Carl Adolf Cornelius

Carl Adolf Cornelius (12 March 1819 – 10 February 1903) was a German historian. In the context of the 1848 revolutions he was elected to the Frankfurt Parliament in 1848/49, after which he switched from the schools sector to the universities sector and built a reputation as a church historian.

Life Carl Adolf Wenzeslaus Cornelius was born in Würzburg, Northern Bavaria. He was his parents' first child. His father, Carl Joseph Gerhard Cornelius (1793–1843), was an actor. His mother, Friderike (born Friderike Schwadtke: 1789–1867), also came from a family of actors. The (subsequently ennobled) artist Peter von Cornelius (1783–1867) was an uncle. He taught successively at schools in Emmerich and Koblenz before moving on again, in 1846, to the Collegium Hosianum, a prestigious Jesuit school in Braunsberg, then in East Prussia. a prototype national legislature which in 1848 was seen as a possible precursor to the national parliament of a newly united liberal Germany. Initially Cornelius supported the "Großdeutschland" solution which foresaw a united German state that would be administered from Vienna and incorporate those parts of the Austrian empire where German language and culture predominated. This raised various difficult issues because of the multinational multi-ethnic nature of Austro-Hungary, however, and when unification actually took place it was based on a "Kleindeutschland" model, creating a smaller German state, completely excluding Roman Catholic Austria, with much power devolved to the regions, and national control exercised not from Vienna but from Berlin. The process of creating this new German state was deftly choreographed by Chancellor Bismarck: after 1866 Cornelius abandoned his support for "Großdeutschland", becoming a huge admirer of Bismarck's approach to the unification challenge.

In 1858, Cornelius became one of the original members of the Historical Commission of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities. Here he took responsibility for the so-called Wittelsbach Correspondence, a large archive of political papers of the Bavarian ruling house from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. After the departure of Heinrich von Sybel, Cornelius became secretary to the entire commission.

In his 70s, Carl Adolf Cornelius undertook his final major academic project, researching and producing various books and other publications on John Calvin.