Caspar Decurtins

Caspar Decurtins (23 November 1855 – 30 May 1916) was a politician (Catholic-Conservative) from the Surselva region, up-river to the west of Chur in the Swiss canton of Grisons.

He is regarded as a leading pioneer of the European Social Catholicism movement.

Life Caspar Decurtins was born in Trun, a small village in the Romansh speaking western part of the canton. His father, Laurenz Christian Decurtins, was a physician and one of the local landowners. His mother, born Margaretha Katharina Latour, also came from a prominent family in the Vorderrhein (literally: "pre-Rhine") valley. The politician Caspar de Latour (1827-1861) was a paternal uncle.

He attended Gymnasium (secondary school) in Disentis and Chur, before moving to Germany in 1875 to conclude his university-level studies. He studied History, Art history and Civil Law at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München and Heidelberg University where after just three (half-year) terms He then spent a term at Strasbourg.

A principal focus of his contributions was in the area of social reform. He joined up with Georges Favon, the radical member from Geneva, to draft and argue for a motion supporting an international law for the protection of workers. His willingness to work with "the left" was believed to be out of keeping with his catholic ultramontane convictions, and attracted lively criticism from within his own party. He was also the driving force in the long running Cantonal Teaching Material Struggle which came to a head in 1900. He had arranged for the young priest, Maurus Carnot, to produce a volume of "Christian soul food" ("christliche Gesinnungsstoff") for the local schools school. It included a German translation of the story of Sigisbert of Disentis, an eighth century hermit credited with having founded what became Disentis Abbey. The book was introduced to the school replacing a German version of "Robinson Crusoe" which Decurtins dismissed as "lightweight" ("zu seicht"). Then, in 1899 a version of the Sigisbert story, "Sigisbert en Rezia", was produced in Romansh. However, Sigisbert came up against the modernising agenda of the education administrators in the cantonal capital, Chur, who had implemented a major school reform in 1890, following the precepts of the influential education reformers Johann Friedrich Herbart and Tuiskon Ziller. It turned out that the prescriptive cantonal reforms included Robinson Crusoe, internationally admired at the time for his civilising credentials. Decurtins led support for the Sigisbert text in a sustained campaign that culminated in a mass meeting in the public assembly place in the main square at Ilanz (in the local language, "plaz cumin"). 2,700 people gathered, including 27 school governors, demanding use of the Sigisbert text and, at the same time, a pay increase for the teachers. The cantonal government backed down. Sigisbert was restored to the curriculum and the teachers received a pay increase.

In 1889 Decurtins worked with his friend Georges Python over the establishment of a University at Fribourg along the Franco-German language frontier to the west of Bern, described by one source as the university's "spiritual father", and according to another, personally interviewing and recruiting a number of the university's first professors. Although he remained a member of the national parliament until 1904, the tide of election results nationally during the 1890s was moving increasingly against his catholic conservative group, and he himself embarked on a parallel career teaching at the university where he was a professor until 1914. As a university professor he taught art history and was noted for his dislike of "modernism".