The treaty provided for the German rulers who lost territory west of the Rhine to be compensated elsewhere in the empire at the expense of the ecclesiastical states.Įast of the river, this allowed Napoleon to preside over a reorganisation, ostensibly carried out by a committee of imperial princes, which redrew the map of Germany, drastically reduced the number of petty states, secularized or destroyed the ecclesiastical ones and abolished most of the free cities.

The process began when the German territories on the west bank of the Rhine were annexed to France in 1801 under the Treaty of Lunéville, which the Hapsburg Emperor, Francis II, had no choice but to accept after the French victories at Marengo and Hohenlinden the previous year.

A motley medley of more or less independent kingdoms, lay and ecclesiastical principalities and free cities, it was finally destroyed by Napoleon and the French.

It may not have been holy or Roman or an empire, as Voltaire remarked, but whatever it was, it had survived for more than a thousand years since the coronation of Charlemagne in the year 800.