beyond the middle of the nineteenth century, Germany was understood to include the German-speaking sections of Austria, which was usually the dominant German state. In the words of the Deutschlandlied, or national anthem (written in 1841 by the exiled liberal August Heinrich Hoffmann von Fallersleben), Germany ranged from the Maas River in the West to the Memel River in the East and from the Etsch (Adige) River in the South to the Belt (Baltic Sea passages) in the North.
The domain of German rulers was not limited, however, to German-speaking territories. Poles and other Slavic peoples lived in the eastern sections of Prussia, especially after the conquests by Frederick the Great to which Mises refers. Brandenburg, where Potsdam and Berlin are located, was the nucleus of what became the Kingdom of Prussia in 1701. The Hohenzollern family held the title of Margrave of Brandenburg from 1415 on and continued as the Prussian royal family until 1918. Frederick William, the “Great Elector” (the meaning of “elector” is explained below), ruled from 1640 to 1688. He presided over the rebuilding and expansion of his state after the Thirty Years’ War and obtained full sovereignty over Prussia. His son, Frederick I, who ruled from 1688 to 1713, was crowned the first King of (technically, “in”) Prussia. Frederick William I, king from 1713 to 1740, was largely the founder of the Prussian army. His son Frederick II became known to history as Frederick the Great. He wrested Silesia from Austria in 1745 and joined with Russia and Austria in the first partition of Poland in 1772. His successor, Frederick William II, joined in the second and third partitions of 1793 and 1795, which wiped Poland off the map.
The Austrian Empire included not only speakers of German but also Hungarians, Rumanians, Czechs, Slovenes, Poles, Ruthenians, Italians, and others. According to a 1910 census, the population of the Austrian part of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy consisted of 35 percent Germans, 23 percent Czechs, 17 percent Poles, 19 percent other Slavs, 2¾ percent Italians, and scattered others.
The Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, to use its full name, existed until 1806. It coincided roughly, but only roughly, with German-speaking territory. It sometimes included parts of northern Italy but left out the eastern parts of Prussia. It was organized (or revived) under Otto I, whom the Pope crowned Emperor in 962. (He was succeeded by Otto II and Otto III; Mises refers to the age of the Ottonians.) The Empire was a loose confederation of princely and ecclesiastical sovereignties and free cities. Seven, eight, or nine of their rulers were Electors, who chose a new Emperor when a vacancy occurred. From 1273, except for a few intervals (notably 1308 to 1438), the Holy Roman Emperors belonged to the Habsburg family, whose domains included many lands outside the boundaries of the Empire. The dynastic expansion of the Habsburgs explains Mises’s reference to the “married-together state.” The male line of the family died out in 1740, when Charles VI was succeeded in his domains by his daughter Maria Theresa, an event that touched off the War of the Austrian Succession. Maria Theresa’s husband was the former Duke of Lorraine and Holy Roman Emperor as Francis I from 1745 to 1765, which explains why the dynasty became known as the house of Habsburg-Lorraine.
Mises mentions several other events and personalities in the history of the Holy Roman Empire. Until his death in 1637, Ferdinand II reigned from 1617 as King of Bohemia, from 1618 as King of Hungary, and from 1619 as Emperor. His fanatical Catholicism alienated the Protestant Bohemian nobles, who rebelled in 1618 (the picturesquely named Defenestration of Prague occurred at this time), beginning the Thirty Years’ War. The war, which wrought havoc on Germany, hinged not only on religious differences but also on the ambition of the Habsburgs to gain control of the entire country. The Imperial forces won the war’s first major battle, fought on the White Mountain, near Prague, in 1620, ending Bohemian independence for three centuries. The Protestant side was aided at times by the Danes, the Swedes, and even the French under Louis XIII and Louis XIV. The Treaty of Westphalia, in 1648, awarded certain German provinces on the Baltic Sea to Sweden and southern Alsace to France, while the Emperor’s authority over Germany became purely nominal. Acceptance of the religious split of Germany was an important step toward religious toleration. Leopold I, whom Mises mentions, was Holy Roman Emperor from 1657 to 1705. The greater part of his reign was occupied by wars with Louis XIV of France and with the Turks. Leopold II, Emperor from 1790 until his death in 1792 and the last crowned King of Bohemia, succeeded his brother Joseph II (also a son of Maria Theresa). He instigated the Declaration of Pillnitz, which helped precipitate the French Revolutionary Wars a few weeks after his death.
The Napoleonic Wars brought lasting changes to the map and the political systems of Europe. The Enactment of Delegates of the Holy Roman Empire (Reichsdeputationshauptschluss) was adopted in 1803 under pressure of Napoleon. Mises mentions this Enactment as an illustration of the old idea that lands were the properties of their sovereigns and so could be bought and sold, traded, reshaped, divided, and consolidated without regard to the wishes of their inhabitants, who were mere appurtenances of the land. The Enactment greatly reduced the number of sovereignties in the Empire, in part by ending the temporal rule of dignitaries of the Catholic Church and putting their lands under the rule of neighboring princes. In 1806, again under pressure of Napoleon, who had detached the western parts of Germany—only temporarily, as things turned out—and organized them into a Confederation of the Rhine, the old Empire was liquidated. Francis II gave up his title of Holy Roman Emperor but retained the title of Emperor of Austria as Francis I.
Mises mentions two men who strove for a unified Italian state at the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Joachim Murat, a marshall of France whom Napoleon had made King of Naples in 1808, tried in 1815 to make himself king of all Italy; but he was captured and shot. Florestano Pepe, one of Murat’s generals, fought against the Austrians in 1815. (Mises’s allusion is presumably to Florestano Pepe rather than to his brother Guglielmo, another Neapolitan general, who organized the Carbonari and who led an unsuccessful proconstitutional revolt in 1821.)
After the Napoleonic Wars, the reigning dynasties of Europe tried to restore the old regime. The Holy Alliance, to which Mises repeatedly refers with scorn, is a phrase frequently but imprecisely used to label the reactionary policies of Russia, Prussia, and Austria in particular. Strictly speaking, the Holy Alliance was an innocuous declaration of Christian principles of statesmanship drawn up by Czar Alexander I in 1815 and signed by almost all European sovereigns. The repressive policies are more properly associated with the Congress system and the Quadruple Alliance of 1815. Mises mentions, by the way, the Polish kingdom of Alexander I. The Congress of Vienna (1814–1815) created the kingdom in personal union with Russia but with a constitution of its own (which was suspended after the Polish insurrection of 1830–1831).
With the Holy Roman Empire defunct, a decision of the Congress of Vienna loosely joined some thirty-eight (soon thirty-nine) German sovereignties together again as the German Confederation. The federal diet, which met in Frankfurt under the presidency of Austria, had little power because unanimity or a two-thirds majority was required for most decisions.
In 1834, after achieving a free-trade area within its own territories, Prussia took the lead in establishing the Zollverein among most German states, not including Austria, through the merger of two regional customs unions. The new union is considered a step toward political unification. In 1867 it was reorganized with a constitution and parliament of its own. Mises mentions one of its intellectual fathers, the economist Friedrich List. List had been forced to emigrate to the United States in 1825 for advocating administrative reforms in Württemberg but had returned to Germany in 1832 as U.S. consul at Leipzig. He favored internal free trade, together with strictly temporary tariff protection to encourage the development of infant industries.
Mises makes many admiring and wistful references to the European revolutions of 1848. The revolutions were mostly the work of the middle-class intellectuals, who were bringing mainly French ideas to bear against political repression. The February revolution in Paris, resulting in the overthrow of King Louis Philippe and establishment of the Second Republic, was emulated elsewhere. In the numerous sovereignties into which Italy was still split, a movement for liberal constitutions was followed by an unsuccessful patriotic war to eject the Austrians.
Revolutionary riots came to
