ABSTRACT
Nationalism can certainly not account for the reserve on the part of the Germans in respect to the Revolution, since they had but recently received the first stimulus to a reawakening of nationalism from the Prussian king. Moreover, there was one idea within the structure of French revolutionary thought that seemed to be well suited to counteract even a better assured and matured nationalism, the idea of humanity. This conception of humanity and of man has its roots deep in the thought of the eighteenth century, in the French as well as in the German Enlightenment; in both it developed in opposition to the religious conception of 'the ideal of the absorption of manhood into God'. Political nationalism had as its forerunners a group of intellectual leaders who combined with advocacy of an all-embracing and abstract conception of humanity an intense readiness and willingness to assimilate the ideas of foreign nations.
