Résumé
As a young man, in 1843-44, Karl Marx believed that Lutheranism was the ‘revolutionary past’ of Germany. In his view the revolution to come, which would be intellectual and social alike, began ‘in the philosopher’s brain’, just as the Reformation had first existed ‘in the monk’s brain’. As far as he was concerned, Hegel considered the Reformation, which resulted both in the transformation of consciences and the change of government, as safely protecting Germany against any French-like revolution (either in its 1789 or its 1830 form). The ‘subverting’ of Hegel by Marx was only a significant landmark in the large intellectual and political debate about the Lutheran Revolution and its links with authority and revolution that took place in Germany from the last decade of the XVIIIth century to 1848, from the Aufklärung as radicalized in ‘jacobinism’ down to the Hegelian left, through political romanticism, Young Germany and Heine.