As one of the world's busiest rivers the Rhine carries about 300 million tons of freight annually, upriver and down, between Switzerland and the Dutch ports on the North Sea. Heavy shipping traffic on the Rhine, including ocean vessels reaching Mannheim and barges reaching Basel, has been an integral part of the Rhine valley landscape for the past 150 years. But a bounty of commercial shipping on the Rhine has not always been part of the river's history. Despite the Rhineland's growing population and increasingly productive economy at the end of the early modern period, long-distance shipping activity along the river gradually declined during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. River commerce revived and expanded only in the early nineteenth century, stimulated in part by new developments in transportation technology, business organization, industrial development, and an unprecedented civil engineering assault on the river's natural contours. These material components of the nineteenth century transportation revolution as it unfolded along the Rhine are generally well known.Footnote 1
Ironically, one unique element of the Rhine's modern commercial growth preceded and was more important than any of these others, yet remains almost unrecognized: the creation of a single, unified commercial regime to regulate the river and its commerce as they flowed through several independent sovereign states. Throughout its history, the fragmentation of state authority along the river sharply distinguished the Rhine from other important inland waterways, and the international nature of the Rhine continues to set it apart from the world's two other great commercial rivers, the Yangtze and the Mississippi. The unique problems of fragmented authority along the Rhine were already evident in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when lack of coordinated regulation on the river led to chaotic conditions and noticeable underuse of the Rhine as the great conduit that it could have been.
In the nineteenth century, an appropriately unified regulatory and administrative framework for a river that touched several states was the absolute precondition for removing ancient trade barriers and deploying new technologies to reduce transportation costs and increase shipping volumes. Therefore, the ultimate roots of the problems that plagued the river under the Old Regime and the solutions that were first devised during the French occupation of 1795–1813 were primarily political in nature. The inclusion of necessary political and administrative reforms made modernization of Rhine commerce a more complex process than took place on waterways elsewhere, where new political frameworks were not required for the transportation revolution to unfold.
The question of how to regulate conflicting commercial claims along the river arose as far back as 1355 when Emperor Charles IV confirmed the monopolistic commercial privileges proclaimed by Archbishop Konrad von Hochstaden for the city of Cologne in 1259. During the 450 years following Charles's reign, commercial practices on the Rhine remained entangled in a thorny thicket of disputed rights and claims advanced by merchants, shippers, boatmen's guilds, Rhine cities, territorial lords, fishermen, and millers. Without some form of governing structure for the river, these conflicts remained unresolved and the river did not fulfill its potential as a great natural transportation link connecting the North Sea to the Alps. An enduring resolution of these issues began only in the 1790s when revolutionary French ideas and the power to insist on a systemic overhaul of river governance arrived at the banks of the Rhine. The process was completed in 1868 with the abolition of the last remaining tolls on the river.
This article briefly analyzes the evolution of the commercial regime of the Rhine from the eighteenth century through the middle of the nineteenth century. The focus is on the years from 1795 to 1813 when French hegemony inspired the states bordering the river to establish overarching rules and institutions governing Rhine commerce, innovatively transforming the river from a state of anarchy to cooperation. Beginning in 1814 a new series of international decisions preserved the essential content of the French reforms, thereby establishing the basis for the river's commercial growth in the following two centuries.
The commercial regime of the Rhine has been the subject of several very thorough legal studies that explore these issues from the perspectives of international water rights and river law.Footnote 2 These studies set the river's history in a long but very narrow juridical context stretching back to Roman law. These highly specialized works have generally not been cast in a manner that invites wider readership, even among historians of political economy.
Commerce along shorter portions of the river and in important cities such as Cologne and Mainz has been the subject of many good local studies. The fragmented political arrangements that characterized the Rhine basin throughout its history and the highly differentiated nature of shipping in the navigationally distinct stretches of the lower, middle, and upper portions of the river encouraged local and regional examinations of commerce rather than treatments of the entire river.Footnote 3 Because of its dominant position in the river's trade from the thirteenth to the nineteenth centuries and because of a large body of existent historical documentation, Cologne's role in the Rhine trade has received particular attention.Footnote 4 But the concerns of any one locality do not reveal the larger issues surrounding common use of the river, and the interests and practices of the river's two great metropoles at Cologne and Mainz certainly were not typical of, or even compatible with, the interests of many other users of the river. By their nature, local studies do not illuminate the evolution of the political decisions and administrative reforms that transformed the Rhine in its entirety, nor do they connect economic developments along parts of the river to broader political and economic trends in German history.Footnote 5
Historians of German and European economic development in the nineteenth century have given as least passing recognition to later developments in the evolution of the Rhine's commercial regime, particularly the Rhine Shipping Agreement (Rheinschiffahrtsakte) of 1831, also referred to as the “Treaty of Mainz” or “Mainzer Akte” from the seat of the Central Commission for Navigation of the Rhine (Zentralkommission für die Rheinschiffahrt or Commission centrale pour la Navigation du Rhin). Unfortunately key provisions of that agreement have often been flat-out wrongly presented in the literature, perhaps because of misunderstandings of what contemporary governments meant when they endorsed “free navigation” on the Rhine. For example, even the distinguished historian Hermann Kellenbenz wrongly stated that the Rhine tolls were “abolished” (beseitigt) by the treaty of 1831, when in fact the treaty confirmed collection of tolls at twelve stations between the Dutch border and Strasbourg.Footnote 6 A decade later, Hans Jaeger made a similarly wrong statement that the treaty had voided “all fees” (alle Abgaben) on the river, but in fact both goods tolls and passage tolls continued.Footnote 7 In the Cambridge Economic History of Europe, Louis Giraud misleadingly indicated that after the Congress of Vienna “freedom of navigation” prevailed on the Rhine and inaccurately added “though tolls remained frequent upstream from Mannheim”; in fact, tolls were collected above Mannheim only at Germersheim (Bavarian Palatinate), Strasbourg (France), and Breisach (Baden), but were collected below Mannheim at nine stations before the Dutch border.Footnote 8 Other examples abound. At present, misinformation is widespread about nineteenth-century Rhine navigation from the upper river to the Dutch border. For example, Ronald Findlay and Kevin O'Rourke recently cited Giraud in misleadingly stating that “along the river Rhine, the Congress of Vienna recognized the freedom of navigation that had been established under Napoleon” and Michael Loriaux recently relied on Kellenbenz in wrongly reasserting that “the Rhine Shipping Act of 1831 eliminated tolls along the river.”Footnote 9
This discussion of the transformation of the Rhine, its commerce, and its administration seeks to move beyond the narrow focus of legal studies and the limited perspective of local investigations. By supplementing material from these earlier studies with additional, new material from a number of print and archival sources and examining longer stretches of the river, including the middle and upper Rhine, I hope to challenge, modify, and correct a number of assumptions regarding the modern administration of the river. Because the central issues in the evolution of the commercial regime along the Rhine were enduring ones, this inquiry compares river management in three distinct political eras: the era of the late Empire from 1648 to its demise, the era of French hegemony from 1795 to 1813, and the era of the German Confederation after 1815. Analyzing the significance of French-era reforms in the longer history of the Rhine's commercial traffic provides an opportunity to discuss larger issues central to German history in each of these periods.
An analysis of the river's problems under the Old Regime will necessarily stimulate some conclusions about the ability of the Holy Roman Empire to act in its own interests and about the extent and vitality of Imperial and individual state reforms underway in the final decades of the Empire's existence. The material presented here does not support the “revisionist historiography” mentioned by John Breuilly that links the reforms of the Napoleonic era to the “traditions of princely reform in the eighteenth century.”Footnote 10 Nor does it support the claim that “Napoleonic intervention thus merely accelerated trends that had been at work for some time” as Andreas Fahrmeir stated, but it will confirm his insight that French reforms “managed to harness existing pressures.”Footnote 11 Similarly this study does not support Michael Rowe's claim that eighteenth-century reforms in the German states “prefigured those of the Napoleonic era,” although this article does support his counterclaim that the “Empire greatly restricted the scope of reforms” that were possible.Footnote 12
An analysis of French reforms along the river in the period from 1795 to 1813 allows some specific, material, and concrete observations about the economic impact of French revolutionary occupation. The success of innovative French ideas and administration, particularly the “Octroi” regime that regulated the Rhine after 1805, indicates an important and positive role played by French commercial reforms in stimulating Rhenish economic development. Growth and changes in patterns of Rhine commerce demonstrate that at least this element of revolutionary French policies was greatly beneficial to the large portion of Germany attached to the Rhine basin, an insight that is often obscured by emphases on the destructive nature of the French occupation and the extractive demands made on the German territories. This article also identifies the beginnings of substantive reform on the river in 1795 and the origins of the new Octroi regime in 1798, i.e., deep in the middle of a decade that is widely perceived as having been a destructive setback for the Rhenish economy.Footnote 13
Space does not permit inclusion here of a full-blown discussion assessing the place of the revolutionary and Napoleonic experiences in the longer sweep of German history—a vastly complex topic that has produced an impressive body of new work over the past few decades.Footnote 14 But this study does directly compare French solutions for the problems of organizing Rhine commerce with earlier trends from the eighteenth century and subsequent developments from the nineteenth century. Rhine river management suggests that comprehensive evaluations of earlier efforts and later achievements are possible only by placing those developments in a comparative context with the crucially important administrative innovations of the French interlude.
Finally, even a brief history of political change, administrative reform, and commercial revival along the Rhine must confront fundamental questions on the role of the state in promoting economic growth during this period—an issue debated by contemporary theorists and economic historians for almost two centuries.Footnote 15 By explicating the role of state action in reducing river tolls, erasing barriers, fostering the revolution in transportation technology, and improving the river physically, this article can speak directly to these questions. The active role of the Central Commission in preserving French reforms while it regulated the river in the period after 1815 is particularly illustrative. The experience of the Rhine confirms the importance of state intervention in promoting economic growth in nineteenth-century Germany, but would indicate that the prevailing focus of study in this area could be brought forward from the period after 1850 to include important developments in the very first decades of the century.Footnote 16 In a larger context, developments along the Rhine do not conform to a perceived general pattern in which nineteenth-century globalization was “overwhelmingly technological in origin,” whereas twentieth-century globalization “was much more political in origin” with “artificial barriers” being “dismantled.”Footnote 17 This article would contest the view that “political” actions were not important in revolutionizing transportation in the early nineteenth century. On the contrary, political agreements that established governing structures and dismantled artificial barriers on the Rhine were the absolute prerequisite for applying the technological developments of the period to the river.
