Part 9

Germany was now about to be aroused from the torpor into which she had been cast by the Thirty Years' War; but her awakening was due, not to the action of the Empire, which was more and more seen to be practically dead, but to the rivalry of two great German states, Austria and Prussia. The latter had long been laying the foundations of her power. Brandenburg, the centre of the Prussian kingdom, was, as we have seen, granted in the 15th century by the emperor Sigismund to Frederick, count of Hohenzollern. In his hands, and in those of his prudent successors, it became one of the most flourishing of the North-German principalities. At the time of the Reformation Albert, a member of a subordinate branch of the house of Hohenzollern, happened to be grand master of the Teutonic Order. He became a Protestant, dissolved the order, and received in fief of the king of Poland the duchy of Prussia. In 1611 this duchy fell by inheritance to the elector of Brandenburg, and by the treaty of Wehlau, in 1657, in the time of Frederick William, the Great Elector, it was declared independent of Poland. By skill, foresight and courage Frederick William managed to add largely to his territories; and in an age of degenerate sovereigns he was looked upon as an almost model ruler. His son, Frederick, aspired to royal dignity, and in 1701, having obtained the emperor's assent, was crowned king of Prussia. The extravagance of Frederick drained the resources of his state, but this was amply atoned for by the rigid economy of Frederick William I., who not only paid off the debts accumulated by his father, but amassed an enormous treasure. He so organized all branches of the public service that they were brought to a point of high efficiency, and his army was one of the largest, best appointed and best trained in Europe (see PRUSSIA: _History_). He died in 1740, and within six months, when Frederick II. was on the Prussian throne, Maria Theresa claimed, in virtue of the pragmatic sanction, the lands and hereditary titles of her father Charles VI.

Frederick the Great.

First Silesian War.

Charles VII.

Second Silesian War.

Frederick II., a young, ambitious and energetic sovereign, longed not only to add to his dominions but to play a great part in European politics. His father had guaranteed the pragmatic sanction, but as the conditions on which the guarantee had been granted had not been fulfilled by Charles VI., Frederick did not feel bound by it, and revived some old claims of his family on certain Silesian duchies. Maria Theresa would not abate her rights, but before she could assert them Frederick had entered Silesia and made himself master of it. Meanwhile, the elector of Bavaria had come forward and disputed Maria Theresa's right to the succession, and the elector of Saxony had also put in a claim to the Austrian lands. Taking advantage of these disputes, France formed an alliance with the two electors and with the king of Prussia against Austria; and in the war which followed the allies were at first so successful that the elector of Bavaria, through the influence of France, was crowned emperor as Charles VII. (1742-1745). Maria Theresa, a woman of a noble and undaunted spirit, appealed, with her infant son, afterwards Joseph II., in her arms, to the Hungarian diet, and the enthusiastic Magyars responded chivalrously to her call. To be more at freedom she concluded peace with Frederick, and ceded Silesia to him, although greatly against her will. Saxony also was pacified and retired from the struggle. After this Maria Theresa, supported by England, made way so rapidly and so triumphantly that Frederick became alarmed for his new possessions; and in 1742 he once more proclaimed war against her, nominally in aid of the emperor, Charles VII. Ultimately, in 1748, she was able to conclude an honourable peace at Aix-la-Chapelle; but she had been forced, as before, to rid herself of Frederick by confirming him in the sovereignty of the territory he had seized.

Francis I.

After the death of Charles VII., Francis, grand duke of Tuscany, Maria Theresa's husband, was elected emperor. Francis I. (1745-1765), an amiable nonentity, with the instincts of a shopkeeper, made no pretence of discharging important imperial duties, and the task of ruling the hereditary possessions of the house of Habsburg fell wholly to the empress-queen. She executed it with discretion and vigour, so that Austria in her hands was known to be one of the most formidable powers in the world. Her rival, Frederick II., was, if possible, still more

## active. It did not occur to him, any more than to the other German

sovereigns of the 18th century, to associate his people with him in the government of the country; he was in every respect a thoroughly absolute sovereign. But he shared the highest ideas of the age respecting the responsibilities of a king, and throughout his long reign acted in the main faithfully as "the first servant of the state." The army he always kept in readiness for war; but he also encouraged peaceful arts, and diffused throughout his kingdom so much of his own alert and aggressive spirit that the Prussians became more intelligent and more wealthy than they had ever before been. He excited the admiration of the youth of Germany, and it was soon the fashion among the petty princes to imitate his methods of government. As a rule, they succeeded only in raising far larger armies than the taxpayers could afford to maintain.

The Seven Years' War, 1756-1763.

