Dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire

The Holy Roman Empire had long been no more than a legal architecture: three hundred entities, a permanent diet at Regensburg, an elected emperor with no army of his own. The Recess of 1803 had already suppressed one hundred and twelve ecclesiastical states and the free cities in favour of the lay princes; Pressburg had recognised the full sovereignty of Bavaria and Württemberg.

On 12 July 1806 sixteen princes signed the act of the Confederation of the Rhine in Paris and declared their withdrawal from the Empire. On 1 August the French ambassador at Regensburg notified the diet that his master no longer recognised the existence of the Holy Roman Empire and summoned Francis II to abdicate before 10 August, on pain of war.

On 6 August the emperor signed the act: he laid down the crown, released the states from their obligations and freed his officials from their oath. He kept only the title of Emperor of Austria, taken as a precaution in August 1804.

Eight hundred and forty-four years after Otto I, a political construction was extinguished by a chancery act, without a battle. The void released two opposing forces: modernisation through the Civil Code and French administration on one side, a German nationalism of reaction on the other — Fichte would deliver his Addresses to the German Nation in occupied Berlin.

The Congress of Vienna would not restore the Empire: it replaced it with a German Confederation of thirty-nine states, from which the unification of 1871 emerged.