A new novel returns to the short-lived Republic of Mainz (1793)

In the novel Resolution (2016) by A. N. Wilson, its protagonist, Polish-German naturalist Georg Forster (1754-94), finds a job as a university librarian in Mainz, and when the city is seized by the French revolutionary army, he puts his Jacobin ideals in action by becoming a Deputy in the Provincial Revolutionary Government of the four-month Republic of Mainz (1793), the first democratic state on German territory.