Conference Group for Central European History of the American Historical Association
Echoes of the French Revolution in the Rhineland, 1830-1849
Author(s): Jonathan Sperber
Reviewed work(s):
Source:
Central European History,
Vol. 22, No. 2, The French Revolution in Germany and
Austria (Jun., 1989), pp. 200-217
Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of Conference Group for Central European History of
the American Historical Association
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Echoes of the French Revolution
in the Rhineland, 183 o-1849
JONATHAN SPERBER
OF
all the regions of Central Europe, the Rhineland was the
one most affected by the French Revolution. The area on the
left bank ofthe Rhine belonged for almost two full decades
to the First French Republic and the Napoleonic Empire; parts of the
right bank were, for a shorter period, under the rule ofthe Napoleonic
satellite state, the Grand Duchy of Berg. In studying these unusual
circumstances, historians have sometimes focused on short-term polit?
ical implications, asking how the Rhenish population of the 1790s
responded to the Jacobin regime. They have also studied the long-term
social and economic effects of the revolutionary legislation and the
secularization of church lands.1
In this essay, I would like to invert the usual order of investiga?
tion and inquire into the long-term political consequences of the
revolutionary and Napoleonic era. While going against the historio?
graphical grain, this is nonetheless a particularly useful question to ask,
since the heritage of those years remained a continuous and substantial
presence in the Rhineland, through the middle ofthe nineteenth cen-
i. Examples of the first approach
include F. G. Dreyfus, Societes
et mentalites en Mayence
au
dix-huitieme siecle
(Paris, 1968);
T.C.W. Blanning, The French Revolution in Germany:
Occupation
and Resistance
in the Rhineland
I7g2-i802 (Oxford, 1983);
Axel Kuhn,
Jakobiner
im Rheinland: Der
Kblner Konstitutionelle
Zirkel
von
1798
(Stuttgart,
1976);
Hans-Georg
Molitor, Vom Untertan zum
Administre: Studien
zur
franzbsischen
Herrschaft
und zum Verhalten
der
Bevolkerung
des Rhein-Mosel-
Raumes
von den
Revolutionskriegen
bis zum Ende der
napoleonischen
Zeit
(Wiesbaden,
1980).
Paradig-
matic
for the second have
been the works ofthe late
Herbert
Kisch, now conveniently
collected
in From
Domestic
Manufacture
to Industrial
Revolution:
The Case
of the Rhineland Textile Districts
(Oxford, 1989).
Jeffry
Diefendorf’s Businessmen
and Politics in the
Rhineland,
1789-1834
(Prince?
ton, 1980)
also deals
with the subject,
in spite
of its title. A useful
summary
ofthe many
works
on the secularization of church
lands, which, however,
leaves
open the question
ofthe long-term
economic effects
of this action,
is provided
by Harm
Klueting, “Die Folgen
der Sakularisation:
Zur Diskussion der
wirtschaftlichen
und sozialen
Auswirkungen
der
Vermogenssakularisation
in Deutschland,”
in Deutschland
zwischen
Revolution und
Restauration,
ed. Helmut Berding and
Hans-Peter Ullmann (Konigstein
and
Dusseldorf, 1981), 184-207.
200
Jonathan Sperber 201
tury. At the beginning ofthe 1850s, the peasants of Rhaunen, on the
banks of the Moselle River, had no trouble pointing out the tree of
liberty planted in the village square some fifty-five years previously.
The iron Phrygian cap the Jacobins had fastened to the spire of St.
Augustine’s church in Landau still hung there, even after the church
had been converted into an armory and Landau into a fortress of the
German Confederation, directed against the possibility ofa new rev?
olutionary regime in France again taking up the Jacobin policy of
revolutionary war. Once a year, the Rhenish veterans of Napoleon’s
army would parade through the streets of major cities, on their way
to church to memorialize the souls of their departed comrades.2
The revolutionary regime was also present in an abstract but polit?
ically significant way via the rule of “Rhenish law [Rheinisches Recht].”
This was a circumlocution for the Napoleonic Codes of Civil, Com-
merical, and Criminal Law, all of which were valid for about 90
percent ofthe Prussian Rhine Province, and all ofthe Rhenish posses?
sions of Bavaria and Hesse-Darmstadt, into the 1850s. The Napole?
onic Civil Code continued in force until the promulgation of the
all-German Civil Code of 1901.3
Constantly encountering physically tangible reminders of the rev?
olutionary regime and enjoying the protection of its legal institutions,
the Rhinelanders would turn the demand for the preservation of the
institutional accomplishments of the revolution in their region into a
vehicle to call for change throughout Germany. They would make use
of the French Revolution’s political symbolism to press their own
social and political demands and would identify their enemies in terms
of antagonisms developed during the great revolution. The first use
of this heritage came in the years 1830-32, when the European-wide
revolutionary wave swept across the Rhineland.
