Few sights more disconcerting could have confronted a rationally minded Napoleonic bureaucrat than the heterogeneous Rhineland. He viewed cultural diversity ‘not [as] the characteristic of the rational individual, but [as] evidence of the historical survival among groups and communities of beliefs and superstitions that belonged to earlier ages’. It was not only that a Rhenish department like the Roër encompassed under the Old Regime thirty-two territorial entities. Territorial fragmentation was matched by confessional diversity and a plethora of local patois, or ‘local dialects and ways of speech’, as Braudel more accurately refers to them.

Contemporaries experienced difficulty placing Rhinelanders within any single, culturally defined category. Dorsch, the former radical who became sub-prefect of Cleves, distinguished between Rhinelanders of Dutch origin, who spoke ‘German gibberish’, and ‘Prussians’. Many Germans from the right bank believed Rhinelanders closer to the Dutch in character.