If the French faced the 200th anniversary of the Napoleonic Empire with some trepidation about how to commemorate the infamous Corsican, the British celebrated the Battle of Trafalgar as an enduring national victory. A grand exhibit in the National Maritime Museum in London, “Nelson and Napoleon,” observed this event in 2005. In contemporary Germany, however, the commemoration of 1806 has occurred mainly among small circles of specialists and remained largely absent from popular historical consciousness. In recent times, besides the exhibition on the Holy Roman Empire in the German Historical Museum in Berlin, only small local exhibits and substantial articles in magazines like Die Zeit and Der Spiegel recall 1806. Past momentous occasions such as 1848, 1914–1919, 1933–1945, and 1949 clearly overshadow in contemporary historical memory the tumultuous decades that surrounded the Napoleonic Wars. This tendency to overlook and underestimate the significance of the early nineteenth century also remains evident among scholars who work on later periods of German history. In the shadow of World Wars and the Holocaust, the period of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars between 1792 and 1815 seems distant to the contemporary audience. But why do historians also tend to disregard the importance of this era of warfare and domestic, social, and economic transformation—a period so rich in complexity—and its enduring consequences for nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe?

In the “Year of Prussia” 2001, celebrated in Germany because of the three-hundredth anniversary of Prussia's becoming a kingdom in 1701, the editor of the culture section of Die Welt, Eckhart Fuhr, remarked in a review of recent publications, “The discourse (on Prussia) has long since lost all of its (former) severity, obstinacy, and passion. The Germans today,” he declared, “are perfectly comfortable with the ambiguity of the Prussian legacy.” His colleague, the historian and Die Zeit journalist Volker Ulrich, agreed. He observed that the discussion about Prussia lacked a critical edge and regretted that no “truly sharp anti-Prussian book” had appeared among the many new publications. Gavriel D. Rosenfeld reached the same conclusion in his article, “‘A Mastered Past?’ The West-German Historiography on Prussia after 1945,” published in 2004 in the journal German History. He interpreted as a sign of “normalization” the fact that—unlike thirty years ago—Prussia is no longer the source of sharply formulated historical debates.

The following article focuses on the Rhineland, and more specifically, the region on the left (or west) bank of the Rhine bounded in the north and west by the Low Countries and France. This German-speaking region was occupied by the armies of revolutionary France after 1792. De jure annexation followed the Treaty of Lunéville (1801), and French rule lasted until 1814. Most of the Rhineland was awarded in 1815 to Prussia and remained a constituent part until after the Second World War. The Rhineland experienced Napoleonic rule first hand. Its four departments—the Roër, Rhin-et-Moselle, Sarre, and Mont-Tonnerre—were treated like the others in metropolitan France, and it is this status that makes the region distinct in German-speaking Europe. This had consequences both in the Napoleonic period and in the century that followed the departure of the last French soldier. This alone would constitute sufficient reason for studying the region. More broadly, however, the Rhenish experience in the French period sheds light on the much broader phenomena of state formation and nation building. Before 1792, the Rhenish political order appeared in many respects a throwback to the late Middle Ages. Extreme territorial fragmentation, city states, church states, and mini states distinguished its landscape. These survived the early-modern period thanks in part to Great Power rivalry and the protective mantle provided by the Holy Roman Empire. Then, suddenly, came rule by France which, in the form of the First Republic and Napoleon's First Empire, represented the most demanding state the world had seen up to that point. This state imposed itself on a region unused to big government. It might be thought that bitter confrontation would have resulted. Yet, and here is a paradox this article wishes to address, many aspects of French rule gained acceptance in the region, and defense of the Napoleonic legacy formed a component of the “Rhenish” identity that came into being in the nineteenth century.

“The fate of Europe sits on a razor's edge, if war starts now, it will be dreadfully feared. Neutrality will be impossible,” worried Hamburg enlightened merchant and philanthropist Caspar Voght in April 1803. He added, “Should war come, Bremen and Hamburg will be occupied by the French or the Prussians, and the rivers will be blockaded. God give us peace.” His fateful words preceded the French occupation and annexation of northern Germany and the corresponding imperial Continental System, which shattered the north German coastal economy. When he returned to Hamburg in September 1812, Voght shared his impressions in another letter: In what misgivings, with what spirits did I approach the city from Harburg, the once fortunate shores, the towers of the once so prosperous city! I landed. Everything I saw and heard demonstrated the ruin of earlier prosperity, [the city] stripped of its attributes, cloaked in the fog of a threatening future. How my heart bled … The city empty and desolate, benefactors of the poor impoverished, the poor without help, my life's work destroyed.

Travelers strolling through Stuttgart's Old Town who pause before Württemberg's royal residence can hardly fail to notice the Victory Column. Thirty meters high, it towers over the square and proclaims Crown Prince Wilhelm's victories against the armies of Napoleon in 1814. Erected in 1841, the Victory Column marked the Silver Jubilee of Wilhelm's reign, by that time a much-loved regent. Eight years earlier, at the twentieth anniversary of the Battle of Leipzig, the Bavarian king Ludwig I dedicated a memorial to the dead of the Russian Campaign. Evidently cast from the metal of French cannons, the massive obelisk dominates a crossroads in Munich—roads named after victorious battles fought during the Wars of Liberation. With their military campaigns engraved in stone, the two monarchies, Württemberg and Bavaria, demonstrated their zealous opposition to the French Emperor.

Fritz Ringer, Emeritus Mellon Professor of History at the University of Pittsburgh, died on February 3, 2006, of a chronic pulmonary illness with which he had been struggling for several years. With his death we lost one of our most distinctive and recognizable voices in modern European intellectual history. He leaves us a distinguished body of scholarship that reflects an unusually unified, lifelong, intellectual project as well as an example of active, principled conduct in defense of the ethical ideals of the university. Both will remain challenges to us now and in the future.