John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton

John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton KCVO DL (born January 10, 1834 in Naples , † June 19, 1902 in Tegernsee , Bavaria ) was an English historian , Catholic liberal and publicist .

origin

John Emerich Edward Acton-Dalberg came from high nobility families operating across Europe. The Acton-Dalberg family returned to the Roman Catholic denomination in the 18th century . Under the legal situation in the Kingdom of Great Britain at that time, Catholics were unable to take leading positions in politics. The ancestors of Lord Acton-Dalberg therefore moved to France and later to Italy, where his grandfather, John Acton, 6th Baronet (1736–1811), was a Neapolitan admiral and temporarily first minister. In 1791, as heir to the older line of the family, he had inherited the English nobility title of Baronet , of Aldenham Hall in the Parish of Morville and County of Salop , created in 1644 , as well as the family estates in Shropshire . His son, Ferdinand Richard Acton, 7th Baronet, married Marie Louise von Dalberg , only child and thus heir daughter of Duke Emmerich Joseph von Dalberg (1773–1833). The Duke and Talleyrand had the interests of King Louis XVIII. represented at the Congress of Vienna . After the Duke's death in 1833, Richard Acton took the name Dalberg-Acton.

John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton was the only son from the marriage between Marie Louise von Dalberg and Richard Acton. Because of his maternal descent, Dalberg-Acton saw himself as "half German". John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton was three years old when his father died. His mother moved to the family estate in Shropshire and married Lord Leveson in 1840 , later 2nd Earl of Granville, to whom Lord Dalberg-Acton had a distant relationship.

Educational path

The young Dalberg-Acton was educated as a Catholic at St. Mary's College in Oscott near Birmingham, which was then headed by the later Cardinal Nicholas Patrick Stephen Wiseman , and by Félix Dupanloup in Paris .

In 1850 he came to Munich, where he lived in the house of the important theologian and church historian Ignaz von Döllinger and was trained and promoted by him. Dalberg-Acton had a lifelong friendship with Ignaz von Döllinger. His time with Ignaz von Döllinger laid the foundations for his lifelong pursued historical studies. He compiled an extensive historical library, including 20,000 volumes with marginal notes from his own hand. He was friends with historians in Europe and the United States such as Alexis de Tocqueville , Heinrich von Sybel, and Leopold von Ranke .

Dalberg-Acton could not study at any of the English elite universities due to his Roman Catholic denomination. He therefore went to the University of Munich .

Public work

Politician

In 1856 he was a member of the British delegation to the coronation celebrations of Tsar Alexander II in Moscow , which was led by his stepfather, Lord Granville .

In 1859 Dalberg-Acton settled on his estate in Aldenham, Shropshire and became a member of the House of Commons , where he supported William Gladstone . As a parliamentarian he was not very active and was voted out of office in 1865. Dalberg-Acton became a close friend and advisor to William Gladstone, who gave him the hereditary peerage of Baron Acton , of Aldenham in the County of Shropshire, on December 11, 1869 . This was the first case since the Reformation that a Catholic was called to the House of Lords . Gladstone then sent him as a British observer to the First Vatican Council , where he took an active part in forming a coalition of bishops who campaigned against the conservative tendencies of the council. His letters to Ignaz von Döllinger from this time and his reports in the Allgemeine Zeitung are still important sources on the history of the minority at the Council.

Like Ignaz von Döllinger, Dalberg-Acton turned against the dogmatization of papal infallibility . Acton's insight expressed in this connection has become famous: “Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely” (“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely”), also known in Great Britain as “Lord Acton's Dictum”. However, after the infallibility was proclaimed at the First Vatican Council , he did not leave the Catholic Church, while Ignaz von Döllinge was excommunicated . Dalberg-Acton set out his position in public letters to The Times of November and December 1874, which were widely received at the time. In particular, he emphasized that the connection with the Roman Catholic Church was "dearer than life" for him.

During the American Civil War he was a sympathizer of the southern states and influenced liberal friends in this sense. He saw in the attitude of the southern states the defense of the federal principle, which he saw as the best guarantor against possible tyranny, against a centralized state power.

publicist

Dalberg-Acton was the editor of two influential Catholic magazines, first of The Rambler , a monthly, later bimonthly, the editor of which he took over in 1859 from John Henry Newman . In 1862, The Rambler produced the quarterly Home and Foreign Review , also published by Dalberg-Acton. Dalberg-Acton wrote a large part of the articles in both journals himself. Here he was able to contribute his immense historical knowledge.

