Augustin Violet

Augustin Violet (born July 14, 1799 in Oberlustadt , † April 10, 1859 in Frankenthal ) was a Palatinate-Bavarian pedagogue and pioneer of deaf-mute education .

Live and act

Augustin Violet came from Oberlustadt near Germersheim . His parents, the community clerk Christoph Violet and his wife Josephine geb. Avril, both died in 1808 and he and his sister came to live with relatives in Geinsheim in 1814 .

In 1821 Violet entered the school teacher seminar in Kaiserslautern . Since he was one of the best students, the director of the institution, Friedrich Wilhelm Balbier, proposed him to the government for training as a deaf-mute teacher. This was just looking for a suitable teacher for deaf and dumb children in the Rhine district . In Freising near Munich , an institute for the training of teachers for the deaf and dumb had been established shortly before, from which these teachers were to be deployed throughout Bavaria. Violet was preferred to another candidate because, according to his director Balbier, he showed “a gentle, loving nature” and “a more natural and less tense demeanor” .

The Freising institute director Bernhard von Ernsdorfer was very satisfied with the young man from the Palatinate. On his dismissal in 1825 he confirmed that Violet had acquired such a knowledge and skill in this teaching method "with excellent diligence" and "through diligent use of the relevant literature and special teaching lectures, as well as through active participation in actual teaching" he could immediately begin teaching deaf and mute children and would "continue safely to complete satisfaction" . Also his character as well as "the characteristics of his disposition and his irreproachable morals are quite in accordance with this business" . That makes him his "excellent recommendation worthy" .

On April 29, 1825, Augustin Violet was appointed the first deaf-mute teacher in the Rhine-Palatinate. His school was affiliated with the poor institution in Frankenthal. Violet initially worked according to the method learned by the French priest Charles-Michel de l'Epée in Freising and later supplemented it with the pedagogical approaches of the Bavarian professor Johann Baptist Graser . The focus was on awakening and mobilizing the individual mental and spiritual powers of disabled children with the aim of achieving the greatest possible independence. It was the first such institute in the entire region and Violet was the first trained deaf-mute teacher in the Bavarian Rhine Palatinate , which is why King Ludwig I visited him with great interest in 1829 ; the monarch himself was known to be hard of hearing. The writer and Protestant pastor Georg Friedrich Blaul followed in 1836 , who reported about it in his Palatine Book of Dreams and Foams from the Rhine in 1840 . In the year of his death, King Maximilian II of Bavaria awarded the teacher the medal of the Order of Merit of the Bavarian Crown .

Married to Elisabeth Heller, daughter of a Bach inspector , since 1827 , Violet died as a widower in 1859 in Frankenthal. From 1858 sickly and provided with a school assistant, he succumbed to a "breast ailment" while living in poor conditions throughout his life.

In the place of birth Lustadt a street is named after the pedagogue, in Frankenthal (Pfalz) the deaf school of the district association Pfalz .

literature

• Karl Huther: The deaf-mute institute in Frankenthal: On the 100th anniversary of the death and 160th birthday of the founder Augustin Violet , in: Pfälzische Heimatblätter , Volume 7 (1959), No. 8, pp. 57-61 of the year
• Viktor Carl: Lexicon of Palatinate Personalities , Hennig Verlag Edenkoben, 2004, ISBN 3-9804668-5-X , page 900

Web links

• Biographical website of the District Association of the Palatinate
• Website on the history of the Augustin Violet School in Frankenthal

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Royal Bavarian District Official Gazette of the Palatinate , No. 72, of November 22, 1859