German Jacobins

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As German Jacobins or German revolutionary democrats those individuals are referred to which the ideas of the French Revolution , especially in the sense of the Jacobin Club wanted to implement, also in Germany and aspired to one end of the Princely rule.

Austro-Hungarian Jacobin Conspiracy

Leopold II had planned to increase the civil and peasant influence in the Hungarian estates and corresponding institutions in some parts of the Austrian hereditary lands. In addition, he had supported some people like Ignaz Joseph Martinovics , who advertised such reforms in pamphlets, for example. After Francis II ascended the throne, he ended these plans for fear of the revolution. The reformers radicalized themselves disappointed. Martinovicz wrote a pamphlet in which he advocated the abolition of the monarchy and a democratic republic based on the French model. Probably by Franz Hebenstreit , the "Austrian Babeuf ", came a song in which he described the execution of Louis XVI. defended and called on the peasants to revolt. In addition to the connections between Vienna and Budapest, there were also connections to Klagenfurt , such as the industrialist and art patron Franz Paul von Herbert there .

A real group of conspirators formed in Vienna, consisting of around 80 people. The group planned a coup in 1794, but it did not come to fruition. But it will also represent the theory that the conspiracy only an invention of the Vienna police chief Johann Anton von Pergen was to wish the Emperor Francis II. Unpleasant critics like Andreas Riedel , the former mathematics teacher of the Emperor and advisers of his father Leopold II. Was to get rid of.

In her autobiography, which was published posthumously in 1844, the writer Caroline Pichler reports Memories from My Life about the arrests and those arrested, among whom were friends of her father.

North German Jacobins

In Hamburg and Schleswig-Holstein a radical direction developed within the political public. This was not only about freedom, but also about social equality. The Enlightenment supporters split into two camps. Members of the upper middle class sympathized with the Girondists . Craftsmen and some intellectuals took the side of the Jacobins and Maximilien de Robespierres . The Jacobin Georg Conrad Meyer published a magazine called Der neue Mensch . In it he demanded, among other things, an equal distribution of assets, but without wanting to expropriate the property owners. However, there was still hope in the radical northern German circles that the state would reform. Meyer remained an admirer of Frederick II. There were no plans to implement his own goals in northern Germany.

West German Jacobins

An example of Jacobins in the area on the left bank of the Rhine that had been occupied by the French army since 1794 is Franz Theodor Biergans , who was born in Aldenhoven in 1768 and was a monk in the Schwarzenbroich monastery from 1786 to 1794 with interruptions . He turned his back on the church after the French invaded and stepped onto the political stage as a German Jacobin in Cologne, where he fought against the church and feudal lords as a supporter of the French revolutionary ideals. Biergans published the political magazine Brutus or the Tyrannenfeind in Cologne from 1795 and the magazine Brutus der Freye in Aachen in 1796 .

Republic of Mainz

As a result of its proximity to France and the passage of French troops, the Jacobin movement was most strongly represented in southern Germany. Spiritual support came mainly from Strasbourg, a center of French revolutionary propaganda. The first attempt to put the ideas into practice was made in the Republic of Mainz in 1792/93.

Cisrhenan Movement

Even after the end of the reign of terror in France, there were republican currents in Germany. These included the Cisrhenan movement. In 1797 Joseph Görres and others, supported by General Lazare Hoche , sought to found a Rhenish republic. Appropriate national societies were founded, and trees of freedom were erected in Koblenz , Bonn and Cologne and the republic was proclaimed. However, the dream was soon ended by the French advance on the Rhine. There was little support among the population. The interpretation of the movement as radical democratic is no longer generally shared, rather it was strongly in the tradition of the Enlightenment. Progress was not expected from the crowd, but from the few "men of the Enlightenment."

South German Republicans

Various influencing factors were at work in southern Germany: the Helvetic Republic , French agents and propagandists, student circles and Frankish imperial knights who dreamed of an aristocratic republic in order to avoid mediatization . There were also opposition groups in the estates in some countries and in the imperial cities. The only thing that unites them was the rejection of the ancien régime in its respective form.

Ernst Jägerschmidt was influenced by the Helvetic Republic . There were plans to blow up the Rastatt Congress with French help . However, there was no French support. In Basel in 1799 an extensive text was drawn up with a draft constitution for Germany based on the French model.

In Bavaria, ideas for a southern German republic found support even among the nobility and civil servants. Most pamphlets, however, were not so radical that they were incompatible with constitutional government. In fact, Maximilian von Montgelas largely took the wind out of the sails of the movement with his reform activities. Remarkably, one of the leading representatives of republicanism in Bavaria, Joseph von Utzschneider , became a high-ranking official in the Bavarian Ministry of Finance.

people

Mainz Jacobin Club

Assembly of the Mainz Jacobin Club

Jacobins in Northern Germany

Jacobins in West Germany

Viennese Jacobins

swell

  • Axel Kuhn (ed.): Left Rhine German Jacobins. Appeals, speeches, minutes, letters and writings 1794–1801. In: German revolutionary democrats. Vol. 2, Metzler, Stuttgart 1978, ISBN 3-476-00387-6 .
  • Joseph Hansen : Sources on the history of the Rhineland in the age of the French Revolution 1780–1801. In: Publications of the Society for Rhenish History. Vol. 42, 4 volumes, Hanstein, Bonn 1931-1938, ISSN  0930-8822 .

