Republic of Mainz

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The Republic of Mainz was the first democratic state on German territory and was centered in Mainz. A product of the French Revolutionary Wars, it lasted from March to July 1793.

Liberty pole at the border to the Republic of Mainz. The table reads "Passans, cette terre est libre". Watercolour by Goethe

1 Context
2 Jacobin club
3 Founding of the republic
4 End of the republic
5 Literature

[edit] Context

During the First Coalition against France, the Prussian and Austrian troops that had invaded France retreated after the Battle of Valmy, allowing the French revolutionary army to counterattack. The troops of General Custine entered the Palatinate in late September, and occupied Mainz on October 21, 1792. The ruler of Mainz, Elector and Archbishop Friedrich Karl Joseph von Erthal, had fled the city.

[edit] Jacobin club

On the next day, 20 citizens of Mainz founded a Jacobin club, the Gesellschaft der Freunde der Freiheit und Gleichheit (Society of the Friends of Liberty and Equality). Together with their filial clubs founded later in Speyer and Worms, they promoted the Enlightenment and the French revolutionary ideals of liberté, egalité, fraternité in Germany, aiming for a German republic to be established following the French model. Most of the founding members of the Jacobin club were professors and students of the University of Mainz, together with the university librarian, Georg Forster, some merchants and Mainz state officials.

[edit] Founding of the republic

The Deutschhaus in Mainz

By order of the French National Convention, elections in the French occupied territories west of the Rhine were held on February 24, 1793. 130 cities and towns sent their deputies to Mainz.

The first democratically elected parliament in Germany, called the Rheinisch-Deutscher Nationalkonvent (Rhenish-German national convention) first met on March 17, 1793, in the Deutschhaus building in Mainz (nowadays the seat of the Rhineland-Palatinate state parliament). The convent declared the represented territory (which extended to Bingen in the west and to Landau in the south) to be free and democratic, and disclaimed any ties to the empire. The Convention's president, Andreas Joseph Hofmann, proclaimed the Rhenish-German Free State (Rheinisch-Deutscher Freistaat) from the balcony of the Deutschhaus. On March 23, 1793, it was decided to send delegates (among them Georg Forster and Adam Lux) to Paris and to request accession of the Mainz republic to France. The French national convention granted this on March 30.

[edit] End of the republic

Prussian troops soon after retook all the French-occupied territory except for the heavily fortified city of Mainz itself. After a long siege in which much of the city was destroyed, Prussian and Austrian troops conquered the city on July 22, 1793. The republic ended, and the Jacobins were persecuted until 1795, when Mainz came under French control again.

[edit] Literature

T. C. W. Blanning, The French Revolution in Germany. Occupation and Resistance in the Rhineland 1792–1802; Oxford Clarendon Press, 1983
T. C. W. Blanning, Reform and Revolution in Mainz 1743–1803; Cambridge University Press, London, 1974. ISBN 0521204186