Maria Theresa never gave up the hope of winning back Silesia, and, in order to secure this object, she laid aside the jealousies of her house, and offered to conclude an alliance with France. Frederick had excited the envy of surrounding sovereigns, and had embittered them against him by stinging sarcasms. Not only France, therefore, but Russia, Saxony and ultimately Sweden, willingly came to terms with Austria, and the aim of their union was nothing short of the partition of Prussia. Frederick, gaining knowledge of the plot, turned to England, which had in the previous war helped Austria. At the close of 1755 his offer of an alliance was acceded to; and in the following year, hoping by vigorously taking the initiative to prevent his enemies from united action, he invaded Saxony, and began the Seven Years' War (q.v.), the result of which was to confirm Prussia in the possession of Silesia.

Prussia now took rank as one of the leading European powers, and by her rise a new element was introduced into the political life of Germany. Austria, although associated with the Empire, could no longer feel sure of her predominance, and it was inevitable that the jealousies of the two states should lead to a final conflict for supremacy. Even before the Seven Years' War there were signs that the German people were beginning to tire of incessant imitation of France, for in literature they welcomed the early efforts of Klopstock, Wieland and Lessing; but the movement received a powerful impulse from the great deeds of Frederick. The nation, as a whole, was proud of him, and began, for the first time since the Thirty Years' War, to feel that it might once more assume a commanding place in the world.

## Partition of Poland.

Joseph II.

In 1772 the necessities of Frederick's position compelled him to join Russia and Austria in the deplorable partition of Poland, whereby he gained West Prussia, exclusive of Danzig and Thorn, and Austria acquired West Silesia. After this he had to watch closely the movements of the emperor Joseph II., who, although an ardent admirer of Frederick, was anxious to restore to Austria the greatness she had partially lost. The younger branch of the Wittelsbach line, which had hitherto possessed Bavaria, having died out in 1777, Joseph asserted claims to part of its territory. Frederick intervened, and although no battle was fought in the nominal war which followed, the emperor was obliged to content himself with a very unimportant concession. He made a second attempt in 1785, but Frederick again came forward. This time he formed a league (_Furstenbund_) for the defence of the imperial constitution, and it was joined by the majority of the small states. The memory of this league was almost blotted out by the tremendous events which soon absorbed the attention of Germany and the world, but it truly indicated the direction of the political forces which were then at work beneath the surface, and which long afterwards triumphed. The formation of the league was a distinct attempt on the part of Prussia to make herself the centre for the national aspirations both of northern and of southern Germany.

French Revolution.

The French Revolution was hailed by many of the best minds of Germany as the opening of a new era. Among the princes it excited horror and alarm, and in 1792 the emperor Leopold II. and Frederick William II., the unworthy successor of Frederick the Great, met at Pillnitz, and agreed to support by arms the cause of the French king. A more important resolution was never taken. It plunged Europe into a conflict which cost millions of lives, and which overthrew the entire states system of the continent. Germany herself was the principal sufferer. The structure which the princes had so laboriously built up crumbled into ruins, and the mistakes of centuries were expiated in an agony of disaster and humiliation.

End of the Holy Roman Empire.

The states of the Empire joined Austria and Prussia, and, had there been hearty co-operation between the allies, they could scarcely have failed of success. While the war was in progress, in 1793, Prussia joined Russia in the second partition of Poland. Austria considered herself overreached, and began negotiations with Russia for the third and final

## partition, which was effected by the three powers in 1795. Prussia,

irritated by the proceedings of her rival, did as little as possible in the war with France; and in 1795 she retired from the struggle, and by the treaty of Basel ceded to the French republic her possessions on the left bank of the Rhine. The war was continued by Austria, but her power was so effectually shattered by blow after blow that in 1797 she was forced to conclude the peace of Campo Formio. Napoleon Bonaparte, to whose genius the triumph of France was mainly due, began separate negotiations with the states of the Empire at Rastadt; but, before terms could be agreed upon, war again began in 1799, Austria acting on this occasion as the ally of Great Britain and Russia. She was beaten, and the peace of Luneville added fresh humiliations to those imposed upon her by the previous war. France now obtained the whole of the left bank of the Rhine, the dispossessed princes being compensated by grants of secularized church lands and of mediatized imperial cities (1803). The contempt of Napoleon for the Empire was illustrated by his occupation of Hanover in 1803, and by his seizure of the duke of Enghien on imperial territory in 1804. In 1805 Austria once more appealed to arms in association with her former allies, but in vain. By the peace of Presburg she accepted more disastrous terms than ever, and for the moment it seemed as if she could not again hope to rise to her former splendour. In this war she was opposed not only by France, but by Bavaria, Wurttemberg and Baden, all of which were liberally rewarded for their services, the rulers of the two former countries being proclaimed kings. The degradation of Germany was completed by the formation, in 1806, of the Confederation of the Rhine, which was composed of the chief central and southern states. The welfare of the Empire was asserted to be its object, but a body of which Napoleon was the protector existed, of course, for no other purpose than to be a menace to Austria and Prussia. Francis II., who had succeeded Leopold II. in 1792 and in 1804 had proclaimed himself hereditary emperor of Austria, as Francis I., now resigned the imperial crown, and thus the Holy Roman Empire and the German kingdom came to an end. The various states, which had for centuries been virtually independent, were during the next few years not connected even by a nominal bond. (J. Si.)

