Hecker Uprising

The Hecker uprising was an attempt by Baden revolutionary leaders Friedrich Hecker, Gustav von Struve, and several other radical democrats in April 1848 to overthrow the monarchy and establish a republic in the Grand Duchy of Baden. The main action of the uprising consisted of an armed civilian militia under the leadership of Friedrich Hecker moving from Konstanz in the direction of Karlsruhe with the intention of joining with another armed group under the leadership of Georg Herwegh there to topple the government. The two groups were halted independently by the troops of the German Confederation before they could combine forces. The Hecker Uprising was the first large uprising of the Baden Revolution and became, along with its leader, part of the national myth.

In the Grand Duchy of Baden, which already had a relatively liberal constitution enacted under the politically moderate Grand Duke Leopold, radical democratic ideas were strongly in vogue. The influence of the French February Revolution, which had proclaimed the Second Republic several weeks before, was stronger in Baden than anywhere in Germany.

The uprising is named after its leader, the 37-year-old lawyer from Mannheim, Friedrich Hecker, who in 1848 was already the spokesman for the liberal-democratic opposition in the Second Chamber of the Baden Parliament.

Hecker, Herwegh, and Gustav Struve were well-known representatives of the Left in northern Baden. In the preparatory parliament of the March Revolution, however, they were in the minority with their radical, far reaching anti-monarchical ideas. The majority of the bourgeois liberal representatives of the revolution, who mostly came from the upper-middle class favored a constitutional monarchy under a hereditary emperor, in which liberal reforms would be possible.

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