Title

Petitioning in the Rhineprovince

Description

The 1833 Letter from the governor of the Rhineprovince regards King Frederick William III’s complaint of receiving petitions from ‘representatives of the people’ outside of the sitting of the Landtag. In the king's understanding, representatives could not exist whenever the provincial assembly is not sitting.

It highlights how little the Prussian King was inclined towards ruling in a representative system or allowing the drafting of regional constitutions according to conditions he agreed to at the Congress of Vienna in 1815. Following Frederick William III’s death in 1840, his son Frederick William IV was deemed a promising change of leadership due to his friendly relations to the Rhineland. By 1849, however, the Prussian king’s view on progressive, liberal politics and the establishment of a German state and constitution had reverted back to those of his father and he rejected petitioners from the Frankfurt Assembly offering him the crown of German emperor.

The instalment of a Rhenish provincial assembly that sat for the first time in 1826 in Düsseldorf might not have been the most obvious and immediate success democrats had imagined, as it was organised through representation of estates (nobility, privileged land owners, cities, small landowners) and thus restricted access and representation. However, it facilitated formation of public opinion through assembly debates on church-state relations, Jewish emancipation, local government reform, public finances being balanced between eastern and western parts of Prussia. Petitioning became a new means to influence assembly debates in Düsseldorf as well as Berlin, spawning a wave of petitions regarding the new constitution, respectively the attempts of change to the Rhenish law during the 1830s and 40s. This method, under penmanship of lawyers and Rhenish officials, was successful in 1843 as the Rhenish law defeated the Prussian-proposed antiquated Allgemeines Landrecht. While Rhenish law, i.e. French law, has public hearings and juries, Prussian law operated in secret without involvement of the public until a ruling has taken place and is published in writing. Ultimately, the Rhenish law system provided a model for Prussian and German reform following 1848.

By 1848/9 petitions that reached the National Parliament in Frankfurt and the Prussian Parliament set out and repeated the demands and content of the election campaigns and manifestos. They comprised of, among others, universal suffrage, freedom of speech, press and association as well as confession and religion, safety of labour rights, personal freedom and the judiciary and state-funded education.

Spatial Coverage

Germany

Temporal Coverage

The Rhenish provincial assembly between 1826-1848.

Date

1833

Bibliographic Citation

LHK 441 4920, p.1

Contributor

Isabelle Riepe

Subject

carnival

Germany

petitions

practices