Kingdom of Westphalia

Napoleon's model kingdom, assembled from other people's territory and handed to his youngest brother. Created in 1807 after Prussia's defeat at Jena, it was stitched together from Hessian, Brunswick, Hanoverian and Prussian lands with a capital at Kassel, and Jerome Bonaparte was installed as king at the age of twenty-two. The point was demonstration. Napoleon wrote to Jerome that the kingdom's constitution should show Germans the benefits of French rule, and it was genuinely the most liberal state in Germany on paper: serfdom abolished, the Napoleonic code introduced, guilds ended, Jews granted full civil equality for the first time anywhere in Germany, and a representative assembly created. In practice the assembly met rarely and the kingdom was taxed and conscripted to exhaustion, contributing tens of thousands of soldiers to Spain and Russia, and Jerome's court spending became a byword. Peasants who had been freed still owed compensation payments they could not afford. The kingdom collapsed in October 1813 as Cossacks approached, and Jerome fled; the Congress of Vienna dissolved it entirely and restored the old rulers. Its legal reforms proved harder to undo, and the code remained in force in parts of the Rhineland into the twentieth century. Jewish emancipation was revoked almost immediately. The name was later reused for a Prussian province. Kassel's Wilhelmshohe palace served as the royal residence and is now a World Heritage site. The kingdom covered about thirty-eight thousand square kilometres. Jerome was known to his subjects as Konig Lustik, king merry. The Brothers Grimm both held posts under its administration.

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