Switzerland

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SWITZERLAND

the french revolution and napoleonic era
1815 to 1848
economic development in the nineteenth century
democratization and the constitution of 1874
switzerland on the eve of world war i
bibliography

In 1789 Switzerland was a loose confederation of small valleys—some independent, some not—and sovereign cities with surrounding territories. They called themselves "Republics" but not in the same sense that the word republic has in the early twenty-first century. For example, the Republic of Geneva was an aristocratic oligarchy of wealthy families, corrupt and undemocratic but, by the standards of eighteenth century Europe, "free." Independent, Protestant, and French-speaking, it published texts forbidden in Catholic France. Only a quarter of the population were "citizens" with full rights. The rest were either habitants (inhabitants) or natifs (native-born but without rights). All Swiss cities had similar constitutions.

At the eastern end of the sprawling confederation was Graubünden (the Gray Leagues), composed of several hundred sovereign village communities, which debated foreign and domestic affairs in village assemblies. South of the Alps lay the territories of Italian-speaking Switzerland around the valley of the river Ticino. Ticino before 1789 was a subject territory of the thirteen cantons of the so-called Old Confederation. In 1796, the Bern aristocrat Karl-Viktor von Bonstetten reported that Ticino suffered from bad government and that "in no corner of Europe, no matter how dismal, has torture raged so wildly as in Italian Switzerland," (Bonstetten, p. 140).

The European Romantics saw none of that. Nikolai Karamzin, in his Letters of a Russian Traveler, 1789–1790, expressed the early Romantic vision of Switzerland as a picturesque paradise: "What views! What scenes!… Happy Swiss! Dwelling in sweet nature's embrace, under beneficent laws of brotherly union, with simple ways, serving God." (Ely, p. 49). Switzerland, with its mountains and sturdy peasants, became a symbol of the perfect society. Friedrich Schiller's drama Wilhelm Tell (1804) immortalized this image of Swiss liberty, and Gioachino Rossini (1792–1868) turned the Schiller play into an opera, Guillaume Tell (1829), first performed in Paris on 3 August 1829. The Tell story has no historic basis but it became the "foundation myth" of modern Switzerland.

the french revolution and napoleonic era

In reality, Swiss peasants were far from "free." On 25 January 1798, French revolutionary troops crossed the borders of the Old Confederation to liberate them. The French imposed uniformity and centralization on a patchwork of ancient sovereignties. On 12 April 1798, "the One and Indivisible Helvetic Republic" was proclaimed. The Swiss were to be one people, in one unified state, governed from the center. The mountain communities of central Switzerland, however, refused. In September 1798, the tiny villages of Nidwald rose in revolt, proclaiming their ancient Catholic faith, their historic rights, and their hatred of new taxes imposed by what they saw as a puppet regime. By 1802 the protests had spread so widely that Napoleon had to intervene. On 19 February 1803, he imposed a modern, federal constitution on Switzerland, which restored the historic cantons but raised the former subject territories to full statehood.

The end of the Napoleonic Empire forced Switzerland to reorganize again. On 7 August 1815, the Swiss cantons (the name for the states in Swiss federalism) agreed on a new federal treaty.

There were now twenty-two sovereign states in the confederation, but they differed in their political systems: nine cities (Bern, Lucerne, Freiburg, Solothurn, Schaffhausen, Zurich, Basel, Neuchâtel, and Geneva) had old-fashioned patrician or guild constitutions; eight mountain cantons (Uri, Schwyz, Obwald, Nidwald, Glarus, Zug, Appenzell Inner Rhodes, and Appenzell Outer Rhodes) had traditional communal systems in which the adult males met in the open air to vote on the laws; and five former subject territories (Aargau, Thurgau, Vaud, St. Gall, and Ticino) had modern representative, democratic constitutions. There was no central government, but a con-federal diet at which the cantons legislated for the confederation. At the Congress of Vienna in March 1815, the victorious Great Powers declared that the perpetual neutrality of Switzerland served the interests of Europe, and from that time on the Swiss Confederation has remained absolutely neutral.

1815 to 1848

During the years 1815 to 1848, conservative regimes in Europe tried to suppress any hint of revolution. Switzerland with its "republics" posed a permanent threat to the reactionary system of European politics. Its various small states gave sanctuary to dangerous radicals, and its domestic radicals staged local revolutions. Prince Clemens von Metternich, the architect of European reaction, hated Switzerland. In 1845 he wrote, "Switzerland presents the most perfect image of a state in the process of social disintegration…. Switzerland stands alone today in Europe as a republic and serves troublemakers of every sort as a free haven," (Steinberg, p. 6).

The prince was particularly appalled by anti-Jesuit riots and by attacks on the Catholic Church. In 1841 the parliament in Protestant Aargau abolished monasteries and cloisters. Catholic Lucerne responded by entrusting the school system to the Jesuits, a provocative demonstration, which infuriated liberals in neighboring Aargau and Bern, who organized guerilla bands to try to overthrow the Lucerne conservative government. By 1847, civil war had broken out. A group of Catholic cantons formed a Sonderbund (special alliance), in violation of the federal constitution. The central government suppressed it by armed force. The fighting in the civil war lasted for twenty-six days and cost 150 soldiers on both sides their lives. The liberal victory outraged Metternich, and he would undoubtedly have intervened had revolution not broken out in 1848 all over Europe. He fled Vienna on 13 March 1848, and the Age of Metternich was over.

