Daughter republic

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Champignons républicains (republican i.e. revolutionary mushrooms), French caricature, around 1799. - The monarchs of Europe are surrounded by a sea of ​​new republics that are springing up like mushrooms: in the center the great French mother republic, around them smaller subsidiary republics.

Subsidiary republics (French: républiques sœurs , sister republics ) were states established by the French Republic from 1792 through military intervention and the export of revolution , with constitutions based on the French model. The term emphasized the kinship and ties to these republics . First and foremost, the term Napoleon's satellite states in Italy.

At the beginning of this reorganization of Europe there was a sense of mission of the revolutionary state as well as the need to free itself from the isolation of the monarchical rest of Europe. For this reason France supported the self-proclaimed subsidiary republics and actively promoted the proclamation of such allied states. Proper annexations occurred for the first time during the First Coalition War of 1792/93, during which France mainly occupied German territories in order to reach the “natural borders”, especially the Rhine.

Most of the subsidiary republics did not emerge until after the Jacobean phase of the French Revolution 1793–1794, and their fate was closely related to Napoléon Bonaparte's career from 1796, especially with his successes in the Italian campaign . But even in all of Europe, the military strategic point of view of the formation of buffers on the borders of France became more important. The Napoleonic state system in Europe was not limited to subsidiary republics in the narrower sense, but also included the Kingdom of Etruria established in 1801 , the Kingdom of Italy , which emerged from the Italian Republic in 1805 , the Kingdom of Holland , which emerged in 1806 from the Batavian Republic , and the Kingdom of Naples , which was split off in 1806 , the Duchy of Warsaw (from 1807–1815), fought over from 1808 on Spain . The German states were all under Napoleonic influence, in particular the states of the Confederation of Rhine - above all the three Napoleonic model states Kingdom of Westphalia , Grand Duchy of Frankfurt and Grand Duchy of Berg .

From 1804 the element of the Napoleonic dynasty formation ( Napoleonids ) also played an important role. The daughter republics became kingdoms with relatives of Napoleon as kings. In addition, the new states were increasingly viewed less as partners and more as recipients of orders. With the beginning of the continental blockade (1806), Napoléon finally went over to open annexation.

Numerous revolutionary achievements in administration, civil liberties, economy, justice and the school system were exported to the subsidiary republics and beyond. In the case of Prussia in particular , these reforms played a central role in its rise in the 19th century. In the course of the formation of the Napoleonic dynasty, the element of republicanization disappeared with the formation of new vassal states : they were only equipped with weak legislatures . Even states that were not directly under French control mainly took on the task of making the administration more effective and standardized. In the whole of Europe there was also the dissolution of the manorial rule , which, however, sometimes dragged on until after 1848. Numerous other reforms were started in the satellite states, but not implemented. They persisted at least as a program through the 19th century.

The names of the subsidiary republics themselves (e.g. Batavian Republic or Cisalpine Republic ) were mostly derived from geographic and ethnographic terms from antiquity . The special naming for the allies of revolutionary France resulted from a special understanding of the essence of the revolution . The later valid meaning - radical new beginning and violent progress - was originally not in the word revolution, but rather meant "turning back" ( lat. Re-volutio ), d. H. away from a feudal present seen as degenerate towards earlier natural law conditions. The masterminds of the revolution believed that these freer societies were realized in antiquity, in the Roman Republic or among the Celtic-Germanic peoples, which were thus referred to in a linguistic way. The high age of the terms, going back to the beginnings of the then known history, was intended both to counterbalance the artificiality of the formation of states and to give the new republics greater legitimation than the feudal order rooted in the Middle Ages.

List of daughter republics

Northern Italy 1796.png Northern Italy 1803.png Northern Italy 1806.png
1796: Northern Italy before
the French invasion.
1803: Subsidiary Republics
in Northern Italy.
1806: Subsidiary republics replaced
by monarchies.

First of all, the republic of the “ United Belgian States , established in 1790 by revolutionaries in the Austrian Netherlands parallel to the French Revolution, was again suppressed. But later followed z. B. the

The list is not complete. There were a significant number of smaller and largely insignificant republics that are often only mentioned in the specialized historiography. In the area of ​​the pre-revolutionary Confederation, with its pronounced local self-government and territorial division, during the period of upheaval in spring 1798, subject places and areas declared themselves to be republics (Léman or canton of Vaud ) or free states ( Toggenburg ) before they were consolidated into the Helvetic Republic . The situation at that time is still reflected in the divergent self-designations of the Swiss cantons as “state” or “republic”. The cantons that existed before the revolution prefer the traditional “state”, while the (French-speaking Switzerland) cantons, which are particularly rooted in the revolutionary and Napoleonic era, see themselves as a “republic”. The canton of Jura , which was only separated from Bern in the 1970s, calls itself the République et Canton ; It is thus probably the most distant independent state echo of the subsidiary republics and at the same time closes a circle, since it largely coincides territorially with the Raurak Republic of 1792, which in turn was the first of all subsidiary republics.

Related terms

The term “sister republic” is used in a similar way to the daughter republic, but with the aspect of equality. So idealized end of the 18th century, the United States , the Switzerland as a sister republic by comparing their War of Independence against the British with the existence of the Confederation in an otherwise monarchical Europe. In order to counter the accusation of dependence, the Napoleonic creations often called themselves républiques sœurs . The similar constitutional history (federalism, two-chamber system, democracy, modified directory system) promoted the "sisterhood" between the Swiss Confederation and the United States of America. In 1991 a postage stamp with the same layout was issued in the USA and Switzerland at the same time, the Capitol and the Federal Palace. This to remind of this "Special Relationship".

The Eastern European people 's democracies , which were established after the Second World War based on the Soviet model and represent the best-known further development of the concept of subsidiary republics, called themselves “ brother countries ” .

The French colonies that were transformed into autonomous republics within the French Union or the French Community were ultimately subsidiary republics.