WI HRE Survives

Taking a failed ARW TL, wherin the French Revolution is delayed and made milder -- one effect being that Napoleon does not abolish the Holy Roman Empire.

How do the German states evolve? What are the butterflies from this particular aspect of European politics? What else?
 
I have expressed my thoughts elsewhere (there's a thread on the Rhineland in the Revolutionary Age that I wrote about), but suffice it to say I think people are too quick to write off the HRE. A lot of people supported it and its institutions, and IMO there is no reason reform couldn't take place within its structure.

It took place in the same region later on, after all.
 
How long could it have survived? Does German nationalism still reform the German states in the HRE into something resembling The German Empire? I've never read anything on here about Germany evolving out of the HRE I don't believe...
 
There's a reason the post-1648 Empire is more frequently called the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. While Imperial princes were increasingly autonomous of Vienna, the fact still remained they were nominal vassals of the Kaiser, and the Reichstag did provide avenues for Imperial discourse (and for a way for the smaller states to get something).

So assuming there's no Napoleon, the HRE could take on what the German Confederation was supposed to be.

EDIT: Man, I'm starting to sound a bit like Susano.
 
With Napoleon already in power in France...
... a really crushing defeat (OTL Austerlitz) had to be avoided. Which avoids the dissolution of the HRE in 1806. Defeating Napoleon at Austerlitz, however unlikely, might do wonders.
... a victory against Napoleon in the years following the dissolution. Most Probably at Jena and Auerstedt. Let both the russians and the austrians use the same calendar and they might have defeated Napoleon in the War of the fourth Coalition. And only two month after its dissolution the HRE might see a comeback.
... everything goes like OTL up to the Congress of Vienna. There, in November of 1814, a group of 29 small and medium sized independent german states petitioned the 'committee for the creation of a German Federation' to reintroduced the HRE.
 
I have to agree with Faeelin and SavoyTruffle; if the HRE survives, and there's no reason to assume it wouldn't sans the Napoleonic Wars, its likely continues on as what the German Confederation theoretically was and 'should' have been; a rather loose collection of independent states drawn together by culture, ethnicity, language, and (occasionally wavering) loyalty to the Emperor.

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EDIT: Man, I'm starting to sound a bit like Susano.

I'm not quite sure which of these is more appropriate ;)

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yannik

Banned
"the post-1648 Empire is more frequently called the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation"

The title "Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation" is used since the 15 century .

http://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Datei:HRR.gif&filetimestamp=20071030175655

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4c/HRR_1789_EN.png

In my opinion, a major problem is that large parts of Prussia and Austria-Hungary did not lie within the boundaries of the empire.
And secondly, without a Congress of Vienna, Prussia didn't acquire large parts of the German heartland thus Prussia didn't gain the supremacy among the German states.
I don't think Austria-Hungary was willing try to gain (more than ) predomiance among the German states. (and perhaps to lose Hungry and Siebenbürgen)
 
How long could it have survived? Does German nationalism still reform the German states in the HRE into something resembling The German Empire? I've never read anything on here about Germany evolving out of the HRE I don't believe...

Decades of Darkness did it. Kind of. Basically the German Confederation forms into Germany, EU style, but the Austrian Emperor gets the title Holy Roman Emperor.
 
Well, why bother to call it "the Holy Roman Empire" if it is really going to boil down to being just some kind of German Confederation?

If it really is a consensual and federal union, why shouldn't it include non-German nations like Bohemia or major parts of Poland in a non-subordinate role?

For that matter both Czechs and Poles would tend to strengthen the "Holy" aspect.

Which is quite problematic if by HRE we really mean "early edition Germany" because of course Germany is divided between Catholic and Protestant regions.

And the "Roman" part is a big red herring unless Rome, and hence at least a lot of Italy, is included. Trying to make it so and keep it so proved a major distraction from the mission--assuming the early HRE emperors (Hohenstaufens IIRC) should have chosen to accept it--of forming the nucleus of a German nation.

So all in all, I have a rather different perspective on what the HRE "should" have been--either a true pan-European Empire, and thus only partially German, or at any rate the greater-than-Germany central European Empire it generally was--including pretty much all of Germany, but also the Lowlands, parts of Italy, and Bohemia.

The problem, as the posts here with their narrow focus on averting or defeating Napoleon already acknowledge, is that key parts of the minimum whole were held by powers peripheral to it who had strong interests well outside the boundaries of the traditional Empire. And this was always a problem--basically because any European dynasty strong enough to hold the core of the Empire probably rose to power outside of it and brought these distant peripheral possessions in--but none of them could strengthen the unity of the Empire to the point that these outer realms got irrevocably attached to the whole.

in the end, most of what people here are talking about as the "Empire" did indeed become one--the German Empire, taking its organizational core as the concept of a German nation, to the detriment of various non-German minorities within it.

So--with a POD well before 1789 and all that, I might accept that a stronger HRE consolidates itself, and de facto is recognized as mostly German and the natural home of all German states; given the realistic trends of the Modern period it seems likely that minorities would indeed get eclipsed--along that path, we have basically the First Reich sequeing into something like the Second Reich, probably with somewhat more territory. If the nationalist principle is strong enough perhaps Bohemia gets ejected; perhaps Austria, with her long-standing possessions and preoccupations south and east, gets ejected too.

