FREEDOM »Oh Britannia! of your freedom (...) just a hatful!« is what Friedrich Daniel Schubart, the Swabian poet and publicist of the Enlightenment, wished for himself and his German compatriots in 1774. He recalled the British constitutional tradition, but above all the time-honoured civil liberties of the English people, set down in the Magna Charta (1215), defended in the Glorious Revolution (1688), and guaranteed anew by the Bill of Rights (1689). The French revolutionaries, too, cried out for freedom in 1789 and demanded liberty from feudalistic tyranny. After 1791 the motto of the French Revolution became »Liberty, Equality, Fraternity«, a slogan that has remained in the collective consciousness until the present day both in and outside of France. Ever since this epoch-making event, the turning point of Europe on the way to the modern age, the cry for freedom has reverberated across the continent: the cry for individual freedom inscribed in human and civil rights as well as freedom in the sense of national independence and sovereignty. The French Revolution influenced, directly or indirectly, the history of all European states and nations. As in its motherland, the Revolution was everywhere the object of passionate and antithetical perception. For with the coming of the Revolution, and especially in consequence of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars and French hegemony over Europe, national consciousness awakened in all corners of the continent. A few nations succeeded in achieving the desired freedom without spilling blood, others flung themselves into ruinous conflicts, while still other countries that could look back upon a long tradition discovered in their own past the foundations for legitimising their national identity.
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