The revolutionary and Napoleonic wars in the Prussian political imaginary: a politico-anthropological genealogy of the ‘special’ German–French relations

Abstract

This paper captures the processes by which the French revolutionary and Napoleonic wars redefined enduringly the logics of interaction between Prussia/Germany and France. It explains transformations of power, political imagination and social organisation that are key to understanding the ‘special’ nature of contemporary German–French relations. The paper finds that historical and international relations narratives fail to address the entire range of system-level transformations in the international order. Making use of approaches and concepts such as liminality, communitas, mimetic theory and the sacred, this paper proposes a novel, political anthropological perspective on such transformations, conceiving them as the interlocking of mimetic binds. First, I present wars and revolutions as liminal moments of collective threshold experiences. Second, I show how the liminal process functions at the international system-level. Third, I explain the challenge that the approach of liminality is posing to theories of international and systemic change. Fourth, I analyse the liminal process in Prussia and show how the said wars brought the French and the Prussians/Germans in a long-term mimetic rivalry. Finally, I argue that the proposed theoretical framework can take the research on international institutions and nationalism beyond the narratives of sociology, political science and historical studies.

The liminality of wars and revolutions: understanding experience as ‘threshold’

In this paper, I focus on the way the French revolutionary and Napoleonic wars induced a new logic of reality in the relations between France on the one hand, and Prussia and Germans on the other hand. I claim that the processes leading to this new logic of interaction are key to understanding the history of the ‘special’ German–French relations, therefore disclosing aspects of power, political imaginary and social organisation that go to the heart of European modernity. The conceptual framing of my research problem requires us to recognise how social change at the international system-level was produced at the time and what were the lasting consequences of such changes. While the impact of these wars on French society has been acknowledged by current historical literature,¹ much less theoretical reflection has been put into thinking about the transformative experiences that these wars occasioned in other European societies. Narratives on the political dynamics taking place at the level of the international system are often dominated by accounts emphasising timeless power contests,² state interests defined by hegemonic elites,³ everlasting traps spun by geography and crystallised in people’s minds as inescapable curses of geopolitics⁴ and value rationality defined usually in relation to the political theology of the specific states/elites under consideration.⁵ Despite their attempted empirical grounding, what such approaches have in common is their un-reflexive take on history reproducing more often than not constitutive cultural elements of the contemporary world. These perspectives are usually reifying Hobbesian categories of the transcendental state or Kantian ‘pure reason’, their rationalist-utilitarian excesses often making up for poor social theory and historical sociology.

Nowhere becomes this shortcoming more pervasive than in the study of revolutions and wars, the two most complex and ‘game changing’ events of social and political history. The frequent failure to address such watersheds hinges upon the larger problem of how to think of the messiness, the irregular and seemingly irrational aspect of historical experience itself. Political science and sociology usually differentiate between structural approaches, in which historical events simply ‘come’ as opposed to being made,⁶ and processual accounts, which allow for agency and contingent action.⁷ However, as Walter Armbrust (2013: 844) points out, even these latter processual accounts do not allow for contingency as a social phenomenon in its own right, but attempt to embed it as one of the variables of political behaviour in predictive theories about the future. Consequently, they often underestimate the sheer weight of confusion, disorientation and emotionality characteristic of highly explosive events and the way passions come out to stamp the social enduringly and in unpredictable ways.

I intend to avoid these pitfalls by looking at the French revolutionary and Napoleonic wars as instances of liminality.⁸ Praised so far in some accounts as ‘potentially one of the most general and useful terms of social science’ (cf. Szakolczai 2000: 218), liminality offers rich avenues for exploring complex processes of radical historical changes. First introduced by the French anthropologist Arnold van Gennep (1909/1960), liminality captures the threshold situation of the rites of passage. These rites express a period of transformative transition for the individuals and/or society and have a tripartite structure: rites of separation, rites of transition and rites of incorporation. In this period, individuals and/or society are caught in moments of radical contingency, where the distinction between structure and agency does not make sense anymore, and where communal life can be carried away in different directions (Thomassen 2009: 5). Therefore, at its most basic level, liminality refers to experience understood in its etymological meaning, as the ‘going through something’, and, in this respect, it invites us to reflect upon the process of a concrete spatial and emotional crossing of boundaries. It forces us to think how people behave in relation to any in-between situation or object, any in-between place or moment. From such a perspective, liminality does not explain historical experience, it simply is a universal feature thereof (see Thomassen 2014: 1–7).

Starting as a concept applied to moments of transition in small-scale communities, decades later liminality underwent a revival thanks to Victor Turner’s anthropology of experience (see Turner 1969, 1985) and it has lately managed to attract the attention of a number of scholars who have applied its theoretical and methodological assumptions to the study of transformative periods involving modern large-scale societies and whole epochs (see Horvath et al. 2015; Szakolczai and Horvath 1992; Eisenstadt 1995; Szakolczai 2000, 2003, 2008; Wydra 2000, 2007, 2009; Armbrust 2013; Thomassen 2012; Mälksoo 2010; Bauman 1994; Norton 1988). In the field of international relations, for example, the application of liminality to large-scale societies questions the ontological and epistemological arguments of much of the rationalist and positivist IR theories written in the traditions of realism, liberalism or constructivism (Mälksoo 2012). However, despite the empirical use of liminality by authors across academic disciplines, the employment of the concept is still lagging far behind its theoretical promise and potential.⁹ This paper wishes to fill some space in this gap and to bring a theoretical contribution to the fields of international relations, modern and contemporary European history, political anthropology, historical sociology and critical war studies.

Methodological outline: the liminal process at the international system-level

International relations are arguably the place of liminality where sociability can be most readily seen as determined by the way in which individual and collective actors deal with crossing boundaries or meeting in the ‘in-between’. The French revolutionary and Napoleonic wars can therefore be codified as the process in which international order collapsed and systemic liminal conditions burst out, reconfiguring political imaginaries, identities and rules of conduct across the system. In such moments of liminal disorder, the fundamental interaction between the high and the low, the centre and the periphery, the domestic and the international, becomes most visible. Consequently, what is needed in terms of theory is not a deterministic search for the interaction between these levels of analysis, but a study of their complex emergence, the emphasis falling on processuality, relationality and differentiation (Mälksoo 2012). I would like to capture this liminal process by making use of three complementary concepts: communitas, mimesis/mimetic crisis and the sacred. This particular modus of grasping the liminal process has already been used elsewhere;¹⁰ however, for the discipline of IR it is a novel approach. Here, I present briefly the basic methodological idea of this framework, while throughout the rest of the paper I explain further and illustrate empirically the ‘workings’ of its different conceptual parts.

