The Evolution of States Part 39

The best general history of Switzerland available in English is Mr.

E. Salisbury's translation (1899) of the _Short History_ of Prof.

Dandliker. It has little merit as literature, but is abreast of critical research at all points. For the Reformation period, the older history of Vieusseux (Library of Useful Knowledge, 1840) is fuller and better, though now superseded as to early times. The work of Sir F.O. Adams and C.D. Cunningham on _The Swiss Confederation_, 1880 (translated and added to in French by M.

Loumyer, 1890), is an excellent conspectus, especially for contemporary Swiss inst.i.tutions. As regards the first half of the last century, Grote's _Seven Letters concerning the Politics of Switzerland_ (1847, rep. 1876) are most illuminating.

Of fuller histories there are several in French and German. The longer _Geschichte der Schweiz_ of Prof. Dandliker (1884-87) is good and instructive, though somewhat commonplace in its thinking.

Dierauer's _Geschichte der schweizerischen Eidgenossenschaft_ (1887), which stops before the Reformation period, is excellent so far as it goes, and gives abundant references, which Dandliker's does not; though his _Short History_ gives good bibliographies.

Zschokke's compendious _Des Schweizerlands Geschichte_ (9te Aufgabe, 1853) is lucid and very readable, but is quite uncritical as to the medieval period. That is critically and decisively dealt with in Rilliet's _Les Origines de la Confederation Suisse_, 1868, and in Dierauer.

In more than one respect, the political evolution of Switzerland is the most interesting in the whole historic field. The physical basis, the determinations set up by it, the reactions, the gradual control of bias, the creation of stability out of centrifugal forces--all go to form the completest of all political cases.[871] Happier than those of Greece, if less renowned, the little clans of Switzerland have pa.s.sed through the storms of outer and inner strife to a state of something like a.s.sured republican federation. And where old Greece and Renaissance Italy and Scandinavia have failed to attain to this even on the basis of a common language and "race," the Swiss Cantons have attained it in despite of a maximum diversity of speech and stock. As does j.a.pan for Asia, they disprove for Europe a whole code of false generalisations.

The primary fact in the case, as in that of Greece, is the physical basis. Like h.e.l.las, the Swiss land is "born divided"; and the first question that forces itself is as to how the Cantons, while retaining their home rule, have contrived to escape utterly ruinous inter-tribal strife, and to attain federal union. The answer, it speedily appears, begins with noting the fact that Swiss federation is a growth or aggregation, as it were, from a primary "cell-form." From the early confederation of the three Forest Cantons of Schwytz, Uri, and Unterwalden, a set of specially congruous units, led to alliance by their original isolation from the rest of Helvetia and their common intercourse through the Lake of Lucerne, came the example and norm for the whole. The primary influence of mere land-division is proved by the persistence of the cantonal spirit and methods to this day;[872] but the history of Switzerland is the history of the social union gradually forced on the Cantons by varying pressures from outside. That it is due to no quality of "race" is sufficiently proved by the fact that three or four languages, and more stocks, are represented in the Republic at this moment.

-- 1. _The Beginnings of Union_

In the union of the Forest Cantons, as in the rooting of several Swiss cities and the cultivation of remote valleys, the Church has been held to have played a constructive part. At the outset, according to some historians,[873] Schwytz and Uri and Unterwalden had but one church among them; hence a habit of congregation. But the actual records yield no evidence for this view, any more than for the other early dicta as to the racial distinctness of the people of the Forest Cantons, and their immemorial freedom. Broadly speaking, the early Swiss were for the most part serfs with customary rights. The first doc.u.mentary trace of them is in the grant by Louis of Germany to the convent at Zurich, in the year 853, of his _pagellus Uroniae_, with its churches, houses, serfs, lands, and revenues.[874] This did not const.i.tute the whole of the Canton; but it seems clear that the bulk of the population were in status serfs, though when attached to a royal convent they would have such privileges as would induce even freemen to accept the same state of dependence.[875] In the Canton of Schwytz, again, the people--there in larger part freemen--seem to have been always more or less at strife with the great monastery of Einsiedeln, founded about 946 by Kaiser Otto, and largely filled by men of aristocratic birth seeking a quiet life,[876] who held by the usual interests of their cla.s.s as well as their corporation.[877] It was a question of ownership of pastures, the main economic basis in that region; and the descendants of the early settlers were fighting for their subsistence. Unterwalden, finally (then known only as the higher and lower valleys, _Stanz_ or _Stannes_ and _Sarnen_ or _Sarnon_), was led in its development by Uri and Schwytz, each of which possessed some communal property, the former in respect of its beginnings as a royal domain, the latter in respect of the a.s.sociation of its freemen.

Whatever earlier combinations there may have been,[878] it is in the year 1291[879] that the first recorded pact was made between the three Cantons; and it arose out of their making a stand for their customary local rights as against the House of Hapsburg.[880] Uri had in 1231 been granted by King Henry VII of Germany, son of the emperor Frederick II, the cherished privilege of enrolment as an imperial fief, an act which in theory withdrew it from its former feudal subordination to the Count of Hapsburg; and in 1240 Frederick himself gave the same privilege to Schwytz.[881] On the unhinging of the imperial system after Frederick's death, the Hapsburgs, who even in his life had treated the Cantons as contumacious va.s.sals, fought for their own claims; whereupon in due course was formed the Pact of 1291. Thus the Swiss Confederation broadly began in the special strife which arose between the new order of higher feudal princes and the civic or rural communes on the disintegration of the Germanic empire in the thirteenth century.[882] The familiar story of William Tell and the oath-taking at Rutli or Grutli in 1308 appears to be pure myth. There is no historic mention till over a hundred years later of any such acts by the Austrian bailiff as that story turns upon, or of any strife whatever in 1308. A pact of confederation had actually been made seventeen years earlier than that date; and a new and rather more definite pact was made on the same general grounds in 1315; but the romance of 1308 remains entirely unattested, and it bears the plainest marks of myth.

The histories of J. von Muller, Zschokke, Vieusseux, and others of the first half of the nineteenth century, are vitiated as regards the early period by acceptance of the traditions; though the untrustworthiness of the Tell story had been pointed out as early as the year 1600 by Franz Guillimann of Fribourg, and again in the eighteenth century by Iselin, and by Freudenberger in his _Guillaume Tell: Fable danoise_, 1760. (See Dandliker's _Short History of Switzerland_, Eng. tr. 1899, pp. 53, 54.) A full and decisive examination of it will be found in Rilliet's _Les origines de la Confederation Suisse_, 1868. Compare Dierauer, _Geschichte der schweizerischen Eidgenossenschaft_, 1887, Buch ii, Kap. i, -- iii; c.o.x, _Mythology of the Aryan Nations_, ed. 1882, pp. 337-41, and the essay _William Tell_ in Baring-Gould's _Curious Myths of the Middle Ages_, 1888. Some very judicial attempts have been made to show that there is reason to think _some_ fighting occurred in 1308. See, for instance, the pamphlets _Le Grutli_ and _La querelle sur les traditions concernant l'origine de la Confederation Suisse_, by Prof. H. Bordier, in reply to Prof. Rilliet, 1869.

Dierauer, again, declines to go the whole way in negation, and stands for the view "not fable, but legend--on some basis of fact"

(as cited, i, 150). But even M. Bordier reduces Tell to a mere "somebody"; and every student surrenders the apple story, which is at least as old as the twelfth-century Danish version of it in Saxo Grammaticus.

M. Rilliet holds that the Swiss reproduction was not a local survival of the Teutonic myth, but a deliberate adaptation made in Lucerne from the abridgment of Saxo Grammaticus produced by a German monk, Gheysmer, about 1430 (_Les origines_, pp. 214-16, 327, 328). At Lucerne there was a local school of poetry of the kind then common in Holland; and the old ballad, which closely follows Saxo's tale, and which is the probable basis of the story as given in the later chronicles, seems to have been composed by way of securing for the Canton of Uri the main honours of the founding of the Confederation, which were being claimed by the sister Cantons.

Whatever be the basis, the Tell legend is finally untenable, and the tradition of an immemorial state of freedom in the Forest Cantons is abandoned even by the conservative critics. See Bordier, _La querelle_, p. 7. The only point on which a case against the criticism of M. Rilliet seems to be made out is as regards his view that the Forest Cantons were not colonised before the eighth century. As M. Bordier contends, the grant of Louis of Germany seems to describe a long-settled district. M. Rilliet also goes somewhat beyond the evidence in a.s.suming that Uri was mainly colonised under royal influence, Unterwalden by lay and ecclesiastical proprietors, and Schwytz by freemen (_Les origines_, pp. 20, 21).

The rise of a durable federation in the central Swiss group is thus a product of three main factors; the first being their primary physical union through the Lake of Lucerne, their common highway. But for this they would probably have been as hostile as were Uri and Glarus, which had fought from time immemorial.[883] Next was needed the chronic hostile pressure of an outside force, creating a common political interest. The septs of pre-Norman Ireland and England, and of the Scottish Highlands down till modern times, remained at strife long after Christianisation, because within their own country they were so free to struggle, and because the examples of forcible centralisation elsewhere were so remote and so hard to a.s.similate. But when the Forest Cantons emerge as such in history in the thirteenth century they are already menaced by a power which, without undertaking or compa.s.sing the toil of conquering them, habitually drives them to formal combination by its interference. Its continued pressure evolves the definite political agreement of 1315, after the victory of Morgarten, in which was made clear the special difficulty of conquering a race of mountaineers with the normal cavalry forces and armour-clad or servile infantry of medieval feudalism[884]--a difficulty which must rank as the third factor in the beginnings of Swiss independence.

Thus far the half-feudal, half-commercial city of Lucerne, though in touch with the Forest Cantons through the uniting lake, was their enemy, as being feudatory of the Hapsburgs; but as the chronic state of war was ruinous to its trade with Italy, and peculiarly hara.s.sing to all industry, the commercial element forced a coalition, and in 1332 Lucerne joined the Confederation as Fourth Canton. Now emerges in the affairs of the Confederation the element of civic cla.s.s strife, so familiar in the republics of Italy; for the accession of Lucerne is promptly followed in that city by a conspiracy of n.o.bles, which is put down by the help of the allied Cantons; whereupon the n.o.bles are exiled and a civic council set up, the Duke of Austria being unable to hinder. The same trouble arises in the case of Zurich, the next accession to the union. In the ordinary medieval course there had there arisen an oligarchic government of aristocratic citizens in place of the early dominion of the Abbess; and the city was made an imperial fief by Frederick II. On this basis it made commercial treaties in the manner then common among the cities of Germany, joining the Swabian, Rhenish, and South-German Leagues, and developing a large trade with Italy and Germany, and even a silk manufacture. At length the large craftsman cla.s.s revolted (1336) under the leadership of a dissentient patrician, Brun or Braun, who established a const.i.tution in which he as burgomaster held office for life, with a council of thirteen gildmasters and thirteen aristocrats, six of the latter being named by Brun. For the firm support of the gilds he duly paid them by laws checking foreign compet.i.tion in manufactured goods, and denying even to the rural population the right to manufacture. The dispossessed oligarchs kept up a raiding strife on the frontiers, till at length some who were permitted to return formed a conspiracy against the burgomaster, which he suppressed with slaughter. This leading to a league against the city among the Hapsburgs and the surrounding n.o.bles and the Cantons in treaty with them, Zurich pet.i.tioned to join the Forest Confederation, and was readily accepted (1351), finally triumphing by their help.

Zurich on its part enabled the Forest Cantons to protect themselves against Austria by conquering Glarus (1351), which offered little resistance, and was ranked as a protected territory under the Confederation. This now formed a compact territorial group save for the Canton of Zug, intervening between Lucerne and Zurich. As that could not defend itself against its neighbours, it joined their Confederation perforce (1352), being received as a full member. The same status was readily granted to the city of Berne, which, imperially enfranchised in 1218, had carried on a remarkable independent policy on Italian lines, acquiring territory from the decaying n.o.bles around by mortgage, purchase, and conquest, till in 1339 they combined against her. Succour was then given by the Forest Cantons, securing for Berne the victory of Laupen; and when in 1352 they invited her to join their union, her rulers accepted. So tepid, however, was still the spirit of union that at the Peace of Brandenburg in 1352, confirmed by that of Regensburg in 1355, Glarus and Zug consented to withdraw, returning for a time to the Austrian allegiance;[885] and the confederation of the remaining six Cantons was still one of the loosest cohesion, differing only in the fact of its territorial continuity and its organic growth from the many city-unions which flourished in Germany in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.[886] Only the three original Cantons were pledged to make no separate treaties; Zurich was specifically permitted to do so; in 1352 Berne was in alliance with the towns of Fribourg and Soleure; in the next generation Lucerne made a compact with the towns of Sempach and Richensee; and in 1393 a burgomaster of Zurich carried through a treaty of alliance with the common enemy, the Duke of Austria.

In this case the ma.s.s of the citizens were induced to reverse the policy and banish those who had planned it; but the right of the city to make such an alliance was not technically challenged by the Confederation; and even in Schwytz a few loyalists paid old feudal dues to Austria up till 1394. A more serious ground of division was the jealousy duly arising between the rural and the city Cantons, from which came about the forcible intervention of Schwytz in a dispute between the town and country sections of Zug. The remaining Cantons insisted on subjecting the action of both Zug and Schwytz to the verdict of the union, thus effectually establishing a precedent of federal practice; but in the first decade of the fifteenth century the Cantons of Schwytz and Glarus are found on their own account helping the men of Appenzell to win their independence; and when the successful Appenzellers, who had developed a turn for aggression and confiscation, sought to join the union, they were accepted only as allies by the Cantons individually, Berne holding aloof. Yet again, when the house of Austria (which had abandoned its claims on the Cantons in 1412) was under the ban of the Empire in 1415, and the city Cantons led a movement of attack upon its territories, Uri and the Appenzellers took no part; while in 1422 Uri and Unterwalden acted alone in their unsuccessful war with the Duke of Milan.

Thus far the Confederation, in its different degrees of union, had included only German-speaking Cantons; but in 1420 the French-speaking Valais (Ger. Wallis, from the Latin _Vallis Poenina?_ or foreigners), in 1424 Upper Rhaetia, and in the same year the Romance-speaking Engadin, also in Rhaetia, won their virtual independence. In all, three leagues were formed in Rhaetia, forming their own confederation, known as the Grisons (="the Greys," the _Graubunden_ or Grey Leagues, from the colour of the peasants' smocks).

As the sphere of self-government widened, new risks of strife arose. All the while the older Cantons, in particular the cities, had been acquiring lands in the feudal fashion; and in 1440 a general scramble for an inheritance in Rhaetia evolved first a war between Zurich on the one hand and Schwytz and Glarus on the other, and next a joint coercion of Zurich by all the other Cantons. This led to a fresh alliance between Zurich and Austria, and a new and exceptionally ferocious war, lasting for four years. Meantime Basle, a.s.sailed by the Armagnacs under the dauphin of France, was succoured by the union and received into alliance. Next came the Burgundian wars, whereafter, not without much friction and quarrelling over booty, Soleure (Solothurn) and Fribourg were taken into the union, and a new pact framed (1481), defining afresh the general law of the Confederation. Lastly, after the Swabian war, the last in which the Swiss had to defend themselves against German aggression, the cities of Basle and Schaffhausen, become self-governing, were received into the League; and in 1513 Appenzell followed. Thus was rounded the number of thirteen Cantons, which const.i.tuted the Swiss Confederation till the end of the eighteenth century. They were: Schwytz (which gradually gave its name to the whole people), Uri, Unterwalden, Zurich (the "Forest" group), Lucerne, Glarus, Zug, Berne, Fribourg, Soleure, Basle, Schaffhausen, and Appenzell. Aargau and Thurgau, conquered in the wars with Austria in 1415 and 1460, remained subject lands, the property of the allied Cantons; and the Valais and the Grisons remained outside the union as connections or _Zugewandte_, the League proper being restricted to German-speaking Cantons. It will be seen too that the territory of the Confederation remained a compact and connected ma.s.s; the Vaud, the Valais, Ticino, and the Grisons forming a long band of territory outside.

