean, French official, 89, 248 Saxony, electorate, kingdom (1806) army, 163, 194 becomes kingdom, 104, 106, 125 and France, 126, 272, 274 international position, 27 and Prussia, 156–7, 193 and Reich, 35, 99 Scharnhorst, Gerhardt v., Prussian general, 159, 198 Schill, Ferdinand v., Prussian officer, 207 Schiller, Friedrich, dramatist, 30, 270–1 Schleiz, battle (1806), 158 Schmalkaldic League (1531), 2 Schoppenhauer, Johanna, 203 Second Empire French, 126 German, 36, 172–3 secularisation, 28, 266 Senate, Napoleonic, 90–1, 118 Sérurier, Jean-Mathieu-Philibert, French general, 181–2, 185 Siena, city, 77

294

Index

Silesia, province, 205, 206, 273 slavery, 71–2 Slovenia, 72 social structure, 16 Soubise, Charles de, French general, 174–5 Spain, 14, 268 Speyer, imperial city, 47 Stäel, Germaine de, writer, 70, 89, 248 Stavenow, lordship, 44 Stein, Karl baron, Prussian minister, 271, 272, 274 Stendhal (pseud. of Henri Marie Beyle), writer, 67–8 Stephen III, pope 768–72, 119 Stettin, town, 195, 204 Strasbourg, bishopric, 56 Strasbourg, imperial city, 2 Straub, Georg Ernst, Mainz official, 30 Swabia, region, 55 Sweden as invader, 217, 219 and Reich, 6, 27, 31, 98 tactics, 163–6 Talleyrand, Charles de, French statesman, 100, 230 Tauroggen, Convention (1812), 272 Terror, the (1794), 15, 16, 84, 133, 222, 250 ‘Third Germany’, idea of, 100, 104, 277 Thomasius, Christian, philosopher, 52 Thucydides, historian, 68–9, 75 Tilsit, peace (1807), 172, 195, 198 Tocqueville, Alexis de, political analyst, 65, 89 Tournon, Camille de, French official, 76 Toussaint Louverture, François, Haitian leader, 71 Trier, electorate, 4 Tuileries, palace, 90 Tuscany, grand duchy, 77, 144 Tyrol, 268–9 United Nations, 43 universalism, 8, 16, 23, 27, 28, 30, 71–2, 239, 244–5, 250–1

Varennes, 222–3 venality, 88 Verdun, city, 223 Véron-Bellecourt, Alexandre, artist, 181 Versailles, palace, 90, 122 Veste Recklinshausen, 57 Vienna, 26, 47 Vienna, Congress (1814–15), 9, 106–7, 274 Voltaire, François-Marie Arouet de, philosopher, 77–8, 112, 175, 239, 242 war Bavarian Succession (1778–9), 100 of Devolution (1666–7), 121 Dutch (1672–9), 121 Franco-German (1870–1), 217, 220, 227, 262 French Revolutionary (1792–1802): conduct, 222; German involvement, 3, 5, 6, 9–11, 35, 176; impact, 97–8; outbreak, 2, 239 German Peasants (1524–6), 59 of Liberation (1813–15), 13, 192, 199, 208, 261–2, 269–70, 272, 275 Napoleonic (1802–15): economic impact, 204–6; interpretations, 155–6, 191–2; logistics, 160–2, 194, 203–4; operational art, 158–63, 193–4; strategy, 156–8, 193; tactics, 163–6; as total war, 191–2; see also individual battles Seven Years (1756–63), 165, 173–5, 178, 194, 239 Spanish Succession (1701–14), 36, 95, 97, 219 Thirty Years (1618–48), 16, 219, 269 Weimar, city, 203 Weimar, duchy, 193, 194 Weimar, Karl August duke of, Prussian general, 161, 164 Westphalia, kingdom creation, 13, 104, 125 feudalism in, 131 possessions, 146, 147

Index 295 Westphalia, peace (1648), 2, 5, 23, 28 Wetzlar, imperial city, 6, 16, 47, 50, 58 Wilhelm I, king of Prussia (1861), German emperor (1871), 172 Wittelsbach dynasty, 95–106, 184 Wolff, Christian, philosopher, 52 Worms, imperial recess (1495), 48 Württemberg, duchy, electorate (1803), kingdom (1806)

becomes electorate, 99 becomes kingdom, 11–12, 104, 125 and France, 25, 34, 239 and Reich, 29, 100 Zedler, Johann Heinrich, publicist, 23, 30 Zweibrücken, principality, 101 Zwierlein, Christian Jacob v., lawyer, 58