As opposed to small communities that undergo the ritual passage in orderly fashion, in large-scale societies liminal conditions describe situations of crisis, in which there are no acknowledged masters of ceremony to guide societies through their inner strives. For this reason, two mutually reinforcing tendencies are unleashed: an effort of over-rationalising the situation and a desperate search for models. In this most imitative moment of the social, masses of people form what Turner called ‘communitas’, understood as communities of experience that overcome social fluidity and transitoriness through ad hoc ritual order, forming new agencies and a new ‘social will’ orienting the future.¹¹ The key argument here is that the formation of communitas in liminal crises tends to be underpinned by what Girard’s anthropological theory of culture has identified as a mimetic rivalry in which the rival becomes a mimetic double or a model-obstacle to be overcome.¹² This in turn means that the extraordinary passions and emotions set free in conditions of existential uncertainty are contained ritually and ‘normalised’ by specific (sacrificial) practices of the sacred. In the latest and most authoritative treatment of the subject, Harald Wydra shows how such practices of the sacred originating in collective threshold experiences are constitutive of political order, cutting across the public/private, secular/religious or modern-/pre-modern divides. In other words, the sacred regulates occurrences of violence and death, shapes normal politics and law while also lying beyond them.¹³

Summing up, the transformations of international order in the context of major wars and revolutions need to be captured at system-level by reconstructing the underlying liminal process. This requires the following steps: the tracing of cross-national interactions and the way they ‘translate’ locally in the formations of new types of communitas; identification of the emerging practices of the sacred associated with these communitas; understanding of the underlying mimetic rivalries and an analysis of the lasting dynamics of identity-construction and interactions that result from the interlocking of such mimetic binds.

The paper proceeds as follows. First, I discuss the potential challenge that the approach of liminality poses to IR theories of systemic and international change. The discussion is limited to Bukovansky’s (2002) constructivist work on the impact of the French and American revolutions on the international system. The reason I dwell extensively on her work is that Bukovansky’s conceptualisation of systemic change in relation to the French revolution is not only the most comprehensive analysis of the subject matter to date, but also the approach that comes closest to the theoretical sensibilities that liminality presupposes in relation to the category of ‘culture’.¹⁴ Second, I present the French revolutionary and Napoleonic wars as instances of liminal mass politics. Third, I analyse the liminal process in Prussia and show how the said wars brought the French and the Prussians/Germans in a long-term mimetic rivalry. In this context, I make the case for writing ‘binary histories’ in which the aim is to uncover mimetic political structures at the level of the international system. In the final section, I point towards future directions of research by arguing that the proposed theoretical framework can move discussions on contemporary nationalism and international institutions beyond their common understandings in sociology, political science and history.

Liminality’s challenge to theories of systemic and international change

As a conceptual tool for understanding dramatic transformations of political orders, liminality constitutes a significant challenge to mainstream IR theories of systemic and international change. Mlada Bukovansky (2002: 40) already noticed that, when it comes to political legitimacy, IR scholars fail to provide a good theory on how systemic transformation is achieved. To name just a few, this is the case with Robert Gilpin’s (1983) realist theory of hegemonic war, as it is with the liberals working on the democratic peace theory¹⁵ or with Kenneth Waltz’s (1979) neorealist theory of international politics. In her constructivist analysis of the American and French revolutions (which includes the revolutionary wars), Bukovansky is trying to make up for this shortcoming in the literature. This paper is building on her work in thinking of systemic change as ‘a transformation of the parameters of political legitimacy’ in which ‘the identities of the units in the system begin to change’ and ‘the rules governing their interaction are also transformed’ Bukovansky (2002: 50). As I will argue below, liminality is particularly well placed to deal with such metamorphoses of the domestic and international order.

Starting partially as a critique of the constructivist works of Reus-Smit (1999) and Hall (1999), which account for the variations in the anarchic system, however, without providing a theoretical grounding of how and why these variations came about, Bukovansky (2002: 41) deals with this research question explicitly. In her approach, the author follows the sociologist Margaret Archer (1988/1996) and explains the shift from dynastic to popular legitimacy through the actors’ strategic manipulation of patterns of complementarity and contradiction existing in the domestic and international political culture. In order to make sense of the interaction between strategic behaviour/interest and political culture, she analyses pre-revolutionary streams of political thought, elite discourses and the diplomatic and political history of the American and French revolutionary periods. However, by focusing the bulk of the analysis on establishing the patterns of pre-revolutionary political thought as a mode of pinning down the objective reality of complementary and contradictive culture, Bukovansky comes to neglect the transformative effect that the revolutions themselves – and especially the domestic and international wars they initiate – bring upon the existing political culture.

It thus comes as no surprise that, in the drawn conclusions, the American revolution is an event that explains why certain ‘strains of thought became dominant while others receded to the margins’ (Bukovansky 2002: 163) rather than a sequence of events through which new meanings and a distinct life-world have been created. In addition, the French revolution was not per se a mechanism of international cultural change, but ‘one particularly significant result and example of the intensified dynamics of those mechanisms’ (ibid.: 185).¹⁶ Considering these conclusions, my argument is that Bukovansky ultimately fails to accomplish the aim she has set for herself, namely to account for how systemic change has been produced (Bukovansky 2002: 2). Given the extent in the breakdown of markers of existential certainty, an account that aims to understand how change was produced would need to deal with the reconfiguration of the public space and the creation of a new political imaginary from within the social horizon of the French revolution and its wars. As Furet (1997: 22) formulates this, the problem of the causes of the French revolution does not exhaust the aspect of the revolutionary process. To which I would also add that it can hardly cover the question of repercussions.

