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Napoleonic Germany and the Hometown Communities*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 December 2008
Extract
Fundamentally in common among the towns I mean was the self-containment and separateness of each; they faced the power of Napoleonic reform as individual communities. It seems best to begin thinking of their common experience as though it were the experience of one.
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References
1. The experience of one such town is analyzed in Irma and Mack Walker, “A German Community,” an unpublished essay in my possession. The study treats recent and contemporary events as well as earlier ones, and some of the evidence it uses was received in confidence.
2. Riehl, Wilhelm H., Land und Leute (2d ed., Stuttgart, 1855), pp. 132–35, 139–41, 185–217, and passim.Google Scholar
3. Riehl, , Land und Leute, pp. 159–82 and passim.Google Scholar
4. Riehl, , Land und Leute, p. 139.Google Scholar
5. Riehl, , Land und Leute, pp. 99–118, 181Google Scholar; Die bürgerliche Gesellschaft (3d. ed., Stuttgart, 1855), pp. 218–25.Google Scholar For the alien social classes or “false estates” generated by change—civil servants, academics, capitalists, proletarians, and the like—see Land und Leute, pp. 100–105, 117; and Die bürgerliche Gesellschaft, pp. 232–34, 370–83.
6. Riehl wrote of Möser's “artistry” in the “History of Osnabrück,” which had made him “the great forefather of our socio-political literature.” Land und Leute, p. 12.
7. Möser himself was emphatic about using his terms as he meant them and not necessarily in their conventional modern meaning: Osnabrückische Geschichte, in Sämtliche Werke, XII, I (Oldenburg, 1964), pp. 33–34.Google Scholar
8. For an introduction to the Markgenossenschaft theory as it developed from Möser see von Gierke, Otto, Das deutsche Genossenschaftsrecht (3 vols., Berlin, 1868–1881);Google Scholar for a Möser whose views “anticipated latter-day Marxist historians” (p. 317) see Epstein, Klaus, The Genesis of German Conservatism (Princeton, 1966), pp. 297–338Google Scholar, and the citations there and in the “Bibliographical Essay,” pp. 684–85.
9. Möser, , Osnabrückische Geschichte, pp. 38, 91, 101, 243–54, 274–82.Google Scholar
10. Möser, , Osnabrückische Geschichte, pp. 74, 121, 151, 279.Google Scholar Compare Robert Frost: “Home is the place where, when you go there, they have to take you in.” “I should have called it something you somehow haven't to deserve.” (“The Death of the Hired Man” [1914]). This is almost exactly the meaning of the term Heimat in German law.
11. I use “patriciate” less in a legal sense than in a functional one; law and political practice coincide only very roughly. In some large towns there was constitutional recognition of a governing group of families bearing some such title as Patriziat or Geschlechter, but not always; and many small town constitutions provided for legal patriciates too. The key feature here is the ability to live mainly from government functions or at least free from local economic influence, and to rule independently of the political influence of the common Bürgerschaft, or the need to intermarry with it or regularly to replenish the ruling group's numbers from among it. Generally, the larger the town the more likely a patrician constitution. Computations from the fragmentary data available suggest the following (from Moser, Johann J., Teutsches Staats-Recht, XLII [Hanau, 1750], 435;Google ScholarPütter, Johann S., An Historical Development … of the Germanic Empire, III [London, 1790], appendix, pp. 67–71;Google ScholarFranke, Wilhelm, “Die Volkszahl deutscher Städte am Ende des 18. und Anfang des 19. Jahrhunderts,” Zeitschrift des Preussischen Statistischen Landesamts, LXII [1922], 112–20)Google Scholar: that in the later eighteenth century about three-quarters of the identified towns with populations over 15,000 had recognized patriciates, whereas three-quarters of those under 15,000 did not; and that the median patrician town had a population of about 12,000, the median non-patrician under 6000.
12. Here I mean all Germany, including German-speaking Austria and East Prussia, and not just Riehl's “individualisiertes Land,” which is too imprecise to be statistically useful at this stage. The estimate is based mainly on the figures in Franke, “Volkszahl deutscher Städte,” p. 118. In Franke's tables the number of towns increases by a factor of about 2½ as the population halves; I project the pattern beyond his lower limit of 5000 to reach a crude approximation, which accords with other evidence. See also [Friedrich] Zahn, , “Die Bevölkerung des deutschen Reiches im 19. Jahrhundert,” Vierteljahrshefte zur Statistik des deutschen Reiches, XI (1902), pp. I. 167 to I. 190;Google Scholar and Bevölkerungs-Ploetz: Raum und Bevolkerung in der Weltgeschichte, ed. Kirsten, Ernst, Buchholtz, Ernst W., and Köllman, Wolfgang (2 vols., Würzburg, 1956), II, 60–76 and 156–66.Google Scholar
13. Countless local histories show the political and legal resources available to a Landstadt against an overbearing prince. Also, a Landstadt of middle magnitude often held from its prince privileges analogous to those a Reichsstadt held of the Emperor. But contrast Brandenburg-Prussia, where the severe organizing and levelling policies of the great Hohenzollerns and their servants made Prussian towns by 1800 quite different from towns in other German states, with important consequences for questions of reform. Gustav Schmoller noted this: “Das Städtewesen unter Friedrich Wilhelm I,” Zeitschrift für Preussische Geschichte und Landeskunde, X (1873), 589.Google Scholar
14. See for example the circumstances of the town of Quedlinburg before 1802 in Breywisch, Walter, “Quedlinburgs Säkularisation und seine ersten Jahre unter preussischer Herrschaft 1802–1806,” Sachsen und Anhalt, IV (1928), 217–18;Google Scholar of the Bavarian territorial town Landshut before 1804 in Hiereth, Sebastian, “Zur Geschichte des Landkreises Landshut,” Verhandlungen des Historischen Vereins für Niederbayern, LXXXVIII (1962), I–II;Google Scholar and observations on the similarity of constitutionally different communities in Darmstädter, Paul, Das Grossherzogtum Frankfurt (Frankfurt a. M., 1901), pp. 77–78;Google Scholar also Preuss, Hugo, Die Entwicklung des deutschen Städtewesens (Leipzig, 1906), pp. 294–95.Google Scholar
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17. For the relation of Napoleon's Rheinbund policy with the internal reorganization of the German South and West, see Hölzle, Erwin, “Das napoleonische Staatssystem in Deutschland,” Historische Zeitschrift, CXLVIII (1933), 277–93;Google Scholar also Napoleon's letter to Talleyrand in Correspondance de Napoléon Ier, XII (Paris, 1863), 266–68.Google Scholar
18. Meyer, Christian, Preussens innere Politik in Ansbach und Bayreuth in den Jahren 1792–1797 (Berlin, 1904), pp. 37–210Google Scholar, reprints Hardenberg's report on his administration. In a sentence Hardenberg rings successive changes of experience and tactics which officials of the lesser states, dependent on French initiative and support, passed through later and more slowly; “Nachdem man lange vergeblich versucht hatte, sich in Güte auseinander zu setzen, musste dieses freilich aus eigener Autorität auf einmal und mit Nachdruck geschehen, weil von dem constitutionsmässigen reichsgerichtlichen Wege nie das mindeste zu erwarten war, mithin Selbsthülfe nach dem Völkerrechte die einzige Hülfe wurde, weil schlechterdings consequent und mit äusserster Festigkeit gehandelt werden musste, wenn man nicht alles aufgeben wollte” (p. 43).
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34. Professor George Windell, criticizing this point at the 1967 Convention of the American Historical Association, noted correctly that the contradiction was far from clear to contemporaries; see Walker, , “Home Towns and State Administrators,” pp. 42–43;Google Scholar also Heffter, Heinrich, Die deutsche Selbstverwaltung im 19. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart, 1950), passim.Google Scholar For a rather different interpretive theme for official liberalism, based on the Prussian experience, see Rosenberg, Hans, Bureaucracy, Aristocracy and Autocracy (Cambridge, 1958), passim, but especially pp. 204–206.Google Scholar
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