THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE IN DECLINE
[Sidenote: Backwardness of the Germanies]
In another connection we have already described the political condition of the Germanies in the sixteenth century. [Footnote: See above, pp. 10 ff.] Outwardly, little change was observable in the eighteenth. The Holy Roman Empire still existed as a nominal bond of union for a loose assemblage of varied states. There was still a Habsburg emperor. There were still electors—the number had been increased from seven to nine [Footnote: Bavaria became an electorate in 1623 and Hanover in 1708; in 1778 Bavaria and the Palatinate were joined, again making eight.]—with some influence and considerable honor. There was still a Diet, composed of representatives of the princes and of the free cities, meeting regularly at Ratisbon. [Footnote: Ratisbon or Regensburg—in the Bavarian Palatinate. The Diet met there regularly after 1663.] But the empire was clearly in decline. The wave of national enthusiasm which Martin Luther evoked had spent itself in religious wrangling and dissension, and in the inglorious conflicts of the Thirty Years' War. The Germans had become so many pawns that might be moved back and forth upon the international chessboard by Habsburg and Bourbon gamesters. Switzerland had been lost to the empire; both France and Sweden had deliberately dismembered other valuable districts. [Footnote: For the provisions of the treaties of Westphalia, see above, pp. 228 f.]
[Sidenote: Deplorable Results of the Thirty Years' War]
It seemed as though slight foundation remained on which a substantial political structure could be reared, for the social conditions in the Germanies were deplorable. It is not an exaggeration to say that during the Thirty Years' War Germany lost at least half of its population and more than two-thirds of its movable property. In the middle of the seventeenth century, at about the time Louis XIV succeeded to a fairly prosperous France, German towns and villages were in ashes, and vast districts turned into deserts. Churches and schools were closed by hundreds, and religious and intellectual torpor prevailed. Industry and trade were so completely paralyzed that by 1635 the Hanseatic League was virtually abandoned, because the free commercial cities, formerly so wealthy, could not meet the necessary expenses. Economic expansion and colonial enterprise, together with the consequent upbuilding of a well-to-do middle class, were resigned to Spain, Portugal, Holland, France, or England, without a protest from what had once been a proud burgher class in Germany. This elimination of an influential bourgeoisie was accompanied by a sorry impoverishment and oppression of the peasantry. These native sons of the German soil had fondly hoped for better things from the religious revolution and agrarian insurrections of the sixteenth century; but they were doomed to failure and disappointment. The peasantry were in a worse plight in the eighteenth century in Germany than in any other country of western or central Europe.
[Sidenote: The German Princes]
The princes alone knew how to profit by the national prostration. Enriched by the confiscation of ecclesiastical property in the sixteenth century and relieved of meddlesome interference on the part of the emperor or the Diet, they utilized the decline of the middle class and the dismal serfdom of the peasantry to exalt their personal political power. They got rid of the local assemblies or greatly curtailed their privileges, and gradually established petty tyrannies. After the Thirty Years' War, it became fashionable for the heirs of German principalities to travel and especially to spend some time at the court of France. Here they imbibed the political ideas of the Grand Monarch, and in a short time nearly every petty court in the Germanics was a small-sized reproduction of the court of Versailles. In a silly and ridiculous way the princes aped their great French neighbor: they too maintained armies, palaces, and swarms of household officials, which, though a crushing burden upon the people, were yet so insignificant in comparison with the real pomp of France, that they were in many instances the laughingstock of Europe. Beneath an external gloss of refinement, these princes were, as a class, coarse and selfish, and devoid of any compensating virtues. Neither the common people, whom they had impoverished, nor the Church, which they had robbed, was now strong enough to resist the growing absolutism and selfishness of the princes.