Germany from the Earliest Period Volume 4 by Wolfgang Menzel
page 38 of 470 (08%)
page 38 of 470 (08%)
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notwithstanding the favor in which the French language and French
ideas were held at all the courts of Germany. Liberal opinions were denounced as criminal, notwithstanding the example first set by the courts in ridiculing religion, in mocking all that was venerable and sacred. Nor was this reaction by any means occasioned by a burst of German patriotism against the tyranny of France, for the treaty of Basel speedily reconciled the self-same newspaper editors with France. It was mere servility; and the hatred which, it may easily be conceived, was naturally excited against the French as a nation, was vented in this mode upon the patient Germans,[16] who were, unfortunately, ever doomed, whenever their neighbors were visited with some political chronic convulsion, to taste the bitter remedy. But few of the writers of the day took a historical view of the Revolution and weighed its irremediable results in regard to Germany, besides Gentz, Rehberg, and the Baron von Gagern, who published an "Address to his Countrymen," in which he started the painful question, "Why are we Germans disunited?" The whole of these contending opinions of the learned were, however, equally erroneous. It was as little possible to preserve the Revolution from blood and immorality, and to extend the boon of liberty to the whole world, as it was to suppress it by force, and, as far as Germany was concerned, her affairs were too complicated and her interests too scattered for any attempt of the kind to succeed. A Doctor Faust, at Buckeburg, sent a learned treatise upon the origin of trousers to the national convention at Paris, by which Sansculottism had been introduced; an incident alone sufficient to show the state of feeling in Germany at that time. The revolutionary principles of France merely infected the people in those parts of Germany where their sufferings had ever been the greatest, as, for instance, in Saxony, where the peasantry, oppressed |
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