Josef Erasmus Graeff

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Josef Erasmus Graeff (born February 19, 1803 in Zell (Mosel) ; † July 3, 1877 in Trier ) was a German lawyer , district judge and member of the National Assembly 1848/49.

Life

Josef Erasmus was a son of the married couple Anton Joseph Christoph (1772–1855) and Maria Margarete Graeff born. Ebertz (1773-1820) who married in 1799. From 1810 to 1819 Graeff attended elementary school in Zell. At the same time, he was privately taught Latin and French by the clergyman Melchior from 1816 to 1818 . He then moved from 1819 to 1824 at the Friedrich-Wilhelm Gymnasium in Trier, which at that time known as the Enlightenment related Johann Hugo Wyttenbach as headmaster board. From there Graeff went to Bonn at Easter 1825 , where he passed his matriculation examination at the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität on August 6th of the same year in front of a scientific commission . After his matriculation he studied in Bonn to 1828 six semesters law and meanwhile the evening lectures sounded the professor August Wilhelm Schlegel on. After completing his studies, Graeff registered for the first legal exam, spent 15 months as an auscultator where he had to prepare relations and then worked for the purpose of his further training in chambers , a jury , the public prosecutor's office and a lawyer . This was followed by a legal clerkship at the Higher Regional Court in Münster from September 1829 to March 1832 , then a transfer as an assessor to the Trier Regional Court and from 1835 to 1836 he worked as a state procurator in Prüm . On June 19, 1836 he was appointed regional judge in Trier, where he worked as a judge until his death in 1877.

Revolutionary years 1848/49

Graeff, to whom a nephew attested a pure character, modesty and sometimes also erudition as well as a certain unworldliness, was considered a great supporter of the French Revolution . His hope to see France's ideas and his liberal development also realized in a unified Germany earned him the name rebel . After the news about the February Revolution of 1848 in Paris in March 1848 had spread to the Rhineland , Graeff, his wife and daughter Emilie, and his brother Gottfried, who lived with him, were so enthusiastic about the ideas of the revolution that they got together joined the Trier popular movement. When Graeff gave a public political speech in the Götschel beer house in Trier for the first time on March 13, 1848, the local police chief remarked:

"... that the judge Graeff, a learned man of extraordinary prudence, was entangled in a delicate and despicable matter and did not spurn giving a speech to a depraved audience in that tavern."

- Trier Police Chief Müller : Dr. H.-Günther Böse in the Cochem-Zell 2000 homeland yearbook

When the Democratic Association was founded in Trier in May 1848 and the number of members rose rapidly to 1,400, Graeff was elected first as secretary and then to the extended board. On June 21, 1848, he traveled to the Prussian National Assembly in Berlin as the elected deputy of the Trier-Land district to take up the mandate of the deputy Viktor Valdenaire , who had been imprisoned for weeks , there. In Berlin he took his place on the extreme left of parliament in the Waldeck parliamentary group , which met in the evening for discussions and deliberations in the Hotel Mielentz on Taubenstrasse. In front of the Prussian National Assembly, which at that time was still meeting in the Sing-Akademie zu Berlin , Graeff spoke on July 18, 1848 and defended Valdenaire with energetic words that he had not done anything illegal. Together he and Dr. Karl Leopold Wencelius, who was also a member of the Prussian National Assembly for the constituency of Trier-Stadt, called for Valdenaire's convocation, which took place after his dismissal on July 23, 1848. Valdenaire was first brought to the Roscheider Hof, then he traveled to Berlin, where he briefly introduced himself to parliament and then finally handed over on 8/9. August 1848 his mandate to Graeff.

At the 68th session of the National Assembly on October 6, 1848, Graeff “knowledgeably and convincingly” , as the deputy Pastor Hansen from Ottweiler remarked, advocated the abolition of the right to hunt on foreign land without compensation.

"Gentlemen! Assuming that the right to hunt on someone else's property will be abolished and will therefore be consolidated with the property of the previously encumbered Basic Law, we will move on to the further question of whether the principle of the owner is allowed to hunt on even the smallest plot of land, or whether a necessary community of landowners in a community should not be assumed in this regard. "

- Rapporteur MP Gräff : Negotiations of the constituent assembly for Prussia, Volume 5, 53-69 session, Berlin 1848

In addition to the principles of freedom, the report also corresponded to many years of experience in the Rhine Province and was finally adopted as law.

Coup in 1848

After King Friedrich Wilhelm IV marched against revolutionary Berlin on November 10, 1848 with the support of Friedrich Wilhelm Graf von Brandenburg and the troops under the direction of the Prussian Field Marshal Friedrich von Wrangel and carried out a coup , the remaining parliament called on November 15 1848, which had last met in the Schützenhaus and the Hotel Mielentz, to refuse taxes - except for the municipal taxes . When Friedrich Wilhelm IV had decreed the so-called “imposed constitution” on December 5, 1848 without the consent of parliament, Graeff wrote to fellow parliamentarian Carl Christian Otto in the parliamentary album: "The mask has fallen that everyone is now perfected the left never doubted, can see and grasp; in the constitution of the 6th, absolutism has apparently shed its constitutional straitjacket. I think we hold on as friends. "

Election campaign for the 1st and 2nd Prussian Chamber January 1849

After his return to Trier, Graeff gave a speech to his electors to tell them about his experience in Berlin. His lecture received so much attention that the Democratic Party and shortly afterwards also the Mosel-Eifel constituency distributed it as a pamphlet for the upcoming election campaign for the elections for the 1st and 2nd Prussian Chamber ( Lords and Deputies ) in January 1849 let. Graeff's demands provided for a free, independent municipal constitution, an independent church and schools under state supervision, an extensive revision of tax law, a reduction in civil servants' salaries and a downsizing of the standing man . He also called for a law that he himself had drafted in order to be able to issue loans with low interest rates to poor citizens who needed money. According to the constitution of December 5, 1848, which was unilaterally imposed, Graeff missed the democratic principle by remarking: "All violence comes from the people" , whereby he considered the pseudo-constitutionalism, based on nobility , civil servants and the military , to be worse than absolutism itself, true democracy is given by the slogan "freedom, equality and fraternity" . Knowing that the time for a republic was still too early, he campaigned for a democratic-monarchical constitution, i.e. H. a parliamentary monarchy .

In the primary elections on January 22, 1849, Graeff was elected by the Democrats as an elector, who on February 1, 1849, together with Peter Alff (1806-1857) and Carl Philipp Cetto, was elected as a member of the First Chamber. Already in the 5th session of the Prussian First Chamber, Graeff raised his voice, at which he did not fail to call the king by name and lodged an objection to the traditional awe-inspiring phrases. Furthermore, he called for support for state welfare for fellow citizens willing to emigrate as well as the recruitment of Catholic military pastors into the army, and he did not fail to refer again to his consent to tax refusal and this with the words that "I have not felt sorry for it to this day" , To defend. After the debate about the emperor's question became more and more heated and the II. Chamber recognized the Frankfurt Imperial Constitution of March 28, 1849 on April 21, 1849, Friedrich Wilhelm IV. Dissolved the II. Chamber on April 28, 1849, whereby the Prussian Members of the National Assembly lost their seats . Graeff's political career came to an end and he went back to Trier to work as a judge again. Graeff's employers were not too happy about his political ambitions, but they did not succeed in proving that the wise and wise judge had acted in contravention of the law. Nevertheless, he was excluded from all further promotions from this point onwards.

