Friedrich Hölderlin, the French Revolution, and Napoleon: Politics, Poetry, Philosophy

Friedrich Hölderlin’s reaction to the French Revolution and the subsequent historical events, including the rise of Napoleon, was the subject of alternating perspectives among the academics of the last century. From the 1940s onwards, readings focusing on the political dimension of his work started to emerge in both the Marxist and Western blocs, and in the late 1960s the French scholar Pierre Bertaux called Hölderlin a “Jacobin”. The string of monographs and other studies that followed, suggested and discussed alternative categories for describing Hölderlin’s political identity, but this vogue ran out of steam in the 1990s due to a lack of fresh ideas and the ideological deflation brought on by the fall of the Berlin Wall. This essay aims to revive this wave of interest without incurring the ideological shortcomings inevitable in the then historical circumstances. In order to do so, it centres on Napoleon as the key to Hölderlin’s peculiar way of connecting politics, poetry, and philosophy.