The Hecker uprising was an attempt in April 1848 by Baden revolutionary leaders Friedrich Hecker, Gustav von Struve, and several other radical democrats to overthrow the monarchy and establish a republic in the Grand Duchy of Baden. The uprising was the first major clash in the Baden Revolution and among the first in the March Revolution in Germany, part of the broader Revolutions of 1848 across Europe. The main action of the uprising consisted of an armed civilian militia under the leadership of Friedrich Hecker moving from Konstanz on the Swiss border in the direction of Karlsruhe, the ducal capital, with the intention of joining with another armed group under the leadership of revolutionary poet 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.
Background
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.
Hecker and Struve had taken part in the Frankfurt preliminary parliament from March 31 to April 4, 1848. In Frankfurt, however, they had suffered both personal and political losses. Neither managed to be elected to the Fünfzigerausschuss, a committee of 50 chosen to bridge the period until the formation of a proper national parliament and their political ideas were not greeted positively. Disappointed, Hecker decided to advance the revolution in other ways, first in his native Baden.
Preparation
The city of Konstanz on the edge of Lake Constance seemed to Hecker a suitable starting point. The capital of the Lake Constance District was regarded as particularly receptive to liberal ideas and Hecker expected to find many supporters in the city and surrounding countryside. Several groups of liberal and republican-minded citizens had already emerged in Konstanz in the 1830s. Joseph Fickler had emerged as a local agitator in the Vormärz period before the failed March revolutions of 1848. He was the publisher and editor of the Seeblätter, a radical-democratic newspaper. Under Fickler's leadership a sports club was founded on March 31. With 40 charter members, the goal of the club was "to form an armed, but free corps" and shortly thereafter became a nationally-established liberal Workers Association. Fickler's arrest on April 8, 1848 gave Hecker the final impetus he needed to head to Konstanz.
In fact, a somewhat republican but primarily militant mood prevailed in the spring of 1848 in the citizenry of Konstanz. Since March 5, 1848, there had been a permanent Citizens' Committee, convened at a public meeting, which was to represent the political citizenship at the pre-parliamentary assemblies in Offenburg. The situation in the city was tense. On the – as it turned out false – rumor that tens of thousands of armed and unarmed Frenchmen near Offenburg crossed the border to ravage the country, on March 26 a general arming of the citizenry took place. Franz Sigel, a former officer who was in the quasi-militarized city, organized a militia of 400 men on behalf of the mayor, Mayor Charles Hüetlin. The hopes of Hecker and Struve were based on the militia.
Hecker arrived in Konstanz on the evening of April 11. To escape arrest, he had traveled through France and Switzerland. Together with Franz Sigel, Gustav Struve, and Theodor Mogling, who had arrived earlier, he planned the next steps: Four columns were to march and meet up in Karlsruhe, one of Constance, two on different routes of Donaueschingen, and a fourth over upper Black Forest, from St. Blasien and Waldshut. They hoped for a snowball effect: the columns were supposed to gain more and more people en route so that the state should eventually collapse like a house of cards.