Gustav, Count of Schlabrendorf (22 March 1750 – 21 August 1824), described in various sources as a "citizen of the world" ("Weltbürger"), was a political author and an enlightenment thinker. During or shortly before the first part of 1789 he relocated to Paris from where he enjoyed a ringside seat for the unfolding phases of the French Revolution, which, initially, he enthusiastically supported. He backed the revolutionary precepts of "Liberty, Equality and Brotherhood". He soon had reason to become mistrustful of the revolution's radicalisation, however, and during the "Terror" ("Terreur") period spent more than 17 months in prison, avoiding a terminal rendezvous with the guillotine only through an administrative oversight. He subsequently wrote several critical works about Napoléon Bonaparte. It was a reflection of his increasingly idiosyncratic lifestyle that by the 1820s he was becoming known as "The Hermit of Paris" (or, in certain more scholarly contemporary sources, "Eremita Parisiensis"): he was happy to endorse the soubriquet, on occasion using it to describe himself.
Life Provenance and early years was born in Stettin, at that time a recovering war-ravaged port city in the Prussian Province of Pomerania (and since 1945 a Polish city known internationally by its Polish-language name as Szczecin). He was the third son of Ernst Wilhelm von Schlabrendorf by his marriage to Anna Carolina von Otterstaedt, from the aristocratic Dahlwitz family. The two families had been close for a number of generations. Soon after Gustav's birth, his father was appointed First Minister of Silesia. As a result of the promotion the family moved, in 1755, to the Silesian capital, Breslau (as Wrocław was known at that time). The job of integrating the prosperous and recently annexed Silesian territories into the Kingdom of Prussia was a major challenge, but it was one for which Ernst Wilhelm von Schlabrendorf was apparently well rewarded in various ways. On 20 March 1763 the king made him a special gift of 50,000 Thalers. By the time he died in 1769 his family was, by the standards of the time and place, conspicuously wealthy. Gustav von Schlabrendorf spent most of his childhood in Silesia. He received a thorough and comprehensive schooling from tutors and then, in 1767, moved on to Hochschule (university) level education in Frankfurt am Oder where he remained till 1769. Between 1769 and 1772 he continued his studies at Halle. He had enrolled to study Law, which would have provided a conventional preparation for a career in public administration. Gustav von Schlabrendorf, however, interpreted his curricular opportunities more widely, studying ancient and Modern Languages along with Philosophy and the Arts. He was also drawn to Freemasonry which had arrived in Prussia from England and Scotland earlier that century. In 1777 he was accepted into the "Minerva zu den drei Palmen" ("Minerva of the three palm trees") lodge in Leipzig.
Travels His father's death at the end of 1769 left Gustav von Schlabrendorf well provided for. Since 1766 he had also been receiving income from a benefice in Magdeburg which his father had set up for him back in 1753. He could therefore afford to broaden his education with a succession of lengthy trips across the German lands, the Swiss Confederacy, France and England. In the end he based himself in England for six years. He was, in particular, intrigued and impressed by the uniqueness of the country, by its constitutional structure, its highly developed industries and, not least by its philanthropic institutions based around its national church For some of his time in England he was accompanied by the distinguished anglophile aristocrat, Baron vom Stein. During this period he also established what would become a long-lasting friendships with the enlightenment philosopher, Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi. and the radical old-Etonian polemicist Horne Tooke.
Paris Shortly before the outbreak of the French Revolution, von Schlabrendorf relocated to Paris. He took a room in the "Hôtel des Deux Siciles" to which his carriage driver had delivered him. As matters turned out this hotel would become his home for the next thirty years. Several high-profile French intellectuals associated with the enlightenment ideals underpinning the unfolding revolution which von Schlabrendorf anticipated with enthusiasm became personal friends. These included the Marquis de Condorcet, Louis-Sébastien Mercier and Jacques Pierre Brissot. (Two of these three would be dead by the end of 1795.) In addition, he quickly became a part of the network of politically aware German expatriates living in the city. Among these exiled democrats and revolutionaries were the writer-polymath Georg Forster, the Schwabian physician and commentator Johann Georg Kerner, the political journalist from Silesia, Konrad Engelbert Oelsner and more briefly, the youthful revolutionary Adam Lux. Von Schlabrendorf was older and richer than most of the others: he tended to take a lead in offering advice and looking after the material needs of his German radical friends in Paris.
