CROSSING BOUNDARY LINES: RELIGION, REVOLUTION, AND NATIONALISM ON THE FRENCH-GERMAN BORDER, 1789-1840 By DAWN LYNN SHEDDEN A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 2012 1 © 2012 Dawn Shedden 2 To my husband David, your support has meant everything to me 3 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS As is true of all dissertations, my work would have been impossible without the help of countless other people on what has been a long road of completion. Most of all, I would like to thank my advisor, Sheryl Kroen, whose infinite patience and wisdom has kept me balanced and whose wonderful advice helped shape this project and keep it on track. In addition, the many helpful comments of all those on my committee, Howard Louthan, Alice Freifeld, Jessica Harland-Jacobs, Jon Sensbach, and Anna Peterson, made my work richer and deeper. Other scholars from outside the University of Florida have also aided me over the years in shaping this work, including Leah Hochman, Melissa Bullard, Lloyd Kramer, Catherine Griggs, Andrew Shennan and Frances Malino. All dissertations are also dependent on the wonderful assistance of countless librarians who help locate obscure sources and welcome distant scholars to their institutions. I thank the librarians at Eckerd College, George A. Smathers libraries at the University of Florida, the Judaica Collection in particular, Fürstlich Waldecksche Hofbibliothek, Wissenschaftliche Stadtsbibliothek Mainz, Johannes Gutenberg Universitätsbibliothek Mainz, Landeshauptarchiv Koblenz, Stadtarchiv Trier, and Bistumsarchiv Trier. The University of Florida, the American Society for Eighteenth- Century Studies, and Pass-A-Grille Beach UCC all provided critical funds to help me research and write this work. Finally, I would like to thank the many family members and friends who took the time to support me and read my long tale of obscure historical actors. Their comments and our discussions allowed me to envision my work outside of academia and just how broad historical imagination can be. Last, but certainly not least, are my three sons Will, 4 Robert and Bryan and my husband David, who daily inspire me to explore the world deeply, leave some of myself behind, and laugh with sheer joy. 5 TABLE OF CONTENTS page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS .................................................................................................. 4 ABSTRACT ..................................................................................................................... 7 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION ...................................................................................................... 9 2 ―THE SIMPLICITY OF THE DOVE AND THE INTELLIGENCE OF THE SNAKE‖: ADVENTURES IN PARIS, 1789-1807 ..................................................... 24 3 ―DO NOT LOOK AT HOW OTHER HOUSES WERE BUILT‖: GERMAN NATIONALISM IN THE RHINELAND, 1795-1818 .................................................. 85 4 ―DECKED OUT WITH BORROWED PLUMES‖: THE APPLICATION OF NAPOLEONIC LAW IN THE RHINELAND, 1803-1820 ........................................ 132 5 ―A LIFE OF STEADY HYPOCRISY‖?: RELIGIOUS CONVERSION IN THE RHINELAND, 1797-1830 ...................................................................................... 195 6 THE COLOGNE TROUBLES AND DEFINING THE GERMAN NATION: DEBATING MIXED MARRIAGES IN THE RHINELAND, 1817-1840 ................... 266 7 CONCLUSION ...................................................................................................... 336 LIST OF REFERENCES ............................................................................................. 345 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH .......................................................................................... 377 6 Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy CROSSING BOUNDARY LINES: RELIGION, REVOLUTION, AND NATIONALISM ON THE FRENCH-GERMAN BORDER, 1789-1840 By Dawn Shedden December 2012 Chair: Sheryl Kroen Major: History Typical historical constructions like chronology, geography, and faith are helpful in categorizing historical moments, but they are rarely broad enough to properly place any single individual or to make sense of the decisions that they make. Lives are lived at the intersection of multiple, competing identities that are regularly rewritten by time. My dissertation embraces this complexity by examining three families living on the border of France and Germany during the French Revolution and how they reconstruct religious, national, legal, and chronological boundary lines to suit their own needs. The French Revolution was a critical juncture because it opened up new opportunities and ways of thinking that many embraced. Yet even as it attempted to erase older dividing lines, it established new categories that were malleable and unreliable. Each case examined in this work highlights this duality of accessibility and restriction, of stability and uncertainty. As journalists, educators, lawyers, and religious leaders, the people I investigate actively pursued goals that would directly influence their local communities, their emerging nations, and the world beyond. The routes they selected were dramatic, like the case of Samuel Marx, Trier‘s rabbi, and his brothers 7 Heinrich, the father of Karl Marx, and Cerf. They accepted Napoleon‘s call for social and occupational integration only to find professional doors to advancement barred by prejudice. Some cases, like Catholic Romantic leader Joseph von Görres and his brother-in-law Franz von Lassaulx, dean of Napoleon‘s new law school in Coblenz, reinvented themselves politically and religiously, often switching directions multiple times. For others, like Trier‘s first bishop Josef von Hommer, the radical nature of debates left his carefully constructed compromises open to criticism from all sides. Each chapter deals with an issue with which these gentlemen had to grapple: visits to Paris, life in a border region, shifting definitions of law, religious conversion, and interfaith marriage. Though their answers were quite different, they were all boundary crossers who recognized that they had the ability to rewrite history and did so with astonishing variety. 8 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION In a provocative piece in the June 2009 American Historical Review, Kate Brown boldly proposed that historians do not like biography as a genre because it frightens them by highlighting the very individual nature of the historical process. ―Biography...is all the more suspicious for historians because it exposes the shading of history into autobiography. Yet, in many ways there is no biography—nor history, for that matter— without autobiography.‖1 Existing in that nebulous sphere between the social sciences and the humanities, historians do often back away from all personal pronouncements out of fear that showing their own investment in their subjects will expose their projects to ridicule. ―In their quest to explore the human condition, historians can hide behind their subjects, using them as a scrim to project their own sentiments and feelings.‖2 Are historians indeed on such a ―scientific‖ quest that they ignore the pitfalls of their own prejudices and the ways in which their historical frameworks are shaped by their own histories? Such a challenge is one that should not be ignored. The last several decades of scholarship have become increasingly self-aware, but new trends in historical biography suggest that we could do even more. Though my own work does not take the form of a traditional biography, I found myself asking what exactly my own approach to the discipline was and the ways in which my paradigm impacted the direction that my project took. I still struggle to make sense of which parts of my own history created my outlook, but I have uncovered some 1 Kate Brown, ―A Place in Biography for Oneself,‖ American Historical Review 114, no. 3 (June 2009): 599. 2 Ibid., 603. 9 unique threads of thought that weave themselves into my work. The first is a strong sense that individual stories do matter and that we can discover a great deal about history‘s path from each distinct life. Yet to make such a claim is not to go back to ―big man‖ history in which only ―important‖ people were discussed because their impact on history‘s flow was so unmistakable. Rather biographies can be only relevant when connected into the wider framework of politics, culture, religion, economics, and geography that inform every decision and provide markers for a life‘s course. As Karl Marx, nephew and son of three of the subjects of my dissertation observed, ―circumstances make men just as much as men make circumstances.‖3 By placing each story into history‘s stream one can best observe change and continuity, what space each of us is given to act out our own stories, and just how different each path can be. While some may continue to argue that just a few individual examples can never be broad enough to prove general societal trends, I claim the opposite. Societal movements can be made relevant only on the individual level because that is where trends and movements begin and where they are continually shaped in a myriad of confusing pathways. The next crucial element of my own work is an awareness that telling a single story is not enough. I do not claim to be writing conventional biography here because that would mean