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The Men Who Stare at Cathedrals: Aesthetic Education, Moral Sentiment, and the German Critique of French Revolutionary Violence, 1793–1794

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 March 2020

Amir Minsky Open the ORCID record for Amir Minsky [Opens in a new window]
Amir Minsky*
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New York University Abu Dhabi
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Abstract

The despoliation of the Strasbourg Cathedral during the Jacobin Terror of 1793–94 has long been considered a high point of revolutionary iconoclasm, which manifested for some the anti-enlightened nature of the Terror regime and the violence inherent in the French Revolution itself. The hybrid space—linguistic, cultural, and political—in which these vandalizing acts took place, however, brings to the fore the problem of Franco-German cultural transfer and its politics of emotion as a significant, yet previously untapped, interpretative layer. This article explores the emotional vocabularies used by both French and German commentators, which substantiated their divergent stances regarding historical consciousness, aesthetic sensibility, and national identity in the debate on the legitimacy of revolutionary violence. It argues that while it contributed to the denouement of intercultural transfer in the German-speaking sphere, the vandalism debate also had long-term consequences for German communal identity formation in a sentimental key.

Die Plünderung der Kathedrale von Straßburg während des jakobinischen Terrors der Jahre 1793-94 gilt seit langem als Höhepunkt des revolutionären Ikonoklasmus, der für manche das antiaufklärerische Wesen des Terrorregimes und die in der Französischen Revolution an sich inhärente Gewalt offenbarte. Der hybride linguistische, kulturelle und politische Raum, in dem diese Vandalenakte stattfanden, rückt jedoch das Problem des französisch-deutschen Kulturtransfers und seiner Politik der Emotionen als signifikante, aber bisher unerschlossene Interpretationsschicht in den Vordergrund. Dieser Beitrag untersucht das von französischen und deutschen Kommentator*innen verwendete emotionale Vokabular, mit dem diese ihre divergenten Haltungen zu historischem Bewusstsein, ästhetischer Empfindlichkeit und nationaler Identität in der Debatte über die Legitimität revolutionärer Gewalt untermauerten. Obwohl die Vandalismusdebatte im deutschsprachigen Einflussbereich zur Auflösung des interkulturellen Transfers beitrug, hatte sie wohl auch langfristige Konsequenzen für die Bildung der deutschen Gemeinschaftsidentität auf sentimentaler Ebene.

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Article
Information
Central European History , Volume 53 , Issue 1 , March 2020 , pp. 23 - 47
Copyright
Copyright © Central European History Society of the American Historical Association, 2020

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Footnotes

The author wishes to thank Jeffrey L. High, Darrin McMahon, Phillip Mitsis, and the two anonymous readers of Central European History, for their comments on previous versions of this article.

References

1 Reuss, Rodolophe, La cathédrale de Strasbourg pendant la Révolution. Études sur l'histoire politique et religieuse de l'Alsace (1789–1802) (Paris: Librairie Fischbacher, 1888)Google Scholar, chap. XXIII, 391–92. The order to demolish the statues in the cathedral's nave was issued by the mayor of Strasbourg, Monet, on December 4, 1793 (14 Frimaire II) and carried out from December 7–9 (17–19 Frimaire), but further spurts of iconoclasm at the basilica continued during early 1794. See Schönpflug, Daniel, “Das Münster unter dem bonnet rouge. Dechristianisierung und Kult der Vernunft in Straßburg (1793–1794). Zur Eigenständigkeit einer lokalen Politik der Symbole,” Francia 25, no. 2 (1998): 105–29Google Scholar, esp. 121. On the scope and intensity of vandalism during the revolution, see Réau, Louis, Histoire du vandalisme. Les monuments détruits de l'art français, 2nd ed. (Paris: R. Laffont, 1994)Google Scholar; Hermant, Daniel, “Destructions et vandalisme pendant la Révolution française,” Annales 33, no. 4 (1978): 703–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Clay, Richard, Iconoclasm in Revolutionary Paris: The Transformation of Signs (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2012)Google Scholar.

