L’Allemagne et la Prusse vues par un certain Edgar Quinet / Université inter-âges de l'Ain

"Germany and Prussia as seen by a certain Edgar Quinet".
(Bourg-en-Bresse 1803 - Versailles 1875).
Patrick SUBREVILLE

With infinite tenderness for his mother Eugénie, this local boy and historian, almost forgotten in his good hometown, was also a philosopher, writer, politician, poet and translator. A hard worker, a polyglot and a lover of ancient languages, this craftsman of the Republic, married to a young German woman, was first a student at Heidelberg and then a great scholar.
student in Heidelberg, then a keen traveler. Very early on, he became convinced that "the deep, continuous, necessary and irrevocable thought" that inhabits and works on the Germanic states, is the realization of their unity.
He never ceased to warn Paris of the dangers emanating from our neighbors Germany and Prussia, hemmed in at the heart of Europe, between two great, complex countries with long and winding histories, France and Russia.
He announced the coming of a "providential being" who, in the 19th century, would bring about German unity. France's fatal error soon became apparent: a lack of interest in German and Prussian politics, and a faint belief in the reassuring vision of Madame de Staël (1766-1817), who favored a "Germany of thinkers and poets".
Ah, if only we'd listened to Edgar Quinet...!

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