Volume 36, Number 16 · October 26, 1989
Success Story
By Lionel Gossman
The Triumph of Liberalism: Zürich in the Golden Age, 1830–1869
by Gordon A. Craig
Scribner's, 314 pp., $24.95
Dandies, aesthetes, and immoralists have never thought much of Switzerland. 'They had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock,' says Harry Lime in Graham Greene's film of The Third Man. Admirers of political power, like the German historian Heinrich von Treitschke, have had no high regard for the country either. Though its armies were once considered invincible, Switzerland hardly qualifies as one of Hegel's 'world-historical nations,' not even an emeritus one, like Greece or England. Because of that, few people outside Switzerland know much about it; the works of its native historians are rarely translated into English, and the scholarly literature on Switzerland in English is not abundant. There was a time, during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when playwrights and composers were inspired by William Tell and the Rütli oath (which around 1300 bound the original 'forest cantons' of Uri, Schwyz, and Unterwalden to assist each other in defense of their rights, privileges, and freedoms) to effusions of patriotism and love of liberty; but William Tell has long since joined the heroes and heroines of Scott in the opera repertory, only the Swiss remember what the Rütli oath was, and they themselves have adopted a less legendary, better documented account of the beginnings of their confederation in the late thirteenth century.
Review, 4917 words
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