Abstract
The Holy Roman Empire was fractured into a patchwork nature of power and authority. The writer, Johann Caspar Riesbeck, commented caustically in his travelogue that although he desired to thoroughly study Germany, he omitted from his account the ‘numberless landgraviates, margraviates [sic], baronies, republics &c. &c. As to these, it is doing them honour enough to say they exist.’2 Riesbeck argued that few existing travelogues had really done justice to the diversity of Germany. It was, he claimed:
more difficult to know Germany than any other country; for it is not here as in France, where all ape the manners of the capital … In Germany there is no town which regulates the manners of the whole, but the country is divided into numberless variety of large and small states, differing from each other in religion, government, opinions, &c. and which have no band of union whatever, except their common language.3
Beginning in Strasbourg, Riesbeck travelled the length and breadth of the Empire, taking in its most important polities and greatest cities. A true man of the Enlightenment, he provided a commentary on all aspects of life, from the courtly world to the peasant farm, from the state of manufacturing to the strength of the military.
With what horror and dismay upright persons in the land observed the signs of the times. What soul would not be moved by the sight of the dissolution of an Empire that had stood a thousand years, that had been for so long the first and most powerful of Christianity and whose history offered so many glorious periods of splendour and greatness, as well as the smashing of an old, glorious, valiant peoples highly distinguished in every form of human culture?1
Johann Gottfried von Pahl on the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire
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Notes
Johann Gottfried von Pahl, Denkwürdigkeiten aus meinem Leben und aus meiner Zeit. Nach dem Tode des Verfassers herasugegeben von dessen Sohne Wilhelm Pahl (Tübingen, 1840), p. 530.
Johann C. Riesbeck, Travels through Germany, in a series of letters; written in German by the Baron Riesbeck, and translated by the Rev. Mr. Maty, vol. 1 (London, 1787), p. 2. Riesback concealed his authorship of the travelogue. It was originally published in Germany in 1783 with the title, Briefe eines reisenden Franzosen über Deutschland an seinen Bruder zu Paris.
On the Rhineland before 1789, see T. C. W. Blanning, The French Revolution in Germany. Occupation and Resistance in the Rhineland, 1792–1802 (Oxford, 1983), pp. 20–63
Michael Rowe, From Reich to State. The Rhineland in the Revolutionary Age, 1780–1830 (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 13–47.
See Timothy Reuter, ‘The Medieval German Sonderweg? The Empire and its Rulers in the High Middle Ages’ in Kings and Kingship in the Middle Ages, ed. Anne Duggan (London, 1993), pp. 179–211. Geoffrey Barraclough argues in his classic account that the peculiarities of German history lay in the medieval period.
See Geoffrey Barraclough, The Origins o f Modern Germany, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1947), p. ix. That the Sonderweg thesis still maintains its appeal is shown by Heinrich August Winkler’s study Der lange Weg nach Westen (Munich, 2000). On the early modern period, see the essays in GH 20:3 (2002), especially Charles W. Ingrao’s introduction.
Peter Wilson provides an overview of recent historiography on the Old Reich in his essay ‘Still a Monstrosity? Some Reflection on Early Modem German Statehood’ HJ 49:2 (2006): 565–76. For positive assessments, see Karl Otmar von Aretin, Das Alte Reich, 1648–1806, 4 vols (Stuttgart, 1993–2000) and
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The regiment had a paper strength of 1,992, 903 of whom were classed as foreigners. See Willerd R. Fann, ‘On the Infantryman’s Age in Eighteenth Century Prussia’ MA 41:4 (1977): 165–60.
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Thomas Nipperdey, Deutsche Geschichte, 1800–1806. Bilrgerwelt und starker Stadt (Munich, 1998), p. 11.
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James, L.S. (2013). Facing the Revolution: The German States from 1789 to 1815. In: Witnessing the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars in German Central Europe. War, Culture and Society, 1750–1850. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137313737_2
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