'La libertà e i suoi traditori': Heine e Büchner

After tracing the variations of the female allegorisations of the Liberty in the social revolutions at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries, the article aims to examine the libertarian sentiment in Heinrich Heine and Georg Büchner from an imagological perspective. In the words of the philosopher Isaiah Berlin, these authors can be regarded as “betrayers of freedom”, because they exemplify the ambivalent notion of liberty in the image of a femme libre that is as alluring as it is repulsive and fatal.