I. A Map That Cannot Lie
On October 17, 1797, the day after he smashed Ludwig von Cobenzl's porcelain cabaret on the parquet floor at Campo Formio — a gift from Catherine the Great, hurled in fury when the Austrian diplomat equivocated once too often — Napoléon Bonaparte had effectively broken the Holy Roman Empire. He did not dissolve it yet. That would take nine more years. But the Treaty of Campo Formio, which ceded the left bank of the Rhine to France and called for a Congress at Rastatt to negotiate compensation for dispossessed German princes, announced to everyone paying attention that the Empire's fate was no longer in its own hands.
I have spent years with the men who gathered at Rastatt in the months that followed — the five hundred diplomats, jurists, pamphleteers, and princes who argued furiously in a baroque palace in Baden about secularization, mediatization, and the future of Central Europe. What struck me then, working through the Austrian state archives and the pamphlet literature of 1797-1799, was not how revolutionary these debates were. It was how bounded they remained. Even as the Empire faced dismemberment and ideological assault from without, and betrayal by its own princes from within, almost no one at Rastatt could imagine a political future that genuinely escaped the inherited categories of hierarchy, corporate privilege, and law. The average German, as Joseph Görres put it at the time, was a brave but confused man, conflicted between "his old prejudices" and "new, refined concepts" — exhausted by war, alarmed by priests and petty despots, instinctively blinking at a freedom he could not quite bring himself to embrace. Some of my work on the topic can be found here and here.
This map is an attempt to render that confusion visible. It depicts the Empire at 1789: the moment of maximum tension between the world the Empire actually was and the world the Enlightenment was insisting it become. It is a portrait of a political organism that had outlasted every prediction of its death — and was approaching the moment when it finally could not.
II. The Historiographical Stakes
I want to be direct about where this map stands in relation to existing scholarship, because the Holy Roman Empire is a subject that attracts strong interpretive positions and the map makes an argument by the choices embedded in its visual grammar.
The older view of the Empire — dominant until the 1960s and still lingering in popular imagination — cast it as a failed state: a botched monarchy, an embarrassment of political impotence, the thing Voltaire meant when he observed it was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire. Concomitant with that picture was a Sonderweg narrative of German history in which the Empire's anachronism explained Germany's eventual deviation from the Western liberal path. Karl Otmar von Aretin's revisionist work began to complicate this, and more recently Joachim Whaley has pushed the counter-reading furthest: in his telling, the Reich was a functioning limited monarchy that cultivated genuine and widespread patriotic sentiment, and its destruction was far from inevitable even by 1797. Georg Schmidt goes further still, arguing for the Empire as a coherent, pre-modern "complementary imperial state" — a federative structure that nurtured a genuine German national identity.
This map does not share Schmidt's optimism, nor does it fully endorse Whaley's. It aligns instead with Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger and Peter Wilson, who occupy a more sober middle ground. Stollberg-Rilinger has demonstrated brilliantly that the Empire's symbolic and ceremonial structures remained deeply meaningful to its inhabitants — including the Prussians, whose cynicism about the Reich was more tactical than sincere — right up to the end. Yet she concludes that the Empire "ultimately fell victim to its inability to reform itself": its obsessive attachment to status and hierarchy prevented the reorganization that survival required. Wilson agrees. The Empire had to remain hierarchical to sustain the web of corporate rights and privileges on which its entire constitutional edifice rested. That same hierarchy, however, made it structurally incapable of addressing the challenges the eighteenth century kept presenting.
The map is an attempt to make that structural incapacity legible. Not to condemn the Empire, and not to rehabilitate it. To take it seriously on its own terms — which means confronting both its genuine achievements and the contradictions that consumed it.
III. A Juridical Order, Not a State
At first glance, the map appears dense, fragmented, even chaotic. That is intentional, and it is the map's central argument.
The Holy Roman Empire was not a territorial state, and to depict it as one would be to falsify its nature fundamentally. It was a juridical order — a framework of rights, privileges, and obligations layered atop geography rather than derived from it. The philosopher and statesman Samuel von Pufendorf, writing in the seventeenth century under the pseudonym Severinus de Monzambano, called the Empire a "monster": irregulare aliquod corpus et monstro simile. The insult stuck, and contemporaries never quite stopped arguing about whether it was accurate. What they largely agreed on was that the Empire defied the categories available to describe it.
