TY - JOUR
AU - Blanning, Tim
AB - Abstract In the course of the past fifty years there has been a thorough-going reappraisal of the Holy Roman Empire, so long the target of derision or victim of neglect. Virtually every aspect of its history between the peace of Westphalia in 1648 and its final demise in 1806 has been revised. The Empire is now lauded for being a constitutional state based on the rule of law, which succeeded in protecting German liberties and asserting German nationality. It also provided an appropriate framework within which German culture could flourish as never before. It proved less effective, however, in promoting economic growth and protecting its citizens against rapacious neighbours. I am especially grateful for the invitation to give this lecture for two reasons. First, it gives me the opportunity to acknowledge in public and in an appropriate environment my debt to two previous lecturers who have had a powerful influence on both my intellectual development and career. The first was Sir Herbert Butterfield, who gave the Creighton Lecture in 1961 on Charles James Fox and Napoleon. It was he who served as the internal examiner of my Ph.D. dissertation in 1967 and subsequently gave me invaluable advice and support. The other was Owen Chadwick, whom I visited in the Master's Lodge of Selwyn College in the autumn of 1962 when I was beginning my third year as an undergraduate and was seeking advice as to a research topic. It was he who, on learning that I was keen to work on one of the ecclesiastical states of the Holy Roman Empire, steered me in the direction of Mainz. I was clear as to the general direction because – and this is the second reason for my gratitude – 2010 is my jubilee year in my relationship with the topic of my lecture this evening – the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. It was in the spring of 1960 that I went to Germany to spend a term at the Neues Gymnasium in Nuremberg before going up to Cambridge. I had already been to Germany four times previously, but only for short periods and only to the north. Happily, once I arrived in Nuremberg, I found that I was not expected to attend school very often and was encouraged by the enlightened headmaster to spend most of my time exploring Franconia and Bavaria. This I certainly did, hitch-hiking the length and breadth of southern Germany. It was there that I first encountered the Holy Roman Empire in all its wonderfully eccentric diversity – principalities such as the margraviates of Bayreuth and Ansbach, Free Imperial Cities like Nuremberg itself or Rothenburg ob der Tauber and above all the ecclesiastical states, with Bamberg a special favourite. These journeys also took me into the world of the baroque, to the Würzburg Residenz, Pommersfelden, Osterhofen, Kloster Banz, Vierzehnheiligen, and so on. This was both an aesthetic and a historical revelation. But when I got to Cambridge, I found that no one seemed to have any knowledge of – or interest in – the Empire. German history before 1800 meant Prussian history. The two general histories of Germany I read were A. J. P. Taylor's The Course of German History and Geoffrey Barraclough's The Origins of Modern Germany. Taylor had a low opinion of the Holy Roman Empire, especially after the peace of Westphalia of 1648: ‘by the end of the eighteenth century’, he wrote, a harsh inescapable feudalism held most of Germany in its grasp: the people exploited by and subjected to the lords, the lords gratefully subservient to the absolute prince. This feudalism was decked out with a medieval appearance and rigmarole; in fact it was of recent application and therefore all the more crushing and systematic.1 Barraclough agreed: for a century and more after 1648 Germany stagnated. Petty dynasties, class-bound nobilities and corrupt oligarchies, all guided by narrow motives of self-interest, exercised a harsh and oppressive domination over a peasantry and a middle class both ruined by the Thirty Years War. Initiative and freedom were stifled in the strait-waistcoat of a rigidly stratified society … [a] petrifying regime of petty absolutism, which brought neither comfort for the present nor hope for the future. He concluded: ‘The historian's only interest in this stultifying ossification lies in the process by which it was brought to an end, and in its durable effects on the people who underwent it’. When it perished in 1806, he added, ‘it left no gap, for it had been a nullity since 1648’.2 Both Taylor and Barraclough were writing in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, and their perspective on German history was naturally affected, but their contemptuous dismissal of the Empire lived on. Betty Behrens, in the lectures on Europe in the eighteenth century she gave when I was an undergraduate, did not mention the Empire, nor did she in either of her two books.3 She gave a generous review to my doctoral dissertation on the Electorate of Mainz when it appeared as a book in 1974 but could not conceal her view that this ‘pocket principality’, as she called it, was not worth bothering about.4 In the nineteen-seventies, by which time I was myself lecturing in Cambridge on the eighteenth century, the most up-to-date textbook on the period was E. N. Williams's The Ancien Régime in Europe, an excellent book but one which continued to treat the history of Germany as the history of Austria and Prussia. ‘In Germany’, he wrote, ‘the imperial institutions staggered on like figures in a dream … such imperial ghosts no longer embodied the living German reality’.5 Not all change has been for the worse, at least not in the historiography of the Holy Roman Empire. In what follows, I shall discuss some of the major changes that have occurred in the way in which the Empire is viewed by historians and offer some comments of my own. I shall be concentrating on the period between the peace of Westphalia of 1648 and the end of the Empire in 1806. Had I been talking about the previous two centuries, I would have paid proper tribute to the trail-blazing work of Robert Evans, whose concern has been mainly the Habsburg monarchy but who has illuminated imperial history in general too.6 He also deserves a special mention here because, together with Michael Schaich of the German Historical Institute, London, and Peter Wilson of the University of Hull, who also deserve bouquets, he organized a major conference on the Holy Roman Empire in Oxford in 2006 to mark the bicentenary of its end. The proceedings of this conference will appear in print next year and should mark a watershed in the way in which its subject is viewed in the English-speaking world. Another red-letter day is going to be the long-awaited publication of Joachim Whaley's two-volume history of early modern Germany. If I were to mention all the scholars who have played a part in the rehabilitation of the Empire, this lecture would become a dreary list of names and potted summaries. I take this opportunity to apologize to all those heroes and heroines whose exploits will be unsung here but have not been overlooked or forgotten. To begin at the beginning – in 1648 – there has been a radical reappraisal of the peace of Westphalia. This was neither the shameful sell-out to foreign powers lamented by the nationalist historians of the nineteenth century nor the ‘charter of the liberties of the German princes’ derided by Taylor. On the contrary, it has been rehabilitated in no uncertain fashion, and not just for academics, as its 350th anniversary in 1998 demonstrated. This proved to be a major media event, with exhibitions, conferences, television and radio programmes, CDs, concerts, public lectures and, of course, a flood of books. In terms of both quality and quantity it outpointed by a long mile the commemoration in this country of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 ten years earlier. The most emphatic, and arguably also the most authoritative, statement has come from Johannes Burkhardt (whose book on the Seven Years War I reviewed in English Historical Review in 1988, commenting on his ‘pleasing dry wit’). He pointed out that the peace of Westphalia represented not just a peace settlement for the various states involved but also provided the Holy Roman Empire with a written constitution. Moreover, it was a constitution which proved to be more durable than any other German constitution before or since, lasting as it did for more than 150 years. The treaty signed at Osnabrück stated explicitly that the next Imperial Diet or Reichstag should regard the results of the negotiations as ‘perpetua lex et imperii sanctio’. And that was just what the Diet did when it concluded its business at Regensburg in 1654, incorporating the Westphalian settlement into its final settlement and referring to it as ‘a fundamental law of the Holy Empire’.7 During the course of the Thirty Years War that preceded the peace of Westphalia, the Empire could easily have gone one of two ways: it might have succumbed to Habsburg absolutism, as seemed likely in 1629; or its princes could have followed the example of the Dutch, escaped from any form of Habsburg control and fragmented into a collection of sovereign states. In the event, the peace-makers found a third way, restoring and developing a balance between emperor and Imperial Estates (Reichsstände). Significantly, the French negotiators had tried to make the princes sovereign by giving them unlimited freedom to conclude agreements with foreign powers. But that was not what even the most mighty of them wanted. They had fought not for sovereignty but for a share in the government of the Empire, and that was what they got.8 The year 1648 did not mark the triumph of the princes over the emperor, rather a return to – and a strengthening of – the dual system which had developed during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Indeed, thanks to his successful campaigns against the Turks and deft cultural policy, the emperor Leopold I raised imperial prestige and influence to a new peak as guarantor and representative of the Empire. This was not just a constitution, Burkhardt argues, it was a parliamentary constitution. The Imperial Diet became permanent de facto in 1663, or in other words thirty-one years before the English Triennial Act, and thus could claim to be the first ‘standing Parliament’ in Europe. No longer an occasional, peripatetic and often brief gathering of the Imperial Estates, it was now settled at Regensburg, institutionalized and modernized, with a permanent staff, ordered procedures and bureaucratic structures. Although modest when compared with the busy English parliaments, its legislative output was around or above the average of comparable assemblies elsewhere in Europe.9 More importantly, the Reichstag served as a place where interests could be represented, disputes settled and information exchanged. It was also the centre of political public life in Germany, offering the most concentrated medium for publicity, for in no other city was so much published on the politics of the day, both domestic and foreign.10 Detailed reports of proceedings in the Diet were published in the newspapers that proliferated across German-speaking Europe. Nothing was secret, everything could be discovered, provided the right palm was greased – just like the English parliament in other words.11 Charles James Fox famously observed that there were only two constitutions in Europe – that of Great Britain and that of Württemberg – but he would have done better to extend his compliment to the constitution of the Holy Roman Empire as a whole.12 So the Holy Roman Empire had a constitution, but it was also a state. This has been argued with special emphasis – and cogency – by the Jena historian Georg Schmidt, who has used the phrase ‘komplementärer Staat’, best translated as ‘composite state’. It was this imperial composite state that was sovereign, he argues, not the emperor, not the princes.13 It is anachronistic to adopt Max Weber's definition of a state as ‘that agency in society that has a monopoly of legitimate force’ or to apply categories derived from the unified power states of the nineteenth century and find the Holy Roman Empire wanting. Contemporary Germans knew they lived in a state and referred to it as such, even if it appeared to be less unified and uniform than France, Spain or England. As Johann Jakob Moser put it in 1766: ‘Germany is ruled in the German manner’ (‘Teutschland wird auf teutsch regiert’).14 In fact, if they had known just how disparate, not to say chaotic, was old regime France beneath the absolutist veneer, they would have felt less idiosyncratic.15 It has become something of a truism in the historiography of the French old regime that the allegedly absolutist state could actually do very little. Ironically, in officially decentralized Germany, the tide has been running in the opposite direction. In particular, it has been pointed out that the groupings of principalities in the ‘Imperial Circles’ (Reichskreise) proved unexpectedly successful, especially where fragmentation had gone furthest, that is to say in Franconia, Swabia and parts of the Rhineland.16 The individual Circles had their own administration, archive, treasury and enforcement agencies, dealing with a wide range of responsibilities including imperial taxation, coinage, roads, begging, workhouses and penal institutions.17 They could also prove surprisingly effective when it came to organizing defence, most notably in the sixteen-eighties and nineties when the threat from Louis XIV was at its height.18 Everyone knows about the military catastrophe that befell the imperial contingent serving with the French army at Rossbach in 1757 when it was routed by Frederick the Great. Less well known is the determination it showed the following year when driving out Prince Henry of Prussia's army from Franconia.19 Modern cartographers have unwittingly done a disservice to the Imperial Circles by never displaying them on maps of the Holy Roman Empire, preferring instead the patchwork quilt image. Eighteenth-century map-makers knew better.20 For all its occasional martial achievement and capacity for effective government, the Empire was not a state that lent itself to aggressive expansion. But it was a state that promoted the rule of law. Once the targets of much derision, the two senior imperial courts – the Reichskammergericht at Wetzlar and the Reichshofrat at Vienna – have been rehabilitated. Peter Wilson, for example, who has done so much to change the perception of the Empire in the English-speaking world, has shown that the overall caseload the two courts got through was impressive when compared with its counterparts elsewhere in Europe. They arranged – and if necessary enforced – peaceful mediation between feuding princes and they protected both individual subjects and corporations against abuses of princely power.21 In addition, they promoted what Winfried Schulze has called ‘the juridification of social conflict’, that is to say they allowed tensions to be resolved by legal procedure rather than violent confrontation.22 Many an aspiring despot found that the imperial courts' reach could be long and firm: Count Karl Magnus of Grehweiler, for example, who was sentenced to ten years imprisonment by the Reichshofrat when found guilty of forging the consent of his subjects when contracting enormous loans.23 Nor was it only the small fry who were checked, as the duke of Mecklenburg discovered in 1755, the duke of Württemberg in 1770 or the elector of Bavaria in 1765 and 1781.24 This was something in which contemporary Germans took a lot of pride – Heinrich Schellhass, for example, who in 1795 wrote: ‘it is one of the most admirable characteristics of the constitution of the German state that, as a rule, every subject is provided by the Emperor with security against abuse of power on the part of his ruler’.25 Supporting this belief in the rule of law was an equally widespread belief that the Empire incorporated ‘German liberty’. When the German humanists began to comment on Tacitus' Germania, rediscovered in the fourteen-fifties, they not unnaturally paid special attention to his stress on the ‘extensive, vigorous and invincible liberty’ that characterized the Germanic tribes in the first century A.D.26 Their assumption of an ethnic continuity between the Teutons (Germanen) and the Germans (Deutsche), between the Hermann the Cheruscan who destroyed the Roman legions in the Teutoburg forest in A.D. 9 and the present day, allowed them to maintain the tradition that the Germans had always been free and unconquered.27 In the political struggles of the sixteenth century, this ancient liberty was advanced by the princes and their publicists as a counterpoint to the ‘Spanish servitude’ allegedly sought by Charles V. When the elector Johann Friedrich of Saxony and Landgraf Philipp von Hessen addressed the emperor in 1539 they told him that ‘the German nation is a free empire, indeed it is the freest in the world’.28 In his influential book The German Idea of Freedom, published in 1957, Leonard Krieger argued that this ‘liberty’ was nothing more than the special rights of the princes against the emperor. Because the princes had a dual function – as executives within their own states but as representatives within the Empire – political debate did not proceed on the assumption that there was a natural antagonism between subjects and central authorities. So the German idea of freedom was Libertät, the association of political liberty with the very authority of the state.29 Krieger's thesis was, of course, a precursor of the great Sonderweg debate that was to generate so much heat during the last decades of the twentieth century. It has been roundly contradicted by most recent German historians. For Georg Schmidt, the Holy Roman Empire was not a confederation of princes but a republic, albeit in the early modern sense of the word, that is to say a res publica, a commonwealth with a free will and a pluralist division of powers, whose virtuous and patriotic citizens obeyed laws they gave themselves, were subject only to the authority of God and resisted any absolutist initiatives on the part of princes or emperor.30 Johannes Burkhardt has argued that, especially after the Reichstag became permanent in 1663, it developed many parliamentary characteristics, with a broad measure of political participation. At a time when Charles II was ruling England without parliament, in the Holy Roman Empire the Reichstag had established itself as the first standing legislature in Europe.31 These apologists for the Empire as a whig paradise can certainly point to a formidable body of evidence drawn from contemporary pamphlets. Martin Wrede, for example, writing about the late seventeenth century, states unequivocally that ‘the nation was united by the concept of “German liberty” and a belief in the rule of law established by it, and that was as true of 1648 as of 1674 or 1688’.32 The Curieuse Staats-Mercurius of 1684, for example, proclaimed: ‘there is no people under the sun that loves liberty more and is ruled by such a wonderful constitution as the German’.33 This emphasis on liberty did not wane during the eighteenth century, on the contrary. In his influential pamphlet of 1765 On the German National Spirit, Friedrich Karl von Moser stated that the preservation of liberty was ‘a national concern from the Emperor down to the last German capable of rational thought’. It was moreover a liberty that was inseparable from the Holy Roman Empire and its constitution, and it was a liberty which extended to religion and expression.34 Johann Christoph Gottsched asked in 1725: ‘Why is Germany so populous? Why does it have such an abundance of large, medium and small towns and villages? Is it not because all three Christian denominations can enjoy their freedom [of worship] there?’35 In 1814 the publisher Friedrich Perthes recalled with nostalgia: ‘In practice, Germany enjoyed complete freedom of the press, because what could not be published in Prussia could be published in Württemberg, and what could not be published in Hamburg could be published ten paces away in [Danish-ruled] Altona. No book remained unpublished, none undistributed’.36 It was also inseparable from hostility to nations thought to be threats to German independence. After 1648, and especially after 1672, that meant first and foremost the France of Louis XIV. The post-1945 rapprochement between France and the Federal Republic has meant that until very recently there has been a marked reluctance among German historians to address the role played by Francophobia in the political discourse of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Now, thanks largely to Martin Wrede's study of ‘The Reich and its enemies’, its importance is being recognized. As the full extent of Louis XIV's designs on the western territories of the Reich became apparent, he moved quickly from being hailed as the protector of German liberty against the hegemonic ambitions of the Habsburg emperor to being the ‘Christian Turk’, the implacable foe of German independence. The triumphalist cultural project centred on Versailles may have aided social control at home, but it enraged opinion outside France. In particular the exultant frescoes of the Salon de la Guerre at Versailles and the statue of the self-proclaimed Sun-King on the Place des Victoires in Paris were denounced as ‘vain, presumptuous, boastful, unchristian, blasphemous’.37 Moreover, these abusive epithets were then transferred from sovereign to people. Louis XIV himself had aided this process by presenting his German conquests as a national triumph. So, for example, when he had a medal struck in 1675 to mark a victory at Türkheim in Alsace, the motto he chose was ‘Sexaginta milia Germanorum ultra Rhenum pulsa’ (‘60,000 Germans were beaten back over the Rhine’).38 Dislike of French triumphalism was intensified by their style of warfare. No sooner had the French armies crossed the Empire's frontier than horror stories about their barbaric behaviour were broadcast in word and image. Like the Turks, they were alleged to engage in looting, extortion, iconoclasm, rape and murder. In fact they were held to be even worse than the Turks, who had at least had left the dead to rest in peace, whereas the French soldiers thought nothing of digging up graves in pursuit of valuables. The following extract from Der Occidentalische Erb-Feindt (The Hereditary Enemy of the West) will serve as an example: Scorching and burning, old and young mowed down, unspeakable rapes, with even nuns not spared, for the French attitude is that Les Filles sont pour les Hommes! … everything looted right down to the last object, not even churches and monasteries spared, all the poor people beaten like dogs in the Turkish manner and tortured in ways unheard of among Christians to extort money from them.39 The next stage in this demonization of the French was to transfer the bestial characteristics of their soldiers to the nation as a whole. In the flood of pamphlets which poured from the presses during the last quarter of the seventeenth century, they were presented as ‘anti-Germans’ and were ascribed the opposite of all the German virtues, accused of being: vain, supercilious, unfaithful in every sense of the word, areligious, cynical, taking a delight in perversion and excess. It was a cesspit that smelled all the more rank for being concealed beneath a veneer of sophisticated politeness.40 There was special emphasis on the sexual misdemeanours of the French, the example being set right at the top by Louis XIV, who made as free with other men's wives as with other nations' territories. It was notorious, the pamphleteers maintained, that there was no virgin in France above the age of puberty, that Paris in particular was a den of vice where every manner of sexual perversion ruled. In particular, it was the French who had invented sodomy and had then exported it to the rest of Europe along with the syphilis they sought to propagate.41 And so on and so forth. Much of this was, of course, the stock in trade of a people at war and many of the bestial images of the French were borrowed, consciously or not, from Dutch representations of the Spanish a century earlier. They also borrowed the association of one's own cause with liberty and that of the enemy with tyranny. It was only because Louis XIV was a despot who plundered his own people, it was asserted, that he was able to raise the mercenary armies necessary for the despoliation of the Holy Roman Empire.42 On the other hand, his assault on German persons and property was also an assault on German liberty. According to Martin Wrede virtually all the pamphlets published during the sixteen-seventies, eighties and nineties contained appeals to ‘German liberty’.43 Although the tone after the death of Louis XIV in 1715 was less eschatological – there was no more talk of the king of France as the Great Anti-Christ – whenever a fresh war began, the old Francophobe rhetoric was revived. Memories – both real and constructed – of atrocities, especially of those committed during the campaign of 1689, lingered on throughout the next century. Travelling through the region in the mid seventeen-seventies, John Moore wrote of the devastation of the Palatinate: ‘the particulars of that dismal scene have been transmitted from father to son, and are still spoke [sic] of with horror by the peasantry of this country, among whom the French nation is held in detestation to this day’.44 It acquired a fresh impetus in the seventeen-nineties, not least because the armies of the French Revolution were so large and so destructive.45 The question of German nationalism in the eighteenth century is, of course, a highly controversial subject. There are many historians of nationalism who believe that it does not make an appearance until the impact of the French Revolution and Napoleon. That is not my view and I share the objection to this ‘modernist’ approach well put by Noël Malcolm: ‘first it defines the nation in terms that only fit 19th- and 20th-century political conditions, and then it demonstrates that nations were constructed in the 19th and 20th centuries’.46 Not the least of the services of Georg Schmidt and his colleagues has been to demonstrate just how much evidence there is of the ubiquity and vitality of nationalist feeling in the Holy Roman Empire in the early modern period. Unlike some historians, many early modern Germans were well able to maintain simultaneously a loyalty to community, locality, region, confession and nation, the priority at any given time being determined by the identity of the ‘other’ against which they were defining themselves. In one of the most hotly debated pamphlets of the century –On the German National Spirit– published in 1765, Friedrich Karl von Moser wrote: ‘We are one people, with one name, under a common ruler, under the same laws that determine our constitution, rights and duties, bound to liberty by a great common interest’.47 In other words, the Holy Roman Empire was quite adequate to express the nationalist fears, hatreds and aspirations of the German Nation, indeed it was better equipped than the much more exclusive and divisive kleindeutsch German Empire created by Bismarck. Nor was this sense of German national identity confined to the chattering classes. The princes too at least found it expedient to appeal to national interest. In 1673 the emperor Leopold I called on the rulers of the various territories ‘as loyal patriots’ to combine to defend ‘the Holy Roman Empire, the liberty of the German nation and the interest and welfare of its individual members’.48 When Frederick William I of Prussia promised the emperor Charles VI his vote in the next imperial election, he made it a condition that the candidate must be a German: ‘not a Spaniard, not a Frenchman but a German is what we want’ he scribbled in the margin of the memorandum.49 Even his son, Frederick the Great, usually thought of as being a Francophile, made frequent appeals to German patriotism and German interests. Of course, much of that was a cynical exercise in propaganda, but even in his private correspondence, Frederick presented himself as a German: ‘I was born a German prince and my feelings for my fatherland are those of a good patriot and a good citizen’ was how he put it to the marquis de Valory.50 As his most distinguished modern biographer Theodor Schieder observed, if Frederick really was torn between two national identities, it was not between a French and a German, but between a German and a Prussian.51 In 1753 he wrote to Voltaire: ‘I am only a good German and I do not blush to express myself with the candour which is an inseparable part of our national character’.52 It was in accord with his own personal character that he should have enjoyed identifying the defects of the German national character: pedantry, lack of humour, clumsiness and prolixity –‘le mal qu'on appelle logon diarrhœa’.53 Famously – or perhaps that should be ‘infamously’– Frederick had no appreciation of contemporary German literature. In his pamphlet of 1780 Concerning German Literature; the faults of which it can be accused; the causes of the same and the means of rectifying them, he singled out for special abuse the hero of the age, Goethe, whose sensationally successful play Götz von Berlichingen he dismissed as ‘an abominable imitation of those bad English plays’ (by which he meant Shakespeare).54 Nor was he any more receptive to contemporary music. It seems that he simply had no knowledge of Mozart, although he heard enough of Haydn to feel able to dismiss his music as ‘a caterwauling that flays the ears’.55 Yet his life – 1712–86 – coincided with all or part of the careers of the following: Leibniz, Wolff, Johann Sebastian Bach, Handel, Gluck, C. P. E. Bach, Winckelmann, Kant, Klopstock, Lessing, Hamann, Haydn, Wieland, Herder, Goethe, Mozart and Schiller, just to mention the more prominent. Moreover, this quality was woven into a cultural fabric of equally impressive width, for it was just this period which witnessed ‘a reading revolution’ among the population at large in Germany.56 Was this extraordinary surge of cultural distinction because of or in spite of the political framework within which it occurred? Ranke believed that it was inseparable from the variety, pluralism, toleration, social mobility and cultural competition promoted by the Reich's polycentralism – and I agree with him.57 Only once have the Germans engaged in the centralization of authority – between 1933 and 1945 – and the cultural consequences were devastating. Rather oddly, this is one aspect of the Reich's achievement to have been neglected by German scholars seeking to rehabilitate its reputation. In his otherwise excellent general history of Germany in the eighteenth century, for example, Georg Schmidt mentions neither Haydn nor Mozart.58 It might be wondered how such a politically benign and culturally distinguished polity as the Holy Roman Empire came to decline and fall. Karl Otmar von Aretin, the doyen of historians of the Empire and who deserves a special act of homage here, explains it in terms of a clash between the old idea of Empire and the more modern concept of the sovereign state. The latter was strengthened by the growing number of German princes who ruled sovereign territories elsewhere – Brandenburg (Prussia), Hessen-Kassel and Pomerania (Sweden), Holstein and Oldenburg (Denmark), Hanover (England) and Saxony (Poland). Both the most articulate and the most successful exponent of the idea of the state was Frederick the Great, who despised the Reich and its ‘antiquated, fantastical constitution’ and dismissed its central body – the Reichstag – as ‘but a kind of phantom … The envoy which a sovereign sends thither resembles a yard-dog who bays at the moon’.59 This attitude was best expressed in October 1757 at Regensburg when the imperial notary Dr. Aprill presented himself at the residence of the Brandenburg envoy Baron Plotho with the intention of delivering the writ which announced that the king of Prussia had been outlawed and put to the ban by the Reichstag. Plotho's response was to shove the writ down Aprill's waistcoat and to call on his servants to throw the notary downstairs and into the street.60 For the king in Prussia to reject the Reich was one thing, it was quite another when the Habsburgs began to move in the same direction. As I suggested earlier, the long-reigning Emperor Leopold I (1658–1705) had done a great deal to promote the interests of the Reich. His sons Joseph I (1705–11) and Charles VI (1711–40) placed more emphasis on the dynastic interests of the house of Habsburg at the expense of the Holy Roman Empire. Symptomatic was the transfer of responsibility for diplomatic correspondence from the Imperial Chancellery to the Court Chancellery after 1705.61 Charles VI's daughter Maria Theresa proved how little she thought of the Empire when she refused to be crowned empress, referring to the ceremony as a ‘Punch and Judy show’ (‘Kasperltheater’).62 And when she saw her husband in his imperial coronation robes she burst out laughing.63 As Derek Beales has shown, her son, Joseph II, was much more radical in his rejection.64 Once his attempt to reform the imperial courts had failed, he turned back to great-power politics and a pursuit of Austrian interests even more ruthless than in the past. Indeed, by 1778 he was beginning to wonder whether he might sever his links with the Holy Roman Empire altogether, by abdication of the imperial title. In 1784 when pursuing the plan to exchange his Belgian territories for Bavaria, he held out the prospect to the Bavarian elector of becoming Holy Roman Emperor instead of him.65 Joseph made no secret of his contempt for the Empire and its members. The imperial office was ‘a ghost of an honorific power’, its business was ‘loathsome’, the imperial constitution was ‘vicious’, the princes were spineless ignoramuses, putty in the hands of their pedantic and venal ministers.66 Also eager to escape from imperial ties in pursuit of full sovereignty were many of the more powerful secular princes. In an original and revealing study of imperial semiotics published in 2008 –The Emperor's Old Clothes– Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger showed how the vitality progressively drained away from imperial ceremonial. At the Reichstag held at Worms in 1495, the Holy Roman Empire was actually present in the very real sense of the personal attendance of the emperor and the Estates and so was also able to act in a concerted manner. By 1764, when the archduke Joseph was elected and crowned as king of the Romans at Frankfurt, the symbolic representation of the Reich had been reduced to a ‘romantic spectacle’. As the magnificent painting by the imperial court painter Martin van Meytens of the coronation banquet held at the Römer shows, the emperor Francis I and his son and heir Joseph sat alone on a raised dais, but the seats at the tables below them were mostly empty, even though the places were laid and the food was served. The princes who should have occupied them had failed to appear, thus proclaiming their refusal to acknowledge any form of submission to imperial authority.67 However, I do not share the view of Aretin and Schmidt that the Holy Roman Empire was doomed. As the events surrounding the formation of the League of Princes in 1785 showed, when Joseph II turned against the Reich, the king of Prussia had not just the opportunity but the obligation to come to its defence: when the gamekeeper turned poacher, there had to be a reversal of roles. No one supposed that the patriotic rhetoric spouted by Frederick on this occasion was sincere – but what political rhetoric ever is? It was interests that counted and it was now in Prussia's interest to gather the imperial small fry in a protective embrace.68 Moreover, by this time the Holy Roman Empire had acquired another powerful prop in the shape of George III, king of England and elector of Hanover. It is well known that in 1759, shortly before coming to the throne, George had referred to Hanover as ‘that horrid Electorate which has always liv'd upon the very vitals of this poor Country’. By the seventeen-eighties, however, he was talking about ‘mein deutsches Vaterland’, was sending his sons to be educated at Göttingen and in 1783, when under intense pressure from the Fox-North coalition, even contemplated abdication of the English throne and permanent residence in Hanover.69 What preserved the Holy Roman Empire was a self-balancing mechanism involving not just the German princes but the whole European states-system. It was in the interests of all to keep the soft centre of Europe soft. The more sharp-sighted could see what might happen if the composite state became a unitary state. Travelling through the Rhineland in 1748, David Hume wrote home: ‘Germany is undoubtedly a very fine Country, full of industrious, honest People, & were it united it would be the greatest power that ever was in the world’.70 But in 1792 the French revolutionaries unleashed a war that became so destructive and so ambitious that the Holy Roman Empire was blown to kingdom come. It was a long process, beginning with the peace of Basle in 1795 and ending eleven years later when the last emperor abdicated. The great beneficiaries were the larger secular princes, notably Prussia, Bavaria, Württemberg and Baden; the losers were the ecclesiastical states, the Free Imperial Cities and the imperial knights. It was Napoleon's intention that the survivors would be large enough to be useful to France as providers of men, money and materiel, but not large enough to pose a threat to French security. In the short- and medium-term, this worked well, but the more far-sighted could see that the soft centre of Europe had just got appreciably harder and that a major step towards fulfilling David Hume's prophecy had been taken. As the events of 1813, 1815, 1870, 1914 and 1940 were to demonstrate, the great victim in the long-run was France. As own-goals go, this one belongs in the Premier League. The Holy Roman Empire did not perish unlamented. As Wolfgang Burgdorf has shown, this tenacious canard stemmed partly from a misunderstanding of the immediate circumstances of its demise and partly from the kleindeutsch polemics of nationalist historians. In reality, its passing caused intense dismay.71 But its sudden collapse after a millennium of existence does make one pause to think twice about some of the more extravagant claims made by its rehabilitators. A composite state could survive in a world of power politics, it could even survive in a world of nation-states, but alas it proved to be ‘as chaff before the wind’ (Psalms XXXV: 5) when a revolutionary secular state waged total war. Had all the German states combined, they would have proved more than a match for France, as the events of 1813–15 were to show, but they could not. That seems to me to be the rocher de bronze against which the revisionist vessel, for all its comforts and attractions, founders. One must also wonder whether the Empire could ever have succeeded in agreeing on the economic reforms necessary to unlock German potential. The Rhine is one of the world's great natural waterways. Even after the coming of the railway and the Autobahn, it is still thronged with barges. Yet under the old regime, nature's gift was spurned by human avarice. Between Basle and Rotterdam, there were no fewer than thirty-eight customs posts, administered by nineteen different authorities. The elector of the Palatinate owned seven of them, the elector of Cologne had five. So the cost of a load of 200 sacks of salt was 400 talers in Cologne but had risen to 712 talers by the time it reached Frankfurt am Main, with customs dues accounting