The historical journal is a key work in Gentz's career. The periodical, which was published for two years at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries, takes on particular interest for the picture it reflects as well as for its philosophical and political options, the anguish and hopes it conveys at the dawn of a new century. Now a historian, now a committed writer, now a political thinker, Gentz is led to almost premonitory discernments concerning, on the one hand the dangers threatening Europe and on the other hand the benedicial influence of the english constitution on the political and economic life of great britain. In the historical journal Gentz appears both as a counter-revolutionary, fighting with a cold lucidity against the destructive spirit the ideas of 1789 represent for him and as a cosmopolitan dreaming of a philantropic policy based upon law and wisdom, longing for a system of dynamic balance that could manage to create the requisite harmonics between the old and the new one. The evidence of the development of his theory of the balance which will be raised to the rank of a system at the time of the congress of Vienna, the historical journal will have been, for Gentz, the spring board that will enable him to become both a writer and a statesman