Or somewhat more interestingly if less likely, we see the Empire evolve into something more multicultural. It seems that much of the sentiment expressed here for the HRE revolves around the notion that the Empire would have been confederal and so the numerous statelets of Germany prior to the 19th century processes of forced unification might have persisted, perhaps in a royalist/aristocratic analog of the USA's federation of republics.

Well, that's a pretty romantic idea. How it would evolve in practice without simply as OTL being an open invitation to disintegration and providing a battlefield for peripheral powers inside and outside Germany to fight over the pieces--that will take some ingenuity to explain!

The alternative that was seen at the time to balkanized chaos was that some single strong power should take charge of the whole and ramrod it all into what the name of "Empire" suggests it aspired to be, a single centralized unified state. And of course the various established intermediate powers spent most of their time making quite sure nothing like that ever happened, going along with a strong centralizer only insofar as it might help them balance the score with some local rival--then it was time to switch sides and fight the centralizing power. Or better yet, don't elect an Emperor in the first place who has any prospect or program of centralizing!

The idea of the Empire evolving into some kind of liberal Common Central Europe, with or without some established religion (but if "with," it had better be an especially tolerant one, given the fundamental split between Protestant and Catholic, plus of course one would prefer to avoid the brutal suppression of yet other religious sects that OTL were crushed in the region) is appealing enough but I don't see how it could reasonably happen.

But anyway here we are talking, per OP, about taking the Empire as it was in say 1800 and keeping that going. I humbly submit, by that point it was little more than a political trophy, one that had been captured by the Hapsburgs but emptied of all deep significance. Logically the Austrians should either have dispensed with the title or extended it over their entire realm, on the theory that the reborn Roman Empire does aspire to rule the entire world eventually anyway. They couldn't do that of course because the various German states within or partially within the Empire but not under Austrian control would object to the Viennese Emperor packing the Electorate with distant Electorates in his pocket. Which goes to show--the Empire may have served some sort of function but was hardly a unified nation, nor even a confederation based on any deep appreciation of mutual interest.

Now--suppose that both the Hapsburgs and the Hohenzollerns had suffered some severe reverses around the turn of the 18th t0 19th century, and it proved possible for several medium-sized German realms within the Empire to work out a sustained joint common policy for the collective defense of Germany-or perhaps even from the beginning, some of these medium powers could have been non-German--the Danes, the Dutch, the Bohemians, perhaps even some Italians...and they found the old framework of the Empire useful, electing one of their number as Emperor, perhaps picking up the pieces of broken Austria and/or Prussia. If the policy of cooperation proved workable and mutually beneficial to a fair number of key statelets within the old Empire bounds, I can see them working together to maintain and modernize the federal structure and under that rubric, keeping the HRE on the map as a real political unit.

But this is a stretch too--more likely one or another of these medium powers would seek to go it alone as Prussia did OTL.

I suspect that even if Napoleon and indeed the whole existential challenge posed by the French Revolution OTL were butterflied away, the HRE was most likely doomed to continue fading from real-world political relevancy, even if perhaps it might still exist on paper to this day.
 
Do not forget that after 1648(!) the HRE was as good as dead, so Napoleon's desollusion of the HRE was welcomed by most. It can only survive if it had been reformed into something like a monarchist version of the USA with the Elected Emperor as head of State (the United Principalities of Germany) long before the French Revolution.
 
Do not forget that after 1648(!) the HRE was as good as dead, so Napoleon's desollusion of the HRE was welcomed by most. It can only survive if it had been reformed into something like a monarchist version of the USA with the Elected Emperor as head of State (the United Principalities of Germany) long before the French Revolution.

Thats a succinct way of saying about 2/3rds of what I was saying! Kudos!

I just want to stress--if there was going to be a reform that could keep the HRE relevant, it would have to be based on a power or set of powers based within the bounds of the Empire as it was commonly conceived to be bordered, not someplace peripheral or well beyond them like Prussia, Austria, or Spain. The problem with the Empire was that possession of the Imperial title was a political trophy every great power on the Continent vied for.

Italy was supposed to be a core territory of the Empire; I'd be quite amused if someone comes up with a timeline where an Italian family, operating from a power base not much stronger than any Italian state of OTL, managed to play the politics of the Empire so well as to parley their way to the top of the system, based on keeping key German and other principalities north of the Alps happy with their leadership, and thus in turn gaining leverage for a similar patchwork Imperium-by-consensus in Italy itself.

Of course an Italian-led Empire might mean that for it to survive, the Lutherans have to be crushed. But then again maybe not; maybe the Emperors themselves are not unsympathetic to reforms to check the power of the Church and the Empire becomes a patchwork of radical reformists and counterreformists; if this happens to Europe as a whole, perhaps the Empire would not be relatively crippled. Maybe ITTL they think they have it tough with sectarian conflict but don't know a tenth the trouble we had OTL?

Or one side or the other just plain wins--either the Protestants get crushed as other waves of "heresy" had before, or a new generation of "heretics" take over Rome and decree a major change in style of Catholicism itself.

Let it not be forgotten, the "Holy" in "Holy Roman Empire" refers to the fact that it was supposed to be the direct descendent of Charlemagne's Empire which was supposed to champion the Roman Catholic Church. That didn't stop an early Hohenstaufen Emperor from being an outright atheist, a few hundred years after Charlemagne, but as a general rule the Empire and Church did regard each other as mutually necessary.

Or, as some wag said in regards to the thing OTL--

"Neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire...":p
 
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