From Reich to State

From Reich to State: The Rhineland in the Revolutionary Age, 1780–1830. By MICHAEL ROWE (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 2003; pp. 331. £47.50). ‘THIS book is concerned with borderlands and transitions’, the author states in his opening sentence, a theme to which he is consistently faithful. It is also a work of constants and variables on the accompanying theme of ‘centre versus periphery’. Among the constants are local communities of German people, inhabiting a busy frontier between France and Germany, with a culturally diverse population of about 1.1 million Catholics, 400,000 Protestants, and 22,000 Jews at the end of the eighteenth century. Among the variables are the changing political constructions superimposed on a territorial space which straddled the Rhine along its middle and lower reaches. What ultimately emerges from the major political changes which overtook the region from the end of the old regime to 1830 are the continuities: a sense of place and distinctive Rhineland identity which weathered all intrusions from without, strong regional and even local loyalties, and (among the intelligentsia at least) a consciousness of belonging to a greater German Kulturnation. At the heart of these continuities were the cities and towns, with their vibrant culture, which by the end of the period had developed its close association with the liberal ideology of the middle class (Bürgertum). What changed over this half-century was a social and economic base increasingly conducive to agricultural improvement and protoindustrialisation, where more open competitive enterprise encouraged growth, and an evolving institutional framework to which successive regimes contributed: German, French, and German again

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