Historical awareness today

Rhine-Hessian Free Barons

The Rheinhessen Freischaren were recruited on the one hand from the local vigilante groups and on the other from spontaneous supporters.

The roots of the vigilantes can be seen in the fact that Franz Zitz, one of the two commanders of the Rheinhessen Freischaren in Kirchheimbolanden, had begun his political involvement as a colonel of the Mainz vigilantes founded in February 1848.

The second root of the Rheinhessen Freischaren was the “Rheinhessische Provinzialkomitee zur Durchführung der Reichsverfassung” (Rheinhessen Provincial Committee for the Implementation of the Imperial Constitution), based in Wörrstadt. In its name, Bamberger and Zitz issued a marching order, which was distributed in particular via gymnastics clubs:

All inhabitants of Rheinhessen, who have committed themselves and consider themselves obliged to stand up for the German constitution, are ordered by the present to provide themselves as well as they can with firearms, cutting and stabbing weapons, ammunition and

The troops were to be provided with food and to set out immediately upon receipt of this order and to arrive in Wörrstadt by Thursday, May 10, 1849 in the evening in order to march on from there.

One of the participants in this march reported in a letter on May 16, 1849:

When we marched away from Wörrstadt, we came to Alzey at noon, where we […] were received in the best possible way. We were given so much to eat and drink that all 3000 of us felt the wine. In Niederflörsheim we split up; the Alzeyer, Binger and Oppenheimer came to Monsheim […]. We arrived there at 6 o’clock and were received in such a way that we ourselves were astonished. As you can imagine, the farmers scolded each other if one did not receive more quarters than the other; one took 86 men, another 76, at least 10-15 each; indeed, we had to take another 100 men from the others to satisfy the farmers. The next morning we marched to Kirchheimbolanden […] and were received in every village with wine and music. […] Our vanguard is 1200 strong, all riflemen.

However, it was not only marksmen who marched to Kirchheimbolanden. There were also “reapers”, as well as completely unarmed men.

An encounter with irregulars in Kirchheimbolanden

The Freischärler sculpture on the square by the Grauer Turm exudes a romanticism that most of the “men of action” no doubt also saw themselves in – they were named in a report published in February 1850 in the “Rheinische Zeitung, Politisch-ökonomische Revue”:

In the evening we sat with several irregulars in the inn. At [ihnen] there were some of those serious, enthusiastic “men of action” […] who saw no difficulty at all in beating any army in the world with a few weapons and a lot of enthusiasm. These are people who have at most seen the guard parade of the military, who are never at all concerned about the material means to achieve any purpose and who therefore usually, as I later had the opportunity to observe several times, experience such a crushing disappointment in the first battle that they hurry off. I asked one of these heroes whether he really intended […] to beat the Prussians, and was in the best of moods to be amused by the holy indignation of the man of action, wounded in his noblest enthusiasm, when the guard entered and declared me under arrest. […] At the same time, an old acquaintance of mine, a captain in the Rheinhessen Corps, stood up and declared that if I were arrested, he and a considerable number of the best people in the corps would leave immediately. Those present split into two parties, the scene threatened to become interesting and I declared that I would of course be happy to be arrested: They would finally see what color the Palatine movement was. I went with the guard.

The next morning, after a strange interrogation […], I was handed over to the civil commissioner and by him to a gendarme. The gendarme, who had been instructed to treat me as a spy, locked both my hands together and led me away on foot, accused of disparaging the uprising of the Palatine people and of incitement against the government, of which I had casually said not a word.

The rest is quickly added. The delinquent is transferred to Kaiserslautern and released from custody the following day without any conditions.

It remains to add his name: Friedrich Engels (1820-95), who is closely associated with Karl Marx’s revolutionary program.

A visit to the Freischärler in Kirchheimbolanden

Another revolutionary of 1848/49, Karl Schurz (1829-1906) – as an emigrant he later became a senator from Missouri in the USA and then American Secretary of the Interior – who visited the Rheinhessen irregulars in the Palatinate in 1849, was on his way from Mainz to Strasbourg. He wanted to meet Franz Zitz in Kirchheimbolanden.

So I made my way to Kirchheimbolanden on foot, carrying my luggage in a knapsack on my back. In the small town of Kirchheimbolanden I found Zitz, a tall, handsome man, surrounded by what seemed to be a well-equipped and reasonably well-disciplined detachment. The camp did not make a bad impression. […] Only the artillery, which consisted of three or four small firecrackers of the kind used for banging at festivities, had something toy-like about it.

These were the worst possible conditions for a confrontation with regular troops.