The tradition of provincial self-government, which dates back to 1826, the year in which the first Rhineland Provincial Council was convened (29 October 1826), lies at the beginning of the process at the end of which - through the gradual development and differentiation of an administration of tasks in the social, transport, cultural, health and welfare sectors, especially since the last third of the 19th century - the Rhineland Provincial Council and finally the Rhineland Regional Council stand. The area of responsibility of the Rhenish provincial administration was the Prussian province "Rheinprovinz", i.e. an administrative unit extending from the lower Lower Rhine to the Saarland. The central political organ of provincial self-government, and thus directly responsible for the nature and intensity of the performance of the assigned tasks, was the Rheinische Provinziallandtag, which met regularly every two years from 1826 until its compulsory abolition by the National Socialists in 1933. As a political organ in which deputies elected according to certain rules were sent, this Landtag was a sui generis institute of great importance for the implementation of municipal and state policy in the Rhineland. Provincial Landtag and Provincial AdministrationThe provincial self-government of the Rhine Province was brought into being by a "Law on the Arrangement of Provincial Estates in the Rhine Provinces" of 27 March 1824 in order to implement the "Law on the Arrangement of Provincial Estates" enacted on 5 June 1823. The provisions of this law formed the external framework for the activity of provincial self-government, in so far as it was to be carried out by its highest body, the Provincial Council, until the entry into force of the new Provincial Code in 1888, when the first Provincial Council was inaugurated on 29 October 1826. Characteristic was a "representation of the people" in four stands: The status of the "princes" ("born" members from five families of former lords of the profession directly of the Reich), the "knighthood" (25 deputies elected by the owners of the properties entered in the knighthood register), the status of the cities (25 deputies) and the status of the rural communities (25 deputies). The prerequisite for active and passive voting rights was real property with a relatively high real estate tax payment. 54 representatives of the rural landed property stood thus opposite 25 city dwellers, nobility and landed property were clearly privileged. With the overview over the activity of the provincial landed property days is to be distinguished the time to approximately 1850 and the later time. In the first phase, the Rheinische Provinziallandtag devoted itself in particular to the task of bringing the wishes of the population to bear on the government. The true aims and desires of the Diet and the Province it represented lay in the political and economic fields and were clearly reflected in the exercise of the right to petition, also conferred by the 1823 Law. Requests and complaints in the interest of the entire province could be submitted by the estates to the king and were subjected to an examination. It was not until the early 1850s that the stream of petitions ebbed away. As a result, those tasks which were later considered to be the subject of self-administration of the province were completely retired during this period. Its powers, however, apart from the competence to take decisions in municipal matters, were only advisory in nature, especially since the choice of the drafts to be submitted to the Provincial Council was left to the government. The law of 1823 had declared the Provincial Parliament to be the legal organ, especially for those bills which concerned the province alone. In the period from 1826 to 1845, for example, the province had before it draft laws whose advice clearly revealed the actual wishes and interests of the narrower region: city and rural community regulations, district and provincial regulations, regulations on the redemption of real burdens, community divisions and mergers, receiving waters, hunting, fishing, forestry, electricity and dyke regulations, servitude, mortgages, laws and regulations on the administration of justice. In the same way, the 1823 Law intended to protect the provinces' individual character against the unwelcome effects of general laws, in so far as, until the meeting of general assemblies of estates, draft laws on changes in personal and property rights and taxes could be referred to the Provincial Councils for consultation. Thus, the subject of consultation was also the bourgeois conditions of the Jews, land tax, class tax, trade tax, the obligation to care for the poor and the formation of rural poor associations, trade police, marriage legislation, distribution of the quartering burdens. However, the choice of the drafts to be submitted to the Landtag was left to the government alone. In this sense, independent decision-making and administration in municipal affairs were not initially the preserve of the estates. Rather, their task can be characterized as that of advising and modestly participating in the administration of the so-called "provincial institutes", which were, however, regarded as state institutions and administered by the state organs. In these first decades of the Provincial Assembly's work, self-administration in the later sense could not develop, primarily because there was no self-administration body at all outside the Assembly. In 1841 the state government tried to remedy this deficiency by electing a committee of estates for those affairs which were to be carried out outside the Landtag. Since 1842, at the end of the session of the Diet, which was chaired by a Diet marshal, a "Ständischer Ausschuss" (Ständischer Ausschuss) was left to deal with the day-to-day running of the business, which mainly resulted from participation in the administration of the provincial institutes. The committee did not have much influence. As soon as politics disappeared in the 1850s from the negotiations of the provincial parliament, the preoccupation with the affairs of self-administration took a tremendous upswing. The development towards local self-government began with power, both on the material side by extending the tasks and on the formal side by achieving its own provincial administration, separate from the state administration, in an effort to direct the activity of the estates towards the material improvement of the province, the government extended the working area of the Diet from session to session. From the outset, the following had been part of the object of the estate's activities: the Siegburg mental asylum, the Brauweiler labour institution, the country poor house in Trier, the midwifery school in Cologne. Mixed commissions had been set up to manage these institutions, of which four members were elected by the Provincial Council and two were appointed by the Government. The chairman of these commissions was appointed by the government, which also had the casting vote. In 1838, the government allowed the permanent participation of the commissioners of the estates in the administration of the district roads. Until 1851 the Provinzial-Feuersozietät and the cooperation with the Staats- und Bezirksstraßenverwaltung were added, in 1854 the Taubstummenwesen and the Provinzial-Hilfskasse, until 1862 still the beginnings of the Blindenfürsorge. The first decisive step towards provincial self-government was the farewell to the 18th Provincial Assembly on 11 March 1868, which granted the estates the requested self-government of the insane and nursing homes. After the provinces newly created in 1866 had been granted extensive self-government with the approval of grants, the provincial states of the Rhineland were also granted self-government of the provincial institutes at the request of the provincial councils by farewell to the Landtag on 8 June 1871.A "Regulativ für die Organisation der Organisation der Verwaltung des provinzialständischen Vermögen und der provinzialständischen Anstalten" (Regulatory for the Organisation of the Administration of Provincial Property and Provincial Institutions) submitted by the Commissioner of the Landtag and which came into force on 1 January 1873 led to the election on 8 July 1871 of a Provincial Administrative Council of 15 members to manage the Provincial Businesses, which was constituted on 1 December 1872. With the election of Baron Hugo von Landsberg as Provincial Director on September 8, 1875, the Provincial Administration was for the first time also given a senior civil servant, to whom other senior civil servants ("Provincial Councillors") for the individual business areas were soon subordinated. This constitutive phase of the administrative development was completed in 1877. The administration itself had been transferred from Koblenz to Düsseldorf on 1 July 1873, where the Provinziallandtag also met from its beginnings. In 1881, the newly built "Ständehaus" (House of Estates) was used as the seat of the administration, and the new self-government began immediately after its establishment in 1871, with the takeover of the estates previously administered by the state authorities. It began with the establishment of the rural poor system on the basis of the law of 6 June 1870 and with the implementation of the resolutions adopted by the Provincial Council in 1868 concerning the establishment of five new mental homes in the Rhine Province. On January 1, 1873, the midwifery school in Cologne, the working school in Brauweiler and the insane asylum in Siegburg were founded, on February 1, 1873, the Rheinische Provinzial-Feuer-Sozietät was founded, on March 1, 1873, the Rheinische Provinzial-Hilfskasse and the Meliorationsfonds were founded, on