This reaction was partly due to an exaggerated sentiment of nationality and hatred of everything foreign, aroused by the presence of the French legions in the country, and strengthened by the sacrifices and the success of the struggle for independence. National consciousness found an ally in the Christian revolt against the French Religion of Reason. Enthusiasm for the faith, which the French had overthrown, added zest to the enthusiasm for the fatherland, which the French had overrun. “Christian Germanism” became, not only a patriotic motto, but a veritable cult of a novel and jealous god to whom everything that was non-Christian and non-German, including the Jew, ought to be immolated. ♦1819♦ “Hep, hep!” (_Hierosolyma est perdita_) became the battle-cry of the Jew-baiters in many German towns, and the persecution spread even into Denmark, where the Jews had been placed on a footing of equality since 1814. ♦1828–30♦ The Prussian Government proposed a plan for the improvement of the social and political condition of the Jews, but the measure had to be abandoned owing to the opposition which it met with on the part of the representatives of the Prussian people. ♦1840♦ This return to mediaeval intolerance once assumed in Prussia the mediaeval form of a blood-accusation; but the charge only served to establish the innocence of the Jews and the stupid credulity of their assailants. None the less, it supplied a striking illustration of the retrogression of the public mind. For the prejudice, even when its basis was proved false, continued to subsist in a more or less latent condition among the lower intellectual strata of society--as prejudices have a way of doing for long centuries after they have vanished from the surface--and during the revolution of 1848, on the Upper Rhine, it led to a general persecution of the Jews, who sought refuge in the neighbouring territory of Switzerland. But the reaction was temporary, and the revolutionary movement proved, in the main, favourable to the cause of Jewish emancipation.