Johann Aloys Becker

Johann Aloys Becker (born May 22, 1769 in Mainz ; † September 21, 1850 there ) worked as an active Jacobin in the French-occupied Mayence in various administrative functions from 1792 . After the end of the Mainz Republic , he was imprisoned and later emigrated to Strasbourg and Paris .

When the left bank of the Rhine was ceded to France on December 30, 1797 with the Peace of Campo Formio , he returned to Mayence. Due to his political stance and later also due to his increasing administrative experience, Becker held ever higher positions in the administration of the Département du Mont-Tonnerre in the areas of finance and administration and belonged to the group of "Citoyens notables", the society of notables. After the end of French rule in Mainz, the meanwhile politically moderate Becker remained a high administrative officer, first in the provisional Prussian and later in the Grand Ducal Hessian administration.

youth

Johann Aloys Becker was born on May 22, 1769 as the child of the wax worker Heinrich Becker and his wife Elisabeth in their parents' house at Franziskanerstraße, on the corner of Emmeranstraße. After the death of his father in 1782, Becker had to leave school, began an apprenticeship as a businessman in the Dumont family's trading house and helped in his parents' business. A close friendship with the Jacobin Franz Falciola, who later became a Jacobin, has been a close friend since he was in high school, and the brothers Johann and Friedrich Dumont joined the circle of friends during his training. With the prestigious upper-class house of the Dumonts, which Becker soon went to and from, he got to know a previously unknown liberal and enlightened environment. Through the Head of House of the Dumonts, Adam Lux , he also came into contact with the ideas of a Rousseau or Montesquieu .

Political activity 1792/1793

When the revolution broke out in France in 1789 and the first news reached Mainz, Becker had already become a supporter of the Enlightenment philosophy. He welcomed the events in France because he saw them as an opportunity to put ideas of the Enlightenment into practice. With the advance of the French revolutionary army under General Custine to Mainz in October 1792, Becker suddenly found himself actively involved in the revolutionary events. After the capitulation of the city of Mainz on October 21, 1792, he and his friends Falciola and Reichard were the first Mainz residents to visit the French camp in front of the city:

" " As soon as you were allowed to go out of the gate, Reichard, Falciola and I planted the cockades on us marched into the camp near Mombach. We were the first Mainz residents to arrive. The Franks really enjoyed our visit, they shook hands with us all. We welcomed them and shouted "Vive la Nation!" They clapped us, and the whole camp rang out "Vive la Nation!" We had never had such a feeling in our whole life. " "

- Johann Aloys Becker

Becker now fully identified with the ideals of the French Revolution and became its enthusiastic supporter. He also saw the problems and failures that began later in revolutionizing his homeland in a rather larger context, as he wrote in one of his letters at the end of November 1792: “What keeps me and many others in good spirits, despite all possible obstacles, never to give up the matter , is the consideration that it is a world revolution. The question is not whether France is the only one to secure her freedom ... but whether despotism and all arbitrary power in the whole of polished Europe should be overthrown and freedom and equality should triumph everywhere. And I say: yes! So, the poor people of Mainz will not stop a world revolution. ” As a result, he had little understanding for his rather hesitant and politically wait-and-see fellow citizens of Mainz: “ These brave people have no feelings for anything in the wide world of God but for the most vile selfishness, nothing stimulates them, as what relates to it, they are just as dull for everything great as they are numb to the good. Cowardice and the greatest ignorance are the main features of her character. "

Despite his enthusiasm for the cause, he joined the Mainz Jacobin Club relatively late, namely on December 2, 1792 . This late decision , which was more or less contrary to the political course of things in Mainz (the Prussian troops conquered Frankfurt on this day from the French, who then retreated to the mouth of the Main opposite Mainz), he came only after careful consideration. He let his mother know, whether appalled by his accession, that: “... neither selfishness nor childish recklessness but and reasons had determined (him) to do so”. Once a member of the Jacobin Club, he immediately became active. He signed petitions, took an active part in the meetings of the club and was also present at the construction of the second tree of freedom on January 13, 1793 on the Mainzer Mark. His reliability as a Mainz Jacobin and as a club member was also the reason for his appointment to two committees of the Mainz Jacobin Club. He was appointed to the vigilance committee to combat counter-revolutionary tendencies and he became a member of the economics committee, which dealt with the administration of the club's finances.

