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On 5 April 1815, Frederick William III proclaimed the incorporation of the two Rhenish provinces – the grand duchy of the Lower Rhine, and the duchies of Cleves, Berg and Geldern – into Prussia. Two million souls, including 1.5 million Catholics, were thereby added to his kingdom. Frederick William undertook to protect property, safeguard religious beliefs and ensure justice. Significantly, he promised the creation of a representative body. The vast majority of Rhinelanders became aware of the transfer of sovereignty with the appearance of Hohenzollern eagles in their towns instead of French symbols. On 30 April, Berlin decreed the future administrative structure for the enlarged Monarchy, and the King promised ‘respect for the constitution, uniformity of action, liberality and impartiality’, and the protection of ‘all advantages gained through the free employment of personal talent’. Prussia was divided into ten provinces, each headed by a governor (Oberpräsident), and twenty-five districts, administered by district governors (Regierungspräsidenten). The two Rhenish provinces were Jülich-Cleves-Berg, administered from Cologne, and the grand duchy of the Lower Rhine, governed from Koblenz. Each was sub-divided into three districts.At the local level, the French structure remained intact and, like other Napoleonic institutions, became the focus of dispute between reformers and conservatives. To complement the administrative reforms, Frederick William issued his fateful edict of 22 May, promising ‘representation of the people’ through an ‘assembly of representatives of the land’, a vague formulation that implied representation through estates. Nevertheless, the edict raised Rhenish expectations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Napoleon lost 570,000 men in Russia in 1812. Such unparalleled losses upset the balance of power and jeopardised the French position in central Europe. Napoleon abandoned the remnants of his army in early December 1812, passed through Mainz incognito, and arrived in Paris, which only two months previously had witnessed the attempted coup by General Malet. Having expelled the invader, Tsar Alexander followed the prompting of the Freiherr vom Stein and other Germans in his entourage who urged that the Russian army continue westwards. As it did so, the Prussian contingent in the Grande Armée defected. Its commander, General Yorck, signed a convention with the Russians at Tauroggen on 30 December 1812, an action disowned by Frederick William III. The Austrian corps managed to extricate itself from Russia intact. Vienna declared its neutrality, a position it maintained even after Prussia signed the Treaty of Kalisch with Russia (26 February 1813) and declared war on France (17 March). Napoleon ordered new levees and rebuilt his forces, which he led to victory at Lützen (2 May) and Bautzen (20–1 May). These engagements proved indecisive, not least because the French lacked cavalry to exploit them. There followed the Armistice of Pleschwitz (4 June), which both sides welcomed as a breathing space. Metternich, Austria's foreign minister, now entered centre stage. He had no intention of seeing French hegemony replaced by Russia's, and hoped for the preservation of Napoleonic rule in the Rhineland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ray Stannard Baker, an American traveler to Germany at the turn of the century, exclaimed: “From the moment of landing on German soil, the American begins to feel a certain spirit of repression which seems to pervade the land.” Intellectually and visibly struck by the omnipresent guiding and rather militaristic hand of the German government – erect, militarily dressed, and heavily armed policemen on nearly every corner; statues and sculptures honoring and commemorating German leaders and soldiers on the rooftops of city buildings, in public parks, at important and sometimes unimportant intersections; and uniformed soldiers constantly on drill or parade – Baker concluded that he never before knew “what it really means to be governed,” and that he agreed with the sarcastic remark of a German socialist who had said: “It takes half of all the Germans to control the other half.” Most vexing of all to Baker were the ever-visible signs posting the comprehensive government and police regulations that seemed to deal with nearly all forms of human behavior, prescribing what was allowed and more often proscribing what was verboten. Feeling the “wild west in me slowly suffocating,” he eventually came to amuse himself by making a curious game of trying to discover what was not yet forbidden but, no doubt, soon would be. One of his odder discoveries concerned the hitherto unregulated automobile buses of Berlin, which “tooted up and down the streets like so many steam locomotives, running at a rate of speed much greater than that of the ordinary trams.” [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]