694 Chapter XXIX
versity towns, or courtly and governmental centers, in which the leading persons of
economic importance were old- fashioned and conservative gild members. As a
result, there was very little bourgeois development, but a large supply of middle-
class intellectuals—Catholic ecclesiastics, university professors, librarians, doctors,
journalists, booksellers, writers, and employees of government.
The Rhineland had been under strong French influence at least since the time of
Louis XIV, and news of the French Revolution produced an immediate impact.^22
As early as 1790 there were cases of peasants, who were not serfs as in eastern
Germany, refusing to pay taxes and seigneurial dues. Many purely indigenous dis-
putes were revivified by the French example. In the diets of the territories of Trier
and Cologne there were demands for tax equality between Third Estate, nobles,
and clergy. The privileged classes made no concession. The arrival of French émi-
grés, who congregated especially at Coblenz, had contrary effects. Their accounts
of the Revolution increased the conservatism of some, while their aristocratic be-
havior sharpened the radicalism of others. The local rulers became more conserva-
tive, adopting, among other measures, a stricter control over the universities. Two
university professors who had taken priestly orders, and who had in fact become
very unorthodox, may be mentioned. One, A. J. Dorsch, professor of philosophy at
Mainz, and one of the rare individuals who had actually belonged to the order of
the Illuminati, was deprived of his position in 1791 for Kantian opinions. He
spent the following years collaborating with the French in the Rhineland. Eulo-
gius Schneider, a highly successful professor at Bonn, was removed in 1791 for the
liberality of his views in the divinity of Christ. He went to Alsace, plunged into the
Revolution in France itself, became increasingly violent, and was executed in Stras-
bourg in 1794 by Saint- Just as an extremist.
There was also Georg Forster, librarian of the University of Mainz, a man of
about forty, well known for a variety of publications on science and literature. A
cosmopolitan and peripatetic intellectual, born German but of Scottish back-
ground, brought up near Danzig, where he had formed Polish connections (he was
at one time professor at the University of Vilna), he had, in his youth, accompanied
Captain Cook around the world. At Mainz in 1792 he formed a political club, like
the clubs so common all over Europe. At Mainz in the summer of 1792 such a
club was unavoidably secret. The East German historian, Walter Markov, calls it “a
secret democratic party on the model of the Jacobin club,”^23 though how a secret
22 The great published source collection is J. Hansen, Quellen zur Geschichte des Rheinlandes im
Zeitalter der französischen Revolution, 4 vols. (Bonn, 1931–1938). Useful also for the sources it incor-
porates is the work of a German republican of 1848, drawing on the papers of his father, a Cisrhenane
of 1797: Jakob Venedey, Die deutsche Republikaner unter der französischen Republik (Leipzig, 1870). For
a contemporary account in English see Ann Radcliffe, A journey made in the summer of 1794 through
Holland and the western frontier of Germany, 2 vols. (London, 1795). The best historical treatment is by
Droz, Allemagne, 187–247, 439–50, and the whole of his Cisrhenans. Droz holds that German national
consciousness took form around a sense of cultural and moral mission, which in the Rhineland in
these years expressed itself in the belief (exquisitely ironical to a Frenchman) that Rhineland Germans
should be annexed to the Republic for France’s good. There is much illuminating material on the
French occupation of the Rhineland in J. Godechot, Les commissaires aux armées sous le Directoire, 2
vols. (Paris, 1938).
23 Kampf um Freiheit, II. There is a large mass of writing by and about Georg Forster.