Revolutions are often associated with great upheavals and bloodshed – accompanied by metaphors of eruptions and earthquakes. Revolutionaries are often portrayed as heroic figures – strong and invincible – but the reality is often very different. Revolutionaries such as Thomas Jefferson, for example, wielded pens rather than swords. I’ve always been fascinated by the men and women who used ideas and words to fight their battles. Or those who quietly rose against their oppressors, undermining and outsmarting them with their minds, philosophy, covert operations, wit and non–violent resistance.
My book Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self tells the story of a group of brilliant poets, thinkers and philosophers who came together in the small German university town Jena in the last decade of the 18th century and changed the way we think about ourselves, the world and nature. At a time when most of Europe was held in the iron fist of absolutism, they put the self at centre stage and imbued it with the most thrilling of all powers: free will and self–determination. They did so by giving rousing lectures and writing books, pamphlets, articles and poems – and with pens as sharp as the French guillotines. “A word of command set armies in motion,” the poet Novalis wrote, it was “the word freedom.”
