Georg von Schmerfeld

Georg Schmerfeld , from 1817 von Schmerfeld , (born March 18, 1759 in Kassel ; † December 21, 1823 ibid) was a German lawyer, administrative officer and statesman in the service of the landgraves and electors of Hesse-Kassel .

origin

Georg Schmerfeld came from a family of civil servants in Lower Hesse. He was the only son of Johann David Schmerfeld (1707–1774), Hessen-Kassel chamber bookkeeper and councilor at the War and Domain Chamber, and his wife Marianne von Borries (1726–1759).

Career

After studying law in Marburg and Göttingen , in 1779, when he was just 20 years old, he became an assessor at the so-called French law firm in Kassel . He was characterized by legal expertise, organizational talent and virtuoso violin playing . After five years in this position, he became a judge and Rhine toll collector in St. Goar . From 1788 to 1792 he was reserve commissioner for the Lower County of Katzenelnbogen in St. Goar, who was responsible for exercising the Hesse-Kassel sovereign rights and church authority in this part of the Landgraviate. Afterwards he became high school student and chairman of the regional court in Kassel. In 1804 he became a secret councilor and chairman of the secret country chancellery; so he got into the immediate environment of the Landgrave Wilhelm IX., the 1803 Elector Wilhelm I became.

After the elector's flight from Kassel in late autumn 1806, Schmerfeld initially stayed in Kassel to negotiate with the invading French. In 1809 he was one of the important co-conspirators in the Dörnberg uprising in 1809 against the regime of King Jérôme von Westphalen , who was appointed by Napoléon Bonaparte , but went into exile there after his failure in Prague to the elector.

After the restitution of the electorate in 1813, Elector Wilhelm appointed primarily men to leading positions in his government who had been with him in exile in Prague. One of the first among these was Georg Schmerfeld, who became the secret minister of state for the interior and justice and at the same time also regional president in Kassel, head of the secret offices and member of the cabinet treasury. He was considered to be of great integrity and, unlike most of his colleagues, probably did not participate in the unrestrained favoritism and personal enrichment that was rampant in Hessen-Kassel. In October 1815 the elector appointed him to the four-person commission, which in December 1815 presented the first constitutional draft for the Electorate of Hesse, which was progressive and forward-looking in many respects.

Schmerfeld was raised to the nobility in 1817 and was still held in high esteem in the first years of the reign of Elector Wilhelm II from 1821. He was a leading member of the Kassel Freemason scene , and it was thanks to his influence that the lodges in Kurhessen were not banned after 1813.

family

Georg Schmerfeld married Friederike Charlotte Gissot (1764–1821) in 1787, a daughter of the landgrave's personal physician and chamberlain Jean Gissot (1728–1798). The marriage remained childless.

literature

• Stefan Brakensiek: Prince servants, civil servants, citizens: administration and life of local civil servants in small towns in Lower Hesse 1750–1830. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1999, ISBN 3-525-35677-3 , p. 296 ( Google books ).
• Stefan Brakensiek: The civil servants; The example of the learned councilors in the Kassel government. In: Heide Wunder , Christina Vanja , Karl-Hermann Wegner (Hrsg.): Kassel in the 18th century: Residence and city. Euregio, Kassel 2000, ISBN 3-933617-05-7 , pp. 361–362 ( archive.org ( Memento from June 28, 2007 in the Internet Archive ), PDF; 6.4 MB)

References and comments

1. ↑ A. Heldmann: The Hessian diocese of the Niedergrafschaft Katzenellenbogen . In: Nassauische Annalen: Yearbook of the association for Nassau antiquity and historical research , Volume 31, Association for Nassau antiquity and historical research. Wiesbaden 1900, pp. 115-171 (125-126) books.google.de
2. ^ Draft constitution for Hessen-Kassel (1816), notarized representation of the Electoral Hesse state parliament negotiations . In: Horst Dippel (Ed.): Constitutions of the world from the late 18th century to the middle of the 19th century . de Gruyter, 2007, ISBN 978-3-598-44058-8 , e-book
3. ↑ The other commission members were Ferdinand Schenck zu Schweinsberg , Ernst Friedrich von der Malsburg and Otto von Porbeck . (Werner Frotscher: Constitutional discussion and constitutional conflict: On the development of free-parliamentary constitutional structures in Kurhessen (1813–1866) . (PDF; 73 kB) In: Journal of the Association for Hessian History (ZHG), 2002, Volume 107, pp. 203–221 (206))