Grand Duchy of Baden

A long thin state along the upper Rhine that Napoleon inflated and German liberalism made noisy out of proportion to its size. Baden was a margraviate divided between Catholic and Protestant branches until 1771, and it was small until Karl Friedrich backed France: between 1803 and 1810 it absorbed bishoprics, imperial cities and knightly territories and became a grand duchy roughly four times its former size, stretching some three hundred kilometres from Lake Constance to the Main. That growth created a state of many religions and origins needing a common politics, which is one reason its 1818 constitution was the most liberal in Germany and its chamber the liveliest. Baden became the centre of the 1848 revolution in the German states: after the Frankfurt parliament failed, the grand duke fled, a republican government took over in May 1849, and Prussian troops crushed it - Friedrich Engels served in the campaign, and the executions and emigration afterwards sent thousands of Forty-Eighters to the United States. Baden joined the German Empire in 1871. Heidelberg and Freiburg hold its old universities, and the spa at Baden-Baden drew European society. The monarchy ended in 1918. The state was merged with Wurttemberg in 1952, after a referendum the Badenese half largely opposed. Karlsruhe was the capital, laid out as a fan of streets radiating from the palace. The Black Forest covers much of the state's south. Its wine and spa towns line the Rhine valley. Germany's constitutional court now sits at Karlsruhe. Baden dialect remains distinct from Swabian across the old border.

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