Between Democracy and Liberalism: Ludwig Bamberger's Path
This blog is part of a series on 'Democratic Identity in the Age of Revolutions'. Click here to see other posts in the series.
Ludwig Bamberger (1823-1899) was born to a well-connected Jewish family in Mainz in 1823, just eight years after the post-Napoleonic peace settlement and France’s return of the territory to the German Confederation. From holding broadly liberal views in early adulthood, he moved to an assertively ‘democratic’ political stance in the revolutionary years of 1848-9, ultimately organizing armed resistance to the forces of reaction. After many years in exile, he returned to Germany in 1866 to become a leading liberal in the political system of the Reich.
Although there were some who identified with a broadly conceived democratic cause in Germany during the post-Napoleonic era, the identity of ‘democrat’ was not then readily available: it was a casualty of Napoleon’s reforming absolutism, and anathema to those who feared a recurrence of French Terror. Critics of princely regimes called for unity, freedom and equality, echoing French revolutionary themes, but were most likely to call themselves by the new, less tainted name of liberal, or alternatively, from the 1830s, radical. In Germany, the identity of ‘democrat’ gained traction only in the revolutionary moment of 1848, when the term was given a new impetus by the revolution in France and then by demands for a greater role for the German people in princely states and the Confederation. Self-styled ‘Democratic Associations’ multiplied. By 1849, however, hopes of compromise had dissolved. The assembly agreed on a constitution, but it became clear that the princes were not committed to making it work. Some erstwhile democrats decided that change could be achieved only if Germany was united in a republic. Republican rhetoric then burgeoned at the expense of democratic rhetoric.
By the spring of 1847 Bamberger had concluded his education and legal training and was struggling to overcome family objections to his intended marriage. As was common, he had attended several universities (where he was involved in student groups discussing liberal ideas), graduating from Gieẞen, and had passed the state bar examinations two years later in Mainz. State service as a civil servant, judge or university professor was barred to him because of his Jewish descent, since Hesse-Darmstadt, his main base of operations (where Mainz lay), had re-constrained Jewish opportunities after 1815. He was barred despite his renunciation of Judaism in favour of a life-long secularism (although he remained a vocal champion for Jewish emancipation). He was able to practice as a lawyer and did so within the French Civil Code that Hesse-Darmstadt had retained – a source of some comfort to those who wanted to see their region as distinctively progressive. Bamberger later stressed its orientation towards France. “All of Germany” he wrote in his 70s “but particularly the West, drew its daily political nourishment from these regions.”
The political atmosphere began to warm in Hesse-Darmstadt in 1847: liberals gained control of the legislature; opposition to the Grand Duke’s style of rule rose; and the example of the French Revolution in February 1848 led to concessions. Bamberger won a place for himself at the heart of this increasingly lively political scene by gaining a position as correspondent to a liberal newspaper, the Mainzer Zeitung. Aged 24, he became one of the leading writers – and then speakers - of the reform movement. His journalism radicalised as he continued to challenge the Grand Duke and on March 16 he called for a national republic. By the Spring of 1848 he had become a leading actor within democratic networks in Hesse-Darmstadt, most notably reaching out not only to towns but also to communities in the countryside to encourage the establishment of Democratic Associations. His affirmations of democracy were more than just statements of party affiliation. For him, democracy implied a new form of inclusive community, not least including Jews by religion or descent, to whom the rights and opportunities enjoyed by other Germans had in recent years only haltingly and grudgingly been extended (only sometimes to be retracted). As against some others who ended up supporting armed rebellions, he continued to identify as a democrat, and did not let that identity be lost in that of republican. But he clearly recognized that his world was changing. As he declared, ‘One lives in a completely different way than four weeks ago’ and he determined to ‘swim with the current that impels the age.’
Ludwig Bamberger (1823-1899).
Later in March he went to Frankfurt to cover the ‘pre-parliament’, mainly composed of oppositional activists, who demanded elections to an all-German National Assembly that would agree a constitution for a united German state. On his return to Mainz, he led attempts to extend Democratic Associations in his own state, proselytising across the countryside and building links with other recently formed popular associations: the Workingmen’s Educational Club (Arbeiterbildungsverein) and the Gymnastics Associations – which spawned a specifically democratic variant, the Demokratischer Turnerbund. In June, while reporting on the newly elected Frankfurt Parliament, he also attended (and chaired) the Congress called by the Democratic Associations and reported on the effects of similar efforts elsewhere: 230 delegates attended from 260 Democratic clubs based in 140 cities across the Confederation. By the end of the year, the Mainz Association for its part had over 2,000 members and links to more than 100 other groups in the region. At a New Year’s rally in 1849 Bamberger claimed: ‘Our entire province is one single democratic club!’
