Jacobins, Republicans, and Democracy in Mainz
This blog is part of a series on 'Democratic Identity in the Age of Revolutions'. Click here to see other posts in the series.
In the years 1792 and 1793, the city of Mainz experienced what is often described as the first experiment with democracy on German soil. The area was occupied by French revolutionary troops under the command of General Adam-Philippe de Custine in October 1792 and, with Custine’s encouragement and the engagement of both his secretary Georg Wilhelm Böhmer and several locals, a Jacobin club was founded two days later. Elections to replace the city’s episcopal regime were held in February and the ‘Rhenish-German free state’ was declared in March, only to be reconquered by allied German troops in July 1793. For many individuals involved, the Mainz Republic constituted a formative experience. It has also been described as a unique moment in terms of linguistic innovation, providing a political public sphere with a high density of persuasive communication. This renders it an interesting case in the context of this blog series on democrats in the Age of Revolutions.
In the following, I want to concentrate on a group of friends and collaborators in this pivotal moment: Meta Forkel, Georg Forster, Therese Forster, Ludwig Ferdinand Huber and Georg Wedekind. What brought them to Mainz in the late 1780s were job opportunities and family relations. Georg Forster already gained an international reputation, having circumnavigated the globe on the second of James Cook’s voyages. Now, he and Wedekind were employed by the Archbishop and Elector as librarian and physician, respectively, and Huber acted as a Saxon diplomat. Therese (née Heyne) had married Forster in 1785 and they moved to Mainz together. Huber became a mutual friend and eventually Therese’s lover (and her husband after Forster’s death in 1794). Forkel, estranged from her husband, stayed with her brother Wedekind and his family, and became involved in Forster’s translation enterprises, including David Ramsay’s History of the American Revolution, to earn an independent subsistence. Except for Huber, they all knew each other from Göttingen, where the fathers of Wedekind and Heyne worked as professors. In Mainz, they met often in the Forster household, not least for tea parties and the discussion of current affairs.
Both Georgs played leading roles in the Mainz Jacobin club (although Forster was not a founding member, unlike Wedekind) and the whole group engaged in the dissemination of radical ideas. In 1791, for instance, even before French troops arrived, Forkel, Forster(s) and Huber (who had a French mother and was bilingual) collaborated on the translation of the French constitution that included the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. It was published as part of Forkel’s translation of Tom Paine’s Rights of Man, which Georg Forster had praised for its ‘bold republican language’ and described as ‘so democratic that I cannot translate it, due to my circumstances’ – meaning his official post. Forkel celebrated the Constitution as a ‘document of humanity’ that held world-historical significance. She clearly hoped that this ‘charter of human freedom’ would serve as an inspiring blueprint for the German states.
In 1793, Georg Wedekind published a commentary on the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. In this context, he invested democracy with positive meaning, recommending it as the form of government to make the people happy. The power to legislate for themselves would set them free. In contrast, he (the elector’s former personal physician) called monarchy a madhouse. As president of the so-called Jacobin club, formally the Society of the Friends of Freedom and Equality, Wedekind tirelessly encouraged the establishment of democratic republics inspired by the French, trying to win sympathy for ‘the rule of the people’ through his speeches (held at club meetings) and writings (aimed at a broader public). In these, he defined the democratic republic as a state where the people hold supreme power and make their own laws, and where the freedom of opinion and press established preconditions for open debate.
Club meeting in the Electoral Palace of Mainz.
Similarly, Georg Forster never tired of emphasising these values. As early as 1791, Forkel had called him a 'formidable leader for politics and democracy'. He was no enthusiast but a careful observer, in social and political matters as in those of nature, and his first reaction to the news of the French Revolution was cautious. While eager for the benefits of freedom as he saw them in England, Holland and France, he pinned his hopes on the reforming will of German princes, but became increasingly alarmed by their mobilisation against France. Once the French had conquered Mainz, Forster felt compelled to take a stand and after a few weeks of deliberation, he joined the Jacobin club and threw himself into the work of establishing a republic. Like Wedekind, he became one of the club’s leaders and according to his wife Therese was seen as ‘the head of the revolution’. He too campaigned for the spread of republican ideas, acted as deputy in the freely elected legislative body of the Mainz Republic known as the Rhenish‑German Convention and, eventually, was appointed as Mainz’s delegate to the National Assembly in Paris. Due to his fame as circumnavigator on Cook’s second voyage, his involvement in the Mainz Republic was especially visible. In Weimar, for instance, Friedrich Schiller commented in December 1792 that ‘Forster’s conduct will certainly be disapproved by everyone’ while he disavowed interest in the affairs of the people of Mainz, ‘for all their steps testify more to a ridiculous desire to signify than to sound principles’.
Although women were formally excluded from the Jacobin club and the Convention, the identity of democrat was something they could endorse. Looking back in 1814, Therese (now) Huber self-consciously wrote: ‘I was a Jacobin and a democrat, and a revolutionary’. She had already described herself as ‘a democrat’ and ‘most staunch republican’ in letters written during the 1790s. Moreover, the authorities treated women as fully culpable, as the imprisonment of Meta Forkel, her mother and sister-in-law upon leaving Mainz in the spring of 1793 demonstrated. Therese had left Mainz in December 1792 due to concerns over her safety, following a military confrontation in French-occupied Frankfurt, and she and her children fled via Strasbourg to Switzerland, where Huber joined her in June 1793. From her exile in Neuchâtel, which lasted several years, she wrote that she would be imprisoned as a Jacobin if she returned to Germany. (She also wrote a novel that celebrated the French Revolution while challenging patriarchal authority.) At the same time, she used the formal exclusion of women from Jacobin clubs as a defensive strategy: in 1794, she wrote to the Prussian Field Marshal who reconquered and now administered Mainz that no woman could ever have been ‘a clubbist’, referring him to the Society’s regulations in order to invalidate the charges against her. In a more private letter, she argued that she had shared Forster’s ideas but only wished for Mainz’s incorporation into the French republic and never acted on her beliefs – which of course depends on a narrow definition of acting, but then she did leave Mainz in December 1792 and was thus less involved in the proceedings there.
Portrait of Therese Huber (1764-1829).
The Mainz Republic was forcefully ended when allied troops reconquered the city in the summer of 1793. The news reached Georg Forster in Paris, where he died (of illness) soon after. Therese Forster and Ludwig Ferdinand Huber stayed in their Swiss exile for the next five years. Georg Wedekind spent several years in Strasbourg, becoming more moderate in the aftermath of the Terror, and later served as physician to the Elector of Hesse. Meta Forkel was released after several months of imprisonment in the Fortress of Königstein before moving on to Riga, where she and her new husband were quickly expelled as suspected Jacobins. None of them returned to Mainz, but they remembered their time there with considerable affection.
Being a democrat had tangible consequences for all members of this group. Forkel was imprisoned and expelled; Wedekind and the Hubers went into exile; Forster remained in Paris, although he was not free of doubt and disillusionment with recent revolutionary developments. But in time they became respected members of society again (although Forster’s reputation remained tarnished after his death in 1794). This does not mean they gave up their beliefs. Decades later, for instance, Forkel’s political enthusiasm was recalled by Therese Huber (formerly Forster): in 1819, she wrote that the latest letters from Forkel (now called Liebeskind) were vividly reminiscent of the year ’92, meaning the days and months leading up to the Mainz Republic. Once again, Huber found Forkel unwavering in her support for the ideas of the opposition. Circumstances had changed and a unique historical moment vanished, but the ideals of freedom and equality stayed with them throughout their lives.
Elias Buchetmann, University of Rostock