-- 2. _The Socio-Political Evolution_

The outstanding feature of the Swiss social evolution up to the end of the fifteenth century is the acquisition of munic.i.p.al estates by the chief cities, after the manner of those of Italy. The lead given by Berne was zealously followed by Zurich[887] and Lucerne, till nearly all the old feudal lordships around them had fallen into their hands by purchase, mortgage, or conquest; and by 1477 the Hapsburgs had not a rood of land left in all Helvetia, even the family castle being lost. It was impossible that the revenues thus acquired by the cities should fail in that age to enrich the patrician or ruling cla.s.s, no matter how revolutions might alter its membership. Herein lay one of the effective checks to the growth of the Confederation from 1513 onwards. The rural Cantons and the aristocratic governments of the cities were alike disinclined to enfranchise the rural populations they held in feudal subjection; and the status of the ma.s.s of the townspeople and subject peasantry, though probably better than in France and Germany, was that of men without political rights,[888] save those secured by feudal or civic custom.

Nor can it be said that in the pre-Reformation period the flourishing Swiss cities did much for culture; a main part of the explanation doubtless being (1) the chronic stress of war, which in such communities tended to be borne by all cla.s.ses alike.[889] When the Italian cities had produced Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio; when England had produced Chaucer; and France the _Roman de la Rose_, Villon, Joinville, Froissart, and Comines, Switzerland had a literature only of average German lyrics and a few average medieval chronicles. But the comparison will be quite misleading if it be not kept in mind (2) that the whole Swiss population up till 1500 never amounted to a million, and that the surplus males were being constantly drained off in the fifteenth century in military service outside of Switzerland. The conditions which made for military strength and independence were entirely unfavourable to culture. There remains, however, to be noted in the case of German Switzerland (3) the fundamental drawback of relative h.o.m.ogeneity of race. The one important aspect of "race" in sociology is as a statement of relative lack of intellectual variability; and this condition in modern Europe can be seen to exist only at certain periods, in the case of one or two peoples, chiefly the Germanic.

If the whole process of the renascence of civilisation be considered _seriatim_, it will be found that the growth took place primarily in virtue of degree of access to (_a_) the remains of Graeco-Roman culture and (_b_) to Saracen lore; and, secondarily, in virtue of degree of admixture of physical type in the different communities. Thus (1) the first great new-birth (before the age of the Renaissance so-called) took place in Italy, in a population already highly mixed at the end of the Roman period and repeatedly invaded thereafter by northern stocks, from Odoaker down to the Normans. The reviving Italian culture, being communicated northwards through the Church and otherwise, is next developed by (2) the highly-mixed population of France and (3) that of England after the Norman Conquest--the Welsh element being here prominent. At the same time the literary germination set up in (4) ancient Ireland, under stormy conditions, by the early missionaries of the Graeco-Roman Church, reaches after some centuries the Scandinavian peoples by way of the Hebrides and (5) Iceland, where, however, after a brilliant start, the evolution is arrested by the restrictive environment, the main body of Scandinavian life being too h.o.m.ogeneous (though constantly at strife) for any complex evolution. In the south, again, the populations of (6) Spain and Portugal, mixed to begin with in the Roman period and later crossed by Teutonic invasion, became specially capable of variation after the subdual of the Moors, whose reaction on their conquerors was extensive and important.

All this while the Teutonic stocks in their old homes are noticeably backward, save where, as in (7) the Netherlands, they are in constant contact with other peoples on land and by sea. Culture begins to be at once original and brilliant in the Netherlands only in the period after (_a_) special contact with Spain and (_b_) the large immigration of Protestant refugees from other countries. At first strongly influenced by cla.s.sical scholarship, it is later affected by the influence of France and England. All the more strictly Teutonic cultures were either unprogressive or similarly vitalised from without; and Germany, after the Thirty Years' War, begins almost afresh with an academic literature in Latin, to be followed by new native developments only on French and English stimuli.[890] But it is specially significant that (8) the German renascence of the eighteenth century takes place after (_a_) the large influx of French Protestant refugees at the end of the seventeenth, and after (_b_) a fresh influx of French taste, French teachers, and French literature under Frederick the Great, in whose armies, it should be remembered, there fought no fewer than nine generals of French Protestant descent, as well as others of alien heredity.

The case of Switzerland is thus on this side tolerably clear. Swiss intellectual life, long primitively Teutonic, begins to become notable only at the period of the Reformation, when for the merely diplomatic and military and commercial contacts of the past there is subst.i.tuted a fresh differentiation and interaction from Italian, French, and German Protestantism--a new intellectual impulse--and from the influx of refugees, as in Holland. And the French-speaking city of Geneva, not yet a member of the Confederation, at once takes the lead. The Teutonic population, from the fifteenth century onwards, had in large numbers sought subsistence in mercenary soldiership. It was the medieval a.n.a.logue to the emigration of to-day, the opening even serving to curtail the agricultural and pastoral life;[891] but the result, by the common consent of historians,[892] was disastrous to the higher life at home, the returning mercenaries being in many cases spoilt for steady industry, rural or civic. Their military success and prestige in fact tended to demoralise the Swiss as the success of h.e.l.las against Persia tended to demoralise Athens, making them, in the words of Aristotle, unfitted to rest. Dwelling on past patriotic glories is never the way to discipline the mental life; and the Swiss militia of the end of the fifteenth century, wont to sell their services as fighters to French and Italians, often thus opposing each other, and otherwise wont to interpose arrogantly in other people's concerns,[893] were not on the line of social or intellectual progress. Pensions to leading men from the French and Italian courts wrought a further and even more sinister corruption. But after their defeat by Francis I in 1516 at the desperate battle of Marignano, becoming allies of France, the Swiss ceased to play the part of holders of the balances between contending neighbours; and after their heavy share in the loss of Francis at the battle of Pavia they grew for a time loth even to play the part of auxiliaries on a national footing, though individual enlistment continued. It is at this stage that the Reformation supervenes, creating a new source of strife between Canton and Canton, and so paralysing the Confederation for centuries.

Nowhere is the study of the process of the Reformation more instructive, more subversive of the conventional Protestant view, than in the case of Switzerland. In the first place, it is not the old Forest Cantons, with their ingrained independence and "Teutonic conscience," that do the work. They remained obstinately Catholic. Swiss Protestantism, under the independent lead of Zwingli, began indeed in Glarus and Schwytz, but became an effective movement only in the city of Zurich, and it is notable that in the primitive and poor Canton of Uri[894] there was as little buying of indulgences as there was heresy. The two phenomena went together in the richer Cantons, where the common desire to buy pardons evoked the protest against them. Indeed, the special traffic in indulgences in Germany and Switzerland, and the special laxity of life of their priesthoods, were concomitants of the special grossness of German life;[895] for in no other country did the Reformation proceed nakedly on the basis of protest against indulgence-selling. There the pardoners shamefully overrode all the official and accepted teaching of the Church as to indulgences; and the protests of Luther and Zwingli were properly demands for a reform on strictly orthodox grounds, as against an abuse which was locally excessive. But it lay in the economic and political conditions that when a movement of protest began it should succeed in view rather of the economic and social impulses to break with Rome than of the spontaneous desire for reform. In Germany in particular the movement among the upper and educated cla.s.ses was nakedly financial as regarded the n.o.bles, and to a large extent the reverse of ascetic among the scholars, many of whom, however, were much more spontaneously alive to the doctrinal crudities of the orthodox system than was Luther himself. It was the facile combination, on socio-political grounds, of the five forces of (1) moral indignation among the more conscientious leaders, (2) gain-seeking on the part of n.o.bles and ruling burghers, (3) racial aversion to Italian priests and Italian revenue-drawing among the people in general, (4) critical revolt against primitive superst.i.tions among the more learned, and (5) anti-clerical freethinking and licence among many who had served in the Italian wars,[896] that made the revolt proceed so rapidly in Germany and Switzerland. If the ma.s.s of the people, in all save the most primitive Swiss Cantons, were grossly eager to buy the indulgences so grossly offered by Samson and Tetzel, the people clearly were not zealous reformers to start with. Of those who most resented the traffic, many remained steady Catholics.

When, however, it became known that Samson carried away with him from Switzerland to Italy 800,000 crowns, besides other bullion and jewels, even the buyers of indulgences could share the general inclination to stop the enrichment of Italy at Swiss expense. The intellectual revolt of the educated supplied the basis of the revolution in church management; but without the accruing financial gains the former could have availed little; and while there was the usual violence on the part of the mob, the city authorities were judicious in their procedure. To the clergy they offered on the one hand freedom to marry, and on the other hand a provision for life. Thus in Zurich, under the skilful guidance of Zwingli, the whole chapter of twenty-four canons gave up their rights and property to the State, becoming preachers, teachers, or professors with life-allowances: a plan generally followed elsewhere, save where the parties fell to blows.[897] In Zurich the further steps were: 1523, ecclesiastical marriages; 1524, pictures abolished and monasteries dissolved; 1525, ma.s.s discontinued.

In French-speaking Geneva, destined to become the leading Swiss city, the process was more stormy. Having grown to importance under its bishops, it had been made an imperial city in 1420, thereby finding a foothold in its resistance to the constant claims of the House of Savoy, which in 1519 forced it into a defensive alliance with Fribourg. There were now two Genevan parties, the Savoyards and the republicans, which latter, imitating Swiss usage, called themselves Eidgenossen, whence the French corruption _Huguenots_, ultimately applied to the Calvinistic Protestants of France. Out of the faction strife came the religious, under the fanning of Farel; and in this case the anti-democratic leaning of the Savoyards kept the rich pro-Catholic, while the common people declared for Protestantism. In the end the latter took violent possession of the churches, destroying the altars and images, whereupon most of the Catholics fled, the city retaining the clerical lands; and there immigrated many French, Italian, and Savoyard Protestants. To the community thus made for him came Calvin in 1537.

Meanwhile, Berne, conquering the Pays de Vaud from the Duke of Savoy, made it Protestant. Elsewhere, some communes and districts pa.s.sed and repa.s.sed between Catholicism and Protestantism as neighbouring influences prevailed; in some districts the peasants, hoping for release from t.i.thes and taxes, welcomed the revolution, but renounced it when they found it made no difference to their lot.[898] The magistrates of Berne were prompt to make it clear that their Protestantism made no difference as to their t.i.the-drawing from their rural subjects.[899]

When the period of transformation was over--with its bitter wars, which cost the life of Zwingli, its manifold exasperations, its Anabaptist convulsions, its forlorn and foredoomed peasant risings, its severance of old ties, and its profound impairment of the half-grown spirit of confederation--it was found that the old Cantons of Lucerne, Uri, Unterwalden, Schwytz, and Zug stood fast for Catholicism; that Soleure, after being for a time predominantly Protestant, had joined them, with Fribourg, making seven Catholic States; that the city Cantons of Berne, Zurich, Basle, and Schaffhausen were Protestant, as were Geneva and the Vaud, not yet in the union; and that Glarus and Appenzell were mixed.

The achievement of the landamman OEbly of Glarus, in securing a peaceful and lasting compromise in his own Canton--the two bodies in some parishes actually agreeing to use the same church--was beyond the moral capacity of the ma.s.s of the Swiss people, for Appenzell bitterly divided into two parts, on religious lines. Each of the other Cantons imposed its ruling men's creed on its subjects. They were still as far from toleration in religion as from real democracy in politics.

While Protestantism, by dividing the realm of religion, doubtless wrought indirectly and ultimately for the intellectual freedom of Europe, it is clear that it had no such result for many generations in Switzerland. Calvin's rule in Geneva, while a.s.sociated with a new activity in printing, chiefly of theological works,[900] became a byword for moral tyranny and cruelty. To say nothing of the executions of Servetus and Gruet for heresy, and the expulsions of other men, the records show that in that small population there were between 800 and 900 persons imprisoned between the years 1542 and 1546, and 58 put to death; no fewer than 34 being beheaded, hanged, or burned on charges of sedition in three months of 1545. Torture was freely applied, and any personal criticism of Calvin was more or less fiercely punished.[901]

The conditions were much the same in Zurich and Berne, where a press censorship was set up (in Zurich as early as 1523), and zealously maintained for centuries. It prohibited, under heavy penalties, the sale of the works of Descartes, and in both places Cartesians were prosecuted;[902] while in Protestant Switzerland generally the Copernican theory was denounced as heresy, and the reformed Calendar, as a work of the Pope, was furiously rejected. So high did pa.s.sion run that in Berne and Zurich any who married Catholics were severely punished.[903] The Zurich criminal calendar of the sixteenth century gives a sample of the Protestant city life of the period. There were 572 executions in all, 347 persons being beheaded, 61 burned, 55 hanged, 53 drowned. Only 33 were cases of murder; 2 were executed for abuse of Zwingli, who thus appears to have given a lead to Calvin; 73 for blasphemy, 56 for b.e.s.t.i.a.lity, and 338 for theft[904]--a clear economic clue.

Broadly speaking, the settled Protestant period was one of relapse alike from freedom and from union. Cla.s.s division deepened and worsened throughout the seventeenth century;[905] the people of the subject lands were less than ever recognised as having rights,[906] Puritanism taking to oppression as spontaneously in Switzerland as in England; the stimulus given to culture and art in the controversial period died away, leaving retrogression;[907] and in the personal and the intellectual life alike clerical tyranny was universal.[908] The munic.i.p.alities became more and more close corporations, as the gilds had become long before;[909] and at Berne in 1640 the city treasurer was put to death for exposing abuses.[910] After the Peasants' War of 1653 the aristocratic development was still further strengthened, till in Berne, Soleure, and Fribourg--Catholic and Protestant cities alike--the roll of burghers was closed (1680-90), Soleure stipulating that it should remain so till the number of reigning families was reduced to twenty-five.[911]

The practice of taking pensions from France revived, for the old service of supplying mercenary troops; so that "the Swiss were never more shamelessly sold to the highest bidder" than in the seventeenth century.[912] As of old, the munic.i.p.alities ama.s.sed and invested capital, Catholic Soleure lending great sums to France, while the still wealthier city of Berne lent money in all directions;[913] but though they raised handsome public buildings, it was the small ruling cla.s.s and not the workers that were enriched. In the rural Cantons even the small economic advance made at the outset of the Reformation was lost.[914] It seems difficult to dispute that as a force for social progress the Reformation was naught.

One factor there was to its credit: the establishment of secondary schools, which had not previously existed in Switzerland, and the provision of better common schools;[915] and though the ecclesiastical and religious forces, as in Scotland, prevented the common schools being turned to any higher account at home than that of qualifying to read and write and learn catechisms, even that small tuition gave the Swiss some advantages in the neighbouring countries. All the while the higher political evolution went backwards. In 1586 the Catholic Cantons of Schwytz, Uri, Unterwalden, Lucerne, Zug, Fribourg, and Soleure ejected from the League the Protestant State of Mulhausen; and, ignoring the laws of the Confederation, proceeded to make a separate offensive and defensive alliance among themselves, and with Spain and the Pope. As late as 1656 war broke out between Berne and Schwytz, Lucerne intervening, over a dispute about Protestant refugees; whereafter the principle of cantonal sovereignty reigned supreme for a hundred and forty years. It would seem difficult to maintain, in the face of all the facts, that Protestantism had made for peace, freedom, or civilisation.

On the other hand, the distribution of Protestantism in the Swiss Cantons disposes once for all of the theory that the "Teutonic conscience" or anything else of an ethnic order was the determining force at the Reformation. A rough conspectus of the language and religion of the Cantons as at the year 1900 will present the proof to the contrary:--

-------------------+----------------------------+------------------------ NAME. | LANGUAGE. | RELIGION.

-------------------+----------------------------+------------------------ Berne |Five-sixths German-speaking |Seven-eighths Protestant Zurich |Nearly all German | " "

Lucerne | " " " |Nearly all Catholic Vaud |Mostly French dialects |Nine-tenths Protestant Aargau |Mostly German |Four C. to five P.

St. Gall | " " |Three-fifths Catholic Ticino |Italian dialects |Nearly all Catholic Fribourg |Half French, half German |Four-fifths Catholic Grisons |Half Romansch, three-eighths|Five-ninths Protestant | German, one-eighth Italian| Valais |(?) Half German, half French|Nearly all Catholic Thurgau |Nearly all German |Two-sevenths Catholic Basle | " " " |One-third Catholic Soleure |Nearly all German |Three-fourths Catholic Geneva |Predominantly French |Half-and-half Neuchatel | " " |Seven-eighths Protestant Schaffhausen | " German | " "

Appenzell (Rh. Ext)| " " |Nine-tenths Protestant " (Rh. Int)| " " |Nearly all Catholic Glarus |Nearly all German |One-fourth Catholic Zug | " " " |Nearly all Catholic Schwytz | " " " | " " "

Unterwalden | " " " | " " "

Uri | " " " | " " "

Here we have nearly every species of variation in terms of speech and creed. The one generalisation which appears to hold good to any extent in the matter is that Catholicism usually goes with an agricultural economy and Protestantism with manufactures; but here, too, there are exceptions, as Vaud, which, though Protestant, is predominantly agricultural or vine-rearing; Glarus, which is mainly pastoral and Protestant; the Grisons, agricultural and more than half Protestant; and Geneva, where there is a large minority of Catholics in industrial conditions. On the whole, we are warranted in a.s.suming that in Switzerland, as in most other countries, the town workers were the readiest to innovate in religion; while race, so far as inferrible from language, had nothing to do with the choice made. What differences of life accrue to the creeds, as we shall see, depend on their one important social divergence, that of bias for and against illiteracy.

-- 3. _The Modern Renaissance_

In the earlier part of the eighteenth century the Swiss Confederation figured as "a weather-beaten ruin, ready to fall."[916] It would be hard to point out, in the domestic conditions, any that made for beneficent change, and there were many that rigidly precluded it; but some elements of variability there were, and from other countries there came the principle of fertilisation. Theological hatreds and disputations had in a manner destroyed their own standing-ground by the very stress of their barren activity; and even while press laws were banning new works of thought and science, the better minds were secretly yearning towards them. In cities like Geneva and Basle (the latter then the seat of the only Swiss university), reason must to some extent have played beneath the surface while all its open manifestations were struck at. At Basle, in the old days, Erasmus spent the main part of his life; and he must have had some congenial intercourse. But it is on the side of the physical sciences that new intellectual life is first seen to germinate in post-Reformation Switzerland. There, as elsewhere, inquiring men felt that nature was kindlier to question than the self-appointed oracles of Deity, and that the unending search for real knowledge brought more peace than ever came of the insistence that the ultimate truth was known. Refugee immigrants, chiefly French, seem to have begun the ferment; and it is at the hands of their descendants that Swiss science has grown.[917] Having reason to avoid alike politics and theology in their new home, and living in many cases on incomes from investments, they turned to the sciences as occupation and solace.

With this inner movement concurred the new influences from French and English science and literature, and from the reviving culture of Germany.[918] With the rest of Europe, too, Switzerland turned in an increasing degree to industry, and in the latter half of the eighteenth century had developed many new trades, involving considerable use of machinery.[919] Agriculture, too, improved,[920] and mercenary soldiering began to fall into disrepute[921] under the influence of the new pacific thought. Still the rural economic conditions were bad, and the country seemed to grow poorer while the towns grew richer.[922] The population, in fact, constantly tended to exceed the not easily widened limits of rural subsistence; and in place of foreign soldiering, the old remedy, there began a peaceful industrial emigration into the neighbouring countries, Swiss beginning to figure there in increasing numbers as waiters and servants.[923] All the while the tyranny of the city aristocracies was unmitigated, and the subject lands were steadily ill-treated.[924] In Berne, in 1776, only eighteen families were represented in the Council of Two Hundred; and there and in Zurich and Lucerne the civic regulations were as flagrantly partial to the ruling cla.s.s as in France itself.[925] The new industrial conditions, however, were gradually preparing a political change; and the intellectual climate steadily altered. Voltaire tells in many amusing letters of the spread of Socinian heresy in the city of Calvin. In Geneva arose the abnormal figure of Jean Jacques Rousseau, descendant of a French refugee immigrant of Calvin's day; and though his city in 1762 formally burned his epoch-marking book on the _Contrat Social_, a popular reaction followed six years later. Democratic disturbances had repeatedly occurred before; but this time there was a growing force at work. An insurrection in 1770 was suppressed; another, in 1782, though at first successful, ended in the overthrow of the popular party by means of troops from France, Berne, and Zurich; but in the fateful year of 1789 yet another broke out, and this time the tide turned.

