Nobles and Nation in Central Europe: Free Imperial Knights in the Age of Revolution, 1750-1850

Abstract

How far did the collapse of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806 mark the end of an era? Recent research has often undermined the importance of this caesura, stressing instead the continuities between pre- and post-revolutionary Germany. The Great Reforms are now seen to have had their origins in the 1780s, while the persistence in power of traditional elites has long been accepted as a hallmark of modern German history. William D. Godsey, Jr. mounts a convincing attack on this emerging orthodoxy by demonstrating how for one group that had previously defined the political nation 1806 heralded a fundamental transformation of both their modus vivendi and their raison d’être. This group was, of course, the Free Imperial Knights. Two reasons for their neglect spring to mind: first, the inherent difficulties of researching a topic with such diffuse and widely scattered archival sources; and second, their dramatic decline in status, which appears to render them irrelevant to the key questions in nineteenth-century German history. In both cases, Godsey rises to the challenge admirably. This volume is a monument of patient, archival scholarship, which pieces together material relating to the sixty families represented in the cathedral chapter of Electoral Mainz between 1743 and 1803. It is also an intelligent and important contribution to the extensive literature on German nationalism and nation-state formation on both sides of the Napoleonic divide. That said, the book takes too much for granted in the reader, and Godsey does not push his conclusions as far as he perhaps might do.