Hegel, il barone d'Eckstein e l'«ala erudita della Congrégation».

Abstract: In Hegel’s "Lectures on the philosophy of History" and in a review devoted by the same author to Görres’ Munich conferences about universal history we find two references to Baron Ferdinand von Eckstein, which place him with Friedrich Schlegel, Lamennais and the orientalists Jean-Pierre Abel-Rémusat and Jean-Antoine Saint-Martin among the supporters of the belief in a pre-Christian revelation of the essential truths of Catholicism, whose traces could still be found in the sacred books of the main religions of Far East. Through an examination of Eckstein’s ideas, as they are exposed in his Parisian periodical «Le Catholique», but also in the Bavarian «Eos», and through a reconstruction of Eckstein’s frequentation of the intellectual and political circle called "Congrégation de Marie" (a semi-secret society, working in support of Villèle’s government) during the Restoration in France, this essay aims to discover the philosophical background of Hegel’s polemics and to illustrate some connections between the rising French Orientalism and the counterevolutionary thought in that period.