Constantin Siegwart-Müller
Constantin Siegwart-Müller (10 October 1801 – 13 January 1869), Swiss statesman, was one of the leaders of the Catholic political movement in 19th century Lucerne and played an important role during the Sonderbund War of 1847.
Contents
Biography
Siegwart-Müller was born at Lodrino in Ticino, where his father was a craftsman. In 1826, he received the land rights of Uri and became State Advocate in 1827. In 1832, he moved to Lucerne and acquired the citizenship of Oberkirch. In Lucerne, Siegwart-Müller became state clerk in 1834 and later grand councillor. In the 1830s, he joined the conservative party of Josef Leu and was therefore removed as state clerk. In 1841, he managed to get back into the Grand Council as a conservative representative and finally became a member of the government, Schultheiß of Lucerne and in 1844 president of the Federal Diet. In 1845, he was accepted as an honorary member of the AV Semper Fidelis.
Siegwart-Müller considered a confrontation between the radical liberal and the conservative Catholic cantons of Switzerland inevitable. He actively pursued the escalation of the cantons' disputes and, as chairman of the War Council of the Sonderbund, contacted the Austrian Chancellor Metternich, whom he wanted to persuade to intervene on the conflict.
The defeat of the Sonderbund in 1847 drove Siegwart-Müller into exile in Austrian Lombardy, then to Innsbruck. In 1857 he returned to Switzerland and lived in Altdorf until his death in 1869, where he published his memoirs between 1863 and 1866.
Works
- Ratsherr Josef Leu von Ebersol (1863)
- Der Kampf zwischen Recht und Gewalt in der Schweizerischen Eidgenossenschaft und mein Antheil daran (1864)
- Der Sieg der Gewalt über das Recht in der Schweizerischen Eidgenossenschaft (1866)
References
- Butler, Michael, Malcolm Pender, Joy Charnley, ed., (2000). The Making of Modern Switzerland, 1848-1998. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
- Knonau, Gerold Meyer von (1982). "Siegwart, Constantin". In: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB). 34. Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, pp. 206–12.
- Lerner, Marc H. (2012). "War, Accommodation and the Making of the Modern Constitutional State". In: A Laboratory of Liberty: The Transformation of Political Culture in Republican Switzerland, 1750-1848. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, pp. 289–320.
- Remak, Joachim (2019). A Very Civil War: The Swiss Sonderbund War of 1847. New York: Routledge.
- Zimmer, Oliver (2003). A Contested Nation: History, Memory and Nationalism in Switzerland, 1761-1891. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
