Riesbeck’s opening letter hints at the baroque nature of the corporate political and social structure of the Holy Roman Empire. Founded by Charlemagne in 800, it had experienced a progressive fragmentation of authority as the power of territorial princes had grown. By the late eighteenth century, the Empire consisted of over 300 autonomous territories. The largest and most powerful of these states were Catholic Habsburg Austria and Protestant Brandenburg-Prussia. Below these, in descending order of population, were Bavaria, Saxony and Hanover. Although these states lacked the military and diplomatic clout of Austria and Prussia, they could still aspire to some influence in the Old Reich and the international arena. Next were the smaller states such as margraviate of Baden, the Duchy of Württemberg and landgraviate of Hesse-Kassel. There were also 51 imperial cities and several ecclesiastical principalities, of which the electorates of Mainz, Cologne and Trier were the most significant. Finally, there was the bulk of the Kleinstaaterei, the mass petty polities, both secular and ecclesiastical, of whom Riesbeck was so dismissive.

To make matters more complicated, the boundaries of many of these states were not contiguous. Austria and Bohemia formed the core of Habsburg territory, but since 1713 they also ruled the Austrian Netherlands. The core of the Old Reich, southern and western Germany, was a mosaic of different polities. In Swabia alone, Riesbeck wrote that he ‘ran over, in very short time, about a dozen principalities, and prelacies’.⁴ The Rhineland, for example, included the electorates of Mainz, Trier and Cologne; the Prussian enclaves of Geldern, Cleves and Moers; and the Wittelsbach possessions of the Rhineland-Palatinate, Pfalz-Zweibrücken, Jülich and Berg. There were also four imperial cities in the region. Finally, there were numerous petty polities, some with populations numbering in the hundreds, ruled by imperial knights, counts and abbots. They enjoyed an unmediated relationship with the Emperor (Reichsunmittelbar) and looked to the imperial crown to protect them from the predatory territorial ambitions of larger states.⁵

The imperial crown formed one of two central institutions in this otherwise polycratic structure. The second was the imperial Diet, or Reichstag, which had sat in permanent session at Regensburg since the seventeenth century. It was divided into three colleges. The oldest and most important, the College of Electors, was responsible for electing the Emperor, a post that had been held by members of the Habsburg dynasty since the fifteenth century, apart from a brief interlude between 1742 and 1745 when a member of the Bavarian Wittelsbach held the imperial crown. The number of electors had grown from seven to nine over the centuries, but by 1789 the College consisted of eight: the Archbishops of Mainz, Aachen and Cologne and the secular princes of Palatinate, Bohemia, Brandenburg-Prussia, Hanover and Saxony. Next in importance, the College of Princes was made up of lesser secular and ecclesiastical princes below the rank elector. The imperial Counts shared four collective votes in this college, while a group of monasteries and abbeys held a further two. The Free imperial cities were represented in the College of Cities. It was the least important of the three and only voted when the other colleges were unable to reach an agreement. Although colleges conferred on issues, they debated and voted separately. Once a consensus was reached, it was placed before the Emperor for approval. Finally, there were also two imperial courts. The Imperial Cameral Tribunal (Reichskammergericht), which sat in Wetzlar, dealt with hostile acts between estates, while the Imperial Aulic Council (Reichhofrat) dealt with rights of Emperor vis-à-vis the estates.

Riesbeck’s attitude towards this labyrinthine system was somewhat ambivalent. He claimed in his final letter that the German states had made great progress in education, justice, commerce, industry and agriculture. He argued that ‘the very partition of the country into so many states, prejudicial as it is to the exertion of power for the purpose of foreign conquests, has been of advantage to the internal cultivation’ since it encouraged rulers to compete with each other. In a paean of praise, he lauded Frederick the Great as a particular fine example of a German prince interested in internal cultivation. However, he also implied that the imperial constitution was a barrier to further progress, writing that the constitution of the Old Reich had ‘little brilliancy’. If only Germany ‘could make itself one great people; if it was united under one governor’, then it would make ‘greater steps towards cultivation’. What country then, he wrote, could ‘cope with Germany’?⁶

Many a nineteenth-century German historian, especially those like Heinrich von Treitschke who were actively involved in the unification campaign of the 1860s, would have wholeheartedly agreed with Riesbeck’s last sentiment. But unlike Riesbeck, members of the so-called Borussian School were unequivocal about the merits of the Old Reich. After the war the negative view of the Old Reich was perpetuated by the ‘special path’ (Sonderweg) thesis that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s. This interpretation of German history traced the rise of Nazism to Germany’s supposed deviation from a normative path of economic and political development exemplified by France and Britain. Most proponents identified the Kaiserreich as the point of deviation, but others have traced it back to the Middle Ages and the Old Reich.⁷

Since the 1980s the Sonderweg has faced sustained criticism and a more positive view of both the Kaiserreich and the Old Reich has emerged. Following the excesses of nationalism in the twentieth century, the plurality of states and cultures that made up the Old Reich is now sometimes interpreted as a merit, a sign of tolerance rather than weakness. Moreover, rather than being moribund, recent research has portrayed Reichstag as an active political centre to which German princes ascribed more importance than had previously been believed. Revisionist interpretations have variously seen it as a (con)federation, a ‘central Europe of the regions’, an ‘Empire-State’ or an early modern nation akin with France or Britain.⁸ Some have gone as far as suggesting that its federal structure foreshadowed that of the European Union. Despite their differences, however, revisionist accounts generally agree that nineteenth-century criticisms of the Old Reich were misplaced. Certainly, the Old Reich was no nation state, no Machtstaat, but then it was never intended to be one. Indeed, Riesbeck himself countered contemporary detractors by claiming that ‘the definition of the constitution of the empire, “It is a confusion preserved by God’s omnipotence”, is a just one as long as the empire is erroneously considered a single self-subsisting state’. Instead of confusion, he claimed there was ‘a great deal of order’.⁹ The settlement enshrined in 1648 in the Peace of Westphalia was meant to maintain law and peace in central Europe. Admittedly, in this it was not always successful. The Prussian invasion of Silesia in 1740 was the first act in an Austro-Prussian struggle for dominance in central Europe that lasted over a century. Both the Prussian King, Frederick the Great, and the Habsburg Emperor, Joseph II, were scornful of the Old Reich, the latter piqued by his failure to push through reform of the imperial judiciary. Yet although the imperial structure creaked under this dualism, the integrity of the empire was maintained and, as the political manoeuvring centred on the League of Princes (Fürstenbund) in the 1780s demonstrated, both Austria and Prussia could continue their feud within its ‘legalistic culture’.¹⁰

Not everyone was as critical of the Old Reich as Frederick the Great and Joseph II. It had its active defenders, intent on promoting a form of imperial patriotism. This patriotism was centred on the constitution. Carl von Moser’s Of the German National Spirit argued that the Old Reich’s constitution was the essence of German freedom. Similarly, although Christoph Martin Wieland struggled to find any national unity in the Reich, he regarded it as providing the best protection for people’s freedoms. Imperial patriotism (Reichspatriotismus) also had an obvious appeal to an imperial nobility fearful of the territorial ambitions of larger states. In the 1780s a circle centred on Carl August, Duke of Weimar, and the Mainz Elector, Friedrich Karl von Erthal, attempted to reach a diplomatic solution to the Austro-Prussian rivalry by drawing up and presenting proposals for imperial reform to both the Prussian and Austrian monarchs.¹¹ The appeal, however, fell on deaf ears. Both Frederick and Joseph were more concerned with the developments with their own borders than reforming the Reich.

The eighteenth century had seen the progressive development of other, more particular forms of patriotism. One such form was the republican patriotism in Hamburg, which promoted ‘pride in a republican constitution, long traditions of self-government, urban autonomy, and commercial prosperity’.¹² State patriotism (Landespatriotismus), which centred on the territorial state, also began to spread in the mid-eighteenth century. Brandenburg-Prussia led the way in promoting this state patriotism.¹³ The Seven Years’ War and the associated propaganda campaign provided Landespatriotismus with an important fillip. That conflict, suggests Georg Schmidt, also helped make war itself into a ‘factor of national identification’, something that reached a new intensity during the struggle against Napoleon.¹⁴ Thomas Abbt’s pro-Prussian Death for the Fatherland (Vom Tode für das Vaterland, 1761) challenged the works of the Swiss writer Johann Georg Zimmermann by arguing that patriotism was not the preserve of republics. In monarchies too there existed possibility of ‘love for the fatherland’ (Liebe zum Vaterland).¹⁵ Somewhat later in the Habsburg Monarchy, Josef Sonnenfels published On Love for the Fatherland (Über die Liebe des Vaterlandes). Habsburg loyalism was often bound up with Reichspatriotismus, especially where the imperial knights were concerned. In fact, Moser was in Habsburg pay when he penned his treatise dealing with the German national spirit. Sonnenfels, however, focused his attention on the territorial state, or in Habsburg terms the Gesamtmonarchie, rather than the Reich. His patriotism was predicated on legal rights, through which, he believed, patriots could be made. This, Reinhard Stauber has argued, represented a jumping off point from patriotism to nationalism, where love of the fatherland (Vaterlandsliebe) and national pride (Nationalstolz) shaded into each other.¹⁶

