Ernst Moritz Arndt - Anti-French Resentments and Antisemitism

Anti-French Resentments and Antisemitism

Originally an enthusiastic supporter of the ideas of the French revolution, Arndt dissociated himself from them when the Reign of Terror of the Jacobins became apparent. When Napoleon began to conquer Europe, this renunciation was transformed into hatred.

Like Fichte and Jahn, Arndt began to define a German nation as a society of homogeneous descent, drawing on the history of the Germanic peoples and the "teutonic" Middle Ages. Yet while his writings lack a specific political pogramme, they define external enemies instead. While freedom is often cited, it used in a diffuse context, just like the terms nation, home country and people. It has been noted, that the freedom Arndt envisioned was not that of a modern pluralistic society but a freedom of an archaic and Protestant tribal community. The Frenchmen are called weakened, womanish and morally depraved by Arndt while he praises German virtues which should be preserved:

"The Germans have not been bastardised by foreign peoples, have not become half-breeds, they more than many other peoples have remained in their native state of purity..."

These ideas lead Arndt to produce a harshly critical anti-French propaganda during the Napoleonic occupation of the German states whereby he incited the Germans to hate the French people:

"When I say I hate the French carelessness, I despise the French daintiness, I disapprove of the French loquacity and flightiness, I may pronounce a flaw, but it is a flaw that I share with all my people. I could likewise say I hate the English presumption, the English prudery, the English seclusiveness. These hated, despised, dispraised characteristics are not yet vices as such, from the peoples that they represent they may come with great virtues which I and my people are lacking. Therefore let us hate the Frenchmen quite freshly, let us hate our Frenchmen, the infamisers and destroyers of our power and virginity, even more, now that we feel how they weaken and enervate our virtue and strength."

He also warned of too close contact with Judaism. While he reasoned that "the seed of Abraham" was hardly predominant in a second generation after conversion to Christianity, he still warned of the "thousands which by the Russian tyranny will now come upon us even more abounding from Poland", "the impure flood from the East". Moreover he warned of a Jewish intellectual plot, claiming that Jews had "usurped" a good half of all literature.

Arndt also mingles his hatred of the French with antisemitism, calling the French "the Jewish people (das Judenvolk)", or "refined bad Jews (verfeinerte schlechte Juden)". In 1815 he writes about the French: "Jews... I call them again, not only for their Jewish lists and their penny-pinching avarice but even more because of their Jew-like sticking together."