literature

Monographs

  • Franz Dumont : German Jacobins. Republic of Mainz and Cisrhenans 1792–1798. Volume 1: Manual. Contributions to the democratic tradition in Germany. Hesse, Mainz 1981.
  • Alexander Emanuely : Outcome: Franz Hebenstreit (1747–1795). Silhouettes of the Viennese democrats. 1794. In: Encyclopedia of Viennese Knowledge. Portraits. Volume II, Vienna 2010, ISBN 978-3-902416-42-1 .
  • Elisabeth Fehrenbach : From the Ancien Régime to the Congress of Vienna. In: Oldenbourg floor plan of the story . 4th, revised edition. Vol. 12, Oldenbourg, Munich 2001, ISBN 3-486-49754-5 .
  • Walter Grab : North German Jacobins. Democratic aspirations at the time of the French Revolution. In: Hamburg studies on modern history. Bd. 8, Europäische Verlags-Anstalt, Frankfurt am Main 1967, ZDB -ID 505204-x .
  • Walter Grab: Life and Works of North German Jacobins. In: German revolutionary democrats. Vol. 5, Metzler, Stuttgart 1973, ISBN 3-476-00240-3 .
  • Hellmut G. Haasis : Give wings to freedom. The time of the German Jacobins 1789–1815. (= rororo 8363 rororo non-fiction book ). 2 volumes, Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1988, ISBN 3-499-18363-3 .
  • Hellmut G. Haasis : Dawn of the Republic. The German Democrats on the left bank of the Rhine 1789–1849. (= Ullstein 35199 = Ullstein materials ). Ullstein, Frankfurt am Main a. a. 1984, ISBN 3-548-35199-9 ( online introduction to the origins of the democratic movement in the German-speaking area ).
  • Axel Kuhn: Jacobins in the Rhineland. The Cologne constitutional circle of 1798. In: Stuttgart contributions to history and politics. Vol. 10, Klett, Stuttgart 1976, ISBN 3-12-904940-1 (also: Stuttgart, Univ., Habil.-Schr., 1975).
  • Helmut Reinalter : The French Revolution and Central Europe. Manifestations and Effects of Jacobinism. His social theories and political ideas. In: Suhrkamp-Taschenbuch Wissenschaft 748. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1988, ISBN 3-518-28348-0 .
  • Heinrich Scheel : South German Jacobins. Class struggles and republican aspirations in the German south at the end of the 18th century. In: Writings of the Central Institute for History. Row 1: General and German History. 3rd, revised edition. Vol. 13, Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 1980, ZDB -ID 919844-1 .

Essays

  • Walter Grab: The revolutionary propaganda of the German Jacobins 1792/93. In: Archives for Social History . Vol. 9, 1969, pp. 113-156 ( online ).
  • Walter Grab: Conquest or Liberation? German Jacobins and French rule in the Rhineland 1792–1799. In: Hans Pelger (Ed.): Studies on Jacobinism and Socialism (= International Library. Vol. 75). Dietz, Berlin et al. 1975, ISBN 3-8012-1075-8 , pp. 1–102.
  • Franz Dumont: Liberté and Libertät documents of Franco-German relations in 1792/93. In: Francia, Research on Western European History. Vol. 6, 1978, ISSN  0251-3609 , pp. 367-406, therein the petition to the Prussian king and to the French committee .
  • Anne Cottebrune: “German Freedom Friends ” versus “German Jacobins.” To demythize the research area “German Jacobinism.” In: Discussion Group History of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, issue 46. Bonn, 2002, pp. 3–61.

Web links

Remarks

  1. ^ Fehrenbach: From the Ancien Regime to the Congress of Vienna. 2001, p. 64f.
  2. ↑ Alexander Emanuely : Outcome: Franz Hebenstreit (1747–1795). Silhouettes of the Viennese democrats. 1794. , p. 26.
  3. ↑ Alexander Emanuely: Outcome: Franz Hebenstreit (1747–1795). Silhouettes of the Viennese democrats. 1794. , p. 74.
  4. ^ Fehrenbach: From the Ancien Regime to the Congress of Vienna. 2001, p. 65.
  5. ^ Paul Fabianek: Consequences of secularization for the monasteries in the Rhineland. Using the example of the Schwarzenbroich and Kornelimünster monasteries. Verlag BoD, 2012, ISBN 978-3-8482-1795-3 , pp. 17-20.
  6. ^ Fehrenbach: From the Ancien Regime to the Congress of Vienna. 2001. p. 67f.
  7. ^ Draft of a republican constitutional document as it would be useful for Germany, in the 7th year of the mother republic. Reprinted by Heinrich Scheel : Jakobinische Flugschriften , 1965, pp. 130–182
  8. ^ Fehrenbach: From the Ancien Regime to the Congress of Vienna. 2001. pp. 68f.