" Here were born the abbot WETTERLE, great patriot and French representative. 1861-1931 ".

This patch appears on a house, 20, avenue of the Republic in Colmar. After studies of theology, notably in the Var, in Strasbourg and in Innsbruck, Emile Wetterlé was ordered priest in 1885 and was a private tutor during five years at a viscount in Isère.

While by becoming then a vicar in the parish worker Saint Joseph of Mulhouse, in September, 1890, it took taste in the journalism and in the politics. He published an anonymous brochure at first then created a catholic daily before dashing into the election campaign of 1893.

After the defeat, he took the direction of the " Newspaper of Colmar " and was elected councillor in the canton of Colmar in 1897, then delegated in Reichstag of the district of Ribeauvillé one year later.

He defended the idea of a liberal Alsatian party and worked at a vast union of the Alsatians-inhabitants of Lorraine to obtain autonomy.

From the statement of First World war, WETTERLE hurried to leave Alsace to participate actively in war propaganda of France.

 The inconvenient shooting forced her political friends stayed in Alsace to deny him publicly by excluding him from fraction Alsatian-Lorraine of Reichstag and from centrist fraction of Landtag.

In 1924, he had to give up a new candidature in the mission because of the hostility of a great majority of the republican popular Union.

 It was then named ecclesiastical to the embassy of France with the Holy See, function that it exercised until its death in 1931.