Germany 697
late in 1797, and initiated the steps which led to complete annexation by 1800.
Petitions requesting annexation circulated throughout the Rhineland. Thousands
of signatures were collected. Most of the population undoubtedly had no desire for
incorporation with France (which now included Belgium also); on the other hand
there was little resistance, since there was no alternative that had much appeal. Not
only were the French in military occupation, but Rhinelanders themselves as a
whole lacked positive faith in the peculiarities of their Old Regime. Across the
Rhine lay no political Germany for them to join, but only a Gothic wonderland of
incongruous principalities, verging off in the East to the land of Junker and serf. It
was neither surprising nor discreditable, given such choices, for the Rhinelanders
to accept union with France and Belgium. Annexed until 1814, they proved very
amenable citizens, and they benefited from various reforms which the Napoleonic
empire mediated to them from the Revolution.
Like so much else in Germany, the Cisrhenane movement was ambiguous, and
if a revolution at all it was a revolution of the mind. Many Cisrhenanes, a handful
of youngsters, doctrinaires, and professors, had the presumption to conceive of
themselves as equals to the French in the matter of revolution. They hoped, in
becoming French citizens, to make a moral contribution to the Republic which
was sorely needed. “In the last ten years,” wrote Görres, “we have seen in Ger-
many a revolution which has done no less good for mankind in matters of theory
than that of France in matters of practice—I mean the reforms of Kant in phi-
losophy.” Or as another Cisrhenane, Wyttenbach, put it: “What a blessing for
humanity that the two revolutions, the French and the German, have occurred at
the same time! May the one raise up what the other has destroyed!”^28 To Latin
vivacity would now be added a German earnestness in one great commonwealth.
The Swiss, too, it may be remembered, had expressed a similar idea: they would
fortify the principles of the French Revolution with “German morality and higher
philosophical culture.”^29 There were two revolutions, which were of similar force;
and to the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen would be added the
equally emancipating and stirring doctrine of inward freedom and unconditional
duty, the Categorical Imperative.
The case of Rebmann, a prolific radical journalist, is very illuminating. Born in
1768 in central Germany, and educated for the law, he turned to writing, and by
1792 was established at Leipzig in Saxony, where memories of popular rebellion
were much alive. He exposed the misery of the stocking- workers at Erlangen, and
set forth a socialist idea that the government should purchase and own the
stocking- frames, so as to give work to the needy. He likewise, in 1794, translated
certain speeches of Robespierre. Forced to move on, he went to Erfurt, a Saxon
city which belonged to the distant Archbishop of Mainz. At this time some of the
thousands who signed petitions for annexation to France, one of the more curious and obscure cases
was that of Cornelius de Pauw, whose Recherches philosophiques sur les Américains, published in 1768,
had been well known for its thesis of the degeneration of the flora and fauna, including man, in
America. De Pauw, an uncle of Anacharsis Cloots, and of equally unidentifiable nationality, signed
the petition for annexation at Xanten in 1798. Hansen, IV, 699.
28 Quoted by Droz, Cisrhenans, 38–39.
29 See above, p. 670.