Ludolf Camphausen

Germany state institutions Liberalism and republicanism 1803–1890 ○ Natural causes

Cologne banker and leader of Rhenish moderate liberalism who headed Prussia's March ministry of 1848

Born in 1803 at Hünshoven in the Rhineland under French rule, he built up a Cologne bank with his brother and invested in railways and steam towing. He entered the Rhenish provincial diet in 1843 and the United Diet in 1847, where he was a leader of the constitutional-liberal opposition. On 29 March 1848 Frederick William IV called him to head the Prussian government. His ministry with Hansemann sought limited reform in alliance with the crown, but caught between the king's insincerity and the distrust of the left in the Assembly, he offered his resignation after less than three months, on 20 June. Until April 1849 he was Prussia's plenipotentiary to the Central Power in Frankfurt, pressing the Lesser German solution. He sat in the Erfurt Union Parliament in 1850 and became a life member of the Prussian House of Lords in 1860. He died in Cologne in 1890.

Also known as: Gottfried Ludolf Camphausen