=The Political Enlightenment of Germany――Frederick the Great.= Political changes preceded and did not follow philosophical theories in the German Enlightenment. Germany was therefore like England and unlike France in this respect. The coming of Frederick to the throne of the now powerful Prussia, the reforms that he inaugurated, the religious toleration that he granted, his recall of Wolff to Halle, his avowed support of intellectual things, and especially the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763) were the political groundwork that made possible the Enlightenment in Germany. Frederick himself is the great figure in the German Enlightenment, just as Voltaire is in the French. Frederick accomplished in concrete acts for political Europe what Voltaire accomplished for ecclesiastical Europe. Voltaire destroyed the ecclesiastical absolutism of the spiritual power, while Frederick destroyed the absolutism so long connected with the name of the Holy Roman Empire and the House of Hapsburg. Before he died, he had freed the German states from the dominance of Austria, and had given to the Empire its death-blow. In the Seven Years’ War he had given to modern Europe an example of a new political ideal in an autocrat who professed to be the servant of the State. His whole thought was upon the advancement of his State. He set up the principle of the equality of his subjects before the law, and the principle of religious and philosophical liberty. In his external struggles with Austria and in the internal construction of his kingdom Frederick is the protest of the Enlightenment against the arbitrary despotism of political Europe. The example of Frederick was an inspiration to all Germany. Kant calls the eighteenth century the Age of Frederick the Great. Frederick had made his subjects feel that they were Prussians, or, as Goethe puts it, “Fritzche” (Fritz’s men); that the great foe of the German people was the German Empire as personified by the Austrians and Saxons. When he had conducted to a successful issue a deadly war of seven years single handed against the combined force of more than half of Europe,――Austria, Russia, and France, all representing political absolutism,――he inspired patriotism not only in his own subjects, but in the people of many other German states. Reforms were undertaken in Bavaria, Baden, Saxony, Brunswick, etc., and by Catherine of Russia and Joseph of Austria.