The Swiss Exile in London. Space of Experience and Political Imaginations, 1798-1815 1

Project description Stefanie Göttel The Swiss Exile in London. Space of Experience and Political Imaginations, 1798-1815 1. Topic and scientific research question The Swiss exile from 1798 to 1815 in national historiography is still an unknown. This politically motivated emigration was triggered by the Helvetic Revolution, which, with military support from the French Republic, led the political elite of the Swiss Confederation to flee the country and for the first time created a unitary state. What has so far gone unnoticed in research is the fact that in 1813 émigés returned from exile to the political elite of Switzerland and initiated the Restoration phase of their home cantons. The terms “old-minded” (Altgesinnte), “(ultra-)conservatives”, “counterrevolutionaries” or “reactionaries” that are used to describe the elite of the Restoration do neither take into account the broad political spectrum nor the social heterogeneity of the actors in exile. This research project therefore aims to capture the political spectrum in exile, whose representatives have long been seen as (ultra-)conservative reactionaries and been juxtaposed to the supposedly progressive, liberal revolutionaries. The dichotomous thinking in supporters and opponents of the revolution draws an artificial line that ignores overlapping political ideas. The objective of the dissertation is to show the diversity that was to be found in the émigrés' political plans for the future and what role the migration movement played in the construction and transformation processes of the Swiss state and national identity until 1815. The intention is to break away from preconceived ideas about counterrevolution, restoration and conservatism and instead to get an understanding of the reaction to the revolution in its plurality. Accordingly, the still predominant binary thinking of liberalism vs. conservatism in historiography is to be deconstructed and instead the innovative potential of the counterrevolutionary camp from 1798 to 1815 to be emphasized. The focus of the PhD project lies on the Swiss emigration from 1798 to 1815, because it was generally equated with the counterrevolution. The émigrés – men and women alike – quickly built a network with actors of the European political diaspora in order to organize active resistance against the new regime at home. Many of the politically exiled who were in the service of a coalition power were not entirely averse to the ideals of the French Revolution and competed among themselves for political influence at the European courts. With this research I will demonstrate precisely this heterogeneity within the Swiss exile and the thus resulting diversity of political imaginations of the future. Therefore, it can be shown how the debate on the future existence of the Swiss Confederation was already taking place in exile circles before the Congress of Vienna, thus influencing decision-makers of the European powers. In exile the émigrés processed their experience of political exclusion and homelessness. In response to the revolutionary transformation processes, they formulated their own ideas of how the future Confederation should be organized in the post-war order. In doing so, they drew on a repertoire of elements form the Enlightenment as well as traditionalist ideas. This gives rise to the following research questions, which can be summarized in two larger thematic blocks: 1. general conditions: What are the networks and institutions used in exile? Which networks are expanded in the period from 1798 to 1815? What is the social and political background of the actors? With which political functionaries of the major European powers do the emigrés seek contact? What rivalries and coalitions result from this? 2. content / history of ideas: What political ideas about the future organization of the Swiss Confederation do the people living in exile have? From which past events do they develop a collective memory between 1798 and 1815? 1 Project description Stefanie Göttel 2. Current state of research Prompted by a 1985 conference on the forms of resistance to the French Revolution (Lebrun/Dupuy 1987), research in the past 30 years has become increasingly interested in the counterrevolutionary camp of the French Revolution. This triggered a scholarly debate on the ideology and political objectives of the counterrevolution, which made clear that any attempt to conceptualize anti-revolutionary resistance was bound to fail due to the heterogeneous profile of the actors (Middell 1990, 1994; Martin 2011; Caron/Luis 2015). This becomes particularly clear in the image of the revolutionary enemy, the French émigré – the politically opponent, anti-reform nobleman plotting from abroad against the objectives and the state system of the young republic and who, in 1814/15, triumphantly returned to the top of the restored state. Since the second half of the 20th century, historians on the French emigration have increasingly distanced themselves from this stereotypical portrayal (Greer 1951; Diesbach 1975). Instead, the latest research emphasizes the heterogeneity of this emigration group – be it in its social origins, ideological orientation or political activity (Carpenter 1999; Burrows 2000; Rance 2010; Pestel, 2015). This research corrects the existing binary understanding of liberalism vs. conservatism, whose origin lies in the dichotomy of revolution vs. counterrevolution. These are categorizations under which 19th and early 20th century historians retrospectively divided actors into two camps that never existed in reality. The criticism of these categories is accompanied by a reassessment of the Restoration period (1815-1830), which has its roots in the political emigration and has therefore been pejoratively equated with counterrevolution and conservatism. In Swiss historiography, Irène Herrmann leads the current debate on a re-evaluation of the Restoration, which is generally regarded as conservative (Herrmann 2015, 2016). In contrast to the older historiography, she points out that the restoration provided the basis for a political renewal of the Swiss Confederation, equally through modern political theories and traditionalist ideas. Before the outbreak of the Helvetic Revolution in 1798, French emigrants first came to Geneva, then to Fribourg and Bern. They made contact with the political elite of the Corpus helveticum and these connections continued to exist in exile from 1798 to 1815 (Andrey 1972; Pestel 2015, 299-339). Thus, the research on the French Revolution and emigration provides important references for the present project. Furthermore, new historical studies on early modern foreign relations of the old Confederation repeatedly underline the importance of the European great powers for state independence and the formation of a national consciousness (Holenstein 2014; Arni/Leimgruber/Mathieu/Studer/Tissot 2015; Humair 2018; Holenstein/Kury/Schulz 2018; Veyrassat 2018). So far, there are only isolated studies that deal with partial aspects of the Swiss exile. For the most part, however, they concentrate on patriotic-revolutionary actors such as the educator Frédéric-César de La Harpe (1754-1838) at the Russian court (Tosato-Rigo 2018, 2019) and other patriots from the canton Vaud who intervened with the Tsar at the Congress of Vienna to preserve their homeland (Meuwly 2017; Rapin 2017), or Genevan revolutionaries who went into political exile in Great Britain as early as 1782, some of whom had to flee again in 1798 (Whatmore 2019). The research mentioned above provides important information about actors and existing networks in exile that were reactivated in the period between 1798 and 1815. 3. Description of the primary sources Among the actors to be examined in this project are primarily the émigrés. These include those persons who had left their home country for political reasons and whose return was only possible when the political conditions in the Swiss cantons changed. Excluded from this are emigration movements to America or Russia, which also took place during the period under study. Following current research, the term émigré is extended (Jansen 2018, 500f.; Pestel 2017, paras. 3- 2 Project description Stefanie Göttel 20) to include those persons who had taken up employment in a foreign country before the outbreak of the Helvetic Revolution and who then became part of the exile space in 1798. These are, for example, mercenary soldiers such as Eugène de Courten (1771-1839) or bankers such as Jean (James) Galiffe (1776-1853), who, as “channels of communication”, played an important role in the circulation of political ideas, since most émigrés had broken off contact with their homeland relatives. Finally, politicians (British prime ministers and parliamentarians such as Lord Grenville, 1759-1834), diplomats (William Wickham, 1761-1840, or Stratford Canning, 1786-1880) and agents of the European alliance powers are also considered part of the exile, because the Swiss émigrés served them as political advisors and recognized them as their representatives in a diplomatic sense. This results in source material of different provenance: firstly, officially produced files on emigration, i.e. archival documents stored in the Swiss Federal Archives, consisting of émigré-lists as well as legal texts and the correspondence of cantonal governors, files from the department of justice and police, which monitored the emigration and took measures against it; secondly, correspondence, personal testimonies, memoirs and pamphlets from family

Load more