English: The left bank of the Rhine around 1789. Cropped from a larger map showing the states of the Circles of the Upper Rhine, the Lower Rhine and Franconia, by British map maker and atlas publisher Robert Wilkinson. From his General Atlas of the World published in 1794. The states not belonging to those three Circles are not marked out or colorized.
By 1797, the armies of the French Republic had occupied and de facto annexed all of the left bank up to the Dutch Republic to France. Many German states located astride the Rhine, particularly ecclesiastical states such as Cologne, Mainz ("Mentz"), Trier ("Treves"), Speyer ("Spires"), Worms, as well as secular ones like the Palatinate of the Rhine, found themselves highly mutilated as a result. Others that were entirely located on the left bank, like Sponheim and Sweibrucken ("Deux-Ponts"), disappeared altogether.