Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of maps
- Chronological table
- Map 1 The German Confederation, 1815
- Map 2 The German Customs Union, 1834
- Introduction
- I Three weeks in March
- II The German nationalist movement's road to the creation of the Reich
- 2 The background: Europe's transformation from an agrarian society to a modern civilisation of the masses
- 3 The rise of a national culture
- 4 What has become of the German Fatherland?
- 5 The nationalist movement's passage from an elitist to a mass phenomenon
- 6 From Rhine Crisis to revolution
- 7 1848: the whole of Germany it shall be
- 8 On the road to a national economy
- 9 Speeches and majority decisions
- 10 Blood and Iron
- 11 Revolution from above and below
- III Documentary appendix
- Notes
- Bibliography and source material
- Notes to bibliography
- A critical bibliography of works in English
- Index
4 - What has become of the German Fatherland?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 January 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of maps
- Chronological table
- Map 1 The German Confederation, 1815
- Map 2 The German Customs Union, 1834
- Introduction
- I Three weeks in March
- II The German nationalist movement's road to the creation of the Reich
- 2 The background: Europe's transformation from an agrarian society to a modern civilisation of the masses
- 3 The rise of a national culture
- 4 What has become of the German Fatherland?
- 5 The nationalist movement's passage from an elitist to a mass phenomenon
- 6 From Rhine Crisis to revolution
- 7 1848: the whole of Germany it shall be
- 8 On the road to a national economy
- 9 Speeches and majority decisions
- 10 Blood and Iron
- 11 Revolution from above and below
- III Documentary appendix
- Notes
- Bibliography and source material
- Notes to bibliography
- A critical bibliography of works in English
- Index
Summary
Following the French Revolution and the revolutionary wars the picture of Central Europe was profoundly altered. In Germany, the events in France were at first greeted with unanimous approval by the intellectuals; scarcely any German poet or philosopher failed to applaud the young French Republic with enthusiasm. But the enchantment was soon broken. The ideal of fraternal and peaceful coexistence between free and equal citizens could not be reconciled with the news from Paris; the Revolution had turned bloody and the revolutionary Terror, mass murder in the name of various virtues pertaining to the Enlightenment, was deemed a catastrophe by the horrified citizens of Germany.
Nevertheless, the example of the nation une et indivisible had a profound effect on educated Germans, who had experienced the whole extent of the Empire's impotence during the course of the revolutionary wars. While the French armies were occupying the whole of the left bank of the Rhine and then driving further on into South Germany, the counter-revolutionary coalition of German rulers crumbled. Prussia gave away the Rhineland in April 1795 at the separate peace of Basel and turned to the East to carve up Poland between herself, Austria and Russia, for the third time around. Two years later even the Emperor followed Prussia's bad example with the Peace of Campo Formio, when he sacrified the integrity of the Empire to the particular interests of the House of Habsburg. The last word did not even belong to the German rulers but to France and Russia as the powers guaranteeing the Empire's existence.
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- Chapter
- Information
- The Course of German NationalismFrom Frederick the Great to Bismarck 1763–1867, pp. 48 - 55Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1991