Franz Laurenz Joseph Maria Cantador or Franz Lorenz Joseph Maria Cantador (1 June 1810 – 1 December 1883) was the commander of the Düsseldorf vigilance committee during the German revolutions of 1848–1849 and later was an officer leading a regiment in the Union Army during the American Civil War.
With , Lorenz Clasen, Joseph Euler, Ferdinand Freiligrath, Moritz Geisenheimer,Lothar Schröder: 1848 – das Rheinland erwacht. Article from July 2012 in the portal rp-online.de, retrieved 6 September 2021 Paul von Hatzfeldt, Sophie von Hatzfeldt, Louis Kugelmann, Ferdinand Lassalle, , , Hugo Wesendonck, Wilhelm Weyers and Julius Wulff, he was one of the main actors of the March Revolution in Düsseldorf.
Foundation and leadership of the revolutionary vigilante group in Düsseldorf
Cantador came from a bourgeois family with northern Italian roots that had settled in Düsseldorf in the 18th century and ran a textile business there. In the political life of the city, the family had already achieved a high reputation through several city councillors, an alderman and a mayor, when Cantador was elected head of the Schützenverein St. Sebastianus in 1844, the time of the Vormärz, and founded a uniformed Jägercorps within the Schützenverein.Cantadors Urgroßvater, Anton Cantadore, war 1735 aus dem piemontesischen Toceno nach Düsseldorf eingewandert. – Siehe ausführliche Biografie Cantadors in Astrid Küntzel: Laurenz Cantador (29 November 2013), Webseite im Portal rheinische-geschichte.lvr.de, retrieved 6 September 2021 Since the mid-1840s, Cantador – together with Hugo WesendonckHugo Maximilian Wesendonck in the portal Otto und Mathilde Wesendonck, website of 13 March 2010, retrieved 6 September 2021 – also presided over the Allgemeiner Verein der Carnevalsfreunde (General Association of Friends of Carnival), one of the most notorious carnival societies in the Rhineland, whose satirical actions, caricaturing and provoking Prussianism, soon led to the society being banned by the Prussian Minister of the Interior.Jonathan Sperber: Rhineland Radicals. The Democratic Movement and the Revolution of 1848–1849. Princeton University Press, Princeton 1991, , (Online)
After the bad harvest of 1846, after the economic crisis year of 1847 and after the French Revolution of 1848, political unrest also flared up in the Kingdom of Prussia with demands for democratic reforms and national unity. This unrest quickly expanded into a march revolution. During this period, Cantador intervened in events in Düsseldorf, the parliamentary seat of the Prussian Rhine Province.
On 18 March 1848, the day before King Frederick William IV of Prussia authorised the establishment of citizen guards, he was among the founders of a vigilance committee, which elected him its commander on 26 March 1848 by 735 votes out of 949. By November 1848, some 2,500 men had joined it, including Lorenz Clasen, Ferdinand Freiligrath, Johann Peter Hasenclever, , Karl Hübner, Rudolf Jordan, Ferdinand Lassalle, Carl Friedrich Lessing, Wolfgang Müller von Königswinter and Hugo Wesendonck. The vigilante group, which was later increased to around 3,500 men, was able to arm itself from older stocks from the Cologne artillery depot. The task of the Bürgerwehr was the "protection of legal freedom, preservation of concord and peace among all members of civil society, defence against any disturbance of public order".Astrid Küntzel: Laurenz Cantador (29 November 2013), website in the portal rheinische-geschichte.lvr.de, retrieved 6 September 2021 The Bürgerwehr was also the sign of the democratic awakening and the assumption of power by the people. The arming of the people was based in the people's militia idea of the French Revolution.Albert Boime: Art in an Age of Civil Struggle 1848–1871. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2007, , (Online) Cantador had the vigilantes parade around the city in public view to demonstrate this to the representatives of the Prussian crown and the Prussian military.
In the initial phase of the revolution, Cantador belonged to the moderate forces that rejected the abolition of the monarchy through the proclamation of a Republic based on the French model, as the early socialist inspired Düsseldorf People's Club around Ferdinand Lassalle, Paul von Hatzfeldt and Julius Wulff was striving for. Programmatically, he was close to the democratic movement, whose main focus was on the idea of popular sovereignty, which was to be realised under the umbrella of a constitutional monarchy. On 19 March 1848, Cantador donated a black-red-gold flag, the symbol of German popular sovereignty and the national unity of Germany, which was subsequently hoisted on the . Together with Hugo Wesendonck, Cantador founded the ,Helmut Bleiber, Karl Obermann: Männer der Revolution von 1848, vol. 1, edited by the Working Group Prehistory and History of the Revolution of 1848/49, Central Institute for History (Berlin, East), Akademie-Verlag (GDR), 1988, On 1 July 1848, the deutschkatholische MP Christian Gottfried Daniel Nees von Esenbeck presented his bill The Democratic Monarchy to the Prussian National Assembly (online). Using the term democratic monarchy, Julius Froebel elaborated similar ideas in his 1848 paper Das Königthum und die Volkssouverainität (Online). which, due to the elections on 1 May 1848, elected its chairman Hugo Wesendonck to the Frankfurt Parliament and members Joseph Euler and Anton Bloem in the Prussian National Assembly could send.
