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Switzerland: Historical
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| Reformation and Religious Conflicts (1516 - 1798) |
| The Reformation, which began in Germany in the early sixteenth century and spread across Europe, was sparked in Switzerland by Huldrych Zwingli, a lay priest in Zurich. City after city overthrew its ecclesiastical overlords in favour of the new Protestantism: St Gallen, Basel, Biel/Bienne, Schaffhausen and, in 1528, Bern. In each place, the urban guilds were the motive force behind the overthrow, and once Catholicism had been ejected, each city government gained new power and authority over the countryside surrounding it, fuelling rural resentment. When Zwingli promulgated the controversial notion of reorganizing the Confederacy under the twin city leadership of Zurich and Bern, many Catholics from small towns and villages in central Switzerland in particular resisted strongly, feeling both their religious faith and their political voice to be under threat. Conflict broke out in 1531, in which Zwingli was killed and the Catholic forces won the right to veto in the Diet – Swiss Parliament – what they considered anti-rural policies. Nonetheless, the Reformation continued to spread: in 1530, Geneva along with Neuchatel, Lausanne and the Vaud countryside accepted the Reformation. At the same time, with the support of Spain – a major world power – the Catholic cantons retained their religious identity within the Confederation (although in 1597 Appenzell split into two half-cantons, one Protestant and one Catholic), but they increasingly nurtured an inferiority complex towards the Protestant cities, which held a grip on political authority and the economy. |
| Revolution (1798 - 1848) |
| The impact in Switzerland of the French Revolution of 1789 was enormous. The Confederation itself remained neutral in the battles that followed, but popular revolutionary demonstrations throughout Vaud and Zurich acted as a prelude and a spur to a full-scale French invasion in 1798 by armies under Napoleon. Revolution swept through the country. In Ticino, Aargau and the lower Valais, the old patrician establishment was swept away; urban residents of Basel, Zurich and Schaffhausen at a stroke won equality before the law; Vaud declared itself independent from Bern; and the brief burst of resistance to the French mounted in central areas was violently suppressed. On March 5, French forces entered Bern, marking the fall of the ancien régime in Switzerland. Within weeks, Napoleon promulgated a new constitution intended to replace the archaic patchwork of communities and privileges, Swiss decentralized authority and internecine mistrust that had prevailed since the Middle Ages. His brave new Helvetic Republic did away with cantons altogether and instead vested centralized power, French-style, nominally in the people but actually in a five-man executive. This showed just how drastically Napoleon underestimated the Swiss. A series of coup d’états attempting to end French domination prompted Napoleon to withdraw his troops from the country in short order in 1802. Civil war immediately broke out, and Napoleon stepped in as arbitrator, this time prudently urging the Swiss themselves to come up with a constitution. This short-lived Mediation, as it was called, restored the notion of autonomous cantons, and in addition conferred full cantonal status on six areas previously under joint administration: St Gallen, Graubünden, Aargau, Thurgau, Ticino and Vaud, meanwhile giving the country the new title of the Swiss Confederation, a name it bears today. |
| Reconciliation (1848 - 1918) |
| The post-war Federal Constitution of 1848 – still in effect today – marked the birth of the modern Swiss state. It enshrined a host of liberal measures designed to limit severely conservative, patrician power and to permit continued expansion of industry and the economy. For the first time, Switzerland had a central government, with a parliament comprising two directly elected houses. With the background of revolutions breaking out alarmingly all over Europe during 1848, the radical liberals devised a constitution that was able to defuse the age-old Catholic fears of Protestant domination. They did so principally by dividing power between the center and the cantons, thereby allowing the majority Protestants and the minority Catholics to engage in democratic debate together, in the knowledge that each needed the other to survive. Devolution of power to self-governing cantons – federalism – allowed the retention of strong Catholic communities at the cantonal level and the creation of strong Protestant-led institutions at the national level. And, following 25 years of continued peace and consolidation, the formal adoption in 1874 of the referendum as the prime tool for consultation of the people – on matters of local, cantonal and national interest alike – ensured that politicians remained directly accountable to the electorate. With the mood of reconciliation after 1848, plus an ever-increasing flow of tourists exploring the newly fashionable Alps, the huge national celebrations of six hundred years of Swiss history in 1891, and the unveiling of the idealistic monument to William Tell in Altdorf in 1895, a new, specifically Swiss national identity began to develop. However, although the appeal of Swiss national unity was strong, the new mood of European nationalism threatened to split the country apart again. German Swiss looked towards the achievements of Germany, with its booming economy, military prowess and advanced social-welfare policies, and felt themselves to be part of it, distanced from their French-speaking compatriots. Similarly, French Swiss looked towards the cultural achievements of fin-de-siècle France, and saw their Swiss- German neighbours as foreign. Italian-speaking Swiss in particular felt the arbitrary international border between them and the "rest" of Italy, its culture and literature, to be increasingly absurd. More even than at the height of religious conflict in centuries past, at the dawn of the twentieth the Swiss had stopped talking to each other. |
| Neutrality and World War II (1918 - 1945) |
| The rise in power of a socialist-minded proletariat immediately after the war prompted a correspondent rise in the old forces of Catholic conservatism, as well as in rural farmers, who quickly won a place on the Federal Council alongside the urban Radicals. At the same time, Switzerland began to take the first overt steps away from its traditional absolute neutrality, voting in 1920 to join the League of Nations – which was headquartered in Geneva – and yet insisting on an exclusion clause that permitted Swiss adherence to an ill-defined partisan neutrality. The contradiction remained untested until 1935, when the League imposed economic sanctions on fascist Italy after the invasion of Abyssinia: Switzerland could not bring itself to punish Italy, and withdrew from the League in favour of a return to absolute neutrality. As elsewhere, the economic bubble of the 1920s burst in the early 1930s, with a crippling depression halving output, decimating incomes and causing huge unemployment. At the same time, cosy domestic political coalitions were breaking down under the influence of proportional representation, which brought a myriad of economic and political interest groups into parliament. After Hitler's rise to power in Germany in 1933, sympathetic Nazi "fronts" emerged, gathering support nationwide from right-wing conservatives and hard-hit petty bourgeois merchants who together proposed a root-and-branch revision of the Federal Constitution. But both a devaluation of the franc in 1936 (which boosted Swiss industry in the run-up to war) and a new partnership of liberals and social democrats – who, in the face of spreading fascism, had together consciously abandoned the ideal of class war – were effectively able to sideline these authoritarian movements in favour of continued democratic debate. As war became more and more likely during the late 1930s, the country bolstered its own national institutions, affirming the status of Romansh as a national language, authorizing widespread official usage of Swiss-German as a distancing measure from the High German of the Third Reich, and showcasing homegrown achievements at a National Exhibition in 1939. In addition, it readied its economy and industry for war, passing a series of laws to protect individual earnings should mobilization become necessary, and introducing anonymous numbered bank accounts to protect the savings of German Jews from seizure by the Nazis. Part: 1 2 |
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