2 Quoted in Heitz, Frédéric-Charles, Les sociétés politiques de Strasbourg pendant les années 1790 à 1795 (Strasbourg: F. C. Heitz, Imprimeur-Libraire, 1863), 302Google Scholar. The Münster's spire surpassed the Great Pyramid of Giza, hence Téterel's allusion to a “pyramid of superstition.” All translations are my own, unless mentioned otherwise.

3 See Schönpflug, Daniel, Der Weg in die Terreur. Radikalisierung und Konflikte im Straßburger Jakobinerclub (1790–1795) (Munich: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2002), 236–37Google Scholar. On the rites of the Cult of Reason at the basilica, see “Der alte Münster zu Straßburg, als Tempel der Neufranzösischen Vernunft,” Revolutions-almanach von 1795 (Göttingen: Dieterich,1795), 327–29.

4 On interpretations of iconoclasm see Hermant, “Destructions et vandalisme pendant la Révolution française,” 704–05.

5 Berns, Jörg Jochen, “Prinz aller Höhen Türm. Notizen zur literarischen Wahrnehmung des Straßburger Münsters in der Frühen Neuzeit,” Marburger Jahrbuch für Kunstwissenschaft 22 (1989): 83–102CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. 88–89.

6 See Ulrich, Andreas, Recueil de pièces authentiques servant à l'histoire de la révolution à Strasbourg, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (Strasbourg: Chez Dannbach et Ulrich, 1795)Google Scholar.

7 The mayor Monet, ostensibly attempting to gain time, sent a query in early April 1794 to the district authorities referring to the law for protection of national monuments, issued by the Convention on July 6, 1793, to inquire “si ce morceau d'architecture doit être regardé comme un signe de superstition, ou non.” Quoted in Schönpflug, “Das Münster unter dem bonnet rouge,” 124. A later motion by the city council petitioned the représentants Saint-Just and Lebas to exclude the Münster from destruction on the same legal grounds. See Ulrich, Recueil de pièces authentiques servant à l'histoire de la révolution à Strasbourg, 1:36–37.

8 See Sophia Rosenfeld, A Revolution in Language: The Problem of Signs in Late Eighteenth-Century France (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 181–226.

9 On the centrality of moral autonomy and freedom to German aesthetics in the 1790s, see Leonard Krieger, The German Idea of Freedom: History of a Political Tradition (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1957), 83–85. For the prioritizing of sensibility over reason in the philosophical defintion of freedom, see Frederick Beiser, Schiller as Philosopher: A Re-Examination (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), 213–37, and the discussion of Schiller's Aesthetic Letters following.

10 On the seminal role of emotions, such as fear, in catalyzing political extremism, see, for example, Marisa Linton, Choosing Terror: Virtue, Friendship, and Authenticity in the French Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Timothy Tackett, The Coming of the Terror in the French Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015). On German disillusionment of the Revolution, see T. C. W. Blanning, The French Revolution in Germany: Occupation and Resistance in the Rhineland 1792–1802 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 255–86.

11 The generation of East and West German historians working in the 1960s and 1970s under the auspices of the Cold War ideological divide coopted the legacy and political significance of the Revolution's German fellow travelers in the 1790s. The former treated them as progenitors of the intellectual tradition that birthed Karl Marx and the 1848 revolutions, the German Social Democratic Party and the Second International, and eventually the Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands (KPD), whereas the latter saw in them the liberal democratic kernel of modern German political culture, whose endurance might explain away the Nazi dictatorship of 1933–1945 as an unfortunate accident. Recent scholarship has taken a more impartial view on the origins of the German revolutionary movement and its foundational involvement with the ideas of the French Revolution. See, for example, Axel Kuhn and Jörg Schweigard, Freiheit oder Tod!. Die deutsche Studentenbewegung zur Zeit der Französischen Revolution (Cologne: Böhlau, 2005).

12 See Amir Minsky, “The French Revolution and the German Chimera: Theatricality, Emotions, and the Untransferability of Revolution in J. H. Campe's Briefe aus Paris,” in Teaching Representations of the French Revolution, ed. Julia Douthwaite Viglione, Antoinette Sol, and Catriona Seth (New York: MLA Options for Teaching, 2019), 134–45.

13 On Grégoire, see Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall, The Abbé Grégoire and the French Revolution: The Making of Modern Universalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Anthony Vidler, “The Paradoxes of Vandalism: Henri Grégoire and the Thermidorian Discourse on Historical Monuments,” in The Abbé Grégoire and His World, ed. J. D. Popkin and R. H. Popkin (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 2000), 129–56.

14 Henri Grégoire, “Convention nationale. Instruction Publique. Troisième Rapport sur le Vandalisme, 24 Frimaire, an III” (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1794), 13. Grégoire's three reports on vandalism on behalf of the Committee of Public Instruction were submitted to the Convention in August 1793, October 1794, and December 1794. Despite Grégoire's later claim to having coined the term vandalisme, it was in fact done by Joseph Lakanal, in a report submitted to the Convention on June 4, 1793. See Clay, Iconoclasm in Revolutionary Paris, 1, n. 3.

15 Jean-Frédéric Hermann, Notices historiques, statistiques et littéraires sur la ville de Strasbourg, 2 vols. (Strasbourg: Levrault, 1817–1819), 1:381–85, reproduces a list of the cathedral's damaged ornaments, inscriptions, and statuary, originally detailed in a municipality protocol of 6 Germinal III (March 26, 1795), which was not preserved.

16 See for instance Misocolax Schmeichlerfeind (“Misocolax the adulators’ nemesis”—an alias of the philosopher Heinrich Würzer), “Vandalismus in Frankreich und in Deutschland,” in Neue hyperboreische Briefe (Lichtenstein: Kraus Reprint, 1976 [1796]), 65–73. Würzer, however, considered the Duke of Brunswick's threat to raze France to the ground in his notorious 1792 pamphlet as equally vandalistic. See also Hans-Ulrich Seifert, “L'opinion publique allemande et le ‘vandalisme révolutionnaire’ de l'an II à 1815,” in Révolution française et “vandalisme révolutionnaire”: Actes du colloque international de Clermont-Ferrand, 15–17 décembre 1988, ed. Simone Bernard-Griffiths, Marie-Claude Chemin, and Jean Ehrard (Paris: Universitas, 1992), 65.

17 See Clay, Iconoclasm in Revolutionary Paris, 1; Bronisław Baczko, Ending the Terror: The French Revolution after Robespierre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 198–206.

18 See Bronisław Baczko, “Vandalism,” in A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution, ed. François Furet and Mona Ozouf, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 862.

19 See Michel Espagne and Michael Werner, eds., Transferts: les relations interculturelles dans l'espace franco-allemand (XVIIIe et XIXe siècle) (Paris: Éditions Recherche sur les Civilisations, 1988). On the historiography of Franco-German revolutionary transfer specifically see, for example, G. P. Gooch, Germany and the French Revolution (London: Longmans, 1920); Blanning, The French Revolution in Germany; Michael Rowe, From Reich to State: The Rhineland in the Revolutionary Era (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

20 See Hugh Gough, “Politics and Power: The Triumph of Jacobinism at Strasbourg 1791–1793,” Historical Journal 23 (1980): 327–52; Schönpflug, Der Weg in die Terreur, 15–16; Daniel Schönpflug, “Unité politique et diversité culturelle. Le Club des Jacobins à Strasbourg et la montée des ressentiments culturelles 1790–1794,” in Révolutionnaires et émigrés. Transfer und Migration zwischen Frankreich und Deutschland 1789–1806, ed. Daniel Schönpflug and Jürgen Voss (Stuttgart: Jan Thorbecke Verlag, 2002), 69–92.

