Johann Müller was born at Coblentz, on July 14, 1801. About six months before, the Emperor of Austria by the treaty of Luneville, signed February 9, 1801, ceded to the French Republic all the Austrian possessions on the left bank of the Rhine. The electors of Treves, who were archbishops and reigning princes and who had resided for centuries at Coblentz, by this treaty disappeared forever from the list of German rulers. When Johann Müller was born, French prefects of the Departments of the Rhine and Moselle took up their residence in the old town which had been, since the beginning of the French Revolution, a favorite dwelling place for the French nobility driven from their homes by fear of persecution. Müller's father was a shoemaker and lived in a small house in the street of the Jesuits, so called because the fathers had had a school in it for many years. Johann was {223} not destined to receive his education from the Jesuits, however, for the order had been suppressed nearly thirty years before his birth, and did not re-establish itself in the Rhineland for many years afterward. The circumstances of the Müller family were not such as to encourage hopes of a broad education, though his father seems to have taken every possible means to secure as much school training as could be obtained for his son. The early death of his father promised to deprive Müller of whatever advantages might have accrued from family sacrifices, but his mother was one of these wonderful women who somehow succeed in raising their families well and affording their children an education in spite of untoward circumstances. Johann was the eldest of five children, with two sisters. He was very proud himself of the fact, that while he took from his father a large, strong, healthy frame and a dignified carriage, he had his mother's skill for putting things in order, her constancy of enterprise and her tireless faculty for hard work. After his father's death, his mother's energy and good sense enabled her to carry on the business established by the elder Müller by means of assistants, and as Coblentz was the centre of a district that during the Napoleonic wars was constantly overrun with soldiery, the shoemaking trade was profitable.