After the Peace of Lunéville, in 1801, the electorates of Cologne, Trèves, and Mayence were suppressed, together with the principalities of Münster, Hildesheim, Paderborn, and Osnabrück, while such abbeys and monasteries as had come through the Reformation were dissolved.
Besides Charlemagne's bishoprics, others founded by Otho the Great were suppressed.[{35}]
Upon the restoration of the Rhenish provinces to Germany in 1814, the Catholic hierarchy was reëstablished and a rearrangement of dioceses took place. A treaty with the Prussian state gave Cologne again an archbishopric, with suffragans at Trèves, Münster, and Paderborn, and Count Charles Spiegel zum Desenburg was made archbishop. Other provinces aspired to similar concessions, and certain of the suppressed sees were reërected.
The Lutherized districts, north and eastward of the Rhine, were very extensive, but the influence which went forth again from Cologne served to counteract this to a great extent.
The Catholic hierarchy in Germany is made up as follows:
| ARCHBISHOPRICS | SUFFRAGANS |
Posen and Gnesen | Kulm and Ermeland |
| Breslau | |
| Olmütz | |
| Prague | |
| Cologne | Hildesheim, Osnabrück, Münster, Paderborn, Fulda, Limburg, Trèves, Mayence. |
| Freiburg in Breisgau | Würtemberg, Augsburg, |
| Munich and Freising | Passau and Ratisbon.[{36}] |
| Bamberg | Würzburg, Eichstadt, and Speyer, and the Vicariat of Dresden. |
| Strasburg and Metz | |
The religious population of Germany to-day is divided approximately thus: Protestants, 63 per cent; Catholics, 36 per cent; Jews, 1 per cent.
The reign of the pure Gothic spirit in church-building, as far as it ever advanced in Germany, was at an end with the wars of the Hussites and the Reformation of Luther. During these religious and political convulsions, the Gothic spirit may be said to have died, so far as the undertaking of any new or great work goes.
Just as we find in Germany a different speech and a different manner of living from that of either Rome or Gaul, we find also in Germany, or rather in the Rhenish provinces, a marked difference in ecclesiastical art from either of the types which were developing contemporaneously in the neighbouring countries.
The Rhine proved itself a veritable borderland, which neither kept to the strict[{37}] classicism of the Romanesque manner of building, nor yet adopted, without question, the newly arisen Gothic of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.