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In this article Ronald Asch investigates how far the Peace of Westphalia established religious toleration in the Holy Roman Empire after 1648. He notes the wide differences of opinion on this subject among historians, starting in the seventeenth century itself. In the negotiations at Osnabrück the Protestant delegates had argued strongly for full religious freedom in the Empire, asserting that this had already been implied in the terms of the Peace of Augsburg in 1555. The resistance of the Emperor and the Catholic principalities had forced compromises that fell well short of the Protestant demands. The article examines how the terms of the peace were applied in the Empire after 1648, particularly in those states where the confessional allegiance of the ruler subsequently changed, as in the Palatinate after 1685, usually from Protestant to Catholic. By that stage the Protestants are found to be adopting a strictly conservative interpretation of the scope of the religious liberty conferred in the 1648 settlement, as they perceive themselves threatened by new Catholic advances. The article concludes that by defining the confessional rights of rulers and subjects, the Peace of Westphalia tended to perpetuate confessional divisions in the Empire, and hindered the process of privatizing religious differences, which became the usual basis for the development of religious freedom in the other multi-confessional societies of Europe during the eighteenth century.
