The pursuit of glory, p.37
The Pursuit of Glory, page 37
At first he took his imperial duties seriously but when his attempts to reform the Reichshofrat and the Reichskammergericht ended in disappointment, he threw his hands up in despair and in effect abandoned the Empire. This was hardly a clap of thunder in a clear sky. Throughout the reign of his grandfather Charles VI (1711–40) there had been a struggle for domination between the Imperial Chancellery (Reich-skanzlei), which dealt with his interests as Holy Roman Emperor, and the Austrian Court Chancellery (Hofkanzlei), which dealt with his interests as ruler of the Habsburg Monarchy. The question at stake was: which interests should Charles VI put first? Should he regard himself first and foremost as Holy Roman Emperor, with an obligation to treat all the members of the Empire in an even-handed way? Or should he give priority to those lands he ruled as hereditary sovereign of the Habsburg Monarchy, whose interests often ran counter to those of the Empire? In a world of increasingly rapid state-formation, it had to be the second option which came to seem more compelling. But Joseph took this development much further. Indeed, by 1778 he was beginning to wonder whether it might not be desirable to sever his links with the Holy Roman Empire altogether, by abdication of the imperial title.
Joseph was not a man of half-measures. Once he had abandoned his attempt to make the Holy Roman Empire work, he turned against it with vehemence, making no secret of his contempt for its institutions and its members. The imperial office was ‘a ghost of an honorific power’, its business was ‘loathsome’, the imperial constitution was ‘vicious’, the princes were spineless ignoramuses, putty in the hands of their pedantic and venal ministers. Of the senior dignitary of the Holy Roman Empire, the Elector-Archbishop of Mainz, he wrote to Count Trauttmansdorff, his envoy at Mainz: ‘As I have just come from making my Easter confession on Good Friday and have forgiven all those who trespass against me, I cannot harbour any thoughts of revenge, only contempt for an arrant shit who is bursting with pride.’
In the course of the 1770s, and especially after he escaped from the apron-strings of his mother in 1780, Joseph pursued the interests of his Austrian state in a manner that seemed expressly designed to alienate as many German princes as possible. It would be tedious to follow him through the labyrinth of imperial politics. Two revealing examples must suffice: in 1782 he cancelled all payments made to ministers and other public officials throughout the Holy Roman Empire. Although these ‘pensions’ were thinly disguised bribes, they had been a vital lubricant oiling the cogs of Habsburg influence at the various German courts. At a stroke, therefore, Joseph had turned the most influential political figures in the Empire from friends into enemies and had cut off a vital source of information–and all for the sake of a modest economy. In the following year he unilaterally abolished all the diocesan rights of the prince-bishoprics that extended into the Habsburg Monarchy, expropriating all their property that lay in the latter into the bargain.
When the Holy Roman Emperor violated imperial law so flagrantly, even those members of the Empire bound to the imperial office by history and self-interest began to feel that the ground was moving beneath their feet. Not for the first time, the Empire’s self-regulating mechanism began to operate; help was at hand in the unlikely shape of Frederick the Great. Now that the Austrian gamekeeper had turned poacher, the Prussian poacher could–indeed had to–turn gamekeeper. Frederick was able to grasp that plenty could be achieved through the archaic structure of the Empire, but only if the status quo was accepted and impartiality between the religious parties was observed. His reward came in 1785 with the formation of the League of Princes (Fürstenbund). This was an association aimed squarely against Joseph’s imperial policies, especially the attempt to exchange Bavaria for the Austrian Netherlands. Frederick’s ability to enlist two of the most important princes (the Electors of Hanover and Saxony) and many more of the second rank demonstrated the collapse of Austrian influence in the Empire. Perhaps the greatest catch was that ‘arrant shit’ the Archbishop-Elector of Mainz, the senior prelate of the Church in Germany and the arch-chancellor of the Holy Roman Empire, whose defection was of great symbolic importance–and was recognized as such by contemporaries. Undeterred, Joseph continued in the same vein until his death in 1790. No wonder that his long-suffering foreign minister, Prince Kaunitz, whose imperial policy he had wrecked by his bull-in-a-china-shop approach, remarked ‘that was very good of him’ when told that Joseph had died.
In a century that saw ‘the state’ become the ‘master noun’ of political discourse, the Holy Roman Empire was bound to seem out of date, if not anachronistic. It was not a state and never could become a state. Rather it was an organization for the maintenance of law and peace (‘eine Rechts-und Friedensordnung’). So it should not be judged by the standards of a modern state. It did not seek to centralize authority, maximize resources, build the biggest possible army and conquer other countries’ territory. Its failure to do those things brought it into disrepute, not to say contempt, in the power-political world of the nineteenth century, but also ensured a much more understanding assessment after 1945. As for contemporaries, a few shared Joseph II’s hostility, some preferred the affectionate mocking of the kind expressed by Goethe’s Frosch and quoted at the beginning of this section, and a surprisingly large number appreciated that, for all its faults, the Holy Roman Empire had a lot to be said for it. From the rich store of praise, the following commends itself by the intelligence, objectivity and experience of its author, Christoph Martin Wieland (1733–1813):
From the elected head [i.e. the emperor] right down to the mayor and corporation of the Free Imperial City of Zell am Hammersbach [a tiny community in the Black Forest], there is not a ruler in Germany whose greater or lesser powers are not limited on every side by laws, tradition and in many other ways, and against whom, should he engage in any sort of illegal activity against property, honour or personal liberty, the imperial constitution does not provide the injured party protection and redress of grievances.
Significantly, Wieland wrote of Germany and the Empire as if they were synonymous. Since the late fifteenth century its full title had indeed been ‘the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation’. Such was the contrast between the polycentralism of the Holy Roman Empire and the centralism of the German Empire created in 1871 that for too long the ability of the former to accommodate a national identity was overlooked. Friedrich Karl von Moser spoke for many when in 1765 he published a treatise about the German national spirit that derived from the imperial constitution, proclaiming: ‘we are one people, with one name, living under a common head and bound together by our constitution, rights, duties and laws for the great common pursuit of liberty’. He went on to lament that a general patriotism of this kind was not as widespread as it was in France, Great Britain or the Dutch Republic, but insisted that the Germans were free and that this liberty could serve to revive national feeling.
Ironically, just as the outbreak of the French Revolutionary wars in 1792 ushered in the terminal phase in the history of the Empire, its institutions were working better than ever before. During the 1790s both princes and people showed an impressive ability to make the old order work. For all the attention lavished on the tiny handful of Germans who collaborated with the French invaders–the so-called ‘German Jacobins’–there was never any danger that the Empire would collapse from within. Much more ominous was the possibility that Austria and Prussia might form an alliance to partition Germany in the same way that they had already partitioned Poland. After nearly going to war in 1790, they did indeed achieve a rapprochement in 1791 and went to war with revolutionary France in 1792. In his Thoughts on French Affairs Edmund Burke predicted:
As long as those two princes are at variance, so long the liberties of Germany are safe. But if ever they should so far understand one another, as to be persuaded that they have a more direct and more certainly defined interest in a proportioned mutual aggrandizement, than in a reciprocal reduction, that is, if they come to think that they are more likely to be enriched by a division of spoil, than to be rendered secure by keeping to the old policy of preventing others from being spoiled by either of them, from that moment the liberties of Germany are no more.
Burke was both right and wrong. He was right in the sense that if Austria and Prussia had won the war in 1792, they would have taken ‘compensation’ in the form of an exchange of the Austrian Netherlands for Bavaria, and more Polish territory respectively. But he was wrong because they did not win and very soon their relations were scarred by vehement mutual recrimination. Prussia left the war in 1795 and signed a separate peace with France. What really finished off the Empire was the decision by the revolutionaries to advance the French frontier to the Rhine and to compensate the secular princes affected with the secularization of the ecclesiastical states. It all took a very long time, for the good reason that the Austrians proved remarkably resilient. Not until 1806 did the last Holy Roman Emperor, Francis II, abdicate and become the Austrian Emperor Francis I, a title he had created for himself two years earlier. How proud Joseph II would have been. In terms of the categorization identified earlier in this section, in effect what the French revolutionaries and then Napoleon did was to allow group one to gobble up groups two to five. Napoleon was brutally frank about his motives. In 1807 Karl Theodor von Dalberg, who had been the last arch-chancellor of the Empire, went to see Napoleon at Saint Cloud to recommend the restoration of imperial institutions. He was cut short: ‘Monsieur l’Abbé,’ Napoleon began contemptuously, ‘I am going to let you in on my secret. The little princes in Germany would like to be protected against the big; but the big princes would like to rule as they see fit; but, as all I want from Germany is men and money and it is the big princes who can supply me with them, I shall leave them in peace and the small fry will have to make the best of it.’ In this brave new world of power-politics there was no room for such a soft polity as the Holy Roman Empire. Whether it was sensible of Napoleon to destroy it is a different matter.
6
Reform and Revolution
THE STATE
In the middle of the eighteenth century, the abbé de Véri (1724–99) recorded in his journal: ‘Today, hardly anyone dare say in Parisian society, I serve the king…You’d be taken for one of the chief valets at Versailles. I serve the state is the expression most commonly used.’ Political authority and loyalty had become depersonalized. It was a trend encouraged by some of the monarchs themselves. There is no evidence that Louis XIV said ‘I am the state’ (L’état, c’est moi) but he did write in his treatise On the craft of kingship (Sur le métier du roi) of 1679: ‘The interest of the state must come first.’ It must be conceded that he then reintroduced a personal element by adding, ‘when one looks to the state, one is really working for oneself. The welfare of the former secures the glory of the latter. The ruler who makes the state content, prestigious and powerful also promotes his own glory.’ Succeeding generations were less equivocal. Frederick the Great frequently proclaimed that he was just ‘the first servant of the state’. Joseph II, in his first memorandum, written in 1761 shortly after his twentieth birthday, agreed: ‘everything exists for the state; this word contains everything, so all who live in it should come together to promote its interests’. Significantly, Catherine the Great of Russia did not say anything of the kind, confining herself to a vague commitment to ‘the public good’. The word ‘state’ does not appear in the ‘Great Instruction’ (Nakaz) she produced in 1766.
