Federal Central Authority
The federal central authority was an authority of the German Confederation . It was based in Frankfurt am Main and existed from 1833 to 1842. It represented the second wave of demagogue persecutions in the March .
Background and task
After the Karlsbad resolutions , the Mainz Central Investigation Commission was established in 1819 . At the instigation of Austria, the members of the German Confederation founded the Federal Central Authority in June 1833. The occasion was the Frankfurt Wachensturm on April 3, 1833, which they were supposed to investigate. It consisted of five judges and their ministerial officers sent by the five member states: the Austrian Empire , the Kingdom of Prussia , Bavaria and Württemberg and the Grand Duchy of Hesse . The agency collected information and personal data and coordinated the suppression of revolutionary writings.
In the dispute over supremacy in Germany, it was soon a bone of contention among the states involved. As early as 1835, the Grand Duchy of Baden , then Bavaria and Hesse-Darmstadt, tried to dissolve the too expensive authority. Instead, Metternich suggested setting up a central information office based on the Mainz model . The plans failed because of the objection from Prussia, which did not consider the work of the authority to be finished, and because of the assassination attempt on the French King Louis-Philippe I on July 28, 1835.
In 1836, Baden's new Foreign Minister, Friedrich von Blittersdorf , tried to set up a central federal police instead of the authority. Metternich agreed, but failed again because of Prussia's rejection. In 1838 Metternich campaigned for a “judicial commission”; but basically his favorite project had just got a new name. Prussia agreed in the hope of being able to set the tone for Austria, which had been reduced to three officials. Bavaria, on the other hand, had opposed any change to the authority as early as 1837; for fear of exclusion it blocked the initiative.
Prussia's new (more liberal) King Friedrich Wilhelm IV restricted the persecution of demagogues in 1840 and in August 1840 issued a cabinet order to dissolve the authority as quickly as possible. Austria was against the dissolution because the activities continued and an only adjourned authority could be set up again quickly if necessary. The Federal Assembly decided two years later in favor of Austria. The federal central authority was postponed in August 1842, but was formally retained until 1848.
Heinrich von Prieser and Carl Ernst von Preuschen were among the judges of the federal central authority, the so-called demagogue persecutors .
estate
315 minutes of meetings with over 7,300 paragraphs and the complete list of inculpates have been preserved ; the "Black Book" was published in 1838 and comprises a total of with its Addendum (1842) 2140 persons from 1830 to 1842 for political crimes court had made its appearance. The directory was never put into practical use by the police authorities.
literature
- Manuel Kuck: The Frankfurt Federal Central Authority 1833–1842. An investigative authority between German thoroughness and interstate intrigue . aventinus nova No. 14 (winter 2009), in: aventinus, URL: [1] (accessed on August 10, 2012)
- Leopold Friedrich Ilse: History of the political investigations carried out by the commissions established alongside the Federal Assembly, the Central Investigation Commission in Mainz and the Federal Central Authority in Frankfurt in the years 1819 to 1827 and 1833 to 1842 . Frankfurt am Main 1860.
- Werner Kowalski : From petty-bourgeois democracy to communism , Vol. 2: The main reports of the federal central authority in Frankfurt am Main from 1838 to 1842 on the German revolutionary movement . Topos Ruggell, Vaduz 1978, ISBN 978-3-289-00161-6 (= archival research on the history of the German labor movement, Volume 5/2 GoogleBooks ).
- Theodor Adolf Löw: The Frankfurt federal central authority from 1833-1842 . Gelnhausen 1933 (also dissertation at Johann Wolfgang Goethe University Frankfurt am Main 1931).
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Harald Lönnecker (2011)
- ↑ a b c M. Kuck, 2009