Provincial Assembly (Hesse)

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The Provincial Parliament (also known colloquially as the Provincial Parliament ) was the representative body at the provincial level in the Grand Duchy of Hesse and in the People's State of Hesse .

Background: The Provincial Council in Rheinhessen

Erthaler Hof in Mainz, seat of the Rheinhessen Provincial Council

The Grand Duchy of Hesse was made up of three provinces, the predominantly Protestant provinces of Upper Hesse and Starkenburg and the predominantly Catholic Rheinhessen .

Rheinhessen only came to the Grand Duchy in 1816. Spatially, it consisted predominantly of the previous Donnersberg department . In this there was the département council as the people's representative. In the Grand Duchy, a provincial council was elected instead of his 1818. The seat was the Erthaler Hof in Mainz . The election was made indirectly. At the community level, the primary voters met and elected representatives for cantonal election assemblies. These appointed the 75 members of a provincial assembly (8 for the canton of Alzey ). The provincial assembly selected 32 candidates for the provincial council from the list of the 300 highest taxed persons in the province. The Grand Duke selected 16 of them as members of the Provincial Council. The composition of the provincial council corresponded to the selection process: 9 mayors (including Josef Brunck ), 3 landowners, a city council and a lawyer from Mainz, a notary from Wöllstein and the vice-president of the Mainz Chamber of Commerce , Heinrich von Mappes formed the council. The Provincial Council met for the first time on October 4, 1818. One of his duties was to advise on the financial affairs of the province. However, it only met three times, the last time on January 5, 1820. The Provincial Council was never officially dissolved, but no longer convened and fell asleep.

There were no comparable institutions in the other provinces. The motion of the Mainz deputy in the second chamber of the estates of the Grand Duchy of Hesse , Franz Philipp Aull , on March 23, 1847, to set up provincial councils in all three provinces was unsuccessful.

Prehistory: The district councils after the March Revolution

After the March Revolution of 1848, the three provinces were dissolved and replaced by 10 administrative districts. District councils have been set up as representatives of the people at the level of the administrative districts. These were freely elected for three years. Every two years a third dropped out and was re-elected. On November 29, 1848, Franz Zitz was elected as President of the Rheinhessen District Council.

After the victory of the reaction , the administrative districts were abolished and the provinces and counties re-established. The district councils were retained at the district level and became the predecessors of the district councils . At the provincial level, no representative bodies were set up.

The provincial days

Representative bodies at the provincial level were introduced by the Hessian district and provincial order of June 12, 1874. The district councils were elected to a third by the 100 highest taxed citizens in the district (in the districts Darmstadt, Mainz, Offenbach and Worms it was the 50 highest taxed). The other two thirds were elected indirectly, namely through the municipal councils of the municipalities in the district.

The district assemblies elected a member of the provincial assembly for every 10,000 inhabitants of the district. The members of the Provincial Assembly were elected for 6 years. Half of the members were re-elected every three years.

President of the Provincial tags was appointed by the Grand Duke Provincial Director . The provincial council decided on the budget of the province and on all questions of self-government affairs in the province.

The provincial assembly elected the provincial committee , which consisted of 8 members. The state government had the right to appoint an additional member who had to be qualified to hold judicial office . The term of office of the provincial committee was also 6 years and here, too, half were re-elected every three years.

The provincial committee had in addition to the duties of the general provincial administration the task of municipal supervision over the districts of the province and of the Administrative Court in first and second instance.

The provincial assembly was a dignitary parliament . The modernization of the district and provincial order in 1911 did nothing to change this. The core of this law was a more precise definition of the competencies of the provincial bodies.

In the Weimar Republic

After the November Revolution, the provincial days were democratized. Accordingly, the election of the provincial days now took place in direct, free and equal elections by the citizens of the respective provinces. The members of the provincial assemblies were elected for three years each according to the principle of proportional representation.

The synchronization of the provincial days

After the seizure of power by the Nazis in 1933 was due to the Law for coordination of the states with the Reich Provisional adopted in Hesse, the Regulation on the formation of municipal self-government bodies. Thereafter, the freely elected members of the Provincial Assembly were replaced by members who resulted from the status of the members of the Reichstag, who was semi-freely elected on March 5, 1933. The provincial days, which were thus deprived of any possible effect, were dissolved in 1936 and their tasks were transferred to the provincial committees.

epilogue

With the formation of the Rheinhessen administrative district after the Second World War, a purely administrative unit without its own representative body was created.

swell

  • Klaus Dietrich Hoffmann: The history of the province and the administrative district of Rheinhessen, 1985, ISBN 3-87854-047-7

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Ordinance on the formation of the Provincial Council of August 7, 1818; in: Official Journal for the Province of Rheinhessen 1818, page 339
  2. ^ The history of the province and the administrative district of Rheinhessen, page 24 ff.
  3. ^ Announcement, the election of the district councils, in particular the unsuitable division of the government districts into electoral districts on October 5, 1848 (Government Gazette 1848, page 353)
  4. ^ The history of the province and the administrative district of Rheinhessen, page 41 ff.
  5. ↑ Law on the organization of the administrative authorities subordinate to the Ministry of the Interior concerning April 28, 1852 (Government Gazette 1852, page 201)
  6. ^ Edict concerning the organization of the administrative authorities subordinate to the Ministry of the Interior concerning May 12, 1852 (Government Gazette 1852, page 221)
  7. ↑ Law on internal administration and representation of the counties and provinces of June 12, 1874 (Government Gazette 1874, page 251)
  8. ↑ Law, the amendment of the district and provincial order of June 12, 1874 concerning July 8, 1911 (Government Gazette 1911, page 307)
  9. ↑ Law amending the district and provincial order of July 8, 1911 concerning April 15, 1919 (Government Gazette 191, pages 164-179)
  10. ↑ Law on the elections of city councilors and councilors as well as members of the district and provincial assemblies of August 19, 1922 (Government Gazette 1922, pp. 245–262)
  11. ↑ Ordinance on the formation of new municipal self-governing bodies of April 6, 1933 . In: Hessisches Gesamtministerium (Hrsg.): Hessisches Regierungsblatt. 1933 No. 8 , p. 40 ( online at the information system of the Hessian state parliament [PDF; 1.8 MB ]).
  12. ↑ Law on the repeal of the provincial and district assemblies of July 21, 1936 (Government Gazette 1936, page 77)