The German historian Thomas Nipperdey began his magisterial opus Deutsche Geschichte 1800-1866 with the memorable phrase "in the beginning was Napoleon." Nipperdey's allusions to Genesis aside, Napoleon did cast a long shadow on German politics, culture, and society well beyond Waterloo. But the relationship of German development to Napoleon and the French occupation was complex and evolved over time. The impact of the French often had a very Janus-faced character. While Napoleonic institutions took root within the German sphere, much of Vormärz political culture used resistance to France to legitimize itself.

One of the legacies of the French Revolution and Napoleonic period was the growth of constitutionalism throughout Europe. Germany was no exception, and most of the Kleinstaaten within Central Europe had some form of constitutional compact by the 1820s. This was a reflection of the Revolution's drive for systematizing and redrawing political arrangements to be more rational and enlightened. Napoleon was not just a proselytizer of this system, as he showed in his first major command in Italy where he encouraged a constitutional order, he added twists to it that made it a model well-suited to the Vienna system upholding the monarchic principle. Napoleon showed an avowed preference for constitutions to were "short and obscure" that would simultaneously create an ordered state and strengthen the executive. In this regard the post-1815 wave of German constitutions proved the German princes and kings to be quite apt pupils of their former ally and imperial master. The provisos of these constitutions strengthened executive authority and tried to insulate the monarch from the pressure from below while affirming that the dynast was the expression of the people's general will.

Napoleon's influence did not just extend to the text of the constitutions, but also their presentation. H. G. Wells's memorable quip that Napoleon could have been the father of a new world, but chose instead to be the stepson of the old loses some of the novelty in Napoleon's political culture. Napoleon often wrapped up the implementation of these constitutions as his own personal gift to the people, as seen here in this broadsheet of the Hundred Days' constitution or this painting of Napoleon giving a constitution to the Duchy of Warsaw. Now compare the last two images of Napoleon giving the constitutions to this 1818 lithograph of Maximilian Joseph I granting Bavaria its constitution. In terms of staging and performance in media celebrating the constitution, the message is the same: the monarch in regal splendor "gives" the constitution to his people. Baden's Verfassungsdenkmal not only aped the neoclassical styling of the First Empire (as did Maximilian Joseph I in this 1818 thaler ), but also draws explicit connection between the glory Grand Duke Karl and the political order. So not only in substance were the German constitutions imitating Napoleon, but also in form and style.

These "vague and obscure" constitutions did create a number of problems for the German states in the Vormärz period; Bavaria's annual Verfassungsfest was initially a celebration of the Wittelsbach's gift but soon turned into a meeting point for Bavarians upset over the lack of popular sovereignty and other individual and estate rights. Yet while these monarchs were acting in a manner that did summon up images of Napoleon and the First Empire's political culture, they were also framing their own innovations as an outgrowth of their resistance to the French. In Prussia, this was easier to accomplish as the state reforms of Stein and other Prussian bureaucrats was a means to ready the kingdom for revenge against France after the humiliating defeats of 1806. But other German monarchs had to sidestep the issue of their alliance to Napoleon. Counterintuitively, Bavaria was outside of Prussia was the German state that was most vocal in pushing the narrative of a national resistance to Napoleon. Bavarian state architecture such as Befreiungshalle Kelheim presented a national narrative of a gradual liberation of Germany from the French while ignoring that Bavaria was France's ally for most of the battles inscribed on the temple's bronze escutcheons.

The memory of resistance to Napoleon was not just limited to the etatist Kleinstaat princelings. Although historical research into the 1813 war has shown that the notion of a mass wave of German volunteers against Napoleon was largely a myth outside of Prussia, the valorization of the volunteers was certainly not a myth in the Vormärz. The colors black-red-gold which later became the flag of the abortive German state in the 1848 Revolutions came from the Lützowsches Freikorps of German volunteers. Among more liberal-minded Germans and the growing middling classes, the notion of German volunteers fighting for the had a powerful appeal and metaphorically took the nation's destiny away from the monarchs and handed it back to the people. Moreover the myth of the 1813 Befreiungskrieg (war of liberation) created a narrative of a monarch and the people working in harmony to throw out an invader. That this myth did not quite match reality underlay a number of problems between advocates of greater democratization and their monarchs for the remainder of the century.

One of the more interesting ways in which the script of resistance played out in the post-1815 world was among German Jews. While the the process of repealing of Napoleon's decrees of emancipation actually preceded Napoleon's fall (and often came from the great man himself), this was one innovation the post-Waterloo monarchs did not need. Popular violence like the Hep-Hep riots often preceded the formal repeals. But more important than these legal provisions for the status of Jews in Germany was the expansion of the Kleinstaaten into larger areas and the growing sophistication of the economy. Napoleon's insistent demand on Central Europe for more treasure and warm bodies meant that Jews were now more present within the body politic inside Germany than ever before. Some Jews served in the armed forces or increased activities in commercial and professional sectors of the German economy. But far from celebrating the Napoleonic period as one of lost emancipation, Jewish advocates for greater rights often used their German patriotism as an argument for greater rights. In Prussia, some Jewish pressure groups argued that Jewish volunteers in 1813 deserved access to civil service positions as Gentile volunteers. And while the Prussian state refused these pleas on the grounds these men were not Christian, this type of advocacy was evidence of the greater economic and social integration of Jews beyond the ancien regime's ghettos.

Like Prussia's Jews, other minority groups used their actions against the French as a means to defend the privileges Napoleon had granted them. In the Prussian Rhineland, the Napoleonic Code and promotion of local elites soon became the source of local particularist defense against Prussian overlordship. While nostalgia for the French occupation was kept at a low level, much of the defense of these institutions was framed in the language of Heimat and notions that these local rights were what Germans fought for in 1813. This defense of French institutions as local ones did not register as a cognitive dissonance for the Rhennish elite. Many of them had colonized these institutions during the Empire as one of Napoleon's methods of rule was to maintain alliances with local non-French elites.

In examining the German responses to Napoleon, it is important to distinguish between Napoleon's political system and the man himself. While many Germans openly attacked the French period as one of foreign domination, Napoleon's system did leave the Vormärz states a number of key innovations. Even the most politically reactionary states like Piedmont-Savoy saw a utility in keeping the Kingdom of Italy's system of taxation and conscription. The state-building potential of Napoleonic reforms proved to be necessary for the world Napoleon left to Germany, even if they had to be dressed up as German-inspired and -created institutions.