The reaction of Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843) to the French Revolution and its many historical repercussions, including the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821), was the subject of alternating perspectives among the academics of the last century. From the 1940s onwards, readings focusing on the political dimension of Hölderlin’s work started to emerge in both the Marxist and Western blocs, albeit intermittently and at a different pace. The situation changed radically in the late 1960s, as the French scholar Pierre Bertaux adopted a highly politicized stance on the thought and work of Hölderlin, calling him a “Jacobin.”1 The string of monographs and other studies that followed addressed Hölderlin’s personal connections and political beliefs, as well as the literary expressions of his revolutionary zeal, suggesting and discussing alternative categories for describing Hölderlin’s political identity— “Girondist,” “liberal,” “democrat,” or “republican.” This vogue ran out of steam in the 1990s due to a lack of fresh ideas and the ideological deflation brought on by the fall of the Berlin Wall.

With this essay I aim to revive this wave of interest without incurring the ideological shortcomings inevitable in the then historical circumstances. In order to do so, I focus on Napoleon Bonaparte as the key to understanding Hölderlin’s peculiar way of connecting politics, poetry, and philosophy: in his odes, poems, and letters, Hölderlin in fact portrays the Corsican general as a giant who cannot be reduced to a mere—albeit—dramatic, representative of concrete politics, but is rather to be acknowledged as the personification of the spirit of nature, leading to a collective and cosmic rejuvenation. Here, a philosophy of history indebted to Empedocles (5th century BCE) and Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) helps create a poetic transposition of Bonaparte, where actual political events coexist with religious and mythological elements in a delicate process of literary mediation. As a consequence, Hölderlin’s thought proves averse, even immune, to any attempt to give it a specific label.

Hölderlin and the Politics of His Time

On July 14, 1789, Hölderlin was attending the Philosophical Faculty in Tübingen, where, alongside his friend Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831), he was also a scholar at the prestigious Evangelisches Stift (evangelical seminary). Owing to his youthful readings of the early works of Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805)—the drama Don Carlos (1787), in particular—he responded enthusiastically to the storming of the Bastille, and followed the events that ensued closely.