The fact that the French Revolution was something unprecedented, exceptional, and portentous for the future of Europe and perhaps the world did not escape the notice of some contemporaries. Edmund Burke, its fiercest antagonist, perceived as early as 1790 that he was witnessing the first ‘complete revolution’. Kant predicted in 1798 that such a phenomenon could never be obliterated from the memory of mankind. Some twenty-five years later, Stendhal declared: ‘In the two thousand years of recorded world history so sharp a revolution in customs, ideas, and beliefs has perhaps never occurred before.’ Even so critical an observer as the German nationalist Arndt had to admit in retrospect: ‘I should be very ungrateful and also a hypocrite if I did not avow that we owe an immense amount to that savage and crazy revolution … and that it has put ideas into people's heads and hearts which twenty or thirty years before the event most men would have shuddered to conceive of.’

From the very outset the Revolution had a profound impact on Europe's intellectuals. At that early stage delight by far prevailed upon dismay. Indeed, it was widely felt that a new world was opening to the astonished sight. William Wordsworth immortalised that frame of mind in The Prelude: