Karl Ernst Jarcke

Who was Karl Ernst Jarcke?

Karl Ernst Jarcke was a German publisher and professor of criminal law, who took a conservative stance towards revolutionary movements in the early nineteenth century.

He belonged to a Protestant merchant family. He took up the study of jurisprudence, and became at an early age professor of criminal law at Bonn and later in Berlin. His scholarly attachments were especially revealed in his Handbuch des gemeinen deutschen Strafrechts. Longing for faith and overcome by the conclusively and immensity of Catholic dogma, as he found it disclosed in the decrees of the Council of Trent, he converted to Catholicism in Cologne in 1824. After the outbreak of the July Revolution in Paris, he wrote an anonymous political brochure, Die franzosische Revolution von 1830. It met the emphatic approval of the circle of friends of the then Crown Prince, which was composed of men of anti-revolutionary views, influenced by Romanticism and by Karl Ludwig von Haller.

Jarcke assumed the editorship of the periodical Politische Wochenblatt, founded by these men in 1831 to promote their ideas. In 1832 Metternich called him to the State Chancery in Vienna to succeed the late Friedrich von Gentz.