The Break-Up of the German Empire

Even before the Peace of Basle, the domination of the Jacobins in Paris had been broken. The war had helped them to power, but they were by no means inclined to fight a war for a society that was hostile to them. The more ruthlessly they had abolished feudal exploitation, the more pressure they brought to bear on capitalist exploitation, which grew all the more brazenly after the fall of feudalism. To stem the advance of capitalist exploitation and to abolish its foundations became, next to the combating of foreign enemies, the main aim of the Parisian revolutionaries.

But in this they were attempting a task that could not yet historically be solved. The capitalist mode of production was still in its ascending phase; there was no possibility of replacing it with a higher mode of production. So the Jacobins had to make do with forcible intervention in economic life, pegging food prices and beheading exploiters, stock-jobbers and speculators. However, the more heads they cut off the Hydra, the more grew in their place. It was of no help to the Jacobins that they declared the permanent revolution and intensified the Red Terror which the war had imposed on them. This brought them into an ever-sharper conflict with the other classes in the nation. When victory over the foreign enemy had been assured and the Red Terror had ceased to be a necessity for the salvation of the revolution, it was felt to be an increasingly intolerable barrier to economic development.

Under these conditions the fall of the Jacobins could no longer be postponed. In July 1794 and May 1795 they suffered decisive defeats from which they never recovered. But they still have the merit in terms of world history of having saved the revolution and swept away the feudal state with a thoroughness unparalleled in any country in the world.

Now the French bourgeoisie had a free hand and set up their government by transferring the management of the state to a Directory of five people. But now that there was no longer anyone to pull the chestnuts out of the fire for them, they had to act on their own, showing a political incapacity that threatened to give the feudal powers the advantage after all. This bourgeois regime was marked by rapid deterioration at home and abroad.

That is why the whole nation greeted with great rejoicing the coup d’état of the 18th Brumaire November 9, 1799, with which General Napoleon Bonaparte dispersed the government of the Directory and made himself military dictator, initially as First Consul of the French Republic and then, in 1804, as Emperor of the French. To say, in the manner of current liberalism, that the 18th Brumaire was simply a betrayal of liberty, and to seek its origins in the ambition of an adventurer of genius, is too superficial. Napoleon drew his strength much more from the heritage of the French revolution, and he began to cash in on it at home and abroad. However great his military genius, he was under no illusion as to where his right of conquest was historically rooted. Wherever he planted his victorious eagle he introduced bourgeois reforms.

He succeeded first, in 1801, in forcing the German Emperor to sue for peace. In this treaty, signed on February 9, 1801 in the little town of Lunéville in Lorraine, the Emperor, in the name of the whole German Empire, relinquished the left bank of the Rhine, as the Prussians had done in the Treaty of Basle. The bed of the Rhine was to henceforth to form the frontier between the French Republic and the German Empire. An area of 1150 square miles and almost 4 million inhabitants (about one seventh of its population) was thus lost to Germany. But the Treaty of Lunéville also obliged the Emperor to sacrifice the existing constitution of the Empire; the secular princes of the left bank of the Rhine were to be compensated at the expense of the ecclesiastical states in the interior of the Empire.

Now the German princes began a shameful process of haggling over territory. In Treitschke’s phrase, they hurled themselves upon the bleeding wounds of the Fatherland like a swarm of hungry flies. Forgetting all shame and honour, they rushed to Paris to secure the biggest possible scraps of land by bribing French ministers. The Prussian state, too, took part in this miserable trade, while Austria, trying to save as much as possible of the ecclesiastical states, proposed to throw the Imperial Free Cities, too, into the hands of the receivers in bankruptcy. This highly delighted the mob of princes but did nothing to assuage their greedy appetite for Church property.

Bonaparte watched these repulsive activities for more than a year, but once the German Imperial Diet at Regensburg had shown itself completely incapable of controlling the ravening wolf-pack, he reached an agreement with Russia about the reorganization of German affairs. In obedience to a Franco-Russian Diktat, the Diet of Regensburg, in the so-called Principal Resolution of the German Delegation of February 23, 1803, abolished no less than 112 German states. Only pitiful remnants of the ecclesiastical states and the Imperial towns remained – three of the former and six of the latter. Of the booty, Austria received only as much as it had lost, while Prussia was more richly provided for, since it was in the interest of the French and the Russians to keep this thorn in Austria’s flesh. Bavaria, Württemberg and Baden fared best of all, since Napoleon wished to turn them into compliant vassal states through whom he could dominate southern Germany.

