The year 1798 opened in January with the French invasion of the Swiss Confederacy, causing the collapse of the historically independent cantons and imposing a centralized regime known as the Helvetic Republic. This calculated act of aggression disenchanted many young European intellectuals who had initially shared a heady enthusiasm for the French Revolution and its proclaimed ideals of liberté, égalité, et fraternité. That spring Coleridge published “France: An Ode,” in which he renounced his faith in the alleged revolutionary ideals, and Wordsworth changed his hitherto positive views for the same reason.

But the aggression continued, intensifying the intellectual disaffection and political opposition in other countries. A month later French forces captured Rome and, after destroying the ecclesiastical state, proclaimed a Roman Republic. In May Napoleon, who had already registered decisive victories against the Austrians and Italians, set out for Egypt with an army of forty thousand, capturing Malta along the way and forcing the Maltese Order of Johannites to forsake the island for Russia. By early July Napoleon's forces had taken Alexandria, and later that month, having defeated the Egyptian army near the Pyramids, entered Cairo. Yet only a few days later, as though to fulfill the wishes of the disillusioned British poets, Admiral Nelson destroyed the French fleet in the Nile delta.

These military events, oft en starring the thirty-year-old Napoleon, were accompanied by pronounced shift s in intellectual and cultural affairs featuring other members of a youthful generation with new aspirations and ideas. One of the results, Clifford Siskin has suggested, was the emergence of 1798 as “The Year of the System”—“system” as a marker of modernity and as “a primary modern means of totalizing and rationalizing our experience of the social.” Siskin discusses three such “systems” published in England in 1798, as exemplified by Malthus's Essay on Population, Wordsworth's “Advertisement” for his Lyrical Ballads, and Mary Hays's An Appeal to the Men of Great Britain. Germany would have provided an equal if not greater number of actual systems published in that lustrum, ranging from “Das älteste Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus,” written in 1796 jointly by G. W. F. Hegel, Friedrich Schelling, and Friedrich Hölderlin, to J. G. Fichte's System der Sittenlehre nach Prinzipien der Wissenschaft slehre (1798) and Schelling's System des transzendentalen Idealismus (1800).