Transnational Republicans: Spreading Ideas of Freedom in the Age of Revolutions

• Applicant: Dr. Elias Buchetmann
• Subject Area: Early Modern History
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 572330198

This project investigates the transnational circulation of republican ideas during the Age of Revolutions (c. 1770s-1820s), with a particular focus on the role of women in shaping and transmitting these ideas. It seeks to understand how concepts of freedom, democracy and popular sovereignty transcended national borders, influenced political movements and shaped emerging traditions of thought. To this end, the project analyses intellectual and political networks that facilitated the spread of revolutionary ideas across different cultural and political contexts. Focusing on female intellectuals, activists and writers, and drawing on a broad range of source material, it will shed light on the contributions of radical women who often remain marginalized in existing accounts of the period. The project examines how the republican revolution simultaneously challenged and reinforced gender roles and hierarchies, focusing on the ways in which revolutionary discourses on liberty and equality intersected with feminist claims and religious critiques. The central hypothesis is that the republican revolution functioned as a transformative moment in multiple dimensions - political, feminist and religious - while simultaneously reproducing existing gendered, social and racial hierarchies. Adopting a transnational and comparative perspective, the project mainly works with case studies from the German-speaking world, placing the republican networks of Hamburg and Altona as well as Mainz and (in exile) Neuchâtel in a global context. By reconstructing political debates and tracing the transnational movement of ideas across the Age of Revolutions, the project makes an original contribution to the historiography of the Sattelzeit: it illuminates the emergence of both modern political thought and modern gender relations.

• DFG Programme: Emmy Noether Independent Junior Research Groups