Friedrich von Friesen

Friedrich Freiherr von Friesen (1796–1871)

The Roetha Castle 1855

Friedrich Freiherr von Friesen (born October 11, 1796 in Dresden , † March 21, 1871 in Dresden) was a German manor owner and conservative politician. He was a member and president of the first chamber of the Saxon state parliament .

family

Friedrich came from the old noble family von Friesen and was the son of Johann Georg Friedrich von Friesen (born April 28, 1757 in Rötha; † January 18, 1824), Privy Councilor and supervisor of the Dresden art collections, and library and his wife Juliane Caroline nee. Countess von der Schulenburg.

He inherited the three manors owned by his father in 1824 together with his two brothers Ernst (born February 9, 1800 in Dresden; † June 19, 1869 in Kassel-Wilhelmshöhe) and Hermann von Friesen (born February 27, 1802 in Dresden, † 23 January 1882 in Dresden). He took over Rötha in his possession through compensation and in 1846 bought the Trachenau manor from his brother Hermann . On January 9, 1826, he married Countess Johanne Auguste von Einsiedel from the Wolkenburg family; the marriage remained childless and was divorced in 1836. On September 11, 1838, he entered into a second marriage with Countess Mathilde Kanitz, who was 25 years his junior , but also remained childless.

Friesen died in Dresden in 1871 and was buried in Rötha. By using a fideicommissar inheritance law, he was able to reserve his manor for male descendants of the Friesen family.

Profession and political activity

Like most sons of noble families, he received his first education from a private tutor. After attending school at the Princely School in Pforta between 1808 and 1813, he completed his military service during the Napoleonic Wars . In 1816 he began studying law at the University of Leipzig , which he completed in 1820. He then had a short-term job with a Dresden lawyer, but then entered the Saxon civil service. By 1830 he had made it to the Secret Finance Council in the Dresden Ministry.

In 1826 he was awarded the title of Saxon Chamberlain .

As a member of the general knighthood , he took part in the pre-constitutional state parliaments in 1824, 1830 and 1831, for which, in addition to the manor property, the nobility trial was necessary. In the Saxon Landtag , founded on the basis of the Saxon constitution of 1831 , he initially had a mandate in the 2nd Chamber of Parliament for the first three state parliaments as a representative of the manor owners in the Leipzig district, but was then in 1842 by King Friedrich August II. For life in the I. Chamber appointed. He was one of the wealthiest and most influential manors in Saxony. At the state parliament in 1847 he acted as president of his house.

His liberal -minded contemporary Bernhard Hirschel , after the Landtag in 1846, characterized him with unflattering words as a strictly conservative politician: " For if he seems to belong in his form to a prehistoric creation, his political views transport him to the feudal Middle Ages, to the Time of the aristocracy at Louis XVI. Court. Nothing of the movements of the 19th century is visible in him, yes, he does not even endeavor to adapt to the times and differs from the English high tory in that he has not the slightest concept of a "people". ". In a diary he kept from the 1840s, during the pre- March period, liberals such as Robert Blum were given terms such as “ schemers and troublemakers ”, which, because of their behavior during the Leipzig riots of 1845 , would have to be pursued with “ relentless and restless legal strictness ” .

After the March unrest of 1848 there was such pressure for reform in the Saxon public that when the Landtag was constituted in May 1848 he was not again entrusted with the office of President of the Chamber. King Friedrich August II. Appointed the liberal-minded Friedrich Ernst von Schönfels to this post. In the debates about the future right to vote and the position of the noble manor owners, Friesen did not represent the uncompromising position of the strictly conservatives who wanted to maintain the status quo in parliament, but instead adopted a reform-conservative stance. The search for new ways to influence was ultimately fruitless. With the provisional electoral law of November 15, 1848 , the noble manor owners lost their seats in the first chamber. The Landtag 1848/49, elected in December 1848, no longer belonged to a parliamentarian from the 1848 Landtag.

Only when the pre-March parliament and the electoral law of 1831 were restituted by the government under Ferdinand Zschinsky in the summer of 1850 was he able to take a seat in the state parliament again. In this, the Saxon king reappointed the liberal politician Friedrich Ernst von Schönfels as President of the Chamber in order not to unnecessarily heat up the political situation in Saxony. In 1854, Friesen took over the office of vice-president of the chamber and only moved up to the office of chamber president when Schönfels lost his state parliament mandate after the sale of his Reuth manor in December 1862.

During his time as President of the Chamber, King Johann awarded him the title Real Privy Councilor in 1869 , which gave him the right to be addressed as "Excellency". He last presided over the state parliament in 1869/70.

Fonts

• Lecture to the knightly gentlemen of the Leipzig Circle , Leipzig 1844
• Dedicated with loyal admiration and gratitude to the gentlemen of the Leipzig Circle , Rötha 1863.

literature

• Josef Matzerath : Aspects of Saxon State Parliament History - Presidents and Members of Parliament from 1833 to 1952 , Dresden 2001, p. 15 f.
• Josef Matzerath: Friesen, Friedrich Freiherr von . In: Institute for Saxon History and Folklore (Ed.): Saxon Biography .

Individual evidence

1. ^ Ernst von Friesen: History of the free-lordly family of Friesen . Published by C. Heinrich, Dresden 1899, p. 306.
2. ↑ Bernhard Hirschel: Saxony's government, estates and people , Mannheim 1846, p. 190 ( digitized version )
3. ^ Josef Matzerath: Aspects of the Saxon State Parliament History ... , p. 16.