Théobald Bacher

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Theobald Jakob Justinus Bacher , French Théobald Jacques Justin Bacher , from 1810 Baron de Bacher , also Imperial Baron von Bacher (born June 17, 1748 in Thann , Alsace , † November 15, 1813 in Mainz ), was a French diplomat . In the period from 1777 to 1811 he was entrusted with various diplomatic and intelligence missions in the Old Confederation , in the Holy Roman Empire and in the Confederation of the Rhine .

Life

Family and education

Bacher was one of six children of the doctor Georg Friedrich Bacher (* 1709), who was born in Blotzheim , and his wife Sybilla Franziska, née Fritz, the daughter of Mayor Andreas Fritz. At the age of 14 he joined the Bataillon de Colmar . As a young officer, he served in the general staff of the French army operating against Prussia in the Seven Years' War on the Lower Rhine . With the peace treaty of 1763 , he immediately retired from the military, probably at his own request. He presumably then studied in Strasbourg . Around 1768 he stayed in Berlin to receive military training on the Prussian model. There he came into contact with Prince Heinrich of Prussia . After Bacher left Berlin again, he was appointed aspirant d'artillerie et du génie in France and soon afterwards Ingénieur-geographe-militaire surnuméraire . In 1771 he rejoined the Bataillon de Colmar and held the rank of lieutenant. Two years later he received a leave of absence to prepare for a diplomatic career at the French Foreign Ministry in Paris. With the Strasbourg Provincial Artillery Regiment, he received the status of reserve officer in 1777.

Missions in Switzerland (1777–1797)

In the same year he was sent to the French embassy in Switzerland in Solothurn to serve as secretary and interpreter in contract negotiations between the Swiss cantons and France. He then took on a permanent post there as legation secretary and interpreter and retired from active military service. Until 1791 he represented France in the Swiss parliament in Frauenfeld , provided that the respective French ambassador - Heraclius de Polignac, Jean Gravier de Vergennes and most recently Charles Olivier de Vérac - was unable to attend. In 1791 he went as chargé d'affaires for independent authorized charge d'affaires of France in the Swiss Confederation on, after his predecessor in office to official irregularities had been guilty. At the same time he was of Louis XVI. honored with the Order of St. Ludwig . Between 1791 and 1793, Bacher gradually became a supporter of the French Revolution - probably for reasons of his career . In 1792 France withdrew Bacher from his Solothurn embassy post after a federal expulsion order had been issued because of his sympathy for the revolution. On behalf of François Barthélemy, he then worked as an agent in Basel , in particular to monitor the neutrality of the Canton of Basel in the First Coalition War . From 1793 he organized a comprehensive intelligence service for the First French Republic from Basel . Bacher's network of agents and spies extended not only across parts of Switzerland, but across the whole of southern Germany as far as Mainz , Frankfurt am Main and Regensburg . Together with Barthélemy and the Basel town clerk Peter Ochs , he also played a key role in bringing about the peace of Basel in 1795 . Bacher was also involved in negotiations on the exchange of prisoners. For example, he led the negotiations that led to Marie Thérèse Charlotte de Bourbon , the daughter of the French king who was executed in 1793, being released to the Viennese court in 1795 in exchange for French prisoners. After Bacher's superior Barthélemy had been elected to the 2nd Board of Directors on May 26, 1797 , he himself rose again to become the official chargé d'affaires of France in Switzerland. In this position he forced French emigrants who had left France because of the revolution to be expelled from Switzerland.

