Hans Kudlich

Austria state institutions Russian revolutionary democrats 1823–1917 → Died in exile

Silesian peasant's son who moved the abolition of servile labour in the Austrian Reichstag of 1848, hailed as liberator of the peasants

Born in 1823 into a peasant family at Úvalno near Opava in Austrian Silesia, he was elected to the Austrian Reichstag in 1848 at the age of 25. He introduced the bill abolishing the robot, the compulsory unpaid labour peasants owed their noble landlords, saw it passed, and was hailed as the Bauernbefreier, the liberator of the peasants. He rallied support for the revolution until the parliament was dissolved by force on 7 March 1849, then fled to Germany and Switzerland, where he took a medical degree in Bern and Zurich. In 1853 he emigrated to the United States, settled in Hoboken, New Jersey, practised as a physician and in 1861 co-founded the German-American Hoboken Academy. He died in Hoboken in 1917.

Also known as: Johann Kudlich · John Kudlich