What was confederation of the rhine

The Confederation of the Rhine This issue also dragged Sweden into the war. The formation of the Confederation was the final nail in the coffin of the Holy Roman Empire. Napoleon consolidated the various smaller states of the former Holy Roman Empire, which allied with France into larger electorates, duchies, and kingdoms to make the governance of non-Prussian and Austrian Germany more efficient. In the end, the Confederation was above all a military alliance.

In return for continued French protection, member states were compelled to supply France with many of their own military personnel and contribute much of the resources to support the French armies still occupying western and southern Germany.

It provided a significant strategic advantage to the French Empire on its eastern front. Battle of Austerlitz An battle, also known as the Battle of the Three Emperors, that was one of the most important and decisive engagements of the Napoleonic Wars. The battle brought the War of the Third Coalition to a rapid end. Wikimedia Public domain. Licenses and Attributions. CC licensed content, Shared previously.

Geography and politics are always interlinked, and never more so than in the history of the creation of the Confederation of the Rhine.

The best borders defensively speaking for France's were thought to be the Alps to the South and East and the Rhine river to the north and east. For this reason, after victories in Italy in both the First and Second Italian campaign and , it was the left bank of the Rhine which was handed over to France, thus sealing up the leaky French north eastern border.

However, ever since the Revolutionary wars of , France had also assiduously cultivated the German territories just the other side of the Rhine, the right bank. These statelets were largely characterised by their interest in the Englightenment and the new ideas aired by the French Revolution. And although technically despotic in their regimes, they nevertheless saw that French interest and cooperation would allow them to escape from on the one hand the impediments put upon them by their ancient attachment to the Holy Roman Empire with its Austrian Habsburg Emperor and on the other the traditional territorial rapacity of Prussia.

It would also help them to rationalise their territories, pockmarked as they were by autonomous zones belonging either to bishops, ducal families or even the major powers of Prussia and Austria. Thus as a result of a process of the ten years of assiduous courting, from the beginning of the French Revolution, France and the states to the right-hand side of the Rhine were drawing ever closer.

Nor was a relationship between France and the Rhine states historically unprecedented. Although much smaller in scale to its 19th-century counterpart it only mobilised about 10, troops as opposed to the 73, under Napoleon , it formed a French foreign policy standard of attempting to create a bridgehead against Prussia and Austria, just the other side of the Rhine.

What was of interest to these German rulers in the 17th century was all the more important years later when France was a hyper-power in the region and the Prussia and especially the Austrian empire were on the wane. On the passing of the Holy Roman Empire, Goethe famously remarked that he more interested in an argument between his coachman and the footman.

The foundation stone for the Rheinbund was however the war of the Third Coalition in late His Majesty the Emperor and King is, therefore, compelled to declare that he can no longer acknowledge the existence of the German Constitution, recognizing, however, the entire and absolute sovereignty of each of the princes whose states compose Germany today, maintaining with them the same relations as with the other independent powers of Europe.

He has done this with a view only to peace, and in order that by his constant mediation between the weak and the powerful he may obviate every species of dissension and disorder.

Having thus provided for the dearest interests of his people and of his neighbors, and having assured, so far as in him lay, the future peace of Europe and that of Germany in particular, heretofore constantly the theatre of war, by removing a contradiction which placed people and princes alike under the delusive protection of a system contrary both to their political interests and to their treaties, His Majesty the Emperor and King trusts that the nations of Europe will at last close their ears to the insinuations of those who would maintain an eternal war upon the continent.

He trusts that the French armies which have crossed the Rhine have done so for the last time, and that the people of Germany will no longer witness, except in the annals of the past, the horrible pictures of disorder, devastation and slaughter which war invariably brings with it.

His Majesty declared that he would never extend the limits of France beyond the Rhine and he has been faithful to his promise. At present his sole desire is so to employ the means which Providence has confided to him as to free the seas, restore the liberty of commerce and thus assure the peace and happiness of the world.

Description To increase his control over the German states and definitively destroy the Holy Roman Empire, Napoleon set up the Confederation of the Rhine, grouping together a large number of formerly indepedent states, and forced the Emperor to abdicate his position.

Source James H.