Historiography of Switzerland
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The historiography of Switzerland is the study of the history of Switzerland.
Early accounts of the history of the
Swiss historiographical scholarship of the postmodern era (late 20th century) also followed international trends in its emphasis on topical history, such as economic history, legal history and social history and Switzerland's conduct during World War II.[1]
The first comprehensive historiography was
Swiss chronicles
The earliest works of Swiss history are the battle songs and folk songs in which the earliest Confederates celebrated their deeds, as well as the
With the introduction of movable type in Europe, chroniclers could reach a wider audience and begin to write about Swiss history as a whole. The 1507 Chronicle of the Swiss Confederation by Petermann Etterlin exerted great influence on later writers because, as a printed work, it was the first to be generally available.[2]
Early modern period
Humanist scholars such as Johannes Stumpf and Aegidius Tschudi connected the history of their time with the Roman era of Switzerland and to the accounts of the Helvetii,[3] giving a greater depth to the emerging discipline of history in Switzerland.
This development came to a close with
As the Swiss city-states grew more stratified and oligarchical, and as confessional, social and political barriers became more pronounced, the 17th century saw a shift of focus in historical writing from the affairs of the Confederacy to that of the individual state.
Historical research bloomed again in the time of the Enlightenment, when as early as with Johann Jakob Wagner's 1680 Historia naturalis Helvetiae curiosa, the spirit of critical inquiry took hold in Swiss scholarship.[3] Conditions were not optimal – state archives remained mostly closed to private researchers and the zeitgeist favoured a heroic interpretation of history in a less than heroic present.[4] Still, the early 18th century saw the first critical editions of ancient sources (by Johann Jakob Bodmer in 1735) and the publication of the first Swiss historical journals (Helvetische Bibliothek, also by Bodmer, and Mercure Helvétique, both in 1735).[4] The century's most significant work of historiography was the country's first historical dictionary, the 20-volume Allgemeines helvetisches eidgenössisches Lexikon in 20 volumes (1743–63), written by scholars from all cantons and edited by Johann Jakob Leu.[4]
The need for a historical overview was met by François-Joseph-Nicolas d'Alt de Tieffenthal's very patriotic Histoire des Hélvetiens (1749–53), Alexander Ludwig von Wattenwyl's prelude to Swiss criticism Histoire de la Confédération hélvetique (1754) and Vinzenz Bernhard Tscharner's Historie der Eidgenossen (1756–71).[4] These works were complemented by treatises on the early history of Switzerland, the Reformation in Switzerland or Swiss military service abroad, as well as an increasing number of reports by foreign travelers in Switzerland.[5] These works, in general, hewed closely to the received account of the
Modern historiography
Enlightenment and Napoleonic era
When Bernese historians
The 19th century's most influential work of historiography was
The work, which did not go beyond the
Popularization of history
In the period of historicism, learning from this national history became a general preoccupation, and dozens of works of popular history – notably by the educator Heinrich Zschokke and by the liberal historian André Daguet – were published to meet this demand.[6] The democratic reforms of the 18th century caused a broadening of public education and the publication of innumerable historical textbooks.[6]
Cantonal archives along with the new
As the rationalist Enlightenment gave way to the more emotional period of Romanticism, the questioning of popular heroes grew more unpopular still,[5] and the traditional account of Tell was reestablished for generations by Friedrich Schiller's play William Tell of 1804.
Late 19th to early 20th centuries
Von Müller's work was eventually supplanted by Johannes Dierauer's seminal Geschichte der Schweizerischen Eidgenossenschaft (1887–1917, with extensions up until 1974), which remains indispensable to modern research thanks to its thorough critical apparatus.[7]
An important foundation for later research was laid in the later 19th century through the edition and publication of official documents, including those of the Old Confederacy and the Helvetic Republic, in voluminous series whose publication was not completed until 1966.[8] This tradition is being continued in the ongoing publication of Swiss diplomatic archives by several Swiss universities starting in 1979.[8]
With the 17th and 18th century seen by later 19th-century historians as uninteresting periods of stagnation,
The early 20th century saw the publication of great topical histories of Switzerland, including Eugen Huber's legal history (Geschichte und System des schweizerischen Privatrechts, 1893), Andreas Heusler's constitutional history (Schweizer Verfassungsgeschichte, 1920; supplanted by Hans Conrad Peyer's Verfassungsgeschichte of 1978) and Paul Schweizer's diplomatic history (Geschichte der schweizerischen Neutralität, 1895; continued by Edgar Bonjour from 1946 on).[7]
Later 20th century
On the whole, Swiss historiography up until the early 20th century was focused on the political and military history of Switzerland. The
Some academic attention also shifted to the economic and social history of Switzerland, which began to be treated in substantial monographs by
On the other hand, apologists of the Ancien Régime such as
It was only with the societal upheavals associated with the year 1968, which in Switzerland as elsewhere in the West began to move the mainstream of academic thought to the political Left, that the approach of Swiss historians began to shift again. Picking up where Rappard and Fueter had left off, historians of the 1960s and 1970s published large treatises on the social and economic history of Switzerland.[1] Adapting the newer methods of historical research in the United States, the United Kingdom and France, researchers used disciplines such as historical
Contemporary works
Dierauer's seminal work of 1887–1917 was eventually supplanted as the leading work of Swiss historiography by the Handbuch der Schweizer Geschichte, a collaborative work of 1972–77, which remains largely rooted in the conservative mainstream of the early 1960s.[10] A historians' "committee for a new history of Switzerland", avowedly following the new "total history" approach, published its three-volume Nouvelle histoire de la Suisse et des Suisses in 1982/83; a condensed one-volume edition (Geschichte der Schweiz und der Schweizer, last reprinted 2006) is currently the standard university textbook of Swiss history.
The principal ongoing project of Swiss historiography is the
References
- Oliver Zimmer, A Contested Nation: History, Memory and Nationalism in Switzerland, 1761-1891, Cambridge University Press (2003).
- Marco Jorio: Geistige Landesverteidigung in German, French and Italian in the online Historical Dictionary of Switzerland, 2006.
- Ernst Tremp, François Walter: Geschichte in German, French and Italian in the online Historical Dictionary of Switzerland, 2015.
- Bertrand Müller: Historismus in German, French and Italian in the online Historical Dictionary of Switzerland, 2015.
- Georg Kreis: Nation in German, French and Italian in the online Historical Dictionary of Switzerland, 2011.