Georges Ducotterd

Georges Ducotterd

Georges Ducotterd (born May 13, 1902 in Estavayer-le-Lac , † January 25, 1979 in Friborg ) was a Swiss politician ( BGB ) and State Councilor of the canton of Friborg .

Live and act

Ducotterd, Catholic by nature, came from Léchelles and Rueyres-les-Prés. His parents were Tobie Ducotterd, Weber, and Marie-Marguerite nee. Marmy. He married Marie-Louise Grandgirard.

After attending primary school in Estavayer-le-Lac and the St. Michael college , Ducotterd studied agricultural sciences at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich and obtained an agricultural engineering degree in 1924. In 1924 he worked as a farm worker in the Bordelais , before he worked for the Federal Statistical Office (1930-1935) and from 1936 taught as a teacher for agriculture at the Agricultural Institute Grangeneuve. He founded the Association of Swiss Tobacco Growers (1938) and the intercantonal exhibition market for small livestock. He was also the editor of the association newspaper Le Paysan fribourgeois / Der Freiburger Bauer. He regularly took part in international agricultural congresses as a delegate from the Federal Council or the Holy See.

In 1942 he became head of department in the cantonal agriculture department and a close associate of the State Councilor Maxime Quartenoud .

After a lively election campaign, Georges Ducotterd was elected to the Council of State in 1952 as a candidate for the BGB in the replacement election for the resigned liberal Louis Dupraz against the conservative Marcel Renevey . The Conservatives saw this as a betrayal of their camp ("He has denied his principles", says Louis Barras , while Henri de Gendre claimed that Ducotterd wanted above all to "serve his personal ambitions"; "He has left his party", regrets José Python ) . He received 54% of the vote and the majority of the districts (with the exception of the Saane and Sense districts ). Ducotterd became head of the Directorate of the Military, Forests and State Vines. After Quartenoud's death in 1956, he was deprived of his deputy for the Directorate of Home Affairs, Agriculture, Industry and Commerce, a decision that embittered the BGB and met with incomprehension among the public.

In 1956 he was re-elected with Pierre Glasson in the second ballot against the conservative Ernst Etter. Before that, from December 7th to 9th, 1956, meetings between the BGB and conservatives had taken place in order to “reorganize the peasantry”. The conservatives demanded that the BGB State Council should join their party and that the members of the Glane , Saane and Broye districts should join the conservative parliamentary group of the Grand Council. Those of the Vivisbach and Lake Districts could confidently remain agrarians! The BGB delegation rejected this trade. In 1961, Ducotterd and the liberal Emil Zehnder were quietly elected in the second ballot after the five conservatives had won their re-election. After Paul Torche's resignation, he also headed the Agriculture Directorate (April to December 1966). With the rise of the liberal and social democrats, the earlier disagreements were forgotten and he was supported by the conservatives. In 1966 he was the only one to be confirmed in the first ballot. In 1958, 1965 and 1968 he was President of the State Council. At a time when the BGB is relatively weak in French-speaking Switzerland, his party profited from his notoriety by sending him on an election program on French-speaking Swiss television in 1967. As he explained there, he supported a rapprochement with the common market and vigorously opposed the then booming state ring of the independents .

In the State Council, he sat down for the modernization of weapons square Drognens and for the winery Les Faverges ( Lavaux one). He wrote a book about the estate in which one reads: "A thousand years of activity in the West produced a tiny pearl: the Les Faverges vineyard." With joy he repeated the famous saying by Henri Schaller (1894): "We want to look after this vineyard like a family carefully preserves their silver and the jewelry of their ancestors." In order to solve the geological problems, a «Syndicat du Rocher» was founded. In 1963 Nicolas Oulianov, professor emeritus at the University of Lausanne , presented Ducotterd with a study on the instability of rocks. In 1954 Ducotterd successfully defended the revision of the Forest Act. In 1971 he gave up another candidacy.

Elected to the National Council in the Swiss parliamentary elections in 1955 , he was unable to exercise his mandate due to the accumulation of offices. In the army he reached the rank of captain .

Georges Ducotterd died on January 25, 1979 at the age of 77 in Freiburg.

literature

• Georges Andrey , Hubertus von Gemmingen (translation): The Freiburg State Council: 1848–2011; History, organization, members . Ed .: John Clerc, Jean-Pierre Dorand, Nicholas Gex. Paulus, Freiburg 2012, ISBN 978-3-7228-0815-4 .

Web link

• Dominique Roulin / GS: Ducotterd, Georges. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland .