ABSTRACT
For Ferdinand III, in common with all the other princes of the Empire, the most urgent task was reconstruction. The beneficial provisions of the treaties of Westphalia made it easier to establish a lasting arrangement at the institutional level, while the application of ius reformandi offered the Habsburgs the chance to pursue with impunity the Counter-Reformation in the hereditary lands, even briefly presenting Leopold with the hope that he might finally apply his grandfather's programme and realize the unity of the Austrian monarchy through Catholicism. The states of the Empire for their part applied the constitution guaranteed by the Peace of Münster. From this compromise was born an Austro-German complex (quite alien to the French spirit) where the emperor was at once head of a powerful patrimonial state and sovereign of the Holy Roman Empire, using all the possibilities that German public law offered him and without which, contrary to what French historians affirm, Austria and Germany would have led a separate existence after 1648. 1 Saint Simon, a good judge of the peoples and realities of the world beyond the Rhine, understood this well and when writing of the emperor Leopold I asserted that in the end he was more powerful in Germany than Charles V had ever been at the height of his glory. 2
