698 Chapter XXIX
Mainz Jacobins were imprisoned at the citadel of Erfurt, so that Rebmann came to
know something of their revolutionary efforts of the year before. He also, in his
paper, saluted the Negro revolution in Haiti, and denounced the evils of European
colonialism. Again driven away, he went to Hamburg, where he was well received
by Sieveking’s group; passed on through Holland, where he mixed with the Bata-
vian revolutionaries; and arrived in Paris in 1796, shortly after the arrest of Babeuf.
In Paris he published a journal in German (estimating that there were four thou-
sand German workers in the city), in which he seems to have shown little or no
knowledge of Babeuf—so limited, apparently, was the impact of Babouvism even
in radical circles. He was now very critical not only of the Directory but even of
Hébert and Robespierre; he thought the French Revolution had failed “for the
fundamental reason that it was lacking in morality.” “Paradoxical as it may seem,”
he complacently wrote, “the truly republican spirit, enlightenment and sound phi-
losophy are infinitely more widespread in Germany than in France.”^30
Rebmann joined in the demand for a Cisrhenane Republic, which he hoped
would be the first step toward a great unified democratic republic for all Germany.
More than other Cisrhenanes, he resisted the idea of annexation, on the ground
that the French did not understand true moral freedom; but he abruptly changed
his mind, influenced by the Director Reubell, and in November 1798 accepted not
only annexation but appointment as a judge in the newly organizing department
of Donnersberg or Mont- Tonnerre. Obliged, as he explained, to abandon the
beautiful dream, the schöne Traum, of making “Germany a republic and the Ger-
mans a nation,” he was glad that at least some Germans, those west of the Rhine,
could be free citizens of a free country.^31 Rebmann, giving up his writing, contin-
ued to serve in the judiciary of the Rhineland throughout the Napoleonic years,
and even retained a similar post after the Restoration, when some of the territory
passed to the crown of Bavaria. Rebmann was of course not the only advanced
democrat of the 1790’s who held office under the Consulate and Empire. There
were many similar cases among the French, Dutch, Poles, and Italians. Some dem-
ocrats accepted Napoleon, some did not; and both had their reasons.^32
30 Droz, Allemagne, 254–58.
31 Hansen, Quellen, IV, 793, n. 4.
32 The Rebmannfrage seems to be in need of clarification. Hedwig Voegt’s complaint that Reb-
mann has been shamefully belittled by bourgeois historiography seems hardly fair, since the French
bourgeois Droz devotes a whole chapter to him, and the West German bourgeois, Valjavec (218–23)
calls him the most important revolutionary journalist in Germany before 1848. Voegt (Jakobinische
Literatur, 112–30) praises him for his views on class war, but she also emphasizes his attack on “colo-
nialism.” It is Valjavec who gives attention to his socialist ideas, and his defense of the Erlangen
stocking- workers, of which Voegt seems not to have heard. Voegt, Valjavec, and the Deutsche Allgeme-
ine Biographie are all silent on Rebmann’s Cisrhenane period, which, however, is abundantly docu-
mented in Hansen’s source collection, where he may be traced through the copious index. Droz thinks
Rebmann the most important German republican propagandist of the 1790’s, and notes his Cis-
rhenane phase, but as a Frenchman is a little impatient of his claims to German moral superiority, and
as a good neo- Jacobin feels that Rebmann’s ideas on revolution were nebulous, unrealistic, moralizing,
and basically not very “radical.” One would not suppose that these three writers are talking about the
same person. The discrepancies can be attributed to the fact that Rebmann’s writings are numerous,
rare, scattered, and inaccessible; but Voegt’s ignoring of Valjavec and the Hansen documents is hard