Within a month ofthe Parisian July revolution, riots broke out in a
number of larger cities on the lower Rhine. The crowd in Cologne
2. Landeshauptarchiv
Koblenz [LAK] 442 Nr. 7583 pp. 205-40; August Becker, Die Pfalz
und
die Pfalzer
(Kaiserslautern, 1961) [reprint
ofthe original edition of 1858], 307-8. On the
Napoleonic veterans,
see Walter
Klein, Der Napoleonkult
in der
Pfalz (Munich, 1934);
Zentrales
Staatsarchiv der DDR, Dienststelle Merseburg [ZSTAM] Rep. 77 Tit. 505 Nr. 13; Kolnische
Zeitung
[KnZ], 8 Dec. 1841, 7
June 1843, 12
June 1844.
3. Carl Wilhelm Kockerols, Das Rheinische
Recht,
seine zeitliche
und raumliche
Begrenzung
(Hanover, 1902), and especially Karl-Georg Faber, Die Rheinlande
zwischen
Restauration
und
Revolution
(Wiesbaden, 1966), 110-18 and passim. Faber’s
excellent work is one ofthe few to
study the long-term political consequences
of the revolutionary period in the Rhineland.
202 Echoes ofthe French Revolution
called “Vivat, long live Napoleon,” and “abolish the octroi [the tax
on foodstuffs brought into the city].” Inhabitants ofthe silk-manufac-
turing center Elberfeld also tumultuously praised Napoleon, adding,
“We don’t want high [elementary] school fees. . . . They should not
pay us in truck…. The mayor should bring down the price of bread.”
Hand-loom weavers in the woolens town of Eupen destroyed textile
machinery, while cheering Napoleon.4
The responsible authorities denied that the disturbances represented
any conscious effort to change the form of government, and there is
no reason to doubt their judgment. The references to Napoleon, and,
implicitly, to the pre-1814 regimes, might more plausibly be seen as
a way to legitimize demands relating to social and economic griev?
ances, which the authoritarian Prussian government provided no way
for its plebeian subjects to address. The bourgeoisie, who might have
articulated explicitly political ideas for the rioters, took no part in the
disturbances, but instead formed civic guards and cooperated with the
authorities in restoring order.
The situation was quite different in the southern Rhineland, where
the notables of Rhine-Hesse and especially the Palatinate placed them?
selves at the head of the oppositional movement. The ultimate out?
come of their efforts was the celebrated Hambach National Festival of
May 1832, but this quasi-revolutionary mass meeting was the result
of a longer term political campaign, begun in 1830 and becoming
steadily more militant and more openly republican over the two fol?
lowing years.5 Some of this republicanism drew on Jacobin prece-
dents. One Zweibrticken radical printed up German language excerpts
4. For this and
the following paragraph,
see Michael
Miiller,
“Die preussische
Rheinprovinz
unter dem Einfluss
vonJulirevolution
und
Hambacher Fest 18
3
0-18 3
4,
“fahrbuchfiir
westdeutsche
Landesgeschichte
6 (1980):
271-90, esp. 273-75, and ZSTAM Rep. 77 Tit. 505 Nr. 2 Vol. 1 ff.
4-6, 9-12, 16-18, 28-32.
5. This understanding
of the Hambach festival as the culmination of a longer period of
agitation
is characteristic
of several newer works on the event which have
superseded
much of
the older literature. See Wolfgang Schieder,
“Der rheinpfalzische
Liberalismus
von 1832 als
Protestbewegung,”
in Vom Staat des
Ancien
Regime
zum modernen
Parteistaat:
Festschrift
Theodor
Schieder,
ed. Helmut Berding (Munich, 1978), 169-95, and the work of Schieder’s
student,
Cornelia Foerster, Der Press- und Vaterlandsverein von 1832/33: Sozialstruktur
und Organi-
sationsformen
der
biirgerlichen Bewegung
in
der Zeit des
Hambacher Festes
(Trier,
1982),
as well as the
model exhibition
catalog
she
coedited with
Joachim
Kermann,
18321982:
Hambacher Fest:
Freiheit
und
Einheit: Deutschland
und
Europa
(Neustadt
a.d.W., 1982).
Jonathan Sperber 203
from the constitution of 1793 and posted them on buildings in his
home town. They turned up in other Palatine cities as well.6
The same popular discontent apparent on the lower Rhine also
existed in the Palatinate, stemming from a series of bad harvests, the
discriminatory tax and tariff policies ofthe Bavarian government, and
the latter’s strict forest-use regulations. The province’s peasants and
craftsmen expressed their oppositional attitudes by planting trees of
liberty in tumultuous fashion. Such ceremonies occurred in at least
fifty different localities in the spring of 1832, complete with a parade
of the civic guard, speeches, music and drinking, following closely
the forms adopted by the Rhenish Jacobins in the 1790s. In and of
themselves, these were not necessarily more expressly political acts
than the “Vivats” called out to Napoleon in Elberfeld. Opposition to
government limits on wood-cutting, or to regulations requiring the
planting of non-deciduous trees, a form of social conflict extremely
common in Vormarz Germany, played a major role in the events, in
the course of which a spruce would be ceremonially and defiantly cut
down.7
However, in a number of instances, members ofthe “German Press
and Fatherland Association,” the political organization ofthe Palatine
opposition, sponsored these festivals, for the purposes of propaganda
and organization among the plebian population. Such politicized fes?
tivals represented a convergence of two strands of the revolutionary
