Politically and socially the Holy Roman Empire was in striking contrast to the power and splendor of contemporaneous France. The Thirty Years’ War had left the empire absolutely desolate. The land was impoverished, the nation disrupted, and the population reduced from seventeen millions before the war to five millions after the war. The war had been a generation long and it had degraded the nation. It had settled nothing. It left the people poor and the princes absolute within their respective states. The upper classes everywhere, except at Weimar, had become profligate. The universities were reduced to a position below what they were in the Renaissance. The prince of each state established the religion for his state, so that practically no religious liberty had been gained. Lutherans, Calvinists, and Catholics were exhausted, but were still antagonistic. There was no moral activity among the Orthodox; often they set their own immorality up to prove the absolutism of their respective dogma. The war left Germany politically prostrate and intellectually stagnant. In the years that follow the Thirty Years’ War it is possible to detect movements that are the beginnings of the Enlightenment. It is an important point that Germany was resuscitated from sources that lay within her own civilization. The French Enlightenment and the intellectual freedom of modern France were due largely to the influence of foreign ideas from England. The seeds of the German intellectual revival were developed on her own soil. Those beginnings are (1) the rise of Prussia; (2) the early German literature; (3) the Pietistic movement; (4) the transformation of Leibnitz’s rationalism. 1. The rise of the little electorate of Brandenburg to the powerful kingdom of Prussia in 1740 was the political basis of the Enlightenment that followed. No state had suffered more during the Thirty Years’ War. The entire population was reduced to less than a million, and Berlin, the capital, had only three hundred citizens. The government was as harshly absolute as elsewhere. The rights of the citizens were entirely taken away by the three princes who ruled over Prussia between 1648 and 1740. But a powerful kingdom was built up, with a strong and patriotic army. It extended its dominions and was a refuge for Protestants, who fled to it in large numbers. It came to be feared by all the German states, and in the latter part of this period it had to be reckoned with in the councils of Europe. Itself an absolutism, it was the vigorous political body that alone could destroy the traditional absolutism of the Hapsburgs and the Holy Roman Empire. Puffendorf declared that the old Empire with its feeble sovereignties was a monster. It was a monster spectre――a stubborn political idea that hovered over Europe. Frederick the Great’s mission in the next period was to destroy it.