The Bee and the Eagle

This interesting but uneven collection gets off to a shaky start when the editors tell us that the Emperor Francis II was the brother of his predecessor Leopold II and of Queen Marie Antoinette of France. He was, of course, the son of the former and the nephew of the latter. This slip can be taken as symptomatic of a more general neglect of the Habsburg Monarchy and the Holy Roman Empire in the period. One cannot imagine the same sort of mistake being made about, say, George IV of England or even Louis XVII of France. It must also be said that not all the chapters, which are the proceedings of a conference held at the German Historical Institute in London in 2006, address the topic identified in the sub-title. Rafe Blaufarb contributes a scholarly and interesting piece on ‘the abolition of feudalism’ but it has nothing to do with the end of the Holy Roman Empire, which it does not mention. Neither does Claus Telp in his paper on ‘The Prussian army in the Jena campaign’, which is a straightforward piece of military history. David Hopkin has written an original and sophisticated piece on ‘Legends of the Allied invasions and occupations of eastern France, 1792–1815’, but almost all his illustrations are drawn from the duchy of Lorraine. There are characteristically elegant and illuminating essays by William Doyle and Alan Forrest on ‘The political culture of the Napoleonic Empire’ and ‘Napoleon as a monarch’ respectively, but which make no reference to the Holy Roman Empire

Ancient history · Archaeology · Art · Brother · Duchy · Emperor · Empire · Feudalism · German · Mistake · Monarchy · Nephew and niece · Nothing · Politics · Roman Empire · Classics · European Political History Analysis · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Philosophy

• The First European Elections? Voting and Imperial State-Building Under Napoleon, 1802–1813

  Open Access•Malcolm Crook, John Dunne•The Historical Journal•2014

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