The Decline of Rhine Commerce under the Old Regime
By 1789 the anarchic state of the Rhine had long been a major source of discontent for inhabitants of the Rhine basin. Dilapidated infrastructure, physical impediments, tolls, city monopolies, and the privileges of the boatmen's corporations combined to make river commerce unpredictable and expensive, eroding a good deal of the advantage that water transportation generally had at this time. Extensive canal building programs in England and France at this same time and their contributions to the formation of those national economies serve as rough indicators of what the German states “lost” by their inability to activate the Rhine's potential.Footnote 18 Obvious to even the most casual observers was the physical neglect of the river bed. The operable shipping channel was narrow and frequently silted, severely restricting the size of ships that could pass even the middle Rhine. The towpaths were grossly neglected, offering difficult passage for horses pulling loads upstream; paths often abruptly ended, requiring that tow animals be ferried across the river in the hope that the path might resume there. Obstructions by fishermen—nets and fish traps of various sorts—in the already narrow shipping channel and similar hindrances by millers seeking to harness the river's obvious water power provided yet another level of difficulty for commercial traffic on the river.Footnote 19
Equally damaging to the river's commercial life was the arbitrary and rapacious collection of tolls. Numerous contemporary observers commented that the river was underused for transport because of ruinous tolls.Footnote 20 Prior to 1789 no effective regulation existed for the number, amount, or location of Rhine tolls. Although a popular song along the river claimed “Mehr Zölle sind am Rhein als Meilen” (“The Rhine can count more tolls than miles”), most sources agree that on the eve of the revolution, thirty-two toll stations collected revenue between Strasbourg and the Dutch border.Footnote 21 In addition, some local potentates imposed loading and unloading fees on merchants. Arbitrary administration and the secret nature of toll rates compounded the damage inflicted on travelers. American economist Edwin Clapp estimated that “In the eighteenth century, one-third the value of a cargo was levied by the toll stations on the forty miles between Bingen and Coblenz.”Footnote 22 Toll rates were not published; most rulers actively sought to keep the level of their tolls secret. In most cases the tolls actually paid resulted from on-the-spot negotiations between captains and toll collectors. Not surprisingly, regulations regarding toll increases were entirely lacking. The unpredictable and capricious nature of the Rhine tolls was a central feature of the anarchy of the regime.Footnote 23
The medieval privileges retained and exercised by the cities of Cologne and Mainz also impeded commercial use of the river by others. The first of these, the “right of staple” (ius stapulae, Stapelrecht, droit d'étape), enforced since the thirteenth century, required all merchandise passing the city to be unloaded and offered for sale there and this to be done using local agents exclusively. The second, the “right of compulsory transfer” (Umschlagsrecht or droit de relâche forcée) required all long-distance merchandise to be transferred into boats of the local boatmen's association for the next leg of the river voyage. In the eighteenth-century, merchants usually could pay a fee to the city to escape the unloading demanded by the Stapelrecht, but compulsory transfer to local boats remained in force, provoking great hostility from producers, merchants, and neighboring towns.
By the eighteenth century, water transport on the Rhine had lost a good deal of its commercial competitiveness in most categories except those heavy bulk commodities that were, by their nature, impossible to reload at Mainz and Cologne, such as large millstones.Footnote 24 Kellenbenz mentions “stone, clay, and slate” as the few bulk items moving down the Rhine to the Netherlands. Another bulk item, timber, moving from upper Rhine forests to the Netherlands in large rafts, was undoubtedly the most significant commodity by volume in the entire downstream traffic and perhaps the second most important by value as well.Footnote 25 Nassovian iron ore going to the lower Rhine manufacturing centers in the Berg-Mark territories moved down the Rhine, but probably not finished products of that industry.Footnote 26
The wine trade is a telling example. Timothy Blanning mentioned wine exports from Mainz downriver to the Netherlands of 300,000 gulden in 1789, but the fact is that “export of Rhine and Mosel wines to England via the Hansa cites was substantially larger than downstream shipments on the Rhine.”Footnote 27 For the middle Rhine, trade often ran from Frankfurt overland to Kassel and then down the Weser to export facilities in Bremen. For territories on both banks of the upper Rhine, trade via Strasbourg and the toll-free French canal system all the way to Le Havre served as an alternative to the Rhine.Footnote 28 In the course of the eighteenth century, shipments of Alsatian wine disappeared entirely from the middle and lower Rhine.
The existence of deep pockets of wealth in the restricted merchant communities of Mainz and Cologne and in the hands of some territorial lords on the lower and middle Rhine is often misread as an indicator of some larger flourishing of river commerce. It would be more accurate to view those small circles of great wealth as a confirmation of these cities' abilities to extract exorbitant artificial rents from the remaining stream of river trade.Footnote 29 In Cologne, the import trade was dominated by just three commodities coming upriver from the Netherlands—coffee, sugar, and tobacco. Because “all other commodities were insignificant compared to these three,” they were undoubtedly the source of most of the profit from trade moving upriver. Further, the archival and published data compiled for this study confirm that “the Rhine trade was strongly negative for Germany” in balance of payments (which fits with a pattern of predominantly bulk goods moving downstream), so the profit from downstream traffic must have been substantially less than from the upstream trade.Footnote 30 All of this again highlights the ability of Cologne merchants to live well from their monopoly position as suppliers of just a few colonial products to the whole of the Rhine basin. Entrenched interests profited from uncertainty as well. In 1791 Cologne merchants and forwarding agents violently defeated shippers' long-standing demand that an accurate public scale for weighing freight be erected at the harbor.Footnote 31 In short, the accumulation of significant merchant wealth in Cologne is not an indicator of any larger flowering of Rhine commerce; the same is true for Mainz and Koblenz. In each case we could explicate particular local techniques for extracting unfair rents from a river trade that had been reduced at the regional level to bulk exports of the lowest value and luxury imports of the highest.
