Confederation of the Rhine

The Confederation of the Rhine or Rhine Confederation (Rheinbund in German; in French officially Etats confederes du Rhin but in practice Confederation du Rhin) lasted from 1806 to 1813 and was formed from sixteen German states by Napoleon after he defeated Habsburg's Francis II and Russia's Alexander I in the Battle of Austerlitz.

The members of the confederation were German princes (Fursten) from the Holy Roman Empire, technically not their states as such. They were later joined by 19 others, a total of over 15 million subjects providing a significant strategic advantage to France on its eastern front.

Formation

On 12 July 1806, on signing the Rheinbundakte' — the Treaty of the Confederation of the Rhine — sixteen states in present Germany formally left the Holy Roman Empire and joined together in a confederation (the treaty called it the etats confederes du Rhin). Napoleon was its "protector". On 6 August, following an ultimatum by Napoleon, Francis II gave up his title of Emperor and declared the Holy Roman Empire dissolved. In the years that followed, twenty-three more German states joined the Confederation; his Habsburg dynasty would rule the remainder of the empire as Austria. Only Austria, Prussia, Danish Holstein and Swedish Pomerania stayed outside, not counting the left bank of the Rhine which was annexed by the French empire.

According to the treaty (only official version in French; Rheinbundsakte in German), the confederation was to be run by common constitutional bodies, but the individual states (in particular the larger ones) wanted unlimited sovereignty.

    * in stead of a (feudal, rather nominal) Head of state, as the Holy Roman Emperor had been, its highest office was
    * Karl Theodor von Dalberg, the Grand Duke of Frankfurt am Main and Napoleon's close ally, was president of the College of Kings, styled Prince-Primate of the confederation, sort of a Head of government.
    * The 'Diet of the confederation' (closest thing to a parliament) which Von Dalberg should have called together in Frankfurt am Main never met.

The Confederation was above all a military alliance; the members had to supply France with large numbers of military personnel.

In return the state rulers were given higher statuses: Baden, Hessen, Cleves and Berg were made into grand duchies and Wurttemberg and Bavaria became kingdoms. For their cooperation states could also be made larger by incorporating smaller imperial estates.

After Prussia lost to France in 1806, many medium-sized and small states joined the Rheinbund. It was at its largest in 1808, including four kingdoms, five grand duchies, thirteen duchies, seventeen principalities and the Hansa towns of Hamburg, Lubeck and Bremen.

In 1810 large parts of northwest Germany were quickly incorporated into the Napoleonic Empire in order to better monitor the embargo on trade with Britain, the Continental System.

In 1813, when Napoleon's campaign in Russia failed and some of its members changed sides, the Confederation of the Rhine collapsed.

Member monarchies (alphabetically)

    * Duchy of Anhalt-Bernburg joined 15 December 1806
    * Duchy of Anhalt-Dessau joined 15 December 1806
    * Duchy of Anhalt-Kothen joined 15 December 1806
    * Duchy of Arenberg co-founder 25 July 1806
    * Grand Duchy of Baden co-founder 25 July 1806
    * Kingdom of Bavaria co-founder 25 July 1806
    * Grand Duchy of Berg co-founder 25 July 1806 (absorbs Cleves, both formerly duchies)
    * Grand Duchy of Hesse-Darmstadt co-founder 25 July 1806, formerly a Landgraviate
    * Principality of Hohenzollern-Hechingen co-founder 25 July 1806
    * Principality of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen co-founder 25 July 1806
    * Principality of Isenburg-Birstein co-founder 25 July 1806
    * Principality of Leyen co-founder 25 July 1806 (formerly countship)
    * Principality of Liechtenstein co-founder 25 July 1806
    * Principality of Lippe-Detmold joined 15 December 1806
    * Archbishopric of Mainz(Mayence) co-founder 25 July 1806, formerly Prince-Archbishopric and Electorate, after 1810 Grand Duchy of Frankfurt
    * Duchy of Mecklenburg-Schwerin joined 15 December 1806
    * Duchy of Mecklenburg-Strelitz joined 15 December 1806
    * Duchy of Nassau (Usingen and Weilburg) resulting from the union* of the Principalities of Nassau-Usingen and Nassau-Weilburg, co-founders (25 July 1806) **
    * Duchy of Oldenburg joined 15 December 1806
    * Principality of Reuss-Ebersdorf joined 15 December 1806
    * Principality of Reuss-Greiz joined 15 December 1806
    * Principality of Reuss-Lobenstein joined 15 December 1806
    * Principality of Reuss-Schleiz joined 15 December 1806
    * Principality of Salm (Salm-Salm and Salm-Kyrburg) co-founders 25 July 1806 **
    * Duchy of Saxe-Coburg joined 15 December 1806
    * Duchy of Saxe-Gotha joined 15 December 1806
    * Duchy of Saxe-Hildburghausen joined 15 December 1806
    * Duchy of Saxe-Meiningen joined 15 December 1806
    * Duchy of Saxe-Weimar joined 15 December 1806
    * Kingdom of Saxony joined 11 December 1806
    * Principality of Schaumburg-Lippe joined 15 December 1806
    * Principality of Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt joined 15 December 1806
    * Principality of Schwarzburg-Sondershausen joined 15 December 1806
    * Principality of Waldeck joined 15 December 1806
    * Kingdom of Westphalia last to join, 15 November 1807
    * Kingdom of Wurttemberg co-founder 25 July 1806
    * Grand Duchy of Wurzburg joined 15 September 1806

Aftermath

After the dissolution of the Rhine Confederation, the only attempt at coordination (no actual central authority) in Germany until the creation on 21 October 1813 of the German Confederation was headed by a body called Central Administration Council (Zentralverwaltungsrat); its President was Heinrich Friedrich Karl Freiherr vom und zum Stein (b. 1757 - d. 1831); it was dissolved on 20 June 1815.

On 30 May 1814 the Treaty of Paris declared the German states independent.

In 1815 the Congress of Vienna redrew the continent's political map. In fact, only minor changes were made to inner-German borders, and the resulting German Confederation consisted more or less of the same members as the Confederation of the Rhine.

German Confederation

The German Confederation (German: Deutscher Bund) was a loose association of Central European states created by the Congress of Vienna in 1815 to organize the surviving states of the Holy Roman Empire, which had been abolished in 1806.

Situation in space and time

Between 1806 and 1815, Napoleon had organised the German states into the Confederation of the Rhine, but this collapsed when Napoleon's Invasion of Russia failed in 1813.The German Confederation had roughly the same boundaries as the Empire at the time of the French Revolution (less what is now Belgium). The member states, drastically reduced to about three dozen from more than 200 (see Kleinstaaterei) under the Holy Roman Empire, were recognized as fully sovereign. The members pledged themselves to mutual defence, and jointly maintained the fortresses at Mainz, the city of Luxembourg, Rastatt, Ulm, and Landau. A federal diet under Austrian presidency (in fact the Habsburg Emperor was represented by an Austrian 'presidential envoy') met at Frankfurt.

The Confederation was dissolved in 1866 after the Austro-Prussian War, and was 'succeeded' in 1866 by the Prussian-dominated North German Confederation, with a significantly altered territory, e.g. none of the south, but plus Prussia's eastern expansion and Danish Schleswig), which on 1 January 1871 was transformed into a true state, the German Empire, under Prussia's Hohenzollern dynasty.

All the constituent states of the German Confederation became part of the Kaiserreich in 1871, except the Dutch province of Limburg and the presently independent countries remaining in the Austrian Empire (|Austria, Czech republic, as well as parts of Italy, Poland, Slovenia), Luxembourg (except the part lost to Belgium in 1839, and Liechtenstein. After both World wars, more of Germany would later be lost, mainly in the east to Poland and Russia.

Impact of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic invasions

The late 18th century was a period of political, economic, intellectual, and cultural reform, the Enlightenment (represented by figures such as Locke, Rousseau, Voltaire, and Adam Smith), but also involving early Romanticism, climaxed in the French Revolution, where freedom of the individual and nation was asserted against privilege and custom. Representing a great variety of types and theories, they largely respond to the disintegration of previous cultural patterns, coupled with new patterns of production, specifically the rise of industrial capitalism.

However, the defeat of Napoleon enabled conservative and reactionary regimes such as those of the Kingdom of Prussia, the Austrian Empire and Tsarist Russia to survive, laying the groundwork for the Congress of Vienna and the alliance that strove to oppose radical demands for change ushered in by the French Revolution. The Great Powers at the Congress of Vienna in 1815 aimed to restore Europe (as far as possible) to its pre-war conditions by combating both liberalism and nationalism and by creating barriers around France. With Austria's position on the continent now intact and ostensibly secure under its reactionary premier Klemens von Metternich, the Habsburg empire would serve as a barrier to contain the emergence of Italian and German nation-states as well, in addition to containing France. But this reactionary balance of power aimed at blocking German and Italian nationalism on the continent was precarious.

After Napoleon's final defeat at Waterloo in 1815, the surviving member states of defunct Holy Roman Empire joined to form the German Confederation (Deutscher Bund) — a rather loose organisation, especially because the two great rivals, the Austrian Empire and the Prussian kingdom, each feared domination by the other.

To contemporary observers, a post-Napoleon revolutionary upheaval in Prussia, however, would seem unlikely. Later to emerge as the dominant German state, the political base of a united Germany, and a power that would vie for continental preeminence toward the end of the nineteenth century, Prussia was at that time seemingly backward. In eastern Prussia, manorial reaction dated back to the fall of the Teutonic Knights. Although agricultural structures has been very decentralized in form under the Teutonic Order, the Prussian nobility would later expand their holdings at the expense of the peasantry in the territories once held by the Teutonic Order, reducing them to quiescent serfdom. The rise of urban burgers was also greatly impeded. The Junkers sought to reduce the curb the influence of the towns by short-circuiting them with their exports, leaving little revolutionary potential for labor — urban or rural — free from feudal obligation. In Britain and France, which proved far more hospitable to Western democracy from the Enlightenment to Germany's defeat in World War II, the decline of feudal obligations had been connected with the development of the urban citizens. In Prussia, conversely, the Hohenzollern rulers instead forged a centralized state, explaining the weak development of parliamentary government. By the time of the Napoleonic Wars, Prussia was thus a socially and institutionally backward state, grounded in the virtues of its established military-aristocracy stratified by rigid hierarchical lines.

Apart from Prussia, in Germany as a whole — or more precisely in the many German states —, political disunity, conflicts of interests between noblility and merchants, and the guild system, which discouraged competition and innovation, retarded the progress of industrialism. While this kept the middle class small, affording the old order a measure of stability not seen in France, Prussia's vulnerability to Napoleon's military proved to many perceptive minds among the old order that a weak, divided, and backward Germany could very well have been prey to its united and industrializing neighbor.

After 1815, Prussia's defeats by Napoleonic France highlighted the need for administrative, economic, and social reforms to improve the efficiency of the bureaucracy and encourage practical merit-based education. Inspired by the Napoleonic organization of German and Italian principalities, the reforms of Karl August von Hardenberg and Count Stein were conservative, enacted to preserve aristocratic privilege while modernizing institutions.

The reforms laid the foundation for Prussia's future military might by professionalizing the military, decreeing universal military conscription. To industrialize within the framework of Prussian aristocratic institutions, land reforms ended the monopoly of the Junkers on landownership, thereby abolishing serfdom and many other feudal practices.