A History of Germany 1715-1815

C.T Atkinson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429868313
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Published in 1908, this book documents the history of Germany between 1715 and 1815. The book explores international relations, conflicts, growth and cultural change in Germany in the space of 100 years.

Chapter I
Germany in 1715—The Empire and Its Institutions

A HISTORY OF GERMANY 1715—1815

THE practice of dividing history into more or less conventional " periods" is always somewhat arbitrary and unsatisfactory, and at first sight there hardly seems much justification for treating the year 1715 as an important turning-point in the history of Germany. If one is seeking for an end, for a point at which some long struggle has been decided, some doubtful question settled, one would select 1648 rather than 1715, the Peace of Westphalia rather than those of Utrecht, Rastatt and Baden. If, on the other hand, a starting-point is sought, the unloosing of some hitherto unsuspected force, the appearance of a new set of actors, the opening of some great question, 1740 and the attack of Frederick II of Prussia on Silesia would seem to possess a far stronger claim. But the conditions which existed in 1740 and the forces which were then let loose did not spring into being in a moment; they were the fruit of years of development, and to appreciate them one must go back at any rate to the Peace of Utrecht. Similarly, great as were the changes summed up at the Peace of Westphalia, when one looks at it as a landmark in the history of the Holy Roman Empire and of that German Kingdom which, to its own undoing, was associated with the heritage of Charlemagne, it may be argued with some plausibility that the true failure of the Hapsburgs to make real their position as titular heads of Germany came with the premature death of Joseph I (1711). Germany from 1648 to 1815 was little more than a geographical expression, its history, such as it is, is a history of disunion and disintegration; but between 1648 and 1715 it does possess a small degree of unity, and that is given it by the persistent attempts of France to profit by the weakness and divisions of her Eastern neighbour, and by the efforts of the Hapsburgs to unite the German Kingdom in opposition to the aggressions of Mazarin and Louis XIV. The Spanish Succession War, fought out largely on German soil and by German troops, had a very important bearing on the fortunes of Germany, and at one time it seemed that one result of it might be a great increase in the Imperial authority and prestige, and as if the practical independence of the territorial princes, established at the Peace of Westphalia, might be substantially reduced. But this was not to be, and as far as the constitutional condition of Germany was concerned, the Treaties of Utrecht, Rastatt and Baden, instead of undoing the work of 1648, confirmed it, and left the German Kingdom an empty form, a name with no real substance behind it.

Thus the condition in which the year 1715 found Germany differed in degree rather than in kind from that in which the Thirty Years' War had left her in 1648. The great movement of the Reformation had been fatal to the Holy Roman Empire: it had swept away the last relics of its pretensions to universal dominion by emphasising the national character of most of the states of Western Europe, and by introducing between them differences in religion which were of more than merely religious importance. The Thirty Years' War had done a like office for the German Kingdom: it had completed the ruin of the Emperor's authority over the lands which were still nominally subject to him. The forms of the old constitution, the Imperial title, the nominal existence of the Empire were to endure for another one hundred and fifty-eight years, but the settlement of 1648 amounted in all save the name to the substitution of a loosely-knit confederacy for the potential national state which had till then existed in the shape of the Empire. Not that the settlement of 1648 was the sole cause of this change, even the long and terrible war to which it put an end could not by itself have effected so great an alteration had it not been the last in a long chain of causes whose work was now recognised and admitted. At the Peace of Westphalia the Hapsburgs acknowledged principles which struck at the roots of the authority of the Emperor, they accepted because they had failed led to prevent the results of the disintegrating tendencies which had been at work for so long. The practical independence of the Princes of the Empire was no new thing, but it now received formal recognition; the principle cujus regio, ejus religio, now reaffirmed, had been the basis of the Peace of Augsburg. It was all the more strongly re-established because, in the meantime, the Hapsburgs had led the crusade of the Counter-Reformation, and were now forced to leave in Protestant hands many secularised bishoprics as the token of the failure of their great endeavour.

Even before the Reformation the authority of the Emperor over the German Kingdom had been weak and uncertain, though Maximilian I had done much to assert it and had attempted more, while the possibility of converting the German feudal monarchy into a strong national sovereignty like those of England and France was still present. The process of disintegration had, it is true, gone much further in Germany than elsewhere, and localism was stronger and the central institutions were weaker than in France and England, What the Reformation did was that it introduced into Germany a new principle which served to complicate the contest between the spasmodic attempts of the Emperors at a centralising policy, and the disintegrating tendencies of which the Princes were the champions. The already existing aspirations to local independence received the powerful reinforcement of the new spirit of resistance which the revolt from Rome engendered. Seeing how strong the traditions of close relations between the Pope and the Emperor were, and how Intimately the idea of the Empire was bound up with the idea of the Universal Church, it was only natural that resistance to the spiritual authority of the Pope should encourage resistance to the temporal authority of the Emperor. Moreover, when Germany was being divided into two antagonistic camps, the Catholic and the Protestant, it was impossible from the nature of the quarrel that the Emperor should be neutral. He could not be the impartial head of the whole nation, he must take one side or the other. It was with a crisis of the most momentous importance for Germany that Charles v was confronted in 1519 when he was required to make up his mind between Rome and Luther. Had he declared for Protestantism, and placed himself at the head of a national movement against the Papacy, it is possible that the sixteenth century might have seen Germany really united. If the Emperor could have obtained control of the vast territories of the Church, he would have acquired the revenues and resources so badly needed to make the forms of the central government an efficient reality. But such a course must have brought him into collision, not only with all those who clung to the old faith and the old connection, but also with those Princes who adopted Protestantism, partly because they found in it a principle by which to defend their resistance to the Imperial authority; they would not have been so enthusiastic in their support of Protestantism had the Emperor been of that persuasion. Prelates and lay Princes alike would have struggled hard to hinder so great an increase in the Imperial resources and so great a change in the relative positions of the Emperor and his subjects, as that which would have been involved in his annexation of the ecclesiastical territories. As things actually went, the Emperor's continued adhesion to Roman Catholicism gave the Protestant champions of local independence a permanent bond of union in their religion. At the same time, even the Princes of the Emperor's own religion could not but be favourably disposed—as Princes —towards resistance to the Imperial authority and efforts to limit the Emperor's powers.

The Peace of Augsburg (1555) was of the nature of a truce rather than a settlement. The evenly-balanced contending forces agreed to a compromise which actually secured to Germany over sixty years of religious peace of a kind, but it was absolutely lacking in the elements of finality. The omission of any regulations for the position of the Calvinists, the failure to enforce any accepted rule as to new secularisations, were bound, sooner or later, to lead to a new conflict: it is only remarkable that the outbreak was so long delayed. Meanwhile the acknowledgment of the principle cujus regio, ejus religio was a fatal blow to the Imperial authority and the first great breach in the outward unity of the Empire.

The circumstances under which the great struggle between the rival creeds finally broke out were such as to make it even more impossible for the Emperor to adopt a neutral attitude. The local troubles in Bohemia which culminated in the famous "Defenestratio" of 1618 were only the match that fired the train, since for some time the Calvinists of Germany had been contemplating a war in defence of their religion. By adopting the Bohemian cause the Elector Palatine and his supporters brought themselves into a double collision with Ferdinand of Austria. By breaking the peace of the Empire they set at naught his authority as Emperor; but he was also King of Bohemia, and by assisting his revolted subjects the Calvinists assailed him as territorial ruler and as head of the Hapsburg house. Thus the Emperor could not interfere disinterestedly: he could not suppress the Calvinist disturbers of the peace without using the Imperial authority, such as it was, on behalf of his own dynastic territorial interests. Not merely was impartiality impossible, he was the leader of one of the contending parties. Much in the same way, by accepting the Bohemian Crown the Elector Palatine made it impossible for himself and his party to disassociate their defence of oppressed co-religionists from their own selfish interests and ambitions. Thus on the one side the cause of order and of unity became identified with intolerance and oppression, on the other anarchy and violence seemed to be the natural corollary to religious freedom. In this dilemma there were but two alternative possibilities. Either the Emperor would succeed in suppressing Protestantism both as a religious and as a political factor, and would thereby vindicate his authority, or by his failure in this attempt he would leave Germany divided between two hostile factions, one of which must always look upon the decadence of the Imperial constitution as the surest safeguard of its own existence.

