German Freedom in a Revolutionary Epoch: The Congress of Rastatt (1797-1799) and End of an Empire

Note: This text is my master’s dissertation (Oxford, 2022), which examined how German elites debated reform and continuity during the revolutionary crisis of the late eighteenth century. The project underlies much of my interest in borders, political order, and the visual representation of historical power structures. You can read my undergraduate thesis on a similar topic here and a short summary of this work here. Throughout the work, the original German or French spelling of figures and places is employed. Unless otherwise noted, I made the translations with the original text available in the footnotes.

Introduction

            After a striking series of victories over Allied armies in his Italian campaign of 1796-1797, Napoléon Bonaparte met with Ludwig von Cobenzl, the representative of Austria, to arrange peace. Yet in the seasoned German diplomat, Napoléon found a man determined to drag out negotiations. Pressed to reach an agreement before the arrival of winter, which would jeopardize his ability to make war, Napoléon laid out his terms. Cobenzl equivocated, lingering on the issue of Austrian compensation for the loss of Mainz. Incensed, Napoléon exclaimed that the diplomat’s answer was tantamount to refusing peace, that if Austria desired war, he would oblige. “Before three months are out,” he threatened, “I’ll break your monarchy as I break this porcelain,” at which point Napoléon seized Cobenzl’s porcelain cabaret—a gift from Catherine the Great—and hurled it on the parquet floor.[1] Speechless, Cobenzl stared at the shattered pieces before him. Later that day, October 14^th, 1797, he signed the Treaty of Campo Formio, which formally concluded the War of the First Coalition and called for a Congress to be held at Rastatt to broker peace between the Holy Roman Empire and the French Republic.[2]

            Less than three months later, on December 30, 1797, the French occupied Mainz, signifying to many contemporaries the shattering of a different power than the Habsburg monarchy. To German philosopher and republican sympathizer Joseph Görres, the loss of the city heralded the long-overdue demise of the Holy Roman Empire.[3] ‘“Mourn despots!’” he decreed. “‘The surrender of Mainz dealt you the deathblow.”’[4] Johann Ludwig Klüber, an esteemed law professor, dreaded what the event presaged. For Klüber, Mainz was the Empire in a city: “the key to Germany, the residence of the Imperial Arch-Chancellor, of the First Imperial Estate, and of the Director of the Reichstag”[5]; without it, the Reich would be but a hollow shell. A newspaper in Frankfurt went further, proclaiming, “[Mainz] is destroyed, and with it everything.”[6]

            The cession of Mainz first became publicly known in the opening phase of the Second Congress of Rastatt, prompting a maelstrom of panicked publications. If to many the news signified the end of the Empire, then that suspicion was all but confirmed when the Habsburgs occupied Venice in January 1798. It seemed that the fate of Poland—partition among the great powers—was soon to befall the Reich, that the Austrians, Prussians, and French were working in concert with one another.[7]

Indeed, despite the contentious porcelain episode in Italy, Austria had achieved suitable solatium for the loss of Mainz by means of French assent to Austria’s annexation of Venice, Bavarian territory east of the Inn, and Salzburg.[8] To Germans, to Europeans, the epoch was one of prodigious transformations, and the future was opaque and menacing. In the previous decade, French revolutionaries stormed the Bastille (1789), Saxon peasants briefly overthrew their feudal lords (1790),[9] Louis XVI was guillotined (1793), Poland vanished from the map (1795), Prussia abandoned the war against France (1795),[10] and Austria recognized French annexation of the left bank of the Rhine (1797). As one alarmed diplomat at Rastatt put it, the German man has no choice but to “await the hand of fate.”[11]

Representatives from across the Holy Roman Empire flocked to the Second Congress of Rastatt to manipulate the direction of the winds of change. The more than 500 diplomats[12] in attendance were a diverse group, lobbying the official delegates on behalf of the interests of every corporate class and imperial Estate[13]—including the secular princes and the (relatively) weak[14] ecclesiastical Estates, Imperial Cities, and Imperial Knights. The Germans clashed with one another over visions for the future of Central Europe, and those different visions echoed out into the public literary sphere. Most pressing was the question of dispossessed princes from the ceded territory. Should they be compensated? And if so, how?

This study investigates how delegates at Rastatt and voices in the public sphere across the Empire addressed these questions. What different futures did they imagine, and what arguments did they present to legitimize their preferred paths forward? Weaker Estates, at risk of being swallowed whole by the princes, tended to support measures which precipitated as little change to the Reich as possible. For some that entailed furnishing divested princes with material compensation via the imperial treasury rather than territory, while for others it implied giving nothing to dispossessed princes at all. At Rastatt, members of this camp frequently championed the cause of war: reconquering the lost territories, after all, meant the status quo could be maintained. Princes, on the other hand, tended to recoil upon hearing the drumbeats of war: not only was conflict expensive, but they feared French occupation could incite revolutionary insurrection, imperiling the structures on which their power depended.

Instead, the secular princes favored securing compensation in the form of secularized ecclesiastical property and other mediatized[15] territories. While secularization and mediatization had historical precedent,[16] their implementation at Rastatt would be at such a scale as to decimate constituent Estates of the Empire and thereby torpefy the traditional imperial institutions.[17] But for many princes that was hardly disagreeable: since at least the Thirty Years War (1618-1648), middling princes harbored designs to annex their smaller neighbors.[18] At Rastatt, princely conspiracy against the Reich reached an unprecedented level as numerous middling powers signed traitorous alliances with the French in exchange for promises of territorial aggrandizement at the expense of their weaker neighbors.[19]

Private interest in maintaining or elevating one’s power and privileges undoubtedly undergirded individual positions advocating or opposing secularization and mediatization. Of chief interest for the purposes of this work, however, is how such positions were framed in public discourses. Upon close analysis, it becomes clear that legalistic appeals pervaded public defenses of every proposed course of action. Ecclesiastical Estates and Imperial Cities underscored their legal right to exist; in the same vein, secularists contended the dissolution of such Estates was lawfully permissible under the trying circumstances and with the emperor’s endorsement.