21 See Helmut Mathy, “Georg Wedekind. Die politische Gedankenwelt eines Mainzer Medizinprofessors,” Geschichtliche Landeskunde V, part 1: Festschrift für Ludwig Petry (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1968), 177–205; Martin Weber, Georg Christian Gottlieb Wedekind 1761–1831: Werdegang und Schicksal eines Arztes im Zeitalter der Aufklärung und der Französischen Revolution (Stuttgart and New York: Gustav Fischer, 1988).

22 Grégoire, “Convention nationale. Instruction Publique. Troisième Rapport sur le Vandalisme, 24 Frimaire, an III,” 14.

23 Georg Wedekind, “Etwas von Vandalismus in Straßburg, verübt im andern Jahre der französischen Republik. Schreiben an Bürger Grégoire, Volksrepräsentant zu Paris” ([no place of publication], Jahr 3). Reprinted in Georg Wedekind, Beyträge zur Geschichte der französischen Revolution, vol. 1 (Lichtenstein: Kraus Reprint, 1972 [1795]), 295–305.

24 Sepinwall, The Abbé Grégoire and the French Revolution, 137–39.

25 Wayne Sandholz, Prohibiting Plunder: How Norms Change (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 51.

26 Wedekind, “Etwas von Vandalismus in Straßburg, verübt im andern Jahre der französischen Republik,” 296, n. 297.

27 Wedekind, “Etwas von Vandalismus in Straßburg, verübt im andern Jahre der französischen Republik,” 298.

28 Reuss, La cathédrale de Strasbourg pendant la Révolution, 352.

29 Wedekind, “Etwas von Vandalismus in Straßburg, verübt im andern Jahre der französischen Republik,” 298.

30 See Lee Palmer Wandel, Voracious Idols and Violent Hands: Iconoclasm in Reformation Zurich, Strasbourg and Basel (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 103-41.

31 This is likely a reference to the religious cults (which incorporated Celtic elements as well) of the Germanic Ubii, loyal to Rome since Caesar's Gallic Wars, who were resettled in the Roman province Germania Inferior on the west bank of the lower Rhine between the second and fifth century CE. The survival of some of their deities, although syncretized to Roman ones, seems to support Wedekind's claim. See Alex G. Garman, The Cult of the Matronae in the Roman Rhineland: An Historical Evaluation of the Archaeological Evidence (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2008). In his Germania, Tacitus similarly describes Germanic indigenous rituals as understood within a “Roman translation” (interpretatio Romana). See Tacitus, The Agricola and the Germania, ed. J. B. Rives, trans. H. Mattingly (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2010), chap. 43.

32 Wedekind, “Etwas von Vandalismus in Straßburg, verübt im andern Jahre der französischen Republik,” 301.

33 Wedekind, “Etwas von Vandalismus in Straßburg, verübt im andern Jahre der französischen Republik,” 301.

34 Wedekind, “Etwas von Vandalismus in Straßburg, verübt im andern Jahre der französischen Republik,” 297–98.

35 Wedekind, “Etwas von Vandalismus in Straßburg, verübt im andern Jahre der französischen Republik,” 300.

36 The four national festivals of the early Republic were increased to seven by the law of 3 Brumaire IV (October 25, 1795). On the festivals as sites of either emotional aridity or excess, see Mona Ozouf, Festivals and the French Revolution, trans. Alan Sheridan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 27–32.

37 On the attempts to germanize the festivals in the Rhineland, see Rolf Reichardt, “Französischer Revolutionskultur in Mainz, 1792–1801,” in Der Pubizistik der Mainzer Jakobiner und ihre Gegner. Revolutionäre und gegenrevolutionäre Proklamationen und Flugschriften aus der Zeit der Mainzer Republik (1792/93), ed. Klaus Behrens (Mainz: Stadt Mainz, 1993), 11–51.

