Franz Gustav Duncker

Franz Duncker (4 June 1822 – 18 June 1888) was a German publisher, left-liberal politician and social reformer.

Life

Family provenance and early years Franz Gustav Duncker was one of the sons of the publisher Carl Friedrich Wilhelm Duncker. His brothers included the publisher Alexander Duncker, the historian Maximilian Wolfgang Duncker and the Berlin mayor. Duncker studied Philosophy and :History at Berlin. the granddaughter of a bishop who as "Lina Duncker" would create one of several fashionable political and literary salons in Berlin. A frequent guest was Gottfried Keller who fell in love with Lina's sister Betty Tendering, and later featured her, renamed as Dorothea Schönfund, in his semi-autobiographical novel, "Grüne Heinrich".

Franz and Lina Duncker's marriage would also give rise to one recorded child, their daughter Marie, born in 1856. Po und Rhein, an anonymously published "pamphlet", actually by Friedrich Engels (1858)

Control of the publishing business was taken over in 1877 by a man called Wilhelm Hertz. Duncker sold the Berliner Volks-Zeitung to Emil Cohn in 1885: twenty years later, in 1904, it was acquired by Rudolf Mosse.

The political activist Thwarted revolution in 1848 was followed by political repression in Prussia, but the ideas of liberalism and nationalism that had underpinned 1848 never completely disappeared, and Duncker was supportive of both aspirations. In 1858 he was one of the founders of the German National Association, serving on its principal committees till 1867. He was also, in 1861, a founder of the liberal-leaning Progressive Party,

During the 1861 Constitutional Conflict he was strongly opposed to militia (Landwehr) reforms because he feared they would lead to a weakening of citizen spirit which till that time had been a unique corrective against resurgent militarism.

Along with his membership of the Prussian House of Representatives, between 1867 and 1878 Duncker also belonged to the national legislature, the Confederation Reichstag and its 1871 successor, the Imperial Reichstag, sitting as a Progressive Party member and representing an electoral district that included the Berlin quarters Spandau and Friedrich-Wilhelm-Stadt. Together with Max Hirsch and Franz Hermann Schulze-Delitzsch he established the Hirsch-Dunckersche Gewerkvereine, which was a form of liberal trades union movement, founded in 1868.