Founding With General Custine’s seizure of power and the consequent incorporation of Mainz (as "Mayence") into the
French First Republic, all the necessary conditions for political activity in the spirit of the new rulers of Mainz had been created. The theologian, canon lawyer, and former university professor from Worms, Georg Wilhelm Böhmer, who had by then become Custine’s secretary, had arrived in Mainz with the French troops. Already the next day, on 22 October 1792, he publicly called in the
Privilegirte Mainzer Zeitung – of which he had just become editor – for the founding of a "Society of German Friends of Liberty and Equality" modelled on the Paris Jacobin Club: The call was preceded by a meeting the previous day at the home of Custine’s adjutant-general Stamm, which Böhmer chaired. Even during his campaign, Custine had planned the establishment of revolutionary societies and sought experienced individuals to serve as suitable propagators of revolutionary ideas in these bodies. Böhmer’s activities were explicitly encouraged and supported by Custine, who also arranged payments through Böhmer to those willing to support the French cause. Böhmer, in turn, repeatedly invoked General Custine directly in his activities in Mainz and acted officially in his name and on his behalf. Twenty people, mostly from the milieu of the University of Mainz, appeared on the evening of 23 October 1792 in the academy hall of the Electoral Palace. Böhmer arrived accompanied by the physician Georg von Wedekind and the merchant André Patocki. He opened the constitutive session by excusing General Custine, who was detained by "pressing military affairs", and had propaganda material distributed. Speeches followed by court councillor Kaspar Hartmann – who would develop from an electoral court official into one of the most uncompromising Mainz Jacobins – as well as by professors Georg Wedekind and
Mathias Metternich, in which the old regime of the Elector and his aristocrats was primarily attacked. The attendees then signed a joint protocol. In it they welcomed the liberation and support provided by the French, formally declared the establishment of the Society of the Friends of Liberty and Equality, and resolved to request the statutes of the Strasbourg Jacobin Club. The first session of the Mainz Jacobin Club ended with the solemn oath of admission:
To live free or die! The founding members of the Mainz Club included, besides Böhmer, the university professors Mathias Metternich, Georg Wedekind, and
Andreas Joseph Hofmann, additional professors and students of the university, as well as merchants such as André Patocki and Georg Häfelin, and military men such as
Rudolf Eickemeyer. At the next session the following day, Georg Häfelin was elected the club’s founding president, with Mathias Metternich as his deputy.
Growth and peak Already at the second meeting on 24 October, which General Custine also attended and addressed, the academy hall was overcrowded. In the ensuing roughly two-week founding phase, membership grew rapidly, reaching a peak of exactly 492 registered members by the end of November 1792. During this period the club’s political programme was drawn up in its essentials. Attempts by conservative and moderate forces to limit the Jacobin Club to a merely passive discussion forum within the ongoing changes were clearly rejected. Most members wished to take an active part in the democratisation process that was now under way. The members’ energetic and self-motivated participation in actions to bring about societal change was demonstrated by the high-profile initiative to erect a
liberty tree on the Höfchen and by the creation of a “Red Book of Liberty” and a “Black Book of Slavery”, in which the people of Mainz could voluntarily register and thereby vote for or against the revolutionary ideas of the French. Jacobins arriving from
Alsace, such as Anton Joseph Dorsch – who until 1791 had held the chair of philosophy at the University of Mainz and had been recruited earlier by Custine to support the newly founded Jacobin clubs in the left-Rhenish territories – contributed significantly to intensifying the club’s work. In the early phase they decisively shaped the structure, organisation, and outward propaganda of the Mainz Jacobin Club. The club’s popularity and prestige rose further with the later accession of prominent Mainz personalities. The entry of the popular police commissioner Franz Konrad Macké, who was subsequently elected
maire, sent an important signal to the still-underrepresented guild citizens. The accession two days later – after initial reservations and careful consideration of his future political stance – of the scholar and explorer
Georg Forster, who was famous far beyond the city and regional borders, attracted attention outside Mainz as well. In mid-November General Custine appointed leading club members such as Forster and Dorsch to high offices in the newly created civil administration. Dorsch, for example, became president of the “General Administration” and thus the highest civilian representative in the entire French-occupied territory. This increase in authority, executive power, and prestige – and thus Custine’s esteem for the Mainz Jacobins active in the club – together with the peak membership of almost 500 at the end of November, marked the high point of the Mainz Jacobin Club’s influence. From the beginning of December 1792 the previously steady growth in membership stagnated. This was largely due to the first military setbacks suffered by the French Revolutionary Army near
Frankfurt am Main against Prussian and Austrian forces, together with the recapture of Frankfurt by those troops. On 13 December 1792 the French occupation authorities officially declared a state of war for Mayence. The exercise of unrestricted powers by Custine’s military council severely curtailed the civil administration’s room for manoeuvre. The Mainz Jacobin Club was greatly restricted in its activities, and former sympathisers and members now kept their distance from the Jacobins because of the uncertain political future. Another development that proved extremely negative for the club’s future began at the end of December 1792. Differences of opinion that had already existed since mid-November regarding the future of the left-Rhenish territory – especially the question of possible union with France – led to internal ideological and programmatic disputes. This resulted in the formation of two camps among leading members: a moderate wing and a more radical one. These divisions now became public.
Dissolution, end, refoundation and final dissolution The decline of the Mainz Jacobin Club continued into 1793. Fierce disputes, now fought out in public, broke out between the moderate and radical wings. The radical leadership around Dorsch, Wedekind, and Böhmer faced growing opposition over the further course of “revolutionising” the population. At the club meeting on 10 January 1793 the topic
Why do the principles of liberty and equality find so little approval? was to be discussed. The session ended in scandal when Andreas Hofmann, spokesman for the dissatisfied members, sharply attacked Wedekind, Dorsch as head of the General Administration, Forster as his deputy, Friedrich Georg Pape as chairman of the influential correspondence committee, and ultimately the French occupation authorities themselves. By this time Hofmann represented the interests of the Mainz population – especially the lower social classes – within the club. The very next day Custine charged him with slander and threatened him with execution for treason. The club members he had attacked immediately countered by accusing Hofmann – falsely – of collaborating with the
coadjutor and deputy of the Elector,
Karl Theodor von Dalberg. The escalation of these internal conflicts, the club’s increasing paralysis, and the first public criticism of the behaviour of French soldiers and their leadership – which stood in stark contrast to the autumn of 1792 – ultimately led to a further stagnation of the “revolutionisation” of the population, the club’s primary goal. Progress was neither as rapid nor as lasting as the French (and most German Jacobins) still desired. Both the German Jacobins and the French administration were disappointed with the “liberated” population, which in their view behaved too phlegmatically and failed to take the initiative for political change themselves. Forster in particular expressed – though never publicly – in private letters his despair at the people’s incapacity for freedom:
I remain convinced that Germany is not ripe for a revolution… our crude, poor, uneducated people can only rage, but cannot constitute itself. Little more was heard of the right that Custine had promised the people of Mainz on 26 October 1792:
“Your own unfettered will shall decide your fate. Even if you prefer slavery to the benefits with which liberty beckons you, it remains your choice to decide which despot shall return your chains to you.” A decree of the French National Convention on 15 December 1792 marked a paradigm shift – already foreshadowed – in revolutionary policy in the occupied left-Rhenish territories. The right of self-determination of the liberated population was effectively suspended, and the Convention in Paris now intensified pressure on the occupied German territories, which increasingly acquired the status of “conquests of war”. Primary assemblies were to be held to elect and establish provisional governments and courts in order to finally control and accelerate the process of political transformation on the French model. To this end the Convention dispatched three of its members – Nicolas Haussmann,
Merlin de Thionville, and Jean François Reubell – together with two national commissioners as direct representatives of the Convention and the Executive Council to Mainz. The latter, in cooperation with General Custine, were to represent the interests of the occupying power France in the provisional government to be elected. Instructions debated and adopted in the Convention on the same day granted them extensive powers: the two national commissioners were immediately to eliminate all openly or secretly active reactionary and counter-revolutionary forces, especially among the nobility and clergy. They were responsible for overseeing the French occupation army and for investigating and remedying deficiencies in equipment or supplies. They also had far-reaching authority in political matters concerning the administration still to be elected and constituted in Mainz. The Alsatian intellectual Jean-Frédéric Simon and his brother-in-law Gabriel Grégoire, also from Alsace, were appointed on 13 January 1793 and arrived in Mainz on 31 January. This increasingly strict control from Paris was compounded by military defeats of the French troops and the steady advance of allied forces (Prussian and Imperial troops from various parts of the Holy Roman Empire) toward Mainz. All of this led to a drastic decline in membership from 492 at the end of November 1792 to about 150 in February 1793 and to the growing irrelevance of the club and its activities. In March 1793 the French national commissioner of the Executive Power, Jean-Frédéric Simon, finally announced in Mainz the closure of the Mainz Jacobin Club and the simultaneous founding of a “Société des Allemands libres”. This successor organisation, called in German the “Society of the Friends of the Republic”, was intended to replace the previous club while excluding the former moderate members. Like its model, the Jacobin Club in Paris, it was primarily to prepare the substantive groundwork for parliamentary debate in the Rhenish-German National Convention. This “second Mainz Jacobin Club” began its work in March 1793; the last trace of this now-insignificant successor dates to early May 1793. At the latest with the encirclement of Mainz in June 1793 it quietly dissolved. Immediately after the recapture of Mainz on 23 July 1793 many club members were subjected to reprisals by the population; there were beatings and looting in the city and outside its gates.
