[2][3] The Ibell family had originated in France, but they were Protestants, and so following the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 they left their homeland to build a new life in Germany.

[1] Initially educated by his parents, from 1790 he was taught by his great uncle (by marriage), the Protestant pastor Jakob Ludwig Schellenberg, in Bierstadt.

[3] In 1802 he accompanied the president of the government of Nassau-Usingen, Karl Friedrich von Kruse [de] on a trip to Regensburg, as a private secretary for a meeting with an imperial deputation ("Reichsdeputation").

[1] The meeting concerned the reallocation of territories within the Holy Roman Empire following the allocation by Napoleon of the Left Bank of the Rhine, an issue which was of great importance for Nassau-Usingen.

His father, in the end, served as a contented (if not particularly well paid) and by all accounts highly effective senior district official based at Wehen for forty-two years, but for the son a career on the national level was chosen.

In 1815 Carl Friedrich Justus Emil Ibell was appointed "Regierungspräsident" (President of the government) of Nassau-Usingen and nominated as a member of the State Council.

[1] The document was widely welcomed by liberals and progressives as the first modern written constitution to appear anywhere in the territories defined by what had been, till 1806, the Holy Roman Empire.

Despite this very public mark of appreciation, Ibell's uncompromising commitment to economic and social liberalism was beginning to cause unease among members of the landed classes who saw some of their own privileges threatened by principles underlying the new Constitution.

The assassination attempt was one of a series of events which was triggered by the passing by the quasi-parliamentary Federal Assembly, in September 1819, of the Carlsbad Decrees, an essentially reactionary set of legislative measures which banned nationalist fraternities ("Burschenschaften"), removed liberal university professors, and extended press censorship.

[citation needed] The constantly shifting complexities of relationships between Prussia and the lesser states in the "German confederation" (which had been created in 1815 to try and fill the vacuum left by the demise of the Holy Roman Empire) are beyond the scope of an essay on Carl Friedrich Ibell; but the Prussian king's interest in the German states on the Rhineland region went back a long way.

In 1793 Frederick William, at that time the Prussian Crown Prince, was an honoured guest when he stayed with "Amtmann von Ibell" at the family's castle-home in Wehen while he was engaged in the successful recapture from the French of their city stronghold at nearby Mainz.

[1] By 1830 old Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Ibell was dead, but his son was raised in that year to the rank of a Prussian aristocrat in recognition of his early and practical commitment to precursors of the German customs union.

Two years later he felt well enough to attempt a return to work, representing Hesse-Homburg at a ministerial conference at Vienna which Metternich had convoked, as a response to the upheavals of 1830, in order to impose an anti-democratic constitution across the German confederation.