Peace of Basel

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The Peace of Basel of 1795 (Basel Peace) put a temporary end to the war between France and Prussia and Spain . These parties, in coalition with England, Austria and the Netherlands, fought each other during the First Coalition War (1792–1797). The peace led to revolutionary France being recognized as a great power with equal rights.

background

Central Europe after the peace agreements of Basel and Campoformio

The military participation of Prussia in the coalition against France was presented by Berlin in 1794 to the imperial estates as no longer to be financed. If the other imperial princes refused to provide funding, Prussia threatened - contrary to the statutes of the imperial law - with the withdrawal of the troops. The Polish Kościuszko uprising gave Prussia a welcome opportunity to intervene to gain territorial gains that it had not been able to achieve in the war against France. Prussia was facing national bankruptcy and was dependent on financial aid, or it had to end its unsuccessful operation on the Rhine in order to be able to participate in the division of Poland.

Contract negotiations

The peace consisted of three separate peace treaties:

  • On April 5, 1795, France and Prussia agreed on a treaty that had been discussed since 1794. On the night of April 6, the representatives of both countries, François Barthélemy and Karl August von Hardenberg , signed the peace treaty. Everyone was in their own Basel accommodation, in the Rosshof or the Markgräflerhof, and the papers were delivered by courier. In the treaty, Prussia left its possessions on the left bank of the Rhine to the French and in a secret article received the promise that it would be compensated on the right bank of the Rhine if the left bank of the Rhine should finally fall to France in a general peace. The Basel town clerk Peter Ochs , as a mediator, played a key role in this conclusion. On April 15, 1795, the peace treaty concluded at Basel was ratified in Berlin . The French diplomat and secret service chief Théobald Bacher is also said to have had a major impact on the achievement of this diplomatic solution .
  • On July 22, 1795, the peace treaty between France and Spain was signed again at night, represented by Domingo de Iriarte . This time in the city palace of Peter Ochs, the Holsteinerhof . Spain had to cede two thirds of the island of Hispaniola with Haiti to France.

With Prussia and Spain, two main opponents of the French Republic were eliminated from the First Coalition War.

During the peace negotiations in Basel, the Duchess of Angoulême Marie Thérèse Charlotte de Bourbon , daughter of the French king Louis XVI , who was beheaded in 1793 . , exchanged for five commissioners of the Convention (including the former Minister of War Beurnonville ) who had been held hostage by General Dumouriez to the Austrians in Belgium.

Remarks

The separate peace between Prussia and France was in fact a withdrawal from the Reich alliance. Relations with Austria as a coalition, which had been strained since the wars between Frederick the Great and Empress Maria Theresa , reached a low point and encouraged Austria to be even more willing to continue the war.

“For her part, Austria made very bitter remarks to the Reichstag; it declared that it wanted peace as much as anyone else, but that it considered it impossible and would wait for the favorable moment to negotiate; It would also be far more beneficial for the states of the empire to entrust themselves to the traditional Austrian loyalty than to powers that have broken their word and who had not yet fulfilled their obligations. In order to give himself the impression that he was preparing for war, although he only wanted peace, the Reichstag decreed five times the contingent for this campaign and stipulated that those states which could not provide soldiers should pay 240 fl could buy the man out of this obligation. " ( Adolphe Thiers around 1825)

The Peace of Basel was a defeat for the Holy Roman Empire and its constitution. Prussia agreed without any immediate French consideration, but received the promise of compensation on the right of the Rhine for losses on the left . From the Prussian point of view, another advantage of the Basel Peace was that after the pacification in the West, it was better able to get involved in the Third Partition of Poland . The empire was then divided into a north dominated by Prussia and the south led by Austria (→ German dualism ). Between these blocks, some sovereigns tried to maintain and strengthen their states through skillful maneuvering (→ Third Germany ). A temporary solution for the German Reich did not come about until twenty years later in the course of the Congress of Vienna . One historian commented on the result of the Peace of Basel as follows: "This marked a turning point from which a straight and irreversible path led to the dissolution of the Old Kingdom."

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Individual evidence

  1. ↑ E. von Cosel: History of the Prussian State and People under the Hohenzollern Princes , Third Volume, Leipzig 1870, p. 385 ( Google Books )
  2. ↑ Meyers-Konv.-Lexikon, Basler Frieden , Vol. 2
  3. ↑ The names of places and countries are taken from the representation of the neutrality line from May 17, 1795 in Basel . SPSG, atlases and maps 14
  4. ↑ A. Thiers, Gesch. d. Franz. Rev., Vol. 5, pp. 62ff.
  5. ↑ A. Thiers, Gesch. d. French Revolution, Vol. 4, p. 399
  6. ↑ M. Plassmann, Die preuss. Reich policy and peace v. Basel , p. 147