In 1648 the Peace of Westphalia announced to the world that after thirty years of a most terrible and devastating war both combatants had failed, and had been obliged to assent to a compromise. That the Hapsburgs had failed, was proclaimed by their assenting to such a Peace. To their failure many causes had contributed; their want of material resources, Ferdinand Ii's incapacity and lack of statesmanship, the lukewarmness of those Catholic Princes whose political aims would not have been served by the complete success of the Catholic cause if championed by the Emperor, but more especially the intervention of foreign powers who had good reasons of their own for dreading the establishment of Hapsburg supremacy over Germany. Yet such a result had at one time seemed probable, for Frederick's headlong folly had given the Emperor a chance a statesman would not have missed. But Ferdinand had misused his victory at Prague: he had endeavoured to do to Frederick what Frederick had failed to do to him, he had then driven the Lutherans into taking up arms by his efforts to reverse the compromise on which the territorial distribution of Germany rested: he had parted with Wallenstein at the bidding of the Catholic League when that general seemed to have Protestant Germany at his mercy. Had the Emperor believed in the honesty of Wallenstein, or in the wisdom and justice of the toleration advocated by that mysterious adventurer, sufficiently to stand by him, it is possible that his confidence might have been rewarded by success; but Wallenstein's record was not one to inspire confidence, and toleration was a policy not only in advance of the age but quite opposed to the traditions of the Empire and of the Hapsburg dynasty. Thus though the Peace left Bohemia and its dependencies in the Emperor's keeping, it left the Empire hopelessly and irretrievably disunited. As the next seventy years were to show, not even common dangers of the most formidable kind could weld Germany together effectively. The acknowledgment of the rights of the heretic minority in the Empire was in absolute conflict with the theory of Church and State on which the Empire was based; the concessions which the Princes had extorted reduced the Emperor's authority over them to a mere form, and made the name of Kingdom a complete anachronism when applied to Germany. But signally as the Hapsburgs had failed, their opponents could hardly claim to have been much more successful. The Imperial supremacy which Frederick V and the Calvinist Union had sought to destroy still existed, even if it was a mere shadow of what Ferdinand had hoped to make it. The Protestants, Calvinists and Lutherans alike, had succeeded in freeing themselves from the jurisdiction of the Pope, in wringing from the Catholic majority in the Diet a recognition of their right to freedom of worship in their own lands, and in defending their possession of those ecclesiastical territories which the Edict of Restitution had endeavoured to wrest from them. But they had not managed to obtain the rich and coveted abbeys and bishoprics of the South: indeed, on the whole they had lost ground. Bohemia and its dependencies had passed from them, and the skilful propagandism of the Jesuits was rapidly extirpating Protestantism from its former strongholds there. The adoption of January ist, 1624, as the date by which the possession of disputed territories was to be determined on the whole favoured the Catholics, to whom it left a majority of the bishoprics. Moreover, the religious freedom thus won by the sword—and in no small measure by the swords of the Swede and the Frenchman—could only be retained by the sword. It was indissolubly connected with local independence and Imperial impotence; in other words, the disunion of Germany was its only guarantee. Identified as the Hapsburgs were with Rome, with intolerance, with the forcible promulgation of Catholicism, German Protestantism could not but look upon the Imperial institutions as hostile to its rights and could hardly do otherwise than seek to prevent anything which promised to restore their vitality. Loyalty to the Empire seemed to the majority of German Protestants incompatible with the safety of their religion.

The collapse of the old constitution not unnaturally occupied the minds of the pamphleteers and publicists of the day, and many were the schemes for reconstruction and reform put forward in the second half of the seventeenth century. Among the most important and interesting of these is the Dissertatio de ratione status in Imperio nostro Romano Germanico, written by Philip Boguslaw Chemnitz, a Pomeranian jurist of some repute, and published under the pseudonym of Hippolytus a Lapide. The treatise sets out an ideal which was never realised, and was based on a theory which was neither sound historically nor accurate as a statement of the existing facts, the assumption that neither the Emperor nor the Electors, but the whole Diet was the sovereign body. This may be accounted for by the fact that Chemnitz was actuated throughout by an intense hostility to the Hapsburgs. When he looks at them the sight of the sack of Magdeburg rises before his eyes, and the Edict of Restitution is for him the type of their acts and aims.

Chemnitz was not the first writer to find salvation for Germany in the decrease of the Imperial authority and in the increase of the powers of the Princes, but he may be taken as the best example of those who hold that view. He regarded the Emperor as the representative of an aristocratic republic, the sovereignty of which resided rather in the assembled Estates than in the Emperor. To him the Emperor was little more than the nominal head, the minister of the Estates, not their superior. Thus it is by the Diet, not by the Emperor, that the decision as to peace or war must be taken, to the Kammergericht¹ rather than to the Reichshofrath² that the final jurisdiction belongs. Throughout Chemnitz assails the Hapsburgs in unsparing terms; their pretensions are the principal danger to Germany, their power must be diminished, their Imperial authority curtailed and restricted in every possible way. "Delenda est Austria" is his panacea for the ills of Germany and the burden of every page of his pamphlet.

