Geneva, Zurich, Basel: History, Culture, and National Identity

by Nicolas Bouvier, Gordon A. Craig, Lionel Gossman, Carl E. Schorske (Introduction)

Overview

Recognized by historians and politicians as a model for European unity, Switzerland is nonetheless a difficult country to understand as a whole. Whereas individual Swiss cities have strong identities in the international political, cultural, and economic arenas, the country itself seems to be less than the sum of its parts. To capture the elusive spirit of Switzerland, four eminent writers explore the roots of its political unity and cultural diversity in a series of urban portraits. Their observations make for both good storytelling and insightful social commentary.

Nicolas Bouvier offers a quick-paced history of Geneva—the city John Calvin had envisioned as a radiating center of godliness, international in its scope and legal in its methods—the home of the Red Cross and the League of Nations and, since 1945, the location of numerous disarmament and diplomatic conferences. Gordon Craig examines Zurich, the city of the militant religious reformer Huldrych Zwingli, whose centralizing political zeal was harnessed by subsequent generations of Zurichers to lead Switzerland in its modernization. Today's economically powerful Zurich is analyzed in terms of its liberal past as a refuge for political activists and artists, and in terms of its current generational divisions on moral and cultural questions. Finally, Lionel Gossman explores the conciliatory Basel of Erasmus, showing how vigorous independence, resourcefulness, and remembrance of its humanist traditions shaped the city's culture and economy. Tying together important themes in the histories of these cities, Carl Schorske focuses his introduction on how Switzerland has capitalized on their cultural differences and refined the art of political negotiation to serve a wide range of civic interests.

Originally published in 1994.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691608570
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	07/14/2014
Series:	Princeton Legacy Library , #239
Pages:	116
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.40(d)

Read an Excerpt

Geneva Zurich Basel

? History ? Culture ? & National Identity

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By Nicolas Bouvier, Gordon A. Craig, Lionel Gossman

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1994 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-03618-2

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CHAPTER 1

Geneva

Nicolas Bouvier

Historically and geographically, Geneva is the least Swiss of the three cities evoked in this book. In sentiment, it is as Swiss as any other.

Last week, I was discussing the hackneyed problem of Swiss identity with Hugo Loetscher, the Zurich novelist and journalist. Which would come first, the question ran, Swiss or local patriotism? Loetscher said he did not care. I do. The Zurichers have been Swiss for six hundred years, since 1394 to be precise. My family has been Genevan for three hundred years and Swiss since 1814. That does make a difference, quantitatively if not qualitatively.

The cantons of Valais, Neuchatel, and Geneva are latecomers to this Confederation, admitted at the eleventh hour. Yet Geneva had asked to join as a full-fledged member as early as 1572, in order to be protected against the Duke of Savoy. That was a few years after the treaty of Cateau-Cambresis, which left the Savoyards free to turn against Geneva. The answer, inspired by the Catholic cantons, was no. After the fall of Napoleon, Geneva asked again, supported this time by the Allies, particularly Russia and England, who wanted to make Switzerland a neutral but strong buffer state. Save for the Protestant cities of Bern, Basel, and Zurich, which had been allies or "combourgeois" since the fifteenth century, the Swiss were only mildly interested. They justly feared that this territorial expansion would complicate the linguistic pattern of the country and, above all, upset the religious balance between the confessions. With twenty-five thousand inhabitants in 1815, Geneva was by far the largest city in Switzerland and, in spite of the financial drain of the French occupation, still a rich one.

Still, the answer this time was a polite yes. The Genevans were overjoyed. For two and a half centuries they had been practically alone in defense of their independence and their theocracy. The general feeling was of gratitude and relief: in Vonnegut's phrase, "lonesome no more."

As far as political philosophy was concerned, moreover, Geneva had much in common with Switzerland. Joining was perhaps a choice imposed by circumstances, but it was also the best possible choice.

* * *

At the western and southernmost tip of Swiss territory, Geneva looks like an artificial appendage. Mentally, if no longer physically, it is still a remote place for many German-speaking Confederates. I have come across numerous young German-speaking writers who had traveled the world over and never seen Geneva. I invited them: they loved it. We spoke English together, an absurd and typically Swiss situation. They felt ill at ease in Schriftdeutsch; I do not speak Schwyzertutsch and, since World War II, the French language has lost some of its presence and prestige among the elites of Western Europe, which is a shame and a pity.

