ABSTRACT
Thomas Nipperdey's bold assertion at the beginning of his magisterial synthesis of nineteenth-century German history - 'In the beginning was Napoleon' - is misleading in the sense that it underplays significant developments in central Europe in the last decades of die eighteenth century that come under the heading 'Enlightened Absolutism'. 1 Enlightened reform extended not only to the two biggest central European states, the Habsburg monarchy ruled by Maria Theresa (1740—80), Joseph II (1780—90) and Leopold II (1790—2) and the Prussian kingdom of Frederick II (the Great) (1740—86), but also to many of the smaller states into which the Holy Roman Empire was divided. 2 To an extent, these reforms prefigured those of the Napoleonic era, especially in terms of the development of the modern, bureaucratic, centralised, sovereign state. However, eighteenth-century reform was hampered by that thousand-year-old institution, the Holy Roman Empire, which covered the western (mainly German-speaking) part of the Habsburg monarchy and most of Prussia, as well as all the smaller German states. The Empire greatly restricted the scope of reforms which might impinge upon existing noble, clerical and urban privileges within the individual states. These privileges were protected by the imperial courts in Wetzlar and Vienna. Many Germans cherished the Empire as a guarantor of the peace in central Europe, and argued that it should be reformed and not abolished. Amongst the most prominent advocates of imperial reform in this period was the coadjutor of electoral Mainz, Karl Theodor von Dalberg, of whom more below. 3