Rather different was the account given by Pufendorf, who, writing under the name of Severin de Monzambano, a fictitious Italian traveller who had made the tour of Germany, compared the Holy Roman Empire to the league of the Greeks against Troy, and pronounced it neither monarchy, aristocracy, nor democracy, but an anomalous blend of all three, " a half-way house between a kingdom and a confederation," which the Emperor was striving to make more like a kingdom, the Princes to make more of a confederation. The Princes, he pointed out, though nominally in vassalage to the Emperor from whom they held their fiefs, enjoyed a practical independence, having all sovereign rights in their own territories. Indeed one thing only prevented Germany from being as absolutely disunited as Italy: the possessions of the Austrian Hapsburgs formed a connected state which alone gave Germany some approach to unity by being able and willing to maintain the forms and institutions of the Empire.

Pufendorfs treatise provoked a reply from no less eminent a man than the philosopher Leibnitz, who in his Contra Severinum de Monzambano dealt mainly with the need for unity against the enemies of Germany. He dwelt on the defencelessness of the Empire, the utter absence of military organisation, the need for a standing army and of proper provision for its support. But he had also to point out how slight were the chances that any permanent organisation would be established. To some Princes the present situation offered a good prospect of profiting by the troubles of their neighbours, others for religious reasons entertained suspicions of the use that might be made of a standing army, others again feared that it might be employed by the greater powers to su...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Original Title
• Preface
• Contents
• CHAPTER I GERMANY IN 1715—THE EMPIRE AND ITS INSTITUTIONS
• CHAPTER II THE GERMAN STATES IN 1715
• CHAPTER III THE END OF THE NORTHERN WAR
• CHAPTER IV PASSAROWITZ, SICILY AND THE PRAGMATIC SANCTION
• CHAPTER V PRUSSIA UNDER FREDERICK WILLIAM I
• CHAPTER VI THE LAST WARS OF CHARLES VI
• CHAPTER VII MARIA THERESA AND HER ENEMIES
• CHAPTER IX THE AUSTRIAN SUCCESSION WAR—TO THE PEACE OF AIX-LA-CHAPELLE
• CHAPTER X MARIA THERESA'S REFORMS AND THE DIPLOMATIC REVOLUTION
• CHAPTER XI THE SEVEN YEARS' WAR: CAMPAIGNS OF 1756 AND 1757
• CHAPTER XII THE SEVEN YEARS' WAR (continued): 1758 AND 1759
• CHAPTER XIII THE SEVEN YEARS' WAR (concluded)
• CHAPTER XIV AUSTRIA AND PRUSSIA AFTER THE WAR. THE PARTITION OF POLAND
• CHAPTER XVI MARIA THERESA AND JOSEPH II—DOMESTIC AFFAIRS
• CHAPTER XVII LEOPOLD II AND THE EASTERN QUESTION
• CHAPTER XVIII GERMANY AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
• CHAPTER XX FROM BASEL TO CAMPO FORMIO
• CHAPTER XXI RASTATT AND THE SECOND COALITION
• CHAPTER XXII MARENGO, HOHENLINDEN AND LUNÉVILLE
• CHAPTER XXIV THE CAUSES OF THE THIRD COALITION
• CHAPTER XXV ULM AND AUSTERLITZ
• CHAPTER XXVI THE CONFEDERATON OF THE RHINE AND THE OVERTHROW OF PRUSSIA
• CHAPTER XXVII FRIEDLAND, TILSIT AND ERFURT
• CHAPTER XXVIII AUSTRIA'S EFFORT TO OVERTHROW NAPOLEON
• CHAPTER XXIX GERMANY AT NAPOLEON'S MERCY
• CHAPTER XXX THE WAR OF LIBERATION: TILL THE ARMISTICE
• CHAPTER XXXII THE WAR OF LIBERATION (continued)—LEIPZIG AND HANAU
• CHAPTER XXXIII 1814 AND THE TREATY OF PARIS
• CHAPTER XXXIV THE CONGRESS OF VIENNA
• GENEALOGICAL TABLES—
• INDEX
• Mollwitz, Chotusitz and Sohr
• Prague, Kolin, Rossbach, Breslau and Leuthen
• Minden, Kunersdorf and Torgau
• Marengo and Hohenlinden
• Austerlitz and Jena
• The Danube Valley
• Germany in 1811
• Lützen and Bautzen
• Dresden
• Katzbach and Dennewitz
• South-Western States in 1815}
• Ligny and Prussian gains in 1815