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- Title
Retracing the Sattelzeit: Thoughts on the Historiography of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Eras.
- Authors
Williamson, George S.
- Abstract
The era of the French Revolution and the Napoleon Wars left a deep mark not only on political, social, and cultural life in German-speaking Europe, but also on German academic historiography as it emerged over the course of the nineteenth century. Both before and after the formation of the Kaiserreich, professional historians like Leopold von Ranke, Johann Gustav Droysen, Heinrich von Sybel, and Heinrich von Treitschke sought in their scholarship to justify Prussia's leadership role in Germany, and the French revolutionary and Napoleonic years figured centrally in this effort. For Friedrich Meinecke, writing in the Wilhelmine years, a remembrance of this era was crucial if Germany was to retain its intellectual and moral bearings: “One thing is clear: the survival and continuity of German intellectual life is somehow related to the events between 1807 and 1815—the liberation of Germany from foreign rule, and the transformation of Prussia, her most powerful state, into a freer, more national political entity." In Das Zeitalter der deutschen Erhebung (1906), Meinecke related the process by which the formerly apolitical, individualistic musings of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Wilhelm von Humboldt, and Johann Gottlieb Fichte were given practical, political implementation in the reforms of Karl vom Stein, Karl von Hardenberg, and Gerhard von Scharnhorst, and then in the Wars of Liberation: “By descending to the state, the spirit not only preserved its own endangered existence as well as that of the state, it secured a reservoir of moral and psychological wealth, a wellspring of creative power for later generations."
- Subjects
FRENCH Revolution, 1789-1799; REIGN of Napoleon I, Emperor of the French, 1799-1815; GERMAN-speaking Europe; GOETHE, Johann Wolfgang von, 1749-1832; HUMBOLDT, Wilhelm, Freiherr von, 1767-1835
- Publication
Central European History (Cambridge University Press / UK), 2018, Vol 51, Issue 1, p66
- ISSN
0008-9389
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1017/S0008938918000262