Johann Philipp Palm

Who was Johann Philipp Palm?

Johann Philipp Palm or Johannes Philipp Palm was a German bookseller executed during the Napoleonic Wars.

He was born at Schorndorf in Württemberg. Having been apprenticed to his uncle, the publisher Johann Jakob Palm, 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 Stein publishing house sent to the bookselling establishment of Stage in Augsburg a pamphlet entitled Deutschland in seiner tiefen Erniedrigung, which strongly attacked Napoleon and the behaviour of the French troops in Bavaria. On learning of the violent rhetorical attack made upon his régime and failing to discover the actual author, Napoleon had Palm arrested in 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 25 August 1806, he was shot the following day without having betrayed the pamphlet's author.