At the Festival of the German Unity on 6 August 1848, which had been organised by men from the citizens' militia, the Association for Democratic Monarchy, Düsseldorf painters and members of the newly founded Düsseldorf gymnastics club after the election of Archduke John of Austria as Reichsverweser, Cantador appeared as keynote speaker alongside Lord Mayor Wilhelm Dietze. The event took place in Düsseldorf on what was then Friedrichsplatz – in front of a Germania figure made of wood, cardboard and canvas, designed by Karl Ferdinand Sohn and created by Dietrich Meinardus, with raised sword in her right hand, 15 feet high, and in front of a black, red and gold standard with a double-headed, uncrowned imperial eagle as the emblem of the German Confederation adopted by the Frankfurt National Assembly in March 1848. To the strains of the song Des Deutschen Vaterland, the Germania and standard were festively illuminated with Bengal fire.Sabine Schroyen on cat. no. 46 Festival of German Unity in Düsseldorf in front of the Statue of Germania, 1848. In Bettina Baumgärtel (ed.): Die Düsseldorfer Malerschule und ihre internationale Ausstrahlung 1819–1918. Michael Imhof Verlag, Petersberg 2011, , volume 2, The figure, the standard and the spectacle of the illumination were captured in a watercolour by the American painter Emanuel Leutze.: Kleine Geschichte der Stadt Düsseldorf. Triltsch Verlag, Düsseldorf 1983, Another illustration of the event is preserved on a wood engraving in the . In enthusiasm for national ideals, the artists' association Malkasten was founded on the same day.Friedrich Schaarschmidt: Zur Geschichte der Düsseldorfer Kunst, insbesondere im XIX. Jahrhundert, herausgegeben vom Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Verlag August Bagel, Düsseldorf 1902, pp. 183 f. (Online)
When King Frederick William IV of Prussia visited his nephew Friedrich in Düsseldorf during the Cologne Cathedral Building Festival on 14 August 1848, and on his way from Bergischer Bahnhof to Schloss Jägerhof, he drove along what is now Königsallee (then Kastanienallee) in an open carriage, he was met by anti-Prussian protests and pelted with horse dung. This incident caused unrest among soldiers in the Prussian garrison on the evening of the same day, who eventually attacked Düsseldorf citizens with drawn sabres. Cantador alerted the vigilantes, who succeeded in forcing the soldiers back into the barracks. When the soldiers began to harass the citizens again the next day, Cantador had the troublemakers surrounded so that they could only return to their barracks, which earned him the praise of the citizens of Düsseldorf. Nevertheless, on 19 August 1848 Cantador announced his resignation from the office of head of the citizens' militia. He did so with a view to his political involvement, which he considered incompatible with his neutral position in the Bürgerwehr. The previous deputy, Cantador's cousin Lorenz Clasen, was then entrusted with the command of the Bürgerwehr. Cantador used the freedom of action he had thus gained to speak at public meetings and inspire the masses, for example in September 1848 in front of around 10,000 people in Neuss.
Cantador's moderate stance changed in the course of 1848, after the Rhenish liberal Prussian March (disambiguation) government under Ludolf Camphausen and David Hansemann had failed, Prussia had signed the Armistice of Malmö, perceived as a betrayal, in the Schleswig-Holstein Question, and news had arrived in Düsseldorf of the shooting of the deutschkatholische Robert Blum and the forced transfer of the Prussian National Assembly to Brandenburg an der Havel.
On 8 November 1848, the majority of the citizens' militia declared themselves to be the "armed body of the revolution".Hanna Gagel: Die Düsseldorfer Malerschule in der politischen Situation des Vormärz und 1848. In (ed.): Die Düsseldorfer Malerschule. Verlag Philipp von Zabern, Mainz 1979, , On 12 November 1848, Lorenz Cantador declared at a meeting of the People's Club, with whose members he had maintained constant contact, that a fight might soon break out. A commission was then formed to coordinate the building of barricades. On 14 November 1848, the revolutionary forces in Düsseldorf called for the implementation of the tax resistance decided in the Prussian National Assembly, for the implementation and supervision of which the vigilantes declared themselves to be "permanent"; i.e., to be constantly active. On 17 November 1848, Cantador was once again elected commander of the Bürgerwehr. On 18 November, Cantador, together with Ferdinand Lassalle and other delegates, went to the local authorities and prevailed that some taxes should no longer be levied. On 19 November 1848, the citizens' militia demonstrated their determination with a parade and 2,800 participants. On 21 November, in addition to the Düsseldorf Civic Guard, the Civic Guards of Gerresheim, Bilk, Ratingen and Neuss paraded through the streets of Düsseldorf to reaffirm the demands of the Prussian National Assembly. A little later, on Cantador's orders, the vigilantes searched the Düsseldorf post office for tax money, whereupon the Düsseldorf government president and Divisionskommandeur Lieutenant General imposed a state of siege on 22 November 1848 and banned the Bürgerwehr. As officers of the Bürgerwehr then called for passive resistance and for people not to give up their weapons, the Prussian Minister of the Interior Otto Theodor von Manteuffel managed to get King Frederick William IV, who had not forgotten his unfriendly reception in Düsseldorf and the horse manure he had received, to ban the Bürgerwehr himself on 25 November 1848. On 28 November, Cantador was questioned by the state procurator von Ammon about the accusation that he had exceeded his powers to declare the Bürgerwehr permanent, because a municipal council resolution had been required for this. The Prussian government, which regarded Cantador as a leading figure in the revolution and suspected him of having conspiratorial connections to Berlin, had him arrested on 9 December 1848, like Ferdinand Lassalle and Wilhelm Weyers, the leader of the tax-refusal campaign, before him.