Weidig was born in the Oberkleen district, Langgöns, northwest of Wetterau. The son of a chief forester and his wife, her maiden name being Liebknecht. He went to Butzbach in 1803 to go to school. During his theological studies in the Ludoviciana in Gießen he was a member of the 'fränkischen Landsmannschaft'. In 1812 he became headmaster at the boys' school in Butzbach. Following Friedrich Ludwig Jahn's example, Weidig taught his pupils drill and physical exercise and in 1814 founded a parade ground on the Schrenzer, a north-eastern foothill of the Taunus - later historians and biographers thus called him the "father of Hessian drill". From 1818 Weidig was monitored by the authorities for his political activities in teaching, preaching and in private - he was one of the liberal democrats who aspired to establish Germany as a unified democratic nation state. In 1832 he thus travelled to south-west Germany and helped in the preparations for the Hambach Festival. In 1833 Weidig was arrested for the first time, but in 1834 he still published four illegal issues of "Leuchter und Beleuchter für Hessen ". The same year saw his first meeting with Georg Büchner, with whom he worked on a manuscript that Weidig then published against Büchner's wishes as Hessischen Landboten. Weidig and his students also organised the printing and distribution of illegal pamphlets. On 5 April 1834 Weidig was suspended from his teaching post and demoted to a small village called Ober-Gleen, now in Kirtorf, im Vogelsberg. When the "Hessischen Landboten" project was betrayed in summer 1834, Büchner fled to Straßburg but Weidig refused to emigrate to Switzerland with his family. Soon afterwards he was arrested in the Klosterkaserne barracks in Friedberg and in June 1835 put into house arrest in Darmstadt, where on 23 February 1837 he committed suicide after two years' questioning and physical abuse by state investigators, including Konrad Georgi, a known alcoholic. Ill and desperate, he had written letters to his wife from prison, which were retained by his questioners "for state-political reasons" for many years after his death. His friends noted on his gravestone that he was a freedom fighter, but this was bricked up by the authorities.
Namesakes
The Weidigschule gymnasium-school in Butzbach is named after him, as is the Weidigsporthalle in Oberkleen.
