A lock between Bavaria and Austria, Braunau fell without a fight in October 1805. There, on 26 August 1806, the German bookseller Johann Philipp Palm was shot — the first martyr of the German national awakening.

Historical context

Braunau am Inn commands the crossing of the Inn, the border between Bavaria and Austria. In October 1805, after the capitulation of Ulm, the fortress was evacuated and handed to the French almost without a shot. It became a rear base for the march on Vienna: depots, hospitals, military courts. Napoleon passed through and dated several orders there.

The following year a Nuremberg bookseller named Johann Philipp Palm distributed an anonymous pamphlet entitled Germany in her Deep Humiliation, denouncing the French occupation and calling on the German princes to resist. Palm was not its author; he refused to name him. Arrested on a denunciation, he was taken to Braunau and tried by a military commission.

The trial lasted a few hours, with no real defence. He was shot on 26 August 1806, aged thirty-eight, leaving a wife and four children. The order came directly from Napoleon, who wanted an example: censorship of German printing, until then uneven, became a matter of state.

The calculation backfired completely. Palm's death circulated in engravings, poems and sermons; it fed the generation of 1813, that of the Tugendbund and the Prussian volunteers. A provincial bookseller shot in a small town on the Inn did more for the German national idea than many manifestos. Braunau shows the imperial machine at its harshest — and its most counterproductive.