Historians of Germany in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have always been spoilt for choice when needing to recommend a good general account of their period. Until recently, their colleagues working on the eighteenth century and the revolutionary-Napoleonic period have been less fortunate. The second volume of Hajo Holborn's A History of Modern Germany contains much that is original, penetrating, and powerful but is also decidedly uneven in quality, patchy in coverage, and not an easy read. A.J.P. Taylor's The Course of German History is a wild mixture of insight and perversity, immensely stimulating but marred by an extreme Germanophobia and distorted by a teleological perspective which sees all German history since the dawn of time heading inexorably for 1933: “it was no more a mistake for the German people to end up with Hitler than it is an accident when a river flows into the sea.” “Modern Germany” has usually been deemed to begin in 1815, so the period which immediately preceded the Vienna settlement has been studied with a view only to what it started.

As the French Revolution lurched toward the Terror in the early 1790s, the reaction of the German educated public shifted from qualified approval to horrified condemnation. Johann Gottlieb Fichte was one of the few German intellectuals who defied the trend. In the spring of 1793, at age thirty-one, Fichte denounced the governments of Europe for their reliance on secrecy and censorship and appealed for unconditional freedom of public expression. It was a fitting irony that this brief but impassioned Zurückforderung der Denkfreiheit had to appear anonymously, with its place of publication given as “Heliopolis, in the last year of the old darkness.”

On 6 December 1800, a courier galloped through the gates of Vienna, rushed to the Hofburg, the winter palace of the Habsburgs, and presented to Emperor Francis II a bitter message from Archduke John, the emperor's brother and commander of the Austrian armed forces in Germany. The message read that three days earlier the archduke's troops had engaged the French army under Jean Moreau at Hohenlinden, had suffered serious losses, and were falling back to Salzburg with the officers struggling to maintain order in the ranks while they did so. The news was a crushing blow to Francis. In 1799 the Austrians had begun the War of the Second Coalition with high hopes of reversing the years of defeat at the hands of Revolutionary France. Russia and Britain had agreed to cooperate closely with Austria; France seemed weaker than ever domestically; and Napoleon Bonaparte, who had caused Vienna such grief in 1797, was far away in Egypt trying to inflict damage upon the British Empire. But these hopes turned to ashes. Russia abandoned the Coalition after its army suffered serious losses in Switzerland—indeed, in their wake the Russian ruler, Tsar Paul, had thundered so vehemently against what he saw as Austrian treachery that he had broken relations with Vienna—; Britain had been able to provide much needed funds but not more-needed soldiers; and Bonaparte had returned to work his magic on both the French army and the French people. The result was Hohenlinden, Austrian defeat, and in February 1800 the Treaty of Lunéville that ceded to France primary influence in Germany and Italy.

From the appearance of On War in 1832 until the end of the First World War, Carl von Clausewitz was known chiefly as the most profound, but also the most enigmatic member of a generation of strategists whose common object had been to discover and explain the secrets of Napoleonic warfare. This interpretation, although not entirely wrong, has lately come to seem one-sided, initially as the result of the work of Hans Rothfels in the 1920s, and most decidedly so in light of the more recent, comprehensive analysis of Clausewitz's life and ideas by Peter Paret. Today, most students of the man and his work would agree that the French Revolution itself, and not simply its Napoleonic aftermath, was the decisive influence on the development of Clausewitz's ideas about war.

Of all the regions of Central Europe, the Rhineland was the one most affected by the French Revolution. The area on the left bank of the Rhine belonged for almost two full decades to the First French Republic and the Napoleonic Empire; parts of the right bank were, for a shorter period, under the rule of the Napoleonic satellite state, the Grand Duchy of Berg. In studying these unusual circumstances, historians have sometimes focused on short-term political implications, asking how the Rhenish population of the 1790s responded to the Jacobin regime. They have also studied the long-term social and economic effects of the revolutionary legislation and the secularization of church lands.