family

Graeff had a sister Gertrude (1805–1890) and two brothers, Johann Baptist (1808–1884) tobacco goods manufacturer and Gottfried (1820–1900) who later became a legal advisor. The mother Maria Graeff died a few months after the birth of Gottfried. Josef Erasmus Graeff married Marie Pauline Mathieu (1801–1887) from Metz in Coigny on May 14, 1832 , who was a daughter of the tanner Jean Mathieu and his wife Margerite nee. Speiser was. Both had 3 biological children, Marie Emilie (1833–1899), Leo Heinrich (1836–1989), Maria Lucilia (1840–1901) and the adopted son Georg Michael (1853–1906). After the death of the court president Runten in 1840, Graeff had acquired his former house, the so-called Vogtsburg , which was part of the earlier Simeonstift near the Porta Nigra . Emilie, the first daughter, went to Saint Petersburg as an educator and married the railway engineer Wilhelm Müller there, who had graduated from the upper secondary school in Trier in 1848. The first son Leo Gräff studied mining in Bonn and joined the Corps Saxonia Bonn in 1858 . He was initially in 1860 as a mining trainee in Dudweiler - Jägersfreude busy, then he was appointed on July 18, 1866 Mining Consultant appointed and in 1875, the Irish brought him entrepreneur William Thomas Mulvany as general manager for Hibernia AG to Herne .

The second daughter Lucilia married on September 16, 1862 the factory owner Michael Ernst Cetto (1835–1917), who was a son of the liberal Trier politician Carl Philipp Cetto and her father's fellow member of the First Chamber in Berlin. The adopted child Georg Michael, who was the illegitimate son of a Russian prince and a lady-in-waiting, came to the Graeff family through the agency of their daughter Emilie. The Russian aristocrat wanted to bring his son back home later, but Georg Michael - who has now become a bourgeois Graeff - preferred to stay in Germany, studied mining , later became a high Prussian civil servant and was ultimately mining captain in Breslau .

Publications

  • Travel guide (French) of the married couple Mr. et Mme Graeff: Itinéraire historique et pittoresque du cours entier de la Moselle et de ses environs , Trier, Fr. Lintz 1841.
  • Josef Erasmus Graeff (author): Chronological collection of the Rhenish Prussian legal sources excluding the five statutes. In addition to an overview of the territorial changes and a detailed subject index. Zum Handgebrauche, Trier 1846, printed and published by Fr. Linß`schen Buchhandlung, 1168 pages

literature

  • Heinz-Günther Böse and Alfons Friderichs (eds.): Graeff, Josef Erasmus In: Personality of the Circle Cochem-Zell, Kliomedia, Trier 2004, ISBN 3-89890-084-3 , p. 132.
  • Dr. H.-Günther Böse: Josef Erasmus Gräff (1803–1877) from Zell, A judge as a champion for democracy In: Heimatjahrbuch Cochem-Zell , 2000. pp. 89–97.
  • Heinz Monz (ed.): Graeff, Josef Erasmus in: Trier Biographisches Lexikon Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2000, ISBN 3-88476-400-4 , pp. 141–142.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Wencelius, Karl Leopold / 1808-1864 in the RPPD
  2. ^ Graeff's speech on the abolition of the right to hunt on foreign land without compensation, negotiations of the constituent assembly for Prussia, Volume 5, 53–69 session, Berlin 1848, p. 3592. In: book.google.de. Retrieved March 8, 2019 .
  3. ↑ The Porta Nigra and the Capitolium of the Treviris by Dr. Peter Adolf Linde, ... it is the castle of the Vogts, also the house of the Landgerichtsrath Gräff, Trier, publisher of the author p. 86. In: book.google.de. Retrieved March 7, 2019 .
  4. ↑ Chronolgische collection of the Prussian Rhine sources of law to the exclusion of the five codes. From Josef Erasmus Graeff, Königigl. Provincial Court Council. Trier, 1846, printer and publisher Fr. Linß`sche Buchhandlung. In: book.google.de. Retrieved March 6, 2019 .
personal data
SURNAME Graeff, Josef Erasmus
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German lawyer
DATE OF BIRTH February 19, 1803
PLACE OF BIRTH Zell (Moselle)
DATE OF DEATH July 3, 1877
Place of death trier