Bamberger had his own ideas about what all this meant, seeing the Democratic Associations as enabling the ‘complete transformation of political and social conditions’ and the realization of the good life. In August 1848, accepting the presentation of the colours of the Demokratischer Turnerbund from the women’s groups that had made them, he proclaimed: “The democratic movement must assume all those attributes which it intends to elevate to law as a victor one day. From the law of democracy, the irrational intolerance by which the state surrounds itself with infallible authority and legitimate privilege for the intimidation and stupefaction of the ruled must disappear. …. the whole of human society will no longer be built on the foundations of superstition and prejudice, but on reason, in a democratic state.” He was committed to practical democracy, which he saw as requiring universal (male) suffrage, responsible government (the accountability of ministers to the legislature), and the direct election of representatives; but as the speech testifies, he also expected it to bring a wider social transformation, including transformed relations between the sexes: “To be sure, women do not belong to the machine, but once political life has taken on the mode of popularity, mass movement, thought and action in community, in a word, in democracy, it will also develop in a sublime, lively, formative way, and be capable of true beauty.” For him, the Democratic Association was a “new Church”! Its underlying principles were ‘freedom from prejudice and pure humanity.’
Bamberger was very aware of tensions within the movement, as several leading radicals pressed the claims of the working classes more immediately and harder than he. He was in a Frankfurt café with Ludwig Feuerbach and another democratic journalist, Friedrich Kapp, when they heard news of the ‘June days’ in Paris, which took the revolution there in a more radical and worker-orientated direction: “We felt that a great decision would fall there which had to change the course of the French Revolution and with it the whole European situation…” In retrospect, he saw that moment as fateful: “The social question had thrown its sword into the turmoil of the political struggle, never again to disappear from the battle and to make more difficult, if not impossible for all time the victory of …political freedom.” Bamberger favoured laissez-faire policies, including the abolition of guild restrictions to allow occupational choice, but he could see justice in the workers’ claims, and that their associations might protect them from the extreme costs of free competition on international markets. Still, he feared that their efforts would split supporters of change, frightening liberals and the middle classes. Accordingly, he listened with horror when, at the Congress of Democratic Societies in June 1848, political aspirations were increasingly sidelined by speakers such as Andreas Gottschalk (1815-1849), a radical doctor from Cologne, who insisted on prioritising the social question.
As the Frankfurt Parliament stalled, and insurrections bloomed and were repressed, Bamberger sought a path of conciliation with socialist views, especially those of Proudhon, and became less optimistic about realizing democracy in the immediate present. “Until not too long ago I too believed in a philosophically humane revolution. Our opponents [the princes and their supporters] have torn away this childish illusion. They fight theoretical liberation attempts with the sword. They also want to root out even the innocent core of the development. With that they teach us that they themselves must be eliminated root and branch.”
Bamberger helped to organize insurgents in the Bavarian Palatinate, but in June they were defeated by the Prussians, and he fled to Switzerland – with several prison sentences hanging over his head, including a Bavarian death sentence for High Treason. After a period in London, he joined the Bischoffsheim banking firm, first in Antwerp, then Rotterdam, and finally in Paris, where he was finally able to marry his fiancé. As hopes for political change revived early in the 1860s he established Demokratiche Studien, a periodical defending the principles of 1848, which quickly evolved into the Deutsche Jahrbücher für Politik und Literatur (1861-4). He also sought to return to Germany (finally gaining the chance under the amnesty of 1866). By this point, he was prepared to work within the new North German Confederation, later Empire, that Prussia was assembling. Liberalism in a nation-state became his central commitment; democracy he remembered as his youthful hope; while socialism became increasingly anathema, though he retained a pragmatic willingness to build bridges between parties.
Battle of Kirchheimbolanden, 14 June 1849.
The revolution of 1848 immersed Bamberger in the practicalities of organization and controversy, allowing him to build a reputation as a powerful writer, activist and spokesmen for the cause represented by the Democratic Associations. His commitments and his ideas radicalized together, driven by his sense that genuine freedom demanded a serious rethinking of the nature of human equality and the liberation of human potential, opening the way for his reluctant accommodation with socialism. But his commitments and ideals subsequently collapsed together, being reshaped by his experience in exile working in trade and banking, re-persuading him that socialism could not promote the realisation of freedom. Bamberger never wholly renounced his past. Even as a respected liberal politician in the 1870s and 1880s, he saw 1848 as a moment in which something significant for human development had been possible, if evanescently: “this dream, so quickly ended, was not merely the product of a wild intoxication. There was an idealistic trait in the people, which had been produced by the formation of the mind and heart of the preceding epoch.”
Mark Philp, University of Warwick