Missions in Germany (1797-1811)

Shortly after the Peace of Campo Formio , on November 16, 1797, Bacher was promoted to the chargé d'affaires at the Diet of the Holy Roman Empire in Regensburg . This post, which de jure only gave him the status of a private citizen, but de facto the function of an official French envoy , was intended to serve France to maintain diplomatic contact with the imperial estates with which it was officially at war. At the same time, Bacher controlled a secret service network there, which gave the French Republic - in particular its Foreign Minister Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord , the French envoy at the Rastatt Congress , the French envoy Jean Baptiste Bernadotte in Vienna and the generals of the French Rhine Army - information about political and provided militarily relevant events. In Bacher's political correspondence there are early references to the idea that a Corps Germanique from a confederation of imperial estates, but without Prussia and Austria , should enter into a protective alliance with France (→ Third Germany ). The political situation came to a head for France - and thus for Bacher at his Regensburg post - at the end of 1798, when a new alliance against France for the Second Coalition War began to form under Russian initiative . When Bacher interfered in this situation, began to influence the imperial estates and officially intervened in the Reichstag against an advance by Austria, Archduke Karl had him expelled from Regensburg on March 9, 1799.

Bacher moved to neutral Hessian territory to Hanau , where he stayed until October 1800, suffered from a lack of money and acted as a commissioner for the exchange of prisoners. With the withdrawal of Russian troops to Russia at the end of 1799 and France's military victories, the French negotiating position in Germany improved noticeably. Wilhelm , the Landgrave of Hesse-Kassel , and other German sovereigns intensified diplomatic contact with Bacher. In this situation, the Directory gave him formal permission to receive further disclosures about peace proposals from the imperial estates. After the Treaty of Lunéville , which ended Bacher's assignment as commissioner for the exchange of prisoners, he traveled back to Regensburg from Frankfurt am Main , where he had lived from October 1800, in order to be able to establish better contact with the Rhenish courts.

On the trip to Regensburg, where he resumed his previous activities including espionage on May 20, 1801, the Electoral Mainz minister Franz Joseph von Albini had Bacher, Napoleon's representative, prepared a reception with military honors in Aschaffenburg . The prominent position that Bacher assumed from then on as the French chargé d'affaires at the Reichstag is underlined in particular by today's Presidential Palace , which was assigned to him as a representative residence in Regensburg. In the negotiations that began at the Reichstag, Bacher was particularly committed to the compensation of the imperial princes who had been deposed in the course of the Peace of Lunéville , which had to take place within the empire according to the treaty. These negotiations soon resulted in plans for the secularization of the ecclesiastical imperial estates. When these plans came into force through the Reichsdeputationshauptschluss (Reichsdeputationshauptschluss) , these plans drastically changed the map and the power structure of the Reich. In 1804 Bacher received the Legion of Honor from Talleyrand . During the Third Coalition War , Bacher stayed in Vienna from December 16, 1805 to January 8, 1806 . His mission there is unknown, but participation in an internal French vote on the consequences of the Treaty of Schönbrunn and the Peace of Pressburg is an obvious choice. Then he returned to Regensburg. On August 1, 1806, at the Reichstag, Bacher presented the famous French note in which Emperor Napoleon, as protector of the Rhine Confederation founded in July, announced that he would no longer recognize the constitution of the Holy Roman Empire. On August 11, the Austrian Foreign Minister Johann Philipp von Stadion Bacher and the members of the Reichstag sent a note sent by the ambassador there, Egid Joseph Karl von Fahnenberg , that Franz II had laid down the imperial crown on August 6, 1806 .

