Given the negative tone of Kleist's earliest correspondence, his condemnation of the Prussian military hierarchy and his despair of ever finding a suitable position within the equally hierarchically-structured civil service, it might seem surprising that he should commit himself so whole-heartedly to the Prussian cause towards the end of his life. However, whilst Kleist was indeed critical of the conditions in his own country, it was Napoleonic France that he despised above all else. For it was in Paris that Kleist – like so many of his contemporaries – was confronted with the grotesque caricature of the ideals of his eighteenth-century upbringing. In his letter of 15 August 1801, we find him writing to Wilhelmine:

Kleist readily conceded that the French were – at least from a technological point of view – more advanced than the Germans, but in his view this had simply produced a wholly corrupt and materialistically-oriented society, in which individual human beings were reduced to automata.