Becker was entrusted with further and even more important tasks in February 1793. Jean-Frédéric Simon, one of the two national commissioners from Paris present in Mainz, appointed him and other German Jacobins as sub-commissioners on February 18, 1793. The total of 67 sub-commissioners were all people whose reputation and skills were highly regarded by the French administration. As one of the appointed sub-commissioners, Becker was now in direct company with leading Jacobins from Mainz such as Mathias Metternich , Felix Anton Blau , Anton Joseph Dorsch , Andreas Joseph Hofmann and Georg von Wedekind . Their task was the implementation of a decree from Paris of December 15, 1792. In all conquered countries elections were to be held and an oath to be sworn in advance on democracy, in short, to "municipalize" it. Refusals were threatened with treatment under martial law. As the newly appointed sub-commissioner, Becker traveled to Speyer as part of a delegation led by the President of Administration Anton Joseph Dorsch and with his colleagues Lux, Caprano, Cyrer and Schlemmer in order to promote the meetings for the primary elections and the oath in the city and in the rural surroundings . Similar advertising and reconnaissance missions were now taking place simultaneously throughout the French-occupied territory. Your mission was unsuccessful. The so-called general meetings were postponed twice due to the unsupportive attitude of the Speyer citizens. The original meeting, which finally took place on March 8, 1793, was under the direction of Becker. Although the voter turnout was very high at 30% (for comparison: in Mainz the turnout was only 8%), this was a defeat for the Jacobins. The citizens of Speyer had agreed in advance and only elected former councilors, the few Jacobins who were nominated received almost no votes. In the country too, the sub-commissioners were only successful in a few villages; mostly when the population was intimidated with massive French troops.

Becker returned to Mainz in mid-March and witnessed the ceremonial opening of the Rhine-German National Convention on March 17, 1793, as well as the proclamation of the Republic of Mainz on March 18 and the successful vote on the annexation of the Republic of Mainz to France. On March 24th, a parliamentary archive was created for the work of the Rhine-German National Convention. As clerk also Becker and his childhood friend Franz Falciola were employed there. Since the convention was adjourned indefinitely on March 31 (and was never supposed to meet again), Becker took up a new position in the newly elected General Administration under the direction of Andreas Joseph Hofmann . Here he worked again on a finance committee and ultimately laid the foundation for his more than 40 years of administrative work in the areas of administration and finance.

Since the situation in besieged Mainz in July 1793 became increasingly critical for the French-friendly Jacobins, the so-called "clubists", Becker wanted to withdraw with the French army after their surrender from Mainz to France. This failed, not least because of the lack of support from the French, and Becker was mistreated and robbed in his house by a “gang of clubist catchers”. For his own safety, he and about 40 other Jacobins surrendered to the Prussian troops, who then imprisoned them at the Ehrenbreitstein fortress in Koblenz .

Captivity, exile and return to Mainz

Becker spent a total of 18 months in prison, first at the Ehrenbreitstein Fortress, and later also at the Petersberg Fortress in Erfurt . Here he was in the company of many "arch clubists" such as Mathias Metternich. They were all less of a prisoner than a hostage intended for the exchange of hostages from Mainz who were abducted to France at the end of March 1793.

Becker remained true to his revolutionary and Jacobean ideals during this time. At this time he wrote to his mother, who did not approve of his actions, that she was not allowed to tell him:

" ... respect contemptuous creatures that are nothing and everything, act everywhere only for their self-interest, run to any party they hope to take advantage of, and leave them again as soon as it comes into disrepute and requires sacrifice ... Unfortunately, several of this class of people have taken my side and harmed it enough. "

- Johann Aloys Becker

Nevertheless, he admitted to her that many of his former political companions now had to be assigned to this category. He also asked for his favorite books to be sent, which had already strongly influenced his political opinion- making in earlier times: Blaise Pascal's Pensées , Rousseau's Émile and works by the French philosopher Claude Adrien Helvétius . However, his correspondence was monitored and this letter, as well as letters to the Paris deputies and former convention deputies in Mainz, Merlin de Thionville and Jean François Reubell , was not forwarded. At the end of 1794, when the Mainz hostages, who had been deported to France by the revolutionary troops, were able to return, the Jacobins of Mainz, who had meanwhile been imprisoned at the Petersberg Fortress in Erfurt , were released. On February 26, 1795, Becker, along with 27 other Jacobins, was handed over to a French diplomat in Basel . Becker was now one of the “refugiés Mayençais” for the French Republic and received little support from the state as a political refugee in exile.

Like many of the other “Mainz Patriots”, Becker first went to Strasbourg to find work there. At the end of March 1795, however, he was already on the way to Paris . In contrast to other, better-known Jakobins from Mainz such as Andreas Joseph Hofmann or Georg Wilhelm Böhmer , Becker was not employed as a diplomat for the young republic or as its political agitator and publicist for the Rhineland. In autumn 1795 he found work with the emigrated Kiel professor Carl Friedrich Cramer . He ran a small publisher and printer in Paris for the translation of German and French authors such as Schiller , Diderot or Rousseau into the respective other language. Already two months after his arrival in Paris, Becker's strongly idealized image of the revolution, the republic that had emerged from it and its supporters, slowly changed, at the latest in captivity:

“ I came out of my dungeon into the republic with ideas on how to create misery and loneliness in better people. When I first entered, I was outraged by reality, but for a long time I could not recover from my amazement. Despite my many experiences, I had to start all over to get to know people. It was not yet in the circle of my experiences that in a republic people could be as bad as in the most unlimited monarchy ... It occurred to me that nature makes no leaps, that consequently the former French in a period of five Years not Republicans - which we so casually understand by this word - could be. "

- Johann Aloys Becker

In May 1795 he witnessed the Prairial Rebellion , led by Robespierre's supporters , which he strongly condemned. Later he played the editor of the magazine "La Sentinelle", the influential Girondin Louvet de Couvray , articles in which he advocated the rapid annexation of the Rhineland on the left bank of the Rhine . New attempts to contact the former convention commissioner in Mainz, Nicolas Haussmann , from whom he hoped for help, failed again. After almost exactly a year, Becker left Paris again on March 27, 1796, unemployed due to the closure of the printing works. He was sobered to find that he was staying there

" ... tasted the greater part of his belief and trust in and on human virtue ... It was not the physical but rather the moral evils that caused me my bad hours here. "

- Johann Aloys Becker

A few months later, he described his now somewhat more differentiated view of things to a friend:

“ I had to pay dearly for my stay in Paris when you count - as you have to - for a considerable loss of losing faith in the morality of people in general and in the goodness of many other things. However, the sum of the winner is also considerable, namely in a world in which you live, not alone as a dreaming person with completely erroneous notions of the things that surround you, to walk around, to know the real value of things ... Our former ideals were closed high, far too high, but reality is not that bad either. "

- Johann Aloys Becker

Becker went to Saarbrücken where, along with other exiled Jacobins, he also met his friend from his youth, Franz Falciola, again. There he got the offer to become a judge in Lorraine , which he refused. He was drawn closer to his hometown again, and he also felt factually and morally overwhelmed. Shortly afterwards, the Strasbourg official Bella, who was newly appointed “General Director for Taxes and Domains” in the conquered areas on the left bank of the Rhine, was looking for employees in Saarbrücken to manage them. Becker applied for a job and on June 17, 1796, Bella appointed him “Receveur des Domaines et Contributions” in Kusel , which the French had destroyed three years earlier and now owned again. In these areas on the left bank of the Rhine, expressly designated as the occupation area, Becker now collected the taxes for the French army and administered the income from the former aristocratic and church property. In the course of his work he often came into conflict with the impoverished population. In addition, internal conflicts in Paris over the future organization of the Rhineland repeatedly caused uncertainty about its future. The administrative structures in the occupied territories changed several times and in April 1797 he finally had to give up his position. After being unemployed for half a year, the peace of Campo Formio concluded on October 17, 1797 gave him the opportunity to return to his hometown Mainz. When French troops returned to the city on December 30, 1797, and Mainz was renamed Mayence again, they were followed by Becker, who returned after more than four years.

Official of the Département du Mont-Tonnerre in Mayence

Becker was now in an advantageous position. As a Jacobin from Mainz from the very beginning, patriot and meanwhile also an experienced administrative officer, the future work in his now French hometown was highly valued. Mayence became the capital of the re-established Département du Mont-Tonnerre in early 1798, which existed for a short time in 1792/93. The government commissioner François Joseph Rudler , who was sent from Paris and was responsible for the areas on the left bank of the Rhine, was supposed to set up the administrative structures and therefore moved to Mainz on January 11, 1798 in the Stadioner Hof . He immediately offered Becker the position of the highest tax officer in the department. At the same time he was offered a position as head of department by the central administration, the highest authority in the department. Becker was able to choose and, following his inclinations and experiences, decided on February 20, 1798 for the central administration of the department.

Here Becker found himself mainly in the circle of former Mainz Jacobins, who, like him, were rewarded with responsible administrative posts for their loyalty to the republic. Becker finally devoted himself to the administrative work in the department administration and from now on the bureaucracy was to increasingly replace his political activities. However, he and his Jacobin colleagues had not yet become completely apolitical officials. As a Jacobin from Mainz, Becker signed several so-called Reunionsadresses, signature campaigns, which were intended to show in political negotiations such as the Rastatt Congress that the locals of the areas on the left bank of the Rhine wanted a permanent assignment to France. Also in the company of old Mainz Jacobins such as Mathias Metternich , he campaigned (unsuccessfully) in October 1799 for the government commissioner Joseph Lakanal, who was active in Mainz and considered to be radical revolutionary, to remain . The Mainz residents, who are still Jacobin-minded, placed their hopes on him in a continuation of the original goals of the local revolution.

With the coup d'état of 18th Brumaire VIII (on November 9th 1799) Napoleon Bonaparte seized power in Paris and declared the revolution over. The Mainz population and the local administration soon felt this. In the spring of 1800 , the government commissioner Henri Shée , who was newly posted from Paris and succeeded Lakanal, checked all civil servants in the department on the left bank of the Rhine, less for their revolutionary attitudes than for professional experience and knowledge of French. Becker also adapted and immediately declared his willingness to cooperate under the now clearly changed political conditions. The previous central administration, which worked together in a collegial manner, was replaced by a prefect with authority . Becker worked on this from May 1800 as a department head in the prefecture. With this decision to participate in the new political system, Becker gave up other earlier revolutionary ideals and became more and more an established member of the higher society under Napoleon, the so-called society of notables. This consisted primarily of wealthy merchants, notaries, lawyers and senior officials from the administration. Earlier and very active Jacobins from Mainz, such as Becker, Franz Konrad Macké or Rudolf Eickemeyer , had come to terms with Napoleon's rule, had earned money and reputation, and had often acquired prestigious residences in Mainz as part of the sale of national goods. In 1802, Becker acquired parts of the Metternicher Hof on Thiermarkt in the immediate vicinity of the prefecture . Jeanbon St. André had his seat here since 1801 as General Commissioner of the four departments on the left bank of the Rhine and from 1803 as Prefect of the Département du Mont-Tonnerre . Becker was now "Chef de Division" and was responsible for all state domains in the department. In addition, he was the head of general administration. In this function he also had representative duties, for example on all official occasions and especially during the numerous visits by the emperor to Mayence.

Official of the Grand Duchy of Hesse

With the demise of Napoleon after the defeat in the Battle of the Nations near Leipzig in October 1813, hard times came to Mainz as well. The defeated French troops streamed into the battle to Mainz on the Rhine and dragged the typhus ( "typhoid Mayence") into the city. Around 17,000 soldiers and 2,400 inhabitants (more than a tenth of the total population) fell victim to the disease by the spring of 1814, including the French prefect Jeanbon St. André . Mainz was surrounded and besieged by Russian and once again by German troops . It was not until May 4, 1814, that the French troops withdrew due to the First Peace of Paris . Mainz was now, after more than 16 years of French rule, under the provisional administration of the two great powers Prussia and Austria .

The French prefecture was immediately dissolved and replaced by a provisional joint administration, the state administration commission, whereby Becker lost his job. However, Becker now had the reputation of a trustworthy and technically experienced administrative specialist and so he was reinstated by the commission a short time later and appointed the highest tax officer in Mainz. In this function he was also responsible for the funds for the occupation troops' meals. Becker's long past political past was not an obstacle here, as his professional qualifications were beyond question. Two years later, on June 30, 1816, Mainz and the area of ​​today's Rheinhessen were assigned to the Grand Duchy of Hesse, in whose service Becker now entered. The Grand Duke Ludwig I retained many of the facilities from the French period. These were the so-called "Rhenish institutions" such as the Code civil , which continued to exist as "Rhenish law" in Mainz and Rheinhessen. Also took over all civil servants in the civil service. Becker was initially still the “central collector for Mainz”, from 1817 he was appointed to the newly created “Hessian government commission for the other side of the Rhineland”. From March 1818 this commission acted as the provincial government for Rhine-Hesse . The district president in Mainz was the liberal Ludwig von Lichtenberg , and Becker was also a member of the government, now as a councilor. In 1820 he was also appointed to the “Grand Ducal Special Commission for the Liquidation of Claims on France”. On August 30, 1832, Becker was taken over as a high official in the Hessian "Provinzialdirektion Mainz" and retired on February 17, 1835, as part of the dissolution of the authority.

In 1840 Becker was one of the first residents of the Grand Duchy to be awarded the newly created order of Philip the Magnanimous ( Grand Ducal Hessian Order of Merit ), a further sign of political reliability and loyalty to the state in his later years. During the March Revolution , there were also riots and disputes in Mainz and especially in Rheinhessen. Here Becker, in contrast to his son August Becker , who was involved in the Democratic Association , held back completely. On September 21, 1850, Johann Aloys Becker died after a short illness at the age of 81 in his hometown Mainz.

family

On November 25, 1801, Becker married the 27-year-old Katharina Müller, the sister of a friend. Together they had four children, two sons and two daughters. Both sons, August and Johann, later became lawyers and, like their father, entered the Hessian civil service. Johann Becker was also a member of the city council in Mainz in 1866 as a district judge.

reception

While Becker was still alive, in the late 1830s, the conservative Hessian "conducting state minister" (Prime Minister) Karl du Thil wrote about Becker:

" [The Rheinhessen government also includes]" ... a former French prefectural councilor, Becker, a man who knew the country and its conditions very well and who, after that government was dissolved in 1834 and he was retired, made himself useful in many ways. " "

- Karl you Thil

Du Thil, who described himself as a “counter-footer to all Jacobinism”, who ruled the Grand Duchy very conservatively and with a hard hand until the March Revolution in 1848 (until he had to be dismissed due to popular pressure), no longer saw an old Jacobin in Becker which deserved government attention. Rather, he praised him as a useful and important official of the Grand Duchy, who continued to represent the interests of the Grand Duchy even after his retirement in the troubled and, due to the “Rhenish institutions”, clearly more liberal Mainz and Rheinhessen.

