The first phase of this focused on imperial disillusion and dissolution.
The convent and the abbey exercised local sovereignty as imperial states until their dissolution in 1802, when Essen passed to Prussia.
Dissolution of the imperial order, Marx said, "must follow as surely as that of any mummy carefully preserved in a hermetically sealed coffin, whenever it is brought into contact with the open air".
Entering between "two marble slave figures holding up lamps filled with dust and dead moths", the bureaucrat finds chambers full of gorgeously rich rugs, "plum, wine, mulberry and pomegranate", that only in closeup show "what the imperial colours concealed" – patches of dissolution.
Despite the dissolution of the imperial orphanage, the office of the orphanotrophos survived into the Palaiologan period in its fiscal capacity.
While in Italy the empire was in process of dissolution, north of the Alps imperial ideas persisted, but not in the form associated with the papacy.
Duma, Russian in full Gosudarstvennaya Duma ("State Assembly"), elected legislative body that, along with the State Council, constituted the imperial Russian legislature from 1906 until its dissolution at the time of the March 1917 Revolution.
The Star Wars saga, the greatest pop culture icon of the last three decades, is no exception... Palpatine's dissolution of the Senate in favor of imperial rule has been compared to Julius Caesar's marginalization of the Roman Senate, Hitler's power-grab as chancellor, and FDR's court-packing scheme and creation of the imperial presidency".
Indeed after the dissolution of the empire in 1918 many former imperial officers were confused which nationality they actually held and which country to settle down in.
With inequality, individualism and civic distrust rampant, Marquand hopes that a phoenix of post-imperial self-awareness might eventually rise from flames of national dissolution.