Due to his critical attitude to the conditions in the Roman Catholic Church, he came into conflict with its hierarchy. His boldness pleased neither Cardinal Wiseman nor Henry Edward Manning , who warned the Roman Curia against Dalberg-Acton and The Rambler in 1861 and later succeeded Wiseman as Archbishop of Westminster . Among other things, in response to Ignaz von Döllinger, Pope Pius IX. 1864 the Breve Tuas Libenter , according to which Catholic authors were subordinate to the authority of the Roman Catholic Church. Dalberg-Acton then discontinued Home and Foreign Review that same year. However, he continued to write for the liberal North British Review until it was discontinued in 1872 .

In 1886 he helped found the English Historical Review magazine .

Scholar

Dalberg-Acton is considered a brilliant essayist and one of the most important historians of the 19th century, even though, apart from the articles in the journals mentioned, he published comparatively little. He hasn't published a single book. But his few publications achieved a great response. He never completed his life project of writing a “story of freedom”.

In 1890 he became a Fellow of All Souls College , Oxford . In 1895 he was appointed Regius Professor of Modern History in Cambridge , "precisely where he had asked in vain for admission as a student forty-five years earlier because of his Catholic faith". He was the first with a Roman Catholic denomination after the Reformation to receive such a position. He gave lectures on the French Revolution and Modern History .

family

Memorial plaque for John Lord Acton-Dalberg in the cemetery in Tegernsee

In 1865 John Emerich married Edward Dalberg-Acton Maria Countess Arco on Valley (* 1841, † 1923) from the Bavarian branch of the Counts of Arco . They had two sons and four daughters. A daughter and a son died as children. The son Richard Lyon-Dalberg-Acton, 2nd Baron Acton , inherited the title of his father.

From 1879 Dalberg-Acton lived alternately in London, in Cannes in winter and in Tegernsee in the summer months in the Villa Arco (today part of the orthopedic clinic).

John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton died in 1902 on the family estate in Tegernsee. There he found his final resting place. His important library was bought by Andrew Carnegie and given by him to the Gladstone biographer Viscount John Morley , who bequeathed it to Cambridge University.

Honors

In 1872 he was awarded an honorary doctorate in philosophy from the University of Munich . In 1876 the Bavarian Academy of Sciences appointed him its external member. He was a member ( fellow ) of the British Academy . William Gladstone earned him the title of Lord-in-waiting in 1892 during his second term as Prime Minister .

Fonts

Dalberg-Acton left only a few publications, but these achieved even greater response. Particularly noteworthy are:

  • The essay Nationality , written in 1862, the year after the Kingdom of Italy was founded . This essay is an urgent warning of the dangers of nationalism that is emerging everywhere, which - Dalberg-Acton feared - will plunge and tear Europe into wars. That is why he sided with the Habsburg Monarchy as a supranational state.
  • The essay Democracy in Europe (in: Quarterly Review , January 1878)
  • Two lectures given in Bridgnorth in 1877 on The history of freedom in antiquity and The history of freedom in christianity . These are key texts to understanding Acton, who interpreted history as a process of freedom being realized.
  • The essay German Schools of History . It is an argument u. a. with Barthold Georg Niebuhr , Leopold von Ranke , Heinrich von Sybel , Johann Gustav Droysen , Heinrich von Treitschke and Theodor Mommsen , also with Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and the theologians of the Tübingen school and a bow to the achievements of the historiography of the schools of historicism .
  • The inaugural lecture The Study of History , which made a deep impression.
  • His - later also published in book form - lectures in Cambridge on modern history , where Dalberg-Acton understood modern history to be the epoch from the Renaissance to the eve and the French Revolution. The 19th century was his contemporary history.
  • His letter to the Board of Directors of Cambridge University Press of October 1896, in which he set out the basics (aim, subjects, presentation, etc.) of the planned Cambridge Modern History . Under the impression of his inaugural lecture in Cambridge the previous year, the University of Dalberg-Acton asked for the outline of an overall presentation of the history of modern times, for which there was no comparable model, to be determined. Its 14 volumes appeared between 1902 and 1912 after Acton's death.

literature

in alphabetical order by authors / editors

  • Christoph Böhr , Philipp Hildmann, Johann Christian Koecke (eds.): Faith, conscience, freedom. Lord Acton and the Religious Foundations of Liberal Society . Springer VS, Wiesbaden 2015, ISBN 978-3-658-08287-1 .
  • Victor Conzemius : Lord Acton or the free word in the Church . In: Otto Bardong (ed.): Herrnsheim 771–1971. Festival book for the 1200th anniversary . Worms 1971, pp. 145-155.
  • Alexander Dörrbecker (ed.): History and freedom. A Lord Acton Breviary. NZZ Libro, Zurich 2010, ISBN 978-3-03823-612-2 .
  • Roland Hill : Lord Acton. A pioneer for religious and political freedom in the 19th century. Herder, Freiburg 2002, ISBN 3-451-27875-8 .
  • Golo Mann : Lord Acton . In: Ders .: History and Stories . S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1961, pp. 85-101.
  • biography
  • Acton (John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton), 1st Baron . In: Encyclopædia Britannica . 11th edition. tape 1 : A-Androphagi . London 1910, p. 159 (English, full text [ Wikisource ]).

