Franz Alwens

Franz Alwens (born October 10, 1792 in Börrstadt , † July 16, 1871 in Speyer ) was a senior Bavarian administrative officer and politician, from 1846 to 1849 regional president of the Bavarian Rhine Palatinate in Speyer.

Life

Origin and early life

The Alwens family came from Brabant and Peter Alwens, the great-grandfather of Franz Alwens, immigrated from there around 1720 to Winnweiler in Upper Austria , the administrative seat of the upper office of the same name .

Franz Alwens was born in 1792 in Börrstadt, also in Upper Austria, as the son of the local teacher Joseph Wilhelm Anselm Alwens and his wife Susanne, née Rhinelander.

Alwens' homeland was mostly French occupied from December 1792 and was ceded to France as part of the left bank of the Rhine to France at the peace agreement of Campo Formio (1797) , where it remained until 1814. At this time it belonged to the French department du Mont-Tonnerre with the seat of government in Mainz . In 1815/16 there was a joint Austrian-Bavarian government in Kreuznach , in 1816 the territory fell to the new Rhine district of the Kingdom of Bavaria .

Franz Alwens's professional activities also proceeded according to the political circumstances. After completing his university studies, he first worked in the imperial French domain administration, under the provisional Austrian-Bavarian government he officiated as a domain inspector in Kaiserslautern, before finally transferring to Bavarian services. On November 1, 1817, Alwens took over the post of second domain inspector for the Rhine district. In 1821 he moved to the finance chamber of the Palatinate government, on January 22, 1838 he took up the position of director of the finance chamber, where he headed the finance department of the Rhineland-Palatinate district government.

Palatinate District President

On May 30, 1846, Franz Alwens succeeded Karl Freiherr Schrenck von Notzing (1806-1884) as the district president of the Bavarian Rhine District in Speyer. He was the first from the Palatinate to hold this post and the only district president who had ever been in French service.

Alwens' predecessor had already warned of tensions in the Palatinate population in a report dated March 1, 1846. Mainly the dominant Protestant circles would revolt against the Bavarian government, it would only take less outside influence to separate the Palatinate from Bavaria. A famine year followed in 1847 and in 1848 the so-called February Revolution took place in neighboring France , which spread to the German states in March of that year. As part of the German Revolution of 1848/49 , the Palatinate uprising broke out in Alwens' administrative district .

On March 30, 1848, the elections for the National Assembly took place in the Paulskirche in Frankfurt , and on March 28, 1849 the new imperial constitution was proclaimed there. The Bavarian government announced on April 23 of that year that, according to the current legal situation in Bavaria, this constitution could not become legally binding automatically, but only with the consent of the crown and both chambers of the state parliament.

Franz Alwens reported to Munich on April 28th that due to this announcement there was “not insignificant excitement” in his administrative district, the impact and scope of which could hardly be foreseen. At the same time he called on the population to remain calm, warned against rash action and banned all armed public assemblies. Regardless of this, the opponents of the government called such a people's assembly in Kaiserslautern on May 1st and constituted a "National Defense Committee" there on May 2nd, which claimed governmental power, which resulted in two rival Palatinate governments.

To prevent a violent uprising, Franz Alwens advised the Bavarian government to put the Paulskirche constitution into force for the Palatinate, but this was rejected. In order to avoid a confrontation with the rebels, he had already moved his official residence to the fortress Germersheim ; the revolutionary government, however, set up in Speyer. As expected, on May 22, 1849, the Munich state government classified the apparent breach of the constitution as "treasonable" and regarded the Rhine Palatinate as a "province in a state of turmoil".

There was bloody fighting by the rebels, but the Palatinate Revolution failed after just under a month due to the invasion of Prussian and Bavarian troops. On June 16, the revolutionaries were expelled from Speyer and on June 21, the Bavarian corps arrived there under the leadership of Prince Karl Theodor von Thurn und Taxis , who now exercised actual power in the Palatinate as the highest military commander.

As early as June 30, 1849, Karl Alwens was given early retirement because he had not cracked down on the rebels. Karl Theodor von Thurn und Taxis wrote:

"His (Alwen's) abilities and good will are all recognized, just because he was born in the Palatinate and is related to other officials and administrators everywhere, his hands were tied that he took too much consideration in such a critical time had to, so that he could have appeared on all sides with the necessary energy. "

- “Pfälzer Heimat” magazine, Historisches Museum der Pfalz, Speyer, 1979, p. 148f.

Johann Baptist von Zenetti (1785–1856) succeeded him as President of the Government on July 4, 1849 .

Alwens carried the Knight's Cross 1st Class of the Bavarian Order of Merit of St. Michael .

Family relationships

Franz Alwens had been married to Caroline, nee Falciola from Lauterecken , since 1819 . They had a son and three daughters.

The son Karl Alwens (1820-1889) was a member of the Bavarian state parliament and in 1887 was raised to the nobility as Vice-President of the Chamber of Deputies.

The daughter Karoline Alwens (1822-1896) married to from Two Bridges coming, later ennobled Ministerialrat in the Bavarian Ministry of Finance , Karl August von Roos (1813-1873). He died of cholera . Together with her daughter Julie Roos (1843-1896), she was the victim of a robbery on February 14, 1896, in Munich .

The daughters Julie Alwens (1823–1849) and Susanne Alwens (1828–1899) married successively the appellate judge Goswin Hörmann von Hörbach (1810–1873), son of Joseph Hörmann von Hörbach , the district president of Upper Bavaria. After the death of her husband in 1873, Susanne Hörmann von Hörbach b. Alwens, a religiously motivated poor relief worker in Munich, became a Benedictine on the advice of her confessor, Speyer Bishop Daniel Bonifaz von Haneberg , and died in 1899 as sister Lioba and prioress of the Frauenchiemsee monastery . The foundation of the daughter monastery in Tettenweis goes back to her initiative .

The Speyer Medical Councilor Otto Hörmann von Hörbach (1848–1923) is a grandson of Franz Alwens from this family line.

literature

• Viktor Carl: Lexicon of Palatinate personalities. Hennig Publishing House. Edenkoben 2004. ISBN 3-9804668-5-X . P. 15.
• Werner Schineller: Franz Alwens. District President of the Palatinate. in: Palatinate home. Historical Museum of the Palatinate. Speyer. Born in 1979. p. 147ff.
• Rudolf H. Böttcher: The family ties of the Palatinate Revolution. Special issue of the Association for Palatinate-Rhenish Family Studies. Volume 14. Issue 6. Ludwigshafen am Rhein 1999.
• Justus Perthes : Gothaisches Genealogisches Taschenbuch der Briefadeligen houses. 1912 edition. Pp. 440-442.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Report on the French occupation of the Oberamt Winnweiler, 1792
2. ↑ On Karl Theodor von Thurn and Taxis see Josef Rübsam:  Taxis, Karl Theodor Prinz von . In: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB). Volume 37, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1894, p. 507 f.
3. ^ Yearbook for West German State History , Volume 4, p. 278, self-published by the Landesarchivverwaltung Rheinland-Pfalz, 1978; (Clipping scan 1) ; (Detail scan 2)
4. ↑ Landshuter Zeitung , year 27, 1875, p. 431 of the year; (Digital scan)
5. ^ Studies and communications on the history of the Benedictine order and its branches, Volume 85, Page 580, Pustet Verlag, Regensburg, 1974; Excerpt from the source
6. ↑ Website on the history of the St. Gertrud Monastery in Tettenweis, with a mention of Lioba von Hörmann ( memento of the original from September 12, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.