Friedrich Ancillon
Johann Peter Friedrich Ancillon (30 April 1767 – 19 April 1837) was a Prussian historian and statesman.
Ancillon was born in Berlin, Kingdom of Prussia, and was the great-grandson of French jurist and diplomat Charles Ancillon. After studying theology at Geneva University, he was appointed minister to the French community in Berlin. At the same time his reputation as a historical scholar secured him the post of professor of history at the military academy. In 1793 he visited Switzerland, and in 1796 France, publishing the impressions gathered during his travels in a series of articles which he afterwards collected under the title of Mélanges de littérature et de philosophie (1801).
Ancillon took rank among the most famous historians of his day by his next work, Tableau des révolutions du système politique de l'Europe depuis le XVe siècle (1803, 4 volumes), which gained him the praise of the Institute of France, and admission to the Military Academy of Berlin. It was the first attempt to recognize psychological factors in historical movements, but otherwise its importance was exaggerated. Its "sugary optimism, unctuous phraseology and pulpit logic" appealed, however, to the reviving pietism of the age succeeding the Revolution, and these qualities, as well as his eloquence as a preacher, brought Ancillon to the notice of the court. In 1808 he was appointed tutor to the royal princes, in 1809 councillor of state in the department of religion, and in 1810 tutor of the crown prince (afterwards Frederick William IV of Prussia), on whose sensitive and dreamy nature he was to exercise a powerful but far from wholesome influence. In October 1814, when his pupil came of age, Ancillon was included by Prince Hardenberg in the ministry, as privy councillor of legation in the department of foreign affairs, with a view to utilizing his supposed gifts as a philosophical historian in the preparation of the projected Prussian constitution. But Ancillon's reputed liberalism was of too invertebrate a type to survive the trial of actual contact with affairs. The practical difficulty of the constitutional problem gave the "court parson", as August von Gneisenau had contemptuously called him, excuse enough for a change of front which, incidentally, would please his exalted patrons. He covered his defection from Hardenberg's liberal constitutionalism by a series of "philosophical" treatises on the nature of the state and of man, and became the soul of the reactionary movement at the Berlin court, and the faithful henchman of Klemens Wenzel von Metternich in the general politics of Germany and of Europe.
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