The Political Culture of the Holy Roman Empire on the Eve of its Destruction

Abstract

It has become almost obligatory to preface any analysis of the Holy Roman Empire in its final decades with an observation on the historiography of this strange entity, and of how, in the last half century, our understanding of the old Reich has been transformed. Previously, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the early-modern Reich stood as an object of ridicule and condemnation, sentiments nowhere more strongly expressed than in the Borussian historiography that identified Prussia as the entity through which Germany’s destiny would be fulfilled. The condemnation of Prussia and Prussian values after 1945 provided one precondition for the rehabilitation of the Reich. The political context of post-war Europe, which celebrated the resolution of conflict through peaceful, legal channels, and rejected the unrestrained application of Realpolitik, was a second. The product of this reassessment from the 1960s onwards was a stream of publications devoted to those imperial institutions that contributed most to orderly and relatively peaceful conflict resolution, namely the imperial courts that administered justice and the imperial circles (or Kreise) that theoretically enforced legal judgements. Here is not the place to explore in greater depth this rich historiography pertaining to the eighteenth-century Reich. Suffice it to say that it celebrates the old Reich not as a state, but as a legal order that was in many respects unique in early-modern Europe.¹