Eulogius Schneider

Eulogius Schneider (baptized as: Johann Georg; October 20, 1756 – April 1, 1794) was a Franciscan friar, professor in Bonn and Dominican in Strasbourg.

Johann Georg Schneider was born as the son of a wine grower and his wife in Wipfeld am Main, a place which belonged to the Prince-Bishopric of Würzburg (a Hochstift, an area ruled by a prince-bishop during the Holy Roman Empire).

The young Schneider began learning Latin at the nearby Heidenfeld Monastery with the canon Valentin Fahrmann.

Because Schneider supported the ideas of the Enlightenment, there was soon discord with the lord, who threatened to send the court chaplain back to the monastery.

However, in 1789, his countryman, Thaddäus Trageser, found him a position as a professor for literature and fine arts at the University of Bonn.

In the following year, he emerged as an author of books which aroused massive protest among the clerics of the Archbishopric of Cologne, to which the university in Bonn belonged.

After Schneider's employer, Archduke Maximilian Franz of Austria first tried to avoid a conflict and refused a petition for release of the Nuncio at Cologne, Bartolomeo Pacca, he finally reacted with a ban on sales.

In the course of his increasing radicalization, he was the leader of the surveillance and security committee and the civil commissioner and prosecutor at the Revolutionary Tribunal.

A few hours after his wedding, Schneider was arrested on December 15 on the orders of Saint-Just and Lebas, the commissioner of the National Convention and "Representative on Extraordinary Mission" for Alsace, and he was executed by guillotine on the Strasbourg "Parade Ground".

The reason: Schneider, "former priest and born subject of the (German) Kaiser had driven into Strasbourg with excessive splendor, drawn by six horses, surrounded by guardsmen with bare sabres".

Schneider's execution must be seen in the context that the Committee of Public Safety around Maximilien Robespierre had to make concessions to the bourgeoisie, after it had liquidated the girondists and the "right" circles of their Mountain party around Georges Danton, and now also had to take action against the social-revolutionary sans-culottes, of whom Schneider was considered to be an advocate.

In addition, Schneider was deemed suspicious in view of his cosmopolitanism, which corresponded to the political positions of the gironde in this respect.

Moshua Salomon, Jewish tradesman: The citizen Schneider was a true patriot and cosmopolitan, a man of principles.

If he had not held his hand protectively above us and defended our newly-acquired civil rights again and again, I and my Jewish co-citizens would have fared quite badly in the time of terror.

Not a few of the sworn enemies of Judaea, of whom there were all too many in Alsace, wanted to commend us to the "promenade à la guillotine"; the very least would have been our expulsion and deportation, against which the citizen Schneider raised his voice again and again.