The American Cyclopædia (1879)/Blind, Karl

BLIND, Karl, a German political agitator, born in Mannheim, Sept. 4, 1820. While studying law in Heidelberg he was twice arrested for political offences, and spent several months in prison. He was banished from Germany for is participation in the republican rising under Hecker in the spring of 1848, and while plotting with Struve and other exiles, he was expelled from Alsace by order of Gen. Cavaignac on a charge of abetting the Paris insurrection of June. Joining Struve in the September movement, he was with him captured after the fight at Staufen, in S. Baden, and sentenced to eight years' imprisonment at Bruchsal. Liberated after eight months by a revolutionary mob, he went to Carlsruhe, whence the grand duke had fled; but Brentano, whom he accused of secretly working for the restoration of the

dynasty, soon got rid of him by sending him as a plenipotentiary of the provisional government of Baden and the Palatinate to Paris. There he was accused of encouraging the rising of June 13, 1849. Expelled from France in August, he went to Brussels, but was obliged to leave that city also in 1852, and established himself in London, where he for a long time continued his political agitations through the press of various countries. After the events of 1866, however, his revolutionary ardor abated. He was pardoned by the Baden government in 1867. In 1872 he published a pamphlet entitled &ldquo;Away with the House of Peers,&rdquo; which was exclusively circulated in Berlin.