Legal justifications were, however, often supplemented by spirited appeals to German welfare. Defenders of the status quo painted a terrifying picture of one possible future: princes act as despots, capriciously abusing their power to oppress their new subjects. In such a world, the happiness of the German citizen would wither away. But secular princes imagined a different future, one in which secularization allowed reason—and thus high culture and happiness—to flourish. Germany would prosper if edified princes subsumed populations suffering under the wholly corrupt and degenerate administrations of the clergy. These visions, drawing on Enlightenment ideas about the intrinsic value and possibility of human happiness, demonstrate the existence in the Reich of a public that was concerned about, and believed in, a shared German destiny.

In historical scholarship, the Second Congress of Rastatt itself has largely been overlooked, with Hermann Hüffer’s 1878 three-volume Diplomatische Verhandlungen aus der Zeit der französischen Revolution the most recent in-depth analysis of the event. It has usually been dismissed as ultimately insignificant, especially ­because Napoléon did not take part in the negotiations.[20] Academic neglect might be attributed to the episode's eclipse by more conclusive events, such as the Imperial Recess of 1803 and Emperor Franz II’s[21] dissolution of the Empire in 1806. The Congress was altogether confusing, and it ended in failure; as the War of the Second Coalition took shape, its proceedings became even easier to forget, and only its fatal conclusion has endured to any significant degree in historical memory.[22] Nevertheless, Rastatt was a pivotal moment in which diplomats and invested members of the literate public openly discussed the Empire’s flaws and advantages, and it thus serves as an exciting entry point into several historiographical debates. Specifically, this analysis contributes to discussions about the role of the diplomat in New Diplomatic History; the German Enlightenment in intellectual history; and interpretations of the Empire, the revolutionary challenge to that Empire, and conservative adaptation to change within the Empire in political history.

Although what follows is not an extensive analysis of diplomatic practice at Rastatt, it brings diplomatic actors to the fore of an historical investigation, thereby contributing to the field of New Diplomatic History. Moreover, it may offer insight into just how “revolutionary” republican French diplomacy was. Scholars have long agreed that 1789 transformed traditional diplomacy,[23] but what precisely changed? Syndey Seymour Biro argues that French diplomatic policy became improvisation built on expediency based on self-interest,[24] while Hamish Scott rather accentuates the influence of ideology, which he sees as leading to a decline in ‘give and take’ in negotiations as the French viewed foreign emissaries as adversaries to be overcome.[25] Marsha and Linda Frey agree but go further, contending that “republican zeal” turned French plenipotentiaries into “soldiers fighting for a cause.”[26]

            Indeed, the sources consulted for this work reveal a divide between French and German diplomats at Rastatt that extended beyond culottes courtes.[27] Treilhard’s characterization of Metternich as “cold, proud, impertinent when necessary, a great formalist,” exemplifies how the French tended to view the Germans.[28] Debry concurred and called the Congress “a tortuous march” for imperial delegates’ incessant obsession with “punctilio.”[29] The Germans, meanwhile, commented on French arrogance, simplicity, and general rudeness.[30] One anonymous attendant likened French diplomatic behavior to that of Count Orlov at the Treaty of Sistova, an instance in which Orlov had slapped the Turkish plenipotentiary in the face.[31]

This investigation more directly addresses two other intrinsically intertwined historical debates: that of the prominence of enlightened thought in the German territories and that of the nature and viability of the late Holy Roman Empire. Until the 1960s, the dominant historical narrative cast the Empire as a botched nation-building project, a failed monarchy, and an irrelevant institution to its inhabitants. Concomitant with that picture—and related to Sonderweg theories of German history—was an understanding that the German Enlightenment had had foundered by the 1770s, crushed by conservative political forces and intellectually superseded by the irrationalism of Romanticism and Idealism.[32]

            Beginning in the 1960s, most notably with the work of Karl Otmar von Aretin, a less uniform appraisal of the Aufklärung[33] and the Empire[34] emerged. In contemporary scholarship, Joachim Whaley and Georg Schmidt have proved most optimistic in their assessments of both. Whaley has characterized the Reich as a limited monarchy which cultivated profound and widespread patriotic sentiments,[35] while Schmidt has contended that the Empire was a true, unified, pre-modern “complementary imperial state” with a federative structure that fostered a vision of German national identity.[36] By 1797, the Empire’s destruction was far from certain, according to these authors.

Historians like Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger and Peter H. Wilson are less positive about the vitality of the Empire and its life chances by the opening of the Congress. Stollberg-Rilinger rejects the older view that the Empire lost meaning for its inhabitants—to the contrary, she demonstrates how symbols and apparent trivialities remained deeply significant to figures in the Empire, including the Prussians.[37] Nevertheless, the Empire’s continued fixation with status and hierarchy prevented a reorganization along more obviously rational material lines and she concludes that it “ultimately fell victim to its inability to reform itself.”[38] Wilson agrees, arguing that the Empire had to remain hierarchical to sustain the web of corporate rights and privileges on which its structure rested.[39] That attachment to hierarchy, however, prevented the Empire from adequately addressing new challenges of the 18^th century.

This study aligns with this latter view of the Empire. It rejects both the traditional narrative of the Reich as a failed monarchy and the newer characterization of it as federal. Rather, the Empire must be interpreted in its own context as a distinct entity—a collection of diverse polities with wildly particular traditions united in a common framework of consensus-building to protect the weak against the strong. In a similar fashion, it recognizes the Aufklärung in the Empire as distinct and having evolved from deep-seated ideas about deutsche Freiheit.[40] Thus, this work builds on the conclusions of Jonathan Knudsen[41] and Klaus Epstein:[42] it argues that although a federal, conservative flavor of the Enlightenment did exist and thrive in the Empire and beyond, at core the ideals of that Aufklärung—obedience, hierarchy, philosopher kings—could not be reconciled with other enlightened values, such as egalitarianism and individual liberty.

            Diplomatic correspondences and German publications constitute the bulk of the primary sources consulted in the production of this work. Hundreds of diplomatic correspondences between Paris and Rastatt and between Vienna and Rastatt have survived, offering insight into French and Austrian motives and perceptions of the Congress. Meanwhile, the diplomatic records of August Wilhelm Rabe von Pappenheim,  the envoy from Hessen-Darmstadt, offer the perspective of a middling princely Estate. Finally, many of the more than 200 books and pamphlets written about Rastatt in the Reich between 1797-1799[43] feature prominently in the subsequent pages.

