Early Modern Switzerland
The early modern history of the Old Swiss Confederacy (Eidgenossenschaft, also known as the "Swiss Republic" or Republica Helvetiorum), lasting from formal independence in 1648 to the French invasion of 1798 came to be referred as Ancien Régime retrospectively, in post-Napoleonic Switzerland.
The early modern period was characterized by an increasingly aristrocratic and oligarchic ruling class as well as frequent economic or religious revolts. The loosely organized Confederation remained generally disorganized and crippled by religious divisions. During this period the Confederation gained independence from the Holy Roman Empire with support from France, and had very close relations with France. The early modern period also saw the growth of French-Swiss literature with several famous authors, including the native-born Rousseau, Voltaire and Edward Gibbon, as well as many other writers living in Switzerland.
Read more about Early Modern Switzerland: Thirteen Cantons, The Thirty Years War, Treaty of Westphalia, Relationships With France, Growth of The Aristocracy, Conflict and Revolution, Age of Enlightenment, Culture During The Early Modern Period
Famous quotes containing the words early, modern and/or switzerland:
“Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not; it is the first lesson that ought to be learned; and however early a man’s training begins, its probably the last lesson that he learns thoroughly.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“Though collecting quotations could be considered as merely an ironic mimetism—victimless collecting, as it were ... in a world that is well on its way to becoming one vast quarry, the collector becomes someone engaged in a pious work of salvage. The course of modern history having already sapped the traditions and shattered the living wholes in which precious objects once found their place, the collector may now in good conscience go about excavating the choicer, more emblematic fragments.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“I look upon Switzerland as an inferior sort of Scotland.”
—Sydney Smith (1771–1845)