Did the (Holy) Roman Empire End in 1806? Chevalier Charles Coulombe's Thoughts

Today is the 212th anniversary of the abdication of the last (Holy) Roman Emperor, but did it end the Empire?

Chevalier Charles Coulombe's thoughts on the question from his Facebook page.

August 6 was the date in 1806 when Francis II abdicated as Holy Roman Emperor, purportedly ending said Empire. Nevertheless, the case can be made that the abdication simply began a new interregnum, comparable to that opened by Romulus Augustulus’ renunciation of the throne in 476 A.D., and concluded by Charlemagne’s coronation in 800 (although, to be sure, the Eastern Empire continued uninterruptedly all that time). As Viscount Bryce himself points out:

"Great Britain had refused in 1806 to recognise the dissolution of the Empire. And it may indeed be maintained that in point of law the Empire was never extinguished at all, but lived on as a sort of disembodied spirit. For it is clear that, technically speaking, the abdication of a sovereign destroys only his own rights, and does not dissolve the state over which he presides. Perhaps the Elector of Saxony might, legally, as Imperial Vicar during an interregnum, have summoned the electoral college to meet and choose a new Emperor." Bryce, op. cit., p. 416, note o.

What made Great Britain’s refusal of recognition of the Emperor’s act so important is that her King, at that time Elector of Hanover, had a voice in the governance of the Empire and a vote in the election of any future Emperor. But much the same case is made by Klaus Epstein:

"While there is no question that Francis was personally entitled to abdicate a crown he was no longer willing to wear, he certainly had no constitutional power to dissolve the fabric of imperial obligation per se. The empire, like all sovereign states, was intended to be perpetual and the emperor had sworn to maintain it to the best of his ability. He broke his coronation oath when he declared it dissolved, and he failed to consult the Stände assembled at Regensburg about his highly irregular procedure. One can argue, therefore, that the imperial death warrant was technically ultra vires and therefore null and void, and that the empire “legally” continued to exist after 1806." (The Genesis of German Conservatism, p. 668).

Fr. Aidan Nichols, O.P., for example, in his "Christendom Awake!"would call the Holy Roman Empire back into being:

"Catholicism, as Orthodoxy, has, historically, regarded the monarchical institution in this light: raised up by Providence to safeguard the natural law in its transmission through history as that norm for human co-existence which, founded as it is on the Creator, and renewed by him as the Redeemer, cannot be made subject to the positive law, or administrative fiat, or the dictates of cultural fashion. Let us dare to exercise a Christian political imagination on an as yet unspecifiable future.

The articulation of the foundational natural and Judaeo-Christian norms of a really united Europe, for instance, would most appropriately be made by such a crown, whose legal and customary relations with the national peoples would be modelled on the best aspects of historic practice in the (Western) Holy Roman Empire and the Byzantine “Commonwealth” — to use the term popularised by Professor Dimtri Obolensky.

Such a crown, as the integrating factor of an international European Christendom, would leave intact the functioning of parliamentary government in the republican or monarchical polities of its constituent nations and analogues in city and village in other representative and participatory forms. As the Spanish political theorist Alvaro D’Ors defines the concepts, power — that is, government — as raised up by the people can and should be distinguished from authority.

Power in this sense puts questions to those in authority as to what ought to be done. It asks whether technically possible acts of government, for co-ordinating the goals of individuals and groups in society, chime, or do not chime, with the foundational norms of society, deemed as these are to rest on the will of God as the ultimate power of the shared human goal. Authority, itself bereft of such power, answers out of a wisdom which society can recognise."

God speed the day!