Chapter 1 shows that the discussions which dominated intellectual and public life in the years immediately preceding the publication of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right revolved around the constitutional question as the central and definitive element of political discourse in Germany. It argues that Hegel consciously entered this constitutional debate and that his book constituted a timely intervention in the politics of the immediate post-Napoleonic period. By demonstrating the pan-German and European dimensions of contemporary constitutional concerns, Hegel’s political thought is at the same time lifted out of the exclusively Prussian context to which it has so often been confined.

The chapter reconstructs the biographical and political background to the most widely known project of the brothers Grimm, the Children’s and Household Tales. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm began the collection when they were in their twenties and Jacob worked as a civil servant in Kassel, partly under French rule. By surveying the larger repertoire of genres preferred by leading nationalists reacting to Napoleon’s occupation, such as propagandistic pamphlets and war songs but also collections of folk narratives, the chapter uncovers the specific ideological function of the folktale collection as literary proof of cultural nationhood. Influenced by the volatile geopolitical situation during the Napoleonic wars, the brothers believed that the state should coincide with the German nation as defined by linguistic and cultural criteria, and they thought that the independent existence of this cultural unit was authentically demonstrated by collections of materials such as their folktales. Nationalism emerged as an ideology crucially dependent on scholarly documentation, which the brothers thought they could supply.