Die Bürgersoldaten von Rastatt

When the Prussian King Frederick William IV (1795-1861) rejected the imperial crown offered to him by deputies of the Frankfurt National Assembly on 3 April 1849, a final revolutionary uprising of the German freedom and unity movement of 1848/49 took place, the so-called Imperial Constitution Campaign. While in most German states the uprisings were put down with the help of troops loyal to the government, in Baden the mutiny of almost all garrisons triggered by the Rastatt Soldiers' Uprising on 11/12 May 1849 led to the decisive revolutionary impulse, which resulted in the flight of the Grand Duke and the takeover of governmental power by the state committee of the People's Associations. The democratic ideas spread through the Volksvereine had for the first time also found access and spread in the Baden military. The Baden soldiers regarded the Reich constitutional campaign as a fight for their own rights and were above all no longer prepared to shoot at citizens who supported this constitution. They wanted to be "citizen soldiers". This socio-historical analysis of the conditioning factors of the Rastatt soldier uprising not only deals with its causes, occasions and forms of emergence. It also contains an evaluation of the biographical data of the soldiers involved in a leading function with the conclusions derived from this about social origin, motivation, type of participation and degree of politicisation.