Citizen committees in Aachen in the late period of the Old Empire. Civic participation attempts between communal liberalism and clientelism

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Stephan Laux
• Subject Area: Early Modern History
• Term: from 2018 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 405222537

Since the late Middle Age, the appearance of the bodies of political representation was changing in many German cities: As an addition to the traditional magistrate and aldermen councils there appeared citizens committees of various names. They urged for taking over control and thus for immediate participation in the execution of the official functions of municipal councils. Often these committees existed over long periods or, however, they developed out of situations of conflict. Being well attuned tools of the representation and articulation of public opinion among the citizens, citizens committees became ever more crucial actors in the context of those struggles within the cities as becoming ever more frequent in the about two decades prior to the French Revolution. This project pursues the goal of discussing the diversification of urban power structures and ways of participation in the tension area between a primarily economically motivated distribution battle and an urban republicanism which was most of all based on ideals. In doing so, the project focusses the heavy conflicts in the Imperial City of Aachen which started to escalate in the mid 1780s and overlapped the French Revolution until the ultimate seizure of the city in 1794. The main interest of the project is the further development of participative institutions of urban political culture and its significance for the development of German constitutionalism and early liberalism at about 1800.The research project starts out from the premise that the social form of the “city” was based on citizen participation in all issues concerning the “common good”, as the main idea of its cooperative self-organisation. Thus, participation was somewhat an expression of the nature of urban existence, for only by way of participating in public offices the individual´s civil liberty crystallised, at least in the ideal case. However, as this capability of participation was in principle connected to taxability and thus economic exclusivity, inequality was a momentous concomitant of the corporative principle of the “city”. These contradicting objectives require that the analysis of the ways of participation and participation demands of citizens committees refers to the many dimensions of inequality of urban society. By the end of the 18th and early 19th centuries an age of societal transition and political innovations will be viewed at, when new and old ways of participation were developing in the closest possible connection to changes of established inequality structures in the city. The project aims at analysing the institutional kinds and functions, however in particular the idealistic main ideas of citizens committees in the late period of the Old Empire and their connections to the various dimensions of urban inequality.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants