Germany 699
Southwest Germany, east of the Rhine, was also the scene of considerable unrest
during the years from 1796 to 1800.^33 Here it was the well- to- do non- noble class
that was most disaffected—doctors, lawyers, merchants, government servants, and
men of independent income. They formed clubs and read the numerous papers,
such as Posselt’s Annalen, that favored the new order in Europe. Some of them
secretly worked with the French emissary, Poteratz, sent by the Directory in 1796.
The Directory cancelled Poteratz’ mission, and matters quieted down; but A. J.
Hoffmann and others of the original Mainz Jacobins continued to agitate across
the Rhine, reinforced by Rebmann in 1798, by which time the Helvetic Republic
added a strong stimulus also. At the very moment of the Basel revolution, in Janu-
ary 1798, there was a small putsch of Germans from Basel into Baden. In Würt-
temberg there was a long history of parliamentary disputation between the reign-
ing duke and the estates, which had preserved their powers to a degree unusual in
Germany. The old quarrels broke out afresh in 1798, but this time with a more
modern note; a deputy in the estates, named Baz, actively sought French interven-
tion, and projects were even drawn up for a Swabian or Danubian Republic, under
a constitution to be modeled on the French constitution of the Year III. In 1800 a
republican plot was brought to light in Bavaria. None of these movements was
ever supported by the French government. Their failure illustrates the general truth
that nowhere, except temporarily in Poland, did revolutionaries or radical demo-
crats accomplish anything without French aid. The agitation subsided after 1800.
Probably a good many south- German “Jacobins” were pacified by the active re-
formism, with “abolition of feudalism,” equalization of civil rights, and rationaliza-
tion of territory, that prevailed in Baden, Württemberg, and Bavaria in the time of
Napoleon.
The Colossi of the Goethezeit
Above the busy level of journalists, pamphleteers, publicists, and professors rose
the solemn peaks of the great authors of the Age of Goethe, on whom the little
that can be said here must be trifling in comparison to what has been said before.
Goethe himself was among the various civilian spectators, like A. L. Mencken,
who were present at the cannonade of Valmy. In a phrase often quoted, he later
remembered having said, when asked by a companion what he thought of it: “Here
and on this day begins a new era of world history, and you can say that you were
there.” The young poet, Tieck, longed to fight alongside Dumouriez, whose repub-
lican army he compared to the Greeks at Thermopylae. Klopstock penned an Ode
to the French Revolution when the war began in April 1792.^34 Schiller’s Ode to
to explain on this ground. The statement in the Deutsche Allg. Biog. that Rebmann became a member
of the Legion of Honor in 1804 is not borne out by published membership lists.
33 K. Obser, “Der marquis von Poterat und die revolutionäre Propaganda am Oberrhein, 1796,”
in Zeitschrijt für die Geschichte des Oberrheins, VII (1892), 385–444; id., “Die revolutionäre Propaganda
am Oberrhein im Jahre 1798,” Ibid., X XIV (1909), 199–258; Biro, German Policy, II, 568–86; Droz,
Allemagne, 126–30; Valjavec, Entsethung, 43, 203.
34 Excerpts from Goethe, Tieck, and Klopstock are given by Markov, Kampf um Freiheit, 39 – 47.