 The number of such publications reveals how invested much of the public was about proceedings at the Congress. Moreover, it is noteworthy that the overwhelming majority were printed anonymously or by authors employing pseudonyms. Such writers self-consciously depicted themselves as “unbiased” and “impartial” members of the public looking out for the interests of Germany.[44] The self-confessed radical Jacobin, Johann Nikolaus Becker, for instance, employed the pseudonym Apollonius von Beilstein for his book Zur kritischen Geschichte des Rastadter Friedens, von einem unpartheiischen Beobachter (A Critical History of the Peace of Rastatt, by an Impartial Observer), in which he does little other than denigrate Metternich.[45] By adding their thoughts on the Congress to the public discourse, such men hoped to influence its outcome.

This work is divided into two chapters, each with two subchapters. The first chapter examines the arguments put forward in public and private with the aim of maintaining the status quo. Such arguments can be divided into two: those that appealed to the German constitution, and those that alluded to Enlightenment ideas. The second chapter investigates public and private arguments in favor of transforming the Empire—most often by means of secularization and mediatization. Much like the first chapter, it is subdivided in two parts: one which examines legal arguments and one which examines enlightened arguments for restructuring. A list of official delegates is located in Appendix 1.

Chapter 1: Preserve the Status Quo

Arguments from the German Constitution

            After five long years of war (1792-1797), revolutionary French forces emerged victorious over their German adversaries. Now, Paris controlled a significant area home to two million German souls.[46] Mainz, Cologne, and Trier, the seats of three of the eight prince-electors to the Holy Roman Emperor, were ripped away from the Reich.[47] Many in the Empire protested the legality of that French annexation—yes, luck had favored enemy armies, but did that alone, asks one anonymous pamphlet, “legally justify the extension of the French Republic?”[48] Was France not, reminded a representative of the Electorate of Saxony, a guarantor of the imperial constitution?[49]

Legal or not, France’s annexation of foreign territories would not soon be reversed. Yet hallowed imperial law did carry significant influence in the Reich and appeals to the German constitution were ubiquitous in public discourse concerning the proceedings at Rastatt. Those wishing to maintain the status quo, to avoid or at least minimize territorial redistributions, most frequently raised the issue of legality. But who precisely espoused this conservative position and what alternative compensation plans did they propose? More significantly, why did their arguments ultimately prove weaker than those endorsing transforming the Empire?

            At the very heart of imperial legitimacy was a guarantee of deutsche Freiheit. The prerogatives of even the weakest Estates were protected from the rapacity of stronger neighbors. Naturally, those who most profited from that system were the weaker Estates—most especially the Imperial Knights, the Imperial Cities, and the ecclesiastical Estates. But for supporters of those territories, speculations of secularization and mediatization were menacing: the implication was that they would lose the advantages of immediacy under the emperor. It is thus little surprise that representatives of the weaker Estates most adamantly defended the status quo. And they did so most often through appealing to the law since it held their privileges as inviolable.

“With what right can one demand that only the immediate possessions of the clergy and lesser imperial Estates should be used for sacrifice?” asked one public pamphlet printed in “Germanien.”[50] Another anonymous booklet posed a similar question: “With what rights should the ecclesiastical elective states and princes, whose legal and political existence is based on the same line as that of the secular princes, be distinguished as victims?”[51] Author Karl Moritz Fabritius, too, pleaded: “Have the spiritual electoral princes less right to govern than the hereditary princes?”[52] Is it truly justified, queried Klüber, that the smaller Estates “lose their independence, their political existence completely?”[53]

            The illegality of dissolving any imperial Estate was plainly evident to these authors.  That course of action was incompatible with German freedom and would lead to “the overthrow of the inner imperial constitution,” in the words of yet another pamphlet.[54] At Rastatt, too, representatives expressed indignation at the illegality of the proposed territorial reorganization. A note prepared for the delegation by the Prince-Bishopric of Bamberg, for instance, stated that no “faithful friend of the imperial constitution” could support secularization.[55] Meanwhile Albini, the chief minister of the Archbishopric of Mainz, threatened to end the Congress if it pursued such an unjust policy.[56]

            These staunch defenders of the status quo were outraged by secularization and mediatization plans. What they saw was naked avarice on the part of the secular princes and total contempt for the law. It seemed those most eager to extirpate the weaker Estates were “un-Germans,” like Prussia, whose actions had precipitated Rastatt in the first place, since they had prematurely brokered peace with the French.[57] Klüber lamented how middling principalities then negotiated “not in Rastatt, but in Paris—most securely with a loan of ducats and old German carolins.”[58] Another anonymous diplomat confirmed the prevalence of bribery, describing how he was advised, “one can do a lot in Paris, but it costs money!”[59] What was being proposed was, at least in the eyes of Protestant Enlightenment theologian Andreas Riemer, a “true system of robbery and plunder of fourteen hundred and ninety-two large and small German sovereigns.”[60] Self-interest and greed, it seemed, had eclipsed law.

Even a staunch advocate of the compensation plan like historian and 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.”[61] Yet if it could not be defended, what other (legal) option could the Empire pursue to answer the question of compensation? One public commentator suggested that it would be more “natural” if “all wealthy secular and spiritual Estates made either proportionate monetary or material contributions” to indemnify the dispossessed princes.[62] Doing so would entail sharing the burden of the costs of war among the coequal fiefs of the Empire, thereby adhering to German law. According to Roberjot, the spiritual envoys most favored that course of action and even circulated stories in newspapers that it was the compensation plan which was to be adopted.[63]

Other fringe schemes were proposed as well, one participant at Rastatt contending that compensation need not be provided at all,[64] and Friedrich Lothar von Stadion, the official delegate from the Bishopric of Würzburg, sardonically suggesting that clericalization, rather than secularization, be implemented.[65] To a minority, including Albini for a time,[66] resuming the war represented the most honorable way out of the legal quagmire since reconquering lost territories would negate the need for any change to the Reich at all.[67] A printed proclamation even appeared in Swabia and the Upper Rhine which urged the population to take “arms in hand, to declare themselves free and independent, and to disperse the Congress.”[68]

Such alternative proposals were, however, never taken very seriously by those with the power to enact them. For most of the delegates, it was natural that noble, princely families from the left bank of the Rhine should retain their status as immediate imperial subjects. And ecclesiastical properties seemed to represent the perfect form of indemnities as their potentates were elected, not hereditary.[69] Furthermore, limited secularization and mediatization were amenable to Habsburg policy, as is discussed in Chapter 2. Joseph II had, after all, pursued his own policy of secularization in the 1780s as part of his enlightened reforms.[70] Those reforms further explain why the alternative compensation proposals so often fell on deaf ears: there was a widespread popular equation of secularization with rationalization. Perhaps the weaker Estates and defenders of the status quo had the law on their side, but could they address novel enlightened critiques—could they demonstrate that their continued existence advanced German happiness?  

Arguments from Enlightened Thought

Supporters of the weaker Estates were not blind to their poor reputations. In response to those reputations, they enacted policies[71] and formulated a number of enlightened arguments to justify the perpetuation of their privileges. Always at the heart of such defenses was a framing of deutsche Freiheit as that which facilitates happiness. The intimate and organic bonds between a ruler and his subjects, it was contended, had prevented revolutionary terror from bourgeoning in Germany. The evils of princely despotism meant that the small Estates served as vital places of refuge; their destruction would submerge the German people into an abyss characterized by capricious abuse of power. Moreover, the Empire’s structure had maintained balance in European politics and its demise would be against even France’s state interests.[72] The prevalence of this vision of the Empire in public discourse reveals the nature and popularity of a particular conservative Aufklärung which had developed and thrived in the Reich over the course of the eighteenth century.

Poland became a ubiquitous foil in the writings of conservative enlightened thinkers across the Empire. Numerous figures, from the jurist Friedrich Karl von Moser[73] to the Swiss delegate at Rastatt, Karl Ludwig von Haller,[74] considered Poland’s fate a disaster. The partitions, as one Frankfurt-based newspaper put it, were “a tremendous sin in political morality.”[75] And that sin might annihilate Germany, too. Riemer worried that illegal annexations of weaker Estates signified “a kind of polonization.”[76] An anonymous delegate at Rastatt likewise feared that “Poland's fortunes will ultimately become ours,” that in the next century children would be taught: “Once upon a time there was a country that was called Germany!”[77]

Such writers dreaded a future in which the small German Estates disappeared from the map because, to them, that future represented a disaster for the wellbeing of the German population. One commentator on proceedings at Rastatt anguished that secularization and mediatization would make “sons and daughters become strangers in their own fatherland,” uprooted from the happy existence they enjoyed in the Empire.[78] The evil being contemplated at Rastatt, as another author wrote, was turning people into commodities: forcing new rulers on populations regardless of whether they want them and regardless of whether they would be subject to impulsive abuse of power by their new lords.[79] Their emphasis on wellbeing rather than on legality indicates how far enlightened ideas had permeated German sensibilities.

            Further demonstrative of this fact is the way by which defenders of the lesser Estates described life in those Estates. An anonymous publication originating in the Bishopric of Würzburg, for instance, argued spiritual polities were the best places to live since their governing principles were guided by philosophy.[80] In his treatise on the value of ecclesiastical governments, Fabritius wrote that each resident of such an Estate “has his own pride, religion, occupation, and is happier in the narrow confines of his territory than millions of subjects in the broader domain of a monarchy.”[81] He added that churches and monasteries had long served as “places of refuge and sanctuary for quiet industriousness, the arts, crafts, agriculture, and trade.”[82] In Fabritius’ conception, everything an enlightened thinker values—tolerance, art, industry, and most importantly happiness—prevails in Estates at risk of being secularized.

Advocates of the Imperial Cities likewise adopted enlightened language when formulating their arguments. One delegate at Rastatt, for example, claimed that among the German regimes, the free cities elevate German industry, promote trade, and “give the bourgeoisie its real value.”[83] Riemer concurred, adding that Imperial Cities protected freedom of the press and were the only places of refuge for men “who are persecuted, deported, or forced to emigrate by despots because of their reasonable principles.”[84] According to this line of argument, mediatization would be wrong not only because it was illegal, but also because it would undermine the Aufklärung.

            Particularly revealing is the reaction of the Swabian Imperial Cities to rumors about their imminent mediatization in March of 1798.[85] Representatives of the cities held an assembly in Ulm, where they wrote a text (Mémoire) for the delegates at Rastatt which was later circulated in newspapers across the Empire. In addition to affirming their legal rights under the German constitution, they asserted that malevolent actors who wished to “establish their fortune on the entire ruin of their country” had spread rumors “that the Imperial Cities and their fellow-citizens, dissatisfied with their old constitution, preferred to pass under the domination of a prince, and that they would consider themselves thus much happier.”[86] To circulate the false notion among the public, such actors took great care to “fill the gazettes and daily newspapers with it.”[87] By contrast, the delegation confirmed it to be the ardent wish of all Swabian Imperial Cities to retain their position as immediate subjects, “in which they have been happy for centuries.”[88]

The essay exposes how both proponents and opponents of mediatization appealed to fundamentally enlightenment arguments about happiness. According to the Imperial Cities, greedy princes disseminated disinformation which suggested rule under a prince was preferable to residence in a free city. They rejected the idea, insisting the Imperial Cities have distinguished themselves from others in their “trade and industriousness”[89] and in the intolerance for the abuses of “arbitrary power” both in their mores and their constitutions.[90] But while both proponents and opponents of maintaining the status quo alluded to enlightened thinking in their respective arguments, how each side understood the Aufklärung, and thus the best path forward, differed.

That difference is hinted at in several defenses of the spiritual Estates. One such publication argues that unlike in secular principalities, there is no oppression, poverty, or, significantly, “false Enlightenment” in ecclesiastical territories.[91] The implication is that a genuine Enlightenment does flourish in such territories, one marked by its cherishing of deutsche Freiheit. That conservative flavor of the Enlightenment abhors despotism and values religious liberty, the security of property, the right to move freely from one territory to another, and equal access to the law, if not under it.[92] It stimulated the Archbishopric of Mainz to institute state welfare and free maternity cover for unmarried mothers, among other enlightened policies, in 1785,[93] and it inspired far-reaching education reform aligned with enlightened principles in the Bishopric of Würzburg.[94] Crucially, adherents to this Aufklärung privileged gradual, experimental reforms over radical initiatives. That is why one diplomat who hoped to witness the end of the ecclesiastical Estates on account of their unenlightened natures nevertheless called for their preservation. As he explained, it would be far preferable for the spiritual Estates to “fall by themselves” like everything must do that stands in contradiction to nature.[95]

The alternative, the “false Enlightenment,” according to this train of thought, embraced centralized and impersonal power. Its ideas had spurred France’s murderous terror and bellicosity, and it was also responsible for the sin of Poland’s partitions. If its “pretty projects” of enlargement and rounding off of borders was allowed to flourish in the Reich, wrote one delegate at Rastatt, then it would “also accelerate a revolution in Germany.”[96] Fabritius mordantly denounced the un-German princes who follow this immoral path: “your pride, your thirst for honor, lust for power, rapaciousness, lust for revenge, thirst for blood and other shameful passions which you harbor behind the smokescreen of freedom and equality, philosophy and human rights and other beautiful pretenses” will engender the “demise of the whole human race.”[97] The ideas the princes espoused were serious: they were the same which had destroyed France and, if followed, they would destroy art and happiness, and transform Europe into a wasteland. Fabritius dared the princes to try it: “Bring forth a new world, a better creation, through your murderous philosophy! You can’t do it?—But you can certainly destroy!”[98]

To Fabritius, at least, true Enlightenment had actually damaged princely legitimacy. He wrote that as a result of the dissemination of countless enlightened publications across the Empire, the reputation of the secular princes had already “exceptionally fallen in public opinion.”[99] Unsurprisingly, the explanation defenders of the weaker Estates provide for that fall was an attachment to a false Enlightenment. One publication, for instance, affirmed that a ruler could only measure his success through the happiness of his people, that a prince’s territorial ambition therefore belied his assertions to be an enlightened ruler.[100] It added that princes were at fault for “recogniz[ing] neither fatherland nor fellow citizens” and for seeing themselves “not as representatives of their people, not as the first servants of the state” but as innately superior to their subjects.[101] How can one claim to be enlightened, asked Fabritius, who derived the right to rule from birth: who treats one’s subjects not as people, but as possessions to be inherited?[102]

Evidently, enlightened arguments in favor of the status quo in the Reich buttressed arguments grounded in law and tradition. In public discourse and in private letters, defenders of the Imperial Cities and ecclesiastical Estates appealed to the constitution and to German welfare. These defenders built on a particular understanding of the Aufklärung which was not only compatible with the existing structures of the Empire, but which reinforced them. It conceived of deutsche Freiheit as a principle which thwarted despotism. Those seeking to destroy coequal Estates were not only engaging in an illegal act but were playing with fire. By treating people as commodities and amassing more power in their own hands, they would destroy everything German by inciting real revolution.  

 

Chapter 2: Transform the Empire

Arguments from the German Constitution

            No proponent of secularization and mediatization at Rastatt saw that path as leading to real revolution. To the contrary, such men framed those measures as necessary to protect the Empire against the potential catastrophe of a revolution in Germany catalyzed by French power. Indeed, Germans on both sides of the secularization issue shared the goal of imperial preservation. And like their counterparts discussed in the previous chapter, Germans advocating a transformation of the Reich consistently referenced imperial laws and the Enlightenment to legitimize their case.

Illustrative of this perspective is a conception of the Empire posited by several authors.[103] In their metaphor, the Reich is “an outdated, tottering, ramshackle building on the verge of collapse.”[104] But the structure should not be torn down; rather “give the outside walls good buttresses, the inside easier communication, and improve the roof so that it doesn't rain inside: that way it can remain livable for a long time.”[105] Renovations—major or minor—would serve to strengthen the Empire, not destroy it.

Proponents of recompensing princes from the left bank of the Rhine with territories on the right bank did not desire the end of the Empire. Most prominently, the Habsburgs consistently and sincerely, in public and private remarks,[106] articulated maintaining imperial integrity as imperative while nevertheless endorsing the compensation plan. In a letter from December 7^th, 1797, for instance, Cobenzl related a conversation he had with Treilhard in which the latter had intimated Austria might profit from secularizing the spiritual electors. Cobenzl rejected the idea: “we have to maintain the three ecclesiastical electors … nothing which essentially interests the German constitution is to be destroyed.”[107] In a separate letter from June 5^th, 1798, Cobenzl again rebuffed a suggestion to secularize the electors, this time proposed by French plenipotentiary François de Neufchâteau, on the grounds that it “would be to annul the German constitution.”[108]

Austrian policy sanctioned the secularization of ecclesiastical properties not controlled by the imperial electors, and many in the Reich interpreted that course of action as both legally vindicated and as the surest way to maintain their own privileges as immediate subjects. As a rule, figures with closer ties to the Habsburgs underlined these justifications when presenting their case for compensation via secularization. Imperial Knights[109] and several ecclesiastical princes[110] who had lost territory to the French, for example, sought Austrian support for indemnities on the right bank of the Rhine.

The same was true of the secular princes. Karl Anselm, 4^th Prince of Thurn and Taxis, had a close relationship with the Habsburgs: he personally represented both Joseph II and Franz II as principal commissioner at the Imperial Diet, and his family controlled the Imperial Reichspost.[111] In a letter from December 13 1797, Alexander Freiherr von Vrints-Berberich wrote Thugut on behalf of the Princely House of Thurn and Taxis. In it, he sought indemnity for territories lost to the French via ecclesiastical properties.[112] Vrints-Berberich stressed the House’s loyalty to the Emperor and affirmed that such compensation was confirmed in the laws of the German constitution.

   The House of Croÿ was likewise close to the Habsburgs and sought compensation for dispossession of territories west of the Rhine. In a letter to Lehrbach, the Duke of Croÿ, Auguste Philippe, wrote that it was clear “in the eyes of the law” that he should be recompensed.[113] Both the Thurn and Taxis and the Croÿ noble families sought indemnities and neither expressed fear about secularization entailing the end for the Empire. To the contrary, Vrints-Berberich and Auguste Philippe insisted that their cardinal interest lay in maintaining an immediate status, even if that engendered obtaining smaller or poorer territory than what they had lost. As Vrints-Berberich wrote, “far from aiming at an increase in power or property, [the House of Thurn and Taxis] only seeks to be delivered an indemnity much inferior to its losses.”[114] Rather than stressing their material losses to make their case for secularization, loyal nobles highlighted their fear of losing status in the traditional imperial hierarchy.