November 1, 1873, the Provinzial-Blindenanstalt zu Düren was founded, and on November 1, 1873, the first half of the year, the first half of the year, the second half of the year, the first half of the year, the first half of the year, the first half of the year, the first half of the year, the first half of the year, and the first half of the year, the first half of the year, the first half of the year, the first half of the year, were founded. The donation laws of 30 April 1873 and 8 July 1875 transferred large new tasks to the provincial self-administration by transfer of appropriate state pensions. The sole competence of the provincial administration was transferred to:1) Arbeitsanstalt Brauweiler 01.01.18732) Hebammenlehranstalt Köln 01.01.18733) Provinzial-Irren-Heil- und Pflegeanstalten 01.01.18734) Rhein. Provinzial-Feuer-Sozietät 01.02.18735) Rhine. Provincial relief fund with Rhine. Meliorationsfonds 01.03.18736) Provinzial-Blindenanstalt Düren 01.11.18737) Taubstummenanstalten Brühl, Kempen, Moers, Neuwied 01.09.18748) Road construction, later Provinzial-Straßenverwaltung 01.01.1876/01.04.18779) Landarmenhaus Trier 01.01.187610) Commission for the Rhine. Provincial Museums Bonn and Trier 1876, 1885 and Provincial Commission for the Preservation of Monuments 188210) Welfare Education 1879/1890, 190111) Low agricultural schools and support for agriculture 1879/1880, 190112) Rhine. Landwirtschaftliche Berufsgenossenschaft 1887, 190113) Ruhegehaltskasse der Landbürgermeistereien 188915) Witwen- und Waisen-Versorgungsanstalt für die Kommunalbeamten 189216) Ruhegehaltskasse der Kreiskommunalverbände und Stadtgemeinden 1901The implementation of the Prussian law of 13 March 1878 on the compulsory education of neglected children began in 1879, and the implementation of the law on the prevention and suppression of livestock epidemics began in 1881. The development of the Provinzial-Hilfskasse into an agricultural credit institution in 1882 and its transformation into the Landesbank der Rheinprovinz in 1888 were of the greatest importance. 1823's provincial constitution was put on a completely new footing by the enactment of the Provinzialordnung of 29 June 1875 and its introduction into the Rheinprovinz by the law of 1 June 1887. The provinces as municipal associations were equipped with an extensive self-administration of their own affairs. The first provincial parliament elected according to the new foundations and responsibilities was the 34th in 1888, so that we are now entering a new era of provincial self-government and political representation. This epoch ends with the 58th Provinziallandtag in 1918.literature:- Johannes Horion: Die Entwicklung der provinziellen Selbstverwaltung der Rheinprovinz, in: Ders. (Ed.), Die Rheinische Provinzial-Verwaltung, ihre Entwicklung und ihr heuteer Stand (Düsseldorf 1925), pp. 9-79- Gustav Croon: der Rheinische Provinziallandtag bis bis bis zum Jahr 1874 (Düsseldorf 1918)- Horst Lademacher: Von den Provinzialstände zum Landschaftsverband. On the history of the landscape self-administration of the Rhineland (Cologne 1973)- Kurt Schmitz: Der Rheinische Provinziallandtag (1875-1933) (Neustadt a.d. Aisch 1967)The tradition "Archiv der Provinzialstände der Rheinprovinz "The Archiv der Provinzialstände forms the oldest part of the archive of the Provinzialverband or today of the Landschaftsverband Rheinland in Pulheim-Brauweiler. It includes not least the tradition from the phase of the old provincial estates 1826-1871, which had already been processed by an expert in 1856: On July 1, 1856, Lacomblet, a member of the Landtag who was in charge of supervision, was able to inform the Chief President of the Rhine Province that "the arranging and repertory of the Landständisches Archiv" and the library had been carried out under his direction by the "archive helper" Dr. Woldemar Harless (1828-1902). Seven boxes of files had been brought by ship from Koblenz to Düsseldorf at the beginning of 1855. In addition to these holdings, which grew routinely in the following years parallel to the respective Provinziallandtage, the "Archive of Provincial Estates" received the records of the expanding municipal association administration after 1871 and 1887 respectively, whose registry scheme underwent many changes and in particular around 1924 underwent a far-reaching renaming of the departments. The files, which became ready for archiving after the Harless period, were merged without order and without a finding aid book and soon formed an unmissable mess. Hand in hand with the expansion of the premises, in which the initiative of the provincial governor Heinz Haake (1933-1945) and the First Provincial Councillor Dr. Wilhelm Kitz (1933-1945) had a large part to play, went the establishment of a real "Archive of Provincial Administration" in the Düsseldorf Landeshaus, i.e. a professional administration of the