38 Louis-Marie de La Révellière-Lépeaux, Réflexions sur le culte, sur les cérémonies civiles et sur les fêtes nationales (Paris: H. J. Jansen, 1796); François de Neufchâteau, Le Manuel républicain (Paris: Imprimerie de P. Didot l'aîne, an VII [1799]).

39 Neufchâteau, Le Manuel républicain, xi.

40 Vidler, “The Paradoxes of Vandalism,” 134; Clay, Iconoclasm in Revolutionary Paris, 220–24.

41 C.-F. de Volney, Les Ruines, ou méditations sur les révolutions des empires (Paris: [no publisher], 1791), Invocation, xvi. See also Peter Fritzsche, “Chateaubriand's Ruins: Loss and Memory after the French Revolution,” History & Memory 10, no. 2 (1998): 102–17.

42 See François Hartog, Regimes of Historicity: Presentism and Experiences of Time, trans. Saskia Brown (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015).

43 Henri Grégoire, “Convention nationale. Rapport sur les inscriptions des monumens publics, 22 Nivôse, l'an II” (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1793), 5. See also Sepinwall, The Abbé Grégoire and the French Revolution, 133.

44 See Claude Betzinger, Vie et mort d'Euloge Schneider, ci-devant franciscain des Lumières à la Terreur 1756–1794 (Strasbourg: La Nuée Bleue, 1997).

45 This exchange appeared (in German) in Schneider's journal, Argos, oder der Mann mit Hundert Augen, as “Bürger Münsterthurm,” on November 2, 1793. Quoted (in French) in Reuss, La Cathédrale de Strasbourg pendant la Révolution, chap. XIX, 414–15. Schneider's mention of the Holy Father probably references Pius VI's unsuccessful bid to oppose the Civil Constitution of the Clergy in 1791.

46 On the historiographic debate surrouding the Sonderweg thesis see, Jürgen Kocka, “Asymmetrical Historical Comparison: The Case of the German Sonderweg,” History and Theory 38, no.1 (1999): 40–50; David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley, The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1984).

47 See Blanning, The French Revolution in Germany, 286–316.

48 Michael Bell, Sentimentalism, Ethics and the Culture of Feeling (Basingbroke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), 74–75.

49 Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000 [1790]), §59 (5:353), 227.

50 Ibid., §42 (5:298), 178.

51 Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters, trans. Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967 [1793–1795]).

52 See Zvi Tauber, “Aesthetic Education for Morality: Schiller and Kant,” Journal of Aesthetic Education 40, no. 3 (2006): 22–47; Lesley Sharpe, “Concerning Aesthetic Education,” in A Companion to the Works of Friedrich Schiller, ed. Steven D. Martinson (Camden House: Boydell & Brewer, 2005), 147–67. The Letters’ motto is a quote from Rousseau's Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse (1761): “Si c'est la raison, qui fait l'homme, c'est le sentiment, qui le conduit.”

53 Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters, fourth letter, 19.

54 Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters, fourth letter, 19. On Schiller's advocacy for diversification of individuality as a condition for republicanism, see Douglas Moggach, “Schiller's Aesthetic Republicanism,” History of Political Thought 28, no. 3 (2007): 520–41.

55 Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters, fourth letter, 21.

56 Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters, eighth letter, 53.

57 Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters, second letter, 9.

58 Tauber, “Aesthetic Education for Morality,” 23.

59 Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters, twenty-first letter, 147. On the socially harmonizing function of art in Schiller, see Jürgen Habermas, “Excursus on Schiller's Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man,” in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), 45–50.

60 Georg Wedekind, “Handlung ohne Bewußtseyn der Triebfedern, oder die Macht der dunkeln Ideen,” in ΓNΩΘΙ ΣΑΥΤΟN oder Magazin der Erfahrungsseelenkunde als ein Lesebuch für Gelehrte und Ungelehrte, ed. Karl Philipp Moritz, 3. Bd., 2. St. (1785): 80–89, esp. 85.

