Adam Lux
Adam Lux (December 27, 1765 - November 4, 1793) was a Bavarian-born German revolutionary and sympathiser of the French Revolution.
Life
Early life
Lux was born in Obernburg am Main, Lower Franconia, as a farmer's son. However, his parents managed to finance his studies at the University of Mainz (in the Archbishopric of Mainz of the Holy Roman Empire, nowadays in Rhineland-Palatinate), where he became a Dr. phil. with his Latin dissertation on the notion of enthusiasm.
As a destitute academic, he first worked as a tutor for a merchant family in Mainz, into which he married. His wife's dowry made it possible for him to buy an estate in Kostheim, now part of Wiesbaden, where he followed the call of the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau by getting back to nature, and became a farmer.
Republic of Mainz
His advocacy of the French Revolution was expressed by an odd political action: after a three-day-long informative meeting, Lux held a referendum, about whether his Rhineland homeland should enter the French First Republic, on November 2, 1779 in Kostheim. Of the 223 men entitled to vote, 213 supported an accession to France; only 2 rejected the idea, the remaining 8 couldn't take part in the referendum. The result of poll was celebrated with a feast, whose climax was the planting of a liberty pole.
Lux then moved to Mainz with his family, where the Rheinish-German National Convention, the parliament of the Republic of Mainz, which was founded according to the French example, elected him to be a representative.
In France
On March 21, 1793, the convention sent the naturalist and writer Georg Forster, the merchant André Potocki, and him to Paris, to complete the planned accession to France. In Paris he met several German friends of freedom, such as Konrad Engelbert Oelsner and Johann Georg Kerner, who shared his disappointment with the development of the Revolution. They were disgusted by the eruption of the Terror and the radicalization of the Sans-culottes and the Jacobin Club.
On July 17, 1793 Lux witnessed the execution of the Girondist Charlotte Corday, who had assassinated the radical agitator Jean-Paul Marat. With the publication of provoking pamphlets, in which justified the killing as an act of liberation, he apparently risked his life deliberately - not all motives of his behavior are comprehensible nowadays, especially those concerning his relation to Corday and her actions. The poet Justinus Kerner, whose older brother Johann Georg Kerner witnessed the events in Paris, reported on these activities in his book Bilderbuch aus meiner Knabenzeit, which was based on his brother's records.
Death and legacy
After giving up the intention of publicly killing himself in front of the National Convention, in order to protest against the violence of revolutionary goals, he set out to be executed by his former political friends. According to eyewittnesses, Lux ascended the guillotine's scaffold, as if it was a rostrum.
Because of his mysterious fate, Lux drew the attention of his contemporaries. Jean Paul wrote: "[Let] no German forget him!". According to the American Germanist Thomas Saine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe even based the first husband of Dorothea in his epic Hermann and Dorothea (1798) on Lux. Comparatively, the interest in Lux went into decline in subsequent periods.
References
- Justinus Kerner, Das Bilderbuch aus meiner Knabenzeit. Erinnerungen aus den Jahren 1786 bis 1804, Chapter "[Verhältnis meines Bruders mit Adam Lux]", Braunschweig, 1849
- Stefan Zweig, Adam Lux. Zehn Bilder aus dem Leben eines deutschen Revolutionärs, with essays by Franz Dumont and Erwin Rotermund, Obernburg am Main, Logo Verlag, 2004