Goethe himself witnessed such mistreatment of fleeing club members and later described it in his autobiographical work
Belagerung von Mainz (“Siege of Mainz”): Approximately one hundred of the most active club members, including for example Mathias Metternich and Franz Macké, were taken as hostages to the fortresses of
Königstein and
Ehrenbreitstein and imprisoned for an extended period. The last 39 prominent former members, who by then were detained at the
Petersberg Citadel in
Erfurt, were allowed to emigrate to France at the beginning of 1795; in exchange, Mainz residents deported in 1793 were permitted to return. Other leading club members, such as Andreas Joseph Hofmann, managed to leave the city unmolested. Many went into exile in Strasbourg or Paris, where a “Societé des Refugiés Mayençais”, an association of exiled Mainz revolutionaries, existed. Even less active or purely passive members of the Mainz Jacobin Club were affected. Craftsmen who had been members, for instance, were expelled from their guilds at the instigation of colleagues loyal to the old regime. Former electoral officials or holders of public offices who had publicly exposed themselves through club membership were punished in various ways, ranging from fines and suspension from office to expulsion from the Electorate of Mainz. Nevertheless, many of these “clubists” would again play leading roles in the now permanently French “Mayence” from 1798 onward.
Organisation After the club’s constitution, its organisation and rules were established in the following period – until early December 1792. These were essentially modelled on the Paris and Strasbourg Jacobin clubs, the latter of which included many German émigrés. At the founding session it had been decided, among other things, to request the statutes from the Strasbourg Jacobins. At the second club meeting on 24 October the presidium was elected, with the merchant Georg Häfelin as president and Mathias Metternich as vice-president, and it was resolved to hold sessions in public as a matter of principle. The presidium consisted of the president and vice-president as well as four secretaries, who were elected anew every four weeks. The club’s bodies were the public plenary session and the non-public “Comité général”. In addition, five further committees were gradually installed between November 1792 and January 1793. These dealt with different tasks: the education, security, economy, charity, and correspondence committees. The education or enlightenment committee (“Comité d’instruction”) was of particular importance. Consisting of 21 members in total, it not only set the agenda for club sessions but also independently conducted revolutionary propaganda. The population was to be comprehensively enlightened through public lectures by members on topics such as the constitution, law, finance, science, or religion. The security committee, modelled on its Parisian counterpart, was established to combat counter-revolutionaries but also proved an effective instrument against opposition inside and outside the club. The charity committee was intended to assist needy Jacobins but also persons outside the club whom it was hoped to win over to membership. The correspondence committee, established immediately after the club’s founding, was likewise of great importance. Staffed with high-calibre members such as Metternich, Wedekind, Patocki, Hofmann, Westhofen, and later also Forster and Pape, this committee engaged in extensive national and international correspondence. It was also responsible for the “affiliation” – the fraternisation of the Mainz Jacobin Club with the clubs in Strasbourg and especially Paris – a process that brought the Mainz club considerable prestige and authority and was psychologically very important for the Mainz Jacobins. Men from the age of 18 (from early November 24) could become members. Certain social and occupational groups such as servants, day labourers, and women in general were excluded from membership. A prospective candidate had to be proposed by one Jacobin and endorsed by five further members. If no more than eleven club members raised objections in three consecutive sessions, the candidate was admitted. A key aspect of the Mainz Jacobin Club’s activity was its fundamentally public character. In accordance with a resolution passed on the second day of its existence, all club sessions were public. Initially meeting every evening in the academy hall of the Electoral Palace, the club later met only four evenings a week. When the palace was converted into a hospital at the beginning of December 1792, the club moved to the “Comödienhaus”.
