Alexandre Mechin

Alexandre Mechin

Alexandre Edmond (Edme) Baron Méchin (born March 18, 1772 in Paris , † September 20, 1849 ibid) was a French politician and state councilor and prefect in several departments.

Live and act

Méchin was the son of a commissioner in the French War Ministry and was already involved in the French Revolution while studying law . After the uprising of the Parisian sans-culottes from May 31 to June 2, 1793 , he had to leave the country first, but was able to return after the uprising of Thermidor 9 (July 27, 1794). A year later, Méchin was on the staff of Louis-Marie Stanislas Fréron , who had been transferred to Marseille as a commissioner . A few months later, Méchin returned and became head of cabinet in the Ministry of the Interior under Pierre Bénézech. In 1798 he succeeded Michel Louis Étienne Regnaud de Saint-Jean d'Angély as the commissioner of the French government in Malta . During a business trip through Italy, Méchin was captured in Viterbo in November 1798 as part of a revolt, from which he was released in January 1799.

After the coup d'état of 18th Brumaire VIII (November 9th 1799) Napoleon Bonaparte appointed him first prefect of the Land department and on July 9th 1802 prefect of the department de la Roer with seat in the London court in Aachen . Méchin did not take up his post as the successor to the late Nikolaus Sebastian Simon until September 23, 1802 and until then the official business was headed by the local Prefectural Councilor Johann Friedrich Jacobi .

During his tenure in Aachen, Méchin showed himself to be an ardent admirer of Napoleon and cultivated an intense Napoleon cult. It was fitting that at the same time that Méchins took office, Marc-Antoine Berdolet was introduced as the first bishop of the newly established diocese of Aachen , who was also a staunch supporter of Napoleon. Méchin decreed, among other things, that Napoleon's appointment as consul for life in August 1802 should be celebrated with the ringing of bells and a solemn Te Deum , and prepared for Napoleon's visit to Aachen for the period from September 2 to 11, 1804. In addition, he had inscriptions and symbols affixed to his homage all over the city. In the meantime, he also implemented the teaching law decreed by Napoleon, according to which French became a compulsory subject, and also granted the Aachen Jesuit School, later the Kaiser-Karls-Gymnasium , the establishment of a secondary school. In addition, he made few friends in the administration and in the citizenry due to the informant system he had built up, which led to tensions with the employees and the citizens as well as with his superiors.

Méchin was then transferred to the prefecture of the Aisne department on September 15, 1804 , where he was appointed Baron d'Empire on December 31, 1809 and has since been accepted as an officer in the Legion of Honor . Finally, he took over the post of prefect in the Calvados department from February 12, 1812 until the collapse of the First Empire in 1814, and from March to July 1815 in the time of Napoleon's rule of the hundred days in the Ille-et-Vilaine department .

In the following period of the French Restoration , Méchin first founded a bank in 1816 and was elected several times for the Liberal Party as a member of the Aisne constituency in the French Chamber of Deputies . During the July Revolution of 1830 he supported the party of François Guizot and was appointed prefect in the northern department from 1830 to 1839 . In 1831 Méchin received his appointment to the State Council and was retired in 1840.

literature

• Thomas R. Kraus : On the way to the modern age - Aachen in the French time 1792/93. 1794–1814 , Verlag des Aachener Geschichtsverein , Aachen 1994, pp. 174/175, u. a .; ISBN 3-9802705-1-3
• Librairi Droz: Souvenirs de 1810 à 1830 , p. 236 ( digitized )
• Étienne Psaume: Biographie moderne, ou galerie historique, civile, militaire, politique, littéraire, judiciaire , Lyon Public Library, 2011, p. 372 ( digitized )

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Entries in the finding aid on archive.nrw.de