Confessionalization, Community, and State Building in Germany, 1555-1870

Abstract

The principle cuius regio eius religio belongs to the fundamental structures of modem German history. Juridically set at the Peace of Augsburg in 1555, expanded to include Calvinists and reapplied at the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, it governed political and religious relations in the German lands until the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire in 1803. Stipulating that the religion of the ruler should be the religion of the ruled, cuius regio eius religio constituted an attempt to ameliorate the vexing problems of religious coexistence, religious pluralism, and religious conflict that the Lutheran Reformation and subsequent Protestant reform movements introduced into the fabric of German society. These problems, in turn, powerfully influenced the special trajectory of German state and nation building, ensuring that the German path, more perhaps even than those of the French or English, would be marked by problems of religious, and therefore cultural, disunity. In what follows we will consider how religious division affected state building and civil society in Germany from 1555 to 1870. While historians of early modem Germany have recently devoted a considerable amount of research to this problem, suggesting complex interactions between confessional formation and the emergence of the early modern state, historians of nineteenth-century Germany have been slower to recognize the impact of religious division on nineteenth-century German society. Moreover, neither early modern historians nor their counterparts who deal with the modern era have attempted to trace the continuities and discontinuities across what has become a strict disciplinary barrier between the two periods. In this article we will consider both periods, but we will also focus on the continuities across the barrier. Such an analysis implies two sets of questions. The first concerns the creationsometimes by suasion, sometimes by force-of confessional unity: What impact did the formation of confessional homogeneity have on state structure, on the con-