The humiliation of Germany was scarcely less profound than that of Italy and Holland. With the advance of years Napoleon's earlier religious impressions, always vague, had degenerated into a mild and tolerant deism. Less than a fortnight after Austerlitz he found time to reprimand sharply a member of the Institute for printing atheistic books; but Christianity, with its attendant morality, was for him, after all, only an important social phenomenon of which atheism would be destructive. Nevertheless, outward respect for Roman Catholicism had been a powerful lever for his ambitious purposes both in Italy and in France. In the latter country he had formed to his profit a stable alliance between Church and State, and this same lever he purposed to make use of for the complete overturning of the old political system of Germany. Among other complaints which he poured out to the Pope was one concerning the utter disorganization of the Church among the Germans. This was largely true, for some of the petty ecclesiastical princes were as licentious as their secular contemporaries. Protestant Germany was apathetic, and almost everywhere religion and morality were at a low ebb. The remnant of good men were as uneasy about the Church as the sensible masses were about the political tyranny under which they suffered. When Bavaria, Würtemberg, and Baden were enlarged and emancipated from the overlordship of Austria, the reigning princes either misunderstood what had actually occurred,--the transfer of their suzerainty from Austria to France,--or else they felt no sense of shame in becoming vassals of the French emperor. The so-called sovereigns occasionally made a mild endeavor to assert some little independence; but such efforts were so often followed by a message from Paris suggesting that they held their offices, not for themselves, but as part of the French system, that they soon desisted entirely. Yet they long rejected Napoleon's proposals for matrimonial alliances between their families and his. Austerlitz overcame their repugnance. On January fourteenth, 1806, Max Joseph of Bavaria yielded to the Empress Josephine's long-cherished desire, and gave his daughter Augusta as consort to the viceroy Eugène, breaking her engagement with the heir apparent in Baden. Soon after, Eugène's cousin Stéphanie, whose relations with Napoleon had made a scandal even in Paris, was married to the prince who had been Augusta's suitor. A year later, Jerome, in defiance of ecclesiastical laws, was wedded to the Princess Catharine, daughter of King Frederick of Würtemberg. Although these arrangements gratified the Emperor's personal pride, they were made primarily to support the new imperial state policy. In them there was nothing calculated to rouse England from the comparative lethargy into which she fell after Trafalgar, nor to exasperate Prussia unduly.