The 150th issue of the Zeitung für die elegante Welt (Newspaper for The Elegant World) of the year 1801 featured a poem dedicated to Berlin actress Henriette Meyer that was contributed by a fan writing under the name Henriette F. … The poem’s first-person speaker, inspired by reports of Meyer’s famous portrayal of the French liberation hero Johanna D’Arc in Schiller’s new drama, Die Jungfrau von Orleans (The Maid of Orleans, 1801) at the Französisches Schauspielhaus (French Playhouse) in Berlin, yearns to see her heroine in person. The poem portrays a character whose domestic life is no comfort to her—it is rather the barrier that keeps her under house arrest: “Ach ich seh’ den Wallern nach und weine, / Daß mich hindern Häuslichkeit und Pflicht / Dich zu schaun, Du hohe Götterreine, / Schön umstrahlt von der Verklärung Licht!” (Oh, I gaze at the pilgrims and cry, / for domesticity and duty prevent me / from seeing you, you elevated one, pure as the gods, / beautifully illuminated by the light of transfiguration; Henriette, 1212). As the despairing poetic speaker, presumably the author herself, wallowed inside her domestic dungeon, the actress Henriette Meyer, clad in armor and sword in hand, marched onto the German stage as Schiller’s Johanna d’Arc—after opening the drama with defiance in response to her father’s wish for her to marry—to lead men in a war for personal and national autonomy. Just seven months before the Leipzig premiere of Die Jungfrau von Orleans (September 11, 1801) and nine months before its Berlin premiere (November 23, 1801), Joseph Bonaparte (1768–1844) and Austrian foreign minister, Johann Ludwig Joseph, Count of Cobenzl (1753–1809) signed the Treaty of Lunéville (February 9, 1801), reaffirming the Holy Roman Empire’s cession of the left bank of the Rhine to France. Austria would not take up arms against Bonaparte again until 1805.

At the turn of the nineteenth century, few late Enlightenment writers explicitly challenged the hypocrisy of those who did not have women in mind when they argued for the protection of individual human rights.