(1800.)
Again did evil arise from France, and again did a new life spring from the struggle against the enemy.
It was not the first time that that country had inflicted deep wounds on German national strength, and had unintentionally awakened a new power which victoriously arrested her progress. The policy of Richelieu had been the most dangerous opponent of the German Empire, but at the same time it had been obliged to support the Protestant party there, in which lay the source of all later renovation. After him French literature ruled the German mind for a century, and for a long time it appeared as if the Academy of Paris and the classical drama were to govern our taste, as did the tailors and peruke makers of the Seine. But indignation and shame produced, in opposition to French art, a poetry and science which, in spite of its cosmopolitan tendency, was genuinely national. Now the heir of the French revolution brought violent destruction on the declining empire, and gave his commands on its ruins like a tyrannical ruler, till at last the Germans resolved to drive him away, in order to take their affairs into their own hands.
Defenceless was the frontier against the invading stranger. Only on the lower Rhine there was the Prussian realm, but along the other part of the stream were the domains of ecclesiastical princes, and small territories without any power of resistance. It was the four western circles of the empire, the Upper Rhine, Suabia, Franconia, and Bavaria, which the North Germans mockingly called the Empire.
Even in the Empire, the ecclesiastical territories and Bavaria were very much behindhand, in comparison with Baden and Suabia. The example of Frederic II. in Prussia, and the philosophic enlightenment of this period, had reformed most of the Protestant courts, as also Electoral Saxony, since the Seven Years' War. Greater economy, household order, and earnest solicitude for the good of the subject became visible. Many governments were models of good administration, like Weimar and Gotha, and in the family of one of the great ladies of the eighteenth century, the Duchess Caroline of Hesse, as well as in Darmstadt and Baden, there was economical mild rule. Even indeed in the court of Duke Karl of Wurtemburg there was improvement. He who had dug lakes on the hills, and employed his serfs to fill them with water, who had lighted the woods with Bengal lights, and caused half-naked Fauns and Satyrs to dance there, had learnt a lesson since 1778, and on his fiftieth birthday, had promised his people to become economical, and had since that been transformed into a careful landlord, under whom the country flourished. Even the ecclesiastical courts had experienced somewhat of this philosophical tendency, though undoubtedly the activity of an enlightened ruler of Würzburg or Munster was much limited by the inevitable supremacy of an ecclesiastical aristocracy, and the increasing priestly rule.
But the Imperial cities of the south were, with the exception of Frankfort, in a state of decadence; they were deeply in debt, and a rotten patrician rule prevented modern industry from flourishing. The councils still continued to issue high-sounding decrees, but the Senatus populusque, Bopfingensis, or Nordlingensis as they called themselves in heroic style, appeared only a caricature to their neighbours. The renowned Ulm, the southern capital of Suabia, once the mistress of Italian agency business, had sunk so low that it was supposed that she must sell her domain to preserve herself from bankruptcy; Augsburg also was only the shadow of its former greatness, its princely merchants had become weak commission agents and small money-changers: it was said that the city only contained six firms that could raise more than 200,000 gulden. The Academy of Arts of the city was nothing but a school for artisans. The famous engravers made bad pictures of saints for the village trade; the old hatred of confessions still raged among the inhabitants, for its famed Senate was divided into two factions, and nowhere did the parties of Frederic and Maria Theresa contend so bitterly. Even Nuremberg, once the flower and the pride of Germany, had been severely injured in the old bad time; its 30,000 inhabitants were hardly the fifth of that community which, 300 years earlier, had mustered in fearful battle array; but the city was still in the way to gain a modest position in the German markets, no longer by the artistic articles of old Nuremberg, but by an extended trade in small wares of wood and metal, in which some of the old artistic feeling might still be perceived.
It was no better along the Rhine,—the great ecclesiastical street of the Empire,—there lay, down the stream, the residences of three ecclesiastical Electors in succession. In the Electorate of Mainz, which, from olden times, had frequently maintained a great independence within the church, two intellectual rulers had undoubtedly given an enlightened aspect to a part of their clergy, and to the new portions of their city; but in the old city and trades, little of the new time was to be perceived, and the prebendaries who read Voltaire and Rousseau were by no means an unqualified gain, at least for the morality of the citizen. But the great Cologne was in the worst repute; the dung-heaps lay all day in the streets, which were not lighted, the pavement was miserable, and on dark evenings the necks and limbs of passengers were in great danger, the roads also were insecure, filled with idling ragamuffins. The beggars formed a great guild, counting 5000 heads; till noon they sat and lay at the church doors in rows, many on chairs, the possession of one of which was considered as a secure rent, and assigned as dowry to the beggar's children; when they left their places, they went to the houses to demand food for dinner; they were a coarse, wicked set.[[32]] On the whole, it is known that the ecclesiastical rulers treated the citizens and peasants with comparative mildness, and the military compulsion was less burdensome, but they did little for the industry or cultivation of the people.
After them, in this respect, Bavaria was in worst repute, and no other people since that has made such great progress; but about 1790 it was said to be most behindhand in wealth and morals; the cities, with the exception of Munich, looked decayed, and were poorly populated: idleness and beggary spread everywhere; except brewers, bakers, and innkeepers, there were no wealthy people. Even in Munich, countless beggars loitered about, mixed with numbers of modish, dandified officials; there was no national industry, only some manufactures of articles of luxury favoured by the government. Not long ago it was maintained by a Bavarian monthly journal, that manufacturing activity and the like were not very practicable for Bavarians, because the great river of the country flowed to Austria, and a competition with the Imperial hereditary States was not possible. The most flourishing countries in Germany, next to the small territories on the North Sea, were then Electoral Saxony and the country of the Lower Rhine, up to the Westphalian county of Mark; and this is little altered.
To those who dwelt in the Empire the inhabitants of the North were a remote people, but they were in the habit of considering Prussia and Austria also as foreign powers.
Of the people in Austria the citizens of the Empire knew little. Even the Bavarian, before whose eyes his Danube flowed to Vienna, desired no intercourse with these neighbours; he preferred looking over the mountains to the Tyrol, for the hatred which so readily divides frontier people was there in full force. The Saxon had important trade with the Germans in Northern Bohemia; it mattered little to him what lay beyond; it was a foreign race, in evil repute, from the old war. To other Germans the "Bohemian Mountains" and an unknown land signified the same thing. The nations which dwelt along the Danube, amongst them Czechs, Moravians, Italians, Slovenes, Magyars, and Slovaks, were a vigorous, powerful race, of ancient German blood; the Thirty Years' War had little injured their stately carriage and personal beauty, but their own rulers had estranged them from Germany. By persecution, not only the heretics, but also the activity and culture of those who remained, had been frightened away; but a life of enjoyment and pleasure still pulsated in the great capital. Any one who wished to enjoy himself went there—Hungarians, Bohemians, and nobles from the Empire. Germany lay outside the Vienna world, and they thought little of it.