Making of a German Constitution : a Slow Revolution

Toward a German Nation • 67Legislative Assembly. A declaration of war against Austria was issued on 20 April1792, and, it should not be underestimated that, in no small measure, French revolutionariesenvisioned themselves as liberating the German lands from effiminate rule.Within weeks, Prussia joined the First Coalition against France. Under the banner of‘guerre aux châteaux, paix aux chamières’ French forces swept Belgium and muchof the west bank of the Rhineland in the summer of 1792. 58 There were those whoembraced the arrival of French troops as a liberating force, to be sure. The FrenchRevolution replaced the American Revolution in Klopstock’s odes to liberty. He wasjoined by other German poets, including Wieland, Tieck, Hölderlin and Wackenroder,amongst other intellectuals. Nonetheless, however many pilgrims of the French Revolutionexisted initially and however much grub-street writers blithely billed it as thedawn or sunrise, the September Massacres of 1792 and the beginning of the Reign ofTerror a year later left many rethinking violent revolution. Caroline Schlegel felt thatthe Jacobins ‘betrayed our ideals and dragged them in the mud, these evil, stupid andbase people who no longer know what they are doing’. 59The west bank of the Rhine fell to the French in 1797, and it was the character ofthe French occupation that sparked resentment and stamped an image of despotismin German minds for a century. The war decree of 1792 ‘announced that the rest ofEurope would be forced to be free and then would pay for this compulsory liberationby supporting the French armies’. 60 The French simply wrung the cost of war out ofCentral Europe. As Carl von Clausewitz wrote, the leaders of the Revolution ‘senttheir soldiers into the field and drove their generals into battle—feeding, reinforcingand stimulating their armies by having them procure, steal and loot everything theyneeded’. 61 The French armies were to supply the war ‘on their own’. 62 Outrageouslyhigh levies were imposed on German towns, not to mention the requisitioning ofeverything from bread and boots to livestock. Many Germans also faced the deeplyresented obligation to meet the gluttonous appetites of French generals, and therewas also the humiliation of conscription and forced labor. 63Despite the original paix aux chamières, in reality even German cottagers fellvictim to French soldiers. No historian has described this history better than Blanning.The citizens of Zweibrucker reported that: ‘They grabbed people on the streetand forced their way into houses, demanding wine, beer, bread, shirts, handkerchiefs,clocks, etc. etc.’ 64 French soldiers were billeted almost immediately in Germanhomes, at the homeowners’ expense, and on the streets, ‘hard-pressed householders’faced the lifting of their portable valuables. 65 Resistance could lead to brutality, as inthe case of Konrad Koch, who was ‘drilled with a bullet’ and killed, after he refusedto turn over his cash to French soldiers. 66 Every army had its collection of criminals,but French military exploitation, replete with large raiding parties to strip wholedistricts clean, took this to new heights. Although smuggling prospered, it is not hardto imagine that the war and occupation had a devastating effect on commerce in theonce prosperous Rhineland. 67 Germans must have also questioned when the Frenchmaintained old regimes against peasants in the countryside through 1798. 68 All of