Jesuits Law (1872)

The Jesuits Law (Jesuitengesetz) of 4 July 1872 forbade Jesuit institutions on the soil of the new German empire.

It was part of a broader intensification of church-state rivalry that emerged in the final decades of the nineteenth century in much of Europe as nationalism flourished, and secular states took a more assertive role in the daily lives of individuals. Within Germany, sources generally identify the resulting church-state struggle as the Kulturkampf (literally "cultural struggle", though the German term is more far reaching than its English language equivalent).

The core focus of the Kulturkampf laws went back to the individual states that together comprised the newly unified German Empire and which still enjoyed considerable autonomy within it. Apart from the so-called Pulpit Law, the Jesuits Law was one of very few Kulturkampf legislative measures enacted at a national level.

Some of the new laws of the 1870s, notably the Prussian and civil registration requirements for marriages, births and deaths, triggered state-church confrontation only as a side-effect. Unlike these measures, the Jesuits Law was from the start part of a struggle against the Jesuits, who were seen as the spearhead of Ultramontanism. By acknowledging the supremacy of Papal authority, the Jesuits contested the secular authority of Germany's imperial chancellor, Otto von Bismarck. Contemporary context for the Jesuits Law came from pre-emptive public campaigning against it by Roman Catholic traditionalists and the Protestant churches.

Within the national legislature (Reichstag), the majority coalition strengthened the draft legislation proposed by Bismarck. On 4 July 1872 the law, which concerned the Jesuits and Catholic religious orders, was promulgated. It proscribed the activities of Jesuit and associated orders on German soil. It empowered the government to impose residency bans on individual members of those orders, and to expel foreign members from the country.

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