Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther
1774
A 24-year-old Frankfurt lawyer published a short epistolary novel about an artistic youth's doomed love and suicide. It swept Europe in months. Young men wore blue coats and yellow waistcoats in Werther's honor; a wave of copycat suicides followed. Romanticism had found its first fever. Napoleon claimed to have read it seven times and carried it on the Egyptian campaign as a kind of talisman.
In context
Also in 1774 (4 other events on record)
- Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca · Middle East · Politics
- Coercive (Intolerable) Acts · North America · Politics
- Priestley Isolates Oxygen · Europe · Science
- First Continental Congress Meets · North America · Politics
Before and after in Europe
Before and after in Culture
Era
Enlightenment (1651–1800), one of 696 events from that era on Saeculum.