Nationalist discourses did not begin in the eighteenth century, but can be traced back to the late fifteenth century, as German humanist scholars drew upon Tacitus’s descriptions of the ancient Germanic tribes. Turning his negatives into positives, they posited the tribes as a single cultural and linguistic community, warlike, virile and liberty-loving in opposition to the decadent, servile, Romanized Italians and French.¹⁷ This juxtaposition to the ‘Other’ was a crucial component in the construction of national identities. In the seventeenth century, this discourse was used by the Protestant princes in their struggle against the universal claims of the Catholic Church and Emperor.¹⁸ Towards the end of that century Louis XIV’s wars and the ravaging of the Palatinate established the French as a common yardstick of national differentiation. Riesbeck’s alter-ego as a ‘travelling Frenchman’ was not merely meant to provide his observations a degree of objectivity. It also gave him a platform from which to compare France and Germany, although his comments were not always in the latter’s favour. The expansion of the public sphere in the eighteenth century, stimulated by increasing literacy and improved printing technology, meant that the language of nationhood spread beyond the ivory towers of Germany’s universities and took root among the growing middle classes. It found expression in a renewed interest in German myths and folklore, in linguistic and reading societies and the emergence of a German national literature and drama.¹⁹ Again Riesbeck’s travelogue was illustrative of this tendency. Despite visiting a multitude of states, he nevertheless entitled it Travels through Germany, suggestive of an underlying cultural unity despite the political fragmentation of the Old Reich. For although the concept was used in struggles between the German territorial princes, nationalism in the eighteenth-century Germany remained essentially a cultural rather than a political concept: something recognized in Goethe and Schiller’s Xenien distich, Das Deutsche Reich (The German Empire). ‘Germany? Where does it lie? I cannot find this land/Where scholarly matters commence, politics come to an end.’²⁰ This observation was an enduring one and over a century later the historian Frederick Meinecke juxtaposed the German ‘culture nation’ (Kulturnation) with the French ‘state nation’ (Staatsnation).²¹

The national discourse of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was conducted by an educated elite and it is difficult to assess to what extent it penetrated down the social scale. The majority of the population remained wedded to more particularistic state or regional identities, although this by no means precluded a sense of attachment to some larger entity.²² To take the Tyrol as one example, Laurence Cole has identified three overlapping identities in the region: a link to Tyrolean fatherland, an allegiance to the Habsburg dynasty and a wider identification with Germans and Germany. At any given moment one might be more evident than another, but no single identity displaced the others and it was the three together that underpinned the patriotic mobilization against French threat in the 1790s.²³

The conflicts that afflicted the Old Reich in the eighteenth century were in part due to the acquisition by German princes of territory that lay outside the imperial boundaries.²⁴ Despite its title, Riesbeck’s travelogue also encompassed parts of western Hungary. For although the kingdom of Hungary lay outside the Empire, it was nevertheless part of the Habsburg territory. It and Transylvania had been secured for the dynasty by the Habsburg reconquista of the late seventeenth century, although relations with the Magyar elite remained tense. Other Habsburg lands outside the imperial boundary included the Duchies of Burgundy in the west and Milan in Italy. Brandenburg-Prussia also possessed extra-imperial territory. Indeed, the Hohenzollern’s acquisition of royal status in 1701 was based upon their possession of what had formerly been East, or Ducal Prussia. In 1772 the Hohenzollerns secured West Prussia in the first partition of Poland, while the Habsburgs seized Galicia. Subsequent partitions in 1793 and 1795 saw Prussia gain the port of Danzig and territory stretching from the borders of Silesia to the Memel. The Habsburgs, excluded from the 1793 partition, had to be content with west Galicia in 1795.

The territories ruled by the German princes varied considerably in size and population. In 1800 the Habsburg Monarchy had around eight million souls in its Austrian and Bohemian heartlands, while another ten million or so lived in its Hungarian territories. Brandenburg-Prussia had just over six million inhabitants, a figure which included those living outside the boundary of the Old Reich. Of the middle-ranking states Bavaria and Saxony had around two million each, while Hanover had a population of just under a million. The Duchy of Württemberg, a larger member of the Klei...