61 Wedekind, “Handlung ohne Bewußtseyn der Triebfedern, oder die Macht der dunkeln Ideen,” 82.

62 Wedekind, “Handlung ohne Bewußtseyn der Triebfedern, oder die Macht der dunkeln Ideen,” 85.

63 Wedekind, “Handlung ohne Bewußtseyn der Triebfedern, oder die Macht der dunkeln Ideen,” 87. See Catherine Minter, “ ‘Die Macht der dunklen Ideen’: A Leibnizian Theme in German Psychology and Fiction between the Late Enlightenment and Romanticism,” German Life and Letters 54 (2001): 114–36, esp. 117–18. Minter, however, sees in Wedekind's contribution a further iteration of the (Humean) trope of enslavement of reason to the passions, whereas Wedekind perceived this spontaneity as a manifestation of the autonomy of the will from reason, as explained following.

64 Karl Wilhelm Jerusalem, “Ueber die Freiheit,” in Philosophische Aufsätze, ed. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (Braunschweig: In der Buchandlung des kurfürstliches Waisenhauses, 1776).

65 Wedekind, “Handlung ohne Bewußtseyn der Triebfedern, oder die Macht der dunkeln Ideen,” 87.

66 Georg Christian Gottlieb Wedekind, “Beitrag zur Beantwortung der von der Gesellschaft der Republikaner zu Mainz, zur Tagsordnung gebrachten Frage. Was können Volksgesellschaften leisten, welche sind die Fehler, in welche sie leicht verfallen, und wie ist denselben abzuhelfen und vorzubeugen?” in Der Patriot, Jg. 2, no. 4 (Lichtenstein: Kraus Reprint, 1972 [1793]), 19–31.

67 Wedekind, “Beitrag zur Beantwortung der von der Gesellschaft der Republikaner zu Mainz, zur Tagsordnung gebrachten Frage,” 20–21.

68 Wedekind, “Beitrag zur Beantwortung der von der Gesellschaft der Republikaner zu Mainz, zur Tagsordnung gebrachten Frage,” 22.

69 Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, ed. Anne Cohler, Basia Miller, and Harrold Stone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989 [1748]), part 1, book 1, chap. 6, 26.

70 Wedekind, “Beitrag zur Beantwortung der von der Gesellschaft der Republikaner zu Mainz, zur Tagsordnung gebrachten Frage,” 24.

71 Wedekind, “Etwas von Vandalismus in Straßburg, verübt im andern Jahre der französischen Republik,” 298–99. On similar impressions of Gothic architecture, see Peter Fritzsche, Stranded in the Present: Modern Time and the Melancholy of History (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2004), 108–10.

72 See Harald Keller, Goethes Hymnus auf das Strassburger Münster und die Wiedererweckung der Gotik im 18. Jahrhundert: 1772–1972 (Munich: Beck, 1974). In the essay, Goethe (an alumnus of the German Lutheran University in Strasbourg) propounded a defense of Gothic art by prominently focusing on the Münster as the touchstone between the German “genius” and the French “spirit of system.” See Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Autobiography of Goethe, trans. John Oxenford, 2 vols. (London: George Bell and Sons, 1891), 1:330.

73 See Joshua Hagen,Preservation, Tourism and Nationalism: The Jewel of the German Past (Burlington: Routledge, 2006), 29.

74 For Kant's distinction, see Immanuel Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime and Other Writings, ed. Patrick Frierson and Paul Guyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 50.

75 This synthesizing move was reinforced in the post-Hegelian generation of German idealists, which also focused on Gothic aesthetics. See Frederick C. Beiser, Late German Idealism: Trendelenburg and Lotze (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 95–99.

76 Karl Philipp Moritz made this analogy in “On the Artistic Imitation of the Beautiful” [1788], in Classic and Romantic German Aesthetics, ed. J. M. Berenstein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 131–44, esp. 132.

77 Grégoire, “Convention nationale. Instruction Publique. Troisième Rapport sur le Vandalisme, 24 Frimaire, l'an III,” 24.

78 Grégoire, “Second Rapport sur le Vandalisme, 8 Brumaire, l'an III,” (Paris, 1794), 7, emphasis added.

79 Grégoire, “Convention nationale. Rapport sur les inscriptions des monumens publics, 22 Nivôse, l'an II,” 9.

80 See Fritzsche, Stranded in the Present, 109.

81 Fritzsche, Stranded in the Present, 102–03.

82 Wedekind, “Etwas von Vandalismus in Straßburg, verübt im andern Jahre der französischen Republik,” 303, note.

83 See Pauline Kleingeld, “Cosmopolitanism and Feeling: Novalis and Kant on the Development of a Universal Human Community,” in Kant and Cosmopolitanism: The Philosophical Ideal of World Citizenship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 149–76.

84 Georg Wedekind, Bemerkungen und Fragen über das Jakobinerwesen (Strasbourg: Karl Friedrich Pfeiffer, 20 Vendémiaire III [11 October 1794]). According to F. C. Heitz, Wedekind delivered the essay as a public speech on February 1, 1795, in the “Société régénéré” in Strasbourg (previously the Jacobin Club). See Heitz, Les Sociétés politiques de Strasbourg pendant les années 1790 à 1795, 394.

85 Franz Dumont, “Liberté und Libertät. Dokumente deutsch-französischer Beziehungen im Jahre 1792/93,” Francia 6 (1978): 385.

86 The essay was delayed at the printer's workshop; when published it bore the originally intended publication date of 20 Vendémiaire (October 11, 1794). See Wedekind's note in Bemerkungen und Fragen über das Jakobinerwesen, 39, and his announcement in the Straßburger Kurier, no. 41 (15 Brumaire, III [5 November 1794]): 164.

87 On the White Terror, see Martyn Lyons, France under the Directory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 14–15, 17. On Wedekind's continued support of Jacobin principles see Weber, Georg Christian Gottlieb Wedekind 1761–1831, 203–05.

88 Wedekind, Bemerkungen und Fragen über das Jakobinerwesen, 9.

89 On these issues, see Keith Michael Baker, Inventing the French Revolution: Essays on French Political Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); William Beik, “The Violence of the French Crowd from Charivari to Revolution,” Past and Present 197 (2007): 75–110.

90 Dan Edelstein, “War and Terror: The Law of Nations from Grotius to the French Revolution,” French Historical Studies 31, no. 2 (2008): 229–62; the quote is from Lucien Jaume, Le discours jacobin et la démocratie (Paris: Librairie Artème Fayard, 1989), 230.

91 Howard G. Brown, Ending the French Revolution: Violence, Justice and Repression from the Terror to Napoleon (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2006).

92 See Sophie Wahnich, In Defence of the Terror: Liberty or Death in the French Revolution, trans. David Fernbach (New York and London: Verso, 2012); Linton, Choosing Terror, 17–20; Brown, Ending the French Revolution, 47–49.

93 See Wahnich, In Defence of the Terror, 21–33.

94 Tackett, The Coming of the Terror in the French Revolution, 7.

95 Wedekind, Bemerkungen und Fragen über das Jakobinerwesen, 34.

96 Wedekind, Bemerkungen und Fragen über das Jakobinerwesen, 9–10.

97 Wedekind, Bemerkungen und Fragen über das Jakobinerwesen, 10.

98 Wedekind, Bemerkungen und Fragen über das Jakobinerwesen, 15–16.

99 Wedekind, Bemerkungen und Fragen über das Jakobinerwesen, 23.

100 Wedekind, Bemerkungen und Fragen über das Jakobinerwesen, emphasis added.

101 Wedekind, Bemerkungen und Fragen über das Jakobinerwesen, 16–17.

102 Wedekind, Bemerkungen und Fragen über das Jakobinerwesen, 24.

103 On the idea of the cathedral as a laboratory, see David Turnbull, “The Ad Hoc Collective Work of Building Gothic Cathedrals with Templates, String, and Geometry,” Science, Technology, & Human Values 18, no. 3 (1993): 315–40.

