Possessionnés Princes

The Princes possessionnés of Alsace are German princes who had preserved strongholds in Alsace after his fastening at France by the Traités of Westphalia of 1648 and that of 1679. The treaties stipulated that their possessions did not depend on the French right but on that of the Saint Germanic Roman Empire. These princes d' Empire who have in Alsace properties, often of important seigniories, and who see of a very evil eye the revolutionary initiatives. The list of these princes in 1789 is the following one:

Revolutionary France vis-a-vis the business of the princes possessionnés in Alsace

It is possible to restore the development of the business in three chronologically identifiable stages:

The period 1787-1789 corresponds to the first confrontation between the princes and the government of France, i.e. the Old Mode in attempt at car-reform. The institution of the municipalities and the assemblies representative of 1787 is felt by the princes like an unbearable interference in the businesses of their Alsatian strongholds. They rise about it near Necker, with the example of the landgrave of Hesse-Darmstadt whose officers of the county of Hanau-Lichtenberg write in 1788 a long complaint enumerating all the injured rights. This reform of 1787 is lived like the first stage of the disappearance of a specific scheme however guaranteed by the peace treaties and the obvious lettes of the XVIIIe century.

The business itself is posed at the time destruction of feudality, in the night of the August 4th, 1789. It is marked by the concern of the princes in connection with the way in which the decrees abolishing the local feudality and characteristics will be applied to their fields. This concern is learnedly used by Prussia, to the great displeasure of Austria of Joseph II who tries to play the conciliators, to give birth to in Germanic world a current as counter-revolutionary and anti-French as quarrelsome and anxious to take on France a revenge of the humiliation of the treaty of Westphalia. From September in November 1789, the Prussian diplomat Goertz carries out a round of all the courses princely (princes which have Alsatian fields, as well as the ecclesiastical lords threatened in their metropolitan rights on the Alsace) to convince them to refuse any negotiation with the new French institutions and to cement a coalition of Germanic princes against the Revolution, in their making gleam the benefit that they would withdraw from a defeat of France. On her side, the National Assembly tries to show itself as generous and laid out well with regard to the possessionnés princes as possible, in particular under the influence of Mirabeau and Koch, the academic of Strasbourg come to Paris to defend the interests of the Alsatian Protestants, and to which the deputies quickly appeal to include/understand the legal stakes of the business.

They are not so much the decrees of destruction of the Ancien Mode and the Féodalité, threatening their prerogatives in Alsace, which worry them that the prospect to lose forever a Germanic capacity of origin on the province, maintained jointly with a French sovereignty which does not cease being reinforced at the XVIIIe century. The business of the possessionnés princes is an Alsatian specificity, not because one finds there princes foreign, but because to each one of these of Alsatian fields is attached a specific scheme of feudality and sovereignty, guaranteed by the peace treaties of the XVIIe century, these same treaties which gradually attached Alsace to France.

October 28th 1790, Philippe Merlin of Douai returns his report/ratio in the name of the committee of feudality charged to examine the Alsatian question. This report/ratio is divided into two quite distinct parts: the first, ideological, shows that Alsace is plain in France not under the terms of the peace treaties, but of the will of the people of this province, which sent its representatives to the General states of 1789, in other words, of the right of the people to have themselves, and which the social contract which binds from now on the Alsace in France invalidates all the Germanic claims. The second, pragmatic, proposes, after having explained the reasons for which France should of nothing estimate itself indebted to compensate the injured princes, to adopt despite everything a attitude of generosity intended to proclaim in Europe the peaceful intentions of revolutionary France. Merlin thus proposes to the princes the payment of allowances though he does not recognize absolutely the legal basis their complaints, and asks for Louis XVI of deal with the negotiations of compensation. Its goal was to hide behind a speech of principle of the quite real concessions, wider and favorable to the princes that initially envisaged. This generosity runs up unfortunately against the Germanic intransigence vis-a-vis the evocation of allowances, even broad. The mission of the knight of Ternant, charged to expose to the courses princely concerned (June-August 1790) that the allowances suggested are a proof of the benevolence of France in their connection is a resounding failure. In Alsace, Stupfel, former tax prosecutor with Lauterbourg of one of the possessionnés princes most francophobe, Auguste de Limburg-Styrum, prince-bishop of Whorl, shows in a work published in 1790, savagely hostile to Merlin of Douai from which he criticizes the reasoning and which he reproaches a knowledge insufficiency of Alsatian realities, that the conciliation of the interests German, French and Alsatian passes by the categorical rejection of the allowances suggested, because they are it by an institution, the National Assembly, not recognized by the other European powers, whereas the princes recognize always only the king of France; because the allowance would be too difficult to determine, and because at the bottom Alsace is always related to the Empire of which it does not wish that it be inattentive.

The third period, that of walk to the war (January 1791 - April 1792) sees the toughening of the tensions in the two countries transforming the business of initially local range into casus belli. The arrest of Louis XVI with Varennes decides the emperor Léopold II to post its support for the cause of monarchy, against the revolution. The conclusum of the Diet of Ratisbon of August 6th 1791 subordinates the business of the princes possessionnés to the Austrian policy. The sending of this conclusum , in the letter that Léopold II addresses to Paris on December 3rd, 1791, is interpreted like a final rupture of the negotiations between France and the princes. Vis-a-vis the threat counter-revolutionary, the Of Gironde ones preach firmness in the negotiation of the allowances, in spite of the efforts of Koch and its diplomatic committee. The rise on the Austrian throne of the quarrelsome François II, on March 1st 1792, completes to precipitate Europe in an inevitable war. This one requires on April 15th, 1792 the rehabilitation of the princes possessionnés in their Alsatian prerogatives. This ultimatum causes, on April 20th, 1792 with the National Assembly, the vote unanimously less seven abstentions for the declaration of war “to king de Bohême and of Hungary”, on proposal of Louis XVI which, in accordance with the Constitution of 1791, arose in front of the deputies for the opportunity. The business remains present in the spirits of the belligerents throughout all conflict, and it is not surprising only celebrates it Manifeste of Brunswick of July 25th, 1792, which promises in Paris an exemplary repression if the king had suddenly been abused, makes mention of the arbitrary suppression of the rights and possessions of German princes in Alsace like event preliminary to the intervention austro-Prussian.

Geopolitical table of Low Alsace in 1789

It is particularly difficult to evaluate the way in which arrange themselves, at the following day of the Traités of Westphalia, various sovereignties present in Alsace. This difficulty was born from the divergences of interpretation of obscure article 87 of the treaty of Münster: this one recognizes with king de France a supremacy on the province (supremum dominium, supreme field), while preserving with princes d' Empire their immediacy ( immedietas , territorial superiority). Consequently, sovereignty on the various Alsatian strongholds is the subject of long debates, which will be completed only little time before the Révolution (1787, date where the duke of Double-decker recognizes the sovereignty of king de France on his bailliage of Cleebourg). France, present in the province, through the figure of the intendant and the Sovereign Council of Alsace, is thus opposed in its sovereignty by the existence of that of large lords of Empire, of which the quasi-kingly rights are guaranteed by the treaty of Münster, at one time when monarchy absolutist does not tolerate in the Kingdom any other sovereignty but that of the king. Louis XIV tries puts an end to this ambiguity while holding between 1680 and 1682 “meetings” of all the sovereign fields on which the king exerted only supremacy with him transferred by the emperor in 1648, including disputed bailliages north of Alsace.

Louis XIV must however give up his project since 1697, when article 4 of the treaty of Ryswick restores the territorial superiority of the possessionnés princes. On the other hand, since 1700, the count of Hanau-Lichtenberg decides to undertake with Louis XIV an exchange of good processes: its tender with royal supremacy against the recognition by letters patent of the exercise of its territorial superiority and the pleasure of its old rights and incomes. This possessionné prince thus agrees to become not the subject but the vassal one of king de France, who ensures it of his protection by recognizing his particular privileges. The exercise of various sovereignties, royal and princely, is thus codified at the XVIIIe century by letters patent, obtained by the princes with the help of their “tender”, achieved on various dates according to the lords, who often, for most francophobe of between-them, refuse to lend themselves willingly to the oath-taking feudal, required when the new king Louis XV goes up on the throne in 1715. The princes generally try to circumvent the recognition of French suzerainty: the most representative example on this subject is the taking possession of prévôté of Wissembourg, in 1719, by the envoy prince-bishop of Whorl, which joins together in catimini the Chapter of the church. When information arrives at Versailles, the temporary sequestration of the fields Alsatian of the prince-bishop is affixed as reprisals.

Other points of discord remain throughout the XVIIIe century, in particular the question of the limit of Alsace with the duchy of Double-decker and Palatinat, in other words that of the “bailliages disputed” in on this side Queich. This question finds its payment diplomatic only in 1786, when an agreement makes transfer with the duchy of Deux-Ponts of the low-office of Schambourg in exchange of the recognition of French sovereignty on the disputed baillages, possible treaty which was to receive its execution only with dead of the Elector Palatine, who occurred only after the Révolution.

Thus, in 1789, two legal designs, one Germanic, the other Frenchwoman, remain related to the Alsatian questions in parallel. The German vision is that of a synallagmatic feudal contract, whose peace treaties are the bases of the recognition of French sovereignty with like indispensable condition the maintenance of the integrity of the fields and the regalities of the possessionnés princes. It raises of the certainty that the new feudal bond between the princes and the king, codified by letters patent, cannot be broken without the assent of the two contracting parties, but recalls in background the principle of inalienability of the components of the Empire, making in any case null and void French sovereignty on Alsace and the treaties, whose application is not that temporary in waiting of a return of Alsace to the Empire, inadmissible. On the contrary, the French point of view of the businesses of Alsace does not recognize this dimension of feudal reciprocity, and considers that in accordance with the letters patent emanated of the free will of the king, the rights of the princes are conditioned and subjected to the exercise of sovereignty of the king who reserves the possibility of changing them the terms if they oppose it, with the help of a right allowance. This Franco-German legal duel will find all its direction in 1789, at the moment when it will be a question of the abolition of the regalities of the princes and any feudality in France.

Study of registers of grievances Alsatian shows that the majority of the inhabitants of the province regard as person in charge of their difficulties and their deprivations the royal taxation, whose taking away, which are superimposed on taxes seigneuriales more than heavy, in exponential progression, even if they claim more justice and of tax equality to the detriment of the princes, up to that point taxes are exempted, and who consume shamefully abroad the revenues resulting from their fields and the incomes of the Alsatian labor. The tensions with regard to the possessionnés princes, much more perceptible in the antiseigneuriaux books of the summer 1789, are radicalized especially as from July, and appear by violent exactions against the seigneuriaux agents, in particular in the area of in addition to-Forest, where feudal parcelling out and density of possessionnés princes reached of the unequalled proportions.

The Révolution thus started in 1789 a business fraught with geopolitical and legal antecedents complex, while reviving political passions on both sides the Rhine.

1792/1793-1801: The departmental reality of the business of the possessionnés princes. Administration of the sequestration

The sequestration is set up in the Low-Rhine between October 1792 and January 1793, in answer to the difficulties which test the local authorities to apply the national decrees. The economic results of the sequestration are debatable, but its political opportunity is undeniable since it is as from this moment that the Alsatian fields of the possessionnés princes, in other words the fifth of the Alsace, enter the territory of the Republic, to come out from it only in 1871. Initially applied under the terms of the laws of emigration, the sequestration is generalized with all the princes possessionnés as enemies of the Republic, in 1793, thanks to the insistence of conventional the Alsatian Philippe-Jacques Rühl, who regularly keeps his fellow-members informed of the intrigues of the princes, which leads on May 14th, 1793 to the publication of a decree sequestering the goods of the foreign princes who had not protested against the conclusum of the Diet declaring the war in France on March 22nd 1793. Actually, the department of the Low-Rhine had very largely anticipated this decision, by stopping on October 1st, 1792 the sequestration of the great princely fields, following a letter which the Minister of Interior Department had addressed to him, Of Gironde the Roland, on September 27th, 1792, advising the affixing of the sequestration on the goods of the Landgraviat of Hesse-Darmstadt. This measurement is quickly generalized with smallest of the German princes, who see their sequestered goods, inventoried and managed by receivers with the pay of the Republic between October 1792 and January 1793. This amount of time corresponds thus to the installation of the network of the offices of sequestration, animated in the ex-seigniories by receivers whose work is centralized in the person of Jean-Baptiste Bella, manager and principal receiver of the fields sequestered on the possessionnés princes, in close cooperation with Thomassin, the director of the Fields of the Low-Rhine. It is interesting to note that the receivers of the sequestration are not very often other than the former seigneuriaux receivers, because the new administration estimates that the people who are the best capable ones to manage well the sequestered receipts are those which managed them before the sequestration, even if the military events of the end of the year 1793 do not leave many of these seigneuriaux ex-agents in place.

Since 1793-1794, the administration includes/understands all the direction of what Merlin of Douai proclaimed in his report/ratio on the question of the possessionnés princes of October 28th, 1790: “It is not allowed in a public convention than in a private convention, to take the useful one, & to leave the expensive one”, by realizing that the sequestration was not inevitably carried out with its financial advantage. Indeed, the difficulty of conservation of certain properties (castles, gardens, cultural heritage) as well as the maintenance of the seigneuriaux officers whose functions continued under the sequestration lead public finances. Worse still, the Republic, which succeeds the princes with the head of their old fields, is held to liquidate the unpaid invoices and to refund all the debts to raise the mortgages which weigh on certain seigniories, like that of Oberbronn, that of prince de Hohenhole-Bartenstein, or those of the duke of Deux-Ponts. Thus, of the enormous sums are absorbed sometimes even only to pay the borrowed interests on capital. It is thus with a great relief that the the Low-Rhine accommodates in 1801 the treaty of Lunéville, which definitively regulates the business of the Alsatian fields, since starting from there all the requests for refunding and replevin of sequestration are addressed to the prefect of the Low-Rhine either, but at a charged commission especially of these questions, sitting at Mainz.

With regard to the legal framework of the sequestration of the goods of the possessionnés princes, revolutionary France, or rather the department of the Low-Rhine, intentionally maintained a confusion between sequestration and confiscation, even if this difference does not import any more but very little once the properties start to be sold under the general name of “national goods”. On the other hand, the distinctions between procedures of sequestration have much more importance when it is a question of granting the replevin of a sequestration, when starting from the Directory, the external threats having been isolated, the authorities estimate that certain sequestrations are not any more topicality. The possessionnés princes of course try to recover a maximum of their properties lost in 1793 while putting forward, according to the circumstances, several arguments:

• Firstly, to recall that they are “German” thus cannot be concerned by the sequestrations affixed for reason of emigration.

• Secondly, to utilize members of their family to explain that certain properties did not concern the sovereignty of the reigning prince, but constituted before the sequestration of the bodies of had goods on a purely “particular” basis.

• Lastly, the small possessionnés princes can try to show that they were wrongly sequestered while proving never not to have had neither voice nor meeting with the Diet of the Empire.

Certain replevins of sequestration are obtained, but few rehabilitations which very often are not carried out, do not concern to in no case the great fields which had at their head a sovereign prince possessionné in 1789, and until 1792, because these vast territories are definitively acquired by the Republic in 1793, and officially integrated into France in 1801 when Bonaparte benefits from the geopolitical upheavals born of the war to compensate certain princes for the losses undergone in Alsace by villages and fields taken Worsens about it on the ecclesiastical principalities, or then by the payment of very broad allowances, whose landgrave of Hesse-Darmstadt holds the record by receiving France ten million guilders for the loss of the county of Hanau-Lichtenberg. Lastly, in year XII, to put an end to the last protests, Napoleon proposes to the small possessionnés princes not compensated to choose French nationality, or German nationality, in which case their properties will have imperatively to be sold. On the other hand, those which will choose France will become French citizens, and their goods, by definition, will not be had any more by foreigners. Finally, this possibility for noble German of melting itself in the French civic body shows that this business of princes d' Empire possessionnés in Alsace remains resolutely revolutionist, until in its outcome.

The business of the princes possessionnés in historiography

The business of princes d' Empire possessionnés in Alsace in 1789 is mentioned in various handbooks and dictionaries of the history of the Revolution as one of the elements which decides France to declare the war in Austria the April 20th, 1792. It actually appears that this business is the pretext of the declaration of war, the casus belli, whose genealogy is complex. Thus, well before 1870 and 1914, Alsace was at the origin of the bursting of a free-Germanic conflict, even if it is advisable to specify that the Empire returns officially in war against the Revolution only one year later, in March 1793.

The bibliography on the subject is at the same time very abundant and very poor: very abundant if one considers the immense number of titles devoted to the politico-diplomatic history of the revolutionary era, and who do nothing but briefly mention the business; restricted because rare are the works which speak about the role that the princes possessionnés in the development of the Revolution in France and Europe played. There are only three publications to mention in this respect, except some articles in local reviews:

• Volume II of Europe and the French revolution of Albert Sorel (Paris, Plon, 8 vol., 1885-1904), published in 1887.

• The work of the German historian Theodor Ludwig: Die deutschen Reichstände im Elsass und der Ausbruch der Revolutionskriege , Strasbourg, Karl Trübner, 1898.

• The article of Pierre Low wall: “The business of the possessionnés princes of Alsace and the origins of the conflict between the Revolution and the Empire”, published in the Re-examined modern history and contemporary , first year, 1899-1900, volume first, Paris, Georges Bleated, p. 433-456 and 566-592, which takes again the theses of Ludwig by supplementing them by the French point of view. This three work evokes obviously how the business arrives to envenimer the international relations until the declaration of war in 1792, but all the authors remain quiet curiously on the events after 1792, until February 9th, 1801, date of the treaty of Lunéville by which Bonaparte regulates the problem definitively.

