Dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire
Francis II laid down the imperial crown on 6 August 1806, and an institution of a thousand years ended by a notice in a newspaper. The Holy Roman Empire had been a real framework and had become a legal fiction — some three hundred territories of wildly different size, free cities, ecclesiastical principalities, imperial knights holding a few square miles, all in a structure of diets and courts that could not raise an army or a tax. Voltaire's line about it being neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire was already a commonplace. Napoleon dismantled it in two moves. The reorganisation of 1803, drafted largely by France and Russia, abolished nearly all the ecclesiastical states and most of the free cities and handed their territory to the middling princes as compensation for losses west of the Rhine — reducing hundreds of entities to a few dozen and destroying the Catholic bloc in the electoral college. Then in July 1806 sixteen princes seceded to form the Confederation of the Rhine under his protection. With that, the empire had no members worth the name, and Napoleon threatened to take the title himself. Francis had prepared for it: he had created the hereditary title of Emperor of Austria for himself in 1804, so he had somewhere to stand. He abdicated the older crown and released all its members from their obligations. The German Confederation of 1815 replaced it with something weaker, and the question of who would organise Germany was left for Bismarck. The empire had also been a genuine legal order for the small. An imperial knight or a free city could sue a prince in the imperial courts and occasionally win, which is the protection that disappeared in 1806 and did not come back in any form for a century and a half.
- Year: 1806 CE
- Category: Political