files. Harless's order had only covered the older files, and since then there had been repeated deliveries of files to the provincial administration when new subjects previously dealt with by other authorities were transferred to it. Dr. Otto-Wilhelm Pansch was now entrusted with the administration of the archive by the governor of the state. At the end of the 1930s, Pansch began to record the archive records stored in the Landeshaus, preserving as far as possible the registry order available at the time of delivery. Due to the repeated relocation of the archive due to the war, the order of the Provinzialarchiv was completely destroyed when it was transferred to the Staatsarchiv Düsseldorf in 1951. Dr. Dahm set up the inventory, restoring the internal order as it emerged from Pansch's signatures, the last uniform scheme. Pansch had not fully mastered the unification of the various deliveries in a clear sequence of departments, but his order was taken as the basis for the search book which was then drawn up in order to avoid confusion due to its proximity to the registry. The older signatures were also recorded. At the end of 1956, Dr. Oediger was able to inform the Ministry of Culture on behalf of the State Archives that the finding aid book for the files of the former Rhenish provincial administration, which had been completed at the beginning of the year, had been extended by the order and recording of a new accession of about 2000 file units. Copies of the three-volume find book "Provinzialverband des prußischen Rheinprovinz 1824-1945" should be available in January 1957. On 4 November 1960, the return of the Provincial Administration Archive from the Düsseldorf State Archive to the Landeshaus in Cologne, where two archive rooms had been equipped with archive shelves, was completed. Since 1986, the collection has represented the oldest part of the tradition in the archives of the Landschaftsverband Rheinland in Pulheim-Brauweiler.the classification of the finding aid bookThe tradition recorded here is, according to what has been said so far, characterised by three indexing actions: First of all, Harless classified the documents rather as registered documents between 1856 and 1866, primarily by the Provinziallandtage or the objects negotiated there, then Pansch classified them in the late 1930s, and finally, in the second half of the 1950s, the documents were registered in the Hauptstaatsarchiv Düsseldorf. While Pansch processed the volumes of documents already recorded by Harless, plus the written material accumulated in the following decades, the Düsseldorf indexing meant above all a reorganization and indexing of the inventory, which had frequently been moved by war and the post-war period, albeit by taking over the title recordings formulated by Pansch of his time. The result, namely a three-volume Düsseldorfer find book, formed the basis for all searches on this archive stock up to the recent past. Samples in the archive of the LVR made however only too soon clear that one could indeed work with this indexing, proved however at the same time that a not insignificant correction need existed both regarding the contents of the files and on the indicated running times. A whole series of titles proved to be pure "file cover distortion" without concrete examination of whether the contents of the file actually corresponded to the description. In fact, a number of contradictions emerged. The oldest layer of the "Archive of Provincial Estates", documents from the period from the First Provincial Landtag in 1826 to the fundamental reorganization of the Provincial Administration in 1888, was therefore subjected to a new indexing. This distortion was done by reconstructing the old structure scheme of Harless, i.e. according to the contemporary systematic classification. In addition, Pansch's old signature layer was also verified in the corresponding section. The title recording was based on the original version as far as possible, but was consistently reformulated if corrections or additions were required. It is also new that for the first time all printed matter, publications, handwritten copies of letters, etc. included in the files have been consistently listed in the "Containält-Vermerken", with the sole exception of the printed minutes of meetings, which have all been published in the corresponding series.Ä. - and thus the following archive numbers were deleted (in brackets the archive numbers containing the same letters): 185 (= 184), 337 (= 289), 357 (= 356), 362 (= 361), 381 (= 380), 400 (= 399), 406 (= 405), 438 (= 437), 459 (= 458), 551 (= 550), 591 (= 590), 603 (= 604), 795 (= 794), 856 (= 855), 1075 (= 1074), 1116 (= 1115), 1216 (= 1215).Wilhelm Kisky later heavily criticized the distortion works of Harless: The order in the finding aid book completed in 1856 was "not exactly very clear and concise", and the impractical and unclear signing of the volumes had contributed significantly to the fact that the original order was destroyed in later years. Harless' overview provided for eleven sections (I Ständische Verfassung, II Ständische Verhandlungen/Provinziallandtag, III Allgemeine Staatsverfassung und Polizei, IV Justizwesen, V Finanzsachen, VI Kirche, Kunst und Unterrichtswesen, VII Kreis- und Kommunalangelegenheiten, VIII Bezirksstraßen-Angelegenheiten, IX Handel, Gewerbe, Industrie, X Landwirtschaft, XI Provinzial-Institute). In the old structure, these departments were again subdivided into "sections", "compartments" and "numbers", which were also reflected in the corresponding file numbers. The files had been consecutively numbered without regard to these departments, which made it very difficult to insert supplements, which Harless himself had to do in large numbers. Regardless of this objection, which is not important for the current distortion - the LVR archive itself has retained the practice of the "numeri currentes" - the original system offered the possibility of clearly assigning almost all files to the corresponding headings. A supplement to the classification is the relatively small group "Sonderüberlieferung - Sekrete Akten des Landtagsmarschalls" ("Special traditions - secretions of the state parliament marshal"), which was found in the context of the oldest layer of traditions, but outside the eleven departments mentioned.The tradition "Archiv der Provinzialstände der Rheinprovinz 1826-1888" thus has the following classification structure:00 00 Special tradition00 01 'Sekrete Akten' des Landtagsmarschalls01 00 Ständische Verfassung01 01 Election regulations01 02 Landtagsfähige Güter01 03 Stand der Städte (Dritter und Vierter Stand)01 04 Ständische Rechte und Pflichten01 05 Ständischer Haushalt02 00 Ständische Verhandlungen im Allgemeinen02 01 Opening and general course of negotiations02 02 Minutes of meetings03 00 Allgemeine Staatsverfassung und Polizei03 01 Reichsstände03 02 Pressfreiheit03 03 Bundesgericht03 04 Wahlen zur Zweiten Kammer03 05 Kreis-.., District and Provincial Regulations03 06 Town and Municipality Regulations03 07 Civil Relations03 08 Immigration03 09 Poor Persons03 10 Police03 11 Moral and Security Police03 12 Gesinde-Polizei03 13 Fire and Construction Police03 14 River and Bank Police03 15 Field and River Police Forest and Hunting Police03 16 Military Affairs03 17 State Officials and Employees03 18 Statistics of the Rhine Province04 00 Judiciary04 01 Administration of Justice04 02 Legal Constitution04 03 Rheinischer Appellhof04 04 Regional and District Courts04 05 Peace Courts and Factory Courts04 06 Commercial Courts and Commercial Law04 07 Notaries04 08 Mortgage Courts04 09 Civil Law Relations04 10 Legal Relationships of Land Ownership04 11 Forestry and Forestry Hunting and grazing permits04 12 Criminal legislation05 00 Financial matters05 01 State debts and treasury, claims, funds05 02 Taxation in general05 03 Property tax and cadastre05 04 Class tax, Building tax05 05 Income tax05 06 Trade tax05 07 Customs duties05 08 Brewing malt tax05 09 Spirits tax05 10 Wine and must tax05 11 Milling and slaughter tax05 12 Stamp tax05 13 Salt tax05 14 House tax05 15 Lotteries05 16 Coin and cash system06 00 Church, Art and Education06 01 Church Constitution06 02 Church Assets and Cultural Costs06 03 Denominational Affairs06 04 Universities and Schools06 05 Deaf and Mute Education06 06 Medical Affairs06 07 Veterinary Affairs06 08 Pharmacies06 09 Art Monuments06 10 Scientific Collections07 00 County and Municipal Affairs07 01 County and Municipal Affairs07 01 County and Municipal Affairs06 06 06 University and Schools06 05 and municipal affairs in general07 02 county councils and mayors07 03 municipal taxes08 00 district road affairs08 01 district roads in general08 02 district road construction fund08 03 state roads of the Rhine province08 04 left Rhine district road system08 05 right Rhine district road system09 00 trade, Trade and agriculture09 01 Trade and commerce in general09 02 Guilds, guilds, Freedom of trade09 03 Trade and commerce in particular09 04 Protection and promotion of industry09 05 Mines09 06 Post and railways10 00 Agriculture10 01 Arable farming and land cultivation10 02 Livestock10 03 Viticulture11 00 Provincial institutes11 01 Provincial institutes in general11 02 Provincial archives11 03 Midwives11 03 Midwives-Educational institution11 04 Deaf-mute educational institution11 05 Versorgungsanstalten11 06 Landarmenhaus Trier11 07 Irren-Heil-Anstalt Siegburg11 08 Irren-Bewahranstalten11 09 Arbeitsanstalt Brauweiler11 10 Besserungsanstalten11 11 Prison society, Prisons11 12 Fire law firm11 13 Provinzial-Spar- und Hilfskasse11 14 Hagel-Assekuranz11 15 Pension banks11 16 School for the Blind Düren11 17 Provinzialmuseen11 18 Agricultural school Desdorf11 19 Provincial administration budgets11 20 Road construction