Not surprisingly, the state of affairs described above—absolute decline of the river's physical infrastructure and relative decline of river commerce compared to the general economic growth of the Rhine basin—correlates closely with a declining level of effective governmental administration of the river. In earlier times, beginning in the fourteenth century, a rudimentary level of cooperation existed between the four electors who owned, but often leased out, the vast majority of tolls along the Rhine: the archbishops of Cologne, Trier, and Mainz; and the Elector Palatine. Cooperation between the four Rhenish electors ceased toward the end of the seventeenth century, perhaps in response to a proliferation of new tolls imposed by the recently independent Netherlands.Footnote 32 Afterward, no other authority emerged to supply the necessary leadership.
After 1648, the most promising potential sources of order on the river were the successive international treaties that contained provisions affecting Rhine commerce, the treaties of Münster (1648), Ryswick (1697), and Rastatt (1714).Footnote 33 On the basis of the Rhine provision in article 6 of the Rastatt treaty, the Rhine electors sued the city of Cologne in the Imperial Chamber Court demanding an end to compulsory local monopolies; the suit was still in progress ninety-two years later when the Empire passed away in 1806.Footnote 34 But the treaties lacked any effective enforcement; either for the ambitious claims that the river should be “free” for commerce or for the more modest goal of limiting tolls to those already in existence. In this period of the later Empire the river's commercial regime descended into a dysfunctional mixture of chaos and extortion. The river's carrying trade was effectively partitioned by the merchant communities of the Netherlands, Cologne, Mainz, and Strasbourg, and the numerous tolls were appropriated by a multiplicity of local authorities. In 1789 at least nine different authorities ranging from the King of Prussia to the Prince of Hessen-Rheinfels to the cathedral chapter of Cologne and all four Rhine electors levied tolls at twenty specific points on the lower half of the river between Mainz and the Dutch border.Footnote 35
Contemporary criticism of the anarchic Rhine regime ranged from one end of the river to the other. On the upper Rhine, Palatine Elector Charles III Philip, himself a holder of several Rhine tolls, had rebuilt Mannheim as his new capital in 1720 with hopes that the city would emerge as a major inland port, but found his plans thwarted by the accumulation of restrictive practices along the river. In the German territories of the lower Rhine, merchants and shippers seethed at coercive navigational restrictions that funneled all long-distance commerce to the Dutch ports and Cologne. Critics cited Imperial ordinances, international treaties, Roman law, the Sachsenspiegel, Grotius, Puffendorf, natural law, free trade, efficiency, and common sense in demanding an end to compulsory transfer and the imposition of some order in the collection of tolls. The final decades of the empire saw a lively public debate in the form of printed pamphlets between critics and defenders of existing practices on the river.Footnote 36
French Reforms and Commercial Revival
Not surprisingly, the arrival of revolutionary French power into this thicket of particularist privileges initiated a fundamental transformation of the river's commercial regime. As early as November 1792, the French had used a combination of natural law arguments and anti-feudal rhetoric to justify their forced reopening of the Scheldt, which had been closed by the Dutch since 1648 under the terms of the settlement at Westphalia. Continued military success as reflected in the treaties of Basel (April 1795) and The Hague (May 1795) brought greater French attention to the Rhine. The Treaty of The Hague contained a declaration that neither France nor the Netherlands could prohibit friendly commerce on the Rhine, Meuse, and Scheldt (article 18).
A victory at Neuwied in April 1797 bought French attention to the major portion of the river. The commander of French forces, General Louis Hoche, declared the Rhine free, although he certainly was not in any position to enforce that claim beyond the territory he occupied.Footnote 37 In October 1797 the Treaty of Campo-Formio delivered a substantial portion of the left bank of the Rhine to France. In the second secret article attached to that treaty, the French and Emperor Francis II agreed to abolish traditional commercial restrictions at several key points on the river (e.g., at Koblenz), thus initiating the revolutionary process of exploding the old regime along the German portion of the river.Footnote 38
At the lengthy Congress of Rastatt, which followed Campo-Formio, the French moved forward with demands for a thorough reform of commercial practices on the Rhine, beginning with a rationalization of tolls.Footnote 39 In July 1798, French authorities unilaterally declared Rhine commerce to be “absolument libre,” explicitly abolishing the Stapelrecht and traditional monopoly privileges of the boatmen's guilds in Cologne and Mainz, now both under French control.Footnote 40 The French advanced a number of even more radical proposals for the river: the abolition of goods tolls; free navigation of the river subject only to a uniform passage toll; the abolition of all compulsory transfers; and French access to the interior rivers of Germany. When the remaining Imperial authorities, the German princes, and the Dutch all balked at these sweeping French proposals, the congress ended inconclusively on this point.Footnote 41
The following years saw a progressive dissolution of the old commercial regime along the Rhine, but as yet without any new, comprehensive set of rules. So, for example, in the four new French departments on the left bank, occupation commissar Francisque Rudler initially ordered an untenable tripartite regime under which goods coming into the left bank were freed from all Rhine tolls, goods going elsewhere but carried by French-licensed shippers received a one-third reduction of tolls, and all other goods remained subjected to current and rapidly changing practices.Footnote 42 When the Treaty of Lunéville secured further French gains along the Rhine and established the river itself as the border between France and the Empire, the ground was set for a comprehensive overhaul of commercial practices as they had evolved on the Rhine over the previous several centuries.
