Germany 695
association could resemble the Paris Jacobins is impossible to understand. In Oc-
tober 1792, a month after Valmy, the French general Custine occupied the city of
Mainz. Looking about for inhabitants to employ in a provisional government, and
finding the gildsmen and town councillors uncooperative, Custine turned to For-
ster and his group, since they welcomed the French with enthusiasm. The group
included a doctor, G. C. Wedekind; a director of the Protestant school at Worms,
G. W. Böhmer; and four professors at the University of Mainz, including A. J.
Hoffmann, who was to attempt revolution in Swabia and live to see the Revolu-
tion of 1848, and Matthias Metternich, a mathematician unrelated to the noble
house of the same name.
The Mainz “Jacobins” found hundreds of like- minded persons in the neighbor-
ing cities and principalities. The French were at first well received throughout the
Rhineland. The peasants favored the agrarian, fiscal, and property reforms of the
Revolution. In the towns, the Weltbürger had long been thinking of liberty, equal-
ity, and the Rechte der Menschheit; and there was little in the crazy- quilt of political
geography—free cities, duchies, bishoprics and territories of imperial knights,
some of them no bigger than any well- to- do gentleman’s private estates—to which
a person of enlarged views could feel much positive political loyalty. For everyone
who greeted the French with enthusiasm there were a dozen who saw nothing in
their own situation to defend. At Aachen, for example, Protestants were annoyed
at their failure to receive toleration from the Catholic council of that free city; and
since the city possessed rural “subjects” who had begun to object to their inferior
status, the peasants offered no resistance to the French. “The spirit in these coun-
tries could not be worse,” as Freiherr von Stein, the future reformer of Prussia, re-
ported to his government in Berlin. “The magistrates of Worms sent a deputation
to meet the French, to give them the keys to the city; and I have no doubt that the
burghers here will do the same as soon as the enemy appears before the gates.”^24
A basis existed, therefore, for some kind of democratic movement. The problem
in some ways resembled that at Liège, which the modern mind thinks of as Bel-
gian, but which in 1792 was a state of the Holy Roman Empire like any other. The
difference was that the bishopric of Liège, relatively industrialized, had already had
an indigenous revolution in 1789. It was explained in Chapter XVII how the Liège
democrats, having no desire or reason to combine with the adjoining “Belgian”
provinces at a time when they were under conservatively aristocratic domination,
took the initiative, in January 1793, in requesting annexation to France. Similarly,
in the principalities of the Left Bank, there was no reason why persons who fa-
vored change should wish to combine with a “Germany” which had no more exis-
tence than “Belgium.” Nor was there any special tie among the Left Bank territo-
ries themselves, from which the notion of a separate Rhineland Republic could
derive any strength.
24 Hansen, Quellen, II, 378. Hansen prints many other similar sources. Edmund Burke wrote in
1791 that a “great revolution is preparing in Germany” and that the Rhineland was particularly in-
fected with the droit de l’ homme; he thought the Westphalia settlement should be maintained in Ger-
many, to preserve the balance of power in Europe, whether the Germans liked it or not. See his
Thoughts on French Affairs (1791) in Writings (Boston, 1901), IV, 328–34.