A Village at the Edge of Revolution
The Revolutions of 1848 were a wave of liberal and nationalist uprisings that swept across Europe, challenging established political orders. In Baden, the movement became particularly radical, culminating in an armed republican uprising in 1849 before being defeated by Prussian-led forces.
In the small Black Forest village of Neukirch, these events were not distant constitutional struggles played out in Frankfurt or Karlsruhe. They unfolded through village meetings, militia levies, disputes over local government and, in the case of Josef Hummel, a deeply personal conflict over religion and political authority.
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| Neukirch |
Josef Hummel (1810–1870) was a watchmaker and watch trader who became mayor of Neukirch in 1847. During the upheavals of 1848–49, he would find himself caught between competing political and religious loyalties.
The Hummel Household and a New Faith
Josef's father, also named Josef, was a maker of clock movements and originally came from Rohrbach. The younger Josef himself was a watchmaker and trader, and in 1840 married Klara Fehrenbach, the daughter of the local Burgbauer Jakob Fehrenbach. In the same year he built the Obere Zinkhäusle on land transferred to his wife by her father.
The surviving sources also connect Josef Hummel directly with the emergence of Protestantism in the area. He is described in local historical literature as playing a founding role in the evangelical congregations of Neukirch, Furtwangen and Gütenbach, while another history of the Upper Bregtal describes him specifically as the evangelisch gewordene Bürgermeister von Neukirch — the Protestant-convert mayor of Neukirch.
By 1849, his own home had become a centre of evangelical activity. Protestant-Pietist ministers visited Neukirch to preach, celebrate communion and conduct devotional meetings there. Hummel acknowledged that gatherings of “believing Evangelicals” were held in his house, explaining that he had left the Roman Catholic Church out of complete conviction and joined the Protestant Church.
This was a significant position in a community that remained overwhelmingly Catholic.
I was originally told that the Josef Hummel who became mayor of Neukirch and played a leading role in the early Protestant movement was Salome Hummel’s father. However, further research into the contemporary records and local histories now leads me to believe that this was her brother, Josef Hummel (1810–1870), while her father was the older Josef Hummel, a clockmaker. I have therefore treated the younger Josef as the principal figure in this account.
Mayor of Neukirch
Josef Hummel was already involved in municipal affairs before becoming mayor. He served on the Bürgerausschuss in 1845 and 1846 and had been the community's Gemeinderechner since July 1845. He had acquired his civic rights in 1840, a prerequisite for holding municipal office, before succeeding Anton Siedle as mayor in September 1847.
His position placed him at the centre of village life just as Baden was entering one of the most unsettled periods of the nineteenth century.
Revolution Comes to Neukirch
The first revolutionary wave reached the Black Forest in 1848. Citizen militias were formed and revolutionary ideas gained support in parts of the region. In 1849 the movement became more radical, and the Baden revolutionary government briefly took control.
Neukirch was among the communities identified by the district authorities as having promoted or encouraged revolutionary activity. After the collapse of the revolution, investigations were launched against a number of Neukirch residents for participation in revolutionary enterprises.
It was during this increasingly unstable period that Hummel's position became untenable.
A petition from the Neukirch municipal council and citizens' committee in September 1849 gives a remarkably revealing account of the hostility towards him. Hummel was accused of trying to establish a Pietist “sect” in the community, of allowing Protestant ministers to preach and celebrate communion in his house, and of attempting to persuade Catholics to join the movement. He was also accused of neglecting municipal affairs and, more seriously from the council's perspective, of governing without consulting the other councillors. The council claimed that he had completely lost their confidence and that the majority of citizens had already sought his removal on 16 May.
Religion and politics had become inseparable.
Hummel and the Revolution
Yet the surviving evidence presents an unexpected picture of Hummel's own political position.
Far from being a revolutionary, he appears to have been strongly opposed to the provisional revolutionary government. In his later complaint to the Baden Ministry of the Interior, Hummel stated that following the revolutionary meeting at Offenburg he had declared himself neither able nor willing to serve a provisional government. He said that he had even obtained a passport and considered travelling to England on business rather than submit to its authority.
This is important when considering why he was removed.
Hummel's opponents were not simply objecting to his religious activities. He himself believed that his removal was connected both with his conversion to Protestantism and with his opposition to expenditure undertaken during the revolution, including the costs of equipping the local Bürgerwehr. He was particularly hostile to the revolutionary sympathies of his eventual successor, Alois Ganter, whom he described as having been active in the revolution.
The picture that emerges is therefore rather more complicated than that of a mayor swept away by the revolution.
Forcibly Removed — and Restored
In May 1849, Hummel was removed from office and replaced by Mathä Ganter. Another mayor, Franz Graf, was subsequently elected, although he soon refused to take up the position. During this unsettled period the administration of the village passed through several temporary arrangements.
Then, as the revolutionary cause began to collapse in July, the authorities attempted to reverse what had happened.
On 18 July 1849 the district administrator reported to the government:
“We have now reinstated the expelled Mayor Hummel in his office, and an investigation will be instituted into his forcible expulsion.”
Hummel's reinstatement did not resolve the conflict. By October, the government accepted his supposed request for dismissal. In his subsequent complaint, however, Hummel was at pains to explain that although he had said he would willingly relinquish the office if he had genuinely lost the confidence of his fellow citizens, he had not actually sought the manner of dismissal that had been imposed upon him.
The distinction matters.
His removal took place during the revolutionary seizure of local power, but his eventual departure from office was also bound up with the older religious dispute and with his opposition to the actions of the revolutionary council.
A Family Follows a Different Path
The religious transformation did not end with Josef Hummel. His sister Salome Hummel (1817–1877) married Vitus Zimber, who formally converted to the Augsburg Confession in 1851. His wife and children subsequently followed him.
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| A Pietist prayer meeting |
A later marginal note in the Catholic family record is revealing in both its language and its hostility:
“A convert to the Lutheran church, known as a drinker… likewise the wife and the whole family have fallen away.”
The comment is clearly not a neutral description. It reflects the attitude of the Catholic parish towards a family that had abandoned the Church. Yet it also records something significant: the conversion eventually encompassed Vitus, his wife and the entire family.
The Zimbers subsequently disappear from the Neukirch Catholic records, suggesting that their change of confession was not simply an individual decision but a significant family realignment.
Faith, Revolution and Local Authority
Josef Hummel's story is therefore difficult to place neatly on either side of the revolutionary divide.
He was a Protestant convert in a strongly Catholic community and appears to have played an important role in establishing evangelical religious life in the region. He opened his home to Protestant ministers and devotional gatherings and defended his right to practise his faith. At the same time, the surviving evidence presents him as firmly opposed to the revolutionary government and particularly critical of those local politicians who supported it.
His removal from the mayoralty may consequently tell us less about his being a revolutionary than about the collision between two different forms of change.
In the end, his story is not simply one of a mayor who lost his office during a revolution. It is the story of a Black Forest community in which political revolution, religious conversion and changing ideas of authority collided, leaving their mark not only on the village government but on the families who lived there.
Through Josef Hummel, his sister Salome, and the Zimber family, we can glimpse how the great upheavals of 1848–49 reached into places far removed from the centres of European politics — into homes, churches, family relationships and the increasingly contested question of what it meant to belong to a community.
