Ernest-Paul Graber

Ernest-Paul Graber (born May 30, 1875 in Travers , † July 30, 1956 in Lausanne ) was a social democratic Swiss politician and publicist.

biography

Graber was the only one of nine children to attend secondary school and first became a teacher in Les Bayards and later in La Chaux-de-Fonds . In 1903 he married Blanche Vuilleumier, with whom he had two children, Aimée and Pierre , who later became Federal Councilor. Together with his schoolmate Charles Naine and other teachers, he founded a youth socialist group, fought alcoholism and became a militant socialist. Graber edited several union newspapers and fought against the anarchists and communists .

Graber and Naine together led the still young Social Democratic Party to success in French-speaking Switzerland . In 1912 Graber was elected to the National Council for the canton of Neuchâtel , which means that both seats in the canton were occupied by Social Democrats. The other seat had gone to Charles Naine in 1911. Graber remained in the council until 1943, serving as President of the National Council from 1929 to 1930 and as parliamentary group leader of the SP from 1919 to 1925. During the First World War, Graber and Jules Humbert-Droz took over the editing and management of the socialist daily La Sentinelle in 1916 , which he made a significant contribution to. He appeared on various occasions as a speaker at mass events and was feared as an agitator in bourgeois circles. Due to his pacifist and anti-militarist stance, after the beginning of the war he also came into conflict with the leadership of the SP, which was mostly positive about national defense. In 1915 he took part in the Zimmerwald movement and gave a speech on Lenin's side in La Chaux-de-Fonds in March 1917 .

In the spring of 1917 Graber became known throughout Switzerland when he was sentenced to eight days in prison for insulting the army because he had publicly denounced attacks by officers on soldiers in the Sentinelle . When he went to prison in La Chaux-de-Fonds on May 18, 1917 to begin his sentence, an angry crowd rescued him. After the military occupation of the city, he went into hiding until June 6th and did not start his sentence again until the end of the summer session of the National Council in Neuchâtel.

After the Russian Revolution , Graber distanced himself from the radical, revolutionary-minded socialists and took a more moderate line. In 1919 he took over the post of French secretary of the SP, first in Bern, then in Neuchâtel. He also took part in the party leadership of the SP 1915–1917 and 1920–1936, where he represented the pacifist-anti-militarist wing of the Welsh social democracy. In the 1930s Graber actively fought the communist united front and fascism. It was not until 1939 that Graber was also persuaded to recognize the national defense of Switzerland as necessary, after the SP had already abandoned its anti-militarist stance in 1935 and 1937. In the last years of his life, as editor of the Sentinelle , Graber wrestled with censorship and the communists, especially after the 1939 Hitler-Stalin pact .

Web links

• Marc Perrenoud: Graber, Ernest-Paul. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland .
• Ernest-Paul Graber Fund in the La Chaux-de-Fonds municipal library