A far-reaching new plan for the Rhine emerged from the negotiations that took place in the Imperial Reichstag after Lunéville and culminated in the Reichs-Deputation-Hauptschluss (RDHS) of February 1803. On two occasions in August and October 1802, the French reiterated their earlier demand from the Congress at Rastatt: abolition of all tolls on the Rhine. Only the desperate French need for additional revenues, some of which could help to compensate the German princes dispossessed by France's own annexation of the Rhine's left bank, convinced French negotiators that river commerce must remain subject to tolls of some sort. But having agreed in principle that both French and German authorities must extract some income from the Rhine, the French were determined that the collection regime should conform as closely as possible to their own fiscal, political, and ideological agendas. On February 11, 1803, the French presented a comprehensive plan, subsequently included in the final RDHS as lengthy article 39. That article laid out the basic principles of a new commercial regime for the river, the Schiffahrts-Octroi, which would be administered “jointly” (gemeinschaftlich) by France and the “German Empire,” and would be elaborated further in an “additional agreement.”Footnote 43
The result was a landmark compromise agreement between France and the remaining German interests, represented by Imperial Arch-Chancellor Karl Theodor von Dalberg, Archbishop of Mainz. Signed in August 1804 and ratified in February 1805, the “Octroivertrag” dramatically reformed the previously anarchic Rhine tolls and established a truly innovative joint Franco-Imperial administration covering the river from Switzerland to the Dutch border.Footnote 44 Most fundamentally, the tolls on goods were rationalized. Fixed toll schedules for three classes of goods were established, and the number of toll stations was reduced to twelve, with six on each bank. First-class goods paid a toll of 2.00 francs/hundredweight (fifty kg.) for the upstream trip from the Dutch border to Strasbourg and 1.33 francs for the downstream trip. The agreement required both parties to use the toll revenues to police and administer the river, including subsequent toll collection, and to maintain the channel, towpaths, and shore facilities.Footnote 45 This streamlined arrangement was a vast improvement for merchants: published toll rates allowed costs to be calculated in advance, fewer toll stations reduced time lost in weighing cargoes and making payments, reduced toll rates saved money, and a designated investment in infrastructure promised physical improvements in the river for all travelers.
More significantly, the Octroi agreement created a small bureaucracy controlled jointly by the French government and the arch-chancellor that administered the river as a unitary whole. Both parties jointly appointed the chief executive officer, the director-general, who supervised toll collection, inspected the towpaths, and issued provisional new regulations. In addition, each side appointed two of the four “inspectors” for the river and one-half of the toll agents. In a judicial capacity, the director-general and the inspectors also served a bipartite court of appeals for penalties imposed by toll agents.Footnote 46
Arriving from Paris to establish the new Octroi regime, one of France's great organizers, Charles Coquebert-Montbret, moved energetically to establish the necessary bureaucratic infrastructure, to enforce the terms of the treaty, and to issue new regulations. He defined the duties of each level of the Octroi administration from the director-general to the clerical staff and boat hands. He also quickly established procedures for collecting fines, hearing appeals, and holding trials. More substantively, he created a system of numbered and recorded bills of lading for presentation at the toll stations that became a centerpiece of regulated commerce on the river. He also prescribed standard procedures for assessing cargo volumes and for loading and unloading ships at the busiest ports of Cologne and Mainz. Having created the necessary organizational structure and established the precedent of active regulation of commerce, Couquebert-Montbret named Johann Joseph Eichoff as director-general and returned to Paris in September 1806.Footnote 47
Eichoff continued to modernize commercial practices on the river, for example, by supplanting the local boatmen's guilds with a training and licensing system open to anyone on the river with certificates issued by the General Direction itself. Toll collection proceeded efficiently; Eichoff claimed that administrative costs for all activities ran below ten percent of revenues, probably below the rate for the collection of other indirect taxes. Most impressive perhaps was the work on the physical improvement of the river. Noticeable upgrades were made to shore facilities on the upper Rhine and to the towpath on the right bank. In 1804 these achievements inspired the Chamber of Commerce of Mainz to propose the formidable project of widening the river channel by blasting and clearing the rock-lined narrows between Bingen and Koblenz—something not accomplished until 1831. On the basis of the knowledge about the course and condition of the river accumulated by the Octroi administration, Johann Ockhardt produced the first thorough natural geographic description of the river in 1816.Footnote 48
Under these new commercial arrangements, trade volumes increased dramatically along the entire length of the Rhine, as the data show clearly. Gothein calculated the volume of total Rhine trade moving through Cologne in 1789 at 1.5 million hundredweights (fifty kg.) “which can be considered a normal year.” In 1807, just the second year of the new Octroi regime, that volume was 5,239,972, an increase of 346 percent. Upriver in Mainz, the increase was similarly dramatic; prerevolutionary annual turnover had averaged 667,083 hundredweights, but moved to 2,721,354 in 1807, an increase of just over 400 percent.Footnote 49 After Napoleon restricted continental imports, traffic heading up the lower Rhine began to shrink, but the increased trade volumes on the upper portions of the river proved a bit more durable. Eichhoff's data indicate that trade between Frankfurt, Mannheim, and Strasbourg increased through 1809.Footnote 50 Geoffrey Ellis mentions Strasbourg's Rhine traffic as having “quadrupled in volume by comparison with annual average before 1806.”Footnote 51
