This study examines the diffusion of political ideas and institutions. Several conclusions can now be drawn. Popular suspicion of new ideas and institutions in the Rhineland in the revolutionary era cannot be ascribed to apathy or ignorance, even though such an interpretation was shared by successive waves of reformers, radicals and revolutionaries, and has entered the historiography. Nor can unease at externally imposed innovation be dismissed as conservative parochialism or unquestioning satisfaction with the existing order, as this underplays the indigenous conflicts that distinguished this period. Historical research has revealed the extent of these under the Old Regime, though their continuation through the superficially depoliticised Napoleonic and Restoration periods may come as a surprise. Their survival illustrates the degree of continuity that existed between those two great revolutionary decades, the 1780s and 1840s.

Discontent with the existing order in the 1780s and 1790s, coupled with suspicion of radical alternatives, led to various moderate reform proposals that one might label ‘third way’ were that phrase not encumbered by modern connotations. In any case, that bland term is fundamentally inaccurate in this context, as it implies location on the modern political spectrum, and not to the alternative order of Reich, Land and Stadt which shaped the Rhineland's political culture. This culture was vibrant, capable of evolution, receptive to external influences and able to thrive within new institutional settings.

Napoleon, who straddled the old and new order, is central to this study. At one level, Napoleon was less significant than is sometimes claimed.