Left Bank of the Rhine

The Sarre province and the district of Landau in der Pfalz, which had been French before the Napoleonic Wars, became by the final act of the Congress of Vienna ceded to the members of the anti-Napoleonic coalition.

The chaos and barriers in a land divided and subdivided among many different petty principalities gave way to a rational simplified centralised system controlled by Paris and run by Napoleon's relatives.

The most important impact came from the abolition of all feudal privileges and historic taxes, the introduction of legal reforms of the Napoleonic Code and the reorganisation of the judicial and local administrative systems.

The economic integration of the Rhineland with France increased prosperity, especially in industrial production, and business accelerated with the new efficiency and lowered trade barriers.

There was only limited resistance, and most Germans welcomed the new regime, especially the urban elites, but one sore point was the hostility of the French officials toward the Roman Catholic Church, the religion of most inhabitants.

[3] The reforms were permanent, and decades later, workers and peasants in the Rhineland still often appealed to Jacobinism to oppose unpopular government programs.

That included the lifting of all estates-based privileges, the creation of egalitarianism, the establishment of a new judicial order and the introduction of the Napoleonic code.

In Koblenz the term Schängel appeared, derived from the French Christian name Jean and (apparently pejoratively) referred to the French-fathered children of German mothers.