Treaty of Paris (1801)

The Treaty of Paris of August 24, 1801 assured Bavaria of ownership of its parts of the country on the right bank of the Rhine and contained the promise of France to offer an early replacement for areas of the electorate on the left bank of the Rhine that it claimed. The treaty was a courtesy of the First Consul of the French Republic, Napoléon Bonaparte , for Bavaria's power-political swing to France.

Bavaria was involved in the first and second coalition wars on the side of Austria and thus the emperor. France had won the military conflict. The Treaty of Lunéville on February 9, 1801, concluded by Austria's ruler and, in personal union, Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire , Francis II , with France, led to the loss of Bavarian territory, among other things.

Maximilian I Joseph from the Palatinate-Zweibrücken line, who became elector in 1799, was rather Francophone because he had spent his youth in France. The leadership of the southern German middle state of Bavaria wanted to break away from the close connection with Vienna, but there was a suspicion that the Habsburgs wanted to seize the Bavarian electorate by annexation. The joint defeat in the Battle of Hohenlinden on December 3, 1800 against the Napoleonic army cut the previous bond between Bavaria and Austria for good. Bavaria took the negative outcome of the war as an opportunity to approach Napoléon and to support French politics. In Munich one could calculate that the country was permanently in danger of becoming a deployment zone or battlefield in conflicts between the great European powers France and Austria. The turn to Paris probably also happened to the then militarily stronger of the two antagonists.

The Bavarian-French treaty of 1801 was followed by a period of calm and fruitful cooperation with the Grande Nation .

Due to the regulations of Lunéville and Paris, Bavaria lost the entire Rhine Palatinate and the duchies of Zweibrücken and Jülich (around 12,400 km² with 690,000 inhabitants). A few months later it received considerable compensation (around 18,000 km² with 900,000 inhabitants) through the Reichsdeputationshauptschluss (1803) with the dioceses of Würzburg , Bamberg , Augsburg , Freising , part of Passau and Eichstätt , with 12 abbeys and 15 former imperial cities.