These large freight volumes produced substantial revenues, despite the overall reduction in toll rates that had been an explicit goal and condition of the Octroi. Toll revenues rose approximately five percent annually, reaching 2,563,000 francs in 1807, before falling off between 1808 and 1813 as the provisions of Napoleon's Continental System dramatically reduced imports moving upstream.Footnote 52 On the upper Rhine, which suffered less under Napoleon's policies of economic warfare, the toll revenues collected at Mannheim increased twenty-nine percent between 1806 and 1809; further upriver at Neuburg, toll revenues increased forty-three percent in the same period.Footnote 53 In the ten years of the Octroi (1805–1814), the river yielded just over seventeen million francs in toll revenues.Footnote 54
Continuities in Governance and Commerce after 1815
Among the victorious powers of 1813–1814, none had an interest in returning to the anarchic Rhine regime of the prerevolutionary period. British and Prussian governments, each for its own distinct reasons, actively sought to continue the administrative rationalizations and toll reductions introduced by the French. Staatsminister Stein preserved the unified structure of the Octroi administration when the allies seized control of the river in 1813. As early as February 1814 Friedrich Graf zu Solms-Laubach, the future Oberpräsident of the Prussian Rheinprovinz, recommended to Stein that the core of Octroi practices be continued.Footnote 55 In Austria and Russia, Metternich and Alexander regarded the future administration of the Rhine as an issue of secondary importance. This rough position of interests produced the early general agreement that the Rhine would remain open to the commerce of all states, a principle that was incorporated into the Peace of Paris in May 1814 as article V as a crucial first step in preserving the gains of the Napoleonic period.Footnote 56
In Vienna the powers established a “Commission rélative à la libre navigation des riviers” in which the Rhine was the major issue. Work began in December 1814 with representatives from Prussia, Austria, France, and Britain. The major powers soon invited the smaller Rhine states—Netherlands, Nassau, Hessen-Darmstadt, Bavaria, and Baden—to participate in discussions that produced thirty-two articles “concerning Rhine shipping” that were signed in Vienna by the five major powers and the Rhine states on June 9, 1815, and incorporated via article 118 into the final protocol of the congress as Appendix 16B.Footnote 57 The Austrian delegate, Deputy Foreign Minister Jan Fillip Wessenberg, had no substantive impact on the sessions. The French were not opposed to preserving the reforms of 1804, but proceeded cautiously in the immediate aftermath of the war. Industrial superiority and an emerging ideology of free trade made the preservation of reforms that promised access to continental markets via the Rhine an obvious goal of British policy; however, Britain lacked the standing of a riparian state, and Lord Clancarty could not influence the commission to the extent that he desired. This conjunction of power and interests gave the Prussian delegate Wilhelm von Humboldt the opportunity to advance Prussian goals for a Rhine regime that would foster commercial development of the river in the new Prussian Rhine provinces.
After 1815, the Prussian administrative leadership was determined to integrate its heterogeneous new possessions in the Rhineland and Westphalia into coherent Prussian provinces and to link the Rhine-Westphalian territory to the older portions of Prussia. Unlike the other German riparians (Baden, Bavaria, Hessen-Darmstadt, and Nassau), Prussia was not willing to issue a constitution to help to unify its new holdings politically.Footnote 58 Instead Prussia relied exclusively on economic and administrative integration to bring its new lands together. Economic integration of the Rhine provinces and Westphalia required the removal of the impediments to commerce along the river itself.Footnote 59 Prussian ambitions were clearly evidenced in Wilhelm von Humboldt's energetic influence in drafting the Rhine articles of 1815 at the Congress of Vienna. Humboldt doggedly argued for the greatest possible commercial freedom on the river and pushed unsuccessfully for an even stronger central administration than eventually emerged.Footnote 60 In pursuit of Prussian goals, Humboldt sacrificed the Cologne boatmen's traditional right of compulsory transfer (article XIX). Subsequent Prussian members of the new commission that governed the river, Johann Jacobi and Heinrich Delius, refused to support the boatmen's petitions for reinstating the right of compulsory transfer at Cologne.
Beyond Humboldt's efforts in Vienna, the impressive record of the Octroi in increasing both trade volumes and producing predictable revenues was a persuasion that spoke for itself, especially to the smaller states that could not resist the allure of revenues arising from river tolls.Footnote 61 Under Prussian lead the other states agreed to establish a permanent Central Commission for Navigation of the Rhine as a replacement for the Octroi—the next crucial step in preserving the governing principles for Rhine commerce that had evolved during Napoleonic hegemony. In June 1815 the member states charged the commission with several duties: first, to “provide official communication between the river states concerning all aspects of shipping on the river” (article X); second, to “develop exact controls for the observation of the common rules” on the river (article X); third, to issue “interim instructions” on toll-rates for the river (article XXXI); and fourth, to produce a new long-term governing agreement for Rhine shipping that would regulate commerce beyond the guidelines given by the congress in the thirty-two articles of 1815.Footnote 62 After considerable delay involving Dutch insistence on placing tolls at the mouth of the Rhine, this fourth obligation eventually produced the Rhine Treaty of 1831 (Mainzer Akte), which reconfirmed the duties of the Central Commission as monitoring enforcement of current rules, offering new regulations, indicating necessary physical improvements in the river, and issuing an annual report on the state of commerce on the Rhine (article 93).Footnote 63 The agreement of 1831 was, in essence, another extension of the river regime invented and put in place during the Napoleonic period.
In the decades between 1815 and 1870, the commission initiated dozens of regulatory directives, added twenty supplementary articles to the treaty of 1831, created an agreement on common police procedures, and finally arranged for a fundamental overhaul of the 1831 agreement, producing a new treaty in 1868, the “Treaty of Mannheim,” which extended the fundamental mechanisms of Rhine governance as they had been developed in 1804 into the late nineteenth century. In addition to its own active agenda, the Central Commission spawned a number of sub-bureaucracies that operated along the length of the river: the Rhine inspectors, the revenue stations, the central accounting office, and the Rhine courts.
The commission's activities had far-reaching consequences for the economic and political development of early-nineteenth-century Germany, many of which are just beginning to receive an assessment. Most immediately, the Central Commission forcefully advanced the economic integration of north and south Germany by preserving earlier toll reductions and permanently voiding the right of compulsory transfer. In subsequent decades the commission continued to administer the river as a unitary whole, moving toward a progressively more liberal regime, and modifying the rules of the river to accommodate changes in technology and business organization, thus transforming the river into the enormous freightway that it remains today.Footnote 64
In the 1830s, for example, the commission adapted the regulatory regime of the river to accommodate the growing use of steam power and iron barges on the Rhine. A decade later the commission modified the Rhine regime to accommodate the organizational change in the business of shipping as new shipping corporations with large fleets of steam tugs moved to capture the business in large-scale long-distance shipping. Both steps were crucial in the evolution of Rhine commerce in the nineteenth century. The Rhine Commission's activities in managing the application of revolutionary transportation technology and new forms of business organizations on the river in the 1820s, 1830s, and 1840s demonstrate how coordinated management of the river was crucial to reducing transportation costs. Declining transportation costs were crucial to the rise of the upper Rhine economy and its industrial centers at Mannheim and Ludwigshafen. Without a coordinating institution such as the commission, it is impossible to imagine that several states would have been willing and able to manage parallel reforms along the length of the river in a unified manner.
In the century from 1835 to 1935 the Rhine increased its share of Germany's total waterway traffic from thirty-five percent to nearly sixty percent, while the percentages of traffic carried by the Elbe and the Oder each declined.Footnote 65 A functional regime for managing traffic on the Rhine was not the root cause of this increase, which was based on colossal exports of coal, iron, steel, and chemicals. But the commercial regime of the river was absolutely indispensable in facilitating the necessary transport of the natural endowments and industrial products of the Rhine basin. A badly dysfunctional regime in the eighteenth century severely constricted the river's trade volume. The creation of a revolutionary new arrangement in the form of the Octroi brought with it almost immediately a commercial revival that reflected the river's natural potential. Napoleonic achievement in river governance was preserved and extended throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth by the Peace of Paris (1814), the Vienna Congress (1815), and the treaties on Rhine shipping (1831 and 1868). That was the great prerequisite for unlocking the river's economic potential in the industrial age.
Conclusions
The state of the Rhine regime in the eighteenth century and the changes of the revolutionary period allow a first set of concluding observations in a subject area about which a good deal has been written lately—the nature and functioning of the Holy Roman Empire. Conditions along the Rhine between 1648 and 1805 demonstrate that some sharp limits remain on the degree of revisionist optimism that can be attached to the later empire. The absolute and relative decline of the river during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries does not support ideas emerging from other studies that the Empire could facilitate common action, enforce the collective will, or employ relatively efficient institutions.Footnote 66
Strong revisionist arguments have been advanced in favor of the old Reich's economic performance and, by extension, its overall structure. Applying the arguments of the new institutional economics (NIE) to the later Empire, Oliver Volckart's work has been influential over the past decade in rehabilitating scholarly perceptions of the Empire as a framework that could and did promote economic prosperity.Footnote 67 This analytic approach, however, is not particularly useful for understanding Rhine commerce or other similar economic activities, for two reasons. First, as Volckart acknowledged, NIE explanations treat only mobile factors of production, most typically the many mobile forms of capital and mobile varieties of labor in that period. In the Holy Roman Empire, the argument applies to mobile factors that could selectively migrate between the numerous political territories of the empire, thereby forcing state governments into a long-term competition that gradually produced increasingly efficient institutional arrangements for economic growth.Footnote 68 This argument cannot apply to immobile natural resources such as waterways, forests, and mines, or to the essentially immobile forms of capital equipment developed to exploit unique physical resources, for example, river barges designed and constructed for maximum efficiency in the specific local topography of the upper Rhine. Significant portions of the Rhine commerce itself were also essentially captive to the river, unable to migrate in search of better institutional arrangements. This was true, for example, for the most important single commodity carried on the Rhine, timber transported downstream from the upper river in vast rafts. Some merchants with more easily moveable goods did abandon the river in favor of less burdened routes, as noted above, but exploitation of the remaining captive commerce continued to provide the holders of tolls, monopolies, and other special privileges with generous revenue streams.
Second, institutional competition between states could lead to improvements only in those institutional defects that lay within the power of a single state to correct; NIE makes no argument that territorial competition either created or improved institutions that would have been inherently interterritorially cooperative in nature. But interterritorial institutions were precisely what the Rhine needed. Improvements that reduced barriers or streamlined regulation in a single state or city would do little to boost the overall efficiency of the river, which could be improved only by addressing the river in longer stretches. For this very reason there was also no incentive for a competition of institutional improvement even within individual territories, and so none of the Rhine territories produced fundamental commercial reforms for river traffic. Any significant improvement for the entire river required jointly coordinated institutional modifications in many riparian territories. This was exactly the type of interterritorial cooperation that the states of the Empire and the Empire itself did not produce.Footnote 69
Any notion of the later Empire as an effective form of federalism in a large, decentralized, and diverse polity confronts the same familiar obstacles of the Imperial ancien régime on which Rhine traffic itself ran aground: particularism and privilege. A political structure that actively impeded the efficient use of one of the most significant natural resources in the old Reich has to be considered dysfunctional at some level.