The tiny and lovely territory of Geneva has a common border of only six miles with Switzerland, but its border with neighboring and encircling France extends for about a hundred. I suppose almost the same thing could be said of Basel or Schaffhausen. The main highway from Geneva to Lausanne, along the north side of the lake, is still known as La route Suisse, after its destination. As late as 1920, the word nation was used about Geneva, and the word patrie about Switzerland. That explains why, in Geneva, patriotic or chauvinist feeling is first local, then Swiss.

Is this to say that the Genevans are second-rate, tepid, or shamefaced Swiss? By no means. As we shall see, they have played a very active part in the affairs of the country. A few years ago a separatist movement was founded in Geneva, led by some brilliant young barristers who were outraged by the haughtiness and brutality of Zurich: an easily understandable reaction but, to me, no more than a youthful prank.

Although the contribution of cities like Basel or Zurich to European and world culture is as important (if not more important, at least in the realm of the fine arts) as that of Geneva, the name of Geneva is better-known abroad. It is certainly the only one of the three that an Ontario grocer or an Australian bus driver might be able to mark on the map without hesitation and without mistaking Switzerland for Sweden. This situation is due to such figures as Jean Calvin, Jean-Jacques Rousseau ("enfant de Genève") and Henry Dunant, the father of the International Red Cross in the nineteenth century, as well as to such facts as the presence in Geneva of international organizations and of conferences on Vietnam, disarmament, Cambodia, and so on. When the big guns of world politics want to meet on neutral ground, it seems that Geneva is still the right place. At least that was the opinion expressed by former Secretary of State, George Shultz, in a speech at Stanford University in the spring of 1991.

Now if we wanted to take a closer look at the way Geneva has treated its most illustrious citizens, we should have to bear the following in mind:

—The Frenchman, Jean Calvin, was first invited by the Genevans, then expelled by them for abuse of authority, then urgently pressed to come back because the city was on the verge of moral and political collapse.

—Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the son of a Genevan watchmaker and a citizen of Geneva, was banished from his native city in spite, or because, of his genius and his liberal theories, and several of his works remained banned until the French invasion in 1798. He was later to exert a tremendous influence on Geneva's pedagogical tradition.

—Henry Dunant, the real founder and father of the International Red Cross was dismissed by his peers because he had declared bankruptcy (a deadly sin in a bankers' city). As a result, he had no part in the successful Geneva Conference of 1864, at which fourteen nations signed the Geneva Conventions for the Protection of Wounded Soldiers. When, much later, at the beginning of this century, Henry Dunant was awarded the first Nobel Peace Prize, the Red Cross had become one of the best-known institutions in the world, and he, its father, was living alone, entirely forgotten, in an old people's home at Heiden in Canton Appenzell. In atonement and embarrassment, Geneva hastily printed a commemorative postage stamp bearing his portrait, and tried to bring him back to a more dignified life in Geneva. He refused. Now there is both an Institut J.-J. Rousseau and an Institut Henry Dunant.

This not only proves that the Swiss are very good at recuperation and that a part, at least, of their reputation is due to citizens who were persecuted before they were granted a belated recognition; it also establishes that Switzerland is really too small a country (not its fault) for outstanding characters, and that real geniuses are too awkward for such a well-monitored society. They have to disappear or go away. This is Swiss, not just Genevan. After all, Zurich could not keep Fussli; Basel could not keep Paracelsus; Neuchatel could not offer the mental space that would have been needed to retain Blaise Cendrars and Edouard Jeanneret, alias Le Corbusier.

* * *

As early as 58 B.C., in The Gallic Wars Julius Caesar mentions an important settlement or town at the outlet of Lake Leman and a wooden bridge of great strategic importance crossing the river Rhone. There was no other bridge or ford to the south for more than two hundred miles. The meaning of Geneva (Latin: Geneva), a Celtic name, is still hotly disputed.

