(This article appeared originally in The Cambridge Wagner Encyclopedia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), ed. Nicholas Vazsonyi)
Frantz, (Gustav Adolph) Constantin (b.
Börnecke, 12 Sep. 1817; d. Blasewitz, 2 May 1891), historian and political
theorist. Prussian civil servant, from 1862 a full-time writer. Initially
Hegelian, Schelling’s influence
turned him rightward. Like many contemporaries, Frantz addressed the “German
question:” how to reconcile cultural nationhood with German Kleinstaaterei (petty-statism). This he
described, with typical national modesty, as the most obscure, most involved,
and most comprehensive problem in all of modern history. Note the German conflation
between national and universal, also present in Wagner’s and others’ writings.
Critical of liberal,
instrumentalist conceptions of state and monarchy, which he viewed in natural,
organic terms, Frantz opposed both the National Liberals (associated with
Jewish hegemony) and Bismarck’s kleindeutsch
policy, meaning unification as a Prusso-German nation state, excluding Austria.
Instead, Frantz advocated particularism within a pacifistic confederation to
include Switzerland, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Scandinavia. Austria and
Prussia would act from within rather than as would-be great powers. This
federal model for Europe as a whole would defend against French and Russian
expansionism, and protect traditional Western Christendom. Latterly claimed as
a forerunner of the European ideal, Frantz was Romantically nostalgic for the
Holy Roman Empire: not a state, but a set of legal institutions, through which
sovereign entities, ranging from electorates to Imperial knights, might thrive,
as much culturally as politically. It was Germany’s particular privilege and
calling, Frantz believed, to form a living connection between state and
international law in the development of continental Europe. German unification (1871), he believed, ignored
German historical development, transplanting foreign constitutional forms in
the name of a national principle.
Frantz may have influenced
a surprisingly rare expression of blatant nationalism in Wagner’s dramatic oeuvre:
Hans Sachs’s peroration in Die
Meistersinger von Nürnberg. Even if the Empire fell to a French (welsch) threat, Sachs exclaims, “holy
German art” would endure. Wagner had encountered Frantz’s work during the
1860s, dedicating the second edition of Opera and Drama to him and proposing
to Ludwig II in 1866 that he
assume leadership of the German Confederation. Cosima records: “R. says, ‘Who
suffered more than I did under the drawbacks of life in Germany? Indeed, I even
got to the stage of wishing to see the whole nation dissolved, but always in
the hope of building something new, something more in line with the German
spirit. It was a great joy to me to get a glimpse through Constantin Frantz of
the German Empire; and who cannot feel at least some hope, now that the Germans
have shown such strength?’” (CWD, 14 Feb. 1871). When Wagner’s initial
enthusiasm for Bismarck’s Reich
faltered, this almost metaphysical Reich
remained an alternative.
In 1878, Wagner
republished “What is German?” requesting Frantz’s response. Frantz’s Open Letter to Richard Wagner (June 1878)
also published in the Bayreuther Blätter, argued that the
new Reich was as un-German as could
be. Importantly, he distinguishes between (German) “metapolitics” and
conventional politics (analogously with metaphysics and physics). Metapolitics
must have a higher aim than mere political ends, a privileging characteristic in
the idealism of the later Bayreuth Circle.