It is true that the first substantive steps toward reform along the Rhine took place during the final days of the Empire, in the RDHS, and that ratification of the Octroi agreement of 1804 with France was one of the last acts of the Imperial Reichstag. But these actions cannot be considered genuine acts of Imperial reform. The long-term evolution of government on the Rhine suggests the Octroi regime was a reluctant compromise response by the German princes to overpowering French insistence on sweeping changes. It remains unrealistic to imagine that either the individual states of the Empire or the Empire itself as an institution could have produced these extensive and rapid reforms without irresistible external pressure.
The inability of Imperial structures to address the well-articulated problems affecting Rhine commerce only highlights the successes of the French period. As early as 1795, revolutionary French ideas and practices began attacking the well-known impediments to river traffic that had accumulated under the Empire. By 1804 the new Octroi treaty indicated clearly that the French presence on the Rhine would constitute a sharp break with preceding practices. Beginning in 1806 French reforms produced immediate, positive, and measurable effects on Rhine commerce. These are clearly demonstrable by using a broad range of data points to balance the financial losses of Cologne and Mainz against the increasing traffic and improved infrastructure on other portions of the river. French reforms were also important for the post-1815 history of the river because they comprised the core of subsequent agreements that shaped the evolution of the Rhine over the nineteenth century as it became Germany's single most important transportation link.
Although the short-term and long-term economic consequences of the new Rhine organization created between 1797 and 1804 were enormous, these developments have received little attention from historians of the period. Except for the specialized work of French historian Roger Dufraisse, the fundamental recasting of the Rhine regime is rarely even mentioned in accounts of the revolutionary and Napoleonic eras.Footnote 70 Nowhere has the Octroi received a substantive treatment. Such omissions are perhaps understandable in larger-themed treatments of Europe in an age of revolution, but these lacunae become more curious as one moves from general works to more specific studies of the French Revolution in Germany, the French presence in the Rhineland, the impact of French occupation policies on the Rhenish economy, French administration during the revolution, or the French occupation in specific departments of the Rhineland.Footnote 71 Much of this literature directly addresses French tariff and customs policies, French trade policy, the Continental System, and the influence of these French policies on the economic development of the Rhineland and Germany, but does not explicitly include the Octroi and the dramatically altered nature of commercial governance on the river as an additional factor that must be evaluated for its own impact on imports, exports, and economic activity along the Rhine. It may be seriously misleading to use changing volumes of Rhine commerce as evidence for how French tariff and trade policies affected European trade without factoring in the independent effects of the Octroi reforms on river traffic.Footnote 72
Beyond their economic impact French commercial reforms on the Rhine might be of general interest because in their combination of revolutionary ideology, rationalizing administration, accommodation with existing structures, taxation, infrastructure improvement, acquisition of scientific knowledge, and compilation of statistics, they could serve as a quintessential example of how the French Revolution and Napoleonic experience unfolded in the “third Germany.”
If French reforms constituted a distinct break with the old Reich by ending many practices of the Imperial past, they also provided an essential continuity for the years after 1815 by furnishing many elements of Rhine governance that would endure over the following decades. This essay has briefly traced the step-by-step preservation of the Octroi reforms between 1813 and 1815 and their reconfiguration as the centerpieces of later agreements on Rhine governance signed in 1831 and 1868. A lengthier explication could show just how closely dozens of articles in the Mainz Treaty of 1831 were modeled on earlier counterparts in the Octroi Treaty of 1804. To be sure, Napoleonic structures were renamed and participating membership in the new Rhine Commission was broadened to accommodate the changed political geography of 1815, but the essential principles and practices of the earlier French creation were recognizable to all involved. Those continuities directly linked the dramatic growth of Rhine commerce and economic expansion in the Rhine basin in the nineteenth century to the organizational achievements of the revolutionary era. Along the Rhine, nineteenth-century economic prosperity owed a lot to earlier French exercises of political power. This important recognition should be added to the complex balance sheet of the French presence in Germany when assessing the impact of the French Revolution on its western neighbor.
Because French reforms have not received adequate recognition in their own right, it can hardly be surprising that their role both in inspiring subsequent agreements on Rhine commerce and in comprising the core elements of those agreements has also generally been overlooked. In addition to the widespread material confusion that persists regarding the contents of the 1831 treaty, there has been little effort on the part of recent German historians to emphasize the intimate link between the Rhine governance of the nineteenth century and the preceding French occupation.Footnote 73
The evolution of the commercial regime on the Rhine is a large regional issue with enormous consequences that remain little known. If Frank Tipton is right that “regional consciousness may be the linking term connecting the economic histories of localities with the emergence and development of the national economy,” then understanding the development of larger regional economies such as the Rhine river basin will be an essential step in a collective historical enterprise that stitches together local histories to produce national, continental, and global histories of trade and transportation.Footnote 74 For the Rhine, this task would include correcting widespread misperceptions about how the river was regulated and drawing attention to the interconnectivity of events before, during, and after the French revolutionary episode.
The Rhine River became Europe's most heavily used waterway through an interplay of highly visible natural, technological, and economic forces. But the history of the period examined here points to the less well-known commercial liberation of the Rhine by political action as the sine qua non for a synergistic unfolding of the material factors in the Rhine's development. Beginning with French suggestions in 1798, a series of multilateral political agreements created an appropriately interterritorial regulatory regime that reduced and eliminated artificial obstacles along the river. In this case, politics and regulation were the absolute prerequisites for releasing the river's economic potential as a transportation resource.