With the interference of the French Republic in Switzerland in 1797 on behalf of the Pays de Vaud, then subject to Berne, began the long convulsion which broke up the old Confederation and framed a new. In 1798 began the wildly premature attempt of the more visionary republicans to create a unitary republic out of Cantons which had retrograded even from the measure of union attained before the Reformation. It could not succeed; and the rapine inseparable from the French revolutionary methods could not but arouse an intense resistance, paralysing the aims of the progressive party. Out of years of miserable ferocious warfare, ended by Napoleon's withdrawal of the French troops in 1801, came the new Confederation of 1803, which, however, it needed the friendly but authoritative mediation of the First Consul to get the conservative Cantons to accept. For once the despot had secured, in a really disinterested fashion,[926] what the Revolution ought to have brought about. The old aristocratic tyrannies were subverted; the subject lands were freed; to the thirteen Cantons of the old union were added Aargau, Thurgau, St. Gall, Vaud, and Ticino; through all was set up a representative system, modified in the towns by a measure of the old aristocratic element; and the whole possessed what Switzerland never had before, and could hardly otherwise have attained--a central parliamentary system. In 1814 Berne would fain have resumed its tyranny over the Vaud and Aargau, a step which would have initiated a general return to the old _regime_. The Allies, however, brought about the completion of the Confederation on the new principles; and by the addition to its roll of Geneva, Neuchatel, and the Valais, and the cession to Berne of the Basle territory formerly annexed by France, created a compact and complete Switzerland, bounded in natural fashion by the Alps, the Jura, and the Rhine. And at this period, after so many vicissitudes, the culture life of Switzerland is found fully abreast of that of Europe in general. Sismondi, standing apart from France and Italy, and writing impartially the history of both, is the greatest historian of his day.

The later history of the Confederation, however, is one of the great ill.u.s.trations of the perpetual possibility of strife and sunderance in communities. Sismondi lived to ban the democracy which would not be content to be ruled by the middle cla.s.s. At 1820 the old spirit of cla.s.s subsisted under the new inst.i.tutions; the press was nearly everywhere under strict censorship; and the ideals which ruled elsewhere on the Continent seemed even more potent in Switzerland than elsewhere. There, as elsewhere, the system inevitably bred discontent; and in 1830, on the revolutionary initiative of Ticino, the most corruptly governed of all the Cantons, there ensued almost bloodless revolutions in the local governments, Radicals taking the place of Conservatives, and proceeding to reform alike administration and education. Then came the due reaction, the Catholic Cantons forming the League of Sarnen, while the extremists again pressed the ideal of a military State. Though morally strong enough to enforce peace in more than one embroilment of Cantons and parties, the Federal Diet was dangerously weak in the face of the new forces of religio-political reaction typified by the activity of the Jesuits, as well as the old trouble of cantonal selfishness, which affected even the tolls.[927] The resistance to Radicalism became a movement of clerical fanaticism, led by the cry of "religion in danger"; Catholics using it to foment local insurrections; Protestants, ecclesiastically led, using it to make a munic.i.p.al revolution by violence at Zurich on the occasion of the proposal to give Strauss a university chair in 1839.[928] But the Jesuits--expelled from nearly every Catholic State in the eighteenth century, yet latterly cherished by the Swiss Catholics for their anti-Protestant services--were the chief mischief-makers; and at length the violences promoted from the headquarters at Lucerne led to Protestant reprisals which took the shape of a beginning of civil war. The collapse, however, of the Catholic "Sonderbund" or Secession-League in 1847, before the resolute military action of the Diet, marked the turning-point in modern Swiss politics.

In 1848 was framed a new const.i.tution, wholly Swiss-made, creating an effective Federal government, on a new basis of a Parliament of two Chambers. Now were definitely nationalised the systems of coinage, weights and measures, posts and telegraphs; and the Customs system was made one of complete internal free trade.

On this footing followed "long years of happiness, and a prosperity without precedent."[929] Yet even this const.i.tution has had to be revised, to the end of guarding afresh against religious strifes and conflict of cantonal jurisdictions. In 1872 the centralising reformers carried in the Chambers a revision of the const.i.tution; but under the referendum (a specialty of Swiss democracy, inst.i.tuted in or after 1831 by the Catholic Conservative party in St. Gall, the Valais and Lucerne) it was rejected by a popular vote of 261,072 citizens to 255,609, and of thirteen cantons to nine. With a few modifications, however, it was carried in 1874 by a vote of 340,199 to 198,013, and of 14-1/2 Cantons to 7-1/2. The whole process is a great lesson as to the superiority of the methods of peace and persuasion to those of revolution and force.

The referendum itself, first set up locally with the most reactionary intentions,[930] has come to be valued--whether wisely or unwisely--by Radicals and Conservatives alike; and while it seems to offer a possibility of appeals to demotic ignorance and pa.s.sion[931] while these subsist, and to be unnecessary where they do not, it is at least a guarantee of the decisiveness of any great const.i.tutional step taken under it. Historically speaking, the consummation thus far is a great democratic achievement, and the whole drift of Federal legislation is towards an increased stability of union. On the other hand, despite a characteristic menace from Bismarck,[932] the international position of Switzerland appears to be as safe as that of any other European State, great or small. Any attempt on its independence by any one Power would infallibly be resisted by others.