The Civil War in Switzerland

#PUBLICATION NOTE

This edition of The Civil War in Switzerland has been prepared and revised for digital publication by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism under the Central Committee of the Communist Party in Switzerland on the basis of the edition published in the Collected Works of Marx and Engels, First English Edition, Volume 6, Lawrence & Wishart, London.

#INTRODUCTION NOTE

This is an article written by Comrade Friedrich Engels in Brussels, Belgium, around the 10th of November, 1847. It was first published in the Deutsch-Brüsseler-Zeitung, No. 91 (14th of November, 1847).

This article was occasioned by the civil war in Switzerland unleashed by the seven feudal Catholic cantons of Old Switzerland, which in 1843 formed a separatist union — the Special League — to resist progressive bourgeois reforms and defend the privileges of the feudal lords, the Church, and the Jesuits. The reactionary actions of the Special League, headed by the Catholic Church and the city patricians, were opposed by bourgeois Radical Liberals, who, in the mid-1840s, were in the majority in most of the cantons and in the Swiss Diet, the supreme legislative body of the Old Swiss Confederation. In July 1847, the Diet decreed the dissolution of the Special League, and this served as a pretext for the latter to start hostilities against other cantons early in November. On the 23rd of November, the Special League's army was defeated by the Federal forces. As a result of this victory and the adoption of a new constitution in 1848, Switzerland, formerly a union of both feudal and capitalist States, became a federal, bourgeois-democratic State.

The struggle between the Radical Liberals on the one hand and the reactionary, paternalist patricians and clericals on the other attracted Comrade Engels's attention as early as 1844, when he described it in his article, The Civil War in Valais.

In the present article, Comrade Engels contrasted modern developed society to paternalist backwardness, exposing the Swiss reactionaries and their attempts to link counter-revolutionary, separatist aims with the historical traditions of the Swiss people. Engels considered Switzerland's past from this standpoint. As a result, he presented a somewhat distorted picture of certain periods of its history, particularly the struggle against Austria and Burgundy in the Middle Ages, which was generally anti-feudal. In his later works of 1856-59 on the history of warfare (Mountain Warfare, Infantry, and so on), Engels showed the great historical significance of Switzerland's struggle for independence in the 14th and 15th centuries. Engels also changed his view of the peasants' role in Norway (in the article, the stress was laid on their paternalist traditions). In Reply to Mr. Paul Ernest (1890), Engels pointed out in particular that the existence of free peasants, who had not experienced serfdom, had a positive effect on Norway's historical development, although it was a backward country due to isolation and geographical characteristics.

#Workers and oppressed people of the world, unite!

#THE CIVIL WAR IN SWITZERLAND

#Friedrich Engels

#Around the 10th of November, 1847

#★

At last, the ceaseless bombast about the «cradle of freedom», about the «grandchildren of Wilhelm Tell and Winkelried», about the heroic victors of Sempach and Murten¹ is being brought to an end. At last, it has been revealed that the cradle of freedom is nothing but the centre of backwardness and the nursery of Jesuits, that the grandchildren of Wilhelm Tell and Winkelried can only be brought to reason by cannon balls, and that the heroism at Sempach and Murten was nothing but the desperation of brutal and bigoted mountain tribes, obstinately resisting development and progress.

It is really very fortunate that European democracy is finally getting rid of this Old Swiss, puritan, and reactionary ballast. As long as the democrats concentrated on the virtue, the happiness, and the paternalist simplicity of these Alpine shepherds, they themselves still appeared in a reactionary light. Now that they are supporting the struggle of developed, industrial, modern-democratic Switzerland against the crude, Christian-Germanic democracy of the primitive, cattle-breeding cantons, they represent progress everywhere, now the last reactionary glimmer disappears, now they show that they are learning to understand the meaning of democracy in the 19th century.

There are two regions in Europe where old Christian-Germanic barbarism has retained its most primitive form, almost down to acorn-eating — Norway and the High Alps, especially Old Switzerland.² Both Norway and Old Switzerland still provide us with genuine examples of that breed of people who once beat the Romans to death in good Westphalian style with clubs and flails in the Teutoburg Forest.³ Both Norway and Old Switzerland are democratically organized. But there are many varieties of democracy, and it is very necessary that the democrats of the developed countries should at last decline responsibility for the Norwegian and Old Swiss forms of democracy.

The democratic movement in all developed countries is, in the last analysis, striving for the political domination of the proletariat. It therefore presupposes that a proletariat exists, that a ruling bourgeoisie exists, that an industry exists which gives birth to the proletariat and which has brought the bourgeoisie to power.

There is nothing of all this either in Norway or in Old Switzerland. In Norway, we have the very famous peasant regiment (bonderegimente); in Old Switzerland, a number of rough shepherds, who, despite their democratic constitution, are ruled by a few big landowners, Abyberg, and so on, in paternalist fashion. A bourgeoisie only exists in exceptional cases in Norway, and not at all in Old Switzerland. The proletariat is practically non-existent.

The democracy prevailing in developed countries, modern democracy, has thus nothing whatsoever in common with Norwegian and Old Swiss democracy. It does not wish to bring about the Norwegian and Old Swiss state of affairs, but something absolutely different. Let us nevertheless look a little closer at this primitive-Germanic democracy and deal first with Old Switzerland, which is what above all concerns us here.

Is there a German philistine who does not rave about Wilhelm Tell, the liberator of their homeland; a schoolmaster who does not celebrate Morgarten, Sempach, and Murten along with Marathon, Plataea, and Salamis;⁴ a hysterical old maid who does not go into raptures over the strong leg calves and sturdy thighs of the chaste Alpine youths? The glory of Old Swiss valour, freedom, skill, and strength has been endlessly praised in verse and prose, from Aegidius Tschudi to Johannes von Müller, from Florian to Schiller. The carbines and cannons of the 12 cantons now provide a commentary on these enthusiastic panegyrics.

The Old Swiss have drawn attention to themselves twice during the course of history. The first time, when they freed themselves gloriously from Austrian tyranny; the second, at the present time, when they march off to fight in God's name for the Jesuits and the homeland.

On closer examination, the glorious liberation from the talons of the Austrian eagle does not look at all good. The House of Austria was progressive just once in the whole of its career; this was at the beginning of its existence, when it allied itself with the urban small bourgeoisie against the nobility, and sought to found a German monarchy. It was progressive in the most philistine of ways, but it was progressive nonetheless. And who opposed it most resolutely? The Old Swiss. The struggle of the Old Swiss against Austria, the glorious Grütli Oath,⁵ Tell's heroic shot, the eternally memorable victory at Morgarten, all this was the struggle of stubborn shepherds against the onward march of historical development, the struggle of obstinate, rooted local interests against the interests of the whole nation, the struggle of crude ignorance against enlightenment, of backwardness against development. They won their victory over the development of the time, and, as a punishment, they were excluded from all further development.

As if this were not enough, these simple, stiff-necked shepherds were soon punished in a quite different way. They escaped the domination of the Austrian nobility only to come under the yoke of the small bourgeois of Zurich, Lucerne, Berne, and Basle. These had already noted that the Old Swiss were just as strong and as stupid as their oxen. They agreed to join the Swiss Confederation and stayed peacefully at home behind their counters while the thick-headed Alpine shepherds fought out all their battles with the nobility and the princes for them. This is what happened at Sempach, Granson, Murten, and Nancy.⁶ In return, these people were allowed to arrange their internal affairs as they wished, and so they remained in blissful ignorance of how they were being exploited by their dear fellow-Confederates.

Since then, nothing much has been heard of them. They busied themselves in all piety and propriety with milking the cows, with cheese-making, chastity, and yodeling. From time to time, they had folk assemblies, at which they divided into horn-people, claw-people, and other animal-like groups, and these gatherings never ended without a hearty, Christian-Germanic fight. They were poor, but pure in heart; stupid, but pious and well-pleasing to the Lord; brutal, but broad-shouldered; and had little brain, but plenty of brawn. From time to time, there were too many of them, and then the young men went off on their «travels», that is, enlisted in foreign armies, where they displayed the most steadfast loyalty to the flag, no matter what happened. One can only say of the Swiss that they let themselves be killed most conscientiously for their pay.

The greatest boast of these burly Old Swiss was that, from time immemorial, they had never deviated by a hair's breadth from the customs of their ancestors, that they had retained the simple, chaste, upright, and virtuous customs of their parents, unsullied throughout the centuries. And this is true. Every attempt at development was defeated by the granite walls of their mountains and of their heads. From the days when Winkelried's first ancestors led their first cows, with the inevitable little pastoral bell around its neck, on to the virgin pastures of Lake Lucerne, up to the present day, when the latest descendants of Winkelried have their guns blessed by the priests, all houses have been built in the same way, all cows milked in the same way, all pigtails plaited in the same way, all cheeses prepared according to the same recipe, all children made in the same way. Here, in the mountains, is Paradise, here the Fall of Man has not yet come to pass. And should some innocent Alpine lad happen to find his way to the great outside world and allow himself to be tempted for a moment by the seductions of the big cities, by the artificial charms of a decadent civilization, by the vices of sinful countries, which have no mountains and where corn thrives — his innocence is so deep-rooted that he can never quite succumb. A sound strikes his ear, just two of those notes of the Alpine cowherd's call that sound like a dog's howling, and he falls on his knees, weeping and overwhelmed with remorse, and at once tears himself from the arms of seduction and will not rest until he lies at the feet of his old father! «Father, I have sinned against my ancient mountains and in thy sight, and am no more worthy to be called thy son.»⁷

In recent times, two invasions against these artless customs and primitive power have been attempted. The first was by the French in 1798. But these French, who spread a little development everywhere else, failed with these Old Swiss. No trace of their presence has remained, they were unable to eliminate one single jot of the old customs and virtues. The second invasion took place about 20 years later and did at least bear a little fruit. This was the invasion of English travelers, of London lords and squires and the hordes of chandlers, soap-manufacturers, grocers, and bone merchants who followed them. This invasion at least ended the old hospitality and transformed the honest inhabitants of the Alpine huts, who previously hardly knew what money was, into the most mean and rascally swindlers anywhere to be found. But this advance made no impact at all on the old simple customs. This not so very virtuous chicanery fitted in perfectly with the paternalist virtues of chastity, skill, probity, and loyalty. Even their piety suffered no injury; the priests were delighted to give them absolution for all the deceptions practised on British heretics.

But it now looks as if all this moral purity is about to be thoroughly stirred up. It is to be hoped that the punitive detachments will do their best to finish off all the probity, primitive power, and simplicity. Then cry, you philistines! For there will be no more poor but contented shepherds, whose carefree peace of mind you might wish for yourselves on Sundays, after you have made your cut out of selling coffee made of chicory and tea made of sloe leaves during the other six days of the week. Then weep, you schoolmasters, for there will be an end to your hopes for a new Sempach-Marathon and other classical feats. Then mourn, you hysterical virgins over the age of 30, for those six-inch leg calves, the thought of which solaced your solitary dreams, will son be gone — gone the Antinous-like beauty of the powerful «Swiss peasant lads», gone the firm thighs and tight trousers, which attract you so irresistibly to the Alps. Then sigh, tender and anaemic boarding-school misses, who, when reading Schiller's works, delighted in the chaste, but oh-so-powerful love of the agile chamois hunters, for all your fond illusions are lost, and now there is nothing left for you but to read the works of Henrik Steffens and fall for the frigid Norwegians.

But no more of that. The Old Swiss must be fought with weapons quite different from mere ridicule. Democracy has to settle accounts with them about matters quite different from their paternalist virtues.

Who defended the Bastille on the 14th of July, 1789 against the people who were storming it? Who shot down the works of the Faubourg St. Antoine with grapeshot and rifle bullets from behind safe walls? Old Swiss from the Special League, grandchildren of Tell, Stauffacher, and Winkelried.

Who defended the traitor Louis the 16th on the 10th of August, 1792 from the just wrath of the people, in the Louvre and the Tuileries? Old Swiss from the Special League.

Who suppressed the Neapolitan revolution of 1798 with the help of Nelson? Old Swiss from the Special League.

Who reestablished the absolute monarchy in Naples — with the help of Austrians — in 1823? Old Swiss from the Special League.

Who fought to the last on the 29th of July, 1830 for a treacherous king⁸ and again shot Paris workers down from the windows and colonnades of the Louvre? Old Swiss from the Special League.

Who suppressed the insurrectionists in Romagna in 1830 and '31, again along with the Austrians, with a brutality which achieved world notoriety? Old Swiss from the Special League.

In short, who holds the Italians down, to this day, forcing them to bow to the oppressive domination of their aristocrats, princes, and priests; who was Austria's right hand in Italy, who enables the bloodhound Ferdinando the Second of Naples to keep a tight rein on his anguish-stricken people to this very moment, who has been acting as his executioners to this day carrying out the mass shootings he orders? Always, again and again, Old Swiss from the Special League, again and again, the grandchildren of Tell, Stauffacher, and Winkelried.

In one word, wherever and whenever a revolutionary movement broke out in France, which was either directly or indirectly advantageous to democracy, it was always Old Swiss mercenaries who fought it to the last, with the utmost resolution. And, especially in Italy, these Swiss mercenaries were always the most devoted servants and lackeys of Austria. A just punishment for the glorious liberation of Switzerland from the talons of the two-headed eagle!

One should not think that these mercenaries were the refuse of their country, or that they were disavowed by their compatriots. Have not the people of Lucerne had a statue hewn out of the rock at their city gates by the pious Icelander Thorvaldsen, depicting a huge lion, bleeding from an arrow wound, covering the Bourbon fleur-de-lis with its paw, faithful into death, in memory of the Swiss who died at the Louvre on the 10th of August 1792? This is the way the Special League honours the venal loyalty of its children. It lives by the trade in human beings and glorifies it.

Can the English, French, and German democrats have had anything in common with this kind of democracy?

Through its industry, its commerce, and its political institutions, the bourgeoisie is already working everywhere to drag the small, self-contained localities, which only live for themselves, out of their isolation, to bring them into contact with one another, to merge their interests, to expand their local horizons, to destroy their local habits, strivings, and ways of thinking, and to build up a great nation with common interests, customs, and ideas out of the many until now mutually independent localities and provinces. The bourgeoisie is already carrying out considerable centralization. The proletariat, far from suffering any disadvantage from this, will, as a result, rather be in a position to unite, to feel itself a class, to acquire a proper political standpoint within democracy, and finally to conquer the bourgeoisie. The democratic proletariat not only needs the kind of centralization begun by the bourgeoisie, but will have to extend it very much further. During the short time when the proletariat was at the helm of State during the French revolution, during the rule of the Mountain Party, it used all means — including grapeshot and the guillotine — to effect centralization. When the democratic proletariat again comes to power, it will not only have to centralize every country separately, but will have to centralize all developed countries together as soon as possible.

Old Switzerland, on the other hand, has never done anything but obstruct centralization; with really brutish obstinacy, it has insisted on its isolation from the whole outside world, on its local customs, habits, prejudices, narrow-mindedness, and seclusion. It has stood still in the centre of Europe at the level of its original backwardness, while all other nations, even the other Swiss, have gone forward. It stands pat on cantonal sovereignty with all the obduracy of the crude, primitive Germans, that is, on the right to be eternally stupid, bigoted, brutal, narrow-minded, recalcitrant, and venal if it so wishes, whether its neighbours like it or not. If their own brutish situation comes under discussion, they no longer recognize such things as majorities, agreements, or obligations. But, in the 19th century, it is no longer possible for two parts of one and the same country to exist side by side without any mutual interaction and influence. The Radical cantons affect the Special League, the Special League affects the Radical cantons, where, too, very crude elements still exist here and there. The Radical cantons are, therefore, interested in getting the Special League to abandon its bigotry, narrow-mindedness, and obduracy, and if it won't, then its self-will must be broken by violence; and this is what is happening at this moment.

The civil war, which has now broken out, can only help the cause of democracy. Even though there is still a great deal of primitive Germanic crudity to be found in the Radical cantons, even though a peasant, or a bourgeois regiment, or a mixture of both, is concealed behind their democracy, even though the most developed cantons still lag behind European development and really modern elements only rise to the top slowly here and there, this is no great help to the Special League. It is necessary, urgently necessary, that this last bastion of brutal, primitive Germanism, of backwardness, bigotry, paternalist simplicity and moral purity, of immobility, of loyalty unto death to the highest bidder, should at last be destroyed. The more energetically the Swiss Diet sets to work and the more violently it shakes up this old nest of priests, the more claim it will have on the support of all really resolute democrats and the more it will prove that it understands its position. But, of course, the five Great Powers are there, and the Radicals themselves are afraid.

As far as the Special League is concerned, it is significant that the true children of Wilhelm Tell have to beg the House of Austria, Switzerland's hereditary foe, for help, just when Austria is lowlier, viler, meaner, and more hateful than ever. This is yet another part of the punishment for the glorious liberation of Switzerland from the talons of the two-headed eagle and the much boasting that went with it. And for the cup of punishment to be filled to the brim, Austria itself has to be in such a pass that it could not give Wilhelm Tell's children any help whatsoever.