Franz von Erlach

This article deals with the lawyer and officer Franz von Erlach. For the mayor of Bern see Franz Ludwig von Erlach .

Hans Franz Ludwig von Erlach (born November 25, 1819 in Bern , Canton Bern , † February 14, 1889 ibid) was a Swiss lawyer , officer and author .

Origin and occupation

Franz von Erlach was the son of Ludwig Robert von Erlach (1794–1879) and belonged to the long-established Bernese noble Erlach family . Franz apparently studied law . On October 31, 1851, he married the teacher Katharina Romang (1828–1887) in Oberburg near Burgdorf (Canton Bern), who gave birth to a son and five daughters, among them the future painters Anna Elisabeth von Erlach and Gertrud von Erlach .

Von Erlach worked as a lawyer in the 1850s . a. for the Bern emigration society . In this position he was in charge of an emigration project to southern Brazil in 1854 . It is unclear when he joined the Swiss Army . His last known rank was a lieutenant colonel . He was an artilleryman and a member of the General Staff . In 1863/64 he participated as an observer on the side of the insurgents in the January uprising in Poland and processed his experiences there in his work The Warfare of the Poles in 1863 , which was translated into Polish in 1960 by the Polish officer Emanuel Halicz . In 1870/71 he took part in the Franco-German War on the German side and published his findings in 1873 under the title From the Franco-German War 1870–1871 .

The wars of freedom of small peoples against large armies (1867) can be regarded as his most important work . In good 680 pages trying von Erlach an overview of the history of guerrilla warfare - and guerrilla warfare of the Maccabees over the struggles of Dithmarscher ( Battle of Hemmingstedt ), the American Revolutionary War to give to the Polish January Uprising. 1863 However, he did not write a historical-critical analysis, but used his examples as instructions for armed resistance to end foreign rule . Although he also dealt with the defensive struggles of the Caucasians under Imam Shamil against the Russian expansion in the Caucasus ( Caucasus War (1817–1864) ), he completely dispensed with non-European examples such as B. the Indian wars , indigenous resistance in Africa or the South American wars of independence . Von Erlach's concept of freedom was therefore purely Eurocentric . Nevertheless, his work can be regarded as one of the first attempts to give a quasi world-historical overview of irregular forms of war .

Nothing is known about his further professional and literary activities after 1874. At the beginning of the 1870s, he worked for a time at the German military journal Von Loebell's annual reports on changes and progress in the military . He also published several articles in the Allgemeine Schweizerische Militärzeitung .

Works

• The warfare of the Poles in 1863. Based on our own observations, collected on the spot from March to August. Darmstadt / Leipzig (Zernin) 1866. A preprint appeared under the same title in 1864/65 in the German general military newspaper . Polish edition: Partyzantka w Polsce w roku 1863. Na podstawie własnych obserwacji zbieranych na teatrze walki od marca do sierpnia . Franciszek L. von Erlach. Przygotował do druku Emanuel Halicz, Warszawa (Wyd. Ministerstwa Obrony Narodowej) 1960. Digitized version of the original
• The wars of freedom of small peoples against large armies. Bern 1867. Digitized
• From the Franco-German War 1870–1871. Observations and considerations of a Swiss military man. Leipzig / Bern 1874.

literature

• Werner Hahlweg : Guerrilla. War without fronts , Stuttgart a. a. (Kohlhammer) 1968.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Hans Franz Ludwig von Erlach , genealogical data sheet in the portal bernergeschlecht.ch , accessed on November 24, 2017