Pictures of German Life in the XVIIIth and XIXth Centuries, Vol. II. by Gustav Freytag

Author:Gustav Freytag [Freytag, Gustav]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781453862636
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: CreateSpace Publishing
Published: 2010-10-04T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER X.

THE PERIOD OF RUIN.

(1800.)

Again did evil arise from France, and again did a new life spring from the struggle against the enemy.

It was not the first time that that country had inflicted deep wounds on German national strength, and had unintentionally awakened a new power which victoriously arrested her progress. The policy of Richelieu had been the most dangerous opponent of the German Empire, but at the same time it had been obliged to support the Protestant party there, in which lay the source of all later renovation. After him French literature ruled the German mind for a century, and for a long time it appeared as if the Academy of Paris and the classical drama were to govern our taste, as did the tailors and peruke makers of the Seine. But indignation and shame produced, in opposition to French art, a poetry and science which, in spite of its cosmopolitan tendency, was genuinely national. Now the heir of the French revolution brought violent destruction on the declining empire, and gave his commands on its ruins like a tyrannical ruler, till at last the Germans resolved to drive him away, in order to take their affairs into their own hands.

Defenceless was the frontier against the invading stranger. Only on the lower Rhine there was the Prussian realm, but along the other part of the stream were the domains of ecclesiastical princes, and small territories without any power of resistance. It was the four western circles of the empire, the Upper Rhine, Suabia, Franconia, and Bavaria, which the North Germans mockingly called the Empire.

Even in the Empire, the ecclesiastical territories and Bavaria were very much behindhand, in comparison with Baden and Suabia. The example of Frederic II. in Prussia, and the philosophic enlightenment of this period, had reformed most of the Protestant courts, as also Electoral Saxony, since the Seven Years' War. Greater economy, household order, and earnest solicitude for the good of the subject became visible. Many governments were models of good administration, like Weimar and Gotha, and in the family of one of the great ladies of the eighteenth century, the Duchess Caroline of Hesse, as well as in Darmstadt and Baden, there was economical mild rule. Even indeed in the court of Duke Karl of Wurtemburg there was improvement. He who had dug lakes on the hills, and employed his serfs to fill them with water, who had lighted the woods with Bengal lights, and caused half-naked Fauns and Satyrs to dance there, had learnt a lesson since 1778, and on his fiftieth birthday, had promised his people to become economical, and had since that been transformed into a careful landlord, under whom the country flourished. Even the ecclesiastical courts had experienced somewhat of this philosophical tendency, though undoubtedly the activity of an enlightened ruler of Würzburg or Munster was much limited by the inevitable supremacy of an ecclesiastical aristocracy, and the increasing priestly rule.

But the Imperial cities of the south were, with the exception of Frankfort,

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