686 Chapter XXIX
modern states; and these changes were brought about by German governments
themselves, when the rulers of Baden, Württemberg, Bavaria, Saxony, and other
domains, in cooperation with Napoleon and with their own reforming civil ser-
vants, and at the expense of German prince- bishops, imperial knights, the patri-
cians of free cities, and miscellaneous lesser lordly beings, effected a territorial and
legal transformation that wiped out many aspects of the Old Regime. The Revolu-
tion from Above, checkmated in the Hapsburg lands, swept over the rest of Ger-
many with astonishing success. Europe offered no other case of structural changes
accomplished so rapidly by existing authorities. It was among the princes them-
selves, in Germany, that the French of the Revolution eventually found their most
effective collaborators.
The present chapter, like the whole of [Part 2 of ] the present book, is concerned
only with the decade that closed in 1800. It was a decade, in Germany, without
great events or dramatic confrontations. Revolution was in the air, but the idea of
revolution—and of counter- revolution—was ambiguous.
There was a feeling that “revolution” might be a good thing, if only carried out in
due form by the proper persons; and this belief of the 1790’s was in a measure
confirmed in the following years. The confidence in existing authorities inhibited
the growth of a truly revolutionary movement, or even of a critical opposition.
There were active groups of radical republicans in the Germany of the 1790’s, but
they achieved little outside the spheres of journalism and conspiracy. Incipient lib-
eralism was ambivalent, sometimes favoring old estates and constituted bodies as
checks upon princely power, sometimes more authoritarian, favoring the princely
power against the privileged classes. Conservatism was also inhibited by the fact
that so many German governments were not conservative, being committed to
policies of progressive change. In Germany, unlike England, conservatism was not
the solid philosophy of an active and experienced ruling class. Conservatism itself
became an unsettling ideology.^2 To express its disgust with the present, it glorified
the medieval, the altdeutsch and the altständisch, or it asserted the superiority of a
pure spirituality over a vulgar world of practical affairs. It found itself opposed, not
only to German republicans but in a more insidious way to tendencies in the Ger-
man governments themselves, and in an unwholesome fashion to the influence of
foreigners. It is well known how in the long run the aberrations of Hitlerism built
upon pathologically ethnocentric qualities in German conservatism.
Distinctive of Germany in the last decades of the Holy Roman Empire was a
profound incapacity for collective political action. Divided into some three hun-
dred states, interlaced with fifty free cities and the minuscule acres of a thousand
sovereign imperial knights, the German world was one in which any action on the
public stage was bound to be local. Waves of political protest or indignation, even
if generated, broke against frontiers which were never more than a few miles away.
Except for the oligarchic free cities, and for the aristocratic Reichsritter or knights,
government was conducted by absolutist princes with their officials and experts, so
that, even on the local scene, the people outside government had little expectation
of participating in it, or even understanding the reasons for its decisions. The
2 This point is developed by Valjavec, Entstehung, 310 –26.