He studied Jurisprudence under various distinguished teachers such as the historian Friedrich Christoph Schlosser, the historian-politicians Georg Gottfried Gervinus and Ludwig Häusser, along with the jurist - and a particularly influential mentor - Robert von Mohl.

After passing his state law exams in February 1848 he moved to his parents' house at Freiburg, intending to deepen his education in history and education, and to "come to an understanding of his times and their needs" ("zum Verständnis seiner Zeit und ihrer Beduerfnisse zu gelangen")[2] The revolutionary outburst in March of that year may have provided clues, and he moved to Frankfurt which had quickly become the focus of many of the important political developments of 1848.

During 1848/49 he served briefly as a volunteer secretary in the Foreign Ministry of the short-lived Provisional Central Government ("Provisorische Zentralgewalt") established by the liberal-nationalist "revolutionaries" of the Frankfurt Parliament.

From 1849 till 1851 he served the Grand Duchy as a young diplomat at its mission in Bonn, which by this time was becoming an important administrative centre in the Kingdom of Prussia's Rhine Province.

[1] Roggenbach was a near-contemporary and close friend of Frederick I, who became Grand Duke of Baden in 1858 but had been regent since 1852 due to his elder brother's mental illness.

Church-state rivalry was inherent in the power structures across and beyond the Holy Roman Empire, and English language sources tend to focus on the larger Prussian "Kulturkampf" of the 1870s.

One reason that the issues became particularly heated in Baden two decades earlier seems to have been the attitude of the leading bishops in the Upper Rhine region, rejecting the state's insistence on a right of veto over church appointments and demanding that clergy should be educated in their own ecclesiastical places of learning rather than in the universities.

In Autumn 1859 he presented his remarkably wide-ranging and detailed "Bundesreformplan" to the Grand Duke, outlining the possible structure of a future united German state.

With his friend Julius Jolly he advocated German unification according to a "Small Germany" model that would exclude Austria-Hungary, and which accordingly would operate under liberal Prussian leadership.

The reactions of Prussia's recently appointed ambassador to the Russian Empire, Otto von Bismarck was necessarily a written reaction, and it was positive with regard to the idea of a German state extending to the Swiss frontier and excluding Austria, although for some of Roggenbach's more detailed thoughts on the structures of a future Germany state, Bismarck's endorsement was notably more nuanced.

Franz von Roggenbach made his home at Schloss Ehner-Fahrnau, a small country estate that he had inherited from his father on the edge of Schopfheim.

[2][7] After the Franco-Prussian War and the Treaty of Frankfurt, which set the seal on Bismarck's unification project, Roggenbach sat as a member of the new German parliament (Reichstag) between 1871 and 1873, representing (broadly as before) the Lörrach-Müllheim electoral district (Wahlkreis Baden 4 - Lörrach-Müllheim-Staufen-Breisach).

He also maintained good relations with the Prussian Queen (later "Empress") Augusta, whom he supplied with length memoranda, "prepared with the expertise and authority of an experienced German diplomat and minister".

[9][10] An early decision involved appointing Friedrich Heinrich Geffcken, widely seen as a political victim of the chancellor's vindictive character,[11] to a professorship of constitutional studies and public law.

He continued to correspond with friends throughout the later decades of his life, and there is some sense of regret towards the end that he had not been able to influence events more strongly in support of the traditional liberalist positions that he favoured.