Department de la Roer

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Rur department (red) alongside other departments in the north of the French Empire, 1811
The department de la Roer

The Département de la Roer or Roër, also Rur department, was a department in the northern Rhineland during the French period (1798-1814). The name of the department goes back to the river Rur (in Dutch spelling Roer), which rises in the High Fens and flows into the Meuse near Roermond . The seat of the prefecture and thus the capital (French chef-lieu ) of the department was Aachen (French Aix-la-Chapelle ). The administration was located in the London courtyard in today's Aachener Kleinkölnstrasse 18.

geography

Value stamp of the department

The department essentially comprised former Prussian , Electoral Cologne and Jülich areas, but also the free imperial cities of Cologne and Aachen as well as smaller, formerly imperial ecclesiastical and secular glories with a total area of ​​over 5,000 square kilometers and 616,287 inhabitants in 1809. It stretched between the Meuse and the Rhine from the northern Eifel to the lower Lower Rhine in the Kleve area ; the northern exclaves Huissen , Malburgen, Zevenaar , Lobith and Wehl were incorporated into the Batavian Republic in 1803 and are now part of the Netherlands . In 1808, the Wesel on the right bank of the Rhine was added to the Kleve district of the department as a bridgehead .

The French geography dictionary Dictionnaire géographique portatif of the time writes about the department: Ce pays produit beaucoup de grains, abonde en pâturages, mines de fer, houillères, sources d'eau minérales; il ya un grand nombre de forges, usines, fourneaux, fonderies de canon. Il ya des filatures de coton, des manufactures de toiles, de velours, de fil de fer et laiton, d'aiguilles, d'épingles; tanneries, chaudronneries, verreries, papeteries; forêts considérables. = This country produces a lot of grain, is rich in pastures, iron mines, coal mines, mineral water springs; there are a large number of blacksmiths, smelters, smelting furnaces, cannon foundries. There are cotton mills, factories for cloth, velvet, iron wire, brass wire, needles, pins; Tanneries, metal goods industry, glassworks, paper manufacture; considerable forests.

history

The former territories of the Holy Roman Empire on the left bank of the Rhine, which had been added to the department , had been conquered by the French Republic as early as 1794 in the First Coalition War . On November 4, 1797, the department was formed by the government commissioner and judge at the court of cassation François Joseph Rudler , who came from Alsace , based on the French model and was divided up on January 23, 1798 by decree. However, the annexation of the territories was not recognized under international law until the Treaty of Lunéville , concluded in February 1801 , with effect from March 9, 1801. The annexed area was initially under special administration; It was only with the adoption of the constitution of 1802 that it was put on an equal footing with the old French departments.

As in the French heartland, the privileges of the nobility and all feudal taxes were abolished in the départements on the left bank of the Rhine . With an ordinance, the consular decision (“Arreté des Consuls”) of June 9, 1802, the church property and thus also monasteries were confiscated as national property and auctioned off to the highest bidder.

The introduction of the Civil Code by Napoleon Bonaparte was very significant . He guaranteed every citizen equal rights and public trials. The population, which until then had lived in small and very small territories, became part of a large economic area without customs and guild barriers . In addition, the male population of the annexed areas was drawn into service in the French army and thus had to take part in the French wars of conquest, including the costly Russian campaign of 1812 .

The Rur Department existed until 1814 and was initially subordinated to the provisional administration of the Lower Rhine General Government (March to June 1814), then to the Lower and Middle Rhine General Government (June 1814 to April 1815). Due to the resolutions passed at the Congress of Vienna (1815), the area was largely assigned to the Kingdom of Prussia; the areas west of the Meuse and a strip to the right of the river "the width of a cannon shot" (three to four kilometers) came to the Kingdom of the Netherlands. Administrative structures that were set up for the first time have partially survived to the present day.

The administrative seat of the department was in Aachen in the London court. Since July 14, 2016, a commemorative plaque, which was initiated by the two partnership committees Aachen- Reims and Stolberg- Valognes , has been commemorating the French period in the Rur department in two languages : from 1800 to 1814, the prefecture of the French Roer- Départements named after the river " Rur ". The department comprised the four districts of Aachen , Cologne , Krefeld and Kleve . The administrative seat was Aachen.

military

The department was part of the 26th division of the so-called Grande Armée after 1802 with its main location in Mainz. Under this division general there were two brigade generals , one in Cologne , who commanded the arrondissement of Cologne and part of the arrondissement of Krefeld , and one in Aachen for the arrondissements of Aachen , Kleve and the rest of Krefeld. Jülich remained a fortress , its facilities were expanded. Military posts were stationed in Krefeld , Uerdingen and Büderich . Stage locations with the appropriate infrastructure were Cologne, Dormagen , Neuss , Rheinberg , Geldern , Kleve , Aachen and Jülich.

To this end, each arrondissement formed a police district under a single command. This gendarmerie under military command consisted of the 32 brigades of the cantons. A gendarmerie captain resided in Aachen and the chief of the squadron in Cologne.

The prefects

The Rur department was administered successively by the following prefects :

Districts and Cantons

The department was divided into the following districts and cantons:

literature

  • Sabine Graumann: French administration on the Lower Rhine. The Roerdepartement 1798–1814. Essen 1990.
  • Irmgard Hentsche: Atlas for the history of the Lower Rhine. Series of publications by the Niederrheinische Akademie Volume 4 , p. 108 ff, Bottrop, 4th edition 2000, ISBN 3-89355-200-6 .
  • Albrecht Friedrich Ludolph Lasius : The French Kayser State under the government of Kayers Napoleon the Great in 1812 . A historical manual, First Department, Osnabrück bey Johann Gottfried Kißling, 1813, page 141.
  • Jean Charles François Baron de Ladoucette : Journey in 1813 and 1814 through the country between the Meuse and the Rhine . Ed .: Birgit Gerlach. Antiquariat Am St. Vith, Mönchengladbach 2009, ISBN 978-3-00-028810-4 ( French original in the Google book search [accessed on April 3, 2013]).
  • Anton Joseph Dorsch : Statistique du Departement de la Roer , Cologne An XII (Cologne 1804) Google Books online , Archive.org
  • Repertoire alphabétique du recueil des actes de la Préfecture du département de la Roer: commençant avec l'an XI de la République (1803) et finissant l'an 1813 . Müller, Aix-La-Chapelle 1813. ( digitized version )
  • Annuaire historique et statistique consacré au département de la Roer . 1799/1800 ( digitized version )

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Paul Fabianek: Consequences of secularization for the monasteries in the Rhineland - Using the example of the monasteries Schwarzenbroich and Kornelimünster. Verlag BoD, 2012, ISBN 978-3-8482-1795-3 , page 12 and annex (regulation “Arrêté portant suppression des ordres monastiques et congrégations régulières dans les départemens de la Sarre, de la Roër, de Thin-et-Moselle et du Mont-Tonnerre ")
  2. ↑ FWA Schlickeysen: Repertory of laws and ordinances for the royal. Prussian Rhine provinces , Trier: Leistenschneider, 1830, p. 13 ff. ( online edition at dilibri )
  3. ↑ after Dorsch, Statistique , p. 40 f.
  4. ↑ Entries in the finding aid on archive.nrw.de