Germany 707
against Republicans and Levellers. “Levellers” significantly became Aufklärer in
German.^59
Reichard and others, in 1794, formed a secret alliance which they called the
“Association A- M,” since each member was given a letter of the alphabet as a code
name. They published a journal, Eudämonia, and so were known as the Eudä-
monists. The Eudämonists offered the best example in Germany of the 1790’s of
what a later generation would call the Radical Right. They included the editors
Reichard and Koester, already mentioned; G. B. Schirach, editor of the Hamburg
Politisches Journal; two conservative booksellers at Frankfurt and Leipzig; the court
preacher at Darmstadt; and J. G. R. Zimmermann of Hanover, who was physician
to King George III, and who, it may be recalled, had been recruited by Hoffmann
into Leopold II’s secret Association. They were a Protestant group, but reached
out to join with like- minded Catholics, notably Hoffmann, soon after his Wiener
Zeitschrift was suppressed in Vienna. Organized secretly, concealing their opera-
tions, composed in part of men who were former or disillusioned Freemasons, and
claimed personal knowledge of conspiratorial societies over the past dozen years,
they busily corresponded and exchanged information, using a cypher in which
“44” meant the Illuminati and “43” the Jacobins, and they accused, denounced,
exposed, and reported upon various persons in government or the universities as
crypto- Jacobins or unregenerate Illuminati in disguise. Their journal, Eudämonia,
was for three years the most influential counter- revolutionary organ in Germany.
It was the repeated attacks in its pages, and the campaign of complaint and letter-
writing which the Eudämonists organized, which, more than anything else, forced
the grand- duke of Weimar to accept Fichte’s resignation at Jena. Wild charges
finally defeated their own purpose. When the imperial censor at Vienna found
himself accused of Illuminism he forbade the paper in Austria. Silenced or dis-
couraged as a nuisance in various of the German states, Eudämonia ceased publi-
cation in 1798.^60
Such extreme counter- revolutionaries, though voluble and articulate, were not
numerous, and it is difficult to assess their significance. Their polemics, however, at
the least—like so much that was non- polemical in Germany—contributed little,
and indeed set up a barrier, to the intelligent understanding of the French Revolu-
tion and the European upheaval that accompanied it. A movement fundamental to
Western Civilization was trivialized into the doings of plotters. As one of the fu-
ture Eudämonists said to another, on first hearing of the fall of the Bastille: “It is
the work of the 44!”^61
On the other hand, much in the counter- revolutionary campaign—like much in
what German sympathizers with the Revolution also said—inflated and ballooned
up the Revolution beyond rational measure. It was more in Germany than in
France, more among those who watched it as spectators than among those who
were active participants, that the idea grew up of revolution as a vast force with a
59 Revolutions- Almanach von 1794 (Goettingen, 1794), 323–33.
60 Valjavec, 304–5; Droz, Allemagne, 414–16; Léon, Fichte, I, 536–49; G. Krüger, “Die Eudä-
monisten,” in Hist. Zeitschrift, Vol. 143 (1931), 467–500.
61 Krüger, 474.