Eugène Ricklin

Eugène Ricklin was born in Dannemarie (German: Dammerkirch) from a sundgauvian hotelier father and an Alsatian mother, Catherine Kayser.

From a young age, he showed a great interest in justice and defence of the common man, and was already noticed at 29 years old when it was suggested to him he might join the municipal council of his home town.

He was relieved of his duties as mayor in 1902 following a complaint about an insult to the Kaiser and as a sanction for having claimed the status of Bundesstaat (federal state) for Alsace-Lorraine.

The Landtag of Alsace-Lorraine has been the only parliamentary institution in Alsatian history, elected by universal suffrage and representing the region as a whole, and succeeded the only indirectly-elected, partly appointed Landesausschuss.

During the war, he was charged and transferred to northern France because he strenuously defended his friend Médard Brogly who had been accused of being francophile by a German military court.

At the end of the war, he saw that the full autonomy granted by the Germans in 1918 had arrived too late and, on the abdication of the Kaiser, formed the Nationalrat (National Council) to try to save Alsatian political gains by means of negotiation with the French.

He found himself in a minority, and a major part of the Zentrum parliamentarians, with the Social Democrats, didn't want to provoke France and opted to rely on the promises of the French generals such as Joffre.

So, they tried by all means to eliminate him from the political scene so as to give themselves a free hand in their policy of francization, which had already been prepared in Paris during the war years.

In spite of the protest of every mayor and priest of Dannemarie and the French-speaking communes which he always defended during the German period, he was only permitted to return in November 1919, after the parliamentary elections in which he was prevented from standing.

Ricklin was triumphantly welcomed back to the whole of his native Sundgau where the people joined forces behind him, to the point of electing him again to the conseil général in October 1928.

The French government tried again to block them, working for the invalidation of the mandate of the deputies Rossé and Ricklin, on the pretext that the presidential pardon had not granted their complete civic rights.