104 Wedekind, Bemerkungen und Fragen über das Jakobinerwesen, 22–24. See also Weber, Georg Christian Gottlieb Wedekind, 196–201.

105 Wedekind, Bemerkungen und Fragen über das Jakobinerwesen, 14, 24.

106 Wedekind's eulogy of his comrade Adam Lux, guillotined in Paris in July 1793 for supporting Marat's assassin, Charlotte Corday, is a case in point. See Georg Wedekind, “Über Adam Lux von Georg Wedekind, und: die Meinung den Parisern gesagt von Adam Lux,” Beyträge zur Geschichte der französischen Revolution 3 (Lichtenstein: Kraus Reprint, 1972 [1795]), 291–322.

107 On the Terror's “divinity,” see Robespierre's speech of February 5, 1794, “On the Principles of Political Morality that Should Guide the National Convention in the Domestic Administration of the Republic,” reprinted in Robespierre: Virtue and Terror, trans. John Howe (New York and London: Verso, 2007), 115.

108 See Thomas E. Hill Jr., “A Kantian Perspective on Political Violence,” The Journal of Ethics 1, no. 2 (1997): 105–40, esp. 106.

109 Wedekind, Bemerkungen und Fragen über das Jakobinerwesen, 25.

110 Georg Wedekind, “Ideen eines Deutschen, über die auswärtigen Verhältnisse der französischen Republik. Dem französischen Volke und dessen Stellvertrettern gewidmet,” Beyträge zur Geschichte der französischen Revolution 7 (Lichtenstein: Kraus Reprint, 1972 [1796]), 534–83, esp. 575–76.

111 See Louis-Marie Prudhomme, “Suite de l'article sur les sans-culottes,” in Révolutions de Paris, dédiées à la Nation 215 (23 November 1793): 201–10, esp. 202.

112 Prudhomme, “Suite de l'article sur les sans-culottes,” 204.

113 Wedekind, “Ideen eines Deutschen, über die auswärtigen Verhältnisse der französischen Republik. Dem französischen Volke und dessen Stellvertrettern gewidmet,” 576.

114 See Schink, J. F., “Briefe über die deutsche Sansculotterie. Erster Brief,” Minerva 17, 3. Bd. (1794): 68–86Google Scholar, esp. 70, and “Briefe über die deutsche Sansculotterie. Dritter Brief,” 267–84, esp. 270.

115 Schink, “Briefe über die deutsche Sansculotterie. Erster Brief,” 72.

116 On the political implications of radical and moderate currents in Aufklärung philosophy, see Israel, Jonathan, Democratic Enlightenment: Philosophy, Revolution, and Human Rights 1750–1790 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 302–25Google Scholar.

117 The pedagogue J. H. Campe is credited with introducing the Latinate “revolution” into German in his epistolary travelogue, Briefe aus Paris (1790); in his dictionary, however, he dwelled on its persistent conceptual foreignness. See Campe, Joachim Heinrich, Article “Revolution,” in Wörterbuch zur Erklärung und Verdeutschung der unserer Sprache aufgedrungenen fremden Ausdrücke. Ein Ergänzungsband zu Adelungs und Campe's Wörterbüchern (Braunschweig: In der Schulbuchhandlung, 1813), 536–37Google Scholar.

118 See Vierhaus, Rudolf, “‘Wir nennen's Gemeinsinn’ (We Call It Public Spirit): Republic and Republicanism in the German Political Discussion of the Nineteenth Century,” in Republicanism and Liberalism in America and the German States, 1750–1850, ed. Henretta, James A. and Heideking, Jürgen (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, with Washington, D.C.: German Historical Institute, 2002), 21–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

119 See Beiser, Frederick C., The German Historicist Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

120 Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters, twenty-seventh letter, 219.

121 Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters, twenty-seventh letter, 219.

122 Habermas, “Excursus on Schiller's Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man,” 49.