In this respect the Romantics could be either progressive or reactionary. In what might be called the revolutionary States, the radical States created after the French Revolution, they were reactionary, they called for the return of some kind of medieval darkness; in reactionary States, such as Prussia after 1812, they became progressive, inasmuch as they regarded this creation of the King of Prussia as a suffocating, artificial mechanism which stifled the natural organic thrust of the life of the human beings imprisoned by it. It could take either form. That is why we encounter revolutionary Romantics and reactionary Romantics. That is why it is impossible to pin Romanticism down to any given political view, however often this has been tried.

— The Roots of Romanticism by Isaiah Berlin, Henry Hardy, John Gray