Web links

Remarks

  1. ^ Anton Graf von Arco auf Valley , Kurt Eisner's murderer , was Actons-Dalberg's nephew.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Golo Mann: Lord Acton . In: Ders .: History and Stories . S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1961. pp. 85-101, here p. 86.
  2. ↑ a b Golo Mann: Lord Acton . In: Ders .: History and Stories . S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1961, pp. 85-101, here p. 96.
  3. ↑ a b c Art. Acton, Lord John Emerich Edward . In: Friedrich Wilhelm Bautz (Hrsg.): Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon . Vol. 1, Verlag Traugott Bautz, Hamm 1975, Sp. 21.
  4. ^ Conzemius: Lord Acton , p. 147.
  5. ↑ a b c Golo Mann: Lord Acton . In: Ders .: History and Stories . S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1961. pp. 85-101, here p. 87.
  6. ^ Conzemius: Lord Acton , p. 147.
  7. ^ Conzemius: Lord Acton , p. 150.
  8. ^ Conzemius: Lord Acton , p. 150.
  9. ^ John Edward Emerich Dalberg-Acton: Historical Essays and Studies , edited by John Neville Figgis and Reginald Vere Laurence. Macmillan, London 1907, p. 504. The sentence relates to the Pope and is found in a letter from Acton to the historian and later Anglican Bishop of London, Mandell Creighton, on April 5, 1887.
  10. ^ Edward Hallett Carr : What is history? The George Macaulay Trevelyan lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge, January - March 1961 . Penguin, Harmondsworth 1964. p. 47.
  11. ^ Edmund Sheridan Purcell: Life of Cardinal Manning, Archbishop of Westminister . Vol. 2: Manning as a Catholic . Macmillan, London 1895, p. 384.
  12. ^ Charlotte Hansen: Ignaz von Ignaz von Döllinger and the Insistence on Academic Freedom in Theological Inquiry . In: Church contemporary history (KZG). ISSN  0932-9951 . Vol. 24 (2011), pp. 27-50.
  13. ^ Edward Hallett Carr: What is history? The George Macaulay Trevelyan lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge, January - March 1961 . Penguin, Harmondsworth 1964. p. 15.
  14. ^ Conzemius: Lord Acton , p. 145.
  15. ^ Conzemius: Lord Acton , p. 154.
  16. ^ Conzemius: Lord Acton , p. 154.
  17. ↑ Her full name was: Marie Anne Ludomilla Euphrosine . According to: Vicary Gibbs: The Complete Peerage of England, Scotland, Ireland, Great Britain and the United Kingdom . London 1910. ND: Alan Sutton, Gloucester 1984. ISBN 0-904387-82-8 .
  18. ^ Deceased Fellows. British Academy, accessed April 28, 2020 .
  19. ^ Nationality . In: John Edward Emerich Dalberg-Acton: The History of Freedom and Other Essays , edited by John Neville Figgis and Reginald Vere Laurence. Macmillan, London 1907, pp. 270-300.
  20. ^ Edward Hallett Carr: What is history? The George Macaulay Trevelyan lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge, January - March 1961 . Penguin, Harmondsworth 1964. p. 115; Man: Lord Acton , 101; Conzemius: Lord Acton , p. 148.
  21. ^ German Schools of History . In: English Historical Review , Vol. 1, 1886, pp. 344-392.
  22. ^ Inaugural Lecture on the Study of History . In: John Edward Emerich Dalberg-Acton: Lectures on Modern History , edited by John Neville Figgis and Reginald Vere Laurence. Macmillan, London 1906, pp. 1-28.
  23. ↑ Golo Mann: Lord Acton . In: Ders .: History and Stories . S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1961. pp. 85-101, here p. 85.
  24. ^ Edward Hallett Carr: What is history? The George Macaulay Trevelyan lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge, January - March 1961 . Penguin, Harmondsworth 1964. pp. 7-9.
predecessor Office successor
Ferdinand Dalberg-Acton Baronet (of Aldenham)
1837-1902 		Richard Dalberg-Acton
New title created Baron Acton
1869-1902 		Richard Dalberg-Acton
personal data
SURNAME Dalberg-Acton, John Emerich Edward, 1st Baron Acton
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Acton, Sir John, 8th Baronet
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British historian, Liberal Catholic, journalist and politician, Member of the House of Commons
DATE OF BIRTH January 10, 1834
PLACE OF BIRTH Naples
DATE OF DEATH June 19, 1902
Place of death Tegernsee