Barricade at the Palace Garden

Revolutionary Site: Barricade

Barricades are particularly dramatic symbols of the 1849 Revolution. Especially in Saxony, where 250 people died in barricade fights in May 1849, they also became a subject in fine art. The painter Julius Scholtz (1825-93) depicted a very striking Dresden barricade scene.

As a close-up, it conveys an impression of the intensity of the confrontation between irregulars (here in civilian clothes) and the Prussian-Saxon military. It also documents the ‘architecture’ of the barricades: torn-up cobblestones, wagon wheels, wooden barrels. The latter (French barrique = barrel) also led to the term ‘barricade’.

The Myth of the Barricade

As a symbolic site of resistance against perceived oppressive authorities, the events at the barricades have often fostered myth-making – as was also the case in Kirchheimbolanden.

Mathilde Hitzfeld [Location 59] provided the personification necessary for a myth. An illustration published in 1893 shows the 23-year-old (in 1849) with a black-red-gold flag on a barricade. Accordingly, the Kirchheimbolanden ‘Lokalanzeiger’ also recalled in an obituary for Mathilde Hitzfeld in 1905: ‘She participated in the barricade fight in Kirchheimbolanden and, with a small group of daring freedom heroes, tried in vain to halt the advance of the Prussians.’ The newspaper text and book illustration are thus consistent.

However, since no barricade fights took place in Kirchheimbolanden in 1849, a dramatic event is constructed – not as ‘fake news,’ but as an incentive for emotional imagination and romanticization.

But the events of June 14, 1849, were already portrayed in this manner shortly thereafter. A letter from the irregular Joseph Regnier from Mainz provides information: ‘It was a strange state of mind we were in; we had forgotten everything around us and thought it couldn’t be any other way.’