The Political Position of the Swiss Republic

#PUBLICATION NOTE

This edition of The Political Position of the Swiss Republic has been translated, 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 12, Lawrence & Wishart, London.

#INTRODUCTION NOTE

This is an article written by Friedrich Engels in the name of Karl Marx in London, England, United Kingdom around the 26th of April, 1853. It was first published in the New York Daily Tribune, No. 3'770 (17th of May, 1853).

#Workers and oppressed people of the world, unite!

#THE POLITICAL POSITION OF THE SWISS REPUBLIC

#Friedrich Engels

#Around the 26th of April, 1853

#★

Royal families formerly used to employ whipping-children, who had the honour of receiving condign punishment on their profane backs, whenever any of the scions of royalty had committed an offence against the rules of good behaviour. The modern European political system continues this practice, in a certain degree, in the establishment of small intermediate States, which have to act the scapegoat in any domestic squabble by which the harmony of the «balance of power» may be troubled. And in order to enable these smaller States to perform this enviable part with suitable dignity, they are, by the common consent of Europe, «in Congress assembled»,¹ and with all due solemnity, declared «neutral». Such a scapegoat, or whipping-child, is Greece — such is Belgium and Switzerland. The only difference is this — that these modern political scapegoats, from the abnormal conditions of their existence, are seldom quite undeserving of the inflictions they are favoured with.

The most conspicuous of this class of States has of late been Switzerland: «Whatever errors the Great Powers commit, the Swiss must atone for.»² And wherever the people of any European State came into collision with their rulers, the Swiss were equally sure to come in for their share of the trouble; until, since the beginning of this year, Switzerland, after having made itself gratuitously contemptible to the revolutionary party, has been placed in a sort of interdict by the rulers of Continental Europe. Squabbles about refugees with Emperor Bonaparte, for whose sake Switzerland once came very near risking a war; squabbles with Prussia on account of Neuchatel; squabbles with Austria about Tessinese and the Milan insurrection;³ squabbles with the minor German States about subjects which nobody cares for; squabbles on all hands, threatening notes, expulsions, passport chicanes, blockades, raining down upon poor Switzerland thick as a hailstorm, and yet, such is human nature, the Swiss are happy, contented, and proud in their own way, and feel more at home in this shower of abuse and insult than if the political horizon was cloudless and bright.

This honourable political position of Switzerland is, by the popular mind of Europe, rather vaguely and clumsily expressed in the common saying: Switzerland has been invented by the rulers of Europe in order to bring republican governments into contempt; and, certainly, a Metternich or Guizot may have often said: If Switzerland did not exist, we should have to create it. To them, a neighbour like Switzerland was a real gift from God.

We cannot be expected to repeat the multifarious charges brought of late, against Switzerland and Swiss institutions, by real or would-be revolutionaries. Long before the movements of 1848, the organs of the revolutionary Communist Party in Germany analysed that subject, they showed why Switzerland, as an independent State, must always be lagging behind in the march of European progress, and why that country, with all its republican shows, will always be reactionary at heart.⁴ They were even violently attacked, at that time, by divers democratic spouters and manufacturers of clandestine declamation, who celebrated Switzerland as their «model republic», until the model institutions were once tried upon themselves. The subject is now as trite as can be; nobody disputes the fact, and a few words will suffice to put the matter in its true light.

The masses of the Swiss population follow either pastoral or agricultural pursuits; pastoral, in the high mountains, agricultural wherever the nature of the ground permits it. The pastoral tribes, for tribes you may call them, rank among the least developed populations of Europe. If they do not cut off heads and ears like the Turks and Montenegrins, they perform acts of hardly less barbarity by their judicial assemblies; and what cruelty and beastly ferocity they are capable of, the Swiss mercenaries at Naples and elsewhere have proved.⁵ The agricultural population is quite as stationary as the pastoral; they have nothing in common with the agricultural population of the American Far West, whose very aliment is change, and who clear every year an amount of land far larger than all Switzerland. The Swiss peasants till the patches of ground their parents and grandparents tilled before them; they till it in the same slovenly way as they did; they earn about as much as they did; they live about as they did, and, consequently, they think very nearly in the same way as they did. Had it not been for feudal burdens and impositions levied upon them, partly by aristocratic families, partly by patrician corporations in the towns, the Swiss peasantry would always have been quite as stationary in their political existence as their neighbours, the cowherds, are up to the present day. The third component of the Swiss people, the industrial population, although necessarily far more advanced in development than the two classes mentioned before, yet live under circumstances which exclude them to a great degree from the progressive giant impulse which the modern manufacturing system has imparted to Western Europe. Steam is hardly known in Switzerland; large factories exist in a few localities only; the cheapness of labour, the sparseness of the population, the abundance of small mountain streams fit for mills; all these and many other circumstances tend to produce a small-scale and sporadic sort of manufactures mixed up with agricultural pursuits, the most eligible industrial system for Switzerland. Thus, watchmaking, ribbon-weaving, straw-plaiting, embroidery, and so on are carried on in several cantons, without ever creating or even enlarging a town; and Geneva and Basle, the richest towns, and Zurich, the most industrial town, have hardly expanded in centuries. If, then, Switzerland carries on its manufacturing production almost exclusively upon the system in practice all over Europe before the invention of steam, how can we expect to find other than corresponding ideas in the minds of the producers; if steam has not revolutionized Swiss production and intercommunication, how could it overthrow the hereditary ways of thinking?

The Hungarian Constitution bears a certain resemblance to that of Britain, which circumstance has been turned to good account by Magyar politicians, who from that would make us jump to the conclusion that the Hungarian nation is almost as developed as the English; and yet there are many hundreds of miles and of years between the small merchants of Buda and the cotton lords of Lancashire, or between the traveling tinkers of the Hungarian steppe and the Chartist workers of a British manufacturing metropolis. Thus, Switzerland would give itself the airs of a United States on a smaller scale; but, barring the superficial resemblance of political institutions, no two countries are more unlike than ever-moving, ever-changing America, with a historical mission whose immensity people on both sides of the Atlantic are but just beginning to divine, and stationary Switzerland, whose never-ending petty distractions would result in the perpetual round-about motion within the narrowest circle, were it not in spite of itself dragged forward by the industrial advance of its neighbours.

Whoever doubts this will be satisfied after a perusal of the history of Swiss railways. Were it not for the traffic from south to north moving around Switzerland on both sides, not a single railroad would ever have been constructed in that country. As it is, they are made 20 years too late.

The French invasion of 1798, and the French Revolution of 1830, gave occasion to the peasantry to throw off their feudal burdens; to the manufacturing and trading population to throw off the mediaeval yoke of patrician and corporative control. With this progress, the revolution of cantonal government was completed. The more advanced cantons had obtained constitutions to suit their interests. This cantonal revolution reacted upon the Federal Diet and the Executive. The political party vanquished in the individual cantons was here strong; the struggle was fought over again. The general political movement of 1840-47, which everywhere in Europe brought about preliminary conflicts, or prepared decisive collisions, was in all second- and third-rate States — thanks to the jealousies of the Great Powers — favourable to the opposition, which may be described as the bourgeois political party. It was the case, too, in Switzerland; the moral support of Britain, the indecision of Guizot, the difficulties which kept Metternich at bay in Italy, carried the Swiss over in the War Against the Special League;⁶ the political party which had been victorious in the Liberal cantons in 1830 now conquered the Central Powers. The Revolutions of 1848 made it possible for the Swiss to reform their feudal constitutions in accordance with the new political organization of the majority of the cantons;⁷ and now we may say that Switzerland has attained the highest political development of which it, as an independent State, is capable. That the new Federal Constitution is quite adequate to the wants of the country, the constant reforms in the monetary system, the means of communication, and other legislative matters affecting the industry of the country, abundantly show; but, alas, these reforms are of a nature that any other State would be ashamed of, on account of the mass of traditional nuisances, and the antediluvian state of society, the existence of which, up to that date, they disclose.

What, at most, can be said in favour of the Swiss Constitution of 1848 is this: that, by its enactment, the more developed portion of the Swiss declared themselves willing to pass, to a certain extent, from the Middle Ages into modern society. Whether, however, they will at any time be able to do away with privileged trade corporations, guilds, and other such mediaeval amenities must remain very doubtful to anyone who has the least knowledge of the country, and who has seen in a single instance the strenuous efforts with which respectable «vested interests» oppose even the most matter-of-course reform.

Thus, we see the Swiss, true to their character, moving on quietly in their own restricted domestic circle while the year 1848 uprooted all the stability of the European continent around them. The revolutions of Paris, Vienna, Berlin, and Milan were by them reduced to as many levers of cantonal intrigue. The European earthquake had even for the Radical Swiss no other interest but this — that it might vex some Conservative neighbour by upsetting their crockery. In the struggle for Italian independence, Sardinia solicited an alliance with Switzerland, and there is no doubt that and addition to the Sardinian army of 20'000 or 30'000 Swiss would have very soon driven the Austrians out of Italy. When 15'000 Swiss in Naples were fighting against Italian liberty, it certainly might be expected that Switzerland, in order to maintain its boasted «neutrality», should send an equal number to fight for the Italians; but the alliance was rejected and the cause of Italian independence was lost as much through Swiss as through Austrian bayonets. Then came the disasters of the revolutionary political party, and the wholesale migration from Italy, France, and Germany to neutral Swiss soil. But there, neutrality ceased; Swiss Radicalism was satisfied with what it had achieved, and the very insurgents who, by holding in check the tutors and natural superiors of Switzerland, the absolutist governments of the Continent, had enabled the Swiss to carry out their internal reform undisturbed — these very insurgents were now treated in Switzerland with every possible insult and turned out of the country at the first bidding of their persecutors. Then began that series of degradation and insult which one neighbouring government after another heaped upon Switzerland, and which would make the blood of every Swiss boil if Swiss nationality had any foundation and Swiss independence any existence other than in boast or fame.

Never has such treatment been offered to any people as the Swiss have been made to submit to by France, Austria, Prussia, and the minor German States. Never were demands half as humiliating made upon any country, without being resented by a struggle for life and death. The surrounding governments, by their agents, presumed to exercise the office of police upon Swiss territory; they exercised it not only over the refugees, but over the Swiss police officers also. They laid complaints against subaltern agents, and demanded their dismissal; they even went so far as to hint at the necessity of changes in the constitutions of several cantons. As for the Swiss government, to every bolder demand, it gave a humbler reply; and whenever its words breathed a spirit of opposition, its acts were sure to make up for it by increased subservience. Insult after insult was pocketed, command after command was executed, until Switzerland was brought down to the lowest level of European contempt — until it was more despised than even its two «neutral» rivals, Belgium and Greece. And now, when the demands of its chief assailant, Austria, have reached that height of impudence which even a statesperson of the temper of Mr. Druey could hardly swallow, without some show of resistance — now, in its most recent, most spirited notes to Vienna, it shows how far it is reduced.

The champions of Italian independence — people who, far from showing any wicked Socialist or Communist tendencies, would, perhaps, not even go to the length of wishing for Italy the same Constitution as that under which Switzerland lives — people who have and make no claim to the demagogic celebrity even of Mazzini, are there treated as assassins, incendiaries, brigands, and upsetters of all social order. As to Mazzini, the language is of course far stronger; and yet everybody knows that Mazzini, with all his conspiracies and insurrections, is as much a supporter of social order, as at present constituted, as Mr. Druey himself. Thus, the result of the whole exchange of notes is that, in principle, the Swiss give in to the Austrians. How, then, is it to be expected that they will not give in in practice?

The fact is this: Any bold and persistent government can get from the Swiss what it likes. The isolated life, which the masses of them lead, deprives them of all sense of their common interest as a nation. That a village, a valley, or a canton should stick together is no wonder. But, to stick together as a nation for a common purpose, be what it may, they never will. In all invasions, as soon as the danger becomes serious, as in 1798, one Swiss has betrayed the other, one canton abandoned the next. The Austrians have expelled 18'000 Tessinese from Lombardy, without any cause. The Swiss make a great outcry about it and collect money for their unfortunate confederates. Now, let Austria hold out, and continue to prohibit the return of these Tessinese, and in a very short time you will see a wonderful change in Swiss opinion. They will get tired of collecting money, they will say that the Tessinese always meddled in Italian politics and deserved no better; in fact, they are no true Swiss confederates (keine guten Eidgenossen). Then, the expelled Tessinese will settle in the other cantons of Switzerland and «turn the natives out of employment». For in Switzerland, a person is not a Swiss, but a native of such and such a canton. And when that comes to pass, then you will see our brave confederates muster up their indignation, then you will see intrigues of all sorts directed against the victims of Austrian despotism, then you will see the Tessinese Swiss as much hated, persecuted, and calumniated as the foreign refugees were during their time in Switzerland, and then Austria will obtain everything it wants and a great deal more if it takes the trouble to ask for it.

When the nations of Europe have recovered their faculty of free and normal action, they will take into consideration what is to be done with these small «neutral» States, which, while subservient to counter-revolution when it is ascendant, are neutral and even hostile to every revolutionary movement and yet pass themselves off as free and independent nations. But, perhaps, by that time, not a trace will be left of these excrescences of an unsound body.