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By Root 2434 0

a state visit to Memel in the summer of that had seen him strike up a warm relationship with Frederick William and his queen, Louise of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, this presented little problem, for giving land to Prussia could not but threaten Austria. But how was France actually to impose her views? Here, too, there was no difficulty. In theory, the reorganization of the Holy Roman Empire was a matter for its own institutions, and in February 1801 a meeting of the imperial Parliament, or Diet, had been summoned at Ratisbon to ratify the treaty of Lunéville and negotiate the programme of territorial adjustments to which it had necessarily given rise. The result, however, was deadlock, and, more particularly, a three-way split between those who wanted no secularization at all (the ecclesiastical rulers, the free cities and the imperial knights); those who wanted some secularization only (Austria and some of the minor states); and those who wanted complete secularization (Prussia, the other Protestant states of the north and centre, and the most greedy of the Catholic states of the south). After months of wrangling, it was finally agreed that there was only one way forward, namely the establishment of a deputation of the Empire’s princes headed by the Archbishop of Mainz and imperial arch-chancellor - the president of the council of princes who nominally ‘elected’ the emperor - Karl von Dalberg, that could lay the matter before France and Russia, discuss any solution that they might come up with and then report back to the Diet.

To act in this fashion was completely to sell the pass to Napoleon. In readiness for this all-too-predictable moment, the French Foreign Ministry had long since been engaged in drawing up a plan of action. Seeing which way the wind was blowing, a number of states - among them Prussia and Bavaria - had already come to an agreement with France as to what their gains should be, and most of the others now rushed to follow their example. There followed scenes of the utmost indignity: a swarm of German princes and their representatives descended on Paris, where they engaged in a desperate battle for territory and, in the less fortunate instances, survival. Bribery, it appears, was common, and Talleyrand, in particular, is supposed to have made a fortune. How far these efforts changed anything is another matter, however: when the Franco-Russian terms were finally published in late 1802, they essentially read very much as Napoleon had always wanted, the one real difference being that the First Consul was unable to prevent Prussia from obtaining her compensation in north-central Germany rather than on the Baltic coast, as he had intended. As for the deputation appointed by the Diet, it was helpless to do anything other than ratify Napoleon’s terms and present them to the full Diet in the so-called Reichsdeputationhauptschluss. As for the First Consul’s proposals, they were all too predictable. At a stroke, 112 of the territories that made up the empire disappeared. Gone were all the fifty-two imperial cities other than Hamburg, Bremen, Lübeck, Frankfurt, Nuremberg and Augsburg; gone were all the ecclesiastical territories apart from one special unit that was created for Dalberg and the estates of the Teutonic Knights and the Order of St John. As for where the land involved went, for Napoleon’s clients the proceeds were almost literally fabulous. To list all the territories that changed hands would be tedious in the extreme, but in brief, the compensation negotiated at Paris in almost every case far outweighed the land that had been lost on the left bank of the Rhine. Prussia, for example, lost 137,000 inhabitants and gained 600,000; Bavaria lost 580,000 and gained 854,000; Baden lost 25,000 and gained 237,000; and Hesse-Darmstädt lost 40,000 and gained 120,000. Gains in income, meanwhile, were even more marked as many of the new territories were more valuable than the ones that had been lost, while states that had consisted of a scattered patchwork of territories now emerged as compact geographical units with relatively