The French Renascence

From the beginning of the Introduction.

In the 'Year of Terror,' 1792, when the hosts of Prussia and Austria, taking advantage of the distress of their neighbours, invaded a distracted country, and initiated a European War which was to last a quarter of a century; when France, bankrupt, without an army, and in the grip of anarchy, seemed threatened with total ruin, the greatest of German poets, who had accompanied the Teutonic legions on their triumphant march through Gaul, wrote down in his...