Franz Mehring  Absolutism and Revolution in Germany    The
French Revolution  Historically speaking, the great French
Revolution that broke out in 1789, through its effects on
Europe, restored the vitality of a Germany that had degenerated
in the swamp of feudalism.  In this revolution, the warring
classes and parties stripped off for the first time all
religious disguise and struggled against one another in purely
secular forms, openly proclaiming their purely secular aims.
Thus Christianity entered its last phase as a world-historical
phenomenon. Incapable of serving any longer as the ideological
banner of any historically progressive class, it became more and
more the exclusive possession of the ruling classes. From then
onwards they used it as a naked instrument of rule, in which
sense it made no difference to them whether or not they believed
in the religion they insisted on preserving amongst the people.
In the very period that absolute monarchy revealed itself in
Germany as merely a deterrent caricatu