Actually, the period 1792-1801, however rich in political upheavals, corresponds to an amount of time where the business ceases being of diplomatic nature, to be integrated, through the decisions of sequestration of the fields of the princes, within the administrative framework of the Département of the Low-Rhine. Consequently, it is advisable to adopt a departmental approach of the business, to be able to include/understand its holding and its outcomes before and after 1792. How is lived and that the seigniory of a prince possessionné before 1789 represents? Which are the transformations juridico-policies by which it passes until 1801, date where the business is disintegrated of the Low-Rhine, to be again to be dealt with by the diplomacy and the international relations?

A business which makes date in the history of the international law

It is advisable to recall that it is in 1790, to the constituent National Assembly, and in connection with the business of the possessionnés princes of Alsace, that Merlin of Douai, as a faithful disciple of Rousseau and of sound '' social Contract '', formula for the first time the principle of the right of the people to have themselves, a principle promised with a large posterity and who shows here that the Alsace is French not by the treaties of the XVIIe century, but by the adhesion of its people in France and by sending its representatives to the General states. The statement of this revolutionary great principle makes it possible Merlin to propose with the Parliament to offer allowances to the princes not because it is held there, but only with an aim of putting a term at this business, by its only generosity, project which fails because of various politicking recoveries, which will lead to the declaration of war of 1792.

The study of this business of the possessionnés princes makes it possible to consider the subtle stages of the French integration of Alsace: while rising against the decrees of abolition of the privileges, the possessionnés princes show that it is the last stage of the entry of Alsace in the French territory. For this reason it had such an amount of repercussion, because these seigniories had in sovereignty by princes of Empire represent the last German political bolt on the province. As of 1789, on both sides of the Rhine, one understands that the breaking of this bolt means in the short run the irremediable Alsatian dismemberment of the Saint Germanic Roman Empire, and this is why the complaints of the princes do not carry on 1789, but on 1648, which was the first stage and which, paradoxically, founds the right on which they rest to defend against the initiatives of the revolutionary France.

List possessionnés princes

The list of these princes in 1789 is the following one: For the Low-Rhine:

Charles-Frederic, Margrave de Bade
Charles II, duke of Double-decker
Ernest de Gemmingen-Hornberg (baron)
Maximilien-Auguste Bleikaard, count de Helmstatt
Louis IX, Landgrave of Hesse-Darmstadt (1719 - 1790)
Joseph, prince de Christian Hohenlohe
, prince de Hohenlohe-Waldenbourg-Bartenstein (brother of the precedent)
Frederic-Charles-Woldemar, prince de Leiningen-Dabo (1724-1807)
Dominique-Constantin, prince of Loewenstein-Wertheim-Rochefort (1762 -1814)
Louis, prince of Nassau-Saarbrucken (1745 - 1794)
Frederic-Guillaume, prince de Nassau-Weilbourg (1768 - 1794)
Jean-Bernard-Joseph-Georges of Reissenbach
Charles-Louis-Guillaume-Theodore, rhingrave of Salm-Grumbach (1720-1799)
Frederic-Othon-François-Christian-Philippe-Henri, prince de Salm-Kyrbourg
Constantin-Alexandre-Joseph, prince de Salm- Salm (1762 - 1828)
Casimir, count de Sickingen (death in 1795)
Damian- Auguste-Philippe-Charles, count de Limburg-Styrum by the birth, prince de Bruchsal by his function of prince-bishop of Whorl (1721-1797)
Charles-Frederic, baron and count Schenck de Waldenbourg

Concurrently to these 18 princes whose seigniories are localized in Low Alsace, it is advisable to also announce the prince-bishop of Strasbourg, the famous Cardinal of Rohan (cardinal “collar”) whose French origins make hesitate the Constituent one to regard it as a possessionné prince, as well as lords of High Alsace: the duke of Wurtemberg, the prince-bishop of Basle, and to a certain extent the Grimaldi of Monaco (the duke of Valentinois).

More than one fifth of the fields of the Alsatian territorial mosaic in 1789, integrated in various stages into the Kingdom of France by the treaties of Westphalia and Ryswick, is had by princes who live most of the time beyond the rhine, where is the essence of their seigniories, although they lay out in Alsace of splendid castles (the castle of Senones of prince de Salm-Salm, that of the landgrave of Hesse-Darmstadt with Bouxwiller, or of prince de Hohenlohe-Bartenstein with Oberbronn) or private mansions with Strasbourg (that of the landgrave of Hesse-Darmstadt or the dukes of Double-decker street Brûlée, that of the prince de Hohenlohe-Bartenstein street of the Brothers).

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