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. During this time he joined the "Alt Berliner" student fraternity and in 1842 another student fraternity, the "Leseverein". After this he returned to the family publishing business. In 1848 he served as a captain ("Hauptmann") in the Berlin Citizen Militia ("Bürgerwehr"). The next year, 1849, he married Karoline Wilhelmine "Lina" Tendering (1828–1885), 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. The publisher In 1850 Duncker acquired Wilhelm Besser's "Bessersche Verlags Buchhandlung" publishing business, and in 1853 he acquired from Aaron Bernstein the Urwähler-Zeitung, a pro-democracy daily newspaper. The world of newspapers was a rapidly evolving one. The Urwähler-Zeitung had been founded only in 1849, and in March 1853 it was banned. Duncker relaunched as a liberal (opposition) voice with a new name as the Berliner Volks-Zeitung. As the Berliner Volks-Zeitung the paper continued to be published for nearly a century. By the 1860s circulation had risen to roughly 22,000, making it the number one newspaper in the Prussian capital. The business acquired from Besser also continued to thrive as a book publisher. Works by political philosophers published by Duncker included: Die Philosophie Herakleitos des Dunklen von Ephesos by Ferdinand Lassalle (1858) Der italienische Krieg und die Aufgabe Preußens by Ferdinand Lassalle (1859) Zur Kritik der Politischen Oekonomie by Karl Marx 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