Windthorst, Ludwig

WINDTHORST, LUDWIG. - German politician, b. 17 January 1812 at the Caldenhof farm near Osterkappeln, d. 14 March 1891 in Berlin.

From a traditionally Catholic family, his father, a lawyer, was in the service of the Counts Droste-Vischering. The young W., at first drawn toward the ecclesiastical ministry, later decided to follow in his father's footsteps. He began in 1830 his legal studies at the University of Göttingen and then at Heidelberg; in 1836 he settled in Osnabrück to practice the legal profession. The equestrian order of the principality of Osnabrück appointed him its own syndic, 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, and in 1850 he opposed the bill on elementary schooling in favor of freedom of teaching and religion against the influences of state authority. Opposed to any reactionary attempt, W. was elected in February 1851 president of the second Chamber and, on the death of King Ernest Augustus of Hanover, in November, Minister of Justice. This allowed him a substantial reorganization of the judiciary, rendering it independent of every other state administration. Subsequent political difficulties, determined by the progressive reinvigoration of reactionary tendencies, culminating in the demand for a truly aristocratic upper Chamber and a revision of the Constitution, forced W. and the entire Schele ministry, toward the end of 1853, to resign. W. returned to practicing law in Osnabrück, continuing to be a member of Parliament until 1856, in opposition to the openly reactionary ministries. The decree of 1857, which forbade former ministers to be deputies without the sovereign's prior permission, put an end to his parliamentary activity. He nevertheless knew how to earn merit for the Church in 1858, by persuading King George V to reestablish the episcopal see of Osnabrück, which since 1824 had been entrusted to an administrator. Again Minister of Justice in 1862 following the fall of the Borries ministry, caused by the drafting of a new single Protestant catechism for instruction, W. eliminated the disagreements between the Lutherans and the so-called Reformed, guaranteeing freedom for both through a new synodal organization for the Evangelical-Lutheran Church. Having clashed with the sovereign, because the latter was opposed to a reduction of the property qualification for voters of the second Chamber, he resigned again in 1865. In May 1866 the King appointed him attorney general at the High Court of Appeal of 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 that incorporation constituted an evident danger for Catholicism, inasmuch as the balance of forces between Catholics and Protestants was greatly altered, entirely to the advantage of the latter. The Prussian state did not in fact offer the necessary guarantees to secure freedom for Catholics, being a direct emanation of the Protestant spirit, and the government seemed inclined to proceed by the exercise of force rather than by compliance with constitutional legislative norms. For various reasons W. was therefore led to defend in the Prussian Parliament a point of view common to broad strata of the population.

For this reason, unlike some of his compatriots who maintained an attitude of waiting, he had himself elected, in 1867, 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 joined in the founding, in December 1870, of the Center party. Events soon proved him right. In Prussia and in Germany the Kulturkampf (v.) began shortly thereafter, an uninterrupted sequence of violence and legalized abuses against the Church and German Catholics. Both in the hall of the Prussian Landtag and in that of the Reichstag, W. was among the most eloquent and effective orators of the Center, nor did he spare Bismarck attacks and criticisms. On the death of Mallinckrodt, in 1874, W. also became the head of the Center group and the skillful organizer of tactical skirmishes in Parliament. W.'s work was crowned with success: his firm opposition duly bore fruit at every renewal of the Chambers, and in the elections of 1881 the Center became, with 100 deputies out of a total of 397, the strongest party in the Reichstag. But as early as 1879 Bismarck, in a conversation requested and urged with W., had taken the first steps to put an end to 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 come to an end all at once, but W. died not before having witnessed a gradual abandonment, on the part of the government authorities, of the repressive measures toward Catholics and the Church (V. GALIMBERTI).

Silvio Furlani