This chapter looks at the impact of the French Revolution on this German discussion of the meaning of Protestantism, as well as at the internationalization of its themes through Charles Villers’ Essay on the Spirit and Influence of Luther’s Reformation (1804). A French exile in Germany, Villers synthesized a German historical discourse about the Reformation and progress and repackaged and publicized it to a European audience in response to a prize essay competition by the Institut de France. Accompanied by a brief discussion of Johann Gottfried Herder’s historical theories, the chapter also shows how Villers’ intervention (and its reception) signaled a return of the themes of nation and religion as forces of historical discourse.

Having found a way to justify a world of state-machines, German lawyers thought about how to manage those machines so as to produce "happiness", which would eventually be understood to include the freedom of the nation and its members. At the University of Göttingen from 1734 onwards ius naturae et gentium eventually produced four specialised idioms: empirical state-science, economics, philosophy and modern law of nations, each opening a distinct way to address an increasingly international world. Among legal professionals, the view of the law of nations as the formalisation of European diplomacy became generally accepted. But the most influential aspect of the German debates concerned the role of the state in realising freedom in conditions of political modernity. Individual rights were to be reconciled with the flourishing of the nation; the state was to adopt its historically appropriate position in relationship to expanding bourgeois civil society. The search for a new vocabulary to address such features of modernity persuaded international lawyers finally to settle on “civilisation”, as will be briefly noted in the Epilogue.