Joseph II’s endless schemes to swap around bits of territory and generally use the Holy Roman Empire as a sort of goody-bag had ravaged the political systems along the Rhine and to the east in ways which also affronted and confused France. He was also well on the way to wrecking the ‘magic circle’ which had until then generally protected the painfully vulnerable religious states and their tiny confederates. If in the east the Holy Roman Emperor wanted to sweep away feudal privileges and stamp out old-style clerical parasitism, then in the west the French Revolution favoured a far more extreme
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