            The position of princes already seeking accommodation with the French differed sharply. For such men, secularization served primarily as a means to expand their power. The minister of Württemberg, Ulrich Lebrecht von Mandelsloh, for instance, appalled the Austrian minister at Rastatt when he presented the list of territories that the Duke of Württemberg expected to annex. Reporting on the incident to Colloredo, Cobenzl described how Mandelsloh’s loss assessment and list of desired territories “were both extremely exaggerated” and contrary to Austrian principle, which sanctioned secularizations that remained as undisruptive to the Empire as possible.[115] The Duke of Württemberg baldly sought “to take advantage of the circumstances to aggrandize” his power—to Cobenzl, the pretentions represented a reprehensible “injustice.”[116]

            Yet Mandelsloh elicited an even deeper affront than that caused by Württemberg’s unmitigated disregard for imperial justice and law. Cobenzl came across a note prepared for the French plenipotentiaries in which the Duke of Württemberg assured fidelity to the French, effectively agreeing to “detach himself from all ties with the Empire” and to become an “enemy” of both the Emperor and the House of Austria.[117] Württemberg was not alone in what amounted to treason. In a letter to Cobenzl, Lehrbach detailed how he was disturbed by the relationship the Count of Solms and the Count of Sickingen had with the French. The former resigned from his station in the Aulic Council[118] and “has completely removed the mask,” betraying himself as a Jacobin and proclaiming he “would rather be called Bonaparte than Nelson.”[119] Though acting with less dramatic flair than the Count of Solms, representatives of Zweibrücken, Hessen-Kassel, Hessen-Darmstadt, Nassau, and Baden, among others, too did little to conceal their infidelity to the Reich.[120]

            Those who promoted compensation for dispossessed princes at Rastatt fell into two broad categories: those with just claims to indemnification and others who wanted far more territory than they had lost. The former saw no contradiction between limited secularization and maintaining imperial law. To such men, secularization would secure their families’ hallowed positions in the imperial hierarchy and had a long historical precedent.[121] As one author saw it, the demise of the ecclesiastical territories was regrettable, “but that I sacrifice the future existence of my house to their preservation and should dismiss the compensation due to me” was asking too much: “here the natural law of the self-preservation and the heavy obligation towards posterity” left no choice.[122] But how did the latter group address German law, considering their apparent disloyalty to the Empire?

            The Prussians, who would eventually be compensated with five times as much territory as they had lost,[123] named the territorial redistribution “an inevitable consequence of the loss of territory.”[124] Yet they insisted that the constitution would be upheld. In publications, writers likewise emphasized that imperial law would persist. Further, they contended that drastic measures were necessary given the emergency which the Reich was facing. In other words, the crisis gave a legal basis for abolishing a coequal Estate. Weisse, for example, wrote that secularization was constitutionally illegal “unless an extraordinary cause requires such a sacrifice.”[125] Another anonymous author affirmed the justification of secularization in times of crisis, while also accusing the spiritual potentates of triggering that crisis since they had harbored French émigrés.[126]

As radical as some secular princes at Rastatt may have seemed, their demands remained moderate when viewed in their proper context. What they advocated was ultimately a change in who ruled this or that territory, but not a transformation in how that territory was to be ruled. Laws would, admittedly, be broken, but that infringement was essential to conserve the core imperial structure. War had to be avoided at all costs because war imperiled that imperial core. Maybe secularizing the ecclesiastical Estates was regrettable, wrote an anonymous author, but it was necessary to prevent war: “A peace bought through secularizations is expensive—but still better than no peace.”[127] No peace, the author continued, meant “revolution and anarchy.”[128]

Pappenheim, a representative of Hessen-Darmstadt who secretly negotiated with the French in Paris, shared that underlying fear. He unabashedly treated Imperial Cities and ecclesiastical territories as a treasure trove to be exploited,[129] but he simultaneously viewed allegiance with the French as advisable for “a good German patriot” because doing so avoided a renewal of hostilities and the possibility of real revolution.[130] In a scenario of real revolution, what place would there be for imperial law? Fear of that revolution, however, extended beyond law and into the realm of utopian and dystopian visions—into the realm of the Enlightenment. While proponents of secularization and mediatization felt the need to address imperial law when making their case, their more potent arguments were, indeed, saturated with appeals to the enlightenment.

Arguments from Enlightened Thought

            In one metaphor, the Reich is cast as a building in need of repairs, but in another it is cast as an organism suffering from disease. And just as the building should not be demolished, the whole organism should not “be destroyed”; rather, the “diseased parts” should be excised or restored.[131] Intrinsic to both pictures is the notion that the Empire could and should be improved. And the changes to be adopted were justified not principally because they jibed with imperial law or tradition. Instead, they were legitimized because they had utility, because they advanced the wellbeing of the Empire and its inhabitants.[132] In public discourse surrounding Rastatt, advocates of secularization and mediatization often employed this enlightened line of reasoning, thereby contributing to the Reichsreformdebatte.[133] It marks a radical departure from the Empire’s traditional political culture, grounded on precedent and ‘hallowed’ rights, since it shifts legitimacy from law to politics. That shift meant old laws could be abandoned if they were no longer fit for purpose, and it meant secularization was warranted, as one author put it, because it was the “will of the nation.”[134]

            What deficiencies in the German constitution did enlightened thinking expose? Imperial Knights, Imperial Cities, and ecclesiastical Estates all acquired reputations for backward administrations. Knightly immediacy faced denunciation on the grounds that Imperial Knights governed territories without State Diets. That made them prone to tyranny and despotism, argued critics.[135] Imperial Cities, meanwhile, faced admonishment for their unequal tax burdens, mismanagement of municipal property and funds, large and growing public debts, and obscurantism.[136] One delegate at Rastatt affirmed that “a number of our Imperial Cities, it is true, are very degenerate in their constitutions.”[137] Most condemnation, however, was directed at the spiritual Estates. Detractors contended that ecclesiastical governance performed poorly with regards to every aspect of public life: education, morality, and the economic well-being of the citizenry.[138] An especially prevalent reproach stemmed from the enlightened idea that Church and State should be separated.[139] As one publication put it, addressing spiritual rulers, “Your kingdom is not of this world.”[140]

