Peter Reichensperger

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Peter Reichensperger

Peter Franz Reichensperger (28 May 1810 – 31 December 1892) was a German politician. In 1848, as a member of the Prussian National Assembly, he was significantly involved in the Prussian constitutional discussion. Together with his brother August Reichensperger, he founded the Catholic faction in the Prussian House of Representatives and was a co-founder of the Center Party in 1869/70. He remained a member of the Reich and state parliaments until his death.

Biography

Early life and education

He was born in Koblenz, the son of Franz Joseph, a Kurtrier judge and his wife, Margarethe Johanna Theresia (née Knoodt). Peter was the younger brother of August Reichensperger. They had two sisters.

The father died in 1812. The family moved to Boppard and lived in the grandfather's house. There Peter life was not quite easy, but he had an overall carefree youth. He passed his school-leaving examination in 1829 at the Royal Gymnasium in Kreuznach.

Between 1829 and 1832, he studied law, cameralistics, physics and chemistry in Bonn and Heidelberg. His father and brother had also studied there. In Heidelberg, Reichensperger came into contact with the theories of classical economic liberalism. He became a member of the Burschenschaft Germania Bonn in 1828.

After graduation, he did military service in Trier. He would not remember fondly this time of his life. Afterwards he continued his education. Reichensperger worked as an Auskultator and trainee lawyer at the Trier District Court.

Marriage and career beginning

In 1837 he married Anna Maria Weckbecker. She was the daughter of a wealthy landowner named Franz Georg Severus Weckbecker, who was called the "Moselle King" or "Castle and Estate Butcher of the Maifeld". The marriage produced two sons and two daughters. Louise married the country forester Bernhard Danckelmann and Helene married the professor of legal history Hugo Loersch. He and his brother August had a lifelong friendship with his brother-in-law Peter Weckbecker.

From 1839 to 1841, he was an assessor in Elberfeld, then a district court councilor in Koblenz until 1850 and a councilor at the Cologne Court of Appeal until 1859. In 1859, Reichensperger moved to the Prussian Supreme Tribunal as Obertribunalrat, a position he held until 1879. Reichensperger published a number of legal and political writings, especially on the agricultural question.

Politics

Political positions in the Vormärz

Politically, he was influenced by various factors. There was his professional closeness to the state. He was later one of the most governmental Rhenish politicians. He was also influenced by the tradition of Rhenish law (Napoleonic Code). Another aspect is economic liberalism. He became a proponent of the liberalization of society and the political constitution. He was convinced of the superiority of the Rhenish economy and its institutions over Prussia, which was perceived as backward.

Reichensperger was a Catholic as a Rhinelander, but he came from an liberal tradition. He was not pious and did not really care about his religious duties. However, the Cologne Troubles of the 1830s helped shape him politically.

In 1842, he published Öffentlichkeit, Mündlichkeit, Schwurgerichte ("Publicity, Orality, Jury Courts"), in which he outlined the superiority of Rhenish law. If the rest of Prussia were to adopt these institutions, it would strengthen the legitimacy of the state. His most important writing in the Vormärz was Die Agrarfrage aus dem Gesichtspunkte der Nationalökonomie, der Politik und des Rechts ("The Agrarian Question from the Viewpoint of National Economy, Politics and Law") of 1847, in which Reichensperger argued for the free divisibility of land in the face of the pauperism and industrialization debate.

This was in contrast to the position in East Elbian Prussia. He saw divisibility not as a danger of fragmentation of property, but as an incentive for the pursuit of profit. He had no doubt about the breakthrough of industrialization, but hoped for a taming of its development. Industrial labor could not be abolished again, but he hoped to limit its further growth. The thoughts on the freedom of the soil were connected with a criticism of the nobility. He rejected an artificial renewal of the estates, as Prussia attempted with the provincial land parliaments. Political institutions should not derive from tradition, but from expediency. However, he also had doubts about the liberal constitutional system. A strong parliament would weaken the king's position. He argued for a federal-corporate model. In it, municipalities and provinces should be given as much power as possible and the king as much power as necessary. Guilds, estates and corporations were to serve for political participation. From today's perspective, these positions distinguished him from the classical liberal. But in the political discussion of the time, there were numerous similarly divergent concepts. At least his theses made him known to the politically interested public.

Pre-Parliament

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Torchlight procession for the pre-parliament (1848)

His writings led to his being invited to the Frankfurt Pre-Parliament in March 1848. Reichensperger had watched the outbreak of the revolution with skepticism. The progress he stood for could be destroyed by the anarchy of the masses. The task of the bourgeoisie thereafter was to steer the unrest into orderly channels. For Reichensperger, as a jurist, the revolution was primarily a problem of constitutional legitimacy.

In this respect, he accepted the invitation to the Pre-Parliament, which for him had a revolutionary flavor, with some hesitation In the Pre-Parliament, he soon made a name for himself. He turned against the radicals around Gustav Struve and Friedrich Hecker. While the latter tried to make the Pre-Parliament a permanent institution, Reichensperger disagreed. Without legitimation through elections, it could, in his view, only be of temporary duration. Fear of developments like those that had led to the French Reign of Terror after 1793 played a role. Between Rhenish liberals and southwestern German liberals, the question of the relationship between the crown and parliament was a crucial difference. While the liberals of Reichensperger's ilk saw the King as the center of gravity, the left saw parliament as the political center. This fundamental divide could hardly be bridged.

