WINDTHORST, LUDWIG. — German politician, born on 17 January 1812 at the Caldenhof farmstead near Osterkappeln, died on 14 March 1891 in Berlin.
Of a traditionally Catholic family, his father, a lawyer, was in the service of the Droste-Vischering counts. The young W., initially attracted to the ecclesiastical ministry, later decided to follow in his father’s footsteps. In 1830 he began studying law at the University of Göttingen and then at Heidelberg; in 1836 he settled in Osnabrück to practise law. The equestrian order of the principality of Osnabrück appointed him its mayor, and in 1842 the Catholic Consistory conferred on him the office of president-councillor. He entered political life decisively as a deputy to the second Chamber of Hanover in 1849; in 1850 he opposed the bill on elementary education, defending freedom of teaching and religion against the influence of state authority. Opposed to every reactionary attempt, W. was elected president of the second Chamber in February 1851 and, upon the death of King Ernest Augustus of Hanover, became Minister of Justice in November. This enabled him substantially to reorganize the judiciary, making it independent of every other state administration. Subsequent political difficulties, determined by the progressive strengthening of reactionary tendencies and culminating in the demand for a genuinely aristocratic upper Chamber and a revision of the Constitution, forced W. and the entire Schele ministry to resign toward the end of 1853. W. returned to practising law in Osnabrück, continuing to sit in Parliament until 1856 in opposition to the openly reactionary ministries. The provision of 1857, which prohibited former ministers from serving as deputies without the prior permission of the sovereign, brought his parliamentary activity to an end. He nevertheless rendered an important service to the Church in 1858 by persuading King George V to restore the episcopal see of Osnabrück, which since 1824 had been entrusted to an administrator. Once again Minister of Justice in 1862, following the fall of the Borries ministry, caused by the preparation of a new single Protestant catechism for instruction, W. eliminated the disagreements between the Lutherans and the so-called Reformed, guaranteeing freedom to both through a new synodal organization for the Evangelical Lutheran Church. Having clashed with the sovereign because the latter opposed a reduction of the property qualification for voters in the second Chamber, he resigned again in 1865. In May 1866 the King appointed him solicitor general at the High Court of Appeal in Celle, but following the Austro-Prussian conflict Hanover ceased to exist as a sovereign state and became part of the Kingdom of Prussia. He then decided to devote himself entirely to politics, because this incorporation constituted an obvious danger to Catholicism, since the balance of power between Catholics and Protestants was greatly altered, entirely to the advantage of the latter. The Prussian State did not in fact offer the guarantees necessary to ensure freedom for Catholics, being a direct emanation of the Protestant spirit, and the government seemed inclined to proceed by the use of force rather than by respect for constitutional and legislative norms. For different reasons, W. was therefore led to defend in the Prussian Parliament a position shared by broad sectors of the population.
For this reason, unlike some of his compatriots who maintained a wait-and-see attitude, he had himself elected in 1867 as a deputy to the Constituent Assembly of the North German Confederation and to the Prussian Chamber of Representatives. In Parliament he soon realized that he in particular, and Catholics in general, were isolated; he therefore enthusiastically supported the formation, in December 1870, of the Centre Party. Events soon proved him right. In Prussia and Germany, Kulturkampf (v.) began shortly thereafter, an uninterrupted succession of legalized violence and abuses against the Church and German Catholics. Both in the chamber of the Prussian Landtag and in that of the Reichstag, W. was among the Centre’s most eloquent and effective orators, nor did he spare Bismarck attacks and criticism. Upon Mallinckrodt’s death in 1874, W. also became leader of the Centre group and the able organizer of tactical skirmishes in Parliament. W.’s work was crowned with success: his firm opposition regularly bore fruit at each renewal of the Chambers, and in the elections of 1881 the Centre, with 100 deputies out of a total of 397, became the strongest party in the Reichstag. But as early as 1879 Bismarck, in a meeting requested and actively sought with W., had taken the first steps toward ending the Kulturkampf, from which he had obtained results
entirely different from those conceived at the beginning of the struggle against the Catholics. Certainly the struggle did not end all at once, but W. died only after having witnessed a gradual abandonment, on the part of the government authorities, of the repressive measures directed against Catholics and the Church (v. GALIMBERTI, LUIGI).