Revolt and Revolution: On the Political Mobilization of the Peasant in Georg Büchner’s “The Hessian Messenger” (1834)

This article takes Georg Büchner’s pamphlet “The Hessian Messenger,” written in 1834 in collaboration with the theologian and revolutionist Friedrich Weidig, as a starting point to explore the literary forms of peasant agitation and mobilization in the context of the German Vormärz (c. 1830–1848). Against the background of the conceptualization of the peasant as a genuinely conservative and anti-revolutionary force in the theory of the mid-19th century, elaborated by such different thinkers like Karl Marx and Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl, this article focuses on the possibilities that writers of the radical and progressive opposition like Büchner opened for the integration of peasants into the (liberal) revolutionary project. What is the function of literature in negotiating the political agency of the peasant and what literary forms, aesthetics, and strategies does it generate to portray and influence the peasant’s perspective on the political conflicts of its time? In a close textual analysis, I explore, how, by implementing specific rhetorical means (statistics, agrarian references, biblical narratives), the text first places the peasant world and the interests and problems of the rural population at the center of its argumentation. Second, I show how the pamphlet connects the disclosure of the peasants’ social and economic grievances inevitably with a discussion of the constitution and the institution of the state. The abstract liberal question of human rights is thus derived directly from power relations and economic exploitation in the countryside. By referring to those seemingly traditional ‘characteristics’ of the peasant, which until then and later influenced the dominant image of the peasant as conservative, that Büchner and Weidig were able to constitute the peasant as a political, powerful collective and revolutionary disruptive force.