The visual grammar of the map reflects this reality. Borders intersect. Colors overlap. Allegiances are implied rather than asserted. What emerges is not a clean political unit but a palimpsest of sovereignty — layer upon layer of jurisdictional claims, historical accidents, and legal fictions that had accumulated over centuries and that no reform program had ever successfully rationalized.
The color scheme serves as the primary guide to this complexity. Territories held by the great dynastic houses — the Habsburgs, the Hohenzollerns, the Wittelsbachs — are distinguished chromatically to emphasize a fundamental feature of the late Empire: its internal equilibrium rested increasingly on powers whose ambitions extended far beyond the Reich's boundaries. Austria and Prussia were imperial Estates, yes — formally subordinate to imperial law and obligated to its structures — but they were also European great powers, and the tension between those roles destabilized the system from within. On the map their lands appear only partially enclosed by imperial boundaries, a deliberate reminder that neither dynasty could be fully contained by the constitutional order it formally upheld. Prussia's willingness to sign a separate peace with France at Basel in 1795, accepting the principle of secularization as legitimate compensation — effectively selling out the Empire's weaker members for its own strategic advantage — was not a betrayal that surprised anyone who understood the dynamics the map is trying to show.
This map from 1800 was produced in Paris and depicts the Circles (“Kreise”) of the Holy Roman Empire. When Germans created maps of the Empire, they too usually depicted it in such a manner.
IV. The Empire's Weaker Members, and Why They Mattered
The categories representing the Empire's smaller constituents are where the map becomes most historically charged, and where I want to spend some time.
Imperial Cities (Reichsstädte) appear as isolated points of autonomy: legally immediate to the Emperor, geographically exposed, economically declining in many cases, but possessed of a fierce consciousness of their historical rights. At Rastatt, the Swabian Imperial Cities produced a remarkable collective memorandum for the French plenipotentiaries in which they indignantly denied rumors that their inhabitants preferred princely rule to their current constitution. Malevolent actors, they wrote, had "filled the gazettes and daily newspapers" with false reports that the cities' own citizens would welcome mediatization. The delegation confirmed, on the contrary, the "ardent wish of all Swabian Imperial Cities to retain their position as immediate subjects, in which they have been happy for centuries." Whether that happiness was real or strategic is an interesting question. What is beyond dispute is that they knew how to speak the language of enlightened governance — invoking trade, industriousness, freedom of the press, and protection against "arbitrary power" — while defending structures that were, in practice, frequently oligarchic and resistant to reform.
The ecclesiastical territories (Geistliche Gebiete) — bishoprics, abbeys, archbishoprics — occupy significant visual space on the map, too. They were among the Empire's most distinctive features, the living embodiment of a constitutional order that had fused spiritual and temporal authority for centuries. By 1789 they were also the most obviously vulnerable. The secularization debate that consumed Rastatt had been building for decades. Joseph II had pursued his own program of monastic dissolution in the 1780s, suppressing hundreds of contemplative orders across Habsburg lands in the name of enlightened rationality. His reforms had demonstrated that secularization was politically thinkable — and had made the ecclesiastical princes acutely aware of their precariousness. Their public defenders at Rastatt argued, with considerable passion, that the spiritual Estates were actually better governed than their secular equivalents: that within their narrow territories, inhabitants were "happier than millions of subjects in the broader domain of a monarchy," that the monasteries had always been "places of refuge and sanctuary for quiet industriousness, the arts, crafts, agriculture, and trade." Whether these defenses were convincing is another matter. Even a committed advocate of the status quo like the legal scholar Christian Ernst Weisse conceded that "most scholars of constitutional law probably agree that the legality of the secularization of clerical imperial lands can in no way be defended" — before proceeding to argue that it should nonetheless be resisted.
The smallest secular territories — the dense mosaic of lordships, counties, and principalities that the map renders as a patchwork across Swabia and Franconia — are perhaps the most poignant category. In the region roughly comparable in size to Switzerland that the Swabian Circle encompassed, there were around six hundred sovereign polities. Six hundred. Each with its own legal existence, guaranteed by imperial law, defended at Rastatt by men who knew perfectly well that the great powers regarded them as useful assets to be redistributed rather than as communities with rights worth protecting. One anonymous pamphleteer — and there were more than two hundred pamphlets published about Rastatt in the Empire between 1797 and 1799 — articulated what was at stake with uncomfortable clarity: the planned redistribution was "a true system of robbery and plunder of fourteen hundred and ninety-two large and small German sovereigns." The number is precise. The rage is genuine.
