German politician, born on 22 March 1808 in Co-
blenz, died there on 16 July 1895, brother of Peter R.
In 1830 he entered the magistracy as an auditor at the
Higher Regional Court of Münster and there attained
the rank of councillor of the Court of Appeal at Cologne, which
he held from 1849 to 1875. From his earliest youth,
as a good Rhinelander, he had a particular aversion to Prussian
rule and was inclined to support wholeheartedly the Catholic
cause when, in 1837, the Prussian authorities imprisoned
the archbishop of Cologne, Droste-Vischering.
A deputy to the National Assembly of Frankfurt in 1848,
he became vice-president of the Catholic group and supported the
Greater German programme. He subsequently belonged repeatedly
to the Prussian Diet, where he worked for the formation of
a compact phalanx for action by the Catholic deputies, spoke
there on several occasions, and opposed legislation on civil
marriage. Of particular importance was the activity he carried
out during the Kulturkampf. An eminent member of the Centre,
in 1877, in Windthorst’s absence, he replaced him as group leader.
PETER, German politician, born on 28 May 1810
in Coblenz, died on 31 December 1892 in Berlin. He abandoned
the magistracy in 1836 and was an assessor
at the Regional Court of Coblenz, and subsequently
at Elberfeld.
Later promoted (1850) to councillor of the Court of
Appeal at Cologne, in 1859 he became councillor of the Supreme Court in Berlin, where he remained until 1879, when he retired. In the meantime he had begun his political career: in 1848 he was a member of the Frankfurt preparliament and a deputy to the Prussian Diet (from 1849) and to the Reichstag (from 1867). From the time he joined the Diet, he worked for the establishment of the Catholic group, which, in the struggles between conservatives and liberals, succeeded in securing for Catholics in Prussia some of those rights that the Catholic deputies of the Frankfurt Parliament had vainly sought to have recognized throughout Germany. On 11 June 1870, in a well-known article in the Kölnische Volkszeitung, he set out the programmatic principles of the future Centre Party. During the Kulturkampf he eloquently defended the rights of Catholics in the Prussian Chamber of Deputies.