The long conflict between emperors and princes in Germany had concluded with the triumph of the latter. Yet the victors soon discovered that, instead of achieving independence, they had merely exchanged one master for another. Indeed, they were more subordinate now to the wishes of Paris than they had been to those of Vienna. Napoleon gradually induced or forced all the states of Germany except Austria and Prussia, 36 states in all, to join the confederation. The inclusion of the two leading powers of central Europe might have proved troublesome for him or even dangerous. The participation of the secondary states, on the other hand, provided him with reliable mercenaries who owed him too much and feared him too much to oppose his wishes. He was free to do as he liked in the region between the Rhine and the Elbe rivers. In order to enforce his embargo on Continental trade with England, he annexed the entire coastline along the North Sea, including much of the electorate of Hanover, a dependency of Britain, Napoleon’s archenemy. When that was not enough, he added Lübeck on the Baltic to the French Empire. He carved out the kingdom of Westphalia, consisting mainly of the remainder of Hanover and conquered Prussian territory, for his brother Jérôme and the grand duchy of Berg, incorporating additional Prussian territories, for his brother-in-law Joachim Murat. He was the undisputed master of all of western Germany.

After the formation of the Confederation of the Rhine, there was only one state in central Europe that had not yet been forced to submit to France. But the leaders of Prussia hesitated and wavered in their policy until they lost the opportunity of profiting from the War of the Third Coalition. Had they joined Austria and Russia against Napoleon, they might have kept him from gaining hegemony over Germany. Or had they become the allies of Napoleon, they might have established a sphere of influence in the region north of the Main River. As it was, they waited until they fell between two stools. They finally declared war against the French in October 1806, after Austria had been forced to surrender, Russia had decided to retreat, and the secondary states had become the vassals of Paris. Yet public opinion in the Prussian capital remained confident that the army of Frederick the Great would prove a match for the conqueror of Europe. The result of such self-deception was a military disaster of unparalleled magnitude. In the two simultaneous battles of Jena and Auerstädt (October 14, 1806), the Prussian armies were completely routed, and the road to Berlin lay open before the French invaders. The city was occupied on October 27.

More disastrous than the military defeat, however, was the moral collapse of a state that had taught its citizens that obedience to authority was the supreme political virtue. The civilian population never thought of offering resistance to the advancing enemy. Even many army officers were so disheartened by Napoleon’s success that they surrendered one fortified position after another without a fight. Frederick William III had to pay a terrible price for the policy of his ancestors, who had built efficient government at the expense of civic initiative. He tried to hold out in East Prussia, hoping that the Russian armies, which were still at war with Napoleon, would help him regain the rest of his kingdom. But when in July 1807 Alexander I concluded peace with France at Tilsit, the unfortunate Frederick William had no choice but to follow suit. The treaty that he was forced to sign was a catastrophe. Prussia lost almost half its territory and population, including most of the Polish possessions in the east as well as all the territories west of the Elbe River. Subsequent agreements, moreover, imposed a heavy indemnity, a military occupation, and a reduction in the size of the army. The proud monarchy of Frederick the Great had been reduced to a secondary state in Germany.

Central Europe remained under the dominant influence of France for more than a decade. That influence was at first limited and indirect, then pervasive and overpowering. Yet it was during this period of alien preponderance that Germany for the first time felt the stirrings of liberalism and nationalism. The regions that had become part of the French Empire experienced firsthand the advantages of efficient centralized government in which equality before the law and freedom of opportunity were accepted principles. Those states that retained a pseudo-independence as satellites of Napoleon, moreover, sought to imitate the example of their master, partly in order to gain his favour, partly in order to emulate his success, but most importantly in order to integrate the new territories that they had so suddenly acquired. One government after another began to remove religious restrictions, relax economic barriers, eliminate servile obligations, and centralize administrative functions. Above all, constitutional rule and popular representation ceased to seem Utopian to men of property and education who had witnessed the stirring events of the years since 1789. The French hegemony also led to the birth of nationalism in Germany. For one thing, the achievement of political unity became a distinct possibility, once the territorial fragmentation of the Holy Roman Empire had come to an end. Furthermore, the presence of foreign occupiers—arrogant, overbearing, and avaricious—aroused among Germans a sense of nationality that they had never felt in the tranquil days of the old order. Finally, all who admired or envied the triumphs of Napoleon had an example of the great deeds that the love of fatherland could inspire. The ideal of cosmopolitan individualism that had been generally accepted in the 18th century began to give way before a growing consciousness of national identity. Yet the emergence of the concepts of constitutional freedom and national unity not through indigenous developments but rather in response to foreign domination influenced the form that these concepts assumed in Germany.

