I am spending a weekend reading the papers of David Hansemann (1790-1864), who was mayor of Aachen in the 1820s and 1830s and was briefly the prime minister of Prussia after the 1848 Revolution. His papers are typical of Rhenish political thought in the early to mid-19th C: they are filled with concrete thought on complex questions of socio-political structures, but the writing itself is difficult to penetrate ... and not because it is written in German. Felix Ponteil wrote that Rhinelanders were, in terms of style, uninspired writers. I agree.

Hansemann is interesting because he brought the stark outlook of merchants and businessmen into politics. He was in constant contact with the Prussian government over commercial and diplomatic issues (necessitated by the position of Aachen and his involvement in the building of the Rhenish Railroad). He jettisoned Enlightenment and Romance notions of rights and sovereignty, believing in liberté but not égalité. He even produced what should be the libertarian mantra:

Equality is the death of liberty.

Unlike others, he had faith that the future of Germany lay with the Hohenzollers rather than the Austrian Habsburgs. What makes him truly unique is that, unlike other advocates of the Prussian monarchy, he dislike the bureaucratic state that was emerging. He hated that local politics was managed meticulously by administrators. And he truly believed in bottom-up government: he rejected the organic nation promoted by the Romantics, but he saw the province as the meeting place of local and state. To use his analogy, the province is "the meeting place of the foundation and the spire" (the Cathedral was a typical image for Rhenish Romantics).

His tenure as prime minister was cut short when he tried to act on these ideas in 1848: he proposed reform the communal code. The most controversial measures were those that allowed for intergovernmental authorities between the cities (an assembly of cities, or Städtetag). The central government felt that this would be a clear challenge to its authority.