Prussia defeated at Jena.

Frederick William III. (1797-1840) of Prussia, the successor of Frederick William II., had held aloof from the struggle of Austria with France. This attitude had been dictated partly by his constitutional timidity, partly by the desire to annex Hanover, to which Austria and Russia would never have assented, but which Napoleon was willing to concede in return for a Prussian alliance. The Confederation of the Rhine, however, was a menace to Prussia too serious to be neglected; and Frederick William's hesitations were suddenly ended by Napoleon's contemptuous violation of Prussian territory in marching three French brigades through Ansbach without leave asked. The king at once concluded a convention with the emperor Alexander I. of Russia and declared war on France. The campaign that ended in the disastrous battle of Jena (October 14, 1806) followed; and the prestige of the Prussian arms, created by Frederick the Great, perished at a blow. With the aid of Russia Frederick William held out a while longer, but after Napoleon's decisive victory at Friedland (June 14, 1807) the tsar came to terms with the French emperor, sacrificing the interests of his ally. By the treaty of Tilsit (July 9) the king of Prussia was stripped of the best part of his dominions and more than half his subjects.

Napoleon in power.

Germany now seemed fairly in the grip of Napoleon. Early in November 1806 he had contemptuously deposed the elector of Hesse and added his dominions to Jerome's kingdom of Westphalia; on the 21st of the same month he issued from Berlin the famous decree establishing the "continental system," which, by forbidding all trade with England, threatened German commerce with ruin. His triumph seemed complete when, on the 11th of October 1807, Metternich signed at Fontainebleau, on behalf of Austria, a convention that conceded all his outstanding claims, and seemed to range the Habsburg monarchy definitely on his side. There was, however, to be one final struggle before Napoleon's supremacy was established. The submission of Austria had been but an expedient for gaining time; under Count Stadion's auspices she set to work increasing and reorganizing her forces; and when it became clear from Napoleon's resentment that he was meditating fresh designs against her she declared war (1809). The campaign ended in the crushing defeat of Wagram (July 6) and the humiliating treaty of peace dictated by Napoleon at the palace of Schonbrunn in Vienna (October 14). Austria, shorn of her fairest provinces, robbed of her oversea commerce, bankrupt and surrounded on all sides by the territories of the French emperor and his allies, seemed to exist only on sufferance, and had ceased to have any effective authority in Germany--now absolutely in the power of Napoleon, who proved this in 1810 by annexing the whole of the northern coast as far as the Elbe to his empire.

Revival of Germany.

The very completeness of the humiliation of Germany was the means of her deliverance. She had been taught self-respect by Frederick II., and by her great writers in literature and philosophy; it was felt to be intolerable that in politics she should do the bidding of a foreign master. Among a large section of the community patriotism became for the first time a consuming passion, and it was stimulated by the counsels of several manly teachers, among whom the first place belongs to the philosopher Fichte. The governments cautiously took advantage of the national movement to strengthen their position. Even in Austria, where on the 8th of October 1809 Metternich had become minister for foreign affairs and the dominant influence in the councils of the empire, some timely concessions were made to the various populations. Prussia, under the guidance of her great minister Stein, reorganized her entire administration. She abolished serfdom, granted municipal rights to the cities, established an admirable system of elementary and secondary education, and invited all classes to compete for civil offices; and ample means were provided for the approaching struggle by drastic military reform. Napoleon had extracted an engagement that the Prussian army should be limited to 42,000 men. This was fulfilled in the letter, but in spirit set aside, for one body of men was trained after another until the larger part of the male population were in a position, when a fitting opportunity should occur, to take up arms for their country.

War of Liberation.

The disastrous retreat of the French from Moscow in 1812 gave Germany the occasion she desired. In 1813 King Frederick William, after an agony of hesitation, was forced by the patriotic initiative of General Yorck, who concluded with the Russians the convention of Tauroggen on his own responsibility, and by the pressure of public opinion supported by Queen Louise and by Hardenberg, to enter into an alliance with Russia. All now depended on the attitude of Austria; and this was for some time doubtful. The diplomacy of Metternich (q.v.), untouched by the patriotic fervour which he disliked and distrusted, was directed solely to gaining time to enable Austria to intervene with decisive effect and win for the Habsburg monarchy the position it had lost. When the time came, after the famous interview with Napoleon at Dresden, and the breakdown of the abortive congress of Prague, Austria threw in her lot with the allies. The campaign that followed, after some initial reverses, culminated in the crushing victory of the allies at Leipzig (October 16-18, 1813), and was succeeded by the joint invasion of France, during which the German troops wreaked vengeance on the unhappy population for the wrongs and violences of the French rule in Germany.

