Europe and the American Revolution 195
uplifting of the human race.”^29 The Italian, Castiglioni, who was not actually much
impressed by what he saw across the Atlantic, allowed nevertheless that in time the
American Revolution would have momentous consequences for Europe. It would
be tedious to repeat examples.
There were many who stood apart from, and even opposed, the idealization of
America, nor did they include only those who, like Schlözer and the other Ha-
noverians, more or less deliberately publicized a British view. In Germany the
warmest enthusiasts for America were generally unknown and obscure people.
There was an unformulated popular sentiment in favor of America. There was in
some circles a literary republicanism, but in others there was a conservatism that
already used conservative language. Thus Wekhrlin, who along with Schlözer was
one of the founders of modern German journalism, thought of the Americans as a
rabble in arms, ridiculed those in Germany who “only learned about men in a
dream world or in Masonic lodges,” and held that “the great words Freedom, Con-
stitution, Country, turn the head of some people.”^30 The professional men of learn-
ing, who already heavily predominated in the expression of German opinion,
tended to disapprove of rebellion, or at the most to preserve a kind of neutrality, to
avoid discussion of the rights of the question, to give factual narratives of events in
America, and to maintain a scholarly view by publishing the arguments and the
documents from both British and American sources. Germany was full of profes-
sors of political or historical or cameralist or statistical science, and these men,
along with Iselin at Basel, were mainly interested in the practical consequences of
American independence, particularly the stimulus to trade now that the North
Americans were free to trade directly with Europe. Yet even this view had its wider
implications. Even Christian Dohm, who represented this practical view very fully
(and who was to become one of the chief reorganizers of Germany under Napo-
leon), observed in Wieland’s Deutscher Merkur in 1777 that an American victory
would give “greater scope to the Enlightenment, new keenness to the thinking of
peoples and new life to the spirit of liberty.”^31
In France the war against England, by making zeal for America coincide with
French patriotism, removed the restraints both of conservatism and of mere objec-
tive study. Where many Germans saw the American war simply as an important
dispute, the French saw it as a crusade. Yet even in France there were doubters.
Linguet, a kind of anti- philosophe, attributed the American Revolution to an over-
dose of eighteenth- century philosophy. This was in 1777, long before Burke and
others offered the same explanation of the revolution in France. Another laughed
at pro- American myth- makers—those “orators, poets, panegyrists of romantic vir-
tues and legislators of societies that will never exist.”^32 Some who did in fact
strongly sympathize with the Americans tried nevertheless to combat, as did Jef-
ferson himself, the more absurd ideas that were current in France. One of these
29 Aufsätzen über Gegenstände aus der Staatskunst (Leipzig, 1776–1777), quoted by Gallinger, op.
cit., 34.
30 Gallinger, op.cit., 60.
31 Ibid., 19.
32 Discours composé en 1788... sur la question: Quelle a été l ’ influence de la découverte de l ’Amérique sur
l ’Europe (Paris, 1792), 72.