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Nation 107a cultural concept of nationality based on the German language andlegitimized with Protestant theology. In 1813, three months before hislecture on translation at the Berlin Akademie der Wissenschaften andeight months before Napoleon was finally defeated at the Battle ofLeipzig, Schleiermacher delivered a sermon entitled “A Nation’s Dutyin a War for Freedom,” in which he represented the war with France asa struggle against cultural and political domination. If victorious, heexhorted the congregation, “we shall be able to preserve for ourselvesour own distinctive character, our laws, our constitution and ourculture” (Schleiermacher 1890:73).In June, the month of his lecture, Schleiermacher wrote a letter toFriedrich Schlegel in which his nationalism turned utopian:My greatest wish after liberation, is for one true German Empire,powerfully representing the entire German folk and territory to theoutside world, while internally allowing the various Länder andtheir princes a great deal of freedom to develop and rule accordingto their own particular needs.(Sheehan 1989:379)This vision of Germany as a union of relatively autonomousprincipalities was partly a compensation for the then prevailinginternational conflict, and it is somewhat backward-looking, tracedwith a nostalgia for the domestic political organization that prevailedbefore the French occupation. Napoleon had introduced socialinnovations achieved by the revolution, abolishing feudalism inPrussia and promoting “enlightened” despotism. Schleiermacherhimself was a member of a bourgeois cultural elite, but his nationalistideology is such that it admits aristocracy, monarchy, even animperialist tendency—but only when they constitute a national unityresistant to foreign domination.Presented to the Prussian academic establishment on 24 June1813, at the height of the conflict with France, Schleiermacher’slecture constructs a role for translation in a nationalist culturalpolitics. His theory of foreignizing translation should be seen asanti-French because it opposes the translation method thatdominated France since neoclassicism, viz. domestication, makingthe foreign author travel abroad to the target-language reader.When surveying the limited acceptance of foreignizing translationin Western culture, Schleiermacher reserves his most witheringsarcasm for France: