Making of a German Constitution : a Slow Revolution

Toward a German Nation • 63to the ground. His great grandfather, Ludwig Johann de Savigny (1652–1701),witnessed the fiery razing of Grünstadt in 1689, where he had attended school. Thefamily’s holdings were destroyed by the dragonnades the same year. Targets ofstate-sponsored violent persecution and having lost everything, the de Savignys fledacross the Rhine.Whatever their lineage, as religious refugees, the family was making a new start,and a legal career offered one of a few paths of professional and social mobility inCentral Europe. Savigny’s grandfather, Ludwig (1684–1740), who was only fourwhen the family fled France, did not attend a prestigious university, but made do withan education from Justus Liebig Universität in the poor principality of Gießen. 32 Bythe third generation, the family’s fortunes began to turn around. Savigny’s father,Christian Karl Ludwig von Savigny (1726–1792), studied law at the prestigious universitiesof Marburg, Halle and Jena and became a member of the diplomatic corps.At the relatively late age of forty, Christian married Phillipine Henriette Groos, whowas an orphan with a sizeable inheritance and only seventeen at the time of the marriage.This was a mixed-faith marriage and, by all accounts, Savigny enjoyed a closerelationship with his devoutly Lutheran mother. It was Phillipine who schooled himin the family’s legacy of religious struggle from an early age. 33By the late eighteenth century, the Rhineland that Savigny was born into was aregion enjoying economic acceleration and substantial prosperity. The area had experiencedan agricultural revolution, and qualitative changes in farming techniques,such as Besömmerung (the growing of crops which reinvigorated the soil on fallowland) raised agricultural output. Increased production along with the opening of newexport markets for luxury items, such as tobacco, wine, honey and raw silk, supportedan expansion of wealth and population in urban centres, and, in turn, this enlargedthe market for peasant farmers. 34 Returning home up the Rhine in 1799, Ernst MoritzArndt (1769–1860) noted the ‘immense fields of corn and the extremely assiduouscultivation of clover and potatoes’. 35 Traveling along the banks of the Main River atmid-century, David Hume commented that he ‘never saw such rich Soil, nor bettercultivated’. 36 ‘Germany’, he believed, was ‘undoubtedly a very fine Country, full ofindustrious, honest People, & were it united it would be the greatest power that everwas in the World’. 37The regions around the Rhineland were also home to Central Europe’s burgeoningmanufacturing and residential cities. By 1781, the cotton manufactory in Kaiserslauternemployed more than 2,000 spinners, and the woolens manufacturer inMonshau more than 4,000. Krefeld’s silk manufactory exported all over the worldand employed some 3,400 workers. Behind these market leaders were a host of lesserentrepreneurs. 38 Noble patronage in new residential capitals like Bonn, Koblenz andMainz created dynamic growth and prosperity with a web of interlocking luxurytrades and service industries. 39 There was also a considerable growth in the numbersof merchants and businessman, who contributed to burgeoning towns and madeup the urban middle class (Stadtbürger). 40 The city of Frankfurt am Main, where