Every German state felt the influence of the new principles of government and economy that the period of French hegemony had introduced, but nowhere was that influence more consequential than in Prussia. For only in the hour of deepest humiliation did the Hohenzollern kingdom finally make an effort to adapt its structure to the changing political and social conditions that it had stubbornly ignored during its years of greatness. Between 1806 and 1813 the statesmen in Berlin initiated a revolution from above to transform a rigid despotism into a popular monarchy supported by the loyalty of a free citizenry. Out of the disasters of Jena and Tilsit emerged a group of gifted reformers who sought to regenerate their country. The leading figures in this movement for civic reconstruction were the civil servants Karl, Freiherr (baron) vom Stein, and Karl August, Fürst (prince) von Hardenberg, along with the military commanders Gerhard von Scharnhorst and August, Graf (count) Neidhardt von Gneisenau. Among their most important achievements was the abolition of serfdom, a measure designed to create citizens out of human beasts of burden. Yet, while the reforms gave the peasant personal freedom, they failed to provide him with economic independence. Most of the land remained in the hands of the aristocracy, which therefore continued to dominate the countryside politically as well as socially. More successful was the law establishing municipal self-government. Thereafter the cities of the kingdom were to be administered by officials chosen not by the central bureaucracy but by the propertied inhabitants of the cities themselves. The autonomy of the cities, it was hoped, would help train a politically conscious and active middle class. The most effective reforms, however, were those introduced in the armed forces. After the officers who had shown themselves incompetent during the war were dismissed or retired, the high command carried out a thorough reorganization of the military system. Discipline became more humane, promotion was to be based on merit rather than aristocratic connections, the method of recruitment was improved, and the training in tactics was modernized. Most important, the army’s leaders sought to instill in the soldiers a new spirit rooted in inner conviction rather than unquestioning obedience. Defeat had changed Prussia from a garrison state into a center of political and intellectual ferment.

Patriotic sentiments became increasingly widespread in Germany as the burden of French domination grew progressively heavier. The financial sacrifices that Napoleon demanded reinforced the personal resentments aroused by his ruthless statecraft. Before long a network of secret organizations had sprung up in the German states seeking the expulsion of the foreign invaders. Yet it would be a mistake to think that all Germans regarded the hegemony of France as an unmitigated evil. There were, in fact, wide differences of opinion among them. The rulers of the secondary states and their supporters in the army and the bureaucracy saw Napoleon as the instrument of their new importance. Many reformers in the south—the Bavarian statesman Maximilian Joseph, Graf (count) von Montgelas, for example—believed that only French influence had made possible the modernization of government in Germany. Some men of letters (writers, journalists, and professors) continued to argue, moreover, that the political disunity of Germany was a natural result of its historical experience and reflected its essential character. Even among those who opposed French domination, there was no agreement regarding the future political structure of the nation. Many of them dreamed of a liberal and united fatherland that would take its place among the Great Powers of Europe. Others preferred a loose association of governments, similar to the Confederation of the Rhine, that could safeguard the interests of the secondary states against Prussia and Austria. Still others hoped for a complete restoration of the old order in which they had grown up and to which they longed to return. And then there were the broad masses of the population of the German states, exploited, illiterate, and uninformed. They remained by and large indifferent to the crosscurrents of political thought, seeking nothing more than an improvement in their standard of living and the preservation of their way of life. Germany was beginning to move toward new civic and social norms, but the transformation of political attitudes was gradual and intermittent.

The slow spread of the ideals of unity and freedom became apparent during the first serious effort to throw off the yoke of foreign domination in the German states. The Austrian government concluded in 1809 that Napoleon’s recent reverses in Spain presaged a general uprising against French hegemony on the Continent. The result was an ill-fated attempt at a war of liberation, in which the Habsburg troops challenged Napoleon for the fourth time, only to go down in defeat once again. Appeals from Vienna to the people of Germany found little response except in Tirol and among a few nationalist hotspurs in the north. The princes refused to risk French wrath until they could be sure of ultimate victory, while their subjects refused to rise against French oppression without princely approval. The result was that the war in central Europe, unlike the one in the Iberian Peninsula, was waged primarily by regular forces rather than by guerrilla bands. Archduke Charles gained important successes for the Austrian army at Aspern and Essling (May 21–22, 1809), an indication that the strategic mastery of the French was drawing to a close. But at Wagram (July 5–6) Napoleon was able to work the last of his military miracles. Vienna had to sue for peace once more, the Treaty of Schönbrunn (October 14) ceding Salzburg to Bavaria, West Galicia to the grand duchy of Warsaw, and the Adriatic coastland to France. The defeat finally persuaded the emperor, who had exchanged the title Francis II of the Holy Roman Empire for Francis I of the Austrian Empire, that resistance would be as futile in the future as it had been in the past. He therefore adopted a policy of collaboration with France, signaled by the marriage of his daughter Marie-Louise to Napoleon. Germany continued to languish in the grip of foreign domination.