Revolutionary Europe, 1789-1815

by H. Morse Stephens

Saxony.

Saxe-Weimar.

The impotence of the Empire for offensive and defensive purposes did not, however, greatly affect the German people; the educated classes prided themselves on being superior to patriotic impulses, and on being cosmopolitan rather than German; the poorer classes thought more of the internal administration which affected them than of the attitude of the Empire to European politics. The tendency towards benevolent despotism, which distinguished the greater powers, showed itself also in the petty states of Germany in the diminution, if not the abolition, of the ancient Estates and in the restraints placed on the authority of the nobility. The increased power of the sovereign was generally, if not universally, used to foster the prosperity of his subjects, or at least to promote literature and art. A notice of a few of the principal rulers of Germany will justify this view. Charles Theodore, the Elector Palatine, who in 1778 had succeeded to the Electorate of Bavaria, and united once more the territories of the House of Wittelsbach, was a most enlightened sovereign. In the Palatinate he had founded a brilliant University at Mannheim, and one of the most famous picture galleries in Europe at Düsseldorf; in Bavaria he suppressed some of the numerous convents, which stifled progress, in spite of his sincere Catholicism. He took as one of his ministers the celebrated American, Benjamin Thompson, whom he created Count Rumford, and that man of science and learning endeavoured to suppress mendacity, and made efforts to bring material comforts within reach of the very poorest. Nevertheless, in some points, the Elector Charles Theodore showed himself a bigot; he left education entirely in the hands of the Roman Catholic priesthood and ex-Jesuits, and he allowed the Protestants in his dominions to be persecuted. The Margrave Charles Frederick, who in 1771 reunited in his person the two margraviates of Baden-Baden and Baden-Durlach, was a more thoroughly enlightened prince. He was truly a benevolent despot; he was a student of political economy, on which he himself wrote a treatise, and applied its principles to his little state; he established a scheme of primary education; and on 23d July 1783 he abolished serfdom in his dominions, while maintaining the royal corvées and the prohibition for a subject to leave the country without obtaining his permission. The Duke Charles Eugène of Würtemburg formed a contrast to his neighbours. He established, like them, his own absolutism, but he used his power to impose heavy taxes and raise an army out of all proportion to the size of his duchy. He treated his subjects like slaves, and his administration was so cruel that the Aulic Council threatened to take measures against him. Nevertheless, he was a patron of literature and the arts. He built a theatre at Stuttgart and founded the Academy of Fine Arts there, and he defrayed the expense of the education of the poet Schiller, who, however, afterwards satirised him and fled to Weimar. Yet Charles Eugène of Würtemburg appears an enlightened monarch to such princes as Duke Charles of Deux-Ponts (Zweibrücken), whose successor, Maximilian Joseph, was to succeed the Elector Palatine, Charles Theodore, and to become the first King of Bavaria, for that prince sacrificed his people to his passion for the chase, and to William IX., Landgrave of Hesse-Cassel, who sold his subjects by the hundred to the English Government to carry on the war in America. Going further east, Saxony, which had ranked among the great states of Germany, was in a state of decline. The Electors Augustus II. and Augustus III. had been Kings of Poland, and had ruined their hereditary dominions to support their royal dignity and position. Fortunately Frederick Augustus, who was Elector in 1789, had not been elected to the Polish throne, and had been able to do something for the prosperity of his subjects. He formed a commission to draw up a code of laws, he abolished torture, encouraged industry and agriculture, and founded an Academy of Mines. But he did not go so far, for instance, as the Margrave of Baden, and made no attempt to suppress serfdom. The glory of Saxony was not, however, on the eve of the French Revolution its electoral house; its intellectual capital was not the beautiful city of Dresden. That place was taken by Weimar, where Duke Charles Augustus of Saxe-Weimar collected around him the great philosophers and men of letters who made the German name famous at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth. To his Court resorted the most illustrious Germans of the time, Goethe and Schiller, Herder, Wieland, and Musæus; and the University of his state at Jena became the most famous in Germany. It is not necessary to particularise the other states; it is enough to say that those in the north were generally very backward, especially the duchies of Mecklenburg, and that Hanover was left to the rule of an aristocratic oligarchy, which allowed no reforms, although its University at Göttingen, founded by George II., took rank with the best.

Mayence.

Trèves.

Cologne.

