Gustav Struve

Baden and Palatinate revolutionaries (1848–1849) Russian revolutionary democrats 1805–1870 ○ Natural causes

Radical democrat who led the Baden revolution with Hecker and proclaimed a German republic at Lörrach in September 1848

Born in Munich in 1805, the son of a Russian diplomat, he studied law at Göttingen and Heidelberg and settled as a lawyer in Mannheim in 1836. As editor of the Mannheimer Journal he was repeatedly imprisoned and moved towards radical democracy and early socialism, and in 1847 he dropped the aristocratic "von". In 1848 his programme for a federal republic of all Germany was rejected by the Pre-Parliament; he rose with Hecker in April, and on 21 September rose again at Lörrach and was captured. Freed by the Baden rising of May 1849, he helped set up Brentano's government but overthrew him for hesitating. After the defeat he went via Switzerland to the United States in 1851, wrote a world history and served as a Union captain in the Civil War. He returned after the amnesty of 1863 and died in Vienna in 1870.

Also known as: Gustav von Struve