When Johann Gottlieb Fichte delivered his famous ‘address to the German nation’ in the winter months of 1807–8, he could be sure that no seat in the huge hall of the Prussian Academy of Sciences in French-occupied Berlin would be left empty. Students and professors, officers and civil servants, academics and aristocrats, along with other leading figures of society and their wives, poured into the hall to listen to Fichte’s evocation of Germany’s history and glory, his praise of national education and his appeal for a common German identity.1 While French hegemony initially limited the scope of nationalist rhetoric, during the wars against Napoleonic France in 1813–15 sermons, pamphlets, speeches and caricatures were produced at a hitherto unparalleled rate. For this reason, and following the lead given by pro-Prussian writers such as Droysen and Treitschke, historians have often claimed the ‘Wars of Liberation’ as the origins of modern German nationalism. Most prominently, Hans-Ulrich Wehler identified this period as a watershed separating the Early Modern Era from the Age of Nationalism in the nineteenth century.2