Historiography of Switzerland - 17th and 18th Centuries

17th and 18th Centuries

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. The continuation of the last great work of Swiss humanist historiography, Franz Guilliman's De rebus Helvetiorum sive antiquitatum, was thwarted by partisan politics. The baroque appetite for curiosa was allayed by Matthäus Merian's great engravings.

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. 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. 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). 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.

The first comprehensive historiography was Gottlieb Emanuel Haller's six-volume Bibliothek der Schweizergeschichte (1785–88). 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). 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.

All these works, in general, hewed closely to the popular account of the Confederacy's creation as established in the 15th and 16th century. According to that tradition, it was established in 1291 as an alliance between Uri, Schwyz and Unterwalden, the result of a patriotic uprising against Habsburg occupation, triggered by William Tell's just tyrannicide of the brutal bailiff Albrecht Gessler. When the Bernese Uriel Freudenberger and Gottlieb Emanuel Haller were the first to publicly question the historicity of Tell – not really believed in any more by Enlightenment-era intellectuals – they triggered a political scandal and caused tensions between Berne and Tell's traditional home state, Uri. Their 1760 book Der Wilhelm Tell. Ein dänisches Mährgen, in which they showed the Tell saga to be an adaptation of a Danish legend, was banned and burnt in public. As the rationalist Enlightenment gave way to the more emotional period of Romanticism, the questioning of popular heroes grew more unpopular still, and the traditional account of Tell was reestablished for generations by Friedrich Schiller's play William Tell of 1804.