Long before the issue of the War of Liberation had been finally decided, diplomacy had been at work in an endeavour to settle the future constitution of Germany. In this matter, as in others, the weakness of the Prussian government played into the hands of Austria. Metternich had been allowed to take the initiative in negotiating with the princes of the Confederation of the Rhine, and the price of their adhesion to the cause of the allies had been the guarantee by Austria of their independent sovereignty. The guarantee had been willingly given; for Metternich had no desire to see the creation of a powerful unified German empire, but aimed at the establishment of a loose confederation of weak states over which Austria, by reason of her ancient imperial prestige and her vast non-German power, would exercise a dominant influence. This, then, was the view that prevailed, and by the treaty of Chaumont (March 1, 1814) it was decided that Germany should consist of a confederation of sovereign states.

The German confederation.

The new constitution of Germany, as embodied in the Final Act of the congress of Vienna (June 9, 1815) was based on this principle. It was the work of a special committee of the congress, presided over by Metternich; and, owing to the panic created by Napoleon's return from Elba (March 5), it remained a mere sketch, the hasty output of a few hurried sessions, of which the elaboration was reserved for the future. In spite of the clamour of the mediatized princes for the restoration of their "liberties," no attempt was made to reverse the essential changes in the territorial disposition of Germany made during the revolutionary epoch. Of the 300 odd territorial sovereignties under the Holy Empire only 39 survived, and these were readjusted on the traditional principles of "compensations," "rectification of frontiers" and "balance of power." The most fateful arrangements were naturally those that affected the two leading powers, Austria and Prussia. The latter had made strenuous efforts, supported by Alexander I. of Russia, to obtain the annexation of the whole of Saxony, a project which was defeated by the opposition of Great Britain, Austria and France, an opposition which resulted in the secret treaty of the 3rd of January 1815 for eventual armed intervention. She received, however, the northern part of Saxony, Swedish Pomerania, Posen and those territories--formerly part of the kingdom of Westphalia--which constitute her Rhine provinces. While Prussia was thus established on the Rhine, Austria, by exchanging the Netherlands for Lombardo-Venetia and abandoning her claims to the former Habsburg possessions in Swabia, definitively resigned to Prussia the task of defending the western frontier of Germany, while she strengthened her power in the south-east by recovering from Bavaria, Salzburg, Vorarlberg and Tirol. Bavaria, in her turn, received back the greater part of the Palatinate on the left bank of the Rhine, with a strip of territory to connect it with the main body of her dominions. For the rest the sovereigns of Wurttemberg and Saxony retained the title of king bestowed upon them by Napoleon, and this title was also given to the elector of Hanover; the dukes of Weimar, Mecklenburg and Oldenburg became grand dukes; and Lubeck, Bremen, Hamburg and Frankfort were declared free cities.

The federal diet.

As the central organ of this confederation (_Bund_) was established the federal diet (_Bundestag_), consisting of delegates of the several states. By the terms of the Final Act this diet had very wide powers for the development of the mutual relations of the governments in all matters of common interest. It was empowered to arrange the fundamental laws of the confederation; to fix the organic institutions relating to its external, internal and military arrangements; to regulate the trade relations between the various federated states. Moreover, by the famous Article 13, which enacted that there were to be "assemblies of estates" in all the countries of the _Bund_, the constitutional liberties of the German people seemed to be placed under its aegis. But the constitution of the diet from the first condemned its debates to sterility. In the so-called narrower assembly (_Engere Versammlung_), for the transaction of ordinary business, Austria, Prussia, Bavaria, Saxony, Hanover, Wurttemberg, Baden, Hesse-Cassel, Hesse-Darmstadt, Holstein and Luxemburg had one vote each; while the remaining twenty-eight states were divided into six _curiae_, of which each had but a single vote. In this assembly a vote of the majority decided. Questions of more than usual importance were, however, to be settled in the general assembly (_Plenum_) where a two-thirds majority was necessary to carry a resolution. In this assembly the voting power was somewhat differently distributed; but the attempt to make it bear some proportion to the importance of the various states worked out so badly that Austria had only four times the voting power of the tiny principality of Liechtenstein. Finally it was laid down by Article 7 that a unanimous vote was necessary for changing "fundamental laws, organic institutions, individual rights, or in matters of religion," a formula wide enough to embrace every question of importance with which the diet might be called upon to deal. Austria, in virtue of her tradition, received the perpetual presidency of the diet. It was clear that in such a governing body neither Austria nor Prussia would be content with her constitutional position, and that the internal politics of Germany would resolve themselves into a diplomatic duel for ascendancy between the two powers, for which the diet would merely serve as a convenient arena.