The achievements of benevolent despotism among the minor states of the Holy Roman Empire varied considerably. Some princes employed their inherited authority in a serious effort to improve the lot of their subjects. Charles Frederick of Baden, for example, devoted himself to the improvement of education in his margravate, and he even abolished serfdom, although manorial obligations remained. Charles Augustus of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach was a hardworking administrator of his small Thuringian principality, whose capital, Weimar, he transformed into the cultural centre of Germany. Charles Eugene of Württemberg, on the other hand, led a life of profligacy and licentiousness in defiance of protests by the estates of the duchy. Frederick II of Hesse-Kassel was another princely prodigal whose love of pleasure impoverished his subjects and forced his soldiers into mercenary service for England. The record of enlightened autocracy in central Europe was as uneven as in western Europe. Yet the ideas of the Enlightenment even at their best were unable to transform the basis of political life in the Holy Roman Empire. They could palliate, reform, and improve, but they could not alter a system of particularistic sovereignty and absolutistic authority resting on a hierarchical structure of society. They could not become an instrument of national consolidation or representative government. Only some great creative disruption of existing civic institutions could break through the crust of habit and tradition sanctified by history. Germany lacked the internal preconditions for a process of political reconstruction. The galvanizing forces of rejuvenation and regeneration were to come from the outside. The French Revolutionary and Napoleonic era
In transforming the Bourbon kingdom into a constitutional state, the French Revolution aroused intense excitement east of the Rhine. Most German intellectuals were at first in sympathy with the new order in France, hoping that the defeat of royal absolutism in western Europe would lead to its decline in central Europe as well. The princes, on the other hand, were from the outset fearful of the Revolution, which they regarded as a serious danger, for the example of unpunished insubordination by the French might encourage demands for reform among the Germans. The result was a growing hostility between the government in Paris and the rulers of the Holy Roman Empire, which led in the spring of 1792 to the outbreak of the War of the First Coalition (1792–97), the first phase of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. The immediate occasion of the conflict was a quarrel over the rights of German princes with holdings in France and over the propagandistic activities of French émigrés in Germany. But the underlying cause was the clash of two incompatible principles of authority divided by profound differences regarding the nature of political and social justice. The course of hostilities soon revealed that the civic ideals and military power of Revolutionary France were more than a match for the decrepit Holy Roman Empire. After 1793 France occupied the German lands on the left bank of the Rhine, and for the next 20 years their inhabitants were governed from Paris. Yet there is no evidence that they were dissatisfied with French rule or at least no evidence that they strongly opposed it. Devoid of a sense of national identity and accustomed to submission to authority, they accepted their new status with the same equanimity with which they had regarded a succession to the throne or a change in the dynasty. The Prussians, moreover, discouraged by defeats in the west and eager for Polish spoils in the east, concluded a separate peace at Basel in 1795 by which they in effect recognized the French acquisition of the Rhineland. The Austrians held out two years longer, but the brilliant successes of the young Napoleon Bonaparte forced them to accept the loss of the left bank in the Treaty of Campo Formio (October 17, 1797). End of the Holy Roman Empire
The peace proved short-lived, however, for at the end of 1798 a new coalition directed against France was formed (the War of the Second Coalition, 1798–1802). This time Prussia remained neutral. Frederick William III, a conscientious and modest but ineffectual ruler, was notable for private morality rather than political skill. The government in Berlin drifted back and forth, dabbling in minor economic and administrative reforms without significantly improving the structure of the state. A decade of neutrality was frittered away while the army commanders rested on the laurels of Frederick the Great. Austria, on the other hand, played the same leading role in the War of the Second Coalition that it did in the War of the First Coalition, with the same unfortunate result. The French victories at Marengo (June 14, 1800) and Hohenlinden (December 3, 1800) forced Emperor Francis II to agree to the Treaty of Lunéville (February 9, 1801), which confirmed the cession of the Rhineland. More than that, those rulers who lost their possessions on the left bank under the terms of the peace were to receive compensation elsewhere in the empire. In order to carry out this redistribution of territory, the Imperial Diet entrusted a committee of princes, the Reichsdeputation, with the task of drawing a new map of Germany. France, however, exercised the major influence over its deliberations. Napoleon had resolved to utilize the settlement of territorial claims to fundamentally alter the structure of the Holy Roman Empire. The result was that the Final Recess (Hauptschluss) of the Reichsdeputation of February 1803 marked the end of the old order in Germany. In their attempt to establish a chain of satellite states east of the Rhine, the French diplomats brought about the elimination of the smallest and least viable of the political components of Germany. They thereby also furthered the process of national consolidation, since the fragmentation of civic authority in the empire had been a mainstay of particularism. That Napoleon did not intend to encourage unity among his neighbours goes without saying. Yet he unwittingly prepared the way for a process of centralization in Germany that helped to frustrate his own plans for the future aggrandizement of France.
The chief victims of the Final Recess were the free cities, the imperial knights, and the ecclesiastical territories. They fell by the dozens. Too weak to be useful allies of Napoleon, they were destroyed by the ambition of their French conquerors and by the greed of their German neighbours. They could still boast of their ancient history as sovereign members of the Holy Roman Empire, but their continued existence had become incompatible with effective government in Germany. The principal heirs to their holdings were the larger secondary states. To be sure, Napoleon could not keep Austria and Prussia from making some gains in the general scramble for territory that they had helped make possible. But he worked to aggrandize those German rulers, most of them in the south, who were strong enough to be valuable vassals but not strong enough to be potential threats. Bavaria, Württemberg, Baden, Hesse-Darmstadt, and Nassau were the big winners in the competition for booty that had been the main object of the negotiations. Napoleon’s strategy had been in the classic tradition of French diplomacy, the tradition of Richelieu and Mazarin. The princes had been pitted against the emperor to enhance the role that Paris could play in the affairs of the German states. Yet the German princes did not resent being used as pawns in a political game to promote the interests of a foreign power. Whatever objections they raised against the settlement of 1803 were based on expediency and opportunism. The most serious indictment of the old order was that in the hour of its imminent collapse none of the rulers attempted to defend it in the name of the general welfare of Germany.