The Course of German Nationalism

Following the French Revolution and the revolutionary wars the picture of Central Europe was profoundly altered. In Germany, the events in France were at first greeted with unanimous approval by the intellectuals; scarcely any German poet or philosopher failed to applaud the young French Republic with enthusiasm. But the enchantment was soon broken. The ideal of fraternal and peaceful coexistence between free and equal citizens could not be reconciled with the news from Paris; the Revolution had turned bloody and the revolutionary Terror, mass murder in the name of various virtues pertaining to the Enlightenment, was deemed a catastrophe by the horrified citizens of Germany.

Nevertheless, the example of the nation une et indivisible had a profound effect on educated Germans, who had experienced the whole extent of the Empire's impotence during the course of the revolutionary wars. While the French armies were occupying the whole of the left bank of the Rhine and then driving further on into South Germany, the counter-revolutionary coalition of German rulers crumbled. Prussia gave away the Rhineland in April 1795 at the separate peace of Basel and turned to the East to carve up Poland between herself, Austria and Russia, for the third time around. Two years later even the Emperor followed Prussia's bad example with the Peace of Campo Formio, when he sacrified the integrity of the Empire to the particular interests of the House of Habsburg. The last word did not even belong to the German rulers but to France and Russia as the powers guaranteeing the Empire's existence.