Ernst Ludwig von Gerlach

He is considered one of the main founders and leading thinkers of the Conservative Party in Prussia and was for many years its leader in the Prussian House of Representatives.

Like his brother Leopold von Gerlach, he belonged to the circle that formed around the Neue Preußische Zeitung (New Prussian Newspaper), better known as the Kreuzzeitung, in the founding of which he also played a leading role.

In 1827 Gerlach, Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg, August Tholuck and others founded the Evangelische Kirchenzeitung, (Newspaper of the Evangelical Church) which became the leading organ of the early conservatives during the Vormärz period.

In 1842 he became Privy High Councilor of Justice (Geheimer Oberjustizrat), and soon thereafter a member of the State Council and the Legislative Commission under Friedrich Carl von Savigny.

[2] In the summer of 1848 he advocated traditional conservative viewpoints in a well-received speech at the general assembly of the "Association for the Protection of the Interests of Landed Property and the Promotion of the Prosperity of All Classes", also called the Junker Parliament.

As chairman of the recently formed Conservative Party, he again fought a tenacious battle alongside Stahl against radical liberalism and democracy and for the restoration of the "divinely ordained", pre-revolutionary order of the Ancien Régime.

The development of his political views was influenced early on by the writings of Karl Ludwig von Haller and later through his acquaintance and close collaboration with Friedrich Julius Stahl.

A member of the Prussian Parliament beginning in 1873, he showed himself to be one of the fiercest opponents of the church laws of Bismarck's Kulturkampf (cultural struggle) and joined the Catholic Centre Party as a guest.

He thus incurred the personal enmity of Otto von Bismarck, with whom he had been friends for decades and in whose political rise he and his brother Leopold had played no small part.

Because of his essay Die Civilehe und der Reichskanzler (Civil Marriage and the Imperial Chancellor), charges were brought against him in 1874 at Bismarck's instigation for contempt of authority.

On 18 February 1877, however, four days before the new Reichstag was sworn in, Ernst Ludwig von Gerlach died at the age of 81 as a result of a traffic accident,[3] which had occurred on the Schöneberger Bridge in Berlin on the evening of the 16th.