Victim of the revolution Gustav von Schlabrendorf greeted the outbreak of the French Revolution as "die Erlöserin des rein Menschlichen" (loosely "the salvation of all humanity"). His circle greeted the Storming of the Bastille with enthusiasm. Government, especially in Bourbon France, was out of touch with the increasingly prevalent enlightenment precepts in which they believed. However, as the revolution unfolded on the streets of Paris the "moderate" revolutionaries found themselves marginalised after the Girondins were replaced by better organised Jacobin hardliners. Gustav von Schlabrendorf and his circle found themselves under intensifying suspicion. In the summer of 1793 von Schlabrendorf was arrested. At about the same time he broke off his brief but passionate engagement with Jane, the sister of the Scots-born reformist Thomas Christie. In prison he found that the inmates divided into "two classes of men: men of rank and foreigners". Determined to keep a low profile, he "shunned the former and associated wholly with the latter", attempting to be identified as a sort of transnational member of the revolutionary "Sans-culottes" faction. He continued to be a generous benefactor to needy friends and fellow inmates. He was able to entrust his wealth to Oelsner, who had been able to avoid imprisonment and probable execution by escaping to Switzerland Oelsner was now able to conserve von Schlabrendorf's property and, later, to return it despite his own financial difficulties. Meanwhile von Schlabrendorf awaited his execution with evident equanimity. Various reports later surfaced as to how he managed to avoid death at this stage: the most colourful contends that on the morning when his name appeared on the list of prisoners to be placed on the cart for transportation to the guillotine he was unable to find his shoes. According to the anecdote that later emerged, on account of this difficulty his jailor agreed that it was unreasonable that he should be executed without his boots on his feet, and he was accordingly left off that day's cart, in order to be taken with the next day's batch for execution instead. However, on the next day, as he awaited the call, duly prepared and booted, his name was not called. His execution had evidently been forgotten, and although he feared being summoned for death each day thereafter, in the end he was able to leave the prison alive. That happened only after the fall of Robespierre, at which point a large number of surviving detainees were released. Gustav von Schlabrendorf, who by this time had been imprisoned for almost eighteen months, now returned to his room at the "Hôtel des Deux Siciles" in the fashionable Rue de Richelieu, where he would live out the rest of his life.
A Paris Diogenes Even though from now on he showed a growing reluctance ever to leave his hotel, von Schlabrendorf quickly resumed his role as a support and focus of intellectual ideas, both through face to face discussion and through his habit of making generous financial provision to those who turned to him whether they deserved it or (in the view of at least one biographer) not. In his city-centre hotel room he himself led an existence of bizarre austerity. His increasingly eccentric lifestyle led to him being described by friends and admirers as a "Parisian Diogenes" ("Diogenes von Paris"), a soubriquet which according to some observers he rather liked. He was also a regular letter writer. Letters survived, which is one of several reasons that he made a major contribution to the detailed knowledge and understanding of the French Revolution across Germany as the nineteenth century progressed towards a more democratic future. That was important because German reformers and revolutionaries who set forth their proposals in 1848, not just in 1848 but also during the decades that followed, drew much of their understanding of the French Revolution from the writings of Gustav von Schlabrendorf.
Women Unusually for those times, but significantly in the context of twentieth century developments, many of his interlocutors and correspondents were women. One who has left a particularly large footprint in history for English-language readers was Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797), like him an enthusiastic backer, at the outset, of the French Revolution who at the end of 1792 came to Paris in order better to understand what was happening. She quickly came into contact with von Schlabrendorf's circle of mainly foreign-born intellectuals during the period of more than two years that she spent in Paris. According to one of Wollstonecraft's biographers "the rich Silesian Count von Schlabrendorff ... was living 'on almost nothing' in order to avoid adverse comment on his wealth". Subsequently von Schlabrendorf would recall her "charming grace ... [and face] ... full of expression.... There was enchantment in her glance, her voice and her movement.... [She was] the noblest, purest and most intelligent woman I ever met". A [female] biographer quoting von Schlabrendorf's reaction also points out that he was "a susceptible man and was [at the time]... engaged to Jane Christie". Indeed there were famously plenty of men who were charmed by Mary Wollstonecraft, and no doubt there will have been other woman to whom von Schlabrendorf was attracted. But there is no record that large numbers of women visited him during his eighteen months in prison awaiting the guillotine: according to an entry in Wilhelm von Humboldt's diaries, Mary Wollstonecraft often did.
Long war