This map depicts the member states of the Swabian Circle in the late 18th century, generally seen as the most efficient and successful of the Imperial Circles. The region shown is roughly comparable to the size of Switzerland and hosted around 600 sovereign polities. The white spaces perforating the map are primarily Habsburg properties.
V. The Aufklärung Beneath the Surface
What the map cannot show directly, but what I want to insist is present beneath its surface, is the intellectual dimension of the Empire's crisis — because the fragmentation visible on this map was not only a legal and political fact. It was, in a specific sense, an enlightened one.
This requires explanation, because the standard narrative of the Enlightenment and the Holy Roman Empire casts them as adversaries: the rational, progressive, universalizing impulse of the Aufklärung against the irrational, archaic, particularist structure of the Reich. That narrative is not wrong, exactly, but it is incomplete. What my research into the Rastatt pamphlet literature revealed was that the Empire had generated its own distinctive Enlightenment — conservative, federative, and deeply attached to deutsche Freiheit — that used the vocabulary of human happiness, rational governance, and individual welfare precisely to defend the Empire's fragmented structure against rationalization.
The logic ran as follows. The danger of centralized power — the danger demonstrated most vividly by revolutionary France's Terror and by the partitions of Poland — was that it turned people into commodities, transferred populations between rulers without their consent, and replaced the organic bonds between a ruler and his subjects with the impersonal machinery of a large state. The Empire's fragmentation, on this reading, was not a constitutional failure. It was a constitutional achievement: a guarantee that power would remain multiple, checked, and local, that no single prince could accumulate enough authority to become truly despotic. As one Rastatt pamphleteer put it, with genuine philosophical force: can one who derives the right to rule from birth — who treats his subjects not as people but as possessions to be inherited — truly call himself enlightened?
The secular princes at Rastatt countered with their own enlightened arguments: that ecclesiastical governance was backward, obscurantist, and incompatible with the separation of Church and State that enlightened reason demanded; that the Empire's disease could be cured by excising its "diseased parts" through secularization; that a "peace bought through secularizations is expensive — but still better than no peace," and that no peace meant "revolution and anarchy." Both sides, in other words, appealed to the same enlightened vocabulary of human happiness and rational governance. Both sides accused the other of embracing a "false Enlightenment." What they could not agree on was what the Aufklärung actually required — and that disagreement was, at its core, a disagreement about what the Empire was for.
The eight electoral coats of arms along the lower margin of the map — representing the composition of the electoral college as it stood in 1789, frozen at that moment of maximum pressure — are the map's most explicit engagement with this tension. The electoral college was the Empire's constitutional core, the institution treated with near-reverence even by those who had privately abandoned any real commitment to the imperial order. Metternich, representing the Habsburgs at Rastatt, was described by the French plenipotentiary Treilhard as "cold, proud, impertinent when necessary, a great formalist" — a characterization Metternich would have recognized as accurate and not entirely disapproving. The Congress, Treilhard's colleague Debry observed, was "a tortuous march" on account of the Germans' incessant obsession with procedural correctness. They were right to be obsessed: procedure was all that remained.
VI. The Anomalies Are the Argument
What I find most historically interesting about this map are its anomalies — the cases that cannot be neatly categorized — because they reveal most vividly what kind of entity the Empire actually was.
Hannover appears within the imperial framework but carries the dynastic union with Great Britain. Holstein, culturally and geographically German, lies under Danish authority. Swedish Pomerania is a relic of the settlement of 1648, a permanent reminder that the Peace of Westphalia had made foreign powers guarantors of the German constitution. Along the left bank of the Rhine, imperial territories persist within lands already absorbed by France — a ghostly jurisdictional presence in territory now effectively lost. These were not aberrations in the system. They were constitutive features of it. They reveal an order that prioritized legal status over territorial coherence, historical continuity over administrative rationalization.
That priority was both the Empire's greatest strength and its fatal limitation. It allowed the Empire to encompass an extraordinary diversity of communities and traditions within a single constitutional framework — to protect, however imperfectly, the weak against the strong. The promise of deutsche Freiheit was real, even if its practice was frequently compromised by the very princes who invoked it most loudly. But it also meant the Empire could not rationalize itself without destroying itself. Every reform that would have made it function more efficiently as a state would have required dismantling the web of corporate privileges on which its legitimacy rested. And dismantling that web was precisely what secularization and mediatization ultimately accomplished — not at Rastatt, where the Congress failed, but in the Reichsdeputationshauptschluss of 1803 and the dissolution of 1806.
The extent of continuity that followed is worth noting. Almost all those who lost political power in 1803 and 1806 retained their economic and social status. Traditional hierarchies endured. The German Confederation, like the Reich it succeeded, preserved the privileges of small states under a loose structure dominated by Austria. True revolutionary sentiment did not seriously threaten the institutions of power until 1848. What Görres had hoped for — that the average German, properly guided, would "find zealous followers and defenders" for the just cause of republicanism — had to wait half a century.
Depicted is Napoleon standing before a large “New French Oven for Imperial Gingerbread” in the process of creating/baking new kings called “Bavaria, Wirtembg, [and] Baden.” To the left, Talleyrand is in the process of making another batch of dough.
VII. Görres' Monster, and What It Missed
I want to return to Görres, because his nightmare vision of the Empire is the most vivid thing anyone wrote about it, and because it is both exactly right and subtly wrong in ways that matter.
The monster with its enormous wig, seven-horned noses, yellow spectacles poring over a book without beginning or end, parchment toga patched from noble deeds and diplomas, three hundred hands none strong enough to wield a sword — buried to its waist in hundred-year-old documents, intermittently screeching about its "constitutional basis" — this is a portrait of the Empire's incapacity that rings entirely true. The Empire was obsessed with legal form at the moment when legal form could no longer protect it. That obsession was both its dominant characteristic and, as I have tried to show in my research, an expression of a specific enlightened ideal that had genuine philosophical content, not merely self-interested posturing.
What Görres missed — or saw but chose not to say — was that the figure of Germania lying nearby, bound and weeping, was not entirely a victim. She was also, in important ways, the Empire itself: the corporate, hierarchical, deutsche Freiheit version of Germany that the men at Rastatt were simultaneously defending, betraying, and eulogizing. The Empire's inhabitants had absorbed its structures so thoroughly that they could not imagine politics outside its categories, even when those categories were demonstrably failing them. The average German was not merely confused between old prejudices and new concepts. He was inhabited by both, simultaneously, in ways that made genuine resolution impossible.
That is what this map is trying to show. Not the monster, and not the weeping Germania. Both of them, superimposed: a political order of remarkable historical depth and genuine constitutional imagination, caught in the moment before it finally accepted that the world had moved beyond it.
Select Sources
Archival
Friedensakten: Kongress von Rastatt, AT-OeStA/HHStA STK Friedensakten 81-85. Österreichisches Staatsarchiv, Vienna.
Printed Primary Sources
Fabritius, Karl Moritz. Ueber den Werth und die Vorzüge der geistlichen Staaten und Regierungen in Teutschland. Frankfurt and Leipzig, 1799.
Görres, Johann Joseph. Das rothe Blatt: eine Dekadenschrift. Koblenz: Lausalx, 1798.
Klüber, Johann Ludwig. Das neue Licht, oder Rastatter Friedens-Congreß-Aussichten. Rastatt, 1798.
Montarlot, Paul, and Leonce Pingaud. Le Congrès de Rastatt (11 Juin 1798–28 Avril 1799): Correspondance et Documents. 2 vols. Paris: Alphonse Picard Et Fils, 1912.
Riemer, Andreas. An den Congress zu Rastadt. Leipzig, 1798.
Weisse, Christian Ernst. Über die Sekularisation deutscher geistlicher Reichsländer. Leipzig: Göschen, 1798.
Secondary Sources
Epstein, Klaus. The Genesis of German Conservatism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975.
Gagliardo, John G. Reich and Nation: The Holy Roman Empire as Idea and Reality, 1763–1806. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980.
Godsey, William D. Nobles and Nation in Central Europe: Free Imperial Knights in the Age of Revolution, 1750–1850. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Schmidt, Georg. Geschichte des Alten Reiches: Staat und Nation in der Frühen Neuzeit 1495–1806. München: C.H. Beck, 1999.
Stollberg-Rilinger, Barbara. The Holy Roman Empire: A Short History. Translated by Yair Mintzker. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021.
Whaley, Joachim. Germany and the Holy Roman Empire. 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.
Wilson, Peter H. Heart of Europe: A History of the Holy Roman Empire. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2016.
———. "Still a Monstrosity? Some Reflections on Early Modern German Statehood." The Historical Journal 49, no. 2 (2006): 565–76.