In the same year, 1803, however, French troops had already occupied a portion of North Germany, the Electorate of Hanover, which was linked by a personal union to the United Kingdom. England and France were still at war, although there was a short respite after the Treaty of Amiens (October 11, 1801). England and France, as the economically most developed nations, were struggling for domination of the world market. This conflict of interests could not be resolved by a treaty, but only by one nation or the other winning. French troops occupied Hanover in order to prevent this German territory being used as an entrepôt for English goods on the continent, but in doing so they obviously crossed the demarcation line that France had promised Prussia she would respect in the Treaty of Basle. However, Berlin lacked the courage to raise any serious objection to this brazen breach of the treaty.

The English government, on the other hand, was able to incite Austria and Russia to a new war against France. This new coalition, which was as reactionary as its predecessors, was formed in April 1805. But the three powers had in the meantime learnt how hard France was to beat, and they made an effort to win the Prussian state as a fourth member of their league. Now the Prussian government was in a quandary; it did not want to fall out either with France or with the coalition of England, Austria and Russia. Constantly unable to follow a clear and consistent policy, it took refuge in a lamentable juggling act.

It mobilized the army in response to the Tsar’s threat to march his troops through Prussian territory, but when Napoleon, without asking Berlin, did what the Tsar had only threatened to do by actually marching his troops through Prussian territory, the King of Prussia promised the Tsar his help. He sent Count Haugwitz with a threat of war to Napoleon, but by the time the ambassador had reached his destination, Napoleon had already decisively beaten the allied Austrians and Russians at the battle of Austerlitz on December 2, 1805; now the Prussian ambassador fell over himself to sign an offensive-defensive pact with Napoleon, which the Prussian King immediately ratified. No state has ever pursued such a miserable, cowardly and worthless policy.

Its first result was that Austria had to sign the Treaty of Schönbrunn on December 26, 1805. In it, Austria agreed to cede 1,140 square miles of territory with almost 800,000 inhabitants. Bavaria, Württemberg and Baden received a large part of it. In addition Napoleon granted a royal crown to Bavaria and Württemberg. They, and the Electorate of Baden, were allowed the same complete sovereignty within the new frontiers as they had enjoyed in their old possessions.

This was the beginning of the Confederation of the Rhine, the end of the German Empire. Napoleon kept his army in southern Germany to nip in the bud any opposition from Austria or Prussia. Then he set about destroying whatever remnants of the Imperial constitution the Principal Resolution of the German Delegation had left behind, sweeping away the countless small Princes, Counts, Lords and Knights of the South and West, who had previously been subject to the German Emperor only, for the benefit of the medium-sized South German states, which could never be dangerous as France’s rivals but could always be useful as her vassals. The beggars’ pilgrimage of the German sovereigns to Paris began for a second time, and many of the dwarf despots succeeded in saving themselves by bribing French ministers. But the bulk of them got short shrift. Whatever still remained in the way of tiny imperial estates in the South and West ceased to exist. All in all, an area of 550 square miles with almost a million and a quarter inhabitants was divided up between the sixteen German princes who, in 1806, renounced the Empire, declared all Imperial law to be null and void as far as they were concerned, and formed the Confederation of the Rhine, recognizing the French Emperor as their protector. In the forefront of these states stood Bavaria, Württemberg, Baden and Hesse-Darmstadt. Thus the old German Empire passed peacefully away. On August 6, the German Emperor Franz declared that the ‘office of head of the Empire’ was abolished, at the same time proclaiming himself Emperor of Austria.

The break-up of the old Prussian state followed immediately upon the break-up of the Empire. It had made itself so contemptible that it was greeted everywhere with kicks, not least by its new ally Napoleon. After a particularly blunt slap in the face, the Prussian King thought he could scare his persecutors by mobilizing, but by doing so merely plunged to his own destruction. After the preparations for the war had exposed the inner dissolution of the Prussian state in a pitiable manner, it was totally annihilated at the double battle of Jena and Auerstädt on October 14, 1806.

There followed the ignominious capitulation of the Prussian fortresses. Almost everywhere, with very few exceptions, the Junker commanders displayed the same cowardly, treacherous outlook. The state bureaucracy collapsed just as ignominiously as the officer corps, and even the King begged for the mercy of the victor in letters full of dog-like servility, which failed to halt the irresistible advance of French arms.

The first to perish were the petty North German princes, however much they begged for grace. All the same, they fared better than the South and West German princes before them. Almost all of them saved themselves by joining the Confederation of the Rhine. Absorbed in the world-wide plans he was pursuing in his continuing war with England and Russia, Napoleon had little time for such incidental matters. He probably felt later that he had been cheated: if he had really known all there was to know about Lippe and Reuss and Waldeck he would have chased them out altogether, which would doubtless have been one more service on his part to the German nation.

Best of all these North German princes fared the ruler of Saxony, who had been able to earn Napoleon’s goodwill by deserting Prussia in good time and received from him the title of King.