The historian Michelet, a keen reader of Herder, thought that his ‘noble country’ should ‘fill within us the immeasurable abyss which extinct Christianity has left there’. Reinterpreting history as the spiritual development of France, he presented Joan of Arc as the lover of France rather than God. France, he declared, was the ‘pilot of the vessel of humanity’ and its revolution the Second Coming.
Eventually, Napoleon, dead since 1821, made a second coming as a demigod. His sacred memory thrilled the Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz as well as Stendhal and Balzac, in whose novel The Country Doctor (1833) the emperor is considered divine (it helped that his birthday was also the Feast of the Assumption). This resurrection was the prelude to a bizarre worldwide deification of a ruthless imperialist. For those who abhorred it, like Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, the general European adoration of Napoleon signified the triumph of godless amoralism. Raskolnikov, the former law student in Crime and Punishment (1866), derives philosophical validation from the cult of the Corsican after murdering an old woman:
A true master, to whom everything is permitted, sacks Toulon, unleashes slaughter in Paris, forgets an army in Egypt, expends half a million lives marching on Moscow, then laughs it all off with a quip in Vilno; and he even has idols erected to him after his death – so everything really is permitted.
Napoleon set the template for many popular despotisms to follow, by seeking, in Madame de Sta?l’s words, ‘to satisfy men’s interests at the expense of their virtues, to deprave public opinion by sophisms, and to give the nation war for an object instead of liberty’. ‘The French, alas!’ she lamented, ‘seconded him only too well.’ And so did aspiring nationalists and imperialists across Europe. Napoleon’s holy ghost supervised the July Revolution of 1830 that ended the Bourbon Restoration, and liberated the repressed creed of the French Revolution. Copycat uprisings in Poland, Italy and Spain soon followed, but suffered for want of mass support.
Their zealous leaders exiled in Paris, London or Geneva remained undaunted, however. Failure or success paled before the necessity of emotional intoxication. The young German writer Heinrich Heine was typical of those who moved to Paris to be close to the action. ‘Together,’ he wrote, speaking of the reappearance in 1830 of Lafayette, the tricolour and the ‘Marseillaise’, ‘they kindled my soul into a wild glow … bold ardent hopes spring up’.
How to Develop, German-Style
In Heine’s politically conservative and stagnant country, however, the yearning for enchantment fed a massive religious revival that made the country seem medieval rather than modern. More than a million pilgrims went to Trier in 1844 to glimpse what they believed to be the Holy Robe of Christ. The sale of theological books rocketed. The spiritual unrest and longing for the infinite spilled over from political theory and art into political-philosophical speculation.
The modern world’s greatest philosophical system, implicit in all our political ideas and values today, was built during this time. The French Revolution may have announced the nineteenth century’s religion of the nation, and the cults of liberty and equality; but Germans brooding on their political inadequacy produced an Ur-philosophy of development: one to which liberal internationalists and modernization theorists as well as communist universalists and cultural nationalists could subscribe.
As the German states modernized in response to the Revolution and Napoleon’s depredations, Hegel came to see human history culminating in a new political system in Germany. Prepared by Luther’s Reformation the Germans, he maintained, were better placed spiritually and philosophically than the French for the tasks of reason and progress. Indeed, the historical trajectory of the Revolution and Germany’s development pointed to an imminent ‘end of history’, when all the major conflicts of history would be at last resolved.
Since Prussian and other German states appeared further than ever from this historical terminus in the 1830s and 1840s – an especially bleak time for German intellectuals – one of Hegel’s keen disciples readjusted his philosophical universal history. Germany’s backwardness, as he saw it, could only be eradicated by a working-class revolution – so far-reaching that it would amount eventually to the emancipation of humanity.
In the social and economic history written by Karl Marx – another form of German exceptionalism and system-building – the end of history became synonymous with a proletariat revolution and the creation of a communist society in Germany. Building brilliantly on the Romantics’ original critique of alienation, Marx came to see Germany as the catalyst of a worldwide transformation.
Marx’s collaborator, Engels, even claimed a sixteenth-century German (and devoutly Christian) peasant leader for the idea of Communism: Thomas Muenzer, he wrote, like a ‘genius’ understood that the ‘kingdom of God was nothing else than a state of society without class differences, without private property, and without superimposed state powers opposed to the members of society’.
The failure of the 1848 revolutions showed that much remained to be done before the Kingdom of God could be established on Earth. Marx and Engels posited several phases, such as class struggle, in the path towards it. Critics such as Max Stirner and Bakunin had argued that the task of securing individual freedom could not be entrusted to such ideological abstractions as class and state – ‘spooks’, as Stirner called them.
Furious with both Stirner and Bakunin, Marx underlined that the conditions must be right before man could become fully human; he should be free of economic and social constraints, and this freedom was not simply an act of individual will or assertion of ego. It had to be worked towards in progressive stages, such as bourgeois industrialization, working-class disaffection and revolution. This was all supposedly scientific. As Engels asserted in his eulogy on the occasion of Marx’s death in 1883, ‘Just as Darwin discovered the laws of development of organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history.’