For the author of the only biographical article on Johann Aloys Becker, the historian and expert on the Mainz Republic, Franz Dumont , Becker's life and political career are typical of many Mainz Jacobins of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Many later Jacobins came from the bourgeoisie, came into contact with the Enlightenment early on and welcomed the spread of the French Revolution to the areas on the left bank of the Rhine, just as Becker and his friends did on behalf of the approaching French soldiers. Just like Becker, they were involved in the Mainz Jacobin Club or in committees of the Mainz Republic in 1792/93.

Becker belonged to the smaller group of higher-ranking Jacobins from Mainz who had to go through the experience of imprisonment and exile. As with one of the most famous Jacobins of Mainz, Georg Forster , the political situation in Paris after 1793 disillusioned him. But, in contrast to Forster, a process of change from a “enthusiastic moral idealist” to a “skeptical but decisive realist” began " a. This could also be found in the case of many other Jacobins from Mainz who, as supporters of the ideals of the French Revolution, have been increasingly unable to identify with the political system and its values ​​since Napoleon came to power. At the latest in the time of the Hessian government, the departure from the old Jacobinism could no longer be overlooked. Becker becomes a loyal state servant of the Grand Duchy of Hesse, Rudolf Eickemeyer became a mayor in his home town of Gau-Algesheim near Mainz during the French period , Mathias Metternich retired from public political life in the spring of 1800 and devoted himself again to his teaching activities and his mathematical studies.

Many of the Mainz Jacobins, like Becker, got into the notables class during Napoleon's time, so they were respected and wealthy citizens of the upper class and had achieved influential posts. After the end of the French era in Mainz they often retained this status and the problem-free integration of these high, formerly French, civil servants, lawyers, entrepreneurs or merchants into the new grand-ducal society led to extensive political inactivity or at least neutrality until the middle of the 19th century at.

literature

• Franz Dumont : Changes of a revolutionary: The life of the Mainz Jacobin Johann Aloys Becker (1769-1850) In: Mainz. Quarterly issues for culture, politics, economics, history . Number 4th year 1982. Verlag H. Schmidt Mainz, pp. 78-89, ISSN 0720-5945
• Franz Dumont: The Republic of Mainz 1792/93. Studies on the revolution in Rheinhessen and the Palatinate. 2nd expanded edition, Alzey 1993, ISBN 3-87854-090-6 .
• Anne Cottebrunne: Des "réfugiés mayençais" dans le Paris révolutionnaire: histoire d'un exil politique 1793-1799. - Accessible online (French)

Web links

• Biography and information on the estate of Johann Aloys Becker in the Mainz City Archives  in the German Digital Library
• Search for Johann Aloys Becker in the German Digital Library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ This scene is shown in detail in the first part of the ARD documentary Napoleon and the Germans
2. ↑ ^{a b c} quoted from Franz Dumont: Wandlungen einer Revolutionärs. P. 79
3. ^ Quoted from Franz Dumont: Changes in a revolutionary. P. 80
4. ^ Franz Dumont: The Mainzer Republic of 1792/92. , P. 323
5. ^ ^{A b c} Franz Dumont: Changes of a revolutionary. P. 82
6. ^ Quoted from Franz Dumont: Changes in a revolutionary. P. 82f.
7. ^ Quoted from Franz Dumont: Changes in a revolutionary. P. 84f.
8. ^ Quoted from Franz Dumont: Changes in a revolutionary. P. 85.
9. ^ Quoted from Franz Dumont: Changes in a revolutionary. P. 85.
10. ^ Quoted from Franz Dumont: Changes in a revolutionary. P. 88
11. ^ Franz Dumont: Changes of a revolutionary. P. 88
12. ↑ ^{a b c d} Franz Dumont: Changes of a revolutionary. P. 89