The German Question, Part Thirty-three

"The End Of The Old German Empire" Part One

The rickety old Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, not really much of an empire since the end of Thirty Years' War, was still dominated by the Habsburgs, when a little man from the island of Corsica* became the leader of France in the aftermath of the French Revolution. That man was Napoleon Bonaparte.

Prior to Napoleon, the empire had given both the Netherlands and Switzerland their independence, costing the empire huge chunks of territory and population, as we already learned in an earlier segment.** Over a period of more than a century, beginning in the mid 1500s, the French began to chip away at the territories of Alsace and Lorraine (Elsass and Lothringen, in German), taking control of more and more of these lands of the German Empire. Alsace was very heavily German in background, including its language, with a fairly small portion being French in character, but Lorraine was a bit more evenly split, with a large area being truly French in character and language.*** By 1700, the French essentially controlled both of these provinces.

The German emperor was greatly weakened after the Thirty Years' War, since the individual German states became much more like separate nations in the war's aftermath, and these states remained purely under a loose umbrella type of association with the empire, which truly lacked a central government organization. (A Word History is below the notes)

* Corsica is an island located some 100+ miles southeast of the French coast (at its nearest point), about 60 miles west of the mainland northwestern Italian coast and about 7 or so miles north of the Italian island of Sardinia. It was under the control of Genoa (before Italy was united as a modern nation) for a few hundred years before a brief period of independence, followed by a takeover by France in the 1760s. The ethnic composition of the island was varied in those times, as many peoples traipsed across the island at one time or another, but "likely" the population was more tilted to Italian than any other one group, and Italian and a Corsican dialect/language (closely related to Italian) prevailed as the languages on the island until French was strongly pushed by France, whereupon it became the dominant language during the mid 1800s, as it remains to this day.    

** I just want to note that the southern area of the "old" Netherlands (prior to the independence of the northern area) was not granted freedom by the ruling (and owning) Habsburgs, and was called "The Austrian Netherlands." The area was approximately 60% Flemish speaking (a Germanic language, closely akin to Dutch and some Low German dialects; and in fact, some linguists classify it as a dialect of Dutch and others classify it simply as Dutch) and 40% French speaking. This general area, which is not so much a part of our story, eventually became modern Belgium.

*** The German dialects in Alsace trace back to the Alemanns, a Germanic tribe. Interestingly, the French use their forms for the Alemanns as their words for Germany, "Allemagne," and for German, "Allemand." The German dialects of the German speaking part of Lorraine trace back to the Franks, another Germanic tribe, and the words "France" and "French" both come from the Franks.

WORD HISTORY:
Tribe-This seems to go back to the Indo European roots "trei" and "bhu." The first is the root of "three," and indeed linguists seem to believe that it was used to signify the division of Rome into "three" parts. The second root, "bhu," is the root of "be." This compound gave Latin "tribus," which denoted the "divisions of the people into groups," which then gave Old French "tribu." It was borrowed into English from French in the 1200s, often initially with reference to the biblical "twelve tribes of Israel."