ABSTRACT
I How Prussian is it? In spite of the excellent literature on social protest in nineteenth-century Germany, the civilian-soldier riots discussed here have largely slipped under the radar screen of historical research. Richard Tilly includes fights with offduty soldiers in his quantitative analysis of collective violence in nineteenthcentury Germany and astutely registers the growing problem of civilian-soldier confrontations over the course of the Vormarz, but offers little close analysis. 19 They are not included in the pool of 165 cases that informed Heinrich Volkmann's pathbreaking study on 183020 and, similarly, they do not figure in
and the Palatinate appears to be lower than in Prussia. 28 This discrepancy can, of course, be attributed to the smaller population and territorial size of the southern Rhenish regions, but this answer is only partial. Because popular political demonstrations occurred with far greater frequency in Baden and the Palatinate, the potential for confrontation was greater than in Prussian territories. In Baden and the Palatinate, for example, the popular political ritual of transforming maypoles into liberty trees brought residents into conflict with state officials in the 1830s, yet these contests remained far more symbolic and verbal than physically violent. 29 Although state archives in the Bavarian Palatinate document dozens of liberty-tree ceremonies, charivaris against state officials, and taunting of soldiers and gendarmes with political songs, I found only six instances of violence that pitted civilians against soldiers and gendarmes.30 The spectacular incident of 6 May 1832 in the Palatinate town of Annweiler certainly merits mention: 3000 residents blocked two companies of soldiers from entering the town to dismantle a liberty tree which thirty residents had provocatively erected in front of the mayor's home. Significantly, though, the military lacked authorization to use force and withdrew, thus allowing the liberty tree to stand.31 Wirtz's ten recorded instances in Baden, combined with the Palatinate's low number, suggests that trends in the Prussian Rhineland differ from other Rhenish states in the years 1830 to 1848.
