Nations hostile to the French Revolution developed race-thinking along national lines

Evidence

WHILE THE SEEDS of German race-thinking were planted during the Napoleonic wars, the beginnings of the later English development appeared during the French Revolution and may be traced back to the man who violently denounced it as the “most astonishing [crisis] that has hitherto happened in the world”—to Edmund Burke. The tremendous influence his work has exercised not only on English but also on German political thought is well known. The fact, however, must be stressed because of resemblances between German and English race-thinking as contrasted with the French brand. These resemblances stem from the fact that both countries had defeated the Tricolor and therefore showed a certain tendency to discriminate against the ideas of Liberté-Egalité-Fraternité as foreign inventions. Social inequality being the basis of English society, British Conservatives felt not a little uncomfortable when it came to the “rights of men.” According to opinions widely held by nineteenth-century Tories, inequality belonged to the English national character. Disraeli found “something better than the Rights of Men in the rights of Englishmen” and to Sir James Stephen “few things in history [seemed] so beggarly as the degree to which the French allowed themselves to be excited about such things.” This is one of the reasons why they could afford to develop race-thinking along national lines until the end of the nineteenth century, whereas the same opinions in France showed their true antinational face from the very beginning. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 465