At the same time as these events, Bacher had received an order from Napoleon to go to Frankfurt am Main with the ambassadors of the Rhine Confederation, where, according to the Rhine Confederation Act, the seat of the Confederation of the Rhenish states was chaired by their Prince Primate , the former Imperial Chancellor Karl Theodor von Dalberg should be set up. When he was transferred to Frankfurt am Main, Bacher received formal authentication from Napoleon for his diplomatic mission as French chargé d'affaires at the Confederation of Rhine. Bacher envisioned this loosely constructed alliance of states as an approach to be further developed: a tight consolidation of German states under a French protectorate, with a standing army, a written constitution and a common judicial system, with federal organs such as a supreme federal court and a federal assembly that was supposed to replace the former Reichstag . However, those expectations were disappointed, not least by Napoleon himself, who made no efforts in this direction. Otherwise, Bacher's expectations of his Frankfurt position were hardly met, because Napoleon appointed independent ambassadors as diplomatic representatives of France in individual states of the Rhine Confederation, who made Bacher ineffective in this respect. Bacher dealt to a large extent with special orders from his government, such as the determination and confiscation of the property of Heinrich Friedrich Karl vom and zum Stein when he had incurred the wrath of the French emperor in 1808. A further function of Bacher as chargé d'affaires for France in the Rhine Confederation was to supervise the establishment of the military contingents of the Rhine Confederation states prescribed in the Rhine Confederation Act, especially those of the smaller states. In 1809 he was commissioned to join the Grande Armée in Austria to serve as Directeur générale de la Police . In this function he was in charge of the Vienna police . He used his position in October 1809 to confiscate the files of the Reichshofrat and have them transported to Paris. At the end of 1809 he returned to Frankfurt am Main. At Bacher's request to be equal to his colleagues in rank through ennoblement , Napoleon appointed him Baron d'Empire on December 29, 1809 .

One of Bacher's last activities in the political service of his nation at the beginning of 1811 was the mission as imperial commissioner to take possession of the Principality of Salm and the Duchy of Arenberg-Meppen and to take the oath of service from the state officials working there to the French Emperor. In December 1810 he had already incorporated the area of ​​the Duchy of Oldenburg into the Empire. All these states of the Rhine Confederation had been illegally annexed by the French Senate by the First Empire in order to obtain a better basis for the enforcement of the continental barrier erected against Great Britain .

By letter of December 6, 1811, Foreign Minister Talleyrand dismissed Bacher from his post in Frankfurt. A successor was not named. In the period that followed, Bacher fell seriously ill. This was reported by a former colleague of Bacher at the court of the Grand Duchy of Frankfurt on November 10, 1813. Soon afterwards, some newspapers reported that Bacher had died on November 15, 1813 in Mainz.

literature

  • Friedrich Otto: Theobald Bacher, an Alsatian diplomat in the service of France (1748–1813). Strasbourg Contributions to Modern History, III. Volume, 1st issue, Herdersche Buchhandlung, Strasbourg 1910 ( digitized ).
  • Bacher (Théobald) . In: Biographie universelle ou dictionnaire de tout les hommes . Second volume, Brussels 1843, p. 7 ( Google Books ).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ France . In: Allgemeine Zeitung . JG Cotta'sche Buchhandlung, December 5, 1813, p. 1353 ( google.de ).
  2. ^ Uwe Schmidt: Southern Germany under the sign of the French Revolution. Citizen opposition in Ulm, Reutlingen and Esslingen . Research on the history of the city of Ulm, Volume 23, Stadtarchiv Ulm, Kohlhammer Verlag, Stuttgart 1993, ISBN 3-17-011705-X , p. 188
  3. ↑ Imperial and Kurpfalzbairisch privileged Allgemeine Zeitung , No. 291 of October 17, 1804, p. 1163 ( Google Books )
  4. ^ Note from the French chargé d'affaires, Mr Bacher, handed over to the Imperial Assembly in Regensburg (note dated August 1, 1806) , original text in French , websites in the documentarchiv.de portal , accessed on December 23, 2015
  5. ^ Leopold Auer: The deportation of the files of the Reichshofrat by Napoleon . In: Thomas Olechowski, Christian Neschwara , Alina Lengauer (eds.): Basics of Austrian legal culture. Festschrift for Werner Ogris on his 75th birthday . Böhlau Verlag, Vienna 2010, ISBN 978-3-205-78628-3 , p. 7 ( Google Books )
  6. ↑ France . In: Allgemeine Zeitung , JG Cotta'sche Buchhandlung, issue No. 339 of December 5, 1813, p. 1353 ( Google Books )
personal data
SURNAME Bacher, Théobald
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Bacher, Theobald Jakob Justinus
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French diplomat
DATE OF BIRTH June 17, 1748
PLACE OF BIRTH Thann , Alsace
DATE OF DEATH November 15, 1813
Place of death Mainz