Searching for “Demokratin”? The Curious Case of Women Democrats in Early Nineteenth-Century Germany
This blog is part of a series on 'Democratic Identity in the Age of Revolutions'.
In nineteenth-century Germany, the term “democrat” had an explicitly gendered connotation. Democrats were radicals, orators, parliamentarians and militants. For women, such activities were hampered by convention and the law. We know that some women activists participated in the democratic movement of the 1848 revolution, but their stories have been largely forgotten or confined to specialised literature. Moreover, how extensively women participated whether as democrats or espousing other political views, is hard to gauge because women were systematically less likely to be mentioned in the formal records of political institutions - the kind of sources that political historians typically consult.
In this post, I use a linguistic feature of my native German to uncover cases where women were explicitly mentioned as democrats. The word democrat has two versions in German (as in some other languages): the masculine “Demokrat” and the feminine “Demokratin”. The masculine democrat was the standard and could also refer to female democrats, especially in the plural “Demokraten”, which included women. However, the female form in the singular, “Demokratin”, was used exclusively for women.
Taking advantage of sources that have been digitised and made machine-readable in recent years, I use “Demokratin” as a broad search term to find rare instances of women democrats - the proverbial needle in a haystack. This method casts a wide net, but the results were remarkably limited, with 152 results from Google Books and 46 from the Deutsches Zeitungsportal in the period 1789 to 1850. Many Google Books results were repetitions and some were false positives, leaving only 54 hits. Nevertheless, these direct mentions of “Demokratin” provide us with some outstanding examples of often forgotten women democrats. In this post, I discuss some of these cases and the way individual ‘Demokratin’ were portrayed.
Democrats of France
Late eighteenth-century uses of the term “Demokratin” were mainly associated with French politics and with travel literature about France. Given the dramatic events of the French Revolution and its impact on Europe, it is not surprising that French politics features so largely. Moreover, using the term “Demokratin” in the French context avoided naming people to whom the German authorities might have access. The foreign setting also avoided problems with the censors for whom democracy was considered a radical political orientation even before the implementation of the repressive Carlsbad Decrees (1819).
One important case of a female democrat appears in the published letters of the poet Friedrich Matthisson (1761-1831). Matthison's work is largely forgotten, but he was a well-known writer of his time. His description of a stay at an inn in a small town near Avignon in the south of the country, probably L'Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, provides the context for the appearance of a female democrat. As Matthison wrote in a letter of March 1792, the family who ran the inn perfectly represented the four political factions in the town: the father was a loyal papist, the daughter a committed aristocrat, the son an outlaw and the mother a “Demokratin”. This curious family constellation, which Matthisson depicted as perfectly representing the political factions of the town, may have been exaggerated, but it is one of the few explicit references to an ordinary woman democrat.
Matthisson himself certainly recognised the lyrical quality of the anecdote. His memoirs, published in 1810, return to the family and give us a more vivid description of the mother, whose status as a democrat was attributed to her being “the cousin of a furious orator in Paris”. Matthisson’s described her as “a Demokratin [fit] to be drowned”, who was constantly exchanging insults with her papist husband. The mother held no political office: she was a democrat because of her beliefs, her family ties and her argumentative nature. There is no reference to political connections or developments in the section on the family. Only a single reference to the democratic movement is made when the daughter, the aristocrat in Matthison's story, “with a malicious glance at her mother”, acknowledged the political situation of the country and advised him to wear the “national cockade” to avoid problems with the “democratic dogs”.
“Demokratin” with a name
This anecdote of an unknown and perhaps even invented “Demokratin” suggests that what defined women democrats was a very loose connection to the democratic movement and the way they expressed themselves. Can these characteristics also be found in women democrats whose existence we can fully establish? The curious case of an identified woman democrat shows that such a search can take an unexpected turn.
In the Geschichte der Emigranten (1802), Marie Therese of France (1778-1851) was called a “Demokratin”. From this anonymous publication, we learn that the so-called “emigres,”embittered aristocrats who had fled France after the Revolution – accused the future Queen of France of being a “sans-culottized democrat”. What had the eldest child of Louis XVI done to deserve this aggressive insult? Her greatest offence was a fashion style that seemed too suspiciously ordinary for a member of the royal family. The princess had refused to exchange her straw hat and coarse clothes for more refined ones. She had also called her jewellery “trash” and refused to wear it in keeping with her station. Her allegedly cynical and stoical attitude was considered unworthy of a princess. “Demokratin” is being used here as an insult and an accusation: encompassing women whose behaviour and personalities were suspected of being in opposition to the aristocracy.
Other early instances of women described as democrats in German include several writers of English and Irish origin. News from Britain played an important role in German publications. In 1800, the Allgemeine Literaturzeitung discussed the work of the English novelist Charlotte Smith. In the eyes of this literary critic, Smith's style had changed from writing as an aristocrat to writing as a democrat in The Young Philosopher (1798). This observation enabled comparisons with Mary Ann Hanway's work Ellinor (1798). Politically radical and apparently fearless, Hanway travelled alone to Paris in 1789, and for German literary critics, her association with the French revolutionary milieu justified the label “democratic”.
The Anglo-Irish writer Sydney Owenson, known by her pseudonym Lady Morgan, was also denounced as a democrat. Despite her progressive leanings, Owenson’s travelogue Italy was translated into German in 1824, but the publisher in Weimar felt obliged to remind readers that, while the “intellectual woman” had described the customs and peculiarities of Italy well, her “political and religious opinions” might be at odds with the spirit of the age. The editor’s preface warned readers that her observations “sound rather unpleasant coming from a woman”, and that she was “a die-hard democrat” of the “narrow-minded” and “spiteful kind”. Being a democrat was not a positive quality. German readers were warned not to follow the author, whose views were so unbecoming.
German democrats
Only a small number of German-speaking Demokratin appear as democrats under their real names in the early nineteenth century. In the following, I shall present two women who left a few traces in printed and written sources.
One early case is the German proponent of women's independence, Emilie von Berlepsch, who is referred to as “a committed Demokratin” in the published collection of letters and writings by the Swiss politician Albrecht Rengger. Following the French Revolution, German women were rarely described as democrats in public documents, but von Berlepsch is mentioned in a private correspondence that dates from 1793 but was not published until 1847, a year before the wave of revolutions in Europe. She is associated with women’s rights activism: her book Caledonia (1802-4) about her experiences in Scotland proposed feminist ideas and introduced Mary Wollstonecraft to a German audience. Indeed, “Demokratin” was used in connection with female emancipation in another collection of private letters from 1792, published in 1832. The author, the poet Johann Paul Friedrich Richter, better known by his pseudonym Jean Paul, playfully announced that he was calling his friend “Demokratin” because she “wanted to be the protective goddess of women's freedom”.
Emilie von Berlepsch (1755-1830).
In the decades following the French Revolution, my sources do not mention women democrats in the German states. Only in 1848 did new opportunities open up for women to be seen and to act as democrats. This new generation of women was democratic not just in their minds or with their pens; they also took part in direct political action.
One telling example is Marie Rogge (1818-1908), who was the inspiration for this post. Her story appeared in a newspaper article in 1852, which reported the interrogation of a “fiery [woman] democrat”. In the years after the revolution, democratic activists came under increasing scrutiny by reactionary police forces. In the article, we learn only that the unnamed Demokratin was “the wife of [Henrich Levin] Rogge and a follower of [Rudolf] Dulon”. The newspaper attributed the story to the city of Bremen and this fact, and her husband's surname, were enough for local historians to identify the “fiery democrat” as Marie Metta Friederike Rogge (née Koch).
Although Marie Rogge does not appear in the standard reference works such as the Deutsche Biographie, she has left some traces for historians. In 1851, the police found fourteen of her letters in her husband’s luggage, which are still kept in the State Archives (Bremen). These letters demonstrate that Marie Rogge played an important role behind the scenes of the democratic movement, mediating between her uncle Cord Wischmann, a moderate democratic representative in the Bremen city parliament, and the pastor and socialist agitator Rudolf Dulon. She also organised donations for political refugees in Switzerland.
Rogge's most important activity as a woman democrat was her involvement in a petition in support of Dulon, who had been suspended from his church office. It was at this point, if not before, that Rogge broke with the activities that we have seen in glimpses of democrat activity in the previous generation. Before 1848 the word “Demokratin” largely referred to political views rather than the assumption of a public role, which was out of reach for women. In the revolutionary years, new political roles were created. Instead of just writing letters, Rogge also took an active public stance. In March 1852, her initiative collected 5356 signatures from women for the petition for Doulon. Together with two other women, Meta Claußen and Anna Knigge, Marie Rogge presented the petition to the Senate in front of a large audience. The three women failed to save the revolutionary movement in Bremen, but their petition demonstrates that women did take public roles in organisational politics, if only for the brief and tumultuous years of the revolution.
Despite the glimpses of women democrats offered above, we should remain wary of relying wholly on digital collections such as Google Books for the study of the history of a political concept and its adherents. We know that in Germany, at least, three women democrats ran newspapers in the Revolution of 1848 – Louise Otto, Louise Dittmar and Louise Aston; we have evidence of direct political and military activity for Amelia Struve, Elise Blenker, Emma Herwegh and Pauline Wunderlich; and a range of Democratic Women’s Associations were established, albeit with a variety of objectives. And there are bodies to be counted from the street fighting in Berlin and Vienna. But of such matters, contemporary books rarely spoke, and the official record is often silent, although it is clear that women activists were arrested and occasionally tried for their actions. As archives and newspapers are increasingly digitized we are likely to find that our isolated examples are indicative of a deeper current of women’s activism – at least at times when the established order begins to slip.
Anne Heyer, University of Leiden