            Such critiques had circulated extensively across the Empire and proved crucial for legitimizing secularization and mediatization at the time of crisis. The lost war itself demonstrated to many that imperial deficiency could no longer be ignored. In peace time, wrote one author, the Reich promoted German welfare, but “how quickly this happiness vanishes when it comes down to defense against an overpowering enemy!”[141] Haller went further, contending the war “revealed the weakness and futility of the German constitution so openly that the nation, if it were to exist as a nation, would at last have to give up its confidence and its attachment to such a defective constitution.”[142]

            Although Germans collectively mourned the loss of the left bank of the Rhine, some enlightened thinkers saw a silver lining. To them, Rastatt represented an opportunity to renovate the imperial structure, to expunge the diseases which had long plagued the Germanic body. Haller, for instance, wrote that French insistence on the principle of secularization would undoubtedly improve the constitution, even though that was certainly not French intent. It would lead to “greater prosperity,” promote “the higher culture of the nation,” and revive “German patriotism, which can never exist in all of the ecclesiastical polities.”[143]

Publications which championed extensive territorial redistributions, such as those referenced in the démarche of the Imperial Cities cited in Chapter 1, agreed with Haller. They asserted that restructuring the Empire would advance German welfare. Weisse commented how numerous supporters of secularization argued secular administrations “have undeniable advantages over the form of government of spiritual ones.”[144] An anonymous author wrote pages about the benefits which secular rule would bring to Regensburg, including superior education standards and better administration.[145] And yet another concluded that the compensation plan at Rastatt would be “a happy metamorphosis of the German empire.”[146]

Such enlightened appeals to legitimize territorial redistribution occurred more frequently in public discourse than in private letters. Yet there is evidence that secular princes at Rastatt extolled their adherence to enlightened principles in discussions with the French. In a letter from October 6, 1798, for instance, Roberjot wrote to Talleyrand that the representatives of Württemberg and other parts of Swabia impressed him with their talk of the principles of liberté.[147] Jean Debry, too, remarked about how many middling princes spoke as “sincere friends of humanity,” conversing with him “of liberty, of instruction, of enlightenment, of the rights of nations.”[148] Whether all these conversations were genuine or rather maneuvers to curry favor with the French is unclear.

            What is clear is that the improved Empire the secular princes wished for was not modeled after Revolutionary France. Rather, secularization and mediatization represented to them the type of gradual, thoughtful, top-down changes which characterized a more conservative Enlightenment project. And their endorsement of that project aligns them more closely with authors like Fabritius than the writings of Fabritius suggest. Supporters of the princes, like the supporters of the spiritual rulers, firmly rejected the “false Enlightenment” which they viewed as having infected the French.

One author, seeking to dispel alarm about the compensation plan, wrote: “I know well that you see the secularizations as encroachments in the constitution … as harbingers of the overthrow of religion and civil freedom.” But he continued, insisting that he did not wish to see the destruction of the Empire or the end of civil and religious liberty.[149] It would be far preferable for spiritual leaders to transfer their lands to secular rulers than to “see their cathedral churches transformed into temples of reason and their episcopal dwellings transformed into municipal houses.”[150]

Another author also mentioned those who “tremble at the mere thought of secularization, out of panicked fear that the fundamental pillars of state and religion might collapse as a result.”[151] But he saw that fear as unjustified. Not only was abolishing the spiritual Estates necessary for the general good of the Fatherland—it “will undoubtedly promote bourgeois prosperity”— but its implementation did not entail revolution, which “would be contrary to prudence, unnecessary and even harmful, because quiet, gentle, and moderate intervention is always better and safer than sudden violence.”[152]

Advocates of secularization and mediatization consistently and overwhelmingly appealed to this more conservative version of the Enlightenment when advancing their vision of the future of the Empire. They framed themselves as walking “the level middle road of reason and wisdom based on elective moderation.”[153] Thus, they rejected men who eschewed reason. They denounced bishops and archbishops who “rule in the darkness of this world,”[154] as Riemer put it, men who cling to “rusty prejudices,” who prefer “blind ignorance and bondage” to “freedom of thought,” and who favor “spiritual and secular despotism” over “civil human rights.”[155]

Simultaneously, they rejected Jacobinism. Delegates at Rastatt and publications advocating territorial redistribution never critiqued the Empire’s fundamental socio-political structure. One anonymous author is convinced “that rulers are there because of the peoples, and not the peoples because of the rulers,” that it is a ruler’s responsibility to promote the wellbeing of his subjects.[156] But he noted that the population of ecclesiastical territories never had the democratic right to elect their rulers and that a “prince-bishop may well have been imposed on them.”[157] Therefore, he concluded that transferring from spiritual to secular rule would not harm the population’s happiness. But unsurprisingly, he did not endorse democracy, instead favoring something closer to enlightened absolutism.

A variety of factors aligned at Rastatt to facilitate broad acceptance of the principles of secularization and mediatization. In an era of profound crisis, legal arguments against territorial restructuring lost their already waning potency. The French, the Prussians, the middling secular princes, and, most reluctantly, the Austrians all saw value in transforming the Empire. Much of that value was material or strategic advantage, but there was also widespread and genuine belief that secular, princely administrations better promoted the wellbeing of the inhabitants. Popular conservative enlightened ideals ultimately proved crucial to legitimizing and directing the metamorphosis of Central Europe at the turn of the 19^th century.

 

CONCLUSION

Görres was no advocate of the Holy Roman Empire and in a nightmare, he imagined the entity as a colossal monster.[158] An enormous wig sat on two conjoined heads with long, protruding donkey ears, seven-horned noses, and yellow spectacles that pored over a book without beginning or end: the German constitution. The monster, adorned in a parchment toga patched together from noble deeds and diplomas, had three hundred hands, none of which was strong enough to wield a sword. Buried up to its waist in hundred-year-old documents, the figure intermittently screeched out: “constitutional basis” and “old traditional imperial constitution!” Nearby, the figure of Germania lay bound and crying.

