By the last decade of the eighteenth century, a national consciousness had developed among educated people in Germany, ‘unsought and as if by accident,’ as Meinecke says, owing to the recent outstanding achievements of German poets and thinkers, but it was a cultural, not a political, nation to which this small minority of the population felt itself to belong. As Goethe and Schiller expressed the feeling of the intellectuals in their satirical Xenien (1796):

In the century just drawing to a close, the two outstanding features in the history of Germany outside the Habsburg territories had been the establishment by Frederick William I and Frederick the Great of Brandenburg-Prussia as a centre of political power of European importance, and the creation by a number of writers, mostly residing outside Prussia, of a body of literature and philosophy that already made nonsense of the earlier French assertion that no German could be a man of wit, and that was to gain for Germany, after the inevitable time lag, a position of intellectual leadership in Europe. The way in which these two new factors in German history, in origin almost entirely separate, now helped and now hindered each other's further growth, and in which the ruling classes, in general obstinately conservative, reacted under these and other influences to the events of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic era, must be the main topics in any account of German constitutional and social history between the Peace of Bale (1795) and the French Revolution of July 1830.