While European cities from Palermo to Warsaw saw violence and revolution, the Swiss transformed their constitution after their civil war into an American-style federal government. The U.S. Constitution of 1787 differed fundamentally from the Swiss Constitution of 1848 in two respects: the American system came from above, designed by the upper classes to protect their privileges and to maintain order against threats from below. The Swiss system grew from the bottom up and its main goal was to protect the rights of the sovereign communities. An American gets his or her citizenship from the U.S. government; a Swiss gets such rights from his or her "community of origin." The second difference lies in the peculiar Swiss dislike of one-person executives. At every level of Swiss government there are councils: communal councils, cantonal councils, and even a federal executive council. Thus the Swiss president is actually a committee (Federal Council) of seven persons elected not by the people but by the upper and lower houses of parliament meeting in joint session.

economic development in the nineteenth century

Switzerland entered a more peaceful period in the nineteenth century, helped by the great economic boom between 1850 and 1873. From the early middle ages on, the Swiss were dedicated to commerce. In the late eighteenth century, the tiny city-republic of St. Gall (total population under eight thousand) had sixty substantial mercantile houses dealing in cotton, muslin, and embroidery. About one hundred thousand spinners, weavers, calico printers, and embroiderers worked for city companies on spinning wheels in their peasant cottages. In the 1850s and 1860s, railroads, water power, and machinery transformed Swiss manufacturing. By the 1880s, Basel, with 60,550 inhabitants, had become the richest city in Switzerland, the capital of a new industrial chemical industry. Watchmaking spread in French-speaking western Switzerland. Zurich specialized in cotton; St. Gall in embroidery. Throughout the nineteenth century, Switzerland was one-fifth richer than Belgium, France, and the Low Countries and was second only to the United Kingdom in gross national product per head. The Nationalzeitung described Basel as a place where "money is the surrogate for talent, diligence, honor, virtue." The same could have been said of every Swiss city.

On the eve of World War I, Switzerland was enjoying the fruits of a sustained economic boom. Population doubled between 1800 and 1910. The new, larger population had abandoned the small communities for the great cities. In 1850, only 6 percent of the Swiss lived in towns with more than ten thousand inhabitants; by 1914, 26 percent. By 1914, imports amounted to 1.92 million Swiss francs, or 46 percent of the net national product, and exports at 1.38 million Swiss francs represented 33 percent, a level of dependence on the international economy not reached again until the 1950s. Textiles made up 48 percent of exports in the years 1912 to 1913. Working wages were roughly twice as high in 1910 as they had been in 1875. The flourishing economy attracted foreign workers, a problem that reappeared after 1945. In 1914, 17 percent of the inhabitants of Switzerland were "foreign." The Federal Office of Statistics (FOS) calculated the number of foreigners in 1910 at approximately 552,000. It took fifty years to reach that level again.

democratization and the constitution of 1874

During the 1860s and 1870s, the new wealth, the new poverty, and the emergence of a new industrial working class led to demands for more rights. The Liberals who made the settlement of 1848 were no democrats. They thought that persons without property had no independence and hence would degenerate into a mob. To their left, a radical movement grew up, and to their right, Catholics began to consider universal suffrage. Philipp Anton von Segesser (1817–1888), a Catholic nobleman from Lucerne, put it this way: "we of the conservative camp must put ourselves onto an entirely democratic basis. After the collapse of the old conditions nothing else can provide us with a future and a justification except pure democracy." Swiss politics moved toward ever more direct participation, which meant not just universal suffrage but popular referenda and initiatives (i.e., in which citizens propose legislation to parliament). As always, the cantons acted first. In December 1867, the radicals in Zurich succeeded in calling a constitutional convention, which gave the canton a new democratic constitution. It provided for direct election of all officials and agencies, the right to introduce legislation by popular initiative, and laws to protect workers. The movement spread, and on 19 April 1874, the Swiss approved a new constitution that included a provision for initiatives on national legislation and that strengthened the central government at the expense of the cantons. In 1891, Dr. Joseph Zemp, a Catholic from Lucerne, became the first Roman Catholic member of the Federal Council, the collective presidency. Old wounds from the religious wars had begun to heal.

switzerland on the eve of world war i

By 1914, Switzerland had assumed its modern form: the home of a unique direct democracy, where local communities remained as important as the federal state, where parties shared power in collective, multi-party stability, and where every adult male served in the militia army and the country maintained armed neutrality. Tourists had replaced the Romantic poets; wealthy visitors enjoyed spectacular scenery and expensive hotels and bought Swiss watches, chocolate, and fine cutlery. Linguistic divisions remained a potential source of friction. Of the total population in 1910 of 3,375,300, the FOS calculated that 72.7 percent spoke German, 22.1 percent French, 3.9 percent Italian, and 1.2 percent Rhaeto-Romansch. World War I between Imperial Germany and the Third French Republic threw comfortable, stable Switzerland into a crisis. Suddenly, the Swiss divided across a linguistic line called the Graben (trench) between German speakers and French speakers, a division that continues to plague Swiss daily life into the twenty-first century.

The "long nineteenth century" had transformed the Helvetic Confederation, but it had preserved its peculiar variant of political liberty: "Swiss liberty," which expressed an idea of democracy from the bottom up. At the same time, this democracy represented groups more so than individuals. Neither the constitution of 1848 nor that of 1874 contained an American-style Bill of Rights. Switzerland in 1910 had a number of enclaves and exclaves, bits of territory that belong to one canton but that remain obstinately lodged in the territory of another, or bits of foreign states surrounded by Swiss territory. This oddity, the last remnant of the old Holy Roman Empire from which Switzerland emerged, guarantees the sovereignty and wishes of often very tiny communities. The passage from the Old Regime to modern society protected the rights of small communities to be different. It took seventy-one years, 1798 to 1869, for Canton Ticino to introduce the metric system. Nothing could be more Swiss than that.

See alsoFrance; Germany; Italy.