Jens Andersen Hansen

Hansen, Jens Andersen

 

Born Jan. 7, 1806, in Odense; died June 1, 1877, in Copenhagen. Danish political figure.

The son of a shoemaker, Hansen himself became a master shoemaker in 1835. From 1842 to 1856 he published the moderate democratic weekly Almuevennen (Friend of the Common People). He took part in the revolutionary events of March 1848 in Copenhagen. In 1849 he was elected a deputy to the Constituent Assembly and the Folketing from the bourgeois democratic Society of Friends of the Peasants (founded 1846), which he led from 1855 to 1865. In 1865 he aligned himself with the conservative landowning wing of the Folketing. In 1866, Hansen’s involvement in the reactionary revision of the June (1849) Constitution cost him much of his support.