340 Kant: A Biographyinterrogated, and a writer had been thrown into the Spandau jail simply be¬
cause of what he had written. This may well be why he did not have much
to say about this topic.
The conversation about Starck was perhaps more interesting to Hippel,
the Freemason, than it was to Kant. Still, Kant knew Starck well from his
time in Königsberg. The two had had close connections more than twenty-
five years earlier, and Starck still had family in Königsberg, having mar¬
ried someone from Königsberg in addition to being related to Kraus.^33 In
any case, Starck had broken with Freemasonry in 1785, and he had tried to
expose what he now took to be the follies of Masons in a novel called St.
Nicaise. Hamann had already accused him of being a crypto-Catholic and
Jesuit during the early seventies. Since the Berlinische Monatsschrift had
close ties with Freemasonry, Starck was soon attacked in its pages, and his
enemies repeated the accusation of crypto-Catholicism. But they did not
appear to know that he had, as a matter of fact, converted to Catholicism
on a stay in Paris. In Königsberg, this was known.^34 The only question was
how to prove it. In any case, because Starck soon became one of the ene¬
mies of the French Revolution, which Kant enthusiastically endorsed, this
conversation is of interest as well. Hippel's sketch introduces some of the
most important problems with which Kant had to wrestle during the next
decade. But there is one characteristic contrast between Kant's role in this
conversation and his role in public discussion. He said little in this con¬
versation, but he had a great deal to say about the taking away of "the sin¬
gle freedom" (Lessing), namely, the freedom of speech that Frederick the
Great had granted. Frederick William II was about to return Prussia to the
state of affairs prevalent during Kant's youth. Given how important he
thought freedom of thought and speech was for the development of
mankind, Kant could not be quiet — and he was not. From now on, reli¬
gion would play a much more important role in his publications than it had
before. This was due not only to the development of his own critical proj¬
ect but also to external political circumstances.
The Revolution: "I Have Seen the Glory of the World"On July 12,1789, in Paris, far away from Königsberg, developments that had
long been in the making and that had formed the subject of many a con¬
versation among Kant and his friends, finally came to a head. France was
bankrupt as a result of the Seven-Year War, intervention in the American
Revolution, and wasteful spending. Jacques Necker was appointed minister