Carl Friedrich Ferdinand Suden

Carl Friedrich Ferdinand Suden (born December 20, 1780 in Arolsen , † September 14, 1853 in Kassel ) was a German government official, most recently in the service of a secret council of state , and a diplomat of the Grand Duchy of Oldenburg .

Life

Suden was born as the son of Waldeck's mountain councilor Friedrich Wilhelm Suden (1748–1790) and Friederike Polyxene Wilhelmine, born. Fiermann (1755-1830) born. He attended high school in Gotha and studied law at the University of Göttingen from 1800 to 1802 . From 1802 to 1805 he worked at the Imperial Court in Vienna . After his return, he was initially cabinet secretary to Prince von Waldeck-Pyrmont Friedrich Karl August . During this activity he was often entrusted with diplomatic missions and negotiations. In December 1814, Suden briefly became a secret legation councilor in the neighboring Electorate of Hesse and finally moved to the state service of the Grand Duchy of Oldenburg the following year. There he was employed as a councilor in the government chancellery reorganized after the French occupation , the highest administrative authority in the country. Already in these years Suden, influenced by the reform ideas of Freiherr von Stein , advocated a cautious modernization of the state and the introduction of local self-government, but failed due to the resistance of Duke Peter I (Oldenburg) and the conservative civil service.

Within the government, Suden was initially responsible for external and internal sovereignty matters and, thanks to his keen understanding, good knowledge of his areas of work and his workforce, earned the reputation of an efficient civil servant who increasingly took on special tasks, such as negotiations with neighboring states. So he represented the Oldenburg interests in Bentinck's succession dispute over the rule of Kniphausen, which went on for years . He was also a delegate of the Grand Duchy in the Minden Weser Shipping Commission, which worked out the Weser Shipping Act in 1823, and from 1828 led negotiations on Oldenburg's accession to the short-lived Central German Trade Association . When Paul Friedrich August took office in 1829, Suden was appointed Vice-President of the Government in the course of a general wave of promotion and was awarded the title of Council of State .

As a reform-minded civil servant, Suden used the events of the July Revolution of 1830 in October 1830 to again advocate a state constitution in the Oldenburg cabinet, but again without success. On the contrary, his public advocacy of political changes probably caused the conservative Grand Duke August I to keep Suden away from the internal constitutional deliberations in the following months. As an expert on communal issues, Suden was at least involved in the preparations for a new, free self-government organization of the rural communities, which came into force in 1831/32 and was considered a preliminary stage for a future Oldenburg state constitution .

When Suden was also working on a draft constitution for the city of Oldenburg, he came into violent conflict with other conservative officials under the leadership of the influential District President Christoph Friedrich Mentz . In this dispute Suden was defeated, who was then suspended in April 1831 from the office of government vice-president and released for special tasks. Since the conflict continued, however, he finally gave up and asked for his release, which the Grand Duke agreed on January 20, 1832. Suden went to Kassel, but in the following years took on several special tasks for the Oldenburg government and was awarded the title of a secret council of state in 1840.

Social life

In Oldenburg, Suden quickly caught up with the leading literary circles and was accepted into the Literary Society in 1818 . In the same year he was one of the founders of the Oldenburg Agricultural Society , whose 2nd chairman he remained until 1830.

family

Suden was married to Louise Regine Christiane von Abel (1787-1853) since 1818. Her father was the Württemberg statesman and later Hanseatic Minister Resident in Paris Christoph Conradin von Abel (1750-1823).

swell

• Hans Friedl: South, Carl Friedrich Ferdinand. In: Hans Friedl u. a. (Ed.): Biographical manual for the history of the state of Oldenburg . Edited on behalf of the Oldenburg landscape. Isensee, Oldenburg 1992, ISBN 3-89442-135-5 , p. 721 f. ( online ).