To the philosophes who marched under the banner of ‘écrasez l'infâme’, the notion of an Enlightenment in Catholic Germany was a contradiction in terms, a monstrous hybrid analogous to grafting a philosopher's head and torso on to the hind quarters of an old, fat and malodorous sow. Nor was this kind of opinion confined to the French, who have never shown much appreciation of the intellectual life of Baron Thunder-ten-Tronckh's fellowcountrymen. The Italian Carlantonio Pilati, who at least had first-hand experience of the German educational system, recorded in 1777 that ‘the German Protestants are infinitely more enlightened than the Catholics. [The latter teach] their children ideas which ruin their judgment and their reason: their minds are crushed and are steered towards error, futility and stupidity.’ Although local historians of Catholic Germany have always sought to do justice to the cultural achievements of their region, it was not until this century that revision on a national scale began.

Even so, the image persists of the Catholic principalities as highly ornamental baroque troughs, in which epicurean prelates happily if sleepily wallowed. In a recent monograph on the German Enlightenment, for example, it is stated confidently that