Ludwig Hassenpflug

Hans Daniel Ludwig Friedrich Hassenpflug (February 26, 1794 – October 15, 1862), German statesman, was born at Hanau in Hesse.

He studied law at Göttingen, graduated in 1816, and took his seat as Assessor in the judicial chamber of the board of government (Regierungskollegium) at Kassel, of which his father Johann Hassenpflug was also a member, in 1821 he was nominated by the new elector, William II, fustisrat (councillor of justice); in 1832 he became Ministerialrat and reporter (Referent) to the ministry of Hesse-Kassel, and in May of the same year was appointed successively minister of justice and of the interior.

It was from this moment that he became conspicuous in the constitutional struggles of Germany. The reactionary system introduced by the elector William I had broken down before the revolutionary movements of 1830, and in 1831 Hesse had received a constitution. This development was welcome neither to the elector nor to the other German governments, and Hassenpflug deliberately set to work to reverse it. In doing so he gave the lie to his own early promise; for he had been a conspicuous member of the revolutionary Burschen-schaft at Göttingen, and had taken part as a volunteer in the War of Liberation.

It is unnecessary to enquire into the causes of the change. Hassenpfiug by training and tradition was a strait-laced official; he was also a first-rate lawyer, and his naturally arbitrary temper had from the first displayed itself in an attitude of overbearing independence towards his colleagues and even towards the elector. To such a man constitutional restrictions were intolerable, and from the moment he came into power he set to work to override them, by means of press censorship, legal quibbles, unjustifiable use of the electoral prerogatives, or frank supersession of the legislative rights of the Estates by electoral ordinances.

The story of the constitutional deadlock that resulted belongs to the history of Hesse-Kassel and Germany; so far as Hassenpflug himself was concerned, it made him, more even than Metternich, the Mephistopheles of the Reaction to the German people. In Hesse itself he was known as "Hessens Hass und Fluch" (Hesse's hate and curse). In the end, however, his masterful temper became unendurable to the regent (Frederick William). In the summer of 1837 he was suddenly removed from his post as minister of the interior, and he thereupon left the elector's service.

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