The Ecclesiastical States followed also the movement of the century. The ecclesiastical rulers were often enlightened men, but they were to a great extent the slaves of their chapters. These chapters were generally filled by younger sons of the smaller princes, who insisted on the newly-elected prelates entering into the closest bonds with them to make no changes in the feudal system in the bishoprics. The prince-bishops and abbots at the close of the eighteenth century were, therefore, generally scions of noble houses, such as, for instance, Francis Joseph, Baron of Roggenbach, Bishop of Basle, Baron Francis Louis of Erthal, Bishop of Bamberg and Würtzburg, the Baron of Rödt, Bishop of Constance, the Count of Hoensbroeck, Bishop of Liége, Count Augustus of Limburg, Bishop of Spires, Count Jerome Colloredo, Archbishop of Salzburg, and the Baron of Plettenberg, Abbot of Münster. One curious point deserves notice, that in some instances, Protestant princes had the right to present to Catholic prince-bishoprics, and in 1789 the Duke of York was Prince-Bishop of Osnabrück, and Prince Peter Frederick of Holstein-Gottorp, Prince-Bishop of Lübeck. Of higher rank and more independent of their chapters were the three archbishop-electors, who were therefore more able to rule their states in consonance with the ideas of the century. The chief of these was Baron Frederick Charles of Erthal, Archbishop-Elector of Mayence, and Prince-Bishop of Worms, the Chancellor of the Empire ex officio. This great prelate busied himself mostly with his pleasures, but his rank caused his countenance to be sought by all parties, and his adhesion to Frederick the Great’s League of Princes was the greatest gain the King of Prussia made in his anti-Austrian policy. In 1789 he had completely abandoned the cares of internal and external politics to his coadjutor Charles, Baron de Dalberg, who was to play a leading part in the history of Germany during the period of the French Revolution and Napoleon. The Archbishop-Elector of Trèves in 1789 was Clement Wenceslas, a Saxon prince, and an excellent ruler, who, in 1783, even issued an edict of tolerance, allowing men of any religion to settle in his state, and exercise any trade or profession there. The last Elector-Archbishop was the Archduke Maximilian, the youngest brother of the Emperor Joseph, Archbishop of Cologne, who shared his brother’s liberal opinions, and patronised his predecessor’s creation, the University of Bonn, which had been founded in opposition to the ultramontane University of Cologne, for the encouragement of the modern developments of science. The tendency of all these governments, lay and clerical, was to promote the prosperity of the people; Joseph II. was but the type of the German princes of his time; all wished to do good for the people, but not by them; their characters differed widely, from the enlightened Margrave of Baden to the hunting Duke of Deux-Ponts; but in their different ways and in different degrees they generally meant well. But, while the more important princes showed the tendency of the century, their poorer contemporaries were unable to do so. They were mostly in debt, owing to their efforts to rival the wealthy princes, and in order to raise money resorted to all the devices of mediæval feudalism. The few villages over which they ruled suffered from this tyranny, and it was always possible to know when a traveller crossed the frontier into one of these ‘duodecimo duchies.’ Beneath the petty princes were the Ritters or Knights of the Empire, who abounded in Franconia and Swabia. These knights had no representation in the Imperial Diet, and were consequently dependent directly on the Emperor. Their poverty made them take service with the wealthy princes; and to quote but two instances, Stein, the great Prussian minister, and Würmser, the celebrated Austrian general, were both Knights of the Empire. The result of this minute subdivision of Germany was to destroy the sense of national patriotism; which was not to rise again until after Germany had passed through the mould of Napoleon’s domination.

Switzerland.

Geneva.

The other European confederation, Switzerland, presented the same symptoms of internal decay as the Holy Roman Empire, but it was preserved from the same political degradation by the consciousness of its nationality and the persistence of its local governments. The eighteenth century was marked in Switzerland by struggles between canton and canton, Catholics and Protestants, nobles and bourgeois. In some cantons, such as Berne, an oligarchical system was maintained in the hands of a few noble families; in others, such as Uri, a purely democratic form of government was preserved, which allowed every peasant a voice in the local administration. Where feudalism had been established, the peasants were in no better condition than in the rest of Europe, but in the mountain cantons such a régime was impossible, and individual and political freedom still existed. It must be remembered that the Switzerland of the eighteenth century was not identical with that of the nineteenth. The Grisons formed no part of the confederation, Neufchâtel belonged to Prussia, and Geneva was an independent republic. The part the latter had played in the intellectual movement of the century was most conspicuous. Rousseau was born in Geneva, and Voltaire retired and spent his last years in its neighbourhood. But Geneva had just before 1789 been the scene of a revolution resembling that in Holland. A struggle broke out between the bourgeois families, which monopolised the magistracy, and the mass of the people, which had ended in the victory of the former. The Genevese democrats were expelled, and many of them, notably Clavière, exercised a considerable influence on the course of the Revolution in France.