This figures as a summary at the end of a fictional traveller's account, supposedly composed by an enlightened French citizen, writing to a brother in Paris about his experiences in Germany a few years before the start of the French Revolution. It belongs to the tradition of texts criticising society by observing domestic conditions through the eyes of foreign visitors with their alien points of view. The author was born in Hoechst in 1754 and was part of the southern Catholic Enlightenment, i.e. was among those publicists who provided the accompanying music to the Josephine reforms. In this text Germany appears as a wealthy and potentially powerful country, and, thanks to her princes, as more enlightened and more inclined to philosophy than her neighbours but unfit for national unity, because the German national character runs counter to it. At the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it was taken for granted, mostly with reference to ancient Greece, that a high level of culture and a dismembered state were mutually dependent.