Confederation of the Rhine
Sixteen German princes seceded from the Holy Roman Empire in July 1806 to form a confederation under Napoleon's protection, and the empire dissolved within a month. The states involved were the middling ones — Bavaria, Württemberg, Baden, Hesse-Darmstadt, Nassau and others — and they had done extremely well out of the previous three years, absorbing the ecclesiastical principalities, free cities and imperial knights abolished in the reorganisation of 1803. Bavaria and Württemberg became kingdoms, and every member acquired territory. The price was military. The confederation's treaty obliged the members to supply contingents to French armies, eventually some 120,000 men, and they fought in Spain and in Russia; the retreat from Moscow destroyed most of the Bavarian and Westphalian contingents. The internal effect was more durable than the alliance. Members introduced the Napoleonic civil code, equality before the law, religious toleration, the abolition of serfdom and of guild restrictions, and a professional bureaucracy, in states that were now large enough to be governed properly — which is how much of Germany acquired modern administration. Francis II laid down the imperial crown on 6 August 1806, four days after receiving an ultimatum to do so, and released all remaining members from their obligations. Prussia and Austria stayed out; Prussia was destroyed at Jena three months later. The confederation collapsed after Leipzig in 1813, when its members changed sides in sequence, and the German Confederation of 1815 kept the territorial rearrangement it had made. Napoleon's own summary of the arrangement was that his federal system was a fine idea that had been badly executed by everyone concerned. What it left behind was thirty-nine states where there had been three hundred, which is the shape the German question then had to be answered in.
- Year: 1806 CE
- Category: Political
