Note (Back) — Chapter IX

Germany in 1814 was still disunited and comparatively backward, but it was by no means the Germany of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The transformations wrought to the east of the Rhine during the period of the Napoleonic ascendancy were three-fold. In the first place, after more than a thousand years of existence, the Holy Roman Empire was, in 1806, brought to an end, and Germany, never theretofore since the days of barbarism entirely devoid of political unity, was left without even the semblance or name of nationality. In the second place, there was within the period a far-reaching readjustment of the political structure of the German world, involving (1) the reducing of the total number of German states—kingdoms, duchies, principalities, ecclesiastical dominions, and knights' holdings—from above three hundred to two score; (2) the augmenting of the importance of Austria by the acquisition of a separate imperial title,[275] and the raising of Saxony, Bavaria, and Württemberg from duchies to kingdoms; and (3) the bringing into existence of certain new and more or less artificial political aggregates, namely, the kingdom of Westphalia, the grand-duchy of Warsaw, and the Confederation of the Rhine, for the purpose of facilitating the Napoleonic dominance of north-central Europe. Finally, in several of the states, notably Prussia, the overturn occasioned by the Napoleonic conquests prompted systematic attempts at reform, with the consequence of a revolutionizing modernization of social and economic conditions altogether comparable with that which within the generation had been achieved in France.