Two interrelated methodological and theoretical problems arise from Bukovansky’s logic of research. First, the constitution and creation of political culture in the moment of the revolution and its wars is under-theorised and, second, the theory proceeds consequently with the construction of a model of historical agent geared mainly to the ‘good-weather’ conditions of the pre-revolutionary period. As such, although Bukovansky’s constructivist work tries to escape rationalist and instrumentalist views of culture, the conceptual grasp of the revolutionary effects through the discursive construction of agents who are caught in the fire between strategic action and political culture tends to underline precisely what she is trying to avoid. The idea of manipulation of patterns of complementarity and contradiction is hereby re-enforcing the rational capacities of historical superheroes. They are able to discern their real interests not only in relation to situations of societal calm and quasi-stasis, but also during periods of maximum personal disorientation and an overwhelming historical movement of society. While accepting the objective existence of cultural patterns of complementarity and contradiction in certain conditions,¹⁷ still no such ability by the actors can be presupposed. As Thomassen (2012: 699) reminds us in his discussion of political revolutions, in liminality human action poses particular challenges because the notions of interest or rational action have no background structures and certainties against which to weigh them. As a result, deep passions and emotions tend to take over social action and become articulated in symbols deemed appropriate for expressing collective states of ekstasis. These symbols in turn serve keeping the passionate state of mind alive. Bukovansky’s argument therefore fails because it depends on the actors’ astonishing ontological stability of the self throughout the revolutionary crisis and on an almost equally miraculous technique of grasping rationally the world at all times and of acting accordingly.

Moulding together methodologically temporal spaces that operate on radically different social ontological grounds gives the impression that the author deals with the French revolution and its wars lacking an appropriate theory of history to approach the subject matter. The revolution as such is thus falling through the grid by being downgraded methodologically and ontologically to a secondary status, while pre-revolutionary intellectual history gains explanatory prominence and becomes a conceptual tool that ‘orients’ the events of the French revolution and justifies the course of history ex post facto. Instead of looking at elite discourses and endowing the history of political thought with ontological primacy, I suggest that what is needed is a more attentive look at the public square and the common places. In as much as political revolutions and their wars of liberation, conquest and missionarism are manifestations of crowds and mass mobilisations, their analysis involves the anthropological study of appropriations of symbolic space through ritual, violence and play (Thomassen 2012: 693–694). This provides a potential answer to the very important question of who is going through liminality, elites or more or less everybody (Mälksoo 2012: 488). Public squares or the public spaces are the frame in which revolutions and wars reconfigure the politic imaginary with lasting consequences. They thus constitute the locus for the symbolisation of passions and emotions for elites and non-elites alike; since the public square transcends any class or group limits, it can be ignored only by an act of wilful denial. This common space therefore provides an existential reference that frames the political, crystallises images of attraction and repulsion and sends potential waves of shock throughout society. The ‘essence’ and condition for the coming into being of the public square is its eventfulness, the moment of aggregation that changes the sense of being and creates the communitas.¹⁸ Following Turner and Thomassen, what emerges with the communitas is the ‘social will’, that ordering force which does not simply result from rational revolutionary programmes and which is ‘felt rather than conceived as the axiomatic source of human bonding’ (Thomassen 2012: 690). Consequently, any attempt to apprehend the systemic changes coming in the trail of the French revolution would need to track down the rise of the new types of communitas out of the contingency of the revolution and its wars, and enquire into their nature and outlook.¹⁹ This paper acknowledges the existence of a new missionary communitas inside France – one that is moved by the ethos of the French nation and of popular sovereignty – and attempts to show the birth of another type of communitas in Prussia.

Last but not least, although sympathetic to the constitutive aspect of culture in the construction of identity and interests, the language used by Bukovansky to capture the transformations of the international order is alienating also on an aesthetic level. In other words, it is insensitive towards the ‘spectacle’ of social convulsions that were played out during this period with an intensity that may seem to observers 200 years later almost impervious. Far from being an irrelevant concern, this critique is ultimately of a methodological order. It actually raises the issue of how to understand a social world that displays tremendous amounts of tragedy and phantasmagorical elevation, a world that mediates to outside observers and upon itself the image of broken lives and fulfilling dreams. The blood pouring out of the dead and mutilated bodies lying at the time on the streets of Europe can hardly be standardised or normalised in an unproblematic manner behind strategic interests or discourses of value and instrumental rationality. If understanding is the issue at stake here, then such discourses are somehow mystifying. Far from denying the rational use and manipulation of culture per se, what I am arguing is that at the time of the French revolution and its wars there was also something fundamentally different at stake, something that is nevertheless essential to explain social change and is more elusive and difficult to approach. Hereby, the coming into being of the new communitas forces us to re-think the analytical category of ‘culture’ in ways that releases it from the enlightened and rationalist grip in which it has grown. This move allows us to retrace one of its fundamental meanings to its roots, namely that which brings it in relation to the activity of ‘worship’. Unless this dimension of sacredness is recuperated, the concept of culture is destined to be suppressed in precisely that element which is likely to offer the most poignant analytical power in our discussion. The birth of a political communitas is closely bound with this particular understanding of culture.

To round up, the study of revolutions and wars as liminal situations suggests two points of a more general kind. First, instead of looking at such moments from a cause–outcome perspective, liminality approaches moments of radical uncertainty by emphasising the transformative power of the situational premises that are lived through. Second, it also makes it possible to normalise methodologically the eruptions of social effervescence, of emotionality, and passions that are so characteristic of such moments (Wydra 2007: 31–44). This phenomenal presence of the ‘irrational’, for lack of a better term, is largely marginalised or simply ignored by mainstream social theoretical discourse. However, actors caught up in revolutionary and war events often experience a state in which they reach the limits of their consciousness, where they are forced to reconfigure and re-represent themselves as people in the world. Culture and the creation of culture or, in other words, the emergence of the social sacred, is that which agents fall back upon whenever their life-worlds implode. It is there to guide people whenever existential chaos forces them to reconfigure meaningfully that which is taken over by malefic forces and negative reciprocity. In the following, I attempt to show how the analysis of a liminal situation gives us a privileged access to the double movement of social life. On the one hand, the Heraclitian panta rhei reminds us of the dissolubility of all human consciousness, of all social structure, of the change inherent in historical time, of the liminality intrinsic to the constitution of social life. On the other hand, the creative power of a liminal situation (from the latin ‘situs’) means, and is given by, above all, the measure in which the actors succeed in finding the ‘site’, the ‘locus’, the ‘emplacement’ that expresses and represents their existential struggle, which helps them shape a new political order and solidify their own passing.

