ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the French Enlightenment can be described as an extension of absolutist court culture. The core of public communication shifted from intellectual conversation in salons to public addresses to the people and mass rallies, from cosmopolitan essays and novels to political pamphlets and journal articles indicting the manipulations of an invisible public enemy. The Romantic idea of Volk and nation referred to a transcendental horizon of understanding and communication, thus replacing the cosmopolitanism of the Enlightenment with a particular national community. The French Revolution attracted some enthusiastic followers in Germany, but occupation by French troops and the Napoleonic Empire turned most German patriots into opponents of the French revolutionary project. In a Jacobin perspective, the axial-age tension between the transcendental order of reason, unity, and perfection and the mundane realm of personal rule, political interests, and conflicts had to be resolved by expunging the mundane level.
