INTRODUCTION from 1750 to 1848, the Swiss Transformed Their Polity

INTRODUCTION

From 1750 to 1848, the Swiss transformed their polity from a decen- tralized confederation of sovereign cantons to a modern federal state. Th is was a process driven by the creation of a new political culture centered around republican ideas, changing understandings of liberty and self-rule, as well as pragmatic political responses to European cul- tural transformations. In the second half of the eighteenth century, Swiss political thinkers and pragmatic actors debated and reassessed the nature of political authority in Switzerland, while in the fi rst half of the nineteenth century, Swiss citizens worked out how to implement this new understanding of political authority. Because of the lack of a strong central government in the Swiss Confederation, there was space for profound political innovation and experimentation in the variety of republics at the cantonal level. Th is experimentation enables historians to view Switzerland as a living laboratory of political thought, one where ideas and political practices evolved along with those of the European Age of Revolution.1 In 1798, the creation of the short-lived Helvetic Republic toppled the Old Confederation and introduced into Swiss practice the revolutionary concepts of the political rights of the individual. In the context of revolutionary Europe, the unitary Helvetic Republic never stabilized, and in 1803 Napoleon imposed the Mediation Act to replace it. Th is quasi-revolutionary settlement of 1803 was upended aft er Napo- leon’s fall in 1815. Th e resulting contention between the supporters of

1 Andreas Würgler emphasizes the complexity, diversity and fl exibility of the Swiss Republics as the key factors in creating space for this political innovation and experimentation. Würgler, “ ‘Th e League of Discordant Members’ or How the Old Swiss Confederation Operated and How it Managed to Survive for so Long,” in Th e Republican Alternative: Th e Netherlands and Switzerland compared, eds. André Holenstein, Th omas Maissen, and Maarten Prak (Amsterdam, 2008), 29. Th ank you to an anony- mous reader for the phrase “living laboratory.” For other references to political labora- tories see also Timothy Ferris, Th e Science of Liberty: Democracy, Reason and the Laws of Nature (New York, 2010); Annie Jourdan, La Révolution, une exception française? (Paris, 2004); Th omas Maissen, “Inventing the Sovereign Republic: Imperial Structures, French Challenges, Dutch Models and the Early Modern Swiss Confederation,” in Th e Republican Alternative, 145. 2 introduction the old order and supporters of revolutionary innovations led to a tur- bulent Restoration period aft er the Congress of Vienna. During this period there was a major struggle between supporters of fundamen- tally diff erent visions of Switzerland: those who sought a restoration of the supposedly timeless Old Confederation and those who embraced a mindset that defended the rights of individuals and egalitarian (male) conceptions of popular sovereignty. Th e supporters of the old order never fully succeeded in their attempts to turn back the clock, but ten- sions remained behind the facade of Restoration stability. Aft er the July 1830 Revolution in Paris had disrupted the European settlement from Vienna, contention in Switzerland burst into the open and split the country. Leaders of “regenerated” cantons such as Zurich actively pursued liberal reform and wrote new cantonal constitutions, whereas conservative leaders in areas such as Schwyz fought against both federal and cantonal reforms. Aft er the Sonderbund War, a short civil war in 1847, and the introduction of the constitution of 1848, the Swiss Confederation established a national federal government based on popular sovereignty, the equality of all Swiss before the law, and the constitutional rights and liberty of the people.2 Th is constitution refl ected the rights-based political culture that emerged in Europe during the Age of Revolution.3 Moreover, Switzerland’s new constitution and national political culture also refl ected an accommodation with older customary notions and rhetoric of self-rule. Th e new constitution did not create a unitary radical state, but claimed to respect—to a degree—the traditions of those who sought continuity with the Old Confederation. Th is is not to suggest that the new constitution of 1848 established a Restoration, rather that it used the language of older forms to make a new political culture palatable. Th e 1848 Swiss constitution created a modern federal state and the beginnings of a voluntary

2 Articles 1, 4 and 5 of the Bundesverfassung der Schweizerischen Eidgenossenschaft / Constitution fédérale de la Confédération Suisse (12 September 1848) republished in Quellenbuch zur neueren Schweizerischen Verfassungsgeschichte: Vom Ende der alten Eidgenossenschaft bis 1848, ed. Alfred Kölz (Bern, 1992), 447–481. 3 I draw on Lynn Hunt’s defi nition of political culture as the common assumptions and implicit rules of society that shape collective intent and actions. Hunt, Politics, Culture and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley, 1984), 10. See also Keith Michael Baker, Inventing the French Revolution: Essays on French Political Culture in the Eighteenth Century (New York, 1990), 4. “Political culture is, in this sense, the set of discourses or symbolic practices by which these [political] claims are made.”