The French revolutionary and Napoleonic wars as liminal mass politics

The shift that occurred during the French revolution and its wars from dynastic towards popular sovereignty involved the uprooting of the entire previous social political system. In this process, the efforts and strain put on the French people were staggering. Domestically, human sacrifices aimed at creating the community of the people multiplied dramatically with the rise of the civil war and the reign of terror, while externally the new French nation was sustaining wars of liberation and conquest for more than 20 years. Among other things, this meant that one in five Frenchmen born in the first years of the revolution was killed by the end of 1815. In Prussia, the enrolment reached 6 percent of the population in 1813, while the British armies increased six times by the end of the Napoleonic period. In comparative perspective, the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars killed proportionately as many soldiers and civilians as World War I, in total about five million dead, and constituted the greatest human carnage of all previous wars (Fritzsche 2004: 33–34, 82). Unsurprisingly, according to one author, this age witnessed the first total wars of the modern era (Bell 2007). Regarding the number of battles, it is clear that the revolution introduced in the international system a political dynamic almost unthinkable in scale and intensity: from 1792, the time of the first revolutionary war, until 1815 there were no less than 713 battles, whereas for example in the 300 years before, and hence including the religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, there were only 2659 battles (Rothenberg 1977: 61).

From these very broad demarcation lines alone, it becomes clear that the epoch from roughly 1792 until 1815 was dominated by almost continuous warfare. This constituted an opening in various parts of European societies that contributed to the growth of new forms of consciousness and historical sensibilities, and that can and should be approached theoretically from the perspective of liminality. The said wars spread the revolutionary ideology across Europe for almost a quarter of a century, and represented the most dynamic agent of change in European societies. The sheer amount of travellers that these wars produced, the innumerable numbers of refugees and soldiers wondering around Europe for more than 20 years, the mobilisation of ideas bound to such movements of people and the recognition of certain events as historical markers of differentiation that render the past irretrievable and lost initiated a transitional period that changed even the way in which people in Western Europe perceived history and time (Fritzsche 2004). It is the experience of such an unsettling and uprooting epoch on a large-scale level that constitutes the real backdrop against which to understand the massive social transformations set in motion by the revolution.

In this context, one of the analytical contributions made by liminality is that it directs our attention to the emergence of the ‘mass’, or of the new political ‘communitas’, revealing its function as carrier of historical change. This move requires, of course, allowing for analytical flexibility when dealing with such IR concepts as ‘systemic change’. While Bukovansky recognises the way the domestic and the international were intertwined during the French revolution and after, the focus on elites takes away methodologically from the analysis of an epoch in which the shift of power towards the masses was the most striking characteristic.

In comparison, by following liminality, the focus on the ‘mass’ and the wars it sustained allows us to look more carefully into the effects of the French revolution. The nationalisation of army inside France contributed to a democratisation of death across the continent, a process culminating in 1914 with the ‘first democratic war in history’ (Furet 1999: 38). Already contemporaries like von Clausewitz (1976: 592–593) observed that French revolutionary warfare changed the relations between the army, the state and society not only in France but also among France’s enemies. These transformations were based on the rise of a national political theology or, as Bukovansky frames it, on the shift from dynastic towards popular sovereignty. However, analysing the liminal process at the international system-level means ascertaining the interlocking of mimetic binds or, in other words, disclosing the mimetic structures emerging between the different societies involved in the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. In the following, I show how the French revolution ended up tying Prussia and the Germans into a model-obstacle relation with the French: a type of ambiguous mutuality that was eventually translated in a durable adversity that cannot be explained entirely in terms of power relations, geopolitics or other forms of rationality (Girard 2010: 11). Very important to specify, in the next section, I do not trace the formation of such a model-obstacle relation inside France. This would not be impossible to show; however, it would require a research paper in its own right. What I do, however, is research the topic from the Prussian perspective and make the more modest claim that France was drawn into such a relation by Prussia’s (and later Germany’s) domestic evolution and international actions.

Prussia/Germany and France: between negative reciprocity and purification

By looking at the creation of a new political community in terms of communitas, liminality discloses aspects of reality that remain hidden in much of the rationalist views of social change. It shows how the emergence of a new communitas lies in close relation to a concept of culture that draws our attention to the creation of a new social sacred. The paper follows here Girard’s anthropological theory regarding the origin of culture and human rites. According to the author, ‘twins’ and ‘enemy brothers’ refer to the escalation of processes of mimetic desires in relation to an object, and the loss of differentiation among the protagonists that is entailed in such a process. Mimetic desires lock up ‘brothers’ in negative reciprocity, the outcome being the outbreak of a sacrificial crisis (Girard 1979). Looking at France and Prussia from this standpoint, the enemy brother construct hinges on the symmetry of conflict and the identity of being of the involved actors. It makes us aware of how inter-societal relations can get stuck, via acquisitive mimesis, in ‘binary histories’ characterised by disciple-model dialectics, in which the disciple, after acquiring a ‘model’, becomes in turn the model of his model. This means that we need to approach system-level transformations in terms of interlocking mimetic binds. Further, given their ontological stability, my argument is that these binds should be seen as fundamental institutions of the society of states.

Since the days of Frederick the Great and the triumph in the 7 Years War (1756–1763), Prussia established itself as a first-rank military power in Europe, managing by the 1780s to replace France as the main balancing power against the Habsburgs within the Holy Roman Empire (Blanning 1996: 24). The political and military elites were professing self-confidence in the Frederickean military legacy and were looking for increasing the power and standing of Prussia in the European system of states (Shanahan 1945: 66). However, the ensuing French revolution was to stop the ascendancy of the Prussian state and to dramatically alter the self-image of the Prussians. In the liminal space of the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, the structural context of the relations between the French and the Prussians transformed from a rivalry characteristic of the eighteenth-century clashes between two absolutist states to an entanglement in which much of the emerging national identities of the actors in Prussia were constructed in opposition to the French. The latter played the role of an ambivalent entity at once admired and hated (Girard 2010: 11–12). The key in this transformation were the images of the nation and of the citizen–soldier that spread with the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars and contributed to a new political dynamic in Prussia, one in which the process of nation-building was accelerated in direct response to French domestic developments.

From the very outbreak of the French revolution, the intellectual and political elites in the entire German-speaking world followed with the greatest interest the course of events. Liberal circles were soon fascinated by such images as the fall of the Bastille and its symbolisation in terms of the people’s heroic struggle against the abuses of despotism came to be celebrated in many places across the Holy Roman Empire, in Hamburg, Frankfurt, Göttingen, Marburg or Leipzig (Lüsebrink et al. 1997: 194).²⁰ Nevertheless, the prevailing views even among liberals seem to have rejected the French model of political action for the German world on two accounts. First, the narrative of more liberal, enlightened and hence politically superior German states, which do not need radical transformations but only reforms from above, appears to have had considerable support.²¹ Second, the increasingly violent turn of the events in France reaching the apogee with the regicide of Louis XVI turned many admirers away from the revolution and its practices, if not necessarily from its pre-1791 ideals (cf. Saine 1988: 20, 35–36, 42–50, 260–263, 275, 280; Hippler 2008: 146).

However, beyond such intellectual and political considerations concerning the opportunity or necessity of applying French political programmes, the revolutionary wars inaugurated a period in which Prussia (and the German world at large) came for the first time in direct contact with the revolutionary France. The rank and file soldiers and the political and military elites of the Prussian state experienced firsthand the radical transformations brought on by the revolution. Hereby, the campaign of 1792 is a source of eloquent illustrations of how the military elite and the king understood very little of the prevailing conditions in France, and of the massive social impact that the revolution had already had on the country (cf. Saine 1988: 78, 87, 107, 141; and Soboul 1975: 249). The highly unexpected defeat, or rather stalemate, at Valmy that, 30 years later, prompted Goethe²² to write his famous dictum – ‘from this place and from this day forth commences a new era in the world’s history’ (von Goethe 1849: 81) – shocked parts of the military elite and came to change its perspectives on the contemporary world. For the first time, it was acknowledged that the political and military modifications brought on by France necessitated nothing less than a re-evaluation of traditional military doctrines (von dem Knesebeck 1794: 54).

The continued successes of the revolutionary armies, which in 1795 forced Prussia to exit the war in a rather inglorious way, without having been able to reverse the revolution or to win any substantial gains, reinforced such reformist tendencies in Prussia.²³ And because the strength of revolutionary armies came to be identified with the image of the citizen–soldier, the representation of this new phenomenon in terms of heroic enthusiasm (and military indiscipline) being widely spread in the Prussian army (Hippler 2008: 141–142), the nucleus of the work of the military reformers had come to focus on the introduction of popular service.²⁴

The idiosyncrasy of introducing universal conscription²⁵ in an absolutist state in which not only large parts of the military leadership and of the aristocracy, and the king himself, but also the bourgeoisie were against the popularisation of the army (cf. Shanahan 1945: 86; Simon 1955: 12–13; and Hippler 2008: 182–183) gives the measure of the political dilemma that the reformers had to face for more than 20 years. Further, if we also take into consideration the difficult decision-making process in Prussia,²⁶ which ultimately favoured centrist political options (cf. Simms 1997: 314), it becomes clear why the efforts to introduce military reforms undertaken before 1806 were bound to fail. It was only because of the dramatic political and moral crisis accompanying the crushing defeats at Jena and Auerstädt (1806) – within 10 months, the Prussian state was downgraded from a major European power to a secondary state (cf. Shanahan 1945: 99) – that the political dynamic changed towards wide-ranging reforms.²⁷ Its overall purpose was to imitate the French revolution in an orderly way and, at the same time, to guard against it (Hippler 2008: 163–164). At various moments until 1820, prominent reformist leaders like Stein, Scharnhorst, von Clausewitz, Gneisenau, Boyen, Beyme, Hardenberg²⁸ or Humboldt came to play significant roles at the top of the Prussian state and/or in the reform movement (see Simon 1955; Shanahan 1945: 101).

It cannot be stressed enough how important this period from 1806 till the defeat of Napoleon was. According to Girard, it is the humiliation and occupation of Prussia by Napoleon that triggered the process in which the Prussians witnessed for the first time a thorough militarisation of civil life and the nascence of national ethos (cf. Girard 2010: 10–12, 34).²⁹ In order to cope with the French threat, the Prussian reformers were working consciously towards creating a Prussian nation and imitate what was seen as the main strength of the French: nationalism as an ideology in service of the state and the nation. By the end of the Napoleonic era, the hatred against the French occupiers became the principle motivation in the developing Prussian and German nationalism, especially among the lower strata (cf. Hippler 2008: 165–167, 187).

It is during these dramatic times that nationalist associations were built with the more or less explicit purpose of resisting the subjugation of the French and fostering the unity of the Germans. The newly created student fraternities (1810), Jahn’s gymnasts movement (1811), the sharpshooting (after 1800) and the choral (after 1809) societies, or Arndt’s German Association (1814) are among the most important and visible of such organisations. The student fraternities and the gymnasts were especially active in staging from the very beginning ritual forms of civic and symbolic resistance to the French. Although not all of them were popular in terms of openness of membership, they would become more and more so, up until their dissolution during the Nazi regime (Mosse 1975: 28, 65, 137, 148). Jahn’s gymnasts, for example, gathered every week around Berlin, on the Hasenheide, for displays in which young men were swinging, twirling and twisting on bars. They sang patriotic songs and participated in processions with sacred flames. These activities attracted huge crowds and constituted a reconfiguration of political culture towards a type of politics propped on voluntary allegiance and not on hierarchical structures of authority (Clark 2007: 351–352; Mosse 1975: 128–129). Their purpose was to train young men for a war against France, they were national citizen fighters involved in civilian forms of resistance that would prepare the nation in the spirit of bodily prowess and patriotic commitment (Clark 2007: 351–352).

The birth of the national ethos was visible also in the extraordinary mobilisation of the population in the liberation wars. In the dramatic years of liberation 1813–1814, the Landwehr that offered reserves to the line army and the Landsturm that was aimed at providing policing and to activate as a guerrilla against the enemy came both in use (Shanahan 1945: 211–212, 219–220; Simon 1955: 169) and contributed substantially to the inclusion of popular masses and of the bourgeoisie in the affairs of the state.³⁰ Hereby, the legislation passed in 1814 reflected the accumulated experience of popular arming and was to remain the basis for conscription in Prussia till the 1860s (Hippler 2008: 209). Over 40 percent of the approximately 290,000 soldiers involved in these wars belonged to units of the Landwehr. In addition to these, the Prussian army operated also a variety of free corps that made up another 30,000 volunteers or 12.5 percent of the Prussian forces. These men swore allegiance not to king Frederick William III, but to the German fatherland (Clark 2007: 374–75, 379).