Size and composition With a total of 492 registered members, the Mainz Jacobin Club was of considerable size – even in comparison with similar institutions later established in the likewise French-occupied cities of
Speyer and
Worms. The roughly 450 members resident in Mainz were drawn from the approximately 7,000 Mainz inhabitants eligible for membership. Of the city’s total population of 23,000–25,000 in 1792, only men above the age of 18 (later 24) were eligible; women and younger men were not permitted to join. Thus the degree of political organisation within the population was about 6% – a figure rarely achieved by comparable French organisations or modern political parties. The registered members of the Mainz Jacobin Club came from nearly all strata of Mainz society. After completing the formal admission procedure, new members entered their names in a membership list kept for the club by the notary Johann Baptist Bittong. This list, later stored in the Hauptstaatsarchiv in Darmstadt, was the only authentic source on the club’s membership until its destruction in
World War II. Fifty members of the Jacobin Club were French. The most prominent member was General Custine himself, who – citing military obligations – did not join until 18 November 1792. The numerically largest group, at about 45% but almost entirely passive, consisted of small merchants and master craftsmen and journeymen representing the guild citizenry. They were followed by members of the educated bourgeoisie and intellectuals – professors, clergy, physicians, jurists, and students – at 21%. Next, with equal strength, came former electoral officials and French citizens at 10% each. Eight percent of club members gave no occupational designation upon joining; this group often included farmers, for example. The proportion of large-scale merchants was vanishingly small; they kept their distance from the Mainz Jacobin Club.
Professors and other intellectuals Although only about one in five members belonged to this group, their influence on the club’s activities was disproportionately large. Almost all professors who had already been politically active before October 1792 – such as Wedekind, Metternich, Eickemeyer, and Hofmann – were either directly involved in the club’s founding or joined soon thereafter. With the accession of the internationally renowned researcher and writer
Georg Forster, who joined only at the beginning of November, the institution gained additional renown. With few exceptions, the group of professors and intellectuals – such as the jurist, publisher, and publicist Christoph Friedrich Cotta – provided the club’s presidents and vice-presidents.
Students of the University of Mainz With the founding of the club, numerous students from the circles of Metternich, Wedekind, and Hofmann also joined. The initial minimum age for membership was 18 years, but on Dorsch’s proposal – despite fierce protests from the younger, mostly student members – it was raised to 24 years on 7 November 1792. This excluded many students from membership, though those who had already joined were allowed to remain. Among these students, Nikolaus Müller and Friedrich Lehne deserve particular mention; both had been politically active beforehand and rose quickly in the revolutionary hierarchy. The law student Dominik Meuth was also a founding member and later, together with the former court councillor Kaspar Hartmann, published the newspaper
Fränkischer Beobachter.
Electoral officials The membership of the Mainz Jacobin Club also included some high-ranking officials of the electoral court. Officials made up about 11% of the total membership. The electoral court councillor Kaspar Hartmann, for example, was involved from the very beginning and at the founding meeting on 23 October 1792 gave a speech calling for the “revival of the hitherto suppressed human rights and the introduction of liberty and equality” while attacking leading Mainz aristocrats. The early entry of the electoral police commissioner Franz Konrad Macké was also widely noted by the people of Mainz.
Major merchants As already mentioned, their share of the membership was extremely small. One of the leading representatives of this small group was, however, the merchant André Patocki. Even in electoral times he had belonged to the pro-revolutionary circle around Mathias Metternich and was a founding member of the Mainz Jacobin Club. On 24 October 1792, the second day of the club’s existence, the merchant Georg Häfelin was deliberately elected its first president. Together with Mathias Metternich as vice-president, he held the office until 24 November 1792. Patocki and Häfelin also played important roles in the later Mainz municipal administration. Eight days after the club’s constitution, the 24-year-old Jewish money-changer Nathan Maas joined. He took part in the procession that erected the first liberty tree in Mainz on the Höfchen on 3 November 1792. On the same day that he took the oath to the revolutionary constitution, Maas left the Jacobin Club again in spring 1793. For his support of the revolutionary cause he was arrested and imprisoned on electoral territory at the end of 1794 and expelled from Mainz in 1796.
Craftsmen The craftsmen, still organised in
guilds, together with small merchants and lower electoral officials formed the largest single group of club members at 45%. Within the organised guilds, however, the roughly 200 Jacobin craftsmen represented only 10% of guild citizens. This numerical dominance of craftsmen was not reflected at the leadership level of the Mainz Jacobin Club, which was dominated by intellectuals such as professors, publicists, students, or higher electoral officials.
Political activities Many of the leading club members had already been politically committed to the ideals of the French Revolution before the club’s founding. With the establishment of the Mainz Jacobin Club and the patronage of General Custine, these activities were now concentrated, intensified, and extended beyond the city limits. The Mainz Jacobin Club became the most important organ of the Mainz Jacobins and the most important instrument of the French occupation authorities for the political mobilisation of the population. Its main task was the enlightenment, information, and of course the revolutionisation of the Mainz population. To this end the active club members used above all the public assembly evenings in the academy hall of the Electoral Palace. There, in front of club members and – at the club’s peak – up to 1,000 visitors, political speeches were delivered, sometimes printed immediately and distributed free of charge or sold later. Leading members of the Jacobin Club such as Mathias Metternich visited villages around Mainz in their role as “voting commissioners” (Sub-Commissair) at the end of 1792 and beginning of 1793, campaigning for the ideas of the French Revolution and specifically for the establishment of a republic on the Parisian model and the acceptance of the “Frankish constitution”. The vote on a new constitution and a new form of state (
Mainz Republic), initiated by the General Administration consisting of nine club members, was the last and – in terms of eligible citizens – the most concrete attempt at revolutionisation. In the context of this constitutional referendum the Mainz Jacobins provided massive on-the-ground support with personal commitment,, though with very mixed success. At the subsequent elections of local officials (in Mainz a
maire and deputy were elected) and deputies to the Rhenish-German National Convention, the parliament of the intended Mainz Republic, held from 24 to 26 February 1793, however, club members were poorly represented. In the name lists of the six Mainz electoral sections a total of only 168 club members and 15 presumed club members were recorded, making up 49% of all voters. Since only 8% (372 citizens) of the 4,626 eligible voters in the entire Mainz urban area turned out to vote, the active club members on their part failed to mobilise either their own members or the eligible population politically. On the contrary, the elections were boycotted by the vast majority of eligible Mainz citizens – in marked contrast to the other large cities of Worms and Speyer – as a conscious political demonstration. The political work of the now-dissolved club was continued by its leading members in other areas of public and political life. In the municipal administration every elected official from Maire Macké downward was a former, usually leading, club member. In the Rhenish-German National Convention both the president Andreas Joseph Hofmann and the vice-president Georg Forster were leading club members. Likewise, of the 45 candidates who received any votes at all, all but two were former club members. The political stance of the Mainz Jacobin Club toward the occupying power France and its goals was ambivalent throughout its active existence. Initially almost unanimous with the French on revolutionary aims, this changed toward the end of 1792. A more radical wing around Wedekind, Dorsch, Pape, and Metternich believed that the revolutionary ideas and goals could only be realised through unconditional cooperation with the French. They advocated the closest possible attachment to France, which after the founding of the Mainz Republic was to become a petition for reunion with France, and the Rhine as the republic’s frontier with aristocratic-despotic Germany. The more moderate wing, which included Hofmann and Macké, thought more pragmatically. They saw on the one hand the lack of support from the population, especially peasants and guild citizens, and on the other the increasingly violent and restrictive behaviour of the French occupying power, especially the army. Hofmann and Macké tended in their respective offices to represent the interests of the Mainz population vis-à-vis the French occupation authorities rather than those of their more radical colleagues in the club. Despite all the quarrels, the work of the Mainz Jacobins – and at a later date the affiliation of Mainz and Rhenish Hesse with France – provided a starting point for the political and social attitudes of the population in southwestern Germany in later attempts at liberal-democratic development. The
Hambach Festival of 1832 was not coincidentally organised by citizens who had grown up or been politically active in a significantly more liberal system than the rest of Germany. Important components of the system were known as the
Rhenish institutions and concerned primarily the liberal legislation and jurisdiction adopted from the French period. Some were first-generation Jacobins such as Georg Friedrich Rebmann or Franz Konrad Macké who was still serving as mayor of Mainz at the time, while others were members of the next or following generations such as
Germain Metternich, son of
Mathias Metternich, or
Franz Heinrich Zitz, grandson of the club member Jakob Schneiderhenn. And so as late as 1833, exactly forty years after the dissolution of the Mainz Jacobin Club, the Austrian Chancellor and eponym of the
Metternich system Klemens von Metternich could still say of Mainz:
“Mainz is a terrible nest of Jacobins.” == Counter-revolutionary Publications on the Mainz Jacobin Club ==