for three-quarters of the increase. Nor does that take into account the amount of time wasted by being forced to stop every few kilometres for a load to be inspected, valued and taxed.72 This situation was not peculiar to western Germany: there were thirty-five customs posts on the Elbe between Pirna and Hamburg.73 Given the fragmentation of authority in the Holy Roman Empire and the tenacity of political and confessional rivalry, there was little if any prospect of a customs union. These were the two great failures of the Holy Roman Empire – defence and economics – and they need to be set against its two great areas of achievement – law and culture. Germany's troubled history since 1806 demonstrated just how difficult it can be to regain legitimacy and consensus once the roots of a polity have been torn up. It might be thought that it has succeeded best when restoring lines of continuity with the Holy Roman Empire by not seeking unity at the expense of diversity, particularism and pluralism. The extensive powers devolved to the Länder– the sixteen states that make up the Federal Republic, especially in educational and cultural matters, hark back to the imperial past. Both Georg Schmidt and Johannes Burkhardt – among others – have advanced the claims of the Holy Roman Empire as the true progenitor of the Federal Republic.74 Here is Burkhardt: ‘I can state unequivocally that the Old Reich was the true predecessor of the Federal Republic of Germany’.75 The same point has been well put by Norman Stone, with characteristic vigour, in his recent history of the Cold War when he wrote that Germany after 1947 had been ‘an extraordinary success story’, adding ‘This time it [has been] a Germany minus Prussia and Austria. It was a return to the old Holy Roman Empire, to a Germany where true civilisation existed on a very local level, that of the prince-bishopric’.76 I agree with that, but with one modification, with which I shall bring this lecture to a conclusion. It is this: the Federal Republic, hitherto at least, has succeeded in combining liberty and the rule of law with economic prosperity. Most Germans, I think, would agree that it has not yet added to the mix a measure of cultural excellence that bears comparison with the age of Goethe, Beethoven and Kant. In the pamphlet on German literature to which I referred earlier, Frederick the Great wrote that he served as the herald of the halcyon days of German culture, although his advanced age robbed him of the hope of seeing them himself, adding: ‘I am like Moses, I see the promised land from afar, but shall not enter it myself’.77 Perhaps, like him, I am too set in my ways to appreciate that a new Schiller and a new Mozart are already among us. I do hope so. Footnotes * This article is a revised version of the Creighton Lecture 2010. 1 A. J. P. Taylor, The Course of German History: a Survey of the Development of German History since 1815 (1945), p. 15. 2 G. Barraclough, The Origins of Modern Germany (2nd edn., Oxford, 1947), pp. 395–7, 405. 3 C. B. A. Behrens, The Ancien Régime (1967); C. B. A. Behrens, Society, Government and the Enlightenment: the Experiences of 18th Century France and Prussia (1985). 4 C. B. A. Behrens, ‘Enlightened despotism’ , Historical Jour. , xviii ( 1975 ), 401 – 8 Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Close . 5 E. N. Williams, The Ancien Régime in Europe: Government and Society in the Major States, 1648–1789 (1970), p. 367. 6 R. J. W. Evans, The Making of the Habsburg Monarchy 1550–1700: an Interpretation (Oxford, 1979); Rudolf II and his World: a Study in Intellectual History, 1576–1612 (Oxford, 1973). 7 J. Burkhardt, ‘Das größte Friedenswerk der Neuzeit. Der Westfälische Friede in neuer Perspektive’ , Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht , xlix ( 1998 ), 592 – 612 , at p. 598 Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Close ; J. Burkhardt, ‘Vorparlamentarische Formen im Heiligen Römischen Reich’, in Das Heilige Römische Reich und sein Ende 1806, ed. P. C. Hartmann and F. Schullers (Regensburg, 2006), pp. 23–37. 8 Burkhardt, ‘Das größte Friedenswerk der Neuzeit’, p. 600. 9 K. Härter, ‘The permanent Imperial Diet in European context, 1663–1806’, in The Holy Roman Empire 1495–1806, ed. R. J. W. Evans, M. Schaich and P. H. Wilson (Oxford, 2011). 10 K. Härter, Reichstag und Revolution 1789–1806: die Auseinandersetzung des immerwährenden Reichstags zu Regensburg mit den Auswirkungen der Französischen Revolution auf das alte Reich (Schriftenreihe der Historischen Kommission bei der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, xlvi, Göttingen, 1992), p. 23. 11 A. Gestrich, Absolutismus und Öffentlichkeit: Politische Kommunikation in Deutschland zu Beginn des 18. Jahrhunderts (Göttingen, 1994), pp. 96–8. 12 F. L. Carsten, Princes and Parliaments in Germany from the 15th to the 18th Century (Oxford, 1959), p. 5. 13 G. Schmidt, Geschichte des Alten Reichs. Staat und Nation in der Frühen Neuzeit 1495–1806 (Munich, 1999), p. 185. 14 W. Heun, ‘Das Reich in Reichspublizistik’, in Heiliges Römisches Reich Deutscher Nation 962 bis 1806: Altes Reich und neue Staaten 1495 bis 1806. Essays, ed. H. Schilling, W. Heun and J. Götzmann (Dresden, 2006), pp. 93–103, at p. 100. 15 See, e.g., F. Braudel, The Identity of France, i: History and Environment (New York, 1988), which makes France seem more like the Habsburg monarchy. 16 The case for the Reichskreise is made powerfully in W. Dotzauer, Die deutschen Reichskreise in der Verfassung des alten Reiches und ihr Eigenleben (1500–1806) (Darmstadt, 1989); see also B. Stollberg-Rilinger, Das Heilige Römische Reich Deutscher Nation vom Ende des Mittelalters bis 1806 (Munich, 2006), p. 49. 17 K. O. von Aretin, Heiliges Römisches Reich, 1776–1806 (2 vols., Wiesbaden, 1967), i. 70–6; G. Schmidt, ‘Das frühneuzeitliche Reich – komplementärer Staat und föderative Nation’ , Historische Zeitschrift , cclxxiii ( 2001 ), 377 – 99 , at p. 384 Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Close . 18 P. H. Wilson, The Holy Roman Empire 1495–1806 (2nd edn., forthcoming). 19 K. O. von Aretin, Das Alte Reich 1648–1806, iii: Das Reich und der österreichisch-preußische Dualismus (1745–1806) (Stuttgart, 1997), p. 98. 20 Burkhardt, ‘Das größte Friedenswerk der Neuzeit’, p. 601. 21 Wilson, The Holy Roman Empire 1495–1806. 22 S. Westphal, ‘Does the Holy Roman Empire need a new institutional history?’, in Evans, Schaich and Wilson, p. 79. 23 L. Auer, ‘The role of the Imperial Aulic council in the constitutional structure of the Holy Roman Empire’, in Evans, Schaich and Wilson, p. 74. 24 Aretin, Heiliges Römisches Reich, i. 31; Carsten, pp. 142–8. 