Johann Philipp Palm

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Johann Philipp Palm (17 November 1768–26 August 1806), German bookseller, a victim of the tyranny of Napoleon I of France over the former Holy Roman Empire.

He was born at Schorndorf, in Württemberg. Having been apprenticed to his uncle, the publisher Johann Jakob Palm (1750-1826), in Erlangen, he married the daughter of the bookseller Stein in Nuremberg, and in the course of time became proprietor of his father-in-law's business.

In the spring of 1806, the firm of Stein sent to the bookselling establishment of Stage in Augsburg a pamphlet (presumably written by Philipp Christian Yelin in Ansbach) entitled Deutschland in seiner tiefen Erniedrigung ("Germany in her deep humiliation"), which strongly attacked Napoleon and the behaviour of the French troops in Bavaria. On learning of the violent attack made upon his régime and failing to discover the actual author, Napoleon had Palm arrested and handed over to a military commission at Braunau on the Bavarian-Austrian frontier, with peremptory instructions to try the prisoner and execute him within twenty-four hours. Palm was denied the right of defence, and after a mock trial on the 25th of August 1806, he was shot the following day.

A life-size bronze statue was erected to his memory in Braunau in 1866, and on the centenary of his death, numerous patriotic meetings were held in Bavaria.

It was to Palm that the poet Thomas Campbell was referring when he gave his famous (and possibly apocryphal) toast to Napoleon at a literary dinner. When this caused uproar, he admitted that Napoleon was a tyrant and an enemy of their country, "But gentlemen! He once shot a publisher."