Towns and cities from 1525 to the present [56, 57]

[697] The decline of the civic community [städtische Gemeinwesen] The comradely corporative community in the towns succumbed to the same internal forces as the system of rural fellowship. In the new system of state and law [ Recht ] there was no place for a free communal constitution. Only two paths were open to the towns: one towards full independence, the other towards full dependence. Both led to the fall of the communities based on fellowship before the principle of sovereignty [ Obrigkeit ]. They must either themselves become territories ruled on the principles of sovereignty, in which only one corporation possessed supreme territorial power; or else they must submit as dependent communities to an alien territorial power, decline politically into the status of administrative state institutions and, in terms of private law, into chartered corporations – in which case the times demanded that their privileges be increasingly demolished. The seeds of such a great change were, in fact, evident as early as the fifteenth century; the great resurgence of the Reformation period once more interrupted the decline of German municipal freedom, only to hasten its final downfall; here as in all other respects the Thirty Years War was a destructive force. From then on the principle of sovereignty has slowly and steadily been penetrating the minutiae of civic administration. The revolutionary legislation drew the final consequences by promoting a few towns to full sovereignty, and destroying the others as political communities.