BEUST, FRIEDRICH FERDINAND. - Protestant diplomat and statesman, b. in Dresden on 13 Jan. 1809, d. at Altenberg on 24 Dec. 1886. Having earned a degree in law, he entered diplomacy in 1836 as secretary of the Saxon legation in Berlin; he then went on to Paris, Munich, and London, returning to Berlin in '48 as minister, for a short time. To him are owed the dynastic constitution of the empire (1867), various internal reforms and, among other things, the promulgation of the so-called Confessional Laws (25 May 1868), clearly secularist and opposed to the concordat, as well as the rapprochement with Napoleon III and the negotiations for the Austro-French-Italian Triple Alliance (1868-69), which failed because of the French refusal to evacuate Rome. Having kept Austria out of the Franco-Prussian War, he opposed the Vatican Council in every way, did not commit himself even to the defense of the temporal power, and ended up, once France had collapsed, by orienting his policy in a direction more favorable to Berlin. Resigning for reasons of internal politics, he became ambassador to London (1871) and subsequently to Paris (1878-82).

Bibliography2 works

BIBL.: P. Balan, Continuazione alla Storia della Chiesa Catt. dell'Ab. Rohrbacher, II, Turin 1879; F. W. Ebeling, F.F. Graf von It., 2 vols., Leipzig 1890.

Alberto M. Ghisalberti

@incollection{ec2_beust_friedrich_ferdinand, author = {Ghisalberti, Alberto Maria}, title = {Beust, friedrich ferdinand}, booktitle = {Enciclopedia Cattolica}, volume = {II}, pages = {1528--1529}, note = {Cited by column}, publisher = {Ente per l’Enciclopedia Cattolica e per il Libro Cattolico}, address = {Città del Vaticano}, year = {1949}, url = {https://azioneromana.com/article/beust-friedrich-ferdinand} }

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Beust, Friedrich Ferdinand

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