Now the direct and indirect consquences of such folly lay before me as crimes and half-crimes, all together effective enough to shake the most beautiful throne in the world.”
34 Goethe, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 16, 566. “For many years I had the occasion to curse with vexation the deceptions of quixotic dreamers and deliberate enthusiasts, and to wonder with disgust at the incomprehensible blindness of excellent men to such impudent impositions. Now the direct and indirect consquences of such folly lay before me as crimes and half-crimes, all together effective enough to shake the most beautiful throne in the world.” There is a close connection here between Goethe’s fascination with such Phantasten and Schwärmer and his abiding sense that the French Revolution was bound up with a proliferation of the fantastical. See Jürgen Söring, “Die Verwirrung und das Wunderbare in Goethes Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten,” Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie 100, no.4 (1981): 544–59.