The elevation of the state to be the ‘master-noun’ of eighteenth-century political discourse had been long prepared. In his classic study The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, Quentin Skinner showed how the main elements of the modern concept of the state were gradually acquired between the late thirteenth and late sixteenth centuries:
The decisive shift was made from the idea of the ruler ‘maintaining his state’–where this simply meant upholding his own position–to the idea that there is a separate legal and constitutional order, that of the State, which the ruler has a duty to maintain. One effect of this transformation was that the power of the State, not that of the ruler, came to be envisaged as the basis of government. And this in turn enabled the State to be conceptualised in distinctively modern terms–as the sole source of law and legitimate force within its own territory, and as the sole appropriate object of its citizens’ allegiances.
During those three centuries, three crucial axioms were formed: first, politics came to be regarded as a discrete realm, independent of theology; secondly, the supreme authority in any polity came to be regarded as independent of any international agency such as the papacy or Holy Roman Empire; and thirdly, that authority also claimed a monopoly of legislation and allegiance within its borders.
The confessional strife unleashed by reformation and counter-reformation, aided and abetted by the closely related struggles between noble factions, advertised the need for a single centre of power in each and every polity. Jean Bodin (1530–96), who lived through the French Wars of Religion, and Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), who lived through the English Civil War, developed a theory of sovereignty that was to form the bedrock of the modern state. Exercising ‘the most high, absolute and perpetual power over the citizens and subjects in a commonwealth’ (Bodin), the state was impersonal in two ways, for it enjoyed an existence separate both from the individual who currently happened to rule it and also from those who were ruled. Consequently, it could demand the absolute loyalty of both. This ‘conceptual revolution’ (Skinner) meant that, although homage was paid to a person, the true object of loyalty was an abstraction. Not every European sovereign was able to detect this sea-change and respond accordingly. Louis XV showed that the old view of the state as an aggregate of estates belonging to the king was still alive and well, when he gave the following dressing-down to the assembled chambers of the Parlement of Paris on 3 March 1766, in a session that became known as the ‘séance de la flagellation’:
I shall not permit in my kingdom the formation of an association which allows the natural ties of reciprocal duties and obligations to degenerate into a conspiracy of resistance, nor that it introduces to the kingdom a fictitious corporation which can only disrupt harmony. The magistracy does not constitute a corporation, nor an order separate from the three legitimate orders of the kingdom. The magistrates are my officers charged with administering on my behalf my truly royal duty to dispense justice to my subjects…Sovereignty resides in my person alone…and my courts derive their existence and their authority from me alone. The plenitude of this authority remains with me. They exercise it only in my name and it may never be turned against me. I alone have the right to legislate. This power is indivisible. The officers of my courts do not make the law, they only register, publish and enforce it. Public order emanates exclusively from me, and the rights and the interests of the nation, which it has been dared to separate from the monarch, are necessarily united with mine and repose entirely in my hands.
The constant repetition of the possessive pronoun–‘my kingdom’, ‘my subjects’, ‘my courts’–projected a personal, not to say proprietorial vision of kingship fundamentally at odds with the objective concept of the state.
The theorizing of Bodin, Hobbes and those that followed in their footsteps, undoubtedly did more than reflect–or react against–current practice. If one cannot accept without reservation Hegel’s maxim that ‘once the world of ideas has been transformed, reality cannot hold out for long’, it is an arid view of the political process that ignores the ideological dimension. On the other hand, it is also possible to detect changes in the material world that were moving things along in the same direction. The greatly improved communications discussed in the first chapter provide a good example. When most members of the human race were confined to the community in which they were born and its immediate environs, power relationships were obviously direct and personal. It can be surmised with confidence that today autarkic tribes living in the depths of the Amazonian rain forest do not have much of a concept of the state (although they would be well advised to develop one as soon as Christian missionaries make an appearance). But once the lords started to spend significant periods away from their regions in town or at court, and once their subjects started to move around as migrant workers, or were recruited into a centralized army, political power had to be envisaged in a correspondingly abstract manner. If it was not until the late nineteenth century that peasants were truly turned into Frenchmen, as Eugen Weber has shown, that long-term process had certainly accelerated between 1648 and 1815. In France alone, several million people were uprooted from their provinces by the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, and marched to the four corners of Europe. The same could be said of those other great solvents of the feudal world: urbanization and capitalism.
