Joseph Thaddäus of Sumerau

Joseph Thaddäus von Sumerau, the last regional president of Upper Austria

Joseph Thaddäus von Sumerau (* 1749 in Vienna ; † March 25, 1817 there ) was the last regional president of the Upper Austrian government in Freiburg from 1791.

Youth and Studies

Joseph Thaddäus von Sumerau was the nephew of Anton Thaddäus von Sumerau . The uncle had adopted him and two nieces in 1750 after the early death of his brother. Anton Thaddäus von Sumerau sent his brother son to the Jesuits in Lorraine in Pont-à-Mousson for school training and let him study in Freiburg from 1762 to 1766. He then got him a government council position, with which Joseph Thaddäus entered the Austrian government on July 14, 1767 at a salary of 400  florins . In Vienna, however, it was criticized in retrospect that the young Sumerau had not provided a prescribed test work, the specimen . In 1769, Anton Thaddäus successfully asked for his nephew to be enrolled in the Breisgau knighthood. On January 7, 1772 Sumerau married Caroline Freiin von Duminique.

Activity as a government councilor

When Pope Clement XIV repealed the Jesuit order on August 18, 1773, the Sumerau government councilor, himself a pupil , pointed out the services of the Jesuits in the education of young people and was in charge of the petitions for the preservation of the order. Between 1774 and 1777 Joseph Thaddäus was director of the fiscal office in Freiburg. After the death of Carl von Ulm 1781 he was elected Praeses appointed the Gymnasien- and normal school commission. Sumerau was active at the newly formed Upper Austrian Court of Appeal from 1784. In 1786 Emperor Leopold II appointed him as a consultant for the foothills to Vienna with the title Hofrat and a salary of 4000 florins . In May 1790 a corporate delegation went to Vienna to reverse the reforms that had taken place in Breisgau under Joseph II . Leopold told only that the stands may elect the President of the Konsess under strict conditions themselves, but that they have the Priminstanz or the right to the first legal authority should introduce only again if they bear the costs themselves.

Activity as the regional president of Upper Austria

On January 25, 1791, the Emperor Joseph appointed Freiherr von Sumerau, with the award of the title of a Real Secret Council as a special feature of the highest grace, with a salary of 8400 florins, as the District President of Front Austria . The ultra-conservative Sumerau began his service in Freiburg in March 1791. He loved the land entrusted to me and its people, and from the beginning insisted on the Josephine reforms .

In addition, since his arrival in Breisgau he fought against the pernicious influences of the French Revolution . With the flight from the unrest of an estimated 150,000 Alsatians and French across the Rhine, the district president saw in every refugee a conspirator. He immediately set up a police spy service. Every citizen was suspected of being a revolutionary in disguise. Even the long-standing Protestant Freiburg Professor Johann Georg Jacobi 's remark had to put up with it because of some positive statements on the Republic: Would that he had in Halberstadt remained .

Sumerau saw the defense against the influence of the revolution primarily ideologically. He reintroduced censorship in the Vorlanden, but could not prevent the smuggling of revolutionary writings. He fought these writings with counter-propaganda writings in German and French, which he had distributed across the border. He let his Foreign Minister Johann Ludwig von Cobenzl in Vienna know: A Reich law must set the sharpest barriers to the tiresome freedom of the press and the unfortunate Illuminati, otherwise all the individual orders and book bans etc. do not help . Sumerau also asked Emperor Leopold for troop reinforcements in the foothills, because otherwise there is every reason to fear that the great boldness of the French, who are interested in the new constitution, will drive them across the Rhine . Because the imperial aid failed to materialize, Sumerau forced the formation of a land militia . After the French had crossed the Rhine near Kehl in June 1796 , a clash between the revolutionary army and the vigilante group broke out on July 7, 1796 near Wagenstadt and Tutschfelden . After a short stay of the French in Breisgau, the French fright Archduke Karl succeeded not only in liberating the area on the right bank of the Rhine, but also in occupying Alsace .

After the lost war in northern Italy, Austria had to bow to Napoleon's dictate in the Peace of Campo Formio : The Breisgau was given to the fashionable Duke Hercules III. offered as a replacement for his duchy, which was added to the Cisalpine Republic . Sumerau was horrified: No people in the world can be more loyal and devoted to the best sovereign than the forelands against SM and the most serene ore house, of which the originally first and oldest tribal subjects boast of being . Hercules III refused to assume the minor rule offered to him, but after a renewed French occupation of the Breisgau in 1799, the defeat of Austria and the additional promise of Ortenau in the Peace of Lunéville in 1801, the area became fashionable ( Duchy of Modena-Breisgau ).

Further work for the House of Austria

Sumerau was appointed commissioner to hand over the Breisgau to the fashionable governor Ferdinand of Austria , Hercules III's son-in-law. Ferdinand then appointed Hermann von Greiffenegg as regional president. In the meantime, Emperor Franz II. Appointed Sumerau on June 18, 1801, because of his experience in the police force, to the position of vice-president of the police station (vice-police minister). Here he expanded the Confidential System . Since 1801 curator of the Theresianum , he has been concerned about the preservation of conservative educational methods. On August 29, 1802, Sumerau was appointed District President of Lower Austria by imperial handwriting, an office he held until 1804. Because of his merits, the now Austrian Emperor Franz I appointed Sumerau as imperial chamberlain in 1805 and awarded him the Grand Cross of the Order of St. Stephen in 1808 . At 67, Sumerau married Maria Franziska, the widow of Count Heinrich Khevenhiller. A year later, on March 25, 1817, he died of a stroke and was buried on his estate in Lengenfeld near Vienna.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ in Quarthal, p. 190.
2. ↑ in Quarthal, p. 194.
3. ↑ von Kageneck, p. 77.
4. ↑ von Kageneck, p. 82.
5. ↑ in Quarthal, p. 200.
6. ↑ in Quarthal, p. 204.
7. ↑ in Quarthal, p. 208.

literature

• Alfred Graf von Kageneck : The end of the front Austrian rule in Breisgau. Rombach & Co. Verlag, Freiburg 1981, ISBN 3-7930-0365-5 .
• Friedrich Metz (Hrsg.): Vorderösterreich, a historical regional studies. Publisher Rombach, Freiburg 1967.
• Franz Quarthal: The four regional presidents of Upper Austria in the second half of the 18th century, in Habsburg and the Upper Rhine. Waldkircher Verlagsgesellschaft, Waldkirch 2002, ISBN 3-87885-344-0 .

predecessor	Office	successor
Johann Adam von Posch	District President of Front Austria 1791–1803	Hermann von Greiffenegg as District President of the Duchy of Modena-Breisgau