French period

In northern European and German historiography, the French period (French: Période française, German: Franzosenzeit, Dutch: Franse tijd, Luxembourgish: Fransousenzäit) was a late 19th-century term for the era between 1794 and 1815, during which most of Northern Europe was directly under French rule or within the French sphere of influence. It is often confused with Napoleon I's rule, although, in the states west of the river Rhine, it began with their occupation by troops of the French Revolutionary Army in 1794. However, in some parts of Germany it lasted roughly from 1804 to 1813 or (used in a stricter sense) from the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806 to the Battle of Leipzig in 1813.

The term emerged only gradually, sometime after the events involved. It entered Low German usage with Fritz Reuter's popular work Ut de Franzosentid (1860). It was used alongside the concept of Erbfeind ("hereditary enmity") to express anti-French feeling as part of the formation of a German national identity and as such was used in a non-neutral way under the German Empire and Third Reich. In Germany, the term has thus been shunned since the Bonn Republic, with "French Revolutionary Wars" and "Napoleonic Wars" more commonly used today.

Following the Battle of Austerlitz and the War of the Third Coalition, Napoleon dissolved the Holy Roman Empire, annexed parts of Austria and certain German states to France, and formed the German states into the Confederation of the Rhine. Napoleon was their "protector," but as the Confederation was above all a military alliance, their foreign policy was utterly dominated by France, and the states had to supply France with large numbers of military troops. Disquiet about mass-conscription (the levée en masse) also trigged an uprising, known as the Peasants' War, in 1798 within modern-day Belgium and Luxembourg. In Germany, Napoleon formed two new states, the Grand Duchy of Berg and the Kingdom of Westphalia, which he gave to his brothers Joachim Murat and Jerome Bonaparte respectively. The Austrian Netherlands and Prince-Bishopric of Liège were annexed and became départements of France.

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