Franz Anton Good

Franz Anton Good (born June 21, 1793 in Mels , canton St. Gallen ; † July 7, 1866 ibid) was a Swiss lawyer and politician in the canton of St. Gallen. He was one of the pioneers of modern democracy in Switzerland.

biography

Good was the son of a doctor in Mels. He attended the Pfäfers monastery school , the Catholic high school in St. Gallen and the Lyceum in Lucerne . After studying law from 1815 to 1818 in Heidelberg and Göttingen , he opened a law firm in Mels. From 1831 to 1836 he was a canton judge, from 1837 to 1839 judge of cassation, from 1840 to 1843 district magistrate and from 1843 to 1855 judge at the district court of Sargans .

1830–31, Good was instrumental in the new constitution of 1831 as a constitutional councilor for the canton of St. Gallen. 1833–59 he was, with interruptions, the Grand Council of St. Gallen , of which 1833–1834 President of the Grand Council. In 1841 he joined the Catholic conservative party around Gallus Jakob Baumgartner . 1833–35 and 1847–53 he was a member of the Catholic Administrative Council .

Movements for direct democracy

Good's father was the leader of a movement in the Sarganserland initiated by the Sargans municipal mayor Johann Baptist Ludwig Gallati in 1814 to separate the landscape from the canton of St. Gallen, which encroached on the Sarganserland from the Rhine Valley . She was part of a broad movement across Switzerland that was fighting for more popular sovereignty . Here the distant St. Gallen government, the costly state budget and legal process were the stumbling blocks. As a result, there were meetings of committees everywhere that criticized the current cantonal constitution and where it was decided to work towards a simpler, more “popular” constitution.

The liberal-conservative Good was elected to the Constitutional Council of the Canton of St. Gallens from 1830-31, where he campaigned for the direct democratic people's veto . With the adoption of the cantonal constitution of 1831, the canton of St. Gallen was the first canton in Switzerland to have a direct democratic instrument, the popular veto. It came about as a result of a compromise between the advocates of the purely representative system and the supporters of direct democracy within the framework of a decentralized assembly democracy.

Formerly theoretician of direct democracy

In the course of St. Gallen's regeneration and constitutional development and to support the introduction of the legal veto , Good wrote one of the first and most important theoretical texts on direct democracy in 1830, which he wrote in 1831 after the constitution was adopted under the title The Sovereignty and the Veto of St. Gall People published.

For Good, the council meeting on December 14, 1830, was decisive, in which the popular sovereignty of the canton of St. Gallen was declared, which would mean a newly recognized dignity ( Pufendorf ) for the people . The sovereignty defined Good in the sense Bodin as the epitome of supreme power of a state that emanates from all other violence. The right to legislate must be included in sovereignty, otherwise it would lose its meaning and would cancel itself out. In the sense of Rousseau's social contract, the sovereign had to delegate judicial and executive power, but exercise the legislative power himself if he did not want to give up himself. The sovereign does not have to draft the laws himself, but sanction them with an additional instrument, for which the people must be responsible. Good saw the necessary maturity - like the representatives of the French-speaking natural law school - given the people with common sense ( le bon sens ) by nature. For Good, this instrument of sanction was the people's veto, which the constitution must grant him. According to Good, the veto expresses the sovereignty of the St. Gallic people in its core:

«The public, free press, the right to petition, free popular election, short term of office - and whatever their name may be, all of these highly expedient guarantees against arbitrariness do not remove the possibility of the Grand Council not passing laws regardless of this which, even if they were completely contrary to the general will of the people, would still have to come into force and effectiveness without further ado. "

- Franz Anton Good

So far the citizens have not paid much attention to the laws because they had nothing to say about it. The people's veto would not only make the application of the right of resistance anchored in natural law unnecessary, but would also become an educational institution for the most important and necessary knowledge of the citizen. The individual will learn that the essence of the rule of law consists in the fact that not only the will of the individual but the collective will (Rosseau: Volonté générale ) of all citizens rule.

font

• The sovereignty and veto of the St. Gallic people. Zollikofer and Züblin, St. Gallen 1831

literature

• Gallus Jakob Baumgartner: Franz Anton Good, from Mels . Obituary in the Neue Tagblatt from eastern Switzerland, July 28 and July 29, 1866
• Urs Dietschi: The people's veto in Switzerland. A contribution to the history of popular legislation . Olten 1926
• Martin Röhl: The political rights in the canton of St. Gallen . Diss. Zurich, St. Gallen 1995
• Bruno Wickli: Political culture and the "pure democracy": Constitutional struggles and rural popular movements in the canton of St. Gallen 1814/15 and 1830/31, Verlag Staatsarchiv and Stiftsarchiv, St. Gallen 2006, ISBN 978-3-908048-48-0 .
• Bruno Wickli: Political culture, political experiences and the breakthrough of modern direct democracy in the canton of St. Gallen (1831) , in: Rolf Graber (Ed.) Democratization processes in Switzerland in the late 18th and 19th centuries, Verlag Peter Lang, Bern 2008, ISBN 978-3-631-56525-4 .
• René Roca: The legal veto as a guide in the St. Gallen awakening - Franz Anton Good as theoretician of direct democracy , in: When popular sovereignty should really become a truth ... Swiss democracy in theory and practice - the example of the canton of Lucerne . Writings on Democracy Research, Volume 6. Center for Democracy Aarau and Verlag Schulthess AG, Zurich - Basel - Geneva, 2012, ISBN 978-3-7255-6694-5 .
• Mathias Bugg and Fabian Brändle: "... as a friend of true freedom and legal order." Franz Anton Good (1793–1866) von Mels, pioneer of direct democracy. In: Terra plana. Sarganserland culture magazine. No. 3/2014, pp. 55-60.

Web links

• Peter Müller: Good, Franz Anton. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland .