Eduard Herbst

A gifted speaker and firebrand, he became one of the most conspicuous members of the liberal Constitutional Party in parliament.

His party lost its control of the government, and he led the German liberal opposition in the Reichsrat in its attacks on the cabinets of Alfred Jozef Potocki and Karl Sigmund von Hohenwart.

The fall of the latter, in October 1871, brought the Constitutional Party more into power, when Herbst became a leader of the government forces in the Austrian Lower House.

He remained an advocate of centralist German-Liberal politics and stood out as an opponent of the Austro-Hungarian rule in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1878.

In the latter years of his life, however, during the second cabinet of Minister-president Taaffe from 1879 onwards, Herbst lost much of his former influence because of a split in his former compact party.