692 Chapter XXIX
view not only of excited German republicans, or of the kind of liberals who did not
see in the British parliament a model for imitation. It could be heard even at the
card- tables in royal courts.^16 Prussia made peace in 1795, taking with it Germany
north of the Main in a policy of neutrality in which it stubbornly persisted for
eleven years. An ideological and class explanation of Prussian neutrality was even
then offered. “The unfortunate neutrality system,” wrote a contemporary, “is the
fruit of the rivalry between the nobility and the Third Estate. The former, partly for
personal reasons, and partly because it gets better prices for its raw products from
the English, wanted a war against France. The latter, composed of the industrious
and literary classes, wanted an alliance with France. The government, forever beset
by both parties, now takes the middle course and remains neutral.”^17
Mainz Jacobins and Cisrhenane Republicans
For Germany it is even less possible than for Switzerland or Italy to trace the agi-
tations that occurred in a multitude of places without any central focus. It was in
the Rhineland and Southwest Germany that revolutionary republicanism became
most apparent. But two other places must be mentioned.
The nearest thing to a mass upheaval occurred among the peasants of Electoral
Saxony in 1790.^18 Here, as in neighboring Bohemia, the rural people showed a
surprising interest in newspapers, and made positive efforts to learn about the
peasant rebellion in France; they were also aroused, as in Bohemia, by unorthodox
religious prophets, as when a certain deacon of Döbeln saw signs of the second
coming of Christ in the French and Belgian revolutions. The peasants revolted
against the servile and seigneurial system. The noble landowners took refuge in
Dresden. For a few weeks the unorganized insurgents were in control of some
5,000 square kilometers of the Electorate. The rebellion has been called the most
significant such movement in Germany since the Peasant War of Luther’s time,
and as such has attracted the attention of a recent East German historian, who
finds that its importance has been gravely understated in bourgeois historiography.
His conclusion, however, confirms the established view. The Saxon insurrectionar-
ies were soon put down by the Elector’s troops. Their uprising was an almost un-
armed outbreak of simultaneous but unconnected local disturbances; and although
the towns of the Electorate were themselves full of unrest, there was no coopera-
tion between town and country. The peasants were isolated, and the net effect, as in
Bohemia, was to strengthen the propaganda of counter- revolution. Similar trou-
bles, though less violent, appeared in the following years in the adjacent territory
of Silesia. The protests of the rural weavers grew into a general agrarian restless-
ness, which reached its height in the summer of 1794, when a rumor spread among
16 See the indignant report of Grenville’s agent, de Luc, Berlin, March 13, 1798, in Gt. Brit.:
Hist. MSS Commission, Manuscripts of J. B. Fortescue Preserved at Dropmore, IV, 128.
17 G. F. W. von Cölln, Vertraute Briefe über die innern Verhältnisse an preussischen Hofe seit dem Tode
Friedrichs II, 2 vols. (Amsterdam and Cologne, 1807), I, 141–42.
18 Stulz and Opitz, Volksbewegungen; Stulz treats the peasants, Opitz the townspeople, of Elec-
toral Saxony. For Bohemia and Poland see Chapter X X above.