            That revolting and wholly pathetic image may indeed represent half the story of Rastatt. In public and private comments, nearly every concerned party parroted appeals to imperial laws, traditions, and the German constitution to defend its respective position. Advocates of the ecclesiastical Estates, Imperial Cities, and Imperial Knights constantly invoked legal rights when contesting secularization and mediatization; loyal secular princes and Austria, meanwhile, supported limited secularization on the basis that it was a justified step to maintain imperial integrity in light of the current crisis. Even those secular princes who had effectively severed ties to the Reich and privately pursued personal power publicly professed that secularization had an extended legal historical precedent.

            Yet over the course of the eighteenth century, arguments about tradition and law rang increasingly hollow to a growing segment of the populace. Enlightenment ideas about the possibility of human progress and the value of human happiness proliferated, gradually gained currency, and prompted the Reichsreformdebatte.[159] Novel critiques and defenses of the Empire emerged, grounded in enlightened perspectives. The second half of the story of Rastatt consists of these most perfervid of arguments. In the public sphere, a case for or against secularization proved most potent when it appealed to the wellbeing and happiness of Germany—when it framed its position as liberating or protecting Görres’ Germania.

This investigation into the Second Congress of Rastatt addresses questions about the diplomacy, the Enlightenment, and politics in the late stage of the Holy Roman Empire. Rastatt exposes a profound gulf between the behavior of the French and German diplomats. The Revolution colored French plenipotentiaries’ perceptions such that they necessarily viewed their German counterparts as enemies. Yet in their conduct at Rastatt, the French proved to be pragmatic negotiators rather than fervent ideologues. The Germans, by contrast, remained consumed by questions of decorum and protocol. The Congress additionally demonstrates the increasing influence of public opinion on diplomatic behavior, as scenes at Rastatt echoed into newspapers and journals, often sparking serious intellectual debates. As Debry noted in a letter to Bonaparte, “more than any other force perhaps [public opinion] will check the ulterior projects of the Court of Vienna.”[160]

What does that public opinion reveal about popular attachment to, and the vitality of, the late Holy Roman Empire? One key finding is that the arguments for and against change in the Empire had much in common: both positions found legitimacy by appealing to imperial law and to a conservative enlightened vision. That vision remained within traditional lines, accepting the Empire and its hierarchical construct as fundamental. No one at Rastatt advocated ‘modern’ federalism which would have entailed levelling the status distinctions between the component elements.

            In the end, the principles of secularization and mediatization implemented in the Treaty of Lunéville of 1801, in the Reichsdeputationshauptschluss of 1803, and in the creation of the Confederation of the Rhine in 1806 did not entail a radical transformation of Central Europe.[161] Rather, the extent of continuity is remarkable. Austria, Prussia, and France did not partition the ‘third Germany’ as so many had dreaded, and true revolutionary sentiment à la 1789 seldom seriously threatened the institutions of power until the Springtime of the Peoples in 1848. For as long as feasible, Austria exerted its influence to preserve crucial imperial institutions: imperial electors persisted until 1806,[162] knights secured material advantages in Austria well into the 19^th century,[163] and several sovereign cities endured until German unification. What’s more, almost all those who lost political power maintained their economic and social status, and traditional societal hierarchies endured.[164] The German Confederation, like the Reich it succeeded, preserved the privileges of the small states under a loose political structure dominated by Austria.[165]        

            So much continuity suggests that the Empire may well have hobbled on in one form or another deeper into the 19^th century had external circumstances been different. But, in the end, the Reich did not and could not offer a satisfactory answer to the challenges posed by the Enlightenment. The chief principle on which the Reich claimed legitimacy, and the one its supporters held most dear, was deutsche Freiheit. But as much as German thinkers attempted to identify the Enlightenment in “German freedom” in so far as it opposed the oppressive despotism of a centralized and impersonal state, at its core, the principle defended corporate privileges and petty princes. Deutsche Freiheit was incompatible with liberté, égalité, and fraternité.[166]

Returning to Görres, one finds an arresting image of what was taking place in Germany. The average German, Görres says, is brave but confused: conflicted between “his old prejudices” and “new, refined concepts.”[167] He is “alarmed by the whisperings of the priests of the monks, frightened by the brazen expressions of his little despots” and altogether exhausted by the “long sufferings of war.”[168] The good German is being purposely misled, and he instinctively blinks at the bright light of freedom. But by providing proper direction, those who preach the just cause of republicanism would “find zealous followers and defenders in him.”[169] It is a prescient assessment in light of the events of 1848.

 

 

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Appendix I

 

 

Franz Georg Karl von Metternich-Winneburg-Beilstein	Imperial Commissar for the Habsburgs
Franz von Albini	Delegate from the Archbishopric of Mainz
Otto Ferdinand von Löben	Delegate from Saxony
Ludwig von Cobenzl	Delegate from Austria, representative of the king of Bohemia and Hungary (until mid-1798)
Johann Amadeus Franz von Thugut	Delegate from Austria, representative of the king of Bohemia and Hungary (replaced Cobenzl on July 9th, 1798)
Ludwig Conrad Lehrbach	Delegate from Austria, representative of the Imperial Circle of Austria
Maximilian von Preysing	Delegate from Bavaria (until early 1798)
Theodor Heinrich Topor von Morawitzky	Delegate from Bavaria (replaced Preysing on February 22nd, 1798)
Friedrich Lothar von Stadion	Delegate from the Bishopric of Würzburg
Friedrich Wilhelm von Reden	Delegate from Bremen-Verden
Emmanuel Meier	Delegate from Baden
Georg Ludwig von Edelsheim	Delegate from Baden
Ulrich Lebrecht von Mandelsloh	Delegate from Württemberg
Ferdinand Heinrich August Weckherlin	Delegate from Württemberg
Christian Hartmann Samuel von Gatzert	Delegate from Hessen-Darmstadt
Franz Xaver von Pflummern	Delegate from the Imperial City of Augsburg
Johann Conrad Schmidt	Delegate from the Imperial City of Augsburg
Friedrich Maximilian von Günderrode	Delegate from the Imperial City of Frankfurt
Friedrich Carl von Schweitzer	Delegate from the Imperial City of Frankfurt

 

 

Napoléon Bonaparte	Representative of France until December 2nd, 1797
Jean-Baptiste Treilhard	Representative of France (until mid-1798)
Antoine Bonnier d’Alco	Representative of France (assassinated)
Claude Roberjot	Representative of France (assassinated)
Jean Antoine Debry	Representative of France (replaced Treilhard on May 21st, 1798)