Prussian National Assembly

He ran for the Frankfurt Parliament in the Mayen-Ahrweiler constituency. His commitment to a strong monarchy, his goal of a merely moderate reform policy, and his criticism of the revolutionary events in Berlin failed to convince the electoral assembly. Without his knowledge, however, he had been elected to the Prussian National Assembly in Kempen. His brother August was a member of the Frankfurt assembly.

Peter Reichensperger was one of the leaders of the constitutional right in the Berlin parliament. He was a member of the central constitutional committee and had considerable influence on the reworking of the government's draft constitution. Various articles in the draft, later called Charte Waldeck, originated with him, and he defended them in the plenum. In doing so, it became clear that he had abandoned various social romantic ideas from the Vormärz period and was now a clear constitutionalist. No longer guilds and estates, but parliament was now the decisive actor alongside the King. He maintained that the King's position should be as strong as possible. This applied, among other things, to the King's right to be able to appoint a government. However, he also wanted the King to be bound by the constitution and pushed for a constitutional oath. Reichensperger also wanted to expand the rights of deputies and citizens along the lines of the Belgian constitution. This applied, for example, to the accountability of the government or to the immunity of deputies. His amendments also provided for diets for deputies. As a proponent of elite rule, he advocated three-class suffrage.

After the counter-revolution began in Prussia and the National Assembly was moved to Brandenburg, Reichensperger was commissioned by the new government to travel to Frankfurt as Prussia's representative to advocate action. He managed to persuade the German National Assembly to condemn the tax-refusal campaign in Prussia and otherwise to keep a low profile. Reichensperger considered the dissolution of the Prussian National Assembly to be lawful. He defended his position in an argument against the leftist Karl Rodbertus. He also defended the imposed constitution as a necessity. He pointed out that it would contain many liberal aspects.

In July 1849, he was elected to the second chamber of the Landtag of Prussia, to which he belonged until 1856 and then again from 1858 until his death in 1892. As a result of the Democrats' abstention from the elections, Reichensperger belonged to the center. He tried to defend the liberal gains of the Constitution against the right. In 1850 he was a member of the Erfurt Union Parliament. There he declared his support for the Greater Germany solution.

Political Catholicism

Subsequently, he became a proponent of political Catholicism. The background was that during the era of reaction, the Prussian government tried to restrict ecclesiastical freedoms as well. Thus, a ban on popular missions in mixed-denominational areas was enacted in 1852. Prussian subjects were henceforth forbidden to study at the Collegium Germanicum in Rome.

These interventions were the trigger for the foundation of the Catholic faction in the Prussian parliament by the Reichensperger brothers. The new grouping was subsequently joined by 63 deputies. Its main objective was to preserve the rule of law, especially in church matters. At the same time, the group was loyal to the King. In Reichensperger's case, the idea of the rule of law was not only to demand equal rights for Catholics, but he also advocated that Jews be allowed to hold public office, but on the other hand was still marked by reservations in this respect, in that he blamed Jews for anti-Semitism and urged them not to "stretch the bow too tightly," otherwise "the day could come when the Christian German people would forget everything and, with elemental force, in righteous indignation, wash overboard" the rights of Jews. In 1858, he was again elected to the Prussian House of Representatives. Because the parliamentary group did not take a clear position during the Prussian constitutional conflict in the early 1860s its members lost massive support.

When the Center Party was founded in 1869/70, the Catholic middle-class of the Rhineland had hardly any part in it. The Reichensperger brothers were exceptions. Incidentally, both claimed the honor of having invented the party name. Peter Reichensperger preformed important points of the party program before its founding through an election appeal. Subsequently, they remained far removed from the Ultras. Peter Reichensperger, for example, rejected the dogma of infallibility. Although he belonged to the inner leadership circle of the party, he stood in the shadow of Ludwig Windthorst. He counted himself among the "heterogeneous elements" of the party. From 1867, Reichensperger had been a member of the North German Reichstag. He belonged to the faction of the Federal-Constitutional Union. After the founding of the German Empire, he was a member of the German Reichstag until his death. For decades, he represented the constituency Arnsberg 2 Olpe-Meschede-Arnsberg in the Catholic Sauerland.

During the Kulturkampf, he tried to defend the liberal foundations of the imperial constitution against anti-Catholic efforts, especially those of the liberals. He published the book Kulturkampf oder Friede in Staat und Kirche ("Cultural Struggle or Peace in State and Church"). In it, he advocated understanding, tolerance and respect for ecclesiastical freedoms by the state. On the other hand, he remained loyal to the state as far as possible. In this, he did not always agree with his faction. In 1884, he voted against the majority of the faction for an extension of the Socialist Law. In 1887 he spoke vehemently in favor of approving the Septennat and could only with difficulty be persuaded to abstain. Later he approved Bismarck's plans for social insurance.

In 1865, Reichensperger was awarded the Commander's Cross of the Papal Order of St. Gregory.

Death

Peter Reichensperger died in Berlin in 1892 at the age of 82. He was buried in the St. Hedwig's Cemetery on Liesenstrasse. The tombstone has not survived.

Works

• Die Wahlen zum Hause der Abgeordneten in Preußen. Von einem Katholiken (1858)
• Parlamentarische Reden der Gebrüder August Reichensperger und Peter Franz Reichensperger. Als Material zu einer Charakteristik der grossdeutschen und katholischen Fraktion 1848–1857 (1858; with August Reichensperger)
• Kulturkampf oder Friede in Staat und Kirche (1876)
• Erlebnisse eines alten Parlamentariers im Revolutionsjahre 1848 (1882)

References

•   which in turn cites:
  • Gorres in Staatslexikon der Gorresgesellschaft (3rd ed., 1911)