[2] Appointed in 1872 professor of constitutional history and public law in the reorganized University of Strassburg, Geffcken became in 1880 a member of the council of state of Alsace-Lorraine.

Of too nervous a temperament to withstand the strain of the responsibilities of his position, he retired from public service in 1882, and lived henceforth mostly at Munich, where he died, suffocated by an accidental escape of gas into his bedchamber, in 1896.

[1] Geffcken was a man of great erudition and wide knowledge and of remarkable legal acumen, and from these qualities proceeded the personal influence he possessed.

This memorandum gave umbrage, and on the publication by Geffcken in the Deutsche Rundschau (Oct. 1888) of extracts from the emperor Frederick's private diary during the Franco-Prussian war, he was, at Bismarck's insistence, prosecuted for high treason.

His writings on English history have been translated by S. J. Macmullan and published as The British Empire, with essays on Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, Palmerston, Beaconsfield, Gladstone, and reform of the House of Lords (1889).