Citizen committees in Aachen in the late period of the Old Empire. Civic participation attempts between communal liberalism and clientelism

自中世纪晚期以来，德国许多城市的政治代表机构的面貌正在发生变化：作为传统的地方长官和市议员委员会的补充，出现了不同名称的公民委员会。他们敦促接管控制权，从而立即参与执行市政委员会的官方职能。这些委员会往往长期存在，但它们是在冲突局势中发展起来的。公民委员会是公民表达和表达民意的良好工具，在法国大革命前约20年城市内部斗争日益频繁的背景下，公民委员会成为越来越重要的参与者。该项目的目标是讨论城市权力结构和参与方式的多样化，在主要出于经济动机的分配斗争和最重要的是基于理想的城市共和主义之间的紧张领域。通过这样做，该项目将重点放在亚琛帝国城的严重冲突上，这些冲突在18世纪80年代中期开始升级，并与法国大革命重叠，直到1794年最终夺取了这座城市。该项目的主要兴趣是城市政治文化参与性机构的进一步发展及其对1800年左右德国宪政和早期自由主义发展的意义。研究项目始于这样一个前提，即“城市”的社会形态是以公民参与所有涉及“公共利益”的问题为前提的，这是其合作自组织的主要思想。因此，参与在某种程度上是城市存在本质的一种表达，因为只有通过参与公职，个人的S公民自由才得以具体化，至少在理想情况下是这样。然而，由于这种参与能力原则上与征税和经济排他性有关，不平等是“城市”的公司化原则的一个重要伴生物。这些相互矛盾的目标要求对公民委员会的参与方式和参与需求的分析涉及到城市社会不平等的多个层面。到18世纪末和19世纪初，人们将看到一个社会转型和政治创新的时代，当时新旧参与方式的发展与城市既定不平等结构的变化尽可能紧密地联系在一起。该项目旨在分析旧帝国后期公民委员会的机构类型和职能，特别是其理想主义的主要思想及其与城市不平等的各个方面的联系。

Since the late Middle Age, the appearance of the bodies of political representation was changing in many German cities: As an addition to the traditional magistrate and aldermen councils there appeared citizens committees of various names. They urged for taking over control and thus for immediate participation in the execution of the official functions of municipal councils. Often these committees existed over long periods or, however, they developed out of situations of conflict. Being well attuned tools of the representation and articulation of public opinion among the citizens, citizens committees became ever more crucial actors in the context of those struggles within the cities as becoming ever more frequent in the about two decades prior to the French Revolution. This project pursues the goal of discussing the diversification of urban power structures and ways of participation in the tension area between a primarily economically motivated distribution battle and an urban republicanism which was most of all based on ideals. In doing so, the project focusses the heavy conflicts in the Imperial City of Aachen which started to escalate in the mid 1780s and overlapped the French Revolution until the ultimate seizure of the city in 1794. The main interest of the project is the further development of participative institutions of urban political culture and its significance for the development of German constitutionalism and early liberalism at about 1800.The research project starts out from the premise that the social form of the “city” was based on citizen participation in all issues concerning the “common good”, as the main idea of its cooperative self-organisation. Thus, participation was somewhat an expression of the nature of urban existence, for only by way of participating in public offices the individual´s civil liberty crystallised, at least in the ideal case. However, as this capability of participation was in principle connected to taxability and thus economic exclusivity, inequality was a momentous concomitant of the corporative principle of the “city”. These contradicting objectives require that the analysis of the ways of participation and participation demands of citizens committees refers to the many dimensions of inequality of urban society. By the end of the 18th and early 19th centuries an age of societal transition and political innovations will be viewed at, when new and old ways of participation were developing in the closest possible connection to changes of established inequality structures in the city. The project aims at analysing the institutional kinds and functions, however in particular the idealistic main ideas of citizens committees in the late period of the Old Empire and their connections to the various dimensions of urban inequality.