Background
The movement of the March revolution within the member states of the German Confederation led to the election of Frankfurt Assembly, the first all-German parliament. This parliament proclaimed the Constitution of St. Paul's Church on 28 March 1849 that provided for the state as a hereditary constitutional monarchy. The Prussian king Frederick William IV refused the imperial crown that he was offered. On 23 April, the Bavarian king and his government rejected the constitution, which was regarded by the left as a coup.
On 2 May, it was decided to set up a ten-member National Committee for the Defence and Implementation of the Constitution and on 7 May 1849 the representative of the Central Power for the Palatinate, Bernhard Eisenstuck, legitimized the National Defence Committee. On 3 May 1849, the May uprising in Dresden broke out, but this was put down on 9 May by Saxon and Prussian troops. On 11 May, the third Baden uprising began with the mutiny of Baden troops in the federal fortress of Rastatt.
The request by the Palatine state committee for the support of Baden and Hesse was made on 9 May in Rheinhessen. [4] and led to the calling up of a Rhenish-Hessian volunteer army or Freikorps by Franz Zitz and Ludwig Bamberger. Military command was initially given to Karl Ludwig Heußner. [5] The corps assembled in Wörrstadt and marched via Alzey to Pfeddersheim and then on to Kirchheimbolanden.
On 11 June, came the feared intervention of the 1st Prussian Army Corps under Moritz von Hirschfeld. The advance guard of his 1st Division, commanded by Major General von Hannecken, crossed the Palatine border unopposed near Kreuznach and advanced south.
Course of the battle
As early as 13 June, during a recce by the Prussians near Morschheim, [6] there was a clash with a company of volunteers, who reported one dead and two wounded. [7]
The rebels left behind in Morschheim as an outpost left their positions, against orders, on the night of 13/14 June and withdrew to Kirchheimbolanden. The advance of the Prussians was spotted in Kirchheimbolanden on 14 June at 5 a.m. A Prussian company of fusiliers occupied Orbis, initially unopposed, and continued from the northwest towards Kirchheimbolanden, while the main body of the Prussian units attacked the town from the north. A third group advanced from the west. One company of the Freikorps initially resisted the Prussians in front of the town, but then pulled back when it was attacked from three sides. The situation of the Freikorp, which had come under artillery fire, had become precarious. Because the Polish Major Rouppert, who was formally in command, made no decisions, a withdrawal to Rockenhausen was organised by Zitz and Bamberger. One section of Mainz riflemen remained, for reasons unknown, in the castle garden where a company of the Guards Landwehr battalion captured the barricade. The Landwehr and fusiliers soon broke through the main gate into the castle garden where the volunteers were killed [8] or captured. Among the prisoners was Mathilde Hitzfeld, who is portrayed in one illustration holding a flag at a barricade, an image that is probably based on portraits of the French Revolution.
The Rhenish-Hessian Freikorps pulled back further to Neustadt an der Weinstraße, where it was united with Schlinke's militia (Volkswehr) battalion and Blenker's corps and then marched over the bridge over the Rhine at Knielingen on 18 June and made for Baden. On 20 June the Rhenish-Hesse Freikorps was disbanded.
The Prince of Prussia, the supreme commander of the whole army that defeated the revolution in the Palatinate and in Baden accompanied the 4th Division and personally thanked his troops after the battle.
Rhineland-Palatinate is a western state of Germany. It covers 19,846 km2 (7,663 sq mi) and has about 4.05 million residents. It is the ninth largest and sixth most populous of the sixteen states. Mainz is the capital and largest city. Other cities are Ludwigshafen am Rhein, Koblenz, Trier, Kaiserslautern, Worms, and Neuwied. It is bordered by North Rhine-Westphalia, Saarland, Baden-Württemberg and Hesse and by France, Luxembourg and Belgium.
The Electoral Palatinate or the Palatinate, officially the Electorate of the Palatinate, was a constituent state of the Holy Roman Empire. The electorate had its origins under the rulership of the Counts Palatine of Lotharingia in 915; it was then restructured under the Counts Palatine of the Rhine in 1085. From 1214 until the Electoral Palatinate was merged into the Kingdom of Bavaria in 1805, the House of Wittelsbach provided the Counts Palatine or Electors. These counts palatine of the Rhine would serve as prince-electors from "time immemorial", and were noted as such in a papal letter of 1261; they were confirmed as electors by the Golden Bull of 1356.
The Palatinate, or the Rhenish Palatinate (Rheinpfalz), is a historical region of Germany. The Palatinate occupies most of the southern quarter of the German federal state of Rhineland-Palatinate (Rheinland-Pfalz), covering an area of 2,105 square miles (5,450 km2) with about 1.4 million inhabitants. Its residents are known as Palatines (Pfälzer).
Ludwig Bamberger was a German Jewish economist, politician, revolutionary and writer.
The German revolutions of 1848–1849, the opening phase of which was also called the March Revolution, were initially part of the Revolutions of 1848 that broke out in many European countries. They were a series of loosely coordinated protests and rebellions in the states of the German Confederation, including the Austrian Empire. The revolutions, which stressed pan-Germanism, liberalism and parliamentarianism, demonstrated popular discontent with the traditional, largely autocratic political structure of the thirty-nine independent states of the Confederation that inherited the German territory of the former Holy Roman Empire after its dismantlement as a result of the Napoleonic Wars. This process began in the mid-1840s.
Alzey is a Verband-free town – one belonging to no Verbandsgemeinde – in the Alzey-Worms district in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany. It is the fifth-largest town in Rhenish Hesse, after Mainz, Worms, Ingelheim am Rhein and Bingen.
The Duchy of Franconia was one of the five stem duchies of East Francia and the medieval Kingdom of Germany emerging in the early 10th century. The word Franconia, first used in a Latin charter of 1053, was applied like the words Francia, France, and Franken, to a portion of the land occupied by the Franks.
Ober-Flörsheim is an Ortsgemeinde – a municipality belonging to a Verbandsgemeinde, a kind of collective municipality – in the Alzey-Worms district in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany.
Wachenheim is an Ortsgemeinde – a municipality belonging to a Verbandsgemeinde, a kind of collective municipality – in the Alzey-Worms district in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany.
The Hessian Ludwig Railway or HLB with its network of 697 kilometres of railway was one of the largest privately owned railway companies in Germany.
The Baden Revolution of 1848/1849 was a regional uprising in the Grand Duchy of Baden which was part of the revolutionary unrest that gripped almost all of Central Europe at that time.
Germain Franz Metternich was the son of Mathias Metternich, one of the leading Mainz Jacobins. Metternich pursued a military career initially, but became involved with the German democratic movement in the southern states of the German Confederation from the beginning of the 1830s onward. He participated in the Hambacher Fest and later in the campaigns of the Revolutions of 1848 in the German states. In 1850 he immigrated to the United States as part of a larger wave of politically active Forty-Eighters, following the defeat of that movement in continental Europe, and remained politically active in his new, democratic homeland. Because of this background, he was particularly concerned with the struggle for of human rights and became involved with both the socialist and the abolitionist movements. At the beginning of the American Civil War he joined the Union Army. He was killed in 1862 by a drunken fellow soldier.
The Palatine uprising was a rebellion that took place in May and June 1849 in the Rhenish Palatinate, which was then an exclave territory of the Kingdom of Bavaria. Related to uprisings across the Rhine in Baden, it was part of the widespread Imperial Constitution Campaign (Reichsverfassungskampagne). Revolutionaries worked to defend the constitution and to secede from the Kingdom of Bavaria.
The Battle of Rinnthal was the heaviest battle of the Palatine uprising and took place on 17 June 1849 near Rinnthal in the Annweiler valley in Europe. The revolutionary troops under August Willich tried in vain to halt the advance of Prussian troops on Landau.
The Guards Fusilier Regiment or Guards Fusiliers was an infantry unit of the Guards Corps of the Prussian Army garrisoned in Berlin. In keeping with the genteel nature of the unit, most of its officer corps were nobility. At the time of the German Empire it commanded soldiers guarding the Wache.
The Battle of Ludwigshafen and the subsequent bombardment of Ludwigshafen lasted from 15 to 18 June 1849 and was part of the Palatine Uprising and Baden Revolution. The young settlement of Ludwigshafen was badly damaged by the shells of the Baden artillery and the resulting fires.
The Kaiserslautern–Enkenbach railway is a single-track main line in the Western Palatinate. It runs within the area of the Verkehrsverbund Rhein-Neckar. It was built in 1875 to shorten the route for trains on the Alsenz Valley Railway (Alsenztalbahn) running to Kaiserslautern. In the following years, several express trains ran over this line. Passenger traffic was discontinued in 1987, but it was reactivated ten years later.
Vlexx GmbH is a rail transport company based in Mainz, Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany; it is a subsidiary of the Regentalbahn, which in turn has been part of the Italian state railway Ferrovie dello Stato (FS) since 2011 via its parent company Netinera. Vlexx operates local rail passenger transport exclusively with diesel railcars in Rhineland-Palatinate, Saarland and Hesse as well as a connection to France on the Winden-Wissembourg railway line into the Alsace to the railway station of Wissembourg.
The Battle of Werbach took place during the Austro-Prussian War as part of the Campaign of the Main on 24 July 1866 between the Prussian Alliance and the German Federal Army.
The Baden Army was the military organisation of the German state of Baden until 1871. The origins of the army were a combination of units that the Badenese margraviates of Baden-Durlach and Baden-Baden had set up in the Baroque era, and the standing army of the Swabian Circle, to which both territories had to contribute troops. The reunification of the two small states to form the Margraviate of Baden in 1771 and its subsequent enlargement and elevation by Napoleon to become the Grand Duchy of Baden in 1806 created both the opportunity and obligation to maintain a larger army, which Napoleon used in his campaigns against Austria, Prussia and Spain and, above all, Russia. After the end of Napoleon's rule, the Grand Duchy of Baden contributed a division to the German Federal Army. In 1848, Badenese troops helped to suppress the Hecker uprising, but a year later a large number sided with the Baden revolutionaries. After the violent suppression of the revolution by Prussian and Württemberg troops, the army was re-established and fought in the Austro-Prussian War of 1866 on the side of Austria and the southern German states, as well as in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 on the side of the Germans. When Baden joined the German Empire in 1870/71, the Grand Duchy gave up its military sovereignty and the Badenese troops became part of the XIV Army Corps of the Imperial German Army.
Palatine rebel army
Prussian Army