Confederation of the Rhine

The instrument that ended the Holy Roman Empire and rebuilt the German map in Napoleon's shape. Sixteen German princes seceded from the empire in July 1806 under French protection, and Francis II laid down the imperial crown the following month rather than watch it be taken - ending a political structure that had existed in some form for a thousand years. Eventually most German states except Prussia and Austria joined. The confederation was frankly a French dependency: Napoleon was its protector, it had no functioning central institutions beyond that, and its real purpose was to supply troops, with contingents that fought in Spain and died in Russia. Its lasting effect was consolidation. The mediatisation that accompanied it abolished the imperial knights, the free cities and the ecclesiastical principalities, reducing hundreds of separate polities to a few dozen, and no one afterwards tried to put them back - the 1815 settlement kept the simplified map. Member states also adopted French administrative practice, the Napoleonic code and religious toleration, and Bavaria, Baden and Wurttemberg were promoted to kingdoms or grand duchies as the price of loyalty. The confederation collapsed after Leipzig in 1813, when its members changed sides in sequence. The German Confederation replaced it in 1815 with the same members and a different protector. Frankfurt hosted its nominal diet. It covered most of Germany between the Rhine and the Elbe at its height. Membership reached thirty-six states. Its troops made up a substantial part of the Grande Armee in 1812 and few returned. Napoleon never convened the diet that its charter provided for.

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