Bürgerausschüsse in Aachen in der Spätphase des Alten Reiches. Innerstädtische Partizipationsbestrebungen zwischen Gemeindeliberalismus und Klientelismus

Citizens' committees in Aachen in the late phase of the Old Empire. Inner-city participation efforts between community liberalism and clientelism

Starting in the late Middle Ages, the composition of political representative bodies in many German cities began to change: alongside the traditional councils (Magistrate) and lay judges’ colleges (Schöffen), new citizen assemblies and representative bodies emerged under various names in numerous imperial cities, but also in larger autonomous towns and, in some cases, even in smaller towns. What they all had in common was a drive to monitor the activities of the council – and, inevitably, to participate in exercising council authority. These committees often existed for long periods of time or were formed situationally during erupting conflicts. As well-established instruments of civic opinion representation and articulation, Bürgerausschüsse became particularly prominent during the intensifying internal urban disputes of the two decades leading up to the French Revolution. This sub-project aims to examine the diversification of urban power structures and participatory forms, situated between a primarily economically motivated struggle over distribution and a largely ideologically driven urban republicanism. It focuses on the development of participatory institutions within urban political culture and their significance for the emergence of German constitutionalism and early liberalism around 1800. Taking the highly significant constitutional struggles in Aachen since the 1780s (“Aachener Mäkelei”) as its point of departure, the project offers a fresh perspective on these representative bodies. One of its guiding questions is what motives actually drove groups critical of the council when they raised and asserted political participation claims – and what changes they brought about, both in individual cases and more generally. Special attention is also given to distinguishing where challenges to council policy were genuinely issue-driven and where, by contrast, civic participation claims were carried by particular, even clientelist, interests.

For example, in the 1780s and 1790s, the leaders of Aachen’s self-proclaimed “New Party” coupled their criticism of the council oligarchy with the hope of themselves gaining admission to the very exclusive circles that had long been closed to them. In this light, the typically republican rhetoric invoking “participation” was not a critique of the principle itself, but of the one-sidedness of a monopolistic political practice that had often been in place for a very long time.