Social Conflict and Conspiracy in Nuremberg 1789–1797

Abstract

The last decade of the 18th century was a time of very pronounced and frequent conflict in the old Reichsstadt Nuremberg: In the face of rising bread prices, hunger riots by plebeian groups were a daily occurrence, journeymen resorted to strikes more than ever before, anonymous threatening letters against the patrician families circulated in the city, the bourgeois opposition movement among the merchants took shape with its demand for the reform of the financial and economic policy of the City Council, and finally, Jacobin clubs formed whose main aim was a republican reformation of the constitution of the city (Grie.ßinger & Reith, 1983). In this tense situation during which, in 1794, an “imminent overthrow of the State”¹ was being predicted even in high places, conspiracy theories played an increasingly large role among the ruling authorities and among the various opposition groups. Thus we are urged to investigate no longer just the intellectual background of these conspiracy theories or understand them one-sidedly as stabilizing (but false) explanations by the authorities for processes of social change. It seems more promising to examine in the form of a case study the function of such conspiracy theories within a concrete political social and economic system.

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Translated by Pauline Cumbers.

Bayrisches Staatsarchiv Numberg, S II, L 78, No.4.