25 W. Schulze, ‘Das Reich und der gemeine Mann’, in Schilling, Heun and Götzmann, pp. 69–79, at p. 78. 26 For a discussion of the importance of Tacitus' text, see C. Hirschi, The Origins of Nationalism: an Alternative History from Ancient Rome to Early Modern Germany (Cambridge, forthcoming 2012). I am grateful to Dr. Hirschi for allowing me to read this very important work in typescript. 27 G. Schmidt, ‘The Old Reich: the state and nation of the Germans’, in Evans, Schaich and Wilson, p. 53. 28 Quoted in G. Schmidt, Wandel durch Vernunft. Deutsche Geschichte im 18. Jahrhundert (Munich, 2009), p. 82. 29 L. Krieger, The German Idea of Freedom: History of a Political Tradition (Cambridge, Mass., 1957), p. 6. 30 Schmidt, Wandel durch Vernunft, pp. 80–2. 31 Burkhardt, ‘Das größte Friedenswerk der Neuzeit’, pp. 600–1; see also his reply to his critics, ‘Über das Recht der Frühen Neuzeit, politisch interessant zu sein’ , Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft , xlvii ( 1999 ), 748 – 56 OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCatClose . 32 M. Wrede, Das Reich und seine Feinde. Politische Feindbilder in der reichspatriotischen Publizistik zwischen westfälischem Frieden und Siebenjährigem Krieg (Mainz, 2004), p. 456. 33 Quoted in Wrede, p. 457. 34 Schmidt, Geschichte des Alten Reichs, p. 242. On the centrality of the concept of liberty to the political discourse of the Reich, see also W. Burgdorf, Reichskonstitution und Nation. Verfassungsreformprojekte für das Heilige Römische Reich Deutscher Nation im politischen Schrifttum von 1648 bis 1806 (Mainz, 1998), esp. pp. 289–92. 35 Quoted in Schmidt, Wandel der Vernunft, p. 94. 36 Quoted in H. Kiesel and P. Münch, Gesellschaft und Literatur im 18. Jahrhundert: Voraussetzungen und Entstehung des literarischen Markts in Deutschland (Munich, 1977), p. 118. 37 Wrede, p. 334. 38 Schmidt, Geschichte des Alten Reichs, p. 219. 39 Wrede, p. 354. 40 Wrede, p. 349. 41 Wrede, p. 355. 42 Wrede, pp. 368–74. 43 Wrede, p. 456. 44 J. Moore, A View of Society and Manners in France, Switzerland and Germany (2 vols., 4th edn., Dublin, 1789), i. 273. The first edition was published in 1779. 45 T. C. W. Blanning, The French Revolution in Germany: Occupation and Resistance in the Rhineland 1792–1802 (Oxford, 1983), pp. 247–53. 46 N. Malcolm, ‘My country, old or young?’, Sunday Telegraph, 30 Nov. 1997, p. 13 (this a review of A. Hastings, The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism (Cambridge, 1997)). 47 Quoted in Schmidt, ‘The Old Reich’, p. 36. 48 Schmidt, Geschichte des Alten Reichs, p. 218. 49 Schmidt, Wandel durch Vernunft, p. 132. 50 Politische Correspondenz Friedrichs des Großen, ii: 1742–3 (Berlin, 1879), p. 280, no. 998, to the marquis de Valory, French envoy to Berlin, Potsdam, 21 Oct. 1742. 51 T. Schieder, ‘Friedrich der Große – eine Integrationsfigur des deutschen Nationalbewußtseins im 18. Jahrhundert?’, in Nationalismus in vorindustrieller Zeit, ed. O. Dann (Munich, 1986), pp. 113–27, at p. 115. 52 Briefwechsel Friedrichs des Großen mit Voltaire, ed. R. Koser and H. Droysen (3 vols., Publikationen aus den K. Preußischen Staatsarchiven, lxxxi, lxxxii, lxxxvi, Leipzig, 1908–9, 1911), ii. 3. 53 A. von Harnack, Geschichte der königlich preußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin (3 vols. in 4, Berlin, 1900), i, pt. 1, p. 388. I have discussed this in ‘Frederick the Great and German culture’, in Royal and Republican Sovereignty in Early Modern Europe: Essays in Honour of Ragnhild Hatton's 80th Birthday, ed. G. C. Gibbs, R. Oresko and H. Scott (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 527 –50. 54 There is a good German edition in Friedrich II., König von Preußen und die deutsche Literatur des 18. Jahrhunderts. Texte und Documente, ed. H. Steinmetz (Stuttgart, 1985), which also includes much other relevant contemporary material, here pp. 81–2. 55 E. E. Helm, Music at the Court of Frederick the Great (Norman, 1960), p. 71. 56 T. C. W. Blanning, The Culture of Power and the Power of Culture: Old Regime Europe 1660–1789 (Oxford, 2002), pp. 132–5. 57 Leopold von Ranke, Die deutschen Mächte und der Fürstenbund (2 vols., Leipzig, 1871–2), i. 100. 58 Schmidt, Wandel durch Vernunft, passim. 59 Friedrich der Grosse, ed. O. Bardong (Darmstadt, 1982), p. 227; Frederick the Great, The History of my own Times: Posthumous Works of Frederic II King of Prussia, i (1789), p. 48. 60 The fullest account is to be found in Thomas Carlyle, History of Friedrich II of Prussia Called Frederick the Great (6 vols., 1865), v. 184–6. 61 Carlyle, v. 200. 62 K. O. von Aretin, ‘The Old Reich: a federation or a hierarchical system?’, in Evans, Schaich and Wilson, p. 36. 63 Aretin, Das Alte Reich, iii. 25–6. 64 D. Beales, Joseph II, i: in the Shadow of Maria Theresa, 1741–80 (Cambridge, 1987), p. 133; D. Beales, Joseph II, ii: against the World, 1780–90 (Cambridge, 2009), ch. 12. 65 Aretin, Heiliges Römisches Reich, i. 13. 66 T. C. W. Blanning, Joseph II (1994), p. 148. 67 B. Stollberg-Rilinger, Des Kaisers alte Kleider. Verfassungsgeschichte und Symbolsprache des Alten Reiches (Munich, 2008), pp. 236–46. See also her paper ‘On the function of rituals in the Holy Roman Empire’, in Evans, Schaich and Wilson, pp. 359–73. 68 Aretin, Das Alte Reich, iii. 207–8, 314–15. 69 T. C. W. Blanning, ‘“That horrid electorate” or “Ma patrie germanique”? George III, Hanover and the Fürstenbund of 1785’ , Historical Jour. , xx ( 1977 ), 311 – 44 , at p. 338 Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Close . 70 The Letters of David Hume, ed. J. Y. T. Greig (Oxford, 1932), p. 126. 71 W. Burgdorf, ‘Wendepunkt deutscher Geschichte: Das Reichsende 1806 und seine Wahrnehmung durch Zeitgenossen’, in Schilling, Heun and Götzmann, pp. 17–30. 72 T. C. W. Blanning, Reform and Revolution in Mainz 1743–1803 (Cambridge, 1974), p. 71. 73 P. Kriedtke, ‘Trade’, in Germany. A New Social and Economic History, ii: 1630–1800, ed. S. Ogilvie (1996), p. 104. 74 Schmidt, ‘The Old Reich’, p. 62; Burkhardt, ‘Über das Recht der Frühen Neuzeit’, p. 753. 75 Burkhardt, ‘Vorparlamtarische Formen im Heiligen Römischen Reich’, p. 23. 76 N. Stone, The Atlantic and its Enemies: a Personal History of the Cold War (2010), p. 338. 77 Steinmetz, p. 129. Copyright © 2011 Institute of Historical Research This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model) Copyright © 2011 Institute of Historical Research
TI - The Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation past and present
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DO - 10.1111/j.1468-2281.2011.00579.x
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