Austria and by extending the Austrian power in Swabia and on the Upper Rhine. The latter result he desired to attain by making the city of Constance a great emporium of trade between Italy and Germany. In Austria he set on foot far-reaching projects of reform. On the non-material side he and other rulers strove to infuse new strength into the intellectual and civilizing influence of Catholicity as opposed to Protestantism. Catholicity in southern Germany, which remained closely in touch with French intellectual life, suffered from the paralyzing influence of French rationalism and its destructive critical tendencies. The champions of the Church, foremost among them being the Prince-Abbot Martin Gerbert of St. Blasien, gave it a more national basis again and infused into it a more positive spirit. But they failed, almost without exception, to renounce in principle the rationalistic movement; this failure led many men, as Joseph II, and Wessenberg, into grievous errors. Progress in southern Germany depended ultimately upon progress in Austria. Not only, however, did all the political plans for Germany of Joseph II break down before the opposition of Frederick the Great, as shown in the War of the Bavarian Succession (1778-79) and in the league of princes formed by Frederick against Joseph (1785), but towards the end of Joseph's reign serious revolutionary movements sprang up against him even in his own dominions. A complete reversal of the relative strength of northern and southern Germany seemed imminent. Nevertheless northern Germany did not fully utilize the pre-eminence it had obtained in intellectual progress. In spirit Frederick the Great was not in sympathy with recent developments. The English political system rested on principles differing widely from French absolutism, the methods and aims of which Frederick, following in his father's footsteps, clung to tenaciously. He even carried these somewhat further, especially in regard to economic administration. Taken altogether his political achievements were the greatest and most effective development of the French system. After 1763 by the annexation of West Prussia, obtained through the First Partition of Poland in 1722, he extended his dominions in the district of the Oder and Weichsel Rivers, and by adopting the policy of Catherine II of Russia he secured for his kingdom a strong position among the states of Eastern Europe. Moreover he declared his intention to give special weight to the eastern or Prussian part of his monarchy by making its nobility, the Junker, his principal instruments both in the military and civil administration. From the time of their arrival in these districts these nobles had been trained to fight and to colonize. The impulse towards a united northern Germany could in this era only come from Frederick the Great, the middle class of north-western Germany had not as yet made itself felt. In 1786 Frederick died, whereupon Prussia's prestige declined once more. Bereft of a strong political stimulus the intellectual life of Germany, both north and south, took on a cosmopolitan and purely humanitarian character.
Even the outbreak of the French Revolution at first produced in Germany not progress but a shock. The ideas of 1789 were greeted with approval, but when the Revolution became radical in 1792 and involved Germany in war, the people, craving peaceful development, without exception rejected it. Austria, reorganized by Leopold II (1790-92), took up again under Thugut, prime-minister of Francis II, who was Francis I of Austria (1792-1835), the policy of expansion initiated by Joseph II. Thugut, however, preferred to make conquests in Italy rather than in southern Germany, and Napoleon's victories in 1796 compelled him to desist even from these (Treaty of Campo-Formio, 1797). The princes of southern Germany, being left to themselves, now turned to the French government and by humble supplication obtained from it the aggrandizement of their territories at the expense of the ecclesiastical rulers whose dominions were to be secularized. At the Congress of Rastatt (1797-99) France was willing to grant their petitions, but Russia, England, and Austria brought the congress to a premature end by renewing the war with France. Previous to this, in 1792, Prussia had joined Austria in taking up arms against the French Revolution. At he Treaty of Basle (1795), however, it had deserted Austria and, influenced by French diplomacy, disclosed for the first time its ambition to become the ruling power of northern Germany, to annex Hanover and to carry out the secularization of ecclesiastical lands. But Frederick the Great's successors, Frederick William II (1786-97) and Frederick William III (1797-1840), were men of little energy. Moreover at the Second (1793) and Third (1795) Partitions of Poland Prussia had assumed more Polish territory than it could assimilate; its administrative resources, unable to bear the strain put upon them, were paralyzed. Thus the end of the eighteenth century left Germany in complete disorder.
South-western Germany, brought into constant contact with France by active commercial relations, now manifested a desire for comprehensive and efficient political organization. For, by the impetuosity with which the French Revolution preached the principle of nationality and the rights of the individual in the State, the German mind had again become accessible to national ideas and strong political convictions. From the beginning of the nineteenth century the Romantic School extolled the glories of German nationality and the empire, and the younger generation of officials in the several states, especially in Prussia, promoted drastic measures of reform. Napoleon, as the instrument of the times, contributed to the realization of these ideals. Defeating Austria again, both in 1800 (Treaty of Luneville, 1801), and in 1805 (Treaty of Presburg), Napoleon proceeded to make a new distribution of German territory. By the Treaty of Luneville he annexed the left bank of the Rhine to France. By the partition compacts with Prussia and Bavaria in 1802 and by the Imperial Delegates Enactment of 1803, he secularized such ecclesiastical states as still existed, and in 1805-06 he abolished the rest of the decadent petty principalities in the south, including the domains of the free knights of the empire and of the free cities. He was to retain only three territorial divisions in southern Germany: Bavaria, Würtemberg, and Baden. These his creative genius built up into secondary states, similar to those of northern Germany both in area and in their capacity for internal development. The South Germans had at last a clear course for renewed progress. Napoleon hoped thereby to put them under lasting obligation to France; in 1806 he bound them, as well as the central German states, more strongly to himself by the Confederation of the Rhine (Rheinbund). In the abolition of the small principalities he gave the death-blow to the Holy Roman Empire, which ceased to exist, 6 August, 1806. The administration and economic condition of the secondary states now rapidly improved, but, contrary to Napoleon's expectations, the sympathies of their inhabitants did not turn to France. Napoleon then overthrew Prussia at the battles of Jena and Auerstädt (1806) and by the Treaty of Tilsit (1807) left to Prussia only its original provinces between the Elbe and the Russian frontier. After this, by means of far-reaching, liberal reforms instituted under the enlightened guidance of Freiherr vom Stein aided by Gneisenau and Scharnhorst, both state and army in Prussia became stronger and more progressive than ever before. In all the German lands on the right bank of the Rhine the educated classes were full of fervid patriotism, and in Austria and Prussia as well the people bore the foreign yoke with