Taking advantage of its excellent geographic situation and of centuries of pax romana and later pax burgundia, Geneva became a prosperous fair-town and a bishopric linked to the neighboring Duchy of Savoy—a destiny similar to that of hundreds of medieval cities. Before we can really speak of a contribution to European culture, we have to wait until the sixteenth century, the Age of the Reformation, but for two exceptions that are worth mentioning:

a. A splendid triptych (oil on wood) by the itinerant German painter Conrad Witz in the late fifteenth century, representing the Miraculous Draft of Fishes. In the background, one can see a highly realistic view of the southern shore of Lake Geneva. Recognizable today, some young oak trees in Witz's painting are still standing, much bigger, five centuries older.

b. The first illustrated love story in occidental printing (as distinct from Korean printing, which began about fifty years earlier). It is a magnificent incunabula, dated 1483, with fifty-three hand-colored woodcuts, printed by Adam Steinschaber, who had left Gutenberg's atelier to settle in Geneva in 1472. Entitled L'Histoire de la belle fée Mélusine, it is the fairy tale of a mermaid (or, rather, a rivermaid) supposed to be the patron of the family of Lusignan, the Kings of Jerusalem, who surrendered the Holy City to their conqueror, the Kurdish general Sala-ud-Din (Saladin) in the late eleventh century. The book is elegant and original, a masterpiece of fifteenth-century graphics. Of an estimated three hundred copies, only two have survived: one in Geneva, one in Wolfensbüttel (Germany). It is the rarest printed book in the West today.

I mention these artistic landmarks as a kind of adieu. Geneva now leaves the gentle waters of fine arts and gallantry to sail toward the darker and stormier sea of militant Protestantism and the crusade for a new faith. For more than a century, the Genevan printers printed no more fairy tales or love stories.

* * *

In 1536, Bern, converted to the Reformation, invades Canton Vaud, the territories of Chablais and Faucigny, and routs the Duke of Savoy, the age-old foe of Geneva.

The same year, on May 21, the Grand Conseil or General Council of Geneva—that is, the totality of citizens eligible for public office—adopts the new faith of the Reformation unanimously.

It is a political choice: Bern is a formidable military power and a traditional ally of Geneva. But it is even more a spiritual choice: for two years ministers of the Reform movement, sent by Bern, had been preaching in the town, confronting Catholic theologians in public disputes, and getting the better of them. They won because they offered a better, more bracing, and exciting message to listeners terrified by war, plague, and inquisition, and whose life expectancy (let us note) was around twenty-three years.

Nowadays, in our language, Calvinism evokes the most rigorous, tormented, and exacting approach to religion. Not so in 1536. In the Reform movement at its peak—whether Lutheran, Zwinglian, Calvinist, or French—there was a roaring, devastating jubilation that we can hardly imagine today but that the French historian Michelet, though an unbeliever, superbly recaptured in his chapter on the family of the French admiral Coligny.

At the turn of the sixteenth century the German humanist, polemicist, and soldier, Ulrich von Hutten, had written: "Ideas clash like spears; it's a pleasure to be alive." The message now became even more urgent and pointed: "God has returned to us and has brought us His Book" (Erasmus's and Luther's translations of the New Testament). This book, a source of hope and wisdom, should be open to every one, regardless of social status or sex. Thus, in the year 1536, school was made compulsory for all children in Geneva, with the help of a reading manual fresh from the printer's press, in which the sound of consonants, vowels, and syllables are explained by means of animal homophones, such as the bumblebee for b and z (bzzz ) or the owl for ou (hu hu).

Even Jean Calvin, who had settled in Geneva in the same year (1536), was carried away by this wind of optimism. He wrote: "Holy Scripture may be taught in a joyous and playful way," and—still more surprising from his pen—"A man unable to laugh aloud has no right to call himself a Christian." This benevolent and merry disposition would not last long.

When Calvin returned from his exile in Strasbourg, at the request of the crestfallen Genevan citizens, he made up for everything by wielding an iron fist. Whoever was not behind him unconditionally was against him and must be laid low.

He condemned the playing-cards manufacturer, Pierre Ameau (a wealthy and respected citizen; splendid packs of cards) to walk through Geneva bareheaded, in his shirt, kneeling and pleading for mercy in each public square.

He banished the theologian Castellion, who had claimed that "to stray is not to sin," who opposed Calvin's tragic vision of predestination, and who held that man can be redeemed, right up to the last moment.

He fined Bonnivard, the official chronicler of the city, for drinking and playing dice with the French poet Clément Marot.

He burned the Spanish-born humanist and physician Michael Servetus, who loathed and attacked the concept of the "Holy Trinity" and who might equally well have been burned by Rome. But by doing so, Calvin took many more lives than he thought. Servetus, a great anatomist and stiff ripper, had discovered the lesser circulation of the blood (that is, between the heart and the lungs). His execution in Geneva delayed the publication of his work until the eighteenth century. But God is with us: Harvey rediscovered the whole thing about seventy years later.

Now Geneva, like the Catholic Inquisition, had its executioners, its heretics, its stakes, its religious terrorism: a "liberal" disaster. But we should be reminded that Calvin had no time for amoenitates. He was the despotic master of a tiny, fighting city, a "New Jerusalem" for some, a "cesspool of paganism, subversion, and iniquity" for others. A painful thorn in the flesh of the Vatican, a "scandal city" of about twelve thousand inhabitants that every Catholic power wanted to crush and destroy.

The truth is that Geneva was a formidable war-machine. Thirty printers, most of them of French origin, worked night and day to flood Europe with anti-Papist pamphlets. They worked well. And after the public dedication, in June 1559, of his academy (now the University of Geneva)—the only institution, along with the academy of Lausanne, capable of training ministers, missionaries, and martyrs of the new faith in the French language—Calvin wrote to his French friends: "Send me raw wood" (by which he meant students) "and I will give you back arrows." Those arrows eventually reached the four corners of Europe and flew as far as Brazil and Florida, to the rage and dismay of the Catholic states.

On December 12, 1602, one of the longest nights of the year, thirty-eight years after Calvin's death, Geneva was attacked without warning by a strong party of the Duke of Savoy, equipped with long, specially constructed ladders and bombs designed to blast open the drawbridge and the city gates. Luckily, the night assault was repelled. The next morning the walls were decorated with the heads of slain enemy soldiers and that evening Bernese troops, arriving at full speed from Lausanne, entered the city to the cheers of the population. But everything was over. The heroic period was over. Until the French invasion of 1798, the tiny Republic of Geneva led a relatively peaceful life.

* * *

With the exception of the magnificent French prose of Calvin's Institution de la religion chrétienne, published in Basel by Thomas Platter, and—a little later—the Psaulmes du Roi David, translated by Theodore de Bèze and "rhymed" by Clement Marot, both works of Frenchmen, sixteenth-century Geneva had very little to contribute to the fine arts or the literature of the time. It is no wonder: a city where pleasures and distractions as innocent as backgammon were banned, where the erotic force in Marguerite de Navarre, Rabelais, Ronsard, and Brantome was absolutely taboo, where a sentence or a curse was sufficient to bring you to the gallows, did not encourage exuberance and fantasy in the fine arts and literature.

What remained is the unique and striking example of a grim, hard-working, and very strong theocracy ruled by a despotic master, and living willy-nilly "under the yoke of Jesus Christ." No doubt the Calvinist experience, along with the bise noire (Geneva's icy north wind), has given a darker cast to the Genevan character and endowed it with strength and endurance. No doubt it shaped a moralistic and puritan society (fostering also the hypocrisy that naturally accompanies moral rigor and puritanism), which, for a time at least, was closer to Sparta than to Athens—a city of pedagogues, scientists, and introverts.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Geneva Zurich Basel by Nicolas Bouvier, Gordon A. Craig, Lionel Gossman. Copyright © 1994 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents

• FrontMatter, pg. i
• CONTENTS, pg. v
• LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS, pg. vii
• EDITOR'S FOREWORD, pg. ix
• Introduction, pg. 1
• Geneva, pg. 17
• Zurich, pg. 41
• Basel, pg. 63

Editorial Reviews

"[The book] is reminiscent of the best of in-depth journalism and can be recommended to any intellectual who ... is planning to sojourn in Switzerland."

Canadian Journal of History

"[The book] is reminiscent of the best of in-depth journalism and can be recommended to any intellectual who ... is planning to sojourn in Switzerland."—Canadian Journal of History

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