The Meaning of Empire in Central Europe around 1800

Abstract

News of Francis II’s abdication on 6 August 1806 spread rapidly throughout Europe, well before the reluctant emperor signed the official letters notifying imperial institutions and foreign heads of state. Johann Wolfgang Goethe heard it already the following morning as he set out on a journey to Jena, but his diary entry merely records that the ‘quarrel between the servant and the coachman on the coachbox agitated us more than the split of the Roman Empire’.1 Flowing from the pen of one of Germany’s greatest literary figures, this quotation has long been cited as proof that the Holy Roman Empire slipped away largely unnoticed and unlamented. More recently, historians have been less prepared to accept this in view of substantial research demonstrating the Empire’s vitality into the late eighteenth century.2 Most attention has been directed to the process by which the Empire ended, starting with the question whether Napoleon merely toppled a crumbling gothic edifice, or destroyed a flourishing state.3 In addition to the part played by individuals, such as the Arch Chancellor and Elector of Mainz, Karl von Dalberg4, historians have questioned whether the Empire’s dissolution was legal5 and whether it constituted a ‘fitting end’ for a state that claimed more than a thousand years of existence.6 The approach of the bicentenary in 2006 encouraged reflection on the place of 1806 in German history and the Empire’s legacy for later development.7