Not only the large and anonymous public was affected by the events of the French occupation, but the ideas of national insurrection against the French arose also at various levels of the Prussian leadership (Shanahan 1945: 186–188), something that would have been unthinkable in the absence of the revolutionary warfare and Napoleonic occupation. Already in 1809 there were rumours of a royal abdication to be forced by the Prussian officers who were unhappy about the king’s resistance in joining the Austrians in their fight against Napoleon. Major Ferdinand von Schill even headed an unauthorised insurrection against the French at the cost of his life. The news of his insurrection provoked great emotions in the capital. Far from being a marginal figure, Schill was already famous for his success as a veteran of guerrilla warfare in 1806/1807. When he and his regiment came in 1808 to Berlin as the first of the Prussian troops to enter the capital after the defeats of 1806, they witnessed tremendous scenes of jubilation (cf. Clark 2007: 346–350).

With Napoleon’s campaign against Russia in 1812, the situation would become even more acute at the level of the military establishment. A number of high-ranking officers like von Clausewitz, Boyen and Gneisenau put their patriotic feelings above the will of their sovereign and in 1812 deserted to the Russians to fight against the French and Prussian armies (Hippler 2008: 188; Clark 2007: 355). Further, the inglorious retreat of the Napoleonic troops from Russia occasioned in East Prussia most astonishing events, which would bring the province temporarily out of royal control. Here, the conservative general York neutralised his corps and allowed the Russians to march unhindered through Prussian territory (Clark 2007: 359). Together with local officialdom and Baron von Stein, these people have acted uniquely in Prussian history not only in the absence of a royal order, but for a short period of time also against the official policy of the Prussian state which was still in an alliance with the French. By declaring universal conscription for all males up to 45 years of age, with the exception of schoolteachers and clergymen, the East Prussian establishment made the nation in arms a reality that replaced for a short while the hierarchical order of the dynastical state (Hippler 2008: 188, 204; Shanahan 1945: 189–195; Clark 2007: 361).

Under the impact of these events, the threat of a revolution became serious and the king was put under increased pressure to assume the leadership of a war against the French. It was at this critical juncture that Friedrich Wilhelm III agreed to a temporary national conscription and, in March 1813, addressed himself in an unprecedented appeal directly to his subjects/people, in order to justify one of his policies. The famous address ‘To my people’ marked symbolically the change in Prussian history from dynastic to national war (cf. Shanahan 1945: 202) and combined skilfully popular insurrectionary rhetoric with dynastic understandings of power and loyalty (Clark 2007: 362–363). From this moment on, the Prussians played a crucial role in the battles of 1813–1815 and in the final defeat of Napoleon. They were the most active and aggressive element within the allied forces. Generals like Blücher and Bülow disregarded repeatedly direct orders in various battles in order to engage the French in critical ways, according to their own assessment of the military situation. Unlike their allied Austrian counterparts, who approached the battles in the manner of the eighteenth-century cabinet wars, it was Prussian commanders who pushed for the systematic destruction of Napoleon’s fighting capacity (Clark 2007: 371–372).

These occurrences illustrate the measure of the substantial shifts in meanings and consciousness that emerged in Prussia as a result of the French revolution and Napoleonic occupation. It was not only that a number of high-ranking Prussian officers entered the age of national wars, being willing to disobey orders and to fight against one’s own country if the situation required it. The population as a whole showed a great deal of readiness to sustain the necessary sacrifices for bringing the Prussian fatherland back on the map of independent great powers. The nationalisation of the masses that occurred in Prussia was to become apparent in the manifestation of a new type of politics linked with the emergence of a national political ‘liturgy’. This secular religion developed new sacrificial practices in festivals, rituals and symbols of commemoration that laid the foundations of German nationalism up until the age of the Nazi regime (Mosse 1975). The end of the Napoleonic wars was the occasion for a multitude of ceremonies of commemoration that would become a solid anchor in the growing cult of the nation. Ringing church bells, target-shooting tournaments, processions of men in militia costumes or local theatrical events were only a few of the ways in which the liberation wars were remembered after 1815 (Clark 2007: 380). More grandiose spectacles also took place and the victory over the French in the Battle of Leipzig became the epicentre, the very heart of these new cultic activities. It would become an essential part of the modern German identity.

The gymnasts, for example, organised pilgrimages to the battlefields of the liberation wars and memorial feast days. The Hasenheide just outside of Berlin witnessed about 10,000 people on 18 October 1814, the day of the first anniversary of the Battle of Leipzig (Clark 2007: 384). The gymnasts’ festivals recalling these wars were combining gymnastic exercises with patriotic and church songs, patriotic sermons, torchlight parades and sacred flames (Mosse 1975: 79). In general, the celebrations of the Battle of Leipzig occasioned the cult of Germanic symbols like the oak leave and the pillars of fire, which were present at these public festivals (ibid.: 51, 77). In 1817, about 30,000 people organised by the student fraternities and the gymnasts gathered at the famous Wartburg Castle to celebrate the same Battle of Leipzig in an awe-inspiring atmosphere (ibid.: 77, 79). The student fraternities came to act as a memorial association that fixed the wars against Napoleon in the broader German memory. This way of bringing people together forged a type of politics that was symbolic, cultic and emotional (Clark 2007: 384–385). The student fraternities, the gymnasts movement, the sharpshooting and choral societies contributed in this way hugely to the growing national ‘liturgy’ and succeeded in preserving the memory of their founding moments throughout the second empire and beyond (Mosse 1975).

In time, the memory of the Prussian liberation wars – on the one hand dynastic, on the other German national – would be recast as a mythical moment of German national liberation (Clark 2007: 387). In retrospect, it appears that these associations carried the day and their nationalist vision of the wars succeeded in channelling in crucial ways the political theology of the Prussian monarchy. This powerful pull towards the national can be observed also in the many monuments that spread across Germany in the next decades, all remembering the central moment of the victory over the French at Leipzig, or worshipping the German nation. The Walhalla temple (1842), the Hall of Liberation (1863), the Hermannsdenkmal (1875) and last but not least the Völkerschlachtdenkmal, opened in 1913 for the 100th anniversary of the victory, constituted sites of a new national sacred (Mosse 1975: 54–65). Even nowadays, at least three new history books dedicated to the Battle of the Nations (Leipzig) appeared across Germany promptly for the 200 years jubilee of that war (Platthaus 2013; Krause 2013; Thamer 2013).

From the behaviour of many Prussian military and political elites, from the self-sacrificial support of the population in the liberation wars and from the cultic activities of many groups that emerged as reaction to the French occupation in Prussia, we can track the birth of a new political communitas. This communitas kept an awe-inspiring attitude towards its foundational moment that was constantly renewed in the midst of the people. In practice, this meant that the rise of the national ‘liturgy’ was bound to the image of the French as the enemy, as the model to be overcome. To be sure, this does not mean that the conservative party in Prussia abandoned itself to the newly born national ethos. As Clark and Mosse show, at the level of the Prussian leadership there was a strong conservative reaction in the aftermath of 1815 and also during the second empire (Clark 2007: 399–408; Mosse 1975: 89–99). However, this does suggest that the conservative, dynastic view of society incorporated sui generis national elements and that this uneasy synthesis was an integral result of the Prussian defeat and liberation wars. The Prussian and later German monarchy was henceforth sustaining itself on two pillars: the dynastic conservative tradition and the rising national cult. The defeat of France in 1871 and the resulting unification of the German nation under the auspices of the monarchy reinforced this alliance. However, as soon as the monarch was not persuasive enough in the sacrificial practices dedicated to the national god, and failed to appease him, as was the case after World War I, the dynasty did not survive. The ritual of the dynasty could not guide anymore the underlying political and social conflicts of the German society and had to give way to something new. On the other hand, it is important to remind us that the nation searched soon enough for an Ersatz-dynasty and found the most unfortunate solution of the Nazi regime.

To sum up, the proposed theoretical framework provides more insights regarding the analysed events than Bukovansky’s social constructivist take on the subject. While the idea of transition from dynastic to popular legitimacy is correct, it is nevertheless too flat to be able to reveal highly significant processes that were part of that transition and that had very important historical consequences. It is neither amenable to provide enough scope for contingency, social differences, reverse processes or new complex emergences, nor able to take sufficiently into account the sheer weight of unpredictable passions and emotions that contribute to the outcomes of such developments. Ultimately, this means that it captures only partially the basic elements of systemic change: the transformations in the identity of the involved actors and the new rules of engagement between them. On the other hand, the political anthropological perspective proposed here shows that, following the events of 1792–1814, monarchic legitimacy in Prussia came to be at once challenged in the name of a national ideal, but also at the same time fused with it. The final victory over Napoleon gave Prussia a national sacred that was bound to a new military identity conceived in opposition to the French (Girard 2010: 90). The concept of ‘twins’ or ‘enemy brothers’ is crucial in understanding the situation that followed in as much as it draws attention to a constant in the French–Prussian relations. The cult of the Prussian and German nations nurtured the image of the French enemy, the admired and hated model, as an axial point of orientation, as a myth that was an integral part of the new political order inside Prussia and later Germany. Further, it also reveals that the more this myth took the lead over the conservative dynastic worldview, the two countries were to grow into a symmetry of conflict and collapse into mimetic violence. World War I can arguably also be seen as the climax of this evolution. Building on the above and following Reus-Smit’s (1999) work on the moral purpose of the state, I suggest therefore that the mimetic bind between France and Prussia/Germany can be conceptualised as a very durable fundamental institution of the European society of states, one whose logic of negative reciprocity was reversed into positive reciprocity only after the tremendous sacrifices of the Second World War.

Conclusion: going beyond understandings of nationalism and international institutions grounded in sociology, political science or (diplomatic) history

The aim of this paper was to give an account of how the French revolution induced, via the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, a new logic of reality between Prussia (and later Germany) and France. By looking at these wars as instances of liminality, this paper suggested that the subsequent French–Prussian/German rivalry should not be conceived as a simple power antagonism, geostrategic game, or as a conflict defined by value and instrumental rationality more generally. Instead, the rivalry needs to be conceptualised as a mimetic political structure. In this capacity, it is a fundamental institution of the modern European society of states that influenced much of the later political dynamics of the continent. This fundamental institution testifies to the transformations in the identity of the actors involved, and to the grounding of a new rule of engagement between them. As such, by capturing more than just the transition from dynastic to popular legitimacy, the present analysis forces us to re-think the idea of systemic and international change in terms of the interlocking of mimetic binds and binary histories.

From this follows that the current study can bring a fresh outlook on two broad themes present in various disciplines. One of these is the study of nationalism. The political anthropology of the liminal process is emphasising the sacrificial practices constitutive of communitas. This means that the exchanges of war victims that took place over the last two centuries between Prussia (later Germany) and France were an integral part of their respective domestic political orders.³¹ Therefore, I claim that there could be room for an alternative way in the study of modern nationalism, one that goes beyond descriptive history or social scientific class, functionalist or utilitarian views of the phenomenon.

The second case I want to make refers to the theme of international institutions. The study of these is mostly based in various strands of sociology and diplomatic history and conceives them as inter-governmental bureaucracies or as formal and informal rules of behaviour between governments. By proposing a political anthropological perspective of the relationship between Prussia/Germany and France, the current analysis has the advantage that it can unearth a deeper level of interaction, one that emerges from the living substance of boundless historical events. This new fundamental institution of the European society of states is, if you want, the more elusive dark matter that absorbs the surface of the subsequent historical evolution between the two countries. As such, my approach does not minimise rationalist contributions in international relations theory towards the object of my study, but it provides them with a potential background structure against which more visible and mundane manifestations of international politics become meaningful.

To conclude, contemporary political order in Europe is largely thought of as depending on the positive outlook of the ‘special’ German–French relations. This paper has tried to provide a political anthropological perspective on the genealogy of the German–French rivalry and, in the process, it has pinned down these ‘special’ relations in the form of a mimetic bind. According to ancient mythology, the pair of twins Castor and Pollux spends half of the year as a star constellation, fixed on the bright heavens of the sky, while the other half of the time it descends into Hades. After a very long cycle in Hades, Germany and France seem to be firmly anchored in the sky. Has finally positive reciprocity triumphed? The theoretical model proposed here is dynamic and suggests that the German–French mimetic bind can potentially always switch back into negative reciprocity. As such, we should be weary of all too naïve scenarios and the ones taken for granted. Positive reciprocity is an active and conscious commitment that needs to be constantly renewed and protected from new outbursts of sacrificial crises.

Notes

• 1 See, for example, Hippler (2008), Bertaud (1979) and Lynn (1984).

• 2 The literature on this is virtually endless. Nevertheless, good theoretically informed starting points are the classical realist, neorealist and neoclassical realist paradigms in international relations. See, among others, the representative works of Hans Morgenthau, Hedley Bull, E. H. Carr, Martin Wight, George F. Kennan, Henry Kissinger, Kenneth Waltz, John Mearsheimer, Stephen Walt, Robert Gilpin, Barry Buzan, Randall Schweller and Thomas J. Christensen.

• 3 The classical works here are, of course, Marx’ theory of social classes, Lenin’s theory of imperialism and Gramsci’s theory of cultural hegemony. For interesting recent debates in international relations that continue these traditions of thought see Anievas (2010), Dunn (2009), Ayers (2008) and Brewer (1990).

• 4 In light of the arguments made in this article, it may be highly revealing that modern geopolitical thinking emerged for the first time in 19th-century Germany. Note in this regard the example of Friedrich Ratzel’s theory of space. As an expression of social Darwinism, the theoretical development of geopolitics clearly testifies to the rise of mimetic rivalry as one of the preeminent experiences of social reality. For the Anglo-Saxon world, the classical accounts initiating and boosting geopolitics as a scholarly concern are considered to be two works that came out at highly significant watersheds in the international politics of the twentieth century: Mackinder (1904) and Spykman (1944). For recent works comprising good historical overviews of geopolitical thinking see, for example, Agnew (2002), Parker (1998) or Csurgai (2009).

• 5 A good example of this kind of work is the body of literature on the democratic peace theory. Inspired by Kantian philosophy, these works attempt to demonstrate that the (democratic) regime outlook is crucial for how states interact with one another. For specific studies see note 15 below.

• 6 This is a paraphrase of the classical statement made by Wendell Phillips about revolutions, which, however, applies equally to the structural analyses of wars. The statement was taken over by Theda Skocpol (1979: 17), one of the leading scholars among the historical sociologists of the second wave.

• 7 For a concise and good discussion of these distinct approaches on the specific study of revolutions, see Armbrust (2013: 843–844).

• 8 For the most up-to-date treatment of liminality, making full justice to the analytics of the approach and to its intellectual genealogy, see Thomassen (2014).

• 9 Among those who pursue empirical studies in IR by using liminality are Neumann (1999), Rumelili (2003), Kuus (2007) and Mälksoo (2009). A welcoming input in the development and promotion of the liminality approach was given also by the Review of International Studies, which dedicated the forum of one of its issues (Vol. 38, No. 2 in 2012) to the topic. Contributors were Neumann (2012), Mälksoo (2012), Rumelili (2012) and Stoicescu (2012).

• 10 For various ways of thinking about the liminal process, see Szakolczai (2000: 207–217; 2009), Wydra (2007), Thomassen (2012), Horvath and Thomassen (2008), Boland (2013) and Roman (2015).

• 11 For a more elaborate exposition of this, see Thomassen (2012).

• 12 For Girard’s analysis of the mimetic mechanism, see Girard (1979).

• 13 The literature on the sacred is enormous and cuts across several disciplines. For the purposes of this paper and the way I grasp the sacred, see Wydra’s path-breaking study ( 2015). Another highly insightful take going in a similar direction is Kratochwil (2013).

• 14 It is important to note that although my work does not deal with the revolutionary phenomena inside France, the international consequences of France’s external wars are part of the same theoretical discussion regarding social change in wars and revolutions.

• 15 For the democratic peace proposition in all its variants, see, for example, Doyle (1983a, b), Levy and Razin (2004), Leblang and Chan (2003), de Mesquita et al. (1999), Maoz and Russett (1993) or Owen (1994).

• 16 However, Bukovansky seems to soften the mentioned argument by asserting just one page later that the French revolution ‘reconstituted shared understandings of what was possible in politics’ (ibid.: 186).

• 17 Bukovansky postulates this existence at all times by following Archer’s critical realist epistemology.

• 18 The term communitas was initially coined by Turner (1969: 94–130) in the context of his extensive reflections on the state of liminality.

• 19 Without calling it a communitas, Sewell’s eventful sociology offers a brilliant exposition of this phenomenon during the fall of the Bastille. See his chapter ‘Historical Events as Transformations of Structures. Inventing Revolution at the Bastille’ in Sewell (2005: 225–270).

• 20 It is also true, however, that between 1789 and 1800, with the exception of Hölderlin’s and Klopstock’s poetry, no single major literary work in the German literature occupied itself with the revolution per se. See Saine (1988: 3).

• 21 See in this regard Kant’s position on the French revolution. Kant was at once against the revolution as a principle of political action, but at the same time he agreed with the revolution’s first achievements and advocated a reform towards a constitutional monarchy in Prussia. Further, it is worth noting that Kant’s position and ideas on the French revolution were widely shared and used by the Prussian reform group. See Hippler (2008: 144–148).

• 22 Goethe was an eyewitness to the Prussian campaign of 1792 in France.

• 23 According to Blanning (1996: 135), Prussia reached its war aims. However, this judgement appears to me to be highly questionable since the war expectations with which the Prussians started the campaign in 1792, to have an easy march on Paris and to reverse the revolution, were never realised, the royal family in France was executed in the meantime, and France, by occupying the entire left bank of the Rhein, expanded its political control far beyond the pre-revolutionary wars period! For a pictorial representation of this argument, compare the European maps from 1792 and 1795 in Simms (1997: xiv–xv).

• 24 According to Shanahan (1945: 75–76), the most important proposal in this regard before 1806 was made by Knesebeck who, in 1803, asked for the introduction of the popular levy.

• 25 Although the canton system functioning in Prussia since the beginning of the eighteenth century asserted on paper every subject’s duty to serve in the army, given the existing class boundaries and the exemptions of the period, the line army was never more than a peasants’ and foreign mercenaries’ army. See Shanahan (1945: 35–43, 47).

• 26 According to Simms (1997), this inherent difficulty of making decisions in Prussia at the turn of the nineteenth century seems to have emerged out of a complex interplay between the design of domestic institutional structures and the Prussian high politics of which the king was the centre, both factors favouring cacophony and circular processes of decision.

• 27 As Simms (1997: 315) argues, at no point before 1807 did the majority of the reformers intend anything else than making the executive more efficient within the political parameters of an absolutist state.

• 28 According to Simon (1955: 197–216), however, Hardenberg ended up contributing to blocking reformist constitutional ideas in Prussia in 1819.

• 29 See, for example, also the famous Addresses to the German Nation and other works by Fichte, who, in the context of Napoleonic occupation, made substantial contributions to the theoretical process of nation-building in Prussia (cf. Hippler 2008: 157–161).

• 30 However, because of fears of being too revolutionary and egalitarian, after 3 months the Landsturm was crippled of its initial breath in national fervour and reduced somehow in its attributions and role in the war. See Simon (1955: 171–180).

• 31 Girard depicts this idea as ritual cannibalism. See Girard (1979: 278–280).