The Origins of Totalitarianism (Penguin Modern Classics)

by Hannah Arendt

A few years later the French exiles actually tried to form an internationale of aristocrats in order to stave off the revolt of those they considered to be a foreign enslaved people. And although the more practical side of these attempts suffered the spectacular disaster of Valmy, émigrés like Charles François Dominique de Villiers, who in about 1800 opposed the ‘Gallo-Romains’ to the Germanics, or like William Alter who a decade later dreamed of a federation of all Germanic peoples,fn12 did not admit defeat. It probably never occurred to them that they were actually traitors